Iykyk

Anyway. Online spaces are tough for us when we live in fear bc we are in such dire need of connection but this medium will kill us if we have too much of it. It feels like drinking seawater when you’re dying of thirst alone and adrift in the middle of an ocean.

The internet, it iterates and iterates and iterates, it concentrates and percolates our fear bc it’s the input, and we consume the output, which is the fear, iterated many times. We come here because we have an inbuilt need to connect, even more so when fear dominates our lives, but we have to be careful, we have to balance it with connection in real life. We have to balance the parts with the whole, the brain with the body, the one dimensional with the multidimensional.

We need balance. When we’re unbalanced we tend to lean into the direction in which we’re unbalanced and that’s how we get spirals. And when we find balance and are moving forward finally, it’s hard to lean into the imbalance.

The conscious mind, cognition, ego, any other name for it, fears the unknown above all else. We get awfully attached to our misery, because it is familiar to us. We make a home in it, we build a life in it, because the only thing more terrifying than all the horrors in our memories is the Unknown. And change is unknown. We resist it incredibly well. We identify with our misery, our trauma, we make it a part of our identity so it is safe in the blind spot of our critical thought. As long as we identify with our trauma, we’ll never escape it. And I find that being online keeps me entrenched in it.

I also think, we do what we need to, and nothing happens until the moment it is possible for it to happen.

I learned so much from tumblr alone, so much about the healing process, so much that without it I wouldn’t have made the progress that I have. In a way, it was necessary to be exposed to all the bad of the internet in order to get some of the good it offers. It was necessary to be struggling and stuck and mired in my own suffering, for a time. The trick, I think, is remaining conscious of it and never forgetting that there is more than this, this is just one stage and there is more after it, and at some point it will be time to move on. I think everyone learns this at exactly the moment they are capable and not a moment before. We have to be reminded to remember.

So I guess maybe this is a gentle reminder that this is just one step on the journey, and it’s okay to be here (metaphysically, whether tumblr itself or the internet in general or, simply, in a state of trauma identification) for as long as you need to, but do remember to listen for the whisper of the moment when you no longer need to be here, and heed its call. It will come from inside you, it will be so soft and small that it’ll be easy to miss if you are surrounded by too much noise. But don’t worry, it will always try again, it will always call back, until you answer.

Mangrove forests used to be considered one of the world's most threatened ecosystems. However, recent analysis of satellite data shows that mangrove forests are no longer in decline and in fact the global coverage of mangrove forests has been increasing over the last 16 years due to restoration and natural habitat expansion.

New research used an AI (note that this is a good use of AI to analyze data for research, not a LLM) to analyze over 45,000 recorded observations of coral reefs with the goal of finding locations where reefs were more likely to survive higher ocean temperatures into the future. Based on over 40 criteria, the AI model predicted at least 64,000 square miles of reef would be able to survive rising ocean temperatures into 2050 and beyond. That's about the size of Wisconsin.

Corals in these "coral refuges" had some combination of a faster rate of recovery, more heat-resistant species, and better protection from heat-related damage.

The study authors hope that their research can help guide more efficient allocation of limited coral conservation resources.

Although coral reefs face immense threat from climate change, our knowledge of coral conservation has increased by leaps and bounds in the last 20 years. Only two decades ago we couldn't breed corals in human care, now we have mobile coral labs that can breed thousands of coral in just a week. We can restore reefs faster and more successfully, and there are scientists working on breeding more heat-resistant coral lineages.

If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.

So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.

I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.

But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".

The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".

Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.

Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".

Curry favor in:

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry_favor

Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curry%20favor

Dodacles plumosa

A firefly found in Costa Rica.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

This is just a small example of what happens when we let scrotes control the narrative; they change terms, definitions, quietly erase facts, and eventually they slowly rewrite history. These small changes (including within academic work and on websites such as Wikipedia) add up and can ultimately influence or change people's opinion. I HIGHLY encourage radfems on this website to join Wikipedia, learn its policies and guidelines, and start making good faith edits so we can restructure the biased cesspit it currently is.