They dont tell you about the dirty jobs involved in spider care. Last week, I fed all the adults nice big juicy mealworms, which they promptly killed and then spent several days sucking on their vital fluids. Even when theyre very thorough in their consumption, though, they still leave behind a sack of chitin with organic leftovers inside.

Then it rots.

It rots thoroughly, turning black and soft and turning hairy with fungus. It has a sulfurous reek to it, as well. Then the spiders turn to me and peremptorily demand, Renfield! Oh, Renfield! Do clean up the rotting corpses, will you? Thats a good Renfield.

Renfield is me, if you havent figured that out. This morning I got to go through all the cages and pluck out decaying mealworms with a pair of forceps. This is my job. That, and regularly bringing them fresh bodies to turn into rotting corpses.

Oh well. I also got to play with my shiny new camera and take photos of my masters.

Youll have to go to Instagram or Patreon if you want to see photos. (Hmm, I didnt do a very good job of promoting those links with all this talk of decaying corpses, did I)

Sri Lanka has a lot of snakes, many species of which, like cobras, are venomous. There is also a lot of folklore surrounding them and many of them likely originated as tales made up to scare the daylights out of children, like ghost stories. I vividly recall one story that was told about the Russels viper. The story was that if anyone in your household encountered a viper and killed it (and killing a poisonous snake was often the chosen method of getting rid of them), then seven other vipers would come to your home and they would hang like a chain from the rafters of the roof if your house did not have a ceiling or from a fixture, each one clasping the tail of the other, until they lowest one reached you where you were sleeping and bit you. Needless to say, that story was enough to give small children sleepless nights.

As children, we did not question the validity of this preposterous theory and the fact that it seemed like it required a lot of coordination and hard work by the vipers just to get at you when they could instead easily have have waited for you by hiding in the grass or under some furniture until you passed by before striking, even allowing for the improbability that there existed some kind of viper committee that organized these revenge attacks and recruited members to carry them out, like some kind of commando snake strike force. There was something so frightening about the idea of snakes slowly lowering themselves down from the roof at night while you slept that it banished any critical inquiry.

There is also a lot of folklore about what to do if you do happen to get by a snake, as this article lays out. First off, it reassuringly says that rather than immediately succumbing to an agonizing end, you are very unlikely to die.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that between 7,000 and 8,000 people in the U.S. are bitten by venomous snakes each year. And of those who are bitten, only about 5 percent die.

To put that in perspective, around 40,000 people die in car accidents each year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

The article says that prompt medical attention is the best response to avoid death.

Stay calm and get to the hospital as soon as possible. The best first aid for snake bites is already in almost everyones pocket: a cell phone. If a snake bites you or you are with someone who is, call 911 immediately and let the pros handle it.

While waiting for the EMT heroes to arrive, carefully follow the dispatchers instructions. The CDC advises washing the wound with soap and water and keeping the bite area below the hearts level. 

You can take a picture of the...

Another mass murder by an asshole with a rifle, on a day ending with the letter y. But this article! Jesus!

The suspect in a Monday morning massacre at a Louisville bank has been identified as a 23-year-old former varsity hoops star and finance grad-turned-banker who livestreamed the horrific attack.

Louisville Police Chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel identified the suspect as Connor Sturgeon, who worked at Old National Banks downtown Louisville branch.

Gwinn-Villaroel said Sturgeon was livestreaming as he used a rifle to open fire at about 8:38 a.m. in the Old National Bank Building, which houses the bank and a variety of other businesses, killing four people and injuring nine more, including three police officers. Sturgeon was killed after exchanging gunfire with officers, she said, but its unclear if he was killed by police or by self-inflicted gunshots.

The article briefly mentions the victims by name, but after that, its got a more important job to do. It spends 22 fucking paragraphs going on and on about what a nice normal guy the killer was. The governor of Kentucky has to tell us what an incredible friend he was, they interview old high school friends and buddies from his college fraternity, they reach the depths of banality by getting a quote from the husband of a neighbor.

Sturgeon seemed like a real normal dude, every day hed wave to me, Allgeiers husband, Michael, added.

What the fuck? The mass murderer was known to sometimes wave to people? This is news? I learned nothing from it other than that the killer was otherwise a mundane person who lived an ordinary, if privileged, life before going on a shooting rampage. The article says nothing about the victims, short of naming them, and should have been slashed to bits by an editor before publishing.

And it took three reporters to cobble together this unquestioning story about a bad man.

I hope they feel a little bit of shame today.

Elon Musk is doing a fine job of wrecking the reputation (what there was of it) of rich people. Heres his idea of a clever joke.

Juvenile. Stupid. He bought this thing for $44 billion, and now he spends all his time mocking it and literally deprecating it. He threw away over $20 billion so far, and is determined to destroy all the rest.

Worse is what hes doing to Matt Taibbi. I dont much care for Taibbi hes also juvenile and gullible but he was defending Musk, incompetently, and was paid by Musk to fire off that damp squib called the Twitter Files, but now Musk is cutting off Substack, where Taibbi makes his money, and has gone so far as to shadow ban Taibbi on Twitter.

Musk is a petty 3 year old child. I browsed his Twitter feed to see whats going on in his brain, and even his deep thoughts are shallow and trivial. Like this one:

Wait, what? Your left arm is the same age as your right, and the two are genetically identical, and typically have similar environmental exposure. How is this an example of precision? How does this tell us that aging can be fixed?

AlthoughI did once meet a man, a truck driver, whose left arm was ruddy, scaly, and weathered, while his right was pale and smooth. He liked driving with the side window down, and his left arm resting on the door. I guess Ive cured aging, then simply stay out of the sun.

Lets have a conversation about Shapiros defence of Harlan Crow:

Ben Shapiro defends Harlan Crow's Hitler artifacts and dictator statues: "I mean, that seems like a reason you might own this stuff is to remember the things that you hate" pic.twitter.com/A4hm7x9nif

Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 10, 2023

Well, but you kind of miss the point there, Shapiro, dear boy, dont you? Its certainly unusual for people to surround themselves with reminders of the things that they hate, but its also something that a human being could do. So far, youre not wrong.

But heres the thing: If you surround yourself with things that evoke hatred in you, then your feelings are feelings of hatred and your thoughts are thoughts of hatred. And your hateful thoughts will inevitably spawn hateful ideas. Those hateful ideas will become hateful policies that you invent or support or even adopt because of your hatred.

And thats the ball game.

If your thoughts are thoughts of hatred and your policies are policies of hatred, then your government is a government of hatred and at that point you can call your movement whatever it is you like. You can even name yourselves the IZANs for all the good it will do. A government of hatred, acting against the people it hates, is a government indistinguishable from Stalins or Hitlers.

Even under your theory, Ben, Harlan Crow is a Nazi.

Some links on AI art I included some of these shoutouts in my comment section, but might as well include in my link roundup as well.  The reason I was thinking about AI art was because Great American Satan has been writing in its defense.  I also saw a video by Jack Saint (21 min), which was in opposition to AI art, but also concluded that the problem was capitalism.  I thought one of the interesting points Jack Saint made was about the use of AI in animation, which is an art form that arguably takes too much work.  Most people will basically never animate anything, and when people like Jack Saint do solo animation projects, it can take a major toll.  This is why Im not very convinced by the idea that AI makes things too easy.  Maybe it makes some things too easy, but other things it could make more reasonably easy.

Adastra: The Best Furry Visual Novel Made Me Come Out as Gay and Now You Have to Hear About It | Keith Ballard (video, 3:14 hours) So, funny story.  I thought Id watch some Myst Lets Plays so I could see what I remembered wrong about the series.  And I got sidetracked because the player was obviously a furry and probably gay.  Clearly thats what Myst was missingfurries.

Anyway, this is the sort of media analysis that includes a summary of the visual novel being discussedthats why its so long.  Adastra is a political drama where the player character is abducted to an alien society and participates in a contest between two successors to the throne.  Its also an 18+ romance.  It sounds like this story has a great alignment of text and subtext: the characters are literally gay, but also metaphorically gay in their relation to society.  Despite the common prejudice against furries, some of the smut they write just sounds so sincere and wholesome.

The Future is a Dead Mall Decentraland and the Metaverse | Folding Ideas (video, 1:49 hours) Dan Olson does a deep dive of Decentraland, the wildly overvalued MMO based on cryptocurrency.  And if 2 hours isnt enough for you, I recommend the Str...

But nothing rhymes with perfect.

This is why I dont use rhyming dictionaries. Look at rhymezone.com, and ask for a rhyme for perfect. It gives you a bunch of them, and not a single one actually rhymes with perfect. Not one.

So you know I have standards.

And by my standards, she is perfect.

Eight perfect arms, two perfect feeding tentacles. Or maybe the human equivalent, I wasnt really paying attention. I was distracted. By her absolute perfection.

Tomorrow, I might look at the news, and see why the world is all going to hell. Tonight, the world is perfect, and she is perfect, and I suspect so are a great many other new humans, and more than a few old humans as well, or if not perfect, at least worth fighting for.

Goddammit, now Im crying.

Anyway. It is a very good day, today is.

I dare us all to make tomorrow a better one.

Have I mentioned that I think were being too slow in our response to climate change? I feel like its come up. Were not moving fast enough. We need to end fossil fuel use far, far faster than the current rate, and that is not going to happen if we care more about corporate profits than human survival. Now, I suppose I should say that this is based on the modeling of a research group, and it isnt currently the consensus that were headed for three degrees of warming. Im willing to bet that most climate scientists would agree that we are, or that three degrees is optimistic, but I couldnt cite you a source on that. What I can cite is this report saying that its likely that thats the trajectory were on:

More and more countries are promising that they will phase out coal from their energy systems, which is positive. But unfortunately, their commitments are not strong enough. If we are to have a realistic chance of meeting the 2-degree target, the phasing out of coal needs to happen faster, and countries that rely on other fossil fuels need to increase their transition rate, says Aleh Cherp, professor at the International Environmental Institute at Lund University.

The phasing out of coal is a necessity to keep the worlds temperature increase below 2 degrees, compared to pre-industrial levels. In a study by Mistra Electrification, a group of researchers has analyzed 72 countries pledged commitments to phase out their coal use by 2022-2050.

In the best case scenarios, the researchers show that it is possible that the temperature increase will stay below 2 degrees. But that assumes, among other things, that both China and India begin phasing out their coal use within five years. Furthermore, their phase-out needs to be as rapid as it has been in the UK and faster than Germany has promised.

The research group has also developed scenarios that they consider to be the most realistic. These scenarios indicate that Earth is moving towards a global warming of 2.5-3 degrees.

The countries commitments are not sufficient, not even among the most ambitious countries. In addition, Russias invasion of Ukraine risks jeopardizing several of the countries commitments, says Jessica Jewell, Associate professor at Physical Resource Theory, Chalmers University of Technology.

And Bidens not really helping, either.

To say Im disappointed would be to imply that I expected better. I suppose I did expect better, a couple decades ago, but world leaders have taught me...

I read this morning:

wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt.  We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous.  We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p.74

No change for almost three centuries, and Id guess much longer than that.

It has long been clear that Republicans were using the abortion issue as a vote getting strategy. That seemed to have worked for a while to rally especially the religious zealots to their cause. But what has happened, as often occurs when a party panders to a fanatical base, is that the zealots get out of hand and push the issue much further than the party leaders would have liked. We see that with gun control measures. People in general approve of common sense gun control measures but Republicans are in the grip of the extremists so that now they cannot do anything at all, however reasonable, that might anger the extremists even if they say they want the right to openly carry bazookas and hand grenades in the streets.

What the Republican establishment seemed to have wanted is to place restrictions on abortion to make it very difficult to get while not blocking it entirely, because that policy of making it access harder seemed to have some appeal. They attacked the Roe v. Wade ruling by portraying it as allowing abortion on demand (though it did not) and called for its overthrow. They got that result by packing the US Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices who hid their beliefs during their conformation proceedings, and exulted over victory of their stealth strategy.

But the zealots essentially want to outlaw any and all abortions at any time and without any exceptions, even for rape and the health of the mother. These moves to so severely restrict abortion access are not popular as can be seen in how it galvanized voters to largely reject Republican candidates in the 2022 mid-term elections.

Conservatives are finding out the hard way that abortion isnt a 50-50 issue anymore.

Going back to the 1990s, Gallup polling showed Americans divided roughly evenly between those who called themselves pro-life and pro-choice. Exit polls from the 1990s and 2000s showed voters who said abortion or moral values were most important to their vote supported Republican candidates in greater numbers.

But those surveys were conducted when a right to an abortion was law of the land. The Supreme Courts Dobbs decision last year ending that constitutional right has exposed Americans broad opposition to the strict abortion bans adopted or proposed in GOP-controlled states. And its revealed that public surveys on the matter probably need more nuanced questions now.

Now, a four-point question probably best measures where Americans sit on the issue: legal in all cases, legal in most, illegal in all and illegal in most. The 2022 national exit poll used this device, finding that 29 percent of voters believed abortion should be legal in all cases, while another 30 percent thought it should be le...

Daniel Perry was an uber driver who ran a red light, drove into a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters, and when one of them approached his car carrying an AK-47 (which, stupid and dangerous as it is, is legal in Texas), opened fire with a handgun and killed him. He was found guilty of murder in a jury trial.

In Texas. After he threatened to kill someone online.

Perrys defense team argued that he acted in self-defense, but prosecutors contended that Perry instigated what happened. They highlighted a series of social media posts and Facebook messages in which Perry made statements that they said indicated his state of mind, such as he might kill a few people on my way to work. They are rioting outside my apartment complex.

A friend responded, Can you legally do so? Perry replied, If they attack me or try to pull me out of my car then yes.

Guess what? The governor wants to free him immediately.

Abbott wants an army of undisciplined thugs who will murder people he doesnt like. Its the authoritarian mindset.

Its what happens in Uganda or El Salvador, said Cofer, a former prosecutor. Total abrogation of the rule of law. And whats even worse is that Abbott knows better. He was a smart Texas Supreme Court Justice. He knows this is legally wrong. Profoundly wrong. Pure politics.

But it works! I know I would never consider living in Texas. I wont even visit the state anymore. Abbott is doing a great job of driving anyone who would oppose him away.

I never thought of it from this angle before, but maybe Noah was a devious guy with a bestiality obsession, and he invented that whole flood nonsense as an excuse to check out animals genitals. That makes more sense than the book of Genesis, thats for sure.

It also suggests how we ought to view all those weirdos today who are insisting on laws to check out childrens genitals. Theres no social catastrophe, just a lot of perverts who think they have a cunning excuse.

Ive been teaching the students all this basic transmission genetics all semester, and while its important and fundamental, it can have a bad effect on peoples brains. I cringe when I hear people talking about human traits using simple Mendelian terms like dominant and recessive because, while it works for many things, for others it misleads and is overly simplistic. I want my students to come away from the class knowing that genetics is complex and subtle and everything is polygenic and epistasis matters, and thats hard to do when theyre trying to figure out the basics of doing a fly cross.

Its also a problem because instilling only the basics of Mendel is a good way to make Nazis its easy to distort simple concepts they barely understand into props for your biases. Id like to forestall that. Also, Im in Minnesota, and Minnesota has a smug white people problem.

The racism you see in Minnesota is the type of racism where people say there is no racism. The only race is the human race, Myers [not me, no relation] said. How can we say the only race is the human race when all the people with dark skin are people with higher unemployment rates, dying from COVID, more likely to be arrested, more likely to be beaten by police and murdered? How does that happen when theres no race?

So Im going to wake up all the smart students in my class. My strategy involves handing them a digital folder full of articles from science journals as well as newspapers, telling them to pick one, and present it to the class (Im sure not going to just lecture on these things I want students to think about them.) Theyre getting the folder today, have to pick an article by Wednesday, and are going to prepare a ten minute summary and review for two weeks from today. Its going to be fun, right?

Heres a list of just the titles they have to choose from:

A framework for enhancing ethical genomic research with Indigenous communities (2018)
A review of the Hispanic paradox: time to spill the beans? (2014)
Addressing Racism in Human Genetics and Genomics Education (2022)
Can We Cure Genetic Diseases Without Slipping Into Eugenics? (2015)
Eugenics and scientific racism, (2023)
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA (2011)
Genetic Evaluation for Heredita...

I used to follow Jim Butchers Harry Dresden books, until I tired of them. Theyre puffalicious, but they remind me too much of S.M. Brusts condensed sci-fi con conversations, and they just started to sound self-similar.

But, one of the characters in those books that I enjoyed, naturally, was Dresdens dog Mouse. Mouse got the name because hes humongous, but once was small(ish) and gray(ish). Butcher teases us with a bit of lore regarding Mouse but never gets detailed: hes a Tibetan temple guard dog (a foo dog) and a supernatural power in his own right. [Mouse]

Just for the heck of it, I thought Id render Mouse in Midjourney.

Midjourney AI and mjr: a giant noble chinese temple dog, gray, realistic, alive.

The first thing I thought was that guy probably eats a 25# bag of kibble for breakfast. Then, I thought, I pity the poor fool who has to brush him. But maybe supernatural dogs dont get poopy butt, or armpit mats, I dont really know.

Midjourney AI and mjr: the chinese woman wearing hanfu is standing next to the huge dog

This one was harder to get: Midjourney has its own idea how big dogs are, and I had to feed back the other image of Mouse in order to get the proportions right. Finally I resorted to roughly compositing a human figure into the picture of the dog, so Midjourney would riff on it from there.

Finally, I tried this and I think it came out pretty well!

Midjourney AI and mjr: the chinese woman is brushing the huge dogs fur with a silver brush.

I know a yarn collector/spinner who once made a sweater that was 50% samoyed dog fur. Allegedly, their fur is hollow and is amazingly insulative because it holds air. OK, whatever, no m...

Delivered by Donald Trump

I dont read current science fiction & fantasy / SFF books, didnt read much of em back in my day either.  But I am around some amateur authors inspired by and working in that genre, and sometimes for yuks I watch video essays about stuff Im not actually interested in.  So I found out about these books by Piper CJ pitched with bi representation, that aside from their other issues   are just utterly failing to make the lady love happen.  Those links go to long video essays so skip em if you dont have the time.  The point is that very heterod-out scenarios get the word count and lady love is some abstract distant thing that is there in theme but almost never on the page.

And with the young authors I know that try to make women-loving-women / WLW content in their own stories, be it bi or les, they often seem reticent or shy or perhaps just asexual about it.  Thats valid, but bi women and lesbians should get to have stories where the ladies are allowed to kiss more than once per five hundred pages, if thats something theyre into.

Most of this music video by Triple Six Mafia is just bros posing in the cloughb, but there are a few bits with ladies touching each other affectionately.  Unlike much lesbian porn made for men, they dont look at the camera in the middle of their scenes, to tell you this is for the benefit of men.  Theyre just, hey, lets look at each other with longing, lets caress, and lets do this weird drug out of baby bottles.  In so doing, this video has more affection between ladies than some entire books sold on the back of that premise.

This got me thinking about the gender-reversed scenario.  What if fujoshis (weird geek girls horny on the concept of gay dudes) went mainstream and made rap like this.  Youd see stocky women in polo shirts and khakis acting tough while gentle-eyed mans get all touchy-feely in slow motion.  I wonder if anybody has made that music video yet.

EDIT TO ADD:  Reminder, still doing my fundraiser up through April 21st (stopping early if I reach stretch goal ahead of then).  Make at least a three dollar donation and Ill rhyme a word of your choice in a rap.  While I appreciate the contributions of people who have...

Its not a dish, its that time of the year. Today was the first day I saw starlings in my garden and I managed to snap a few pics too, although I could not open the window firstly they would whoosh and secondly I would need to remove several plats from the windowsill first.

Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Shame that I could not make better pictures, the light was just right to show the green metallic sheen on their feathers.

And since the ground unfroze and it is unlikely to freeze again, I have taken out the moldy remnants of last years potato harvest and sorted out about 100 tiny sprouting potatoes.

Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I did not plant them in the regular vegetable patch though. I have prepared a small plot in the fall by covering it with mown and dried grass and I put these tiny potatoes on top of the soil below the rotting grass.

I just learned about a curious connection. Remember UATX, that fake conservative university, is having another summer session this year (youre too late to apply, Im afraid). Again, its going to be held in Dallas, not Austin, because theyve been granted the use of some buildings in an office park called Old Parkland.

Guess who owns it?

Conservative billionaire and corrupt villain of the week, Harlan Crow.

The more I learn about these people, the more incestuous they look.

Man, these stories keep popping up, and theyre not even interesting for the irony anymore. Yeah, another crusader protecting children was found to have a stash of child porn.

Michael Dolce, a 53-year-old lawyer known for representing child sexual abuse survivors, was recently arrested by FBI agents at his West Palm Beach, Florida home. Dolce, who founded a group called Protect Our Kids First Inc., was allegedly laying in his bed and downloading sexually explicit images of children when agents broke down his front door.

According to an FBI affidavit, after Dolces March 15 arrest, agents found 1,997 images and five videos of child pornography on his computer. The images were of male and female children ages five to 12, including several of a prepubescent girl in a subfolder titled Sweet Pedo Stars. Dolce could receive a minimum of 20 years in prison if found guilty of possessing child pornography.

The police are brutal, but sometimes they have good timing.

ExceptOK, this Michael Dolce is a sick scumbag, he deserves to lose his job (he already has), and should be mocked and howled at for his hypocrisy, and should never be taken seriously ever again. There ought to be some penalties for his behavior, but twenty years in prison? In our prison system? Is that just? Especially when the article points out what hes going to face.

If Dolce is found guilty of possessing child pornography, hell likely face a living hell behind bars, CBS News reported. Inmates with sexual interests in children often occupy the lowest rung of the prisoner hierarchy, with other inmates sometimes defecating in their cells, using them as sex slaves, or targeting them for violence and murder as a way to gain prestige. Even when such offenders are placed into protective custody, they remain widely despised by other inmates, the news outlet reported.

Child pornography is a deplorable crime that rightly deserves to be punished, but you know what else is a deplorable crime? A state-run rape factory that allows inmates to torture each other. I also have to wonder how the police had such good timing there are serious issues of privacy here (uh-oh, is the FBI going to break down my door and uncover my vast stash of spider images?).

Its unclear why the FBI was monitoring Dulce and whether he had any anti-LGBTQ+ views. However, he is one of the countless cisgender men who have been arrested for child pornography wh...

Heres a fine Easter message for you: The world would be better if every man, woman, and child were Catholic. You are misusing freedom of religion when you use it to promote pluralism and false religions.

Oh yeah, the Church Militant never fails to provide entertaining intolerance for public consumption. Its a strange mixed message, though. This guy is yelling about how pluralism is a good thing, and you shouldnt be angry about it because everyone should be free to make the right choice (Catholicism) and the wrong choice (every other religion), but you should be getting mad that every single minor Catholic festival isnt promoted as heavily as Christmas and Ramadan and Diwali. But have you ever looked at calendar of Catholic holy days? This week alone we had Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, and Black Saturday. Get to work and complain to your HR department that they arent sending out announcements and memos about every single Catholic holiday! If my university started spamming me about every single religious holiday Catholics arent alone in packing the calendar with noise Id have to block their email.

And darn those rainbow flags. Offensive to the Church Militant! There are no gay people in the True Catholic church.

Anyway, Im doing nothing for Easter at all other than grading and making a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. I hear that my granddaughter is going on a family Easter egg hunt, and thats about as religious as were going to get. I guess I better get started on the holy rite of marking my students sins with a red pen.

Ive gotten familiar with the gestation time for a variety of seeds, and can practically set my clock by genovese basil.

Unless something bad happens, Ill have pretty good-sized plants in a couple weeks. Then I can start stealing a leaf now and again to crush into my pasta.

And, the lemongrass. Like the basil, I just scatter seeds all around the pot, so there are a bunch of different plants I can mutilate.

Those roundish things in the center bottom are interesting. Some kind of mushroom that looks like P. Cubensis but isnt (shrooms like to grow a large mycelium web before they poke their heads up, and this pot was empty and dead a week and a half ago, no way shrooms would colonize it that fast)

That tiny little green thing is a folded over baby green onion.

Grow! Grow my little ones! Be proud and strong, so I can eat you.

We had some pretty crazy wind last week, and it completely ripped off the ridgeline vent and the automatic vent control. I have to go searching in the cows field for it and hope they havent stomped on it. Well, I can always build another.

The automatic vent systems are really cool and I do not understand them very well at all. Its a piston full of some kind of grease that expands and contracts with heat, thereby operating a lever system that opens the vent. Pretty cool but not able to survive 60mph winds. I may just leave it open when summer is here the inside of the greenhouse gets very hot 110F plus, which cant be great for the plants.

Most of my memories from Easter are pretty secular. Its not because we werent a religious household, but more because Quakers dont much much stock in holy days, and my family mostly saw it as an excuse to celebrate and see relatives. We did egg hunts, we got huge baskets of candy from my grandmother all the usual stuff. I think thats part of why the claims of a pagan origin for the holiday never really interested me all that much. I believed them, but it didnt really change how I saw things. This also means that discovering that all the Ishtar/Ostara stuff seems to be bunk also doesnt really ruffle my feathers. It certainly seemed plausible, but its just as plausible that another chain of events led to the odd mishmash that is the modern USian conception of Easter. In fact, its apparently more plausible:

Ill admit that I fully bought into the Ostara story and I was honestly shocked to learn that this story has only one single source, and its NOT from anyone who worshiped her, and maybe not even someone who lived in a time when anyone worshiped her. We know of Ostara only because of an 8th century English Christian monk named Bede, who wrote that the local pagans used to hold festivals in Ostaras honor each Spring, but that with the Christianization of the area, the practice died out before his time. Thats it! A THOUSAND YEARS LATER, Jacob Grimm (of the famous Brothers) took that description and ran with it, asserting with no evidence that Ostaras festivals directly connect with Easter and are the reason why we do so much weird shit to celebrate Jesus dying, like how we all love to eat pastry of heathenish form. Thats a direct quote from Grimms Deutsche Mythologie, and FYI it is now a permanent part of my familys Easter traditions.

This binding on of the Easter seax, or sword-knife, leads us to infer that a sword of peculiar antique shape was retained; as the Easter scones, sterstuopha (RA. 298) and moonshaped stermne (Brem. wtb.) indicate pastry of heathenish form.

Note that in the late 19th century, 150 inscriptions were found in Germany that related to three goddesses that seem to have been known as the Matronae Austriahenae ,...

The FreeThought Blogs Poddish Sortacast was interrupted by demonic activity, namely my mans Hecubus causing some kind of mayhem while I tried to speak my piece.  When animals attack

EDIT TO ADD:  Reminder, still doing my fundraiser up through April 21st (stopping early if I reach stretch goal ahead of then).  Make at least a three dollar donation and Ill rhyme a word of your choice in a rap.  While I appreciate the contributions of people who have given generously,-Id like to see more and smaller donations.  So far I only have four words to rhyme.  If I dont make the goal, this rap will remain a text poem.  If I reach $500 I will record myself rapping.  If I reach $600 I will do a short video.  Help cover the wages Ill be losing from this medical situation, thanks!

I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder in my early twenties and my main focus at the time was recovery. After a few years, my symptoms were managed and I decided I wanted to help others, so I got a part-time job at a group home. I have now been working in the mental health field for sixteen years. I have had jobs at three different organizations and Im passionate about my work.

I am a certified peer supporter and last year I also became certified in trauma support. The training in trauma support was intense and took several months. There were many hours of training videos and sixteen weeks of trainings via Zoom.

To my surprise, becoming certified in trauma support was less about taking care of others and more about taking care of myself. The main takeaway was that you cant care for others if you are not well.

During my training, I learned about meditation, relaxation, grounding, and gratitude. Sometimes we started our Zoom meetings by writing down five to ten things were grateful for. We were told that happier people tend to show more gratitude. At first, it was difficult to come up with that many things. I would write down my family and job but it was hard to think of more. As time went on, it got a little easier.

I recently was feeling down and I remembered our exercises in gratitude. Does it truly make you happier? So two weeks ago I started a gratitude journal and Ive been writing down at least ten things every day. I include the big things like my family, my job, art, and writing but also little things like good-smelling hair products, peacock blue paint, and my house plants. Those last few things may seem insignificant, but they really do bring me joy. 

I have to admit, it has boosted my mood. The last two weeks have given me a more positive outlook. I think Im going to keep going with the journal and see if I notice anything else.

One thing I didnt expect is that in a way my journal helps me celebrate my atheism. Every time I make a list of things Im grateful for I realize I can truly appreciate my life and the world around me without having to credit a deity, and it feels amazing. 

My gratitude journal is really cute. Its fuzzy and has a panda on it. I bought it at the book fair at my daughters school. Can I be grateful for my gratitude journal?

Gratitude exercises may seem a little cheesy, but I think it actually helps. I just wanted to share in case anyone needs a little boost and wants to give it a shot.

I would love to read what you guys are grateful for....