Researching the history of the English language has made me realize:
I desperately need a centuries-old sexy immortal romantasy love interest that just CANNOT spell standard modern English, and refuses to try.
Like, this person hates spellcheck, and frankly resents this entire bourgeois attitude to an issue of personal expression and individual freedom. You're not the king! You can't hang me for sedition!
ALTReminds me of our letter from the S3 finale of Monstrous Agonies 😅
ALTnorthern usa comes with a secret fifth season, between winter and spring. it’s called “Gross”. everything is muddy and dead. allergies are flaring up but there’s not a green leaf in sight. the landscape is littered with piles of dirty ice. snow rain mix is probably falling. gross.
This is an actual ecological season called prevernal spring, or false spring, when the plants start waking from dormancy, the snow and ice melts into mud to water the waking plants, and insect larva start growing so they can fly by the time flowers are ready to get pollinated, and the warm(er) days and icy nights help stress-proof the plants for the coming hot seasons. It is anticipatory, preparatory, and magical. And gross.
I’m poetic enough to call it “Snowmelt”. It’s the season where the sides of roads slowly reveal the layers of gravel cars have spit onto them. A winter’s worth of trash and useful items alike appear from under the snowbanks they were dropped in. (One year we found my dad’s phone. It still turned on.)
Bone-dry air finally gives back some of its water, as icicles form and acquire cartoonish proportions. The entire world is cloaked in dead brown-gold grass. The world is made of white, and gray, and brown, and brown, and brown, until one day the snow melts enough to leave brown, and brown, and blue, soccer fields standing with startling shocks of water.
It’s not spring. But I’ve lived long enough to know in my bones that it won’t actually last forever. It’s just a step to get there.
For all my academic researchers out there, especially in fields studying humans:
YouTuber Pete Judo has been covering academic scandals and research fraud in behavioural science and psychology. Now he wants to pivot his channel away from such negative topics, and focus instead on positively highlighting currently active researchers whose work will translate well to a visual medium.
Here’s his explanation of the content he wants to make, and how any researchers looking to present their work to a wider audience can get in touch with him.
We’re experimenting with freedom even though B and I aren’t on speaking terms yet. 😅😂
The fact that she’s willing to run around while I’m in the room is a big deal.
She also climbed up into this cozy nook while I was working at my desk last night so she could watch me, even though there are other places to hide. (She hides during the day.)
She’s wary, still. But she was really sad and bored in the crate and her hunger was decreasing, so more space to run around should help work up an appetite. It’s also easier for me to spend time with her when she feels like she can “get away” if she needs to and choose how close to get to me.
I’ve got about a month until she has to go back to the vet for her second round of vaccinations. Please wish me luck that I can finally convince her I’m chill and actually really good at chin skritches if given the chance.
Its weird how quickly stereotyping cats based on color has taken off online now
I'd say its just people wanting to lovingly tease their pets, but I've come across several conversations recently of people wondering what genetically causes orange cats "to be that way". I think it's because they are a cat.
It's even weirder because people act like "orange cat behaviour" is a long-standing cultural stereotype and not something that popped up in the last five years!
Oh some of my favorites include "my tortie loves to [insert normal cat behavior here], and only torties act that way!" and "I could never get a calico, they are mean!" Like bitch what? You think fur and skin color determines personality? You're cat racist. Make it make sense.
It's astrology for cats. Including people that are real fuckin weird about it.
Tortietude has been a thing for years, I remember reading people joking in my cat magazine when I was a kid many decades ago about torties being spicy, though they didn't use that word.
But the orange cat thing has been memed out. I shouldn't further it, I know I shouldn't. But the lighter fur and their open little faces do indeed make them look very very silly sometimes. There isn't much mystery to an orange cat. Just sunshine.
I’m lowkey bugged by it because they’re also gendered sterotypes. Orange and black are carried on the X chromosome, so XY kittens with an orange X frequently come out orange, while XX kittens with one orange and one black X typically come out with the variable black and orange coat of the tortoiseshell or calico.
So effectively, this means that tortoiseshell and calicos are 99.9% girls and orange cats are 85% boys.
And then, totally coincidentally, people went in hard on stereotypes where the mostly-boy population are sweet dumb himbos, and the girl-population are moody, emotional, and prone to overreacting.
When these cats are not different breeds or geographically separated populations at all; this is a common coat colour for cats all over the world, and oranges and tortoiseshells are frequently brothers and sisters. Or parents and children. A tortoiseshell/calico mother will often have orange boys and tortoiseshell/calico girls; getting a tortoiseshell/calico cat requires one parent with an orange X, which is frequently an orange boy.
When assessing behaviour and personality, a major thing psychology has had to fight against is demand characteristics and confirmation bias. Having a preformed conclusion about how somebody is will lead you to interpret all their behaviour in a way that confirms your original theory, and your preformed concept of somebody can lead you to act in ways that unnaturally evoke that response in their behaviour. I have not seen any study on “tortitude” or “orange cat behaviour” that fails to rule out these two factors.
I normally shut up about this because people are entitled to their own silliness and having fun with their cats, but I’ll be honest, the gender of it all just bugs me deep down.
