It's Always Thursday in my Heart

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I continue to maintain that the Australian combination of compulsory voting with ranked choice voting, is the greatest advancement in democracy in centuries.

Compulsory voting shifts the onus ensuring your access to the ballot box to the government. One Citizen, One Vote, No Matter How Remote.

It's hard to restrict the vote when everyone has to vote by law, and compulsory ranked choice voting gives a better median representation of national opinion.

Showing off the Arapaima I made! (Pattern also made by me)

ok so first of all lets start with the t rex. her very first moment is the goat leg ending up on the car, but we can see in the next shot that she is very capable of swallowing the goat whole. so how did that leg get there? given evidence that t. rexes were likely social creatures, i like to imagine that the leg on the car was more “here you go have part of my meal because you’re small” for the humans

next is her communication. i want to look at one specific thing, which was actually the thing that prompted the post

to me, that certainly looks like eye pinning. eye pinning is a behavior in birds that signals high stimulation. here’s what it looks like in a bird

it can be positive or negative, but in this case it’s probably not negative, because there’s nothing forcing the rex to stay there. if she wanted to leave the situation she could hit the bricks

the continual roaring also sort of suggests play behavior to me. there’s not really any sense in making a shitload of noise at your prey (unless you’re trying to scare them out of cover, but we know she doesn’t need to do that because we see she’s strong enough to just break into the car) so, especially because they keep screaming, that reads way more like “im making noises and they’re making noises back ^w^” then it does as trying to intimidate prey for some reason

play behavior also makes sense because we know, canonically, she’s crazy understimulated. alan grant says as much when he mentions that they aren’t feeding her in a way that promotes hunting behavior. the way she noses at the jeep and spins it really just looks more like curious interaction than anything, as well as all the chasing people she does

next, the raptors. their really famous scene is the kitchen, but first let’s establish some facts about them. we know from muldoon and what we’re shown that:

- they’re smart enough to use one of their own as a distraction for flanking maneuvers

- they’re good at problem solving enough to wait until the electric fences are turned off to systematically test them for vulnerabilities

- they’re absurdly fast. “60 mph on open ground” fast

- they are absolutely not in a big enough enclosure

- they’re not fed in a way that promotes hunting behavior either

so when you put all this information together and then look at the kitchen scene, i don’t believe for even one second that the “hide behind the counter” routine is fooling those two raptors for any time at all. that entire sequence of loudly scrambling around the kitchen while something that can keep pace with a cheetah pretends it can’t catch you? yeah that makes WAY more sense as play behavior than it does hunting, especially since we see numerous times that there are many things on the island easier to catch and eat than a bunch of skinny humans (this goes for the rex, too!)

the bit with the noises is also true here. more true, if anything. muldoon tells us the raptors are ambush predators, so why on earth would they get into a hunting ground and then risk scaring their prey off with the loud barking calls? “hi we’re here come out and play” is a much more sensible use of a call loud enough to hurt a human’s ears from across a room in that situation

individual environmentalism gets a lot of flak in the face of corporate pollution but picking up litter makes a significant, noticeable impact. I spend about an hour a week picking up litter from around my dorm complex and I'm literally outpacing my community's litter production. Just an hour a week from one person is enough to offset nearly 200 people's worth of littering.

it would take less than 100 man-hours of labor per week to keep my whole college campus entirely litter-free. If you got two classrooms' worth of people to spend two hours per week each picking up litter, the whole campus would end up spotless and they'd straight up fucking run out of things to pick up.

I've been litter picking in the background of my walks and I've removed several bags of trash from the area. The other day, children were playing in the creek that I litter pick at a lot. They were jumping into the water and swimming, right in the spot where I pulled torn up cans out of the riverbed and where I removed nearly-buried fishing wire that still had hooks on the ends. Just one person with a sharps container made it safer for those kids to go out and have fun.

That was the most direct cause and effect thing I've had with litter picking after just a little while of doing it, but even aside from that it's just. Good to do. It makes your area cleaner and safer and removes plastic from the environment. Plus, people are less likely to litter in clean areas, and litter can not be subconsciously normalized in people's minds in a litter-free area.

But what this post doesn't even mention is the community aspect. Which is possibly my favorite part.

Every single time I go to pick up garbage without fail I have at least one positive interaction with a stranger in my neighborhood. Sometimes small like someone walking past and saying thank you for doing it. But also people sometimes offering to help or even offering a bottle of water. And since I've started doing it I've seen more people in my neighborhood going out with gloves and a bag on a warm evening after school or work. In which case when I see them on my walks I become the kind stranger they meet that day.

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!