Etherwraith - Dead Air - Tumblr Blog

My girlfriend finally found a water bottle she likes, and so now she actually stays sorta hydrated. It has been a boon to her health and to mine!

drink water

The story of the Australian white ibis is hysterical in many ways.

These birds are native to Australia, yes, but they're not technically native to the cities. Or, well, kinda?

So, Australian ibises typically lived in inland wetland areas. Australia, however, is a dry-ass continent, and the swamps aren't always wet, so whenever there's a dry spell and the swamps dry up and the food dwindles, the ibis colonies will migrate to the coast for food. I suppose when their presence caused enough competition with existing coastal birds they'd fly back inland and hopefully the wetlands would be wet again.

Enter the Europeans - the ibis didn't have much contact with the white man for a hundred years or so, wetlands were too annoying to actively clear, so the white man mostly stayed out and the ibis generally doesn't leave while there's food. Or maybe they did, and the white man towns were too tiny to register for them and they just did their usual thing.

Come the 1970s, severe drought conditions once again led to ibises to flee the wetlands (and the wetlands were probably extra hurt and extra unable to recover due to water diversion for agriculture).

They went for the coasts, and there, due to the absolutely boom in Australian urban sprawl, they found....

Huh. That's new. But was there food?

The answer was yes there was, and not only that, it was almost like the food set out specifically for them!

I am of course talking about bins.

Bins have a couple of nifty features if you're an ibis. One, they contain food scraps, especially protein scraps. Two, the openings tend to be fairly far off the ground, so rats and other flightless creatures can't get to the food (the cockroaches can, which is a plus for the ibis because they eat bugs!)

Two, the bottoms are low, and ibises are wading birds so they have long legs and long beaks. Seagulls, crows and pigeons all have to wait for the bin to be fairly full - ibises can get in there at half full!

And three, natural environment for the ibis is diving into a fetid stagnant swamp with nasty bacteria to eat wriggling things. Their beaks and heads are specially adapted for that - they're bald, and the skin is specially adapted for diving into gross places. Their beaks are sharp and dextrous, so they can open packaging or simply pierce it to get at the tasty, tasty leftover fried chicken or whatever. And if the chicken's already got maggots? Fantastic, they love eating bugs.

So they don't wanna go back. Why the hell would they go back? And with every new drought, even more ibis leave the drying wetlands, find the cities, and decide to stay.

I mean, there's probably a selection effect - the birds that are scared of humans eventually return to their home wetlands, but the ones that aren't decide they're just gonna start nesting in the urban parks. Wetlands are also getting drier and drier (water use issues) so the wetland populations are crashing while the urban populations are exploding.

I think, the bin chicken has to be a symbol of luck. It is so insane to me that the human-designed environment ended up being an ibis paradise, where we've systematically murdered all their enemies and established abundant self-replenishing food sources that they and only them can access.

May you be as lucky as the Australian white ibis. May you leave your normal life for foreign shores and face not the expected adversity, but instead abundance and safety beyond your wildest dreams.

when I was younger I didn’t understand why “may you live in interesting times” was considered a curse in ancient greece.

I get it now.

actual writing advice

1. Use the passive voice.

What? What are you talking about, “don’t use the passive voice”? Are you feeling okay? Who told you that? Come on, let’s you and me go to their house and beat them with golf clubs. It’s just grammar. English is full of grammar: you should go ahead and use all of it whenever you want, on account of English is the language you’re writing in.

2. Use adverbs.

Now hang on. What are you even saying to me? Don’t use adverbs? My guy, that is an entire part of speech. That’s, like—that’s gotta be at least 20% of the dictionary. I don’t know who told you not to use adverbs, but you should definitely throw them into the Columbia river.

3. There’s no such thing as “filler”.

Buddy, “filler” is what we called the episodes of Dragon Ball Z where Goku wasn’t blasting Frieza because the anime was in production before Akira Toriyama had written the part where Goku blasts Frieza. Outside of this extremely specific context, “filler” does not exist. Just because a scene wouldn’t make it into the Wikipedia synopsis of your story’s plot doesn’t mean it isn’t important to your story. This is why “plot” and “story” are different words!

4. okay, now that I’ve snared you in my trap—and I know you don’t want to hear this—but orthography actually does kind of matter

First of all, a lot of what you think of as “grammar” is actually orthography. Should I put a comma here? How do I spell this word in this context? These are questions of orthography (which is a fancy Greek word meaning “correct-writing”). In fact, most of the “grammar questions” you’ll see posted online pertain to orthography; this number probably doubles in spaces for writers specifically.

If you’re a native speaker of English, your grammar is probably flawless and unremarkable for the purposes of writing prose. Instead, orthography refers to the set rules governing spelling, punctuation, and whitespace. There are a few things you should know about orthography:

English has no single orthography. You already know spelling and punctuation differ from country to country, but did you know it can even differ from publisher to publisher? Some newspapers will set parenthetical statements apart with em dashes—like this, with no spaces—while others will use slightly shorter dashes – like this, with spaces – to name just one example.

Orthography is boring, and nobody cares about it or knows what it is. For most readers, orthography is “invisible”. Readers pay attention to the words on a page, not the paper itself; in much the same way, readers pay attention to the meaning of a text and not the orthography, which exists only to convey that meaning.

That doesn’t mean it’s not important. Actually, that means it’s of the utmost importance. Because orthography can only be invisible if it meets the reader’s expectations.

You need to learn how to format dialogue into paragraphs. You need to learn when to end a quote with a comma versus a period. You need to learn how to use apostrophes, colons and semicolons. You need to learn these things not so you can win meaningless brownie points from your English teacher for having “Good Grammar”, but so that your prose looks like other prose the reader has consumed.

If you printed a novel on purple paper, you’d have the reader wondering: why purple? Then they’d be focusing on the paper and not the words on it. And you probably don’t want that! So it goes with orthography: whenever you deviate from standard practices, you force the reader to work out in their head whether that deviation was intentional or a mistake. Too much of that can destroy the flow of reading and prevent the reader from getting immersed.

You may chafe at this idea. You may think these “rules” are confusing and arbitrary. You’re correct to think that. They’re made the fuck up! What matters is that they were made the fuck up collaboratively, by thousands of writers over hundreds of years. Whether you like it or not, you are part of that collaboration: you’re not the first person to write prose, and you can’t expect yours to be the first prose your readers have ever read.

That doesn’t mean “never break the rules”, mind you. Once you’ve gotten comfortable with English orthography, then you are free to break it as you please. Knowing what’s expected gives you the power to do unexpected things on purpose. And that’s the really cool shit.

5. You’re allowed to say the boobs were big if the story is about how big the boobs were

Nobody is saying this. Only I am brave enough to say it.

Well, bye!

Everyone always talks about "You Cannot Have My Pain," and with good reason, but I think this is my favourite Dalinar moment

Everyone always talks about "You Cannot Have My Pain," and with good reason, but I think this is my favourite Dalinar moment

they could never make me trust cops

I have to remember to tell my girlfriend about this, it's hilarious!

Dad posted!

I could cook the meal without a recipe but I doubt my ability to do it quickly, I am known to struggle with that kind of focus.

Often when I see maps like this, it takes me a while to orient myself because I decide that the wrong colour is the ocean and have to wait until I can force myself to swap the land and ocean in my head until they're where they're meant to be or I recognise a shape in one or the other that helps me do that faster.

For a good 3-5 seconds I was trying to figure out which country's east coast this was and why the coloured regions mostly stuck to the coast.

Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, 500 AD.

I feel lied to. This is where the bugs bunny NO meme cokes from

Absolutely cursed. I'm just glad they didn't include a picture of an aye-aye picking its nose in the wild. That long finger disappearing between those massive eyes to tickle its little brain would give me enough nightmares to last my lifetime and many years after I'm dead and buried. I really hope I forget about this post instead of remembering it every time I see an otherwise adorable aye-aye.

What aye-aye nose picking research paper

Just my favorite scientific rendering of all time

if whales are ungulates do they also have four chambered stomachs despite being carnivores

YUP THEY SURE DO

they use it for mashing up fish now but the design is pretty much the same

In my class in primary school there was a Cody and a Kody, and we had to differentiate them by calling one "Cody with a C" and the other "Kody with a K". I have no idea why we did that, their last names weren't long so it would've been more efficient to just do that...

"I don't think I could have the relationship with you that you have with me," she said. She was very casual about it, and I was immediately on the defensive.

"What do you mean by that?" I asked.

She put the book she'd been reading down. "It's just, the way you've described it, and the vibe that I get, I don't think I could do it how you do it."

"I still don't know what that means," I said.

"You're always doing this like ... micro calculation thing," she said. "You weigh your words. You try to time things. You have never once called me up while I was at work, or asked me for something when it was inconvenient for me, and you check and double check that you're not being a nuisance."

"And ... that's bad?" I asked.

"No, I love that about you," she said. "It's very kind and considerate. I know that if I tell you I'm not in the mood to hang out, you'll apologize and not push it. If you suggest that we get pizza and I say I'd rather have Korean BBQ, you fold instantly and we get Korean BBQ. I like that. I get the things I want. But it seems like an exhausting way to deal with people."

"I want you to be happy," I said with a small voice.

"I am happy," she replied. "You're great. You remember when we first got together I was like 'hey, look, if you want pizza, we can get pizza, it's just not what I'm in the mood for', and you kept insisting that you didn't care, that you would rather have me follow my needs? And I just thought, 'you know, maybe I should just trust that's what they actually feel'. And it is, as far as I can tell. There's not some secret part of you that wants me to break your way."

"You think I'm ... a simpering coward?" I asked. Even as I said it, it felt too accusatory, the wrong thing to say in the situation.

"Whoa, no, not at all," she laughed. "I think you do all that stuff because ... I don't know, you want to? Because otherwise why would you do it? It's how you are with every aspect of your life, you're a tryhard. I mean you said to me that you wanted to reclaim the term. Your relationship with me is that you're a tryhard (affectionate)."

"And you're ... not?" I asked.

"I'm not that way with anyone," she replied. "You know why I hang out with you so much? It's 'cause I like you. Most days, I am very much in the mood for you, and if you ask for a meetup, I'll say yes, and if you don't ask for one, then I'll ask you first. And for you ..."

"What?" I asked.

"It's like ... you're keeping track," she said. "You want to make sure that you're not sending me more messages than I'm sending you. You're balancing social micro stuff that I don't pay attention to. You're consciously monitoring how much each of us has said and making sure it's the right number of words or whatever."

"It's really not about the number of words," I replied. "It's more ... making sure that social and emotional labor is equitable, that there's a good rhythm to the conversation. I don't think you'd get good results by tracking word count."

"But see, I don't do any of that," she said. "I talk because I feel like talking. I listen when you need to vent because I like you and it feels good to give you an outlet. I mean you are undoubtedly putting in a bunch of work, and for me, there's no work. That's all I meant, really."

"You've thought about it," I said.

"Oh, I'm just reading this book, and there are two characters like us in it, and I was like 'yes, exactly', and then 'that would not work for me'." She shrugged.

"And if I stopped 'putting in the work'?" I asked. "Would we still be ... friends?"

"See, I don't know," she said. "Because that's never who you've been. You're asking me if I would still be friends with you if you changed your personality and how we interact with each other. Maybe? Probably? Who knows? Maybe we'd be better friends somehow. Maybe we're just two basically compatible people, and every time you've ever worried about anything it would actually have been completely fine."

"Or maybe it's load-bearing," I said.

"Maybe!" she replied with a smile that slowly faded. "You okay?"

"I'm thinking," I said. I didn't know if I could verbalize what I was thinking in a way that would be palatable.

"Do you not like being this way with me?" she asked. "Because I have never asked you to. I've made my preferences known, but if you've been bending yourself into knots and feeling a burden, then ..."

"No," I said, because I knew it was what she wanted to hear. "No, I like the way things are between us."

"Good," she smiled. "I do too."

“There’s a Japanese phrase that I like: koi no yokan. It doesn’t mean love at first sight. It’s closer to love at second sight. It’s the feeling when you meet someone that you’re going to fall in love with them. Maybe you don’t love them right away, but it’s inevitable that you will.”

— Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star

f(x) tribute band called f'(x). you'd think the point would be to be derivative but it's actually quite easy to differentiate the two.