A Helpful Guide To Some Common Birds Here In The Western US

i think the weirdest thing about the shelter-in-place has been the nightly howl, which i forget about every night until i’m walking my dog and the neighbors just suddenly start fucking howling.

well.

Y’know, that makes me think of something, actually.

So if you’re one of those “I can only write when I feel Inspired™” type of writers but you never seem to feel very inspired, and all of the usual “You have to make a schedule and stick to it and sit down and write XYZ words per day” writing tips have never worked for you and only make you feel guilty but you have no idea why,

have you perhaps considered that you might be neurodivergent / mentally ill / have a chronic health condition, and that what you call “inspiration” is what the rest of us call “spoons”?

B/c that is exactly what happened to me.

Star systems follow a standard blueprint that keeps their orbits stable.  They are organized in a hierarchical setup. What that means is that each set of orbits is on a different size scale.  The sizes of stars’ orbits do not go 1-2-3, they go 1-10-100. Any one star is only really close to one other star.  After that, other stars are much farther away.

Here is a cartoon of a hierarchical 8-star system:

This system is hierarchical because each close pair of stars (stars a and b, b and c, etc) is much closer to each other than any other stars (or pairs of stars).  The separation between stars a and b is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b and c+d, which is much smaller than the separation between stars a+b+c+d and e+f+g+h.  Let’s say that the separation between the closest binaries is 0.1 Astronomical Units, the separation between each pair of close binaries is 1 Astronomical Unit, and the separation between clumps of 4 stars is 10 Astronomical Units.

impostor syndrome is a common problem in academia. For example my colleagues keep putting me in the airlock and ejecting me into space

this is a harvest mouse appreciation post

literally the cutest animal ever in history look at this lil fuzz

tiny bean ! friendly bean

they climb on basically everything. probably to get closer to kiss u

if this mouse gets any more disney than this it will probably break out into song

just look at this tiny nugget !!!

harvest mice use their tails for stability while climbing but also to be unnecessarily cute. this deters predators

tiny feet !!!!! tiny toes !

momma with itty puffs

kisses !! 1 hit KO

they are literally too small how dare

harvest mice !!!

harvest mice !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

harv e s t  m i c e  !! ! !!!

thankyou for your time

on a scale of luke skywalker to jaime lannister how well would you deal with losing your right hand

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

dataandphilosophy replied to your post “I just wanted to get on and read some rationalist posts on tumblr and…”

But Kelsey, how can I solve my problem of not having read the Silmarillion by converting to Orthodox Judaism?

Now that you’re observant of Shabbat and don’t use technology from sundown Friday-Saturday, you have a lot of free time, which like any sensible person you spend catching up on all the books you want to read. Thrilled at the prospect of ensnaring someone in two of my interests at once, I send you a pocket Siddur and a pocket Silmarillion, and you end up reading them at the same time, having strange dreams, and writing a long, revolutionary essay on the compatibility of Beresheit with Middle-earth’s revised cosmology. The Christians get mad at us for cultural appropriation. 

Ea Nasir and his shitty copper being a meme in the year 2021 is one of my favourite things about the internet. Like, most of the web is straight up a mistake but meming Ea Nasir is a shining star in the internet bin fire firmament.

Hey guys? 

So I’ve been noticing that lately we’re making fun of adults who live in their parents’ basements again… 

Guess where I live! My parents’ basement! I’m mentally ill and autistic and not capable of living independently. I can’t go grocery shopping alone, I can’t drive, I can’t make transfers on public transportation, and if I’m left alone I forget to do things like eat, drink, shower, take my meds, and do laundry. Even if I were capable of independent living, I don’t make enough on disability to afford an apartment. 

If y’all are actually committed to intersectionality, you’d best find a better insult for misogynists than living in their parents’ basement, because honestly I already get down on myself for feeling useless enough without this stuff. 

Also this is totally ok for abled people to reblog and signal boost if you don’t mind? :) Thanks!