hey did you know??? that if you stop stretching and maintaining mobility in your body then it goes away?? things get tight and you can't move the way that you used to??? and when you decide to try getting a stretch routine going that the first week fucking sucks because you keep going 'damn i used to be able to do this no problem' and then you have to switch gears and be kind to yourself and just focus on getting better from here instead of berating yourself for dropping the good habits in the first place??? and your body never stops aging so you gotta keep taking care of it and sometimes you gotta take care of it extra in certain areas because of things that happened when you were younger and it's boring and sometimes hurts but it's so necessary???

i am yelling this at myself right now i am going through An Experience (trying to get into a routine of body maintenance again for my physical and mental health)

oh, Sisyphus! i got you

if you’re in high school right now you gotta start writing poetry trust me on this, it’s cringe, poetry kids are pretentious, you’ll look back on it and be embarrassed, and it is literally the best thing you could be doing right now. The world is in dire need of more crappy teenage poetry

I don't need someone to match my freak; I need someone to complement my freak. Accentuate and accent my freak. Plus, we gotta diversify our freak portfolio here -- combine our efforts to cover the greatest amount of freakage instead of seeking freak redundancy.

writing tip #3655:

if you write a book then you will have written a book

IT'S TIME TO FLOP IN THE SLOP

no music 🎧

Thank you for the no music note. Animal frolicking noises

@bovineblogger it's not a cow, but, you will like the Noises

using emdashes and a semi colon in the same line. this sentence will end when i do

commitment to the bit to lovers

From here. If you think arachnids with long legs are just scary please watch this solifugid dig her nest (or try to) like SUCH a goofy little person creature. Look how she shoves dirt with her mouth and then gives it a little pat. Is she even making any progress?!

Wow. The patience, kindness and calm communication skills. Outstanding.

From raindovemodel

This made me cry. I wish all situations could be handled as perfectly as this

I just want to point out the core of what the diffuser did in this conversation

They recognized that the mother was also expressing a vulnerable truth about herself - that she felt like a bad mother because her child was expressing gender feelings she wasn’t equipped to help with - and met her where she was, a concerned parent with limited information - to point her where she should be heading, research and resources.

Im going to make more of an effort to stop reflexively pushing people away when they express biases and make more of an effort to hear the underlying fears when i can

“it’s easier to love ourselves when we feel loved as ourselves”

damn that is so  powerful though

“it’s easier to

love ourselves when we feel

loved as ourselves”

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

@radley-writes

Peer review

I passed peer review! Thank you. I think these are important skills for everyone to learn. x

This fake yarn is supposedly better for sheep.

Aimed at people who don’t know where wool comes from, it’s 100% plastic. Yes, plastic.

So any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

You’re supposed to believe that sheep shearing is violent and cruel. There are imbeciles out there that work in an unprofessional manner while shearing, but that’s not the case overall.

Sheep don’t suffer from having their fleece removed.

Left on, the fleece can become a home for fly eggs and the subsequent maggots which can eat the sheep. Chemical treatments are available to prevent that happening. It’s much better for the sheep, the land and the farmer to avoid chemical use.

Don’t be fooled. Wool is a sustainable material, one we should make more and better use of.

Any garment you wash will release microfibres into the sea. It’ll never decompose.

This is very important.

And you need to wash acrylic wool garment more often than natural wool. They get stinky way more easily.

In my almost-decade of owning sheep, there have been exactly two(2) bad shearers try to start up in the area. Know what happened? The first farm they went to called every other shepherd in the area and said “This guy cut one of my sheep and didn’t think it was a big deal, don’t hire him.” And neither of them ever did business in the area again.

Some farmers are less conscientious than they should be about taking care of their stock, and the occasional tiny nick will happen, but no one is going to hire a shearer who is a) incompetent enough and b) uncaring enough to actually injure the animals to the point of bleeding, let alone the kind of horrors the internet claims.

Also, most breeds of sheep will literally die if they go too long without being sheared. PETA (and let’s face it, most of this anti-wool stuff can be traced back to deliberate misinformation from PETA) doesn’t care if sheep die, they have openly stated that they would prefer every domestic species that can no longer survive without humans go extinct rather than live in “"slavery.”“

Humans and sheep have lived together for over ten thousand years, they’ve been domesticated longer than dogs! Their lives consist of doing whatever the heck they want (for the most part they only want to walk, eat, sleep, play, and make lambs) while being fed and cared for, for the low price of having their hair cut once a year. Why would anyone boycott this natural, biodegradable fiber humans have been using for so long to the benefit of both species, in favor of plastics that are killing the planet??

Also loving the “the sheep will be snuggly warm tonight” like… You shear sheep in the spring, when the weather warms up and they no longer need it, and they grow it back for next winter.

Also, you literaly NEED to shear sheep multible times a Year or they fucking Overheat and die in their own wool

Twee, deliberate mislabelling which appeals to kind-hearted people who know nothing about how the real thing is produced.

On the funnier side, ignorance about anything closer to nature than a supermarket shelf can result in gems like this one:

Regular yogurt for me.  Thanks.

(As for ignorance, this post is epic and getting more so every time I see it.)

*****

Back on topic.

Shearing’s not skinning and it’s not painful, unless some guy getting busy with a manscaping clipper means he’s flaying himself alive.

Shearing is an all-over haircut, call it sheepscaping if need be though expect some odd looks, and good shearers - as @ruusverd​ said, bad shearers earn a bad rep and soon earn no more money - will leave less nicks on an entire sheep than I might inflict on my face if I forget to change my razor-blade. 

That’s pretty impressive when dealing with a notoriously dimwit animal that doesn’t understand “now just sit still for a minute” and finds “see that open gate, go through it” a difficult concept. (Going through an unexpected hole in the hedge, however, is something sheep do with great ease and willingness, especially if there’s a soon-to-be-ex herb garden on the far side…)

“All warm and snuggly in their woolly jumpers…” Oh puh-leeze. A jumper is a garment which can be taken off and put on as required. A sheep’s fleece is nothing of the sort. Ireland’s just had a heatwave, so which of these two would have been more comfortable the other day when it was 30°C / 90°F in the shade?

*****

But look at the blood! goes the outcry about sheep with red stains. Here’s what that “blood” is. Unless the outcriers believe the front half is royal and bleeds blue, it’s just dye.

Why dye? There are various reasons: to show who owns which sheep in a mixed flock of the same breed, or to indicate if one has been dosed with something, or to mark if a ewe has mated with a ram.

The ram wears a harness - AFAIK not black leather with chrome studs, at least not on any farm near here - which holds a dye-pad on his chest. After he’s done his business, the hopefully-preggers ewe will have a patch of that dye on her rump as in the photo.

Different colours let the farmer know which ram’s been busy if there’s more than one, or with one ram, on what day the mating occurred so they can calculate when to expect lambs. That kit suggests rams get one day a week off…

*****

Besides shearing sheep to stop them overheating, if the weather is rainy rather than sunny they’ll still need sheared to stop them getting waterlogged.

A waterlogged sheep is a top-heavy sheep, and since rainy weather will have made the ground slippery, a top-heavy sheep can all too easily become a sheep on its back - a broad, flat back that won’t roll - unable to get upright.

Sheep internal organs aren’t meant to be upside down and inversion will eventually kill them, if they’re not gutted by a fox first. Crows will have had their eyes long before then.

Forget deceitful propaganda about fake wool, here’s some REAL advice about how to do a sheep a (literal) good turn.

I’ve done it myself, and though she’d already lost one eye - hoodie crows don’t miss a chance - that ewe survived and next spring produced what I was told were two fine lambs. I felt pretty good about that.

I still do.

*****

This is what shearing really looks like, and that’s not the behaviour of an animal in distress or pain. Baffled, maybe, but any human whose haircut started with a judo throw would be baffled too..

The end result is a 12lb / 5.5kg load of insulation which the sheep no longer has to carry about. How’d you like being stuck inside that lot on a hot day?

The “shearing is cruel” fruitloops rely on deliberate lies, gullibility and lack of knowledge. Be aware.

 Or maybe…

Shear your sheep

I understand the impulse to clown on Essek for walking around in Vasselheim with his recognizable voice with the Bright Queen's spearhead commander, and of course we could turn to the metatextual elements (the necessity of signposting the world for players on the part of the GM, the ease of using a familiar ally to introduce a relevant NPC and new point of contact) to dismiss this if we wanted, but I think it's more interesting—and funnier, as you'll see—to imagine this as simply an extension of the laws and logic that dictate the Mighty Nein as a narrative entity.

Fundamentally, the Mighty Nein within their campaign pursue personal and collective agency, often at the expense or in denial of political power. Where they do interact with more political forms of power, they evade its grasp upon them, most notably in their interactions with the war, but also while they engage with the Cerberus Assembly, the Cobalt Soul, and even the Revelry. The way they pursue agency, on the other hand, has far more to do with their own support of one another and their own individual power, especially where there is magic involved, and manifests in having the freedom to move and act as they wish in the world.

The culmination of this, as we know, is the mechanical ability in their final battle against Lucien and the Somnovem to manipulate the terrain of the battle map to their advantage with only imagination. At the same time, Jester and Caduceus can both call in free favors from their gods, one of whom is unlimited by the Divine Gate and in fact is far more governed by fey logic. Fjord has made three different divine pacts and is virtually unrestricted by any of them. Caleb's hallmark is an almost infinitely malleable home that almost literally seems to operate as a hammerspace, with a pinnacle dedicated to the potentiality of the universe, the application of which is one of his signature spells—against all odds successful in his initial goal, no longer fueled by guilt and grief, of bending reality to his will. It's narratively and thematically cogent that this be the calling card of the party as a whole.

The Mighty Nein are, in effect, dictated by Looney Tunes logic, and nothing else. They have been so successful in their pursuit of their own freedom that they no longer abide by the cosmic laws of Exandria, let alone the laws of physics or sense. So yes, from an external point of view, it does look exceedingly foolish for Essek to be traipsing around in Vasselheim under the Bright Queen's nose, but it's far more entertaining to argue that being a member of the Mighty Nein in fact simply confers the capability of ignoring the laws of reality without consequence when it's narratively convenient, characteristically interesting—or just really fucking funny.

in conclusion

Related: at a neuroscience conference I was at once there was a talk on how the "microslippages" against your fingertip when you lightly pinch something are generally enough for you to work out exactly how much force to grip it with to lift it without crushing it or dropping it.

[ID/A tweet by Cliff 🦖 [dinosaur emoji] Jerrison (@ pervocracy) saying "one of the most amazing things a human brain can do is when you shake an opaque bottle and get an idea of how full it is by how the weight shifts. there's got to be incredible math going on under the hood there" /End ID]

What about tosses? What about catching? THATS some serious math right there too

Theres a post somewhere about how the human brain is just constantly doing advanced calculus, even if we dont understand the math, we are still very good at consepsualizing it

LOVING PHYSICS HOURS!!!