Under the sign of the Angel, 1994 - by Alberto Terrile (1961), Italian

When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I'm not crazy)

Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.

Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)

I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)

YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)

The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)

The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)

The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)

It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)

Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???

To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)

So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don't forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it's true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)

Watching... (P10)

i'm reading the genius of birds by jennifer ackerman (amazing book) and today i learned that the first ever documented case of a bird making a tool to use as a weapon against another bird was a steller's jay breaking off and sharpening a stick to wield like a lance at a crow that was taking too long at a feeding station the jay also wanted to eat at. the jay tried to stab at the crow but narrowly missed, the crow lunged back, the jay dropped the stick, and the crow picked it up with the sharp end pointing towards the jay and pursued it into the trees

imagine the guy in front of you at mcdonald's is taking too long to order and so you fashion a blade on the spot and hold him at knifepoint. and then he steals your knife and points it back at you while chasing you out of the restaurant. and also the guy is twice your size

me because im god

speculative biology/fantasy/fictionalized large predators that kill indiscriminately and don't eat what they kill drive me up the fucking wall. it is so, so dangerous and exhausting to be a large predator. you don't want to get into a fight, you don't want to exert too much energy, because if you fuck up you can die. and once you manage to kill something, you eat it. you don't go and kill the rest of the herd, you scare off the rest of the herd and eat the thing you killed until something scares you off.

did you know tigers only have a 10% success rate as hunters? TIGERS.

There are exceptions if a predator has a bunch of easy prey in a confined space (fox in a chicken coop for example) and some mammalian predators will kill extra and store or bury them for later if the pickings are easy.

So for fantasy/sci-fi creatures, this behaviour might be understandable if the predator gets into a small underground base or space station or what have you and the humans are unarmed and not much of a threat to it. But yeah, it should at least be shown to stop and eat one or two of its first victims before it begins stocking up the larder.

Concept: A creature gets into the underground base, eats a couple of people. But it doesn't stop there because the rest of you are sitting ducks and it plans to save you for later. Walls and other obstacles can't stop it, its claws tear through anything in its way. You reason that it's a fossorial predator, and it's clearly not built for a pursuit over open ground, so you and the other survivors make for the exit up to the surface...

And run straight into the ambush of a different kind of predator. It's far taller and has longer limbs than the other one, this one *is* built for the chase, but a whole group of you popping up out of the ground one by one means it barely has to put in effort at all. It will eat well for weeks.

You realise, too late, that this is no unfortunate coincidence. The surface predator was working with the burrower to drive you out here. These creatures may not be sapient, but they appear to have a strategy. Some kind of symbiotic relationship, perhaps?

You never stood a chance.

Anyway, you just met the sci-fi horror version of these guys:

[ID: A photo of a coyote and an american badger walking together on a prairie. End ID]

Akino Fuku, Swamp, 1991, Hamamatsu City Akino Fuku Museum of Art

audio On 😂😂😂

This picture sums up the past two months pretty well. Wet and grey.

'A gathering in the woods' by Mariachiara Di Giorgio.

A favorite from my collection - this luminous little one from the 1960s.

gazehounds

okay im gonna hypnotize you with my ruby amulet now DONT BE WEIRD ABOUT IT. im doing this to make you betray the king. IT IS NOT A SEX THING

I think the fact that you immediately thought about clarifying it’s not a sex thing kinda makes it sound like it is a sex thing.

FOOL. i would be using my sex amulet for that

had to draw this

^ embroidered a net onto the front pocket of these overalls

^ shrimp in there

My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:

And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process

And from this:

we got this:

The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.

I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.

I love this!

And it that it wasn't a one and done.

The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.

After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it's now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.

This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.