Single and disinclined to mingle

did you know that they are capable of imitation? don't worry! apparently no one else does either, but i have personally overheard them doing terrible approximations of not only red-winged blackbird songs, but also rooster crowing, ring-necked pheasant squawking, and what i now believe to be an eastern meadowlark song (which i have captured on video, something about which no one gave a fuck!!)

they are supposed to be drawn to marshes with deep water, over which multiple females will weave nests in single male controlled territories of typically 1k to 6ksqft. the waters of this marsh are wading depth, and the males control micro-territories of what cannot be more than 500sqft each-- territories that they share neutrally with marsh wrens.

Recently I found a big cheap "canvas" print at the thrift store, the sort of thing that's mass produced to look good in online listing but is noticeably cheap in person. But I loved the colors and the anatomy was surprisingly good, so it came home with me. At a glance it seemed to be an oriole with questionable fidelity, bafflingly posed on some cattails. I didn't think much of it, birds in art are full of bad anatomy and species all smushed together. At least it isn't a macaw with a crest. But as soon as I saw the photos here, I realized it's actually extremely species accurate, I just didn't know this was a species to consider

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

Starting from pople tending to turn every story about siblings who are not besties into this huge tragedy instead of awknowledging that maybe, sometimes, people are not close with their siblings. Or that people are so weird about mothers.

But what irks me even more is the tendency to decide that two people who are close in canon have a "sibling coded relationship" which suddenly also means that shipping them together is wrong. Or if a character has an older person in their life whom they look up to - well that is their parent now!!!! They can't fuck their parent!!!!

There is this underlying idea that elevating characters into a familial bond is above such concepts as romantic love or sex. Which sucks because that is not what the concept found family means - it was meant to describe the queer experience of finding your people and community from outside of your blood relatives, and it was never meant to say that there can't also be romantic relationships within that community.

And it is not even always about the fact that I want to ship my blorbo with everyone who comes near him (although I absolutely do), but I think that sometimes there can be meaningful dynamics that are not about family. I want my blorbo to have friends, lovers, partners, mentors, neighbours, a trusted older person who they can call to but is not their parent.

You can't die from hunger or thirst or lack of medication etc.

It doesn't matter which books you've already read. You have to read them all, starting from now.

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

This post talks about a new DM feature in youtube. What it fails to mention is that as part of this new feature is that when you send someone a link to a video, and they open it in the youtube app, they will see who sent them the link. Specifically, your channel name.

If your google account name is your real name, so is your channel name by default.

This means the new default behavior is that everyone you send a youtube link to will see your full name if they open it in the mobile app.

To turn this off:

Go to your youtube app settings

Go to Privacy

Turn off "Channel visibility for shared links"

mandatory patient-to-nurse ratio laws modeled after the laws in California

pay nurses more