silly blog

staring into the bathroom mirror, trying to discern hints of your parents' faces in your own

falling into a vicious cycle you will spend decades of your life trying to crawl and bite your way out of

placing your ear to the mossy ground. do you hear it? is that the earth's heartbeat, or your own?

whispering forgotten hymns from a dead language into your pillow and listening for a response

putting your tongue to something you would otherwise never get to taste

climbing as high as you can in the tallest tree you can find and reaching up to brush the sky with your fingertips. it can't be that high up, right?

reading

falling to your knees in an empty field and screaming until your lungs give out

listening to yourself talk and realizing that all you say is an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings from other people, some of which you will never see or speak to again

establishing a tentative peace with the spider in that dim corner you can never bring yourself to reach into

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

He was talking about it in the context of designing robots that would go in and stop nuclear reactor meltdowns, something that would 100% destroy the robot, but they would be designed to keep functioning and fighting the meltdown for as long as possible. He had some designs where over 80% of the robot has died and it was functionally dragging its corpse around by its one working arm because one more minute of functionality might save thousands.

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century