reformed slaughter avatar

but i can't find any evidence of its existence from before 2018 lmao

and searching the artist's name only gets me like 6 pages of results on google

and a little artist showcase page on arthive for this guy with exactly 1 painting listed

and a biography that spells this guy's name like 5 different ways

which i'm pretty sure is because it's machine translated from something

Солнечный город "Sunny City" - No date given.

Мир "World" - No date given.

Чусовские просторы. "Chusovskie expanses." Canvas, oil, 1997. Exhibited at the Nizhny Tagil Museum of Nature.

октябрь "October" 2009 cardboard, oil, 29.5x39.5 cm

Осень на Чусовой, "Autumn on Chusovaya" 1999, canvas, oil, 79x100 cm

Чугун идет "Cast Iron is Coming" 1976

Depending on the size and amount of coral you eat, eating coral wouldn’t be bad for you. Are you swallowing large enough chunks to cause intestinal blockages? or grinding it up and using it as an additive? People use coral as a source of calcium in vitamins.

But yeah, it all goes back to "seems easier to just use regular ol' marble dust.

...related important question: are we sure that coral is considered alive, and an animal of any kind, like, halakhically speaking?

I mean:

Coral doesn't bleed (which is the important part about eating a still living animal)

They don't have lungs or gills

They generally don't move? (I guess corallimorphs can...kinda crawl? But otherwise no they don't move).

How is coral really different from like, fungi above water? Sure it can be a collective mass (mushrooms and their mycellium colonies!), but it's not capable of bleeding, and it doesn't have lungs or gills, and it doesn't really move. It just kinda...spreads.

No because fungi are bottom feeders of the ground and yet mushrooms are kosher.

The issue is whether or not these are creatures according to Torah. From Leviticus 11:

These you may eat of all that live in water: anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales—these you may eat.

But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and scales, among all the swarming things of the water and among all the other living creatures that are in the water—they are an abomination for you

and an abomination for you they shall remain: you shall not eat of their flesh and you shall abominate their carcasses.

Everything in water that has no fins and scales shall be an abomination for you.

Now, I am going to reference Bible hub here mostly because they have a nice Strong's Hebrew concordance feature that sefaria doesn't have that is easy to copy and paste from.

But basically I would argue that the important words we have to distinguish here are:

the teeming

שֶׁ֣רֶץ (še·reṣ)

Noun - masculine singular construct

Strong's 8318: A swarm, active mass of minute animals

life

הַחַיָּ֖ה (ha·ḥay·yāh)

Article | Adjective - feminine singular

Strong's 2416: Alive, raw, fresh, strong, life

and creatures

נֶ֥פֶשׁ (ne·p̄eš)

Noun - feminine singular

Strong's 5315: A soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion

So. Is coral an active (teeming) mass of minute animals? Well. It is a living colony in the same way that mushrooms are colonies of living things. But other things that swarm or teem are like... krill. shrimp. Locusts. Flies. Ants.

Y'know, stuff that moves. Swarms. Coral doesn't teem or swarm. It's static.

Which leaves us with living and creatures.

I would argue again that "living" implies regular movement — for example, you can have living waters. (Same root word for mayyim chayyim).

But also the other terms which appear beside the root word for life/living over and over again are basically:

Creeping, moving (Strong's 7430 רָמַשׂ ramas)

Flesh (Strong's 1320 בָּשָׂר basar)

Flying or soaring (5774 עוּף)

Having a soul (or literal breath) (5315, נֶפֶשׁ)

And nefesh is of course, also the last one in that list!

So is coral alive in the way Torah usually means things are living beings? Well, coral doesn't creep or move. It also doesn't have blood (which, arguably, means it can't have a carcass. It sort of has bones! But no carcass). It...MIGHT have flesh? I'm sort of unclear about this.

It can't fly or soar.

Which leaves us with:

Do corals have flesh? and,

do corals have souls? And if not metaphorically souls, do they have breath?

Well, coral do respirate. But so do plants. And neither of them have lungs. Also according to @montereybayaquarium's website coral get oxygen from algae? (Don't worry Monterey bay aquarium no one is actually going to eat the coral, this is all hypothetical)

Coral reefs get their bright colors from the algae — called zooxanthellae — living in their tissues. The zooanthellae provide the coral polyps with oxygen and nutrients produced from photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide zooanthellae with carbon dioxide (a byproduct of the polyps’ “breathing” oxygen) and shelter.

Coral polyps can have mouths, but they don't really breathe with lungs. So I'm not sure they have that kind of nefesh (breath of life). And corals are like, a bunch of skeletal base material with living polyps on the top. But are they fleshy? But all their color comes from the algae living in them.

For this I go back to the presence of blood being a big factor, because again, mushrooms have flesh but don't have blood, and so halakhically...that fungi is a plant.

Also apparently Octocorals don't have those exoskeletons? So at that point how would we know something is an octocoral versus like...a seaweed?

I think either seaweed isn't meant to be kosher, or actually corals are kosher because seaweed is. Oysters have gills and hearts. Scallops have a gajillion eyes. Really easy to see those aren't plants.

Basically if you look at a coral does it have a breath and soul, does it fly or creep, does it bleed, does it have flesh, does it move around in general? Could it possibly be a plant, halakhically speaking? (Not by scientific taxonomy!) Would bronze age folks look at it and go "yeah, that's a plant."? Also important: what IS a plant? Halakhically?

rosie: yes!

The only modification I made to the pattern that's demonstrated is that I took the largest bottom layer, and added about an inch to its total length so that I would have a gap between both halves and could "close" it like you see above. I used a large pad of manila drawing paper, and just made my proportions as big as I could on the paper--I think I was somewhere near 24 inches on the longest side of the biggest piece, and the book is about 12 inches square.

It does hold objects well! Nothing big or bulky, but I usually have stickers, postcards, pressed flowers, envelopes and stamps in here; I emptied it mostly out because I'm thinking about bringing it to the hobbit larp in the fall. It is a bit delicate--it is just paper--but it's also really fun!

Because the pattern is modular, you could basically stop or continue at any stage--mine is five layers deep, but you could stop at three, or continue to ten, if you could find big enough paper.

Boris "professional idiot" Johnson wanted to build an island airport in the immediate area.

it's fucking visible

You weren't kidding they've been trying to get the masts off for 5 years and keep getting foiled because there's probably bombs leaking out of her

And for those people who have access to mobility devices but might benefit from a second chair they can abuse without risking expensive damage…

Erik Kondo has made a website, Open Source Innovations, that details plans for DIY wheelchairs. These wheelchairs can be made from common materials like wood, plastic, and pvc. They are lightweight and can be custom fit to the user allowing from the same degree of movement you would get from a custom chair. And they are durable and easily repairable. (he has been stress testing his latest design by dropping it down stairs, dropping it out of a car, launching it across a driveway, and throwing it off a deck). Its 12lbs and I think he said its was in the $200 ish range for parts.

in finnish, the '@' symbol is sometimes referred to as 'kissanhnta' [cat's tail] or 'miau', 'miau merkki' [meow marks]. in the pokemon universe, i thought it might be cute if the '@' symbol were called 'the mew' or 'mew symbol'

regional dialects make it difficult to share 'mewsernames'!

in swedish, the @ symbol is called 'trunk a' [elephants trunk]

Idk if it’s common knowledge how a nuclear energy is generated. But on the assumption it’s not, I had to learn a little in Environmental science A levels.

I shit you not, they are harnessing the power of splitting the fucking atom just to boil some water. It’s just a high tech kettle. When you boil your kettle you are doing the same thing these people are using Uranium for.

All these crazy energy generation methods and almost all of them revolve around boiling water to turn a turbine.

Earth is not just a Terrestrial World; it’s an Exotic Terrestrial: a Water World.

Water is weird, ok? Everything else that’s anywhere close to its molecular weight is very much vaporous gas at similar conditions to water’s triple point. It’s weirdly easy to make carry an electrical charge (we call it an acid or a base when it’s doing this). It’s polarized as fuck, so it’s squirrely, infiltrating all kinds of stuff you normally think of as being solid, like metal and stone.

Water bonds to itself really well, so the transition from liquid or solid to gas, and back, involves a really profound change in volume.

The Water Cycle, whereby Water goes from solid to liquid to gas in all kinda directions, runs a lot of our geologic and mineral cycles, like the nitrogen and carbon and silicone ones. Plate tectonics is partially enabled by lubrication from the ocean infiltrating the earth’s crust.

It kinda… makes sense? That we’d have Water-based technology? As inhabitants of a Water World? From a world-building standpoint I mean.

We hacked one of the driving forces of our world, and use that power to run our civilization.

Bob Ross was a master artist.

Because his chosen art was never painting. It was using a fairly minimalist TV program to convey the act of painting, the feeling of painting. Including the quiet, meditative, calming aspect of art, as represented by his distinctively soothing narration, and the joy of seeing something on the canvas that looks genuinely cool, and the fact that, yeah—you can do this too.

(You can, by the way. Follow along with a Bob Ross demonstration of painting of a mountain, and you'll more or less get a mountain. Not one that looks exactly like his, probably one that looks kind of rough the first time, but as you listen, as he explains why this side of the mountain needs to be blue and why you use the edge of the knife rather than brush strokes, you're pretty much guaranteed to start shaping things that look like mountains. Or forests, or lakes.)

Like - putting aside the question of whether the amount of fanfiction a piece of media receives is an accurate reflection its cultural impact (I abide by the fanfiction moss analogy, sometimes good media just does not beget transformative work), looking at AO3 for numbers just feels disingenuous. AO3 was operating in 2009 but in my memory it wasn’t really in vogue during the time that Avatar 2009 was in theatres. If you’re looking for fanfic based on media from the 2000s, I find that Fanfiction-dot-net is the better website to look at; Castle 2009 only has 4,808 fics on AO3 at the time of writing, but it has over 23,600 fics on Fanfiction-dot-net. It’s not that Castle 2009 had no cultural impact, it’s just that AO3 wasn’t the website being used when that show was in the zeitgeist to capture that cultural impact.