“the mind of a medieval person was foreign and incomprehensible” factoid is false. the average medieval person was pretty normal. the chivalric death cult, whose members were known to literally die if prevented from riding to war, was an outlier and should not have been counted

I went looking for more information on Guillarme le Jupponier, and found this article, which points to a slew of similar speeches in European and US history-- and, crucially, the fact that Guillarme le Jupponier was released after that speech, not tortured or executed, because it was acknowledged that his sentiments were extremely common.

can we pause on that? 1100 rebellions?!?

forgot how white this website is and expected there to be more uproar about the US bombing my home country, nigeria, on christmas day. my mistake!

Sokoto state, a majority Muslim state in north-west Nigeria was bombed on Christmas day. It is still unclear how many bombs were dropped and where. Confirmed is a bomb dropped on a Mosque in Jabo, killing 5 people.

Trump has claimed that this is in retaliation of the "Christian genocide" happening in Nigeria, committed by "radical Islamists" of the ISIL (ISIS), and the specific choosing of Christmas day was to reify that this is a religious based retaliation.

This Christmas, I am in Nigeria. My family is majority Christian. We are without fear of being persecuted on the basis of our religion. So, what is going on?

There is no Christian genocide in Nigeria. Nigeria is a complex country that faces a lot of violence, exploitation and subsequent neglect from our government. But it is not Christians being targeted in our country. This insidious piece of misinformation has been dutifully organised by US officials for months and gained steam on platforms like X and Truth Social.

I do not believe though, that this action was done to fight Islamic terrorists or protect Nigerian Christians. The reason being:

Sokoto state is not a state with ISIL activity.

This is another display of US throwing its weight around, conveniently, onto the most oil-rich country in Africa.

Do not believe everything the US tells you about its foreign affairs. The US will gladly spill blood on the flimsiest of justifications just to continue gorging its empire.

Please keep love in your hearts for the Nigerian people.

i saw someone say nobody needs to know what a .txt file is anymore. what the fuck is the world coming to

unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school

things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)

I made Hungarian mushroom soup and it's a little too delicious to be real

BUNJY RECIPE BOOK- HUNGARIAN MUSHROOM SOUP

Ingredients:

okay! so take a large saucepan and heat over medium low, and melt the butter in it. add the mushrooms and turn the heat up a notch or so and cover, stirring occasionally until the mushrooms give up their liquid. once the pot gets soupy, add the onion and put the lid back on until the mushrooms are brown and the onion is fully cooked through. once this is achieved, remove the lid and cook off most (not all!) of the liquid. at this point, add the flour and paprika TOGETHER, and mix! this will get gluey and start sticking all over the place- that's fine. cook while stirring for a few minutes, enough for the paprika to gain aroma and the flour to darken. next, add the stock and soy sauce, and stir to work all of the clumps of flour off the bottom of the pan and into the liquid. once the soup is smooth, add the milk and bring to a light boil. once the pot boils, lower to the heat to a simmer and ignore for 10 minutes. once the time is up, REMOVE THE PAN FROM THE HEAT and allow to cool slightly. once the pan is no longer scorching hot, add the sour cream and dill, and stir it in. lastly, add the lemon juice and parsley, plus salt and pepper to taste, and stir again to make it all a smooth lovely soup. serve immediately.

Turned out insanely good for Christmas dinner; been wanting to make this for so long.

If you are on a Windows 11 computer, pause everything you are doing for one minute and:

"But Mx. November, it says right there Microsoft doesn't collect the typing insights data!"

I mean, yeah, it says that..... for *now.*

It also only specifies that Microsoft themselves don't collect it, and they wouldn't have made this something that I was automatically, secretly opted in for without my knowledge if they didn't have something to be gained by me not knowing it exists!

I only found this because a cat walked on the keyboard and turned on Filter Keys and while trying to figure out why my keyboard was just making chirping noises instead of typing, I happened to click on "typing insights" by accident.

Generative AI, and especially AI that is used to "personalize" and track your activity across the web and on your computer are never going to be in your best interest, it is always going to serve these companies in whatever way will line their pockets the most, and all it takes is updating their terms of service once, and then all of that data they promised they weren't collecting suddenly all belongs to them.

Some snicky goblins have asked fervently for some Arwen and Aragorn illustrations. I had been inspired, so there is two other more to come 👀

could be us

pom pom crabs are some of the most unethical animals in the ocean

this man is a serial abuser

His pom poms are two sessile invertebrates he holds in his hands and starves so he can punch stuff with anemones who are so desperate to eat that they’ll use maximum sting on anything that gets close to him. When they starve to death he just finds more

ACTUALLY, IT IS WORSE

The crabs will force the anemones to clone themselves if one dies OR steal others’ anemones if both die

They haven’t found these anemones in their free-living form, so, as far as we know, this anemone species is these crabs’ slave species—it’s only known in association with pom pom crabs

Cool paper on this: Schnytzer, Y., Giman, Y., Karplus, I., & Achituv, Y. (2017). Boxer crabs induce asexual reproduction of their associated sea anemones by splitting and intraspecific theft. PeerJ, 5, e2954. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.2954

So if I understand this right, "slave species" is a biology term only used for this ONE SPECIFIC CREATURE OF ALL THE COUNTLESS LIVING ORGANISMS ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET?!

Oh, the slave species thing is outdated information from the original study in the 90’s. To be fair, that study is still very very respected, it was just wrong about this specific thing.

Their anemones aren’t a unique species, they are only visually distinct because the crab farms them in a very specific way - making a fragment of a larger hawaiian anemone, or finding a newly spawned one. When they carry it around, they force the anemone to adapt to an entire new lifestyle. The crab’s nocturnal behavior slowly kills the anemone’s photosynthetic symbionts, from which it gets its color. After that, the crab can control how much food the anemone actually gets by using it to mop up food off the sea floor, and take excess out of its mouth. Since it doesnt have to reach for sunlight, or reach to catch food, this encourages dense, but short tentacles.

The shortcoming of this study was just that its very hard to get the anemone away from the crab without killing both, and its equally hard to get an anemone to bounce back from this state.

Due to their introduction into home aquaria, we now know any anemone they take will end up in this state, (bubble tips, aipistasia, haitian anemones, the list goes on) and we also know they are not bound to carrying anemone’s specifically. They’ve been seen collecting zoanthids, palythoa, and euphyllia (though euphyllians usually don’t survive).

Catstronomy - Lim Heng Swee.

people kept parroting the gender is a social construct bit until it meant nothing & still fail to understand that what that means is that just as with any other social convention if you transgress it or fail to act as is expected you WILL be othered & alienated even if you are not aware you are doing something wrong. trans & gnc kids are bullied relentlessly for this very reason way before they have any words to make sense of their experiences

The trans women in sports and public life discourse is a very clear indicator that so many people around us are very eager to climb onto the fascism train if the group tied to the tracks are people who they feel vaguely uncomfortable about. I wouldn't even call it hate because a lot of these people genuinely have never met a trans person (or rather didn't know they probably met a trans person at some point) and usually don't even have the faintest idea of how it all works. It seems like a big part of them feel okay with trans people disappearing because it would be awkward if they couldn't tell someone's gender from just a glance, or if someone corrected them as to what pronouns to use. So the easier way is just to disappear them from the public view than to face a minor inconvenience.

They never really noticed a trans person in a women's bathroom, much less one with some ill intent, but hypothetically maybe one day a murderer rapist trans woman will magically appear from a puff of smoke in the bathroom if they don't ban them. So you know, better safe than sorry.

And sure, there was never a trans woman who dominated in WTA, suddenly winning all the slams with her manly power. But maybe one day she will appear and blast the ball through the skulls of every top female player. You never know. So why would you risk that?

And no one cares that these restrictions will not only hurt trans women, but any women who don't perfectly fit the idea of a Woman™. That's why there was so much buzz around Imane Khelif, that's why people are calling Iga Świątek a boy/ man every time she wins something, that's why the moment Sabalenka hit harder than the men she started being transvestigated online. It's all just a roundabout way to throw away all the progress feminism and the players that came before them made in these fields.

No one cares for the facts. No one looks at the science behind HRT, or the number of trans people actually winning anything, or the number of trans people actually competing. The hypothetical Jane Transwoman who transitioned for the sole goal of winning every trophy women sport has to offer is enough for every federation on the planet to bar them from competing. Fuck off.

The Nebra Sky Disc - the oldest depiction of the cosmos in the world; showing the sun, moon and several other celestial constellations.

Found in a burial in Saxony - Germany, associated with the Bronze Age Únětice Culture

Dated to 1600 BC

^ How It Started ^

Humankind’s oldest depiction of the cosmos

How It's Going:

Webb Deep Field, imaged by the Webb Space Telescope in 2022, revealing thousands of baby galaxies forming in the universe's earliest days - humankind’s deepest look into the sky