hands make the tools, build a world, begin again

cleaning or wipe your bare feet

breaking off a piece of bread and handing it to someone

putting the weight of a basket on your hip or head

eating nuts or berries while hunched over close to the ground

seeing something startling just out of your line of sight and very quickly stepping or leaping on to a larger object to get a better view

cupping your hands into running water to wash your face

the unanimous protection of a baby or child in a public space where women are present

Touching someone’s face with the back of your hand to see if they have a fever

Stopping to watch animals moving in groups (geese, fish, horses, butterflies, bees)

huddling together for warmth when it’s cold

marveling at sunlight through leaves

wonderment at the brightness of a full moon

this animal. as "Axe-oh-lottle"

the term 'axolotl' comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Nahua people (or the aztecs, for the uninitiated). it is derived from atl (water) and xolotl (one of the gods in the pantheon). in nahua, x's make a 'sh' sound, not a 'ks' sound. and when you have a 'tl' at the end of the word, it is best to just omit the l (since, in english it does not flow very naturally to make the Proper sound)

with this knowledge, we realize that the word 'axolotl' is actually pronounced "ash-o-lot" and Not "axe-oh-lottle"

anyway. thats my tedtalk

sincerely,

so 'nahuatl' is pronounced 'na-wat' not 'na-how-tle'

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

Once our ancestors came down from the trees and started careening around on two legs, the specialized forelimb anatomy they had evolved for flinging themselves through the canopy at high velocity turned out to also be pretty handy for hucking sharp rocks at prey from a distance. So we kept that and improved on it over four million years and now Randy Johnson can vaporize a bird with a 110mph fastball from hell. We can easily kill anything without touching it. Our yeetage is legendary. To other animals we must be like some kind of terrifying mythical creature.

HELLO MY GOOD FRIEND BABYLON. YOU HAVE ACTIVATED ME LIKE A SLEEPER AGENT BECAUSE HISTORICAL ASTRONOMY IS VERY COOL.

So firstly, YES there is a direct correlation between a star's luminosity and its stability, in terms of lifespan. It doesn't affect how the star moves across the sky, but it does affect how long the star exists for. Brighter stars are larger, which means hotter, which means they burn faster. This of course is still on the scale of dozens-of-millions to billions of years, so it would not necessarily change much over human history... for main sequence stars, that is. As it turns out, most of the brightest stars in the night sky, the ones that are keystones of constellations, are giant stars. As in, they are actively dying. Some may stick around a few million years, but most others will be gone in a few dozen thousand. We are currently waiting on Betelgeuse, the brightest star in Orion, to go supernova, which could happen at any point in the next couple millennia or so.

By the same token, this means that the majority of major named stars are extremely large, extremely bright, and extremely far away, and very distant stars tend to move in the sky much slower. However, there are a handful of notable bright stars that are bright because they are very close, and these stars DO move appreciably over millennia. Trace the sky backwards ten thousand years to the start of Mesopotamian civilization and you find that constellations like Canis Major & Minor, Aquila, and Volans become a bit warped because their brightest stars are all close enough to move noticeably over that time period. It's not really enough to change a culture's constellations... but if you traveled back to the age when our ancestors first discovered fire, some two million years ago, you would barely be able to recognize the sky.

Additionally, Earth's rotation precesses over the course of its orbit, which means the exact position of the heavens as a whole moves in a very slow circle over about 26000 years. Polaris (Alpha Ursae Minoris), the star we know as the North Star, actually wasn't close enough to the north celestial pole to be useful even a thousand years ago! In fact, the Egyptians four thousand years ago used Thuban (Alpha Draconis) as their polestar, and in another dozen millennia it'll be Vega's turn (Alpha Lyrae).

About this blog

Heya! I'm Spyglass, but most folks just call me Spy.

he/him

adult (slowly getting better at it)

touched by the 'Tism

I am a creative polymath, existential nihilist, staunch humanist, science nerd, wistful wannabe-futurist, and –most importantly– TWO-TIME AWARD-WINNING WORLDBUILDER. I contain multitudes. Check out my other internet haunts here. Make sure to skim the Realms Overview to familiarize yourself with my various worldbuilding projects. And if you'd like to support me monetarily, I have a Ko-fi page!

I don't really partake in fandoms, ergo I don't reblog fandom stuff (with rare exceptions, which are tagged appropriately). If I reblog anything nsfw it's exclusively because it's funny; e.g. the odd dirty jokes and shitposts (which will be tagged as such for easy filtering). Consider this blog PG-13 with a big ol' asterisk and footnote. I try my best to ensure this blog is a safe space for all flavors of marginalized folks. Thanks for stopping by! :)

Link system

Links are color-coded! This is for my own reference as well as reader convenience. Green links are links to this blog or my other sites Red links are links to YouTube specifically Blue links are links to any other sites

Tag system

In no particular order. Tagging is a little haphazard, so I may have missed some things in my archive, but this covers the bulk of the content you'll see here.

'Microraptor and the Nest Guard' - an early-Cretaceous short by me.

my wife once asked our roomate where she was parked in a group chat. but she messed up the word "parked" and instead spelled it as "garked". and then me and my roommate just started referring to parking as garking because its just really fun to give my wife shit. its just part of the professional little brother playbook.

but also, at some point it stopped being ironic and we just started calling parking garking.