They are asking (respectfully) to see your coin collection (no intentions of taking to add to their horde)

Sending love to anyone who is just… tired.

Not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, socially, financially.

Life is asking a lot right now.

Pause when you can. Breathe when you remember.

Give yourself space. Give yourself grace.

found this three year old draft buried in my files. is it funny? I don't remember

no no you’re on to something don’t leave this in the notes!

‘Hands weaving magnetic-core memory, IBM, Poughkeepsie, New York,’ 1956. Photograph by Ansel Adams.

My mother used to make computer cores as a "work from home" side business. As a child I got spending money via un-winding the ones that failed testing so that the magnetic center could be re-used. I got between $0.05 and $0.25 per core depending. Mom got more for the finished ones, of course, though I don't know how much. Her sister was an expert, and did the more complicated kind, some of which ended up in satellites and/or were used by NASA!

They were all done by hand using a kind of treadle-operated frame with a little (crochet!) hook to pull the wires around the cores. The people making them were mostly housewives who did this as a side-job in the 80s and 90s. I don't know if it's still done that way anywhere in the USA today, but the history of computing and space exploration is littered with "women's work" like this.

the way aragorn runs is so chaotic

@tathrin's tags have been vetted and approved

#that is a man who A: has tripped over his sword before and been laughed at by EVERY ELF IN RIVENDELL and is NOT going to do it again#and B: knows that he has more leg than anyone else in the room and is GOING TO USE IT BY GODS#he is COVERING GROUND with every step#he got that moniker of strider through HARD HONEST WORK (and very very big steps)#aragorn#lotr movies#viggo mortensen

#So basically. He runs like an actual real person would over uneven ground 😂#The Hollywood Run is pretty to watch sure but also takes place on a paved surface usually#There is no way to look dignified whilst running across lumpy bumpy ground down across a hill. Unless one is an actual gazelle#thankyou Mr. Viggo for that Real Human rep (saving @jonairadreaming's excellent tags because everyone who has ever tried running down an incline over uneven, possibly shifting, ground knows you try to get down there as fast as possible with the least amount of time of foot actually touching the ground and constantly being prepared to shift your weight to keep your balance. By the time the stones actually shift from your weight you already want to be two steps away)

Wait 'til you see what it is... cool!

I'm pretty? Sure this is Odd Tinkering! They do a bunch of incredibly chill, highly detailed restoration/cleaning videos that are immensely satisfying to watch. (And if I'm wrong about the source, well, now you have another place to watch similar videos XD)

I love how it doesn't matter what expedition it is.

They all turn into excited kids when they meet penguins.

The Penguin: GIANTS! no way! I’m gonna wave at them THEY WAVED BACK! Holy Shit they’re dancing with me! My Wife is never gonna believe this OMG I got to dance with a Giant today so cool.

The Humans: Penguin! No way! I’m gonna wave at it IT WAVED BACK! Holy Shit it’s flapping with me! I got to play with a Penguin today; so cool.

where's the joy and whimsy guy? Have they found this one yet?

@joy-and-whimsy-official

Joy and whimsy detected! This post is joyful and whimsical!

Who am I to deny a penguin some joy and whimsy 🐧

People are always so delighted to see penguins. And penguins are so delighted to see people.

Seal Rock, California by Albert Bierstadt

Detritus: I think dem rioters about done. Dem's all calling for a cab.

Littlebottom: They're chanting "ACAB", Detritus. It means "All Coppers Are Bastards"

Detritus: Heh. Well, they ain't wrong. I know I am, and Mister Vines would say he is.

Littlebottom: What about Carrot?

(thinking at Troll Speed)

Detritus: Well, ok. But then again... Nobby is bastard enough for two coppers.

Very precise Ahnk-Morporkian rioters: ACAOTAOBE!*

*All Coppers Average Out To Approximately One Bastard Each

From the man’s own mouth:

I lack perception of time so you could legit walk up to me and say "Hi" after 3 years and I'd be like "aww I missed you. we talked just last week :3"

You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?

So it was with this desktop greenhouse.

I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.

I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.

I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.

I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…

Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.

I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.

This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.

I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.

Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.

In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…

I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.

Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.

this little freak keeps sneaking into my garden and rubbing himself all over my flowers??Hello?????

Real, male bees don’t go after flowers they stay home, that freak is a herself

googling ‘bee genders’ as I dictate this post

The more you google bee reproductive biology the more absurd it is that we’re applying the words male and female to them. Their actual genders are worker, drone and queen. The queen is capable of both asexual and sexual reproduction. Bees born of unfertilized eggs become drones that are capable of fertilizing eggs. Bees born of fertilized eggs become workers, but can also potentially become a queen depending on how they are fed during the larval stage.

Use whatever the fuck pronouns you want to describe bees because they’re all equally incorrect projections of human worldview onto an insect species. Bees don’t experience mammalian sexual dimorphism in a biological sense nor do they experience human gender dimorphism in a sociopolitical sense.

diversity win, the freak sneaking into your garden and rubbing themselves all over your flowers does not fit into a human biological or sociopolitical framework of sex and gender!

Uhhhh not to rain on a 150k post apparently intended as well meaning gender positivity but like…

We don’t determine gender by fertility, do we? Not in people or in animals. Fertility (even by admission of this thread???) is the only difference between worker and queen, and we definitely don’t consider a person to have changed gender solely on whether they lose or gain the capacity to get pregnant.

Perhaps more importantly, the workers are only infertile because the hive has dictated it for them, and we DEFINITELY don’t want to consider forced sterilization to be a type of gender transition.

A beehive is even full of violent drama as the typical worker bee “wants” to be queen and will seize the opportunity to start laying eggs as soon as it arises, which can lead to either the queen or this new rival slaughtering the other.

tl;dr if you consider “queen” a bee gender, then all the workers are also queen gendered because it’s demonstrably how they would choose to identify but their mom is oppressing them.

Ehhh, not quite?

In honeybees - I’m assuming all of the above is talking about honeybees, other bees are up to totally different shit - workers and queens are both genetically female, but have extremely different life histories.

Larvae assigned to become queens are fed royal jelly until pupation, the high level of nutrition as well as hormonal cues leading to full ovarian development, on the order of a million eggs. After emerging as adults, they take a nuptial flight, mating with as many drones as possible and storing a lifetime supply of sperm. In good conditions, a queen can live 3 to 5 years. Good conditions depend, among other things, on how successfully she has mated. If she starts to run out of sperm, and thus begins laying too many unfertilized drone eggs and too few workers, the workers will kill her and raise a replacement. Drones in honeybee hives don’t participate in foraging or other hive activities, so there is a limited ratio of drones a hive can support, relative to workers.

Larvae assigned to become workers are fed royal jelly for about three days, then weaned onto pollen. Ovarian development is extremely limited - possibly 1 in 10,000 workers will have any viable eggs, and likely less than 100 eggs in total. As workers do not go on nuptial flights, any eggs they lay will be unfertilized, therefore drones. Workers do lay these eggs, often at the periphery of the hive, but they are usually removed and destroyed by other workers - a phenomenon known as “worker policing.”

In summer, workers live for about 4 to 6 weeks. They go through a sequence of “jobs”, which can be tracked developmentally by the activation of different glands: brood tending (royal jelly produced), hive construction (wax produced), foraging (venom production begins), hive defense (venom production peaks). This work - especially foraging - is very metabolically intensive, which is often thought to account for the shorter lifespan. The cohort of workers who overwinter enter a state of suspended development, and survive about 6 months, until spring.

The pheromones produced by the queen do significantly influence worker behavior, and part of this influence is a suppression of egg laying among workers, although the data on this are not entirely clear-cut. What’s more notable is that, in the absence of queen pheromones, the hive will immediately pivot to trying to raise a new queen.

When queens are produced in anticipation of a swarm, the large cells in which they develop (queen cups) are built onto the bottom of the comb. In a sudden absence of queen pheromones, workers will remodel the comb around any cell with an unhatched fertile (aka female) egg. They will raise as many queen potentials as possible, keeping them apart from each other so they don’t kill each other, choosing which to kill after they’ve returned from their mating flights.

If you view the whole hive as an organism, the queen is not only responsible for the hive’s reproduction, she is also its only mechanism of cell replacement. During peak season, the queen lays about 2,000 eggs per day, most of them destined to be workers. Workers can’t lay workers, and without workers, the hive dies.

If the process of requeening fails, worker policing usually ends: workers will lay whatever eggs they have, will stop destroying each others eggs, and will raise the resulting drones to send out into the world. This is a dead end for the hive, but reproductively speaking, it’s a last change to get the hive’s genetics to continue by mating with some other queen.

So. The difference between workers and queens is not *just* fertility, they lead functionally completely different lives. An adult worker cannot become a queen. Egg laying by workers is somewhat supressed by the queen’s pheremones, but more actively so by other workers. In some conditions, workers do participate in sexual reproduction, if somewhat indirectly.

What does that mean for gender analogies? I don’t know. I think it’s worth noting that literature on bees doesn’t refer to the categories of worker, queen, drone as genders or even as sexes, but as castes. Which brings in a whole other facet of social analogy which has been projected onto bees - that of politics, and decision making as a hive.

Personally I get antsy about descriptions of hive behavior that focus on the desires or actions of any individual bee. That includes the queen: she’s not actually in charge of anything! She is singular and critical to the hive, but that doesn’t make her any kind of administrator. The processes of the hive - the organization of the comb, the location of the brood, the number of workers, drones, and queens raised - all of these are shaped by many small and seemingly inconsequential actions taken by individual bees. What is currently in the comb effects what gets put where in the comb, a physical instantiation of hive memory. Where the queen lays depends on where her entorage steers her, whether she lays fertile eggs or drones depends mostly on whether she’s laying into a larger drone cell or not, although she also seems able to chose of her own accord. There’s a lot of ambiguity and complexity in the decision making of individual bees and of the hive as a whole. Some limited parts of it are well understood, but much isn’t.

The workers respond to the queen’s pheromones by fawning over her and tending to her every need. Except, sometimes, they will kill her. What makes the difference? How does a worker decide? It isn’t random, it’s related to contexts such as choosing between several mated potential queens, or removing a queen who isn’t laying well. But what does this possibility of queen killing say about the mind-control effect attributed to her pheromones? What can we say about what a worker bee knows, percieves, or wants?

Anyway. Honeybees aside.

Bumblebees have much smaller colonies, with a looser organizational structure. They are also much less well researched. As far as I can find, in most bumblebee species, the worker/queen distinction is fuzzier. A queen overwinters, in spring she establishes a nest, doing her own foraging. The first few workers she lays emerge small, due to limited resources. As the season goes on, the colony rears larger workers, at some point some of them are fertile - that is, queens. They also lay in parallel to their mother queen, within the same nest. Towards late summer, the colony puts more resources to raising exceptionally large queens, who will be able to survive the winter and establish next years colonies. In this case, the distinction between queens and workers is more directly one of nourishment and resource allocation. And, the role of queen is less seperate - queens also participate in foraging, at least at certain times of year.

Bumblebees also handle their drones differently. In honeybees, drones return to the hive in the evening to be fed and cared for (much like queens!) In bumblebees, males set off on their own once mature. You’ll often find them sleeping on flowers, where they can find an easy breakfast in the morning and perhaps encounter a queen to mate with.

#sorry. #*hits buzzer* bee autism #Honeybee hives are absolutely full of dramatic backstabbing shit I’m not disputing that #but the claim that workers try to become queens? That just doesn’t line up with anything I know or have read. #If this is about a totally different honeybee species my apologies for misunderstanding. #I know different species do their queen shit somewhat differently and there are many I’m not familiar with. #But I take issue with relating worker ‘gender’ to sterilization as a transition analogy? #Like. I don’t think it’s meaningful in the context of how a hive opperates to say a worker is a suppressed queen. #workers are 99% of the hive and they do everything except reproduction. #reproductive functions have been hyperconcentrated into a single individual. #there’s stuff you could say about worker policing of worker egglaying to be sure. #Most research on it seems to focus on the genetic relatedness of workers relative to their egg policing - #is it effected by having different drone fathers? Can we use this as a microcosm of kin selection theory? #To me it seems evolutionarily more like a resource allocation issue. Preserving the seperation of reproductive functions because that’s #the setup you’ve optimized? #But ehh what do I know. #I like tossing around weird animal reproductive models as a reminder not to get too attached to binary sex models #And I understand the desire to relate yourself to some particular weird animal model if the desire suits you #But ultimately I think ‘reproductive behavior of nonhumans’ is a dicey thing to align to gender #Because it can imply too tight a correlation of human gender to human reproductive behavior. #On that front I think bogleech and I are making somewhat similar statements? #But personally I find ‘worker bees want to be queens’ to be much more of a ‘what the fuck bees don’t work like that’ claim #than 'bee reproductive categories are adapted so differently that they don’t map well onto humans.’ #which is true largely as a subset of the statement that 'bee eusocial organization is really different than human social organization.’ #Bee castes aren’t genders because they’re something much more all encompassing than genders. In my opinion. #Sorry also that this is a citationless monstrosity. I’m on mobile rn #may or may not come back with reference links later. (via @screambirdscreaming)

I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it

Elf: How have you kept this castle maintained for a thousand years if your lives are so short?

Human: We just train new people how to do it?

Elf: *gears visibly turning in their head*

Human: Are you alright?

Elf: I just realized that we didn’t have to let that whole city fall to ruin just because my grandfather died.

Human: What?

Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?

Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.

Elf: That sword, where did you get it?

Human: My cousin made it.

Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!

Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.

Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.

Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.

Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.

Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?

Elf: Oh, he was definitely ignoring her, too. He was super racist.