whetstone

@whetstone@romancelandia.club

I am curious about basically everything but in particular animals, finance, fashion, art, calligraphy, politics, cocktail recipes, cooking, paleography, languages, gardening. #tfr.

Fiction: fantasy, sf, period romance (particularly non-European).

Non-fiction runs the gamut.

投稿はほとんど英語になると思いますが、（左翼の）政治とアートと日米関係に興味のある方を是非フォローしたいです。

Boulder, CO / NYC

https://romancelandia.club/@whetstone on Twitter, but not really there nowadays. She/her, or whatever you like.

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whetstone, to brainfood

I've read about Daniel Kish before, but never had the opportunity to spend so much time with him. This short #documentary visualizes how his #echolocation technique works and shows him teaching it to younger #blind students. Transformative and beautiful, must-watch for anyone who's interested in #accessibility or #disability or #blindness.

https://kottke.org/24/01/a-blind-teacher-using-echolocation-to-navigate-the-world

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

There's nothing like coming home from a long day at work and putting out a little food for your pet ants and watching as they get all excited, running to and from the nest... a whole little "operation" ensues.

I couldn't help but peek in the nest (under red light so as not to disturb them as much) and they have a huge new clutch of eggs.

The girls have HUGE plans for this spring. These eggs aren't the main batches, just the ants they think they'll need to help raise the main wave.😱

whetstone,

@futurebird this is so exciting!! are you going to need to expand their habitat?

whetstone,

@futurebird lucky ladies! i'm excited for all of you

whetstone,

@futurebird also, that is interesting... my half-baked hypothesis was that the habitat expansion came first, and the population wave will follow to take advantage of it. guess not! did anything else change for them? or is it just an occasional strategy to produce a huge wave and see what the colony can accomplish with it?

whetstone,

@futurebird ah, so this will be a lot of ants but that's a normal thing for ants to do every year in spring? that's cool. i hope you'll post some pictures here :)

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

If Fox tells you "Drink Ivermectin!" you don't believe it. You listen to Drs instead.👍🏿

If they tell you the election is stolen, you don't believe it. You listen to election pros.

But if they tell you that DEI means "stack ranking races! White guys to the back!" you believe it?🤦🏿‍♂️

None of these lies are particularly convincing. The narrators are neither reliable, nor persuasive.

You're just more or less susceptible to each lie based on the belief system you carry with you when you hear it.

whetstone,

@mekkaokereke I just had someone send me this Times article in support of this viewpoint. It's really distressing to me watching ostensibly "liberal" publications like the Times and the Atlantic launder this garbage into the mainstream.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.html

Teri_Kanefield, to random
@Teri_Kanefield@mastodon.social avatar

I was hoping nothing important would happen because I'm busy finishing my book again 😂

I'll answer this one:
the CO Supreme Court just ruled that the 14th amend means Trump can’t be on the state ballot. How does one appeal a state court decision to SCOTUS? (Other than a death penalty sentence)

Federal issues are appealable to federal courts.

The Supreme Court is the final arbiter of what the Constitution means. (See Marbury v. Madison)

whetstone,

@mastodonmigration A lawyer friend here in CO praised the first judge for ruling separately on the facts and the law for exactly this reason. Much harder to overturn her ruling that he is an insurrectionist this way, pushing the higher courts into a corner.

whetstone, to science

I'm reading a book called Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet and just got to an essay about how the boundaries between organisms, and between an organism and its environment, are never clearly drawn.

One of the examples is Mixotricha paradoxa. Under standard magnification it looks like a normal single-celled ciliate. But it's actually 5 different organisms: a containing cell, internal bacteria, and 3 different types of surface bacteria that provide locomotion.

#biology #anthropocene #BookRecs

whetstone,

2/ I loved learning about this organism, and about other inter-evolved collaborations like the Hawaiian bobtail squid whose light organ, and therefore its hunting strategy, is dependent on luminescent bacteria — luminescent bacteria who, through their light, change gene expression in the squid. Taxonomy and strict evolutionary classification are excellent tools but they are not the only way to see the world, a world of living things that are constantly changing each other.

whetstone,

3/ It feels so hopeful, to know myself to be in a world that is, equally, in me. The essay cites a paper titled "We have never been individuals" and that seems exactly right. If we're going to pull ourselves out of this mess that seems like the first, critical step: to accept our interdependence, our whole belonging to the world, our belonging to each other.

Here's a link to the paper: https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1164&context=fac-biology

whetstone, to Israel

Anne Boyer has stepped down as poetry editor for the New York Times. Her resignation letter is devastating and well worth reading.

https://anneboyer.substack.com/p/my-resignation

#gaza #israel #poetry #AnneBoyer

Catlynn, to random
@Catlynn@nerdculture.de avatar

On Halloween morning the moon was so gorgeous 🤩

whetstone,

@Catlynn That's a beautiful shot! I love it when you can really feel the roundness of the moon.

Edelruth, to random
@Edelruth@mastodon.online avatar

Remember, the teens who come to your door tonight are still trying to adjust to leaving childhood behind.

Be kind. They need the candy more than the darling little ones.

whetstone,

@sidereal @Edelruth that is so sweet! i love her.

ct_bergstrom, to Birding
@ct_bergstrom@fediscience.org avatar

flying away in 4x slow motion.

How did they coordinate their departure?

Video of crows flying up from a yellow-leaved horse chestnut tree into the blue sky

whetstone,

@ct_bergstrom crowd control

futurebird, to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I met someone cute in the woods by the lake in NY. Embarrassing that I didn’t know their name!

whetstone,

@futurebird this caterpillar “shopped the look” from albert einstein

andrewstroehlein, to random
@andrewstroehlein@mastodon.social avatar

When I tell people children are being slaughtered, and they want to know which children before moving into outrage mode or justification mode - that mentality, that conditional humanity, is exactly the problem.

whetstone,

@rticks this is a really weird critique. being most concerned for your own literal family is completely human and normal, and does not in any way imply having no ability to care for other vulnerable people.

TerryHancock, to random
@TerryHancock@realsocial.life avatar

Almost eclipse time!

whetstone,

@TerryHancock i love this one because it looks like a hoop earring on the stylized profile of someone with snazzy grace-jones style hair

_L1vY_, to random
@_L1vY_@mstdn.social avatar

I am begging. The English-speaking world. To look up the difference. Between "horde" and "hoard." BEFORE you publish the thing!

whetstone,

@_L1vY_ I poured over all the replies looking for my personal bugbear but it’s not there, I am aloneeeeeee

reginasbread, to random
@reginasbread@homo.promo avatar

I'm so tired of teenagers being "the chosen ones" in fiction. please, let a middle-aged woman save the universe! she's seen some shit and dealt with it. she's tired of it all. she doesn't give a fuck. she's angry. she will get this shit done.

whetstone,

@reginasbread Rosa Parks was 42 when she sat down on that bus. She was in the prime of "I am done with this and we are fixing it NOW" life. Would be so wonderful to see more of that energy in fiction.

kissane, to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

The Novavax news is mostly pitched in the media as "nice for antivax weirdos I guess" but a lot of people with, for instance, autoimmune diseases, have had a fairly terrible time with mRNA shots, so a trad vaccine is a huge thing for a lot of people.

whetstone,

@kissane @donaldball The one silver lining to finally succumbing to Covid last month is that now I can get the Novavax booster in a couple months. I would have signed up for an mRNA earliest, had I been eligible.

heidilifeldman, to random
@heidilifeldman@mastodon.social avatar

I am so sick of #Trump stalking women who threaten his power or interests. I remember him doing it to #HillaryClinton during the 2016 Presidential debates. Now he’s doing it to #LetitiaJames, reports the Washington Post. The #misogyny infuriates me.

whetstone,

@heidilifeldman Someone should tell him that orange jumpsuits make men look taller and slimmer.

whereistanya, to brooklyn
@whereistanya@hachyderm.io avatar

Not actually ideal.

#flooding #brooklyn

whetstone,

@futurebird @zzzeek @signalthirteen @whereistanya What was that project that produced a crap ton of sterile males? So they'd just fly around breeding and producing no viable eggs. That would be a mosquito species-specific intervention so it could at least be precisely targeted but I have no idea if it is scalable.

senanthic, to random
@senanthic@mstdn.ca avatar

I would sell off one of my fingers for an hour of uninterrupted silence.

whetstone,

@senanthic holding you in the light until friday, then

seachanger, to random
@seachanger@alaskan.social avatar

dude can we talk about how many white cis het women are dealing with left or center left husbands spouting alt right talking pts rn? this is an epidemic

whetstone,

@PacificNic @TheBierFrau @julieofthespirits @passenger @seachanger @detritus @miyelsh Yes, it's only marginally better for white women. Fascism and white patriarchy have a lot to offer female collaborators, and the initial offers often look pretty intuitive to people socialized the way we were.

It's important to be borrowing other people's better instincts to train our own.

whetstone,

@seachanger @PacificNic @TheBierFrau @julieofthespirits @passenger @detritus @miyelsh i think of it as a head full of snakes

i am getting better and better at spotting 'em but god DAMN do some of them excel in the camouflage department

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