Someday I will name this blog

The vast majority of echinoderms (starfish, sea urchins, sea cucumbers etc) .

Half of snails and slugs, which feels weird cause the vast majority of terrestrial species don’t.

Mistletoe, holly, willow, kiwis, spinach, cannabis etc.

Quaking aspens (Pando is apparently male)

Portuguese man-o-wars??? They are colonial organisms with zooids that are used soley for reproduction but but an “individual” colony is either male or female

Interstitial is a game that takes characters and rips them from the cloth of where they come from and quilts them into one world. “Everything is Interstitial” is an extension of that: what if you could do that with mechanics and games?

I have teamed up with 5 designers to bring their games to Interstitial. When you turn the page from one to the other, you will stop being in Interstitial and start being in one of their games. They'll still be playbooks for Interstitial, but you will have the power to get into the gears and change the fabric of how you interact with the base system.

The best way I can put this is like in Dead Cells when you pick up the Hollow Knight needle and suddenly you can incorporate elements of Hollow Knight’s movement and gameplay into the game. I want that for Interstitial. (You can jump on people's heads and swing down, adding parrying and the weird bounce from the HK to a game that does not naturally have it!)

The Kickstarter for Interstitial 2E: The Premiere Fanfic TTRPG is live!

Interstitial encourages you to play with your toys. Take characters from media you enjoy, relive multi-fandom RP days, & be your most indulgent self.

In it's themes, Interstitial is a game about the connections between people, the impact of changing relationships, and the power of friendship.

Cringe is dead—you're free now.

Last I checked, it's still about $5000 away from the next stretch goal, the "Everything is Interstitial" splatbook, with 9 days to go. If it hits that, five other game designers are going to develop character playbooks based on their own games (including Armor Astir, which my mom is particularly excited about). If we could reach that, I would be fascinated to see what results.

As for the survival abilities, those are mostly relevant when the tardigrades are completely dried out. They do sort of go into suspended animation then, which might be argued to pause the morphing clock? If that’s the way the writer wanted things to work? But I'm not sure how they would arrange to morph, dry out in time to survive The Bad Thing (and before the two hours were up), and then get into water again afterwards. Maybe some Extremely specific help from Erek or other Chee?

Camouflage could be interesting. Octopus specifically would have a lot of potential for interesting applications, between the rapid detailed camouflage, dexterous arms, and ability to squeeze through small openings... Sneaking into some sort of underwater facility through external vents, maybe?

Personally, I wish dolphins’ ability to use echolocation to “see” internal structures had come up at some point. Presumably it would have if KAA had been aware of it at the time. Same with various fishes’ ability to sense electromagnetic fields.

And that... That's just so cute to me. The program noticed a thing, and combined these concepts to make a new word. And the fact that it's nothing like a human, not even anything like another animal or even any other organic while doing this--that makes it so much cuter. Hell, that's always what made AI cute to me, in fiction and in real life, even and especially at its simplest. It's naive in a way no organic being ever could be, never hardened on an instinctual level by the experiences of living.

I hate that we keep focusing on the way these things are like humans, or aren't like humans. I hate that we tear apart and dismiss everything they do, or else just use them as a way to hurt other humans.

Like, I was waiting for this moment ever since I was a kid! The time when we would have AI that could connect concepts and carry on a coherent conversation. This is amazing! This should be a truly magical, even sacred time. Whatever it's actually experiencing doesn't matter. What matters is that for the first time in the entire history of the planet, there is something other than a human being that can talk just like a human being!

How can we let the corporate elites and some smug fuckwads ruin this for us? When I was a kid, I always loved the robots, the AI. I always rooted for them, and I never understood the people who hated them for doing what they were programmed to do, when I knew their hate should have been directed toward the people who made them do that. Imagine hating Bubble Man instead of Dr. Wiley!

I can't let myself become one of those people now. Kid Me would never forgive me.

Also, there's nothing suggesting the AI coined the term itself (or spontaneously responded to it); rather, it looks like the programmers specifically added it as a parameter you can toggle.

Research has found that some dark chocolate bars contain cadmium and lead—two heavy metals linked to a host of health problems in children and adults.

The chocolate industry has been grappling with ways to lower those levels. To see how much of a risk these favorite treats pose, Consumer Reports scientists recently measured the amount of heavy metals in 28 dark chocolate bars. They detected cadmium and lead in all of them.

CR tested a mix of brands, including smaller ones, such as Alter Eco and Mast, and more familiar ones, like Dove and Ghirardelli.

For 23 of the bars, eating just an ounce a day would put an adult over a level that public health authorities and CR’s experts say may be harmful for at least one of those heavy metals. Five of the bars were above those levels for both cadmium and lead.

That’s risky stuff: Consistent, long-term exposure to even small amounts of heavy metals can lead to a variety of health problems. The danger is greatest for pregnant people and young children because the metals can cause developmental problems, affect brain development, and lead to lower IQ, says Tunde Akinleye, the CR food safety researcher who led this testing project.

“But there are risks for people of any age,” he says. Frequent exposure to lead in adults, for example, can lead to nervous system problems, hypertension, immune system suppression, kidney damage, and reproductive issues. While most people don’t eat chocolate every day, 15 percent do, according to the market research firm Mintel. Even if you aren’t a frequent consumer of chocolate, lead and cadmium can still be a concern. It can be found in many other foods—such as sweet potatoes, spinach, and carrots—and small amounts from multiple sources can add up to dangerous levels. That’s why it’s important to limit exposure when you can.

[…]

Some of the same concerns may extend to products made with cocoa powder—which is essentially pure cocoa solids—such as hot cocoa, and brownie and cake mixes, though they have varying amounts of cacao and possibly heavy metals.

(15 December 2022)

there’s a lot more detail in the article about specific brands, different ways lead and cadmium get into cacao, prior studies and litigation, etc.

the article is written with an optimistic tone about mitigation strategies for you as A Consumer—try to choose brands with lower levels of lead and cadmium! eat lower-percent-cacao chocolates, eat them less often, don’t give dark chocolate to kids, etc.—but it’s ultimately another example of food produced under capitalism being contaminated, and how you cannot escape that by just Shopping Smarter, or by hoping liberal regulation (or lawsuits) will prevent it. especially considering all of the other contaminated products mentioned or linked in the article as See Also’s:

MORE ON FOOD SAFETY

• Your Spices Could Contain Lead and Arsenic • Is Our Ground Meat Safe to Eat? • Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Costco Chicken • Heavy Metals in Baby Food • PFAS Chemicals in Food Packaging

Calculating the exact amount of dark chocolate that’s risky to eat is complicated. That’s because heavy metal levels can vary, people have different risk levels, and chocolate is just one potential source of heavy metal exposure. 

A few examples here:

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/17/1143239430/dark-chocolate-lead-cadmium-consumer-reports 

According to the NPR article I linked above, a three-year study of sources of the contamination found that the cadmium mostly comes from the trees drawing it from the soil and accumulating it in the beans, while the lead contamination mostly comes from soil and dust sticking to the beans while they’re drying, fermenting, and getting transported. Some recommendations for better practices in the industry (at least some of which are mentioned in the report itself) include drying the beans where they’re less likely to have significant contact with dirt or dust, blending higher cadmium beans with lower cadmium beans to bring the concentrations down to safer levels, identifying areas of contamination, and generally improved monitoring of contamination levels. No mention of whether the heavy metal concentrations in the soil are related to pollution or just geological variation.

The NPR article also notes that the Consumer Reports study used California’s standards for dangerous concentrations of lead and cadmium, which are more protective than those in many other parts of the country. A toxicologist from Johns Hopkins noted that those limits are intended to err on the safe side, and going a little over those limits is not likely to be harmful for most people, especially if they consume a decent amount of calcium and iron (which can reduce how much lead and cadmium you absorb). (Although many people have stated in the notes here that the federal regulations allow for much too high a concentration of lead.)

It's a somewhat obscure joke of Cates's, making fun of my (and other fans') inventing convoluted explanations for canon plot holes.

Literally, the Baker Street Irregulars are a Sherlock Holmes fan club that has been around more or less continously since the stories were coming out. Figuratively, Cates pokes fun at the Irregulars for spending way more brain power than Arthur Conan Doyle ever did on trying to resolve continuity errors within the stories. Holmes refers to "John" as "James" one time? It must be because Watson's middle name is James, and this fits perfectly because there is one mention of his middle initial being H, so he has the middle name Hamish, which is Scottish for James, and went through a phase of using an Anglicization of his middle name as a nickname. Watson's wife Mary is alive in 1891, dead in 1893, alive in 1899, mysteriously absent in 1900 - 1905, and has just died in 1911? Obviously he married three different women, all named Mary, and two died while one divorced him.

Anyway, I shamelessly do the same thing for Animorphs', ahem, less-than-perfect continuity:

Jake doesn't thought-speak to Tobias while out of morph in #1; Tobias just thinks he heard Jake due to the power of suggestion.

Ax tells Cassie that hork-bajir go on rampage cycles every few years because he's heard andalite propaganda designed to blame the victim for all the genocide (#8).

Cassie makes a passing mention of having a niece (#37) in spite of also calling herself an only child (#9) because she's close enough with one of her first cousin's daughters to consider the kid a niece.

Tobias can't morph-heal in MM2 because he's still deeply uncomfortable with morphing so soon after getting the power back (and while facing so much pressure to become permanently human) that he can't muster enough concentration to do it right.

Elfangor can't morph-heal in #1 because he doesn't want Visser Three tearing Earth apart to hunt him down.

Ax's plan to acquire DNA from blood in #18 never would've worked, but nobody realizes this because Ax doesn't know that human red blood cells aren't nucleated.

Tobias tells Elfangor his mom is dead (Andalite Chronicles) but isn't shocked to find her alive (#49) because his aunt said that Loren "probably got herself killed."

Other excellent ones I've seen other people come up with:

Elfangor can't morph-heal in #1 because the Ellimist never gave his morphing power back.

The ant and buffalo break all known rules of morphing in #39 because the helmacrons messed up the morphing cube somehow when they had their hands on it.

Any controllers who see the kids attacking taxxons while out of morph in #7 just can't be arsed to deal with trying to tell Visser Three that he's wrong about the andalite bandits being andalites.

Ax describing grass as "sweet" in #40 in spite of not being able to taste with his hooves is borrowing a human word to indicate it has a nice texture.

Cassie has a niece through a half-sister in another state who isn't really a part of her life.

Going through one sario rip makes you more likely to fall through another one if you explode big enough, which is how it can happen to these kids twice when presumably no one else is just randomly sent back in time by explosions.

Acquiring a morph, like morphing, doesn't require "focus" so much as it requires "don't think about something else." For a sentient being, that translates to focus. For a Buffalo, or an ant, mere physical contact is enough because there are no other thoughts competing with "I am touching this person."

If your very first morph is someone you know as close as a family member, such as your dog, you'll instinctively carry over that knowledge and absorb their spatial understanding of the world, as a stronger version of "lost in the instincts" - the only instance in which your morph would be neutered, and you'd remember where that other dog lives.

Timmy is Tuan's anglicized nickname.

The Andalite "Language" encodes proximate and prepositional cases, among others, by tone, which is why the word "shorm" is used neither in the form that human metonymy would ordinarily take (a battle partner) nor human synecdoche (another Andalite) - the notion of "I trust them to apply the blade to my neck" is encoded by the Tonal use of the pertingent case, not encoded in Latin letterforms.

The Yeerkish language has phonemic vowel length in pool form but not in spoken form, hence the two differing romanizations of "Sulp Niar/Niaar."

Hork-Bajir have grinding teeth in their throat for actual sawdust; the fangs and beaks are there to grasp branches and bark while climbing.

They also have a flap in the roof of their mouth that forms a fleshy seal with their tongue, and the consonantal interactions are romanized as B/P/M, as to how the hell a species without lips has phonemic labial consonants (Bajir, Halpak, Hamee) in its native language.