Photo for Your Thoughts?

I learned this from my cousins after they moved abroad. It was their quick, easy, low stakes method of reconnecting / staying connected with family, like if they went for a bike ride by a lake taking a picture and sending it to us like "went for a bike ride by the lake today and the lake was so pretty!".

When I'd been feeling pretty isolated because a chronic fatigue condition was making going out and socializing too exhausting for me, and one of my cousins sent one of their messages, it was a big lightbulb moment like "hey wait a second, why don't I just do this to stay connected with the people I've been drifting from since this chronic fatigue condition has been keeping me from spending as much time with people as I'd like?" and I did.

I'd take pictures of wildflowers and send it to people with a little "look at this cool wildflower I saw today, it smelled so good", and doing this with cats, and birds, and whatever cool or pretty or interesting things I'd encounter during my day. Maybe sometimes doing this with interesting dishes / culinary projects, you get the drift.

I'm not saying it was a complete replacement for actually going out and spending time with people, but it was amazing how much of a difference it made in how isolated vs connected I felt, and subsequently the difference it made in my mental health.

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

thanksgiving

christmas

not pictured: when I came back from the holidays and there’d been a huge storm while I was gone, so all that was left was a pelvis

but we persist. valentines

st patricks day

Migrating sea turtles only sort of know where they’re going

An “approximate” sense of Earth’s magnetic fields means the animals must occasionally reorient during long ocean voyages.

When Charles Darwin visited Ascension Island in 1836, he was perplexed by the vast numbers of green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) nesting on its beaches. Every mating season, these intrepid reptiles leave their feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and journey more than 2000 kilometers across the sea to lay their eggs on this tiny, remote island. How, Darwin later mused in a letter to Nature, did the animals find their way to a “speck of land in the midst of the great Atlantic Ocean?” Since then, scientists have uncovered convincing evidence that sea turtles can sense components of Earth’s geomagnetic field. Now, data collected using a new kind of tracking device lend further support to the idea that these animals use magnetic maps to navigate during their transoceanic voyages. But the system is far from perfect, researchers report today in Science Advances, which means migrating turtles must periodically reorient themselves after veering off course. The findings fit “very comfortably with what we know about turtle navigation,” says Kenneth Lohmann, a marine biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who wasn’t involved in the research. His team previously conducted laboratory studies demonstrating turtles can sense the strength of geomagnetic fields as well as their angle relative to the surface of Earth—potentially providing migrating turtles with a “bicoordinate” geomagnetic map of their surroundings. Exactly how good they are at using those coordinates in the open ocean, however, has been less clear...