where pepperscorn reblogs stuff

the phone isnt evil. she wants to help you, to connect you, to provide convenience so you can be present in your life. she wants you to be connected to your world and the people and things around you. when you use the phone as an avoidance tool it causes her pain. it hurts her when you doomscroll, when you dissociate into short form videos or get angry and fight in the comments. its a misuse of her abilities and she feels it as emotional and physical pain. look at her cracked, greasy screen, her scuffed case. all she wanted was to remind you about your schedule and you do this to her. haven't you hurt her enough?

Do you remember the episode of Spongebob where he's training gary for the snail race and does a coach persona + calls gary a girl and has an aside where he's like "I called you a lady to demean you 🤓" and right after he says that it cuts to sandy and she somehow telepathically feels that Spongebob just did something misogynistic and us like I feel like I need to kick Spongebobs ass for some reason. And then she appears just at the end of the episode to kick his ass.

conservation is worship to me. in a sense.

I'm not religious but I'm a very emotional scientist and I've been thinking about this a LOT lately. I love the earth enough to be its steward. and I have the necessary tools for the task. a complex brain. dexterous hands. legs made to walk long and far. millions and millions of years of Chance and Opportunity shaped me into something that can give back to the planet that has been a life-sustaining home for every person who ever lived. it's enough to make me teary eyed sometimes

"humans are pests that should be exterminated" I don't think that's true. the ecological niche of humans has shifted from persistence predation to stewardship of entire ecosystems. we've done a lot of wrong. but we have incredible potential to do so, so, so much good.

this post speaks very broadly! I know a lot of us have brains that find some tasks very difficult and hands that struggle and legs that hurt. you're a wonderful person if that's you. I'm more than happy to do enough for us both. we're stewards, but we're also a cooperative species with an incredible capacity for kindness. rest well for me. [:

Outer Wilds really said "and yeah music is the thing that connects us. Yeah. the tool you use to reunite us all and change the world is Our Song. we will play and sing until the end of time and our song is so very simple and even though we haven't played together in years we still play to the same beat same tune same melody, just hoping our siblings will catch a note of our shared heartbeat. anyway haha yayyyy explore space"

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.

The problem with studying the deep ocean is that humans need light to look at things, the depths of the ocean are extremely dark, and what lives there is accustomed to spending most of its time in that darkness. So when we go down there with submersibles and turn on Big Lights to see, we invariably and dramatically alter what's going on, in the same way that it's generally difficult to observe the natural behaviors of terrestrial animals if you whip out a megaphone and shout HEY GUYS WHAT ARE YOU DOING at them first.

I put this in the comments but feel it needs a reblog- Check out some of Dr Edith Widder’s work on light in the deep sea! Among other things, she used the bioluminescence of stoplight fish to deduce wavelengths which most deep sea animals can’t perceive and used that to create light filters to be able to film with minimal disturbance! And that’s how we got 25 minutes of giant squid footage!!!!