go forth and make mischief

Nonchaloir (Repose) — John Singer Sargent, 1911 Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington

Scrambled egg slime/Fuligo septica/trollsmör, a species of slime mould.

Fuligo septica, commonly known in Sweden as trollsmör ("troll butter"), belong to a remarkable group of single-celled organisms that spend part of their lives as a giant, multinucleate cell known as a plasmodium.

During this stage, they can slowly move across decaying wood, engulfing bacteria, fungi and other microscopic food in their path. It may only travel a few centimetres a day, but it is very much alive and on the move. When conditions change, the plasmodium transforms into a spore-producing fruiting body, which is usually the stage we notice in the forest.

Slime moulds have fascinated people for centuries because they seem to appear overnight and vanish just as quickly. In Nordic folklore, trollsmör was said to be milk spilled by a magical creature known as a bjära or "troll hare", sent out by witches to steal milk from their neighbours' cows. Wherever a little of the stolen milk was dropped in the forest, trollsmör was believed to appear.

The real explanation is perhaps even more extraordinary than the old legends.

im seeing people fact-check this in the notes so i'll add that the full inscription is "marcosior maternia" and if you search that in google scholar you'll find lots of sources. it might not be true but it's definitely real, by which i mean that scholars don't know for sure what "marcosior maternia" means but this is a common interpretation. it's written on a spindle whorl (little weights that are used in spinning) and there's actually a lot of spindle whorls from roman gaul that have sort of amatory inscriptions on them, so they might have been gifts for lovers but it's not clear, but anyway a sexual meaning is perfectly expected for this type of object, and maternia looks like a woman's name in either the nominative or instrumental case, and marcosior looks like a passive verb related to the word for 'horse' in a desiderative or future form. so "i want to be ridden by maternia", "i will be ridden by maternia", and "maternia will be ridden" are some of the plausible interpretations.

SHANEWEEK | DAY 3: FAVORITE QUOTE