Look At This Thing! Isn't It Neat? Wouldn't You Think My Collection Is Started?

Look at this thing! Isn't it neat? Wouldn't you think my collection is started?

I made this. Well, not the outline. I got that off of a different flower and then filled it in. I'm officially one drawing into however many I do until I die. Congrats me! I spent like two hours figuring out how colors work. I'm still not sure about all of it but it's done now!

Killer whales do not regularly eat moose. It's a rare phenomenon.

Source: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Proceedings_of_the_Third_Glacier_Bay_Sci/98wsAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=moose

You know how orcas will regularly eat moose? I wonder if they ever used to eat mammoth or giant sloth or other megafauna before they went extinct. I would love to hear one day of a killer whale found frozen in some glacier with mammoth remains in its stomach

Love this

Love this

Love this

<3

🌟 pixel rpg marcille on her way to battle more undines! ✨

Howdy world!

So, this is my first post of a blog that is also my first blog.

I've always wanted to do journaling and the like but privacy was a rarity growing up that I, especially, didn't get. I'm looking forward to doing this blogging online. Expect many infrequent posts.

For me, a lot of this will sound super whiny. I know I'm blessed/fortunate/lucky/etc to have the life and opportunities that I do. So, why do I struggle so much? That's another posts day.

I've recently talked to a therapist who helped me figure out that my thoughts matter to. Often times by the time I'm done rolling information around in my brain like the world's most developed rock tumblr (Haha, did you see what I did there?), I've also polished the thought to be refined enough that it's simple.

There's a sort of beauty in simple things. They deserve to be expressed. They deserve to be thought. And I shouldn't cut away (metaphorically) from myself because it took me three weeks to simplify thirteen different sources that made me feel into a phrase that I could write for hours about.

I choose to title this "Howdy world!" because I like saying howdy and because it's the first thing you do when you learn computer coding. I'm not skilled at computer coding but I am skilled at trying new things and keeping parts of them forever. Computer coding is one such thing.

Expect a lot of references to things that I've only ever dabbled in. I'm not going to apologize.

Scientific Paper Review: Insects may or may not be sentient??

Reading this (https://www.wageningenacademic.com/doi/epdf/10.3920/JIFF2022.0041?role=tab) paper about welfare when farming black soldier flies (published 2023) with the main author being Meghan Barret, who is a super duper cool female scientist that believes strongly in insect welfare (e-portfolio link here: http://meghan-barrett.com/about-me/), and I'm astonished!

Introduction starts off with a quick overview of what the paper is getting into and then dives into background history. I love reading scientific papers simply because there is so much cool stuff to learn. Animal welfare is dependent upon how the animal views how it's doing. A pampered lap dog with depression still has depression. A sad bug living in a super duper cool vivarium (which are way hard to set up) is still sad.

Insects in science may or may not be sentient. How do you define sentient? Where do you draw the line of responding to making decisions? Wild! If insects are sentient we should, of course, treat them like we are. If they aren't how do we determine welfare for something that's not sentient. This isn't about philosophy though so we're continuing on.

There is a model called the five freedoms model. The paper said it best so I'm quoting them here, "According to that influential model of animals’ interests (Brambell, 1965), animals ought to kept in ways that keep them free: (1) from hunger and thirst; (2) from discomfort; (3) from pain, injury, and disease; (4) to express normal behaviour; and (5) from fear and distress.".

From here the introduction continues to go on to explain that it's hard to tell when an insect is doing or has this stuff. If a pet cat decides to be a picky eater, is the owner a bad owner for not keeping them free from hunger and thirst or is the cat being picky? Again though! Not hear for philosophy or ethics that's been discussed a hundred times before.

What can be determined though is if something kills an insect it is bad. If it increases mortality, like a parasite would, it is bad. Good thing is that factors between farmed invertabra (aka bugs) is pretty universal. Another good news is we know a lot about the biology of the black soldier fly! They have six larva stages.

That concludes this part of the post! More coming soon.

Always sick of this nonsense of how everything sucks from Stephanie Meyers because she's lds. Like wow! We get it you hate woman or religion or both. Interesting take that I was thrilled of up until the end. Why must people hate people? (Be it because of religion or gender)

Stephenie Meyer's sci-fi novel The Host is like. it's almost so much. the alien bodysnatchers at the center of the plot are like Animorph's yeerks if they got really into cottagecore. no, they don't want intergalactic war and domination! they want intergalactic peace and domination! they make every planet they visit a peaceful socialist utopia and like, okay, yes, they have to violently take over the bodies of a planet's native inhabitants to do it. yes, they have to suppress the unwilling minds of their host bodies. yes they are for all intents and purposes committing a genocide of their chosen planets' initial inhabitants and then puppeting their husks around playing at homogeneous, sanitized versions of the cultures they destroyed. the alien main character mentions that even episodes of the Brady Bunch were scrubbed because they were deemed too violent. and they call themselves souls, which is so loaded on so many levels. impossible not to read into the spiritual connotations, especially when written by an author coming from the mormon church which so highly values mission trips. just by sympathizing with humans who don't want to be possessed, by helping them hide out and stay free, our protagonist becomes a pariah, an outlaw from her own society. peace is valued above all else but not peace for the colonized, who are meat to be processed. it's better this way. they had so much potential but squandered it with foolish violence so now we have the right to overtake them and make them live correctly. isn't it beautiful now? isn't everything perfect? there's like almost so much happening in this story except Stephenie's a fucking mormon so she never draws any meaningful connections to anything and the happy ending is that the alien brain parasite protag is gifted the body of a beautiful coma patient that she can "ethically" puppet around, easy peasy problem solved. also there's a fucking love triangle.