plumedpenn

SINNERS (2025) + Trivia

Shout out to fanfic writers who write short fanfics.

Shout out to fanfic writers who don’t write often.

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A reminder that sell-buy dates or best-used-by dates are not the same as expiration dates.

The website puts a link to the USDA site which links to foodsafety dot gov who really wants you to use the app, but you can bypass it.

Also a link to the Canadian government's advisory on best-before dates.

Three photos of passages from Bernd Heinrich's book The Nesting Season.

Images One and Two read:

In this movie, the filmmaker Luc Jacquet faced down the demon, of not the taboo, of anthropomorphizing an animal. And I, as a biologist, was asked by the New York Times to write an editorial about March of the Penguins (August 26, 2005). Naturally, in my essay, I had to comment on Mr. Freeman's use of the word "love" in the context of the penguin's behavior. I wrote:

The unspoken rule is that this four letter word is to be applied only to one creature on earth, Homo sapiens. But why? A look at the larger picture shows this presumption of exclusivity is utterly unproved. In a broad physiological sense, we are practically identical not only with other mammals but also with birds—muscle for muscle, eye for eye, nerve for nerve, lung for lung, brain for brain, hormone for hormone—except for difference of detail of particular design specifications. Functionally, I suspect love is an often temporary chemical imbalance (relative to when not "in love") of the brain induced by sensory stimuli that causes us to maintain focus on something that carries an adaptive agenda. Love is an adaptive feeling or emotion—like hate, jealousy, hunger, thirst—necessary where rationality alone would not suffice to carry the day. Could rationality alone induce a penguin to trek 70 miles over the ice in order to mate and then balance an egg on his toes while fasting for four months in total darkness and enduring temperatures of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit and gusts of wind of up to 100 miles an hour? And bear in mind that this 5-year-old (minimum age at first breeding) penguin has just returned to the place of its birth from the open sea, and this has never seen an egg in its life, and could not possibly have any idea what it is or why it must be kept warm. Any rational penguin would eventually say, "To heck with this thing, I'm going back for a swim and eat my fill of fish."

Image Three reads:

My implication was that love is not a mystical arrow shot from heaven. It is something as real and adaptive as a bird's beak or our hands. We have less trouble acknowledging behaviors that we attribute to "stress" across species. There is scant objection to identifying behaviors associated with elevated levels of corticosterone hormone in humans, birds, and mammals. So if penguins experience the behavioral state we label as "love," then we would predict similar hormonal and neurological changes that are diagnostic in us. On the other hand, we could not even begin to speculate what insects might feel, if they feel at all, because they have very different hormones and few behaviors that we can "read" as expressions of our emotions.

Those are actually not spiky feathers at all! They sure do look like it, though, and that's likely the point- if I were a raptor looking down upon a pincushion, I would think twice about grabbing it with my bare feet.

However, it's a ruse! Just a marking on a feather

If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...

YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.

Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.

If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".

Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.

YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.

Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.

merlin meme