Yes I'm a Sister of Battle

Dr. Gachey with foxglove, 1890

Some of Van Gogh’s best work was done during a period of his life that he spent in a hospital being treated for his mental health problems. I could be wrong but I think Starry Night was among those.

This is consistently the case. Creators tend to do their best work when they are in a healthy place and receiving proper treatment and not being self destructive in their efforts to cope. Go figure.

All our experiences, good and bad, inform what we create, but suffering is not the price of great art. Suffering is what prevents artists from completing great art.

(I bring to mind this @tkingfisher / Ursula Verson quote about once a week <3)

Austrian Airlines departs twitter in a pretty good post.

X-it is happening💪

A very useful thread on Bluesky:

(There is a lot more. Rather than give you all the images, I've copied the full text below.)

Ecologists, climatologists, geologists, physicists, et al: the planet can easily support more people than currently live on it and if we make some basic changes in how we live our lives and rearrange worldwide logistics we can live sustainably

Tumblr posters who get annoyed when you call them “primitivists”: If everybody doesn’t kill themselves right now we’re all gonna die

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

Our first victory against trump!

Time to start celebrating ALL the small wins, because EVERY win means a lot, and every win helps us fight for the next one!

this can’t be real

He put them together at the kids table that doesn’t exist I’m fucking crying

So, something I learnt the other day. So, you know how dinosaurs supposedly can't see you if you stand still? Well that myth is based on real-life lizards/etc and how eyes in general work. So, once my dad starts infodumping, here comes some other cool information. We, humans, can in fact, also not see something unless it's moving. We fixed this by having our eyes constantly shake. And then our brain compensates for us, so we don't have to have shaky vision.

What if aliens don't have this? Like. What if they find out when one of us was looking at something in the distance, and they walk around this thing that's in front of them, and the alien is confused so they bob their head and oh, there's a thing there, but how did the human know that, and then we explain and they're like, horrified.

Humans are apex predators. They can hunt in packs. They can hunt in pairs. They can hunt on their own. They're persistance predators, which is unheard of. They get stronger when they're mad or scared. They have this thing called 'body language' which acts like a type of hivemind, even if they'll claim it isn't. And. They can see you. When you're not moving. They can still see you. If you ever find yourself in a fight against a human, for whatever reason? Run. Run as fast as you can. And hope, pray if you have a religion, that they won't follow.

ok thats a really neat concept but what do you mean our eyes are always shaking

If you hold your hand at arms length and look at your thumbnail, thats approximately the size of area your eye can actually focus on. Everything else is a composite image generated by your brain.

Your eyes constantly dart around a little bit to fill in the composite.

the scary part? when your eyes move, you go blind. Your visual system has to cover up the periodic blindness but it does it "backwards" from how you'd expect: instead of "lagging" vision, it shows you what you see after the blindness, but makes it seem like you saw it the whole time.

You can see this by looking at a clock with a ticking second hand. The first time you move your eyes to it, the tick you see will seem to take longer than usual. That's because your visual system lied about how long you saw that tick, because you were blind for part of the time you thought you were seeing it. (fun fact: we don't see the same thing with moving objects, but only because our vision system "fakes the footage" of them moving while we were blind, because it understands consistent motion)

The human vision system is a marvelous clusterfuck of hacks.

Wait - is this why/how moving pictures work? Would that mean that aliens whose eyes work differently (or some animals I guess?) would see those rapidly flickering singular pictures instead of motion?

That's a different effect (persistence of vision) but yeah, aliens could easily not be able to watch our movies.

Like, Pigeons already can't: They're too slow for them. According to QI, you'd need to project at (at minimum) 200 FPS for it to appear like motion to them.

Conversely it might be that we can't watch their movies: if they have slower vision than us, it might look like a slideshow to us and motion to them.

the ninth doctor was lowkey so under appreciated. he was the perfect combination of rascal (mostly) benevolent god and slut

imo he was the most considerate doctor, who was the most aware of his power and the people he was capable of hurting. he was cynical and moody and war worn but he cared so deeply. he loved knowing he’d lose. he kissed a servant girl on the forehead that sacrificed herself who no one would remember except for him and rose. and at the same time a right bastard <3

The contrast between Nine's absolute glee in, "Everybody lives, Rose! Just this once, everybody lives!" and the cold self-recognition of loathing in his "Only a killer would know that" dinner with the Slitheen leader. Eccleston was so good.

#the thing about eccleston is that he was ANGRY#and it always showed#but anyways that tangible anger always made his moments of joy greater and his low moments more impactful than any other doctor#because instead of a joyful being who occasionally shows flashes of deep pain#he was a being of deep pain who STILL believed in the universe#and in people and in life#even if it hurt#and you know it did hurt#unlike most of the other doctors he was a presence#because you could feel through the fucking screen that every moment of his life weighed on him#but that he still could not bare to miss a second of it

^^^

Keeping those tags because they're so good

"The Doppelganger program and its “Good Old USA Project” aimed to mimic mainstream media outlets to push pro-Russian policies through fake social media accounts. Documents show that the Kremlin specifically targeted Trump supporters, minorities, gamers, and swing-state voters by spreading far-right conspiracies and capitalizing on existing divisions in U.S. politics."

Do not seek forgiveness, for it will not ease the burden. It weighs as it should.

and a shoutout to the two Māori men who travelled to Vienna in 1859, got themselves apprenticed as printers (and incidentally became accomplished ballroom dancers), and finally had an audience with Franz Josef where they charmed him so much that he sent a printing press to New Zealand….which was promptly used from 1861 to print the newspaper of the Kingitanga anti-colonial movement.

Just researched a bit- they’re names are Wiremu Toetoe and Te Hemara Rerehau Paraone and it’s quite a fascinating story.

I love you PBS I love you NPR I love you public libraries I love you wikipedia I love you project gutenberg I love you librivox I love you libby I love you hoopla I love you openlibrary I love you internet archive I love you resources that make information free and accessible to the public

"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up."

—Terry Pratchett, Night Watch.

The continuation of that passage feels pertinent to right now as well:

“What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when the machinery of city life faltered, the wheels stopped turning and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.”

If you haven't read this book (oh gods, please do) or any Discworld (please. Please it will change your brain chemistry), I feel the need to add- often these books capture so perfectly the crushing disappointment and frustration of people being people in the worst ways.

But, importantly, Sam (and Granny and Tiffanny too) still fight for them. Still go out into the dark and the rain to protect people from the worst they might do to each other. Even frightened and stupid and small minded, Discworlds protagonists will do the thankless work of being the Shepard in the field and the light in the dark, because someone has to.

The key part of that first quote, I think, is the "when you saw people as things to be measured" because-

As you may know, some Democrats are trying to blame the election loss on trans people. Here's my thorough response: "Should Democrats Throw Trans People Under the Bus? Here’s Why It Would Be Bad Politics." No paywall, 8 minute read. It's also on Medium, here's the friend link. And if you appreciate that I make essays like this freely available online, please consider supporting me on Patreon (for as little as $1/month)!