people dont fear herons as much as they should

why?

their entire hunting strategy is making their bodies into spears. basically they can extend their necks super fast at prey and stab them hard enough to the point they can have a hard time getting their prey off of their beaks by themselves

you can see here in this x ray that one vertebra in their necks is elongated right at the s-curve, and this is what makes them crazy efficient hunters. the elongated vertebra allows them to basically launch their heads at prey incredibly fast where they stab it with their sharp beaks. like any animal herons aren't going to hesitate to defend themselves if they have do and it would probably suck to get stabbed by a bird. even bitterns can do a lot of damage like this, plus bitterns have a tendency to go for the eyes

also they can and will snatch gophers right out of the ground. they'll eat pretty much anything they can fit down their throats (which is way bigger than you think. their esophaguses are very elastic)

i'm not saying you should be scared of a heron or anything but people dont realize how much damage they can do

if this guy wants, he can skewer you. remember this

fun fact there's a pretty good body of work suggesting that azdarchid pterosaurs used essentially the same kind of predation model as herons

except. well. they were the size of giraffes.

(image courtesy of Mark Witton)

do you have the good sense to fear the heron now?!

[help]

Blue herons at least, are frighteningly huge up close too

@blizz4rd1203

Léo Forest Leo Forest (b. 1985, based Paris, France) - Chat, 2023, Drawings: Pencil, Charcoal, Pastel on Paper

This is the most perfect depicition of a cat debate I've ever seen.

My hypothesis is that in like 10 years gen z is gonna have a big cult boom the way the boomers did in the 70s

It’s already happening on tik tok. There’s a fun new thing going round that’s citing common symptoms of depression and anxiety as signs you’re about to have your awakening and that you are actually an alien and the reason you don’t feel right is because you’re home sick for your own galaxy. So that’s fun.

agreed, and i don't mean this in a "haha gen z is so dumb they're gonna join a tiktok cult lmao" i mean that conditions are perfect for the formation of cults right now.

[ID:  Spongebob wrestling meme format. Buff Patrick labeled "predatory cult" flexes and growls in a wrestling ring at a stern, buff Spongebob labeled "my intelligence". In his corner Mr Crabs is labeled "my education". Final panel shows Patrick and whistling Spongebob walking out hand-in-hand, both labeled "rationalizing why this isn't really a cult" /ID]

(This is actually more relevant here than standalone.) 

Our popular media has tended to portray people in cults as ignorant or as losers when that’s really not how they work. Cults don’t want dead weight they have to support; they want talented, clever, energetic people they can exploit to siphon wealth and labor out of.

Some are religious, but some are political. You find yourself moving into a house full of Maoist revolutionaries because capitalism really is that awful and ecological collapse is imminent—but for some reason, the leader of the self-crit sessions is also the person everyone else in the house is in a polyamorous relationship with, and they can’t see anyone else outside of the house without her approval. Or you need a little extra money and you get told you’d be so good at selling Keto products. You’re a natural, and after you get through these first tough months, the leg under you will be developed enough you only have to work if you wanna hit bigger goals. Etc.

Loneliness, a lack of purpose, and desperation all make you susceptible to cults no matter how smart you are. In fact, your very clever brain is also extremely capable of redirecting your thoughts away from realizing you’re being exploited and abused because, after all, you’re not some idiot, are you? 

We’ve got a ton of very clever young people fully aware that they’re going to have to suffer through decisions of the selfish dead, and they’re going to crave salvation of all different kinds because the future is going to suck, and it won’t have been their fault, and they won’t be able to do anything to stop it. 

You may be thinking still “I’m not one of those WEAK MINDED FOOLS who would join a cult” let me remind you that there’s no one type of person who joins cults. But lots of people who join cults do so when their life is in some kind of crisis and they are extremely vulnerable, seeking a place to belong or escape.

Right now, I have a place to belong and I’m happy and I am hyper vigilant about high control environments and I probably wouldn’t join a cult…but if I had recently lost my job? My partner passed away? If a handful of my friends who function as family left Texas? If my house burned down? If I began struggling with addiction? If I became very ill? Who knows what I would do if just the wrong kind of predatory group bumped into my life at just the wrong time?

All cults start with some level of reasonable introduction. The whole boiling frog metaphor…none of us are as bulletproof to social manipulation and control as we may wish we are. Our circumstances impact us greatly.

I very much think we are not only going to but are already seeing modern cults in a big way. And it’s interesting how many of them are led by women. Gwen Shamblin Lara. Teal Swan. Mother God.

This is why tiktok things like the tradwife trend or witchtok are so concerning.

Because, guess what! They're called Influencers for a reason! They Influence others for better or for worse! And, guess what, if you go viral, it's surprisingly easy to start a cult-like situation!

Sure, tiktok trends are short-lived, but also, they can HORRIBLY influence everyone that participates in them and cause a LOT of harm already.

Especially since there's gen alpha on tiktok now, which means that easily impressionable little kids are getting into these trends! And it keeps on going! So kids might start joining these predatory cults due to neglect!

It may just be an aesthetic or meme now, but those are weapons used in cults, too.

i used to have a running gag on twitter where i would tweet "i'm going to draw a horse" and then proceeded to draw a horse. here is a compilation

context for boghorse:

i would never lie to you

Negative

well one of you is lying

lindt is being sued in a class action in the united states because they are one of MANY brands of chocolate that tested high for heavy metals. and this is despite lindt claiming their chocolate is "expertly crafted with the finest ingredients". no recall was issued after the tests came out. lead and cadmium can fuck the body over BAD.

lindt's genius defense is that they are going to stop saying the whole thing about being expertly crafted with the finest ingredients, so nobody can complain about the heavy metals in their chocolate anymore! and that makes it okay. source: trust me bro

(now please drop the lawsuit thanks)

consumer reports test results of a bunch of different chocolate brands <- original report being referenced

even more chocolate brands that were tested for heavy metals

imagine this. you advertise yourself as "the coolest dude around". your whole persona is being "cool" and "chill". and then one day, you burn someone's house down on purpose. they inevitably sue the shit out of you. and your defense is that you will stop calling yourself "cool" or "chill" so nobody can reasonably expect that you will not set things on fire, because fire is hot, which is the opposite of cool and chill. and therefore everything is fine now and nobody can be mad at you anymore.

that is lindt's defense here.

Spotted rat again, idk if it's the same one but it would be funny

Everyone go home. I’m taking 72 out back to be shot.

Accidentally wound up on "hear me out cake" tiktok, and I swear, if another one of these bitches puts down an at-most-unconventionally-attractive human man, Lady Dimitrescu or Nick Wilde/Robin Hood I am going to lose my fucking mind.

Saw one where the first person they named was Disney's Aladdin and I tapped out so hard I entered a fugue state and didn't regain full consciousness for like a solid hour.

Girlies giggling and gasping because they said their 'hear me out' was Gill from Finding Nemo, like

I'm so sorry, babygirl, but that's a hot fish. I know you thought you were being so controversial, but that is one of the most fuckable cartoon fish in existence. This is weaksauce.

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Closest match: Biomphalaria glabrata genome assembly, chromosome: 11

(image source)

please do not the snail.

please do not the me.

There is a lot of information out there about weaving, crocheting and knitting, but relatively little about spinning.

Which is a shame, since spinning is really where the "resource provided by the earth" tangibly becomes "object with a use."

Aspects of spinning, such as the amount of twist and the length of the fibers, are impactful upon the thread or yarn created, but lots of fiber crafters don't get to directly play with those variables...

It is so strange how textile production is so utterly dominated by very few fibers, when so many are possible. Industry keeps coming up with new ways to transform bamboo or something into fibers, which is all well and good, but we have yet to run out of easily usable natural fibers that have worked for thousands of years.

Dogbane—Apocyonum cannabinum—was called "Indian hemp" because it was used by Native Americans for ropes, cords and textiles. It's incredibly strong, soft, and easy to collect large amounts of it. But hardly anybody uses it.

As far as yarn construction (twist, fiber staple, ply, draw, etc) goes, may I recommend the Spinner's Book of Yarn Designs (Sarah Anderson) and Yarnitecture (Jillian Moreno)? @dirtypuzzle mentioned SpinOff and Fibershed in the comments and those are great magazines and ways to find local groups as well. I've read some great articles on prepping and spinning flax, hemp, cotton, and silk on there in addition to the more popular fleece/fur/hair fibers.

For those especially I can't over-recommend the Fleece & Fiber Sourcebook or the Field Guide to Fleece (Deborah Robson and Carol Ekarius.) An awful lot of excellent fiber breeds and species are now unknown, under-used, and in danger of going extinct; Shave 'Em to Save 'Em and the Livestock Conservancy in general are good resources for finding local people working with those. There's a chiengora (dog wool) group on Ravelry that's great, too, and lots of easily searchable info on raising silkworms at home and spinning from hankies.

There really is a dearth of information easily available on most plant fibers, I too would love to see more of it for like... almost everything, really. At a guess, most potentials get ignored at an institutional level because they're a pain to grow and process in bulk, which in turn means there's little if any data on how they stand up to modern washing and drying and detergents. Bast fibers tend to be a pain to prep as an interested individual (and often smelly!) and can be hard on the hands while spinning, especially those with extra long fibers. Even so a lot of people would spin old/new/ignored plants if they didn't have to process raw plant into spinnable fiber. I suspect that and not knowing which plants might be good options are the biggest obstacles to at least hobbyist experimentation.

Here's a blog post where someone attempts to process and spin milkweed stalks. Keep in mind, milkweed stalks produce a bast fiber whereas milkweed fluff can also be spun but makes a brittle yarn by itself and is often mixed with wool or cotton, though I would assume you could process the stalks and then spin the floss into the fiber from the stalks. Spin Off talks about it here. Milkweed also sustains monarch butterflies, which have been having a rough time. You might have some skin reactions when handling milkweed though, so keep an eye.

Fibershed did a spotlight on dogbane, nettle, and milkweed in comparison to hemp and flax. They talk specifically about Native American techniques and current cultivation of all three, particularly dogbane, and ways to spin yarn and make rope. They aren't super in-depth about processing the fibers, but it seems like it's because they have more tutorials/guides on other pages. Bast fibers all have a similar retting->drying->scutching->hackling->spinning (you also have to ripple flax at the beginning) process, generally speaking.

Of course, flax is a really accessible plant fiber to spin yourself! You can plant it yourself, buy unprocessed flax (locally or online), or buy processed but unspun flax. If you're interested in the whole process, this book is the flax bible: Linen: From Flax Seed to Woven Cloth by Linda Heinrich. There are a lot of youtubers who go through it all, too.

If you're interested in kudzu, then may I suggest Oigawa Kudzu-fu Studio! They're located in Japan, but they have helpfully created an English website, too, where they go over making kudzu-fu (Japanese name for the cloth from kudzu). And if you ever find yourself going to Japan, you can take a class from them.

On Oigawa Studio's info page, they also mention that they work with ramie (plant in the nettle family), linden tree (basswood), and wisteria, so do with that what you will. I assume a lot of those resources are in Japanese.

Finally, hemp. Laws around if and how you can plant hemp, even for personal non-THC uses, vary wildly from state to state and country to country, so do your research. I'm not super familiar with it, and in my state I literally can't grow any of it at all without applying for a permit, so it's not really worth it for me.

I've seen a lot of these online resources! They're great starting points. I've also done quite a bit of work with spinning various fibers. I actually made a yarn out of entirely milkweed fluff, though it was too fragile to be very useful for anything, it was a fun learning experience and I'm sure it would work great blended with other fibers.

This is my personal experience with dogbane:

I tried retting, but instead of making the fibers easier to separate from the cuticle, it seemed to make them even harder to clean off. What little Ive been able to read about Native American practices of prep suggests that there was no retting process at all, the fibers were cleaned by scraping.

This was roughly what I came to on my own. I have a sickle-shaped chip of reddish chert/quartz, about as long as my palm, and I just pull the fibers against it so the dry flakes of cuticle come off.

My other tools are: a cheap grill brush, the kind with metal bristles, a hair brush with the stiffest hard plastic bristles I could find, and a round rock I took from some decorative landscaping. The grill brush is for combing out the fibers and for using with the hairbrush to agitate the fibers like carding wool. The round rock is for beating the fibers while they're wet and twisted into a tight bundle, which helps them separate into finer threads. Right now I am experimenting with whether boiling the fibers helps any part of the process, and it's inconclusive so far.

A couple reasons why dogbane might be hard to market as a fiber include: the plant while alive is toxic to humans and animals including dogs, as the name suggest, and secondly, the fibers are orange.

I don't know if the color is genetic or caused by growing conditions, since I have gathered some fibers that are a blond color or even nearly white, but most of the dogbane plants i've professed have had orange fibers, ranging all the way into a deep copper shade.

The colors are honestly really beautiful, but I imagine dyeing the dogbane other colors might be difficult.

I would actually suspect one of the reasons these resources are scarce is a really boring one.

In my experience, from talking to other spinners, very few spinners like processing fibre. Most people would prefer to buy it ready to spin, if given the option, and since its a hobby, they have the option. But only if they buy commonly used commercially viable fibres (which tend to be wool and silk and a little bit of flax.

People who really want to do the full process are actually very rare and you will probably be very popular in fibrecrafting spaces if you are publicly interested in doing it.

One (1) guy showed up to our weaving guild and mentioned in passing that he enjoyed processing wool and suddenly he was the most popular person in the room. It was very striking.

One the other hand while you're absolutely right that historically there's been a premium placed on white fibre, there is a rapidly growing interest in naturally coloured fibres so that coppery dogbane I've seen in your photos is probably increasingly appealing right now.

Wait really?

Processing and spinning fibers is like the cocaine of fidget toys. I can't get enough of it. I've legitimately been late to class because I couldn't peel myself away from my fibers

i love john brosio paintings bc theyll be an absolute gut punch that forces you to consider your own morality like two earthlings and they will also be Big Crab

“two earthlings”, an absolutely devastating oil painting that i think about every single day

“fatigue 2”, Big Crab

I hadn’t seen the second one.  You can just tell that guy is standing where his car should be.  He’s too tired to worry about the crab directly, he’s just thinking about how this means he’s gotta call the insurance company and lord knows if giant crab attacks are covered.  He’s looking off to the left because that’s where the bus stop is, he’s watching a bus pull up right now and thinking that while there’s a chance he could sprint for it and make it on he absolutely cannot bring himself to run right now - not from the crab, not to the bus, not for anything.  Fuck the diet, though, he’s getting fast food tonight.  Not like he can drive to the store now anyway.

Man has gotten the bus home (car crushed by giant crab) to find more sea creatures on his property

Is this targeted? What will this do to his insurance premiums?

the astronaut who took this photo during the Apollo 8 mission died friday at the age of 90 after crashing the plane he was piloting into the water off San Juan Islands btw

it is literally their favorite activity

this shit poetic

Waaa the water must be so cold around here... luckily, it seems like Citrus can handle it...

I am absolutely in love with the interpretation that over time Artificer's grief has turned into just bloodlust. That it stopped being about her kids a long time ago.

She can't stop chasing the blood, the adrenaline. She's too consumed with the very feeling of hatred, the very feeling of violence.