In defense of like, humanity, I think our max capacity for knowing other people in historical time was like 10 people max, maybe 8. And 3 of those people were your friends and 2 others were like, “okay, but we do we have to hang out with Jessica in the cave? Is Dave coming? Really?”

Now we are ant hills of thousands upon thousands living on top of each other and trying to know each other and that is so much more than 10 and we aren’t even ants. Society, for what it’s worth, is a tall order.

i need y'all to get that headlines about climate change are supposed to spur people to action, and scientists sound the alarm because humanity still CAN do something, not because it's inevitable and Literally Everyone Will Die

Do NOT let people let you forget that our world is still as habitable as it is today because of the work of scientists and activists of the past, that things would be MUCH WORSE now if people hadn't acted.

Remember the ozone hole? Remember that? You haven't heard about that in a little bit huh? THAT'S BECAUSE WE FIXED THE PROBLEM. If no one had done anything, there would be holes in the ozone layer all over the place and we would be slowly irradiated by the sun. THE EARTH WOULD HAVE BEEN UNINHABITABLE BY MIDCENTURY.

Every time you repeat the line that "Unless we end capitalism worldwide, there's literally nothing we can do to help climate change!" the people that devoted their lives to saving species that would be gone now, preserving habitat that would be obliterated now, and fixing problems that would have been well along the way to making us extinct by now beam psychic rays of contempt in your direction

The powers that be want you to feel helpless. They want you to give up. They need you to think there is nothing you can do.

We have saved countless species, we have created plants that can survive and flourish in environments that shouldn’t be possible, we have found ways to make food more nutritious, less environmentally taxing, and found new and improved power sources to ensure that this planet remains liveable!

Giving up is what they want, they need you to give up and think its all worthless, and useless, because then they can steamroll over anything worth saving and install highways of cash that only lead directly to their wallets.

The planet isn’t ‘over-populated’, the planet isn’t going to die, the planet isn’t going to be impossible to live on. We find solutions, we forge new paths, and if the past hundred years have shown us anything - it’s that when we realize we fucked up, when we realize how much damage things like lead, or gas fumes, or asbestos, (or… or.. or…) we always found a way to stick it to the selfish industrial fuckers who only want to do it the old way.

We can’t and won’t fix everything in a single day (or a year, or a decade), but over the last few decades we have severely reduced per capita oil/gas usage, we have removed lead from paint, from gas, we have limited exhaust and harmful chemical releases, we have ensured that life can be cleaner and more sustainable. We have invented entire new industries for energy demands! From new hydroelectric generations, to making solar affordable and efficient, to turning back on nuclear, to making wind farms. All of these things they hate, that have destroyed their old ways, we have won on.

Scientists People sound the alarm, people demand the change, and people incentivize new research, new developments, and lead revolutions in how we go about our day.

We are living during the golden age of technological development, the golden age of change, and they want to make you feel afraid and that your voice is worthless so that they can keep beating their dead horses. Don’t let them win.

Be an alarmist, but realize that we are making positive changes every day to ensure that this planet lives, and that the others can be reborn.

Alright you guys, ‘tis the season again and I’ve already seen bullshit float about so here we go: what to do and what not to do when you happen to have a tick attached to yours truly.

WHAT NOT TO DO:

DON’T cover the tick in anything. Vaseline, nailpolish, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’ll all suffocate the tick, making it panic vomit germs into your blood stream. That’s the opposite of what you want.

DON’T burn the tick. Same problem, plus the additional option of giving yourself a burn wound in the process. 

DON’T squeeze the body of the tick when you try to remove it. Again this empties the tick’s digestive system into your body. Bad. 

DON’T wait for the tick to detach itself. The longer it stays on you, the higher the chances it’ll transmit anything to you. Plus when ti detaches it may again vomit germs into you. 

WHAT TO ACTUALLY DO

STAY CALM. A tick hanging on you is not a reason to panick. You’re not going to keel over just like that, and if you’re unsure what to do, there are many resources on the internet on how to safely remove a tick, like this one from the CDC (aka the professionals)

USE APPROPRIATE TOOLS. These can be suitable tweezers (the pointy kind, not blunt tipped ones), tick removers (there are cheap ones out there, those you can buy at the vets are totally fine for use on humans, too!). Ideally you can remove the entire tick in one go, however if that doesn’t work and the mouth part breaks off in your skin, that’s not a terribly big deal and you can totally remove it separately after you got the body remove. Again, don’t panic.

KILL THE REMOVED TICK. But not by squeezing it. Flush it down the toilet, submerse it in alcohol in a container etc. Ideally if the tick has bitten you and not your dog, keep the tick around in a sealed container in case you start having symptoms and someone needs to identify the tick species. Also IF you start getting symptoms like the tell tale Lyme disease rash, HIT A DOCTOR RIGHT AWAY AND TELL THEM ABOUT YOUR TICK BITE. Do not wait this out, ticks can transmit a whole host of diseases beside Lyme, so be mindful of that, too! 

Some of those diseases you can actually get vaccinated again, such as tick born encephalitis. Check with the local authorities if you live in a risk area, and if so, get the shots to protect yourself. 

Excellent post! I would like to add that ticks hide in tall grass and bushes mostly. They do not drop down from trees or jump to other people’s heads etc. Ticks aren’t designed to jump, they latch on somewhere on your leg and then crawl upwards in most cases. 

So be careful with bare legs and tall grass!

Millions of Years of Immutable Evolutionary Law: “Cats shall have litters of many offspring at one time. Some will be weak or stricken with disease--they will perish to allow the stronger siblings to escape, and to satiate other predators in order to reduce competition and encourage the existence of more capable adults.”

Human Beings:

"A ship can never truly love an anchor." dude shut up. a ship without an anchor gets dashed against the rocks. it's useless, completely at the whim of the currents. a ship loves an anchor so much it carries it everywhere it goes. the anchor gives the ship the world to love. dude.

DUDE DON'T YOU DO THIS TO ME

Achilles wouldn’t have died if he was wearing OSHA approved work boots.

Don’t let workplace safety be YOUR Achilles heel.

I should have stuck to making little robots, and not robots that can be the size of, say, a small car.

the word “can” is doing a lot of work there, this robot can transform from the size of a few feet to the size of a small (or, I suppose large) car by design with minimal structural changes.

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

some good theories in the notes but I choose to believe those are made by a village or perhaps king as an artificial home, to attract and keep a wizard. like a beehive

While artificially built towers do attract wild wizards a wizard will naturally build their own tower as they enter the later stage of their life cycle. For the first couple hundred years of their lives wizards are extremely mobile and may travel almost anywhere in the world or even beyond. A tower usually begins as a workshop which the wizard returns to during their migration in order to store trinkets and artifacts which they collect during their travels. As the collection outgrows the available space in the workshop a combination of the concentration of volatile magical energy and the wizards natural desire to build secret passageways causes them to begin expanding the workshop. This usually starts with basic "bigger on the inside" magic but due to constraints around energy usage for sustained large scale spacetime warping they will eventually turn to more traditional methods of building. There are some documented cases of wizards whose workshops expanded outward instead of upwards, resulting in labyrinth structures rather than the more traditional tower. It is still unclear what environmental pressure causes these divergent structures. As the wizard ages and their exploratory phase winds down their travels will focus on a progressively more narrow subset of arcane knowledge until they find one secret of the universe complex enough to prompt their transition into the final stage of the wizard lifestyle. By this point they will almost certainly have a fully fledged tower or have settled into one they've found already existing. Their desire to travel is generally severely reduced by this point and outside of quests to discover certain highly specific items related to their studies it's possible that they might not leave their tower for months or years at a time. In some cases they may begin this phase several times if the secret they started pursuing is less challenging or less fundamental to the operations of the universe than expected. When they do find their final subject of study and find the answers they sought, they will finally reach the end of the wizard life cycle, either via death caused by hubris, merging with a larger consciousness, ascendence to a different plane or to godhood, or metamorphosis into a litch. Other wizards may sometimes occupy the abandoned towers of a former wizard but most will move on in order to build their own before entering into these later stages. Very rarely a particularly social variety of wizard may build several connected towers and share resources, these are called schools and over time they will tend to attract a large number of younger and weaker wizards seeking shelter.

Absolutely brilliant analysis of wizards and their migratory patterns through the ages. I can personally verify that this is accurate, and you may now consider this properly peer reviewed and accepted.

this is immensely funny to me

In France, I like to think they *remember* what happens when they protest too hard. The French are exceptionally good at protesting, and we should maybe consider learning some things from them.