Still Life with Cat (1705) by Desportes, It’s no use crying over spilt milk (1880) by Frank Paton, Still Life of the Remnants of a Meal with a Lunging Cat (18th Century) by Alexandre-François Desportes, Fish Still Life with Two Cats (1781) by Martin Ferdinand Quadal, Still Life with a Cat and a Mackerel on a Table Top (18th Century) by Giovanni Rivalta, The Collared Thief (1860) by William James Webbe, Cat Stealing a String of Sausages (17th Century) by Abraham van Beyeren, Still Life with a Cat (1760) by Sebastiano Lazzari, Kitchen Still Life with Fish and Cat (ca. 1650) by Sebastian Stoskopff, An Oyster Supper (1882) by Horatio Henry Couldery, Still Life with an Ebony Chest (17th Century) by Frans Snyders, Still Life with a Cat (1724) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, A Cat Attacking Dead Game (18th Century) by Alexandre-François Desportes, Still Life of Fresh-Water Fish with a Cat (1656) by Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Fruits and Ham with a Cat and a Parrot (18th Century) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, A Cat Holding a Fish in Its Mouth (18th Century) by Sebastiano Lazzari, Still Life with a Cat and a Hare (18th Century) by Desportes, Still Life with Cat and Rayfish (1728) by Jean-Siméon Chardin, A Cat with Dead Game (1711) by Alexandre-Francois Desportes, Still Life with Cat and Fish (1728) by Jean Baptiste Siméon Chardin
sometimes I forget orchids grow on trees and I’m like. oh.
They do what now?
in the wild, most orchids grow on tree bark, a fact which will never not bring me a profound sense of delight
interestingly, orchids aren’t parasites–they are just harmless squatters hanging out with their arboreal buddies. it’s a form of commensalism–one organism benefits, the other neither benefits nor is harmed.
OK but orchids ARE parasites. They just aren’t parasites on trees. All orchids have this very bizzare lifecycle where they begin life as parasites on fungi. Here’s the rough strategy:
1. There’s a tradeoff between how much nutrients can be in a single seed and how many seeds you can make. On one end is the double coconut, the largest seed in the world weighing as much as a small child but each double coconut palm tree makes relatively few seeds per individual per season. OR. Make a fuckton of seed that individually cost very little to make. A lot of your small nonwoody plants chose this option, grasses, dandelions, any little weeds usually.
2. But there’s a limit to how far you can push this.
3. And by god orchids crossed it.
4. Orchid seeds are so fucking small they don’t have the energy stores to fucking germinate.
5. Orchid seeds are so small that they only consist of a few cells that haven’t decided who’s going to be roots or leaves yet.
6. And this is great! If you preferred habitat is in trees where the ability to disperse from one treetop to the next and find the right little spot on that tree to survive as a seedling for a few years is really hard. Lots of seed that can float on the wind and find just that spot is great for that.
7. But shit for actually, you know, being alive.
8. But orchids are crafty bastards.
9. Most plants try very hard not to be colonized by fungi, thats usually not good.
10. But orchid seeds just let fungi in.
11. And how the turn tables.
12. Because they just start eating the fungi back.
13. And this is where it gets weird.
14. Orchids are easily in the running for most diverse plant family at nearly 30,000 different species
15. And every single fucking one of them is like this.
16. And worse than that most of them are dependent on a single species of fungus to do this for them, so they produce millions of seeds just so that one might find the one right fungus.
17. And then after that anything can happen.
18. Some orchids are nice and start paying back their hosts onve they get big enough to phtotosynthesize with nice sugars.
19. Some orchids move on to as many as 30 other fungal species throughout their lives.
20. Some complete bastards keep being parasites after they are big enough to photosynthesize on their own. That’s right, a plant that can make its own food is stealing from something that lives on dead leaves.
21. Some orchids just never grow out of it, orchids have turned into permanent parasites more often than any other group of plants because they’re all parasites so becoming a full parasite is nbd.
22. And worse, most of these actually parasitize fungi that are symbiotic with forest trees that supply sugar to the fungi in return for better access to mineral nutrients, effectively making the orchids both parasites on the fungi and the trees, in a sense the whole ecosystem.
23. This leads to one more weird phenomenon. Mutant albino orchids unable to photosynthesize, of species that normally can photosynthesize, are often recorded as being able to reach maturity and flower without issue. because they just keep being parasites instead. Orchids can just. become parasites at will.
In conclusion orchids are just the weirdest fucking plants in the world. Technically all the above applies to this obscure group of ferns called the Ophioglossum family too. Same fucked up start out life as parasites and become independent (or not) later thing.
I saw a yt document about this just yesterday and it’s wild
Turns out, that on a large scale, it’s not cost effective to farm the fungi in order to farm orchids which can then be sold worldwide. So what happens is that flower producers go entirely different route - 100% sterility. Everything bleached. Seed pods washed by 70% alcohol. Seeds being grown in petri dishes. Basically, if there isn’t the fungus to provide, people do. We know to the T what exactly in what amounds orchid seeds need, so we mix that stuff with agar jelly, sprinkle seeds over all of that, then wait several months to years until those bastards start growing. The process then continues in similar fashion until plants are capable of independent life at which point those, we have figured out, are given growth promoting substances in strategic spots in order to make the plant bloom. Adding that hormone to inactive bud on the flower stem makes it grow too and so we get those beautiful branched phalaenopsys orchids which then refuse to grow more flowers for 2+ years because they are close to collapsing from a) lack of fungy support and b)being forced to produce too many flowers. Remember this the next time you get your mom another of those 12+ flowers having beauties because her previous 3 are (half) dead.
Yeah Mr. Darcy’s proposal was a complete turd and a half but you gotta understand. You got your life together. A good career, stable income, retirement plan, all that shit together. And you meet this girl. And she’s everything. Clever, outspoken, funny, calls you on your bullshit. Grade A cutie, right? And she doesn’t go out of her way to spend time with you but she’s nice, and sometimes you catch her looking your way in a way that makes you think you might have a shot.
But her family. Holy shit.
First off, it’s p much ALL women, and mostly UNMARRIED women, which at this time means of something happens to her dad then you’re financially responsible for like. Four grown ass adults, potentially forever
Because mom in law is DEFINITELY gonna need someone to take care of her when dad in law kicks it, and they have like. NO money. So already you’re accepting that if all goes well, you’re gonna be one random old bag’s retirement home. That’s expensive and exhausting, yeah? Imagine asking someone on a first date knowing that if they say yes and things go good her high-strung chihuahua mother is gonna move in with you. IMAGINE.
And girly’s other sisters. Well, one is a sweetheart, yeah, and she’s getting engaged so she probably won’t be an issue, but that still leaves two more, and those ones are INSUFFERABLE. Never went to school, dumb as rocks, spend cash like it’s toilet paper
And while one of ‘em’s young still and might grow out of it the OTHER one is actively torpedo’ing her entire family’s reputation by wandering off with random dudes and chasing ass. She’s never gonna work, she can’t build connections, she’s a fucking sinkhole, and she’s being led on by the same goddamn con man ass leeching tit who’s been bleeding you dry while telling anyone who’ll listen that your family is full of ratty thieving bastards.
And if he dumps her after a week- WHICH YOU KNOW HIS BITCH ASS IS GONNA- you’ve got a SECOND UNMARRIABLE GROWN ASS ADULT TO PROVIDE FOR. And you KNOW she’s gonna be a tantrum-throwing little shit about it, and it’s not like you can lock her in the basement or something, you’re gonna have to bring her fucking. Everywhere. And give her an allowance and shit while she contributes zero, because again, she NEVER GOT EDUCATED AND HAS NO MARKETABLE SKILLS. She’s not even good to TALK to. FUCK
And you’re looking at this girl’s father like “please for the love of fuck get your spawn under control, marry them off, get them working on their résumé, learning to sew or be nursemaids or manage staff or SOMETHING, yall got no money and one foot in the grave” and that old man just laughs like “haha yeah, what can you do. lol”
So you’re looking to the mom and finally it’s making sense how she got that twitch in her eye and as MUCH as she is you’re starting to realize she’s the SMART one, desperately throwing her armloads of girls at random men like they’re a bunch of fucking lifeboats bobbing around a sinking ship, like yes Jesus Christ sweetly that life boat IS old and ugly and kind of boring but for FUCKS SAKE PICK ONE
And you look back at this girl who is ALSO REFUSING THE LIFE BOATS BY THE WAY and god damn it she’s still the most radiant thing you’ve ever seen so fine, fuck it, Christ alive, you’ll do it. You’ll shoot your shot. She’s everything you’ve ever wanted in anybody abut it’s not even just about that anymore, it’s about being her best fucking shot at a future, and even if she doesn’t like you all that much she’s still gonna say yes and that might break your heart a bit knowing it’s about the money but who knows, maybe it will at least be civil, or companionable, and even if she doesn’t LOVE you at least you’ll know she’s well and cared for
And so you’ll do it. You’ll take on the neurotic stress mess mother in law, the absent father, the broke ass wingnut no brain no money no future airhead sisters, the bad mannered relatives and the embarrassing behaviour and the impending future of sharing your entire shit with a clown parade of freeloaders, you’ll risk it all and accept the absolute certainty of financial ruin and emotional exhaustion for the rest of your whole ass life and you’ll make your own family deal with it too, you’ll do it, you’ll fucking DO IT, you stupid lovesick motherfucker
And so you go to this chick like “look. Your whole family’s a shitshow. You’ve got fucking nothing and you’re gonna die on the street. But for some reason- and I don’t get it either- I’ve fallen in love with you, and I wish I didn’t, but I did, so I’m telling you that whether you like me or not, I’ll give you everything. I’ll give you everything even if it’s the dumbest shit I ever done. Fuck my stupid Baka ass, I’ll marry you.”
And she looks at you- having heard or considered absolutely none of your months-long internal debate and monologue- and goes “The fuck did you just say about my family, you son of a bitch?”
And the shock of that is enough to jolt you back into a reality where you are able to actually hear and process what just came out of your damn mouth
Hey Science side of tumblr folks, if you were working on an NIH grant that was canceled, ProPublica is looking to hear from you to amplify your story and put it in the perspective of the ongoing assault on our commitment to care for each other.
Multiple relatives of mine donated their bodies to science. That donation was in each case an awe inspiring act of kindness and love, an effort to help create a world in which the thing that was at the time actively killing them would not do so to others if they could help it.
Huge swaths of disease research is based on similarly beautiful commitments to humanity, and the NIH represents our societal commitment to make those sacrifices matter.
So I am taking these bastards pulverizing it extremely personally and am incandescent about it. I am personally committed to making everyone involved in this suffer as much as I personally can. Which is to say I would appreciate if you took the time to help ProPublica shine a light on this atrocity if you have a story to tell them.
ProPublica is reputable af and extremely hardcore in their investigations. They’ve also got a pretty good track record of embarrassing politicians enough to get good shit done.
I support them financially because we NEED them, and I encourage anyone who fits the profile to get in touch with them.
The majority of the Earth’s rodents: How do you survive environments with practically zero oxygen, feel no pain, and live for decades when none of the rest of us can???
A friend has once again brought it to my attention that it is unusual to have an intact chronological memory of life prior to age 12 and you know what’s weird to ME is that the rest of yall forgot how to sing the clean-up song
Other shit:
The crotch-and-chin destroying hell of a toddler’s carseat
How fucking scary stairs are when you JUST figured out walking. “You can stand up” nah fuck that these steps go up to my knees and I’m top-heavy I’m gonna scoot down on my ass thank you
Walking alongside fucking giants whose legs are bigger than your whole fucking body and trying to keep up
Not knowing how to blow your nose and everyone expecting you to just figure it out by holding a tissue and saying “blow” like WHAT DO YOU MEAN CLOSE MY THROAT? Just an absolute snot waterboarding
People describing how to make sounds with your mouth but you can’t see inside their mouth when they do it so you kind of just guess over and over while they tell you you still don’t got it
Not having a full grasp of language but fully understanding CONCEPTS so you say shit like “are we going to the park later?” When you mean TOMORROW but all you can come up with is shit like “the next time we have lunch, not today but after today, after that” like a fucked up game of verbal post-brain injury Pictionary where people won’t let you get mad about it
Just. Mucus. Mucus and chapped skin, all the time, chin and upper lip. And you’re not supposed to lick it cause the spit is the PROBLEM but it’s fucking OBNOXIOUS. “Just keep the skin dry” wow thanks I’ve been aware of this mechsuit for about ten minutes and still haven’t fully mastered not falling into the toilet but yeah I know how to stay on top of that, cool
FALLING INTO THE TOILET
Trying to eat at a table where the surface comes up to your chin but not being able to get high or close enough cause you can’t scoot your chair in and your hands still don’t coordinate good so you end up just spooning tomato sauce onto your lap like an asshole. Like yeah mom my bad, have you considered though that I ALSO don’t want me to be covered in sauce? Cool
Adults being WAY too excited about shit that straight up is not worth the hype
Carpet burn. Constant carpet burn. Crawling, tripping, shuffling between toys on the floor. So much goddamn carpet burn
Knowing exactly what you’re talking about and zero people understanding because they think you’re too dumb for what you’re trying to communicate
Being told to wave at or hug complete strangers. And they always smelled kinda weird but you weren’t supposed to say it
The feeling of meeting an older kid and they act like they’re your manager or something
Encyclopedic knowledge and name of every single person in your grade 1 class, and their interests
Stroller rides. You could zone out at the ground for hours I swear to god
Dropping something while buckled into a carseat or stroller and not being able to get it and just resigning yourself to a life in hell
Dropping something while you’re in a carseat and it goes UNDER YOUR ASS and you can’t fucking GET IT
Other children getting away with just absolute war crimes. Imagine if Sharon showed up to the office potluck and offered you a cookie and after you ate one revealed that she licked it. Imagine if Gord took your stapler and put it down his pants so you couldn’t get it back. Imagine if for no reason at all your coworker told you your dad was stupid and then put your laptop in the garbage
Not remembering what different foods are called and getting pressured into agreeing to food you were NOT FULLY AWARE OF. How the FUCK is a chicken wing different from a chicken strip you ask? “Well, one just has a bone in it!” You fool. You fucking idiot. They might as well be from different animals entirely. But now you gotta eat it cause we don’t waste food (hell)
Yes I’ve talked about this before and yes I’m going to talk about it again because every single person on earth should be fully and viscerally aware that being a kid feels like every description I’ve ever read of recovering from a stroke and we all grow up and forget and talk about childhood like it was magic.
Yeah some of it was fun and all but don’t you remember FALLING DOWN CONSTANTLY? You don’t remember needing help putting a shirt on cause you got your arm stuck and couldn’t get out and panicked so bad you started crying? You DON’T remember being just CONSTANTLY STICKY? Ohhh my good, pissing yourself. Pissing yourself was the worst. Christ alive, and being put in the playpen with a weird kid
Why were you falling into the toilet?
I WAS LIKE TWO FEET TALL
what’s weird about my brain is that i have extremely bad *voluntary* recall but if someone else can prompt me, it turns out that more often than not, the memories are still on file
i would like to also add:
-being a nervous kid means living in silent hill permanently forever. there are monsters. they WILL get you. you can’t predict when. no one thinks this is noteworthy.
-some foods make you sick. somehow this doesn’t mean you can just not eat them. being sick is really inconsiderate of you, too.
-sticky crumbs are the worst.
-kids cooler than you hate you. kids weirder than you are even more unpredictably violent.
-no one understands your creative vision. ‘house’ would be so much better with a dragon. why does this require extensive debate.
-the assholes who never put the play dough caps back on the tubs should get their hands unscrewed.
-that one girl who can’t tell a story but cries if you interrupt whatever boring thing she was failing to say
-boys are allowed to kill any creature they want in front of you specifically to hurt your feelings and you’re the bad guy when you bite them???
-rose petals should taste good but don’t. WHY.
-that one church lady who thinks screaming in a shrill and pathetic way at the rude boys is going to work THIS time. what the fuck is wrong with her
-snail slime washes off but slug slime is forever. i still don’t understand this one.
-if there are millions of grownups in the world why can’t they replace the one currently fucking up being in charge of you and the six boys who like to to torture you. like there’s lots more teachers. can’t you get one who is trained in not letting kids get tortured? no one in the room has been sneaky about the torture thing. come on.
-clay soil should taste good. look at it. deeply unfair that it doesn’t.
-you will never regret putting a small smooth rock in your mouth.
-you chewed too much string and are having an unprecedented bathroom situation.
-why does your friend’s mom smell so bad? bad-smelling moms seems like it should be against the rules.
-why does your other friend’s mom smell so good? can you get your mom to smell like this?
-extremely specific pretend game scenarios you revisit over and over until your friends are exasperated and ten years later you go OH SHIT as you understand some very embarrassing things about yourself.
-rolling down a grassy hill was such a fantastic combination of chaos and freedom and safety. it’s still fun as a grownup but my joints don’t agree.
-the utter devastation of squishing a bug you were trying to save. you go from disney princess to warcrimes mcbloodhands in one irreversible second.
-sometimes the free lollipop is just kinda mid. and they don’t give you another one to make up for it. and you can’t even get THAT mad because mid is still better than nothing.
-mom tells you to clean your toys up but you only have one basket for your stuffed animals, who are currently having a civil war. not good.
-being small enough to climb into a box full of packing peanuts. incredibly good noise. incredibly good texture.
-do you also remember unspooling a tape measure allll the way out, confirming to everyone that the metal end bit COULD rip your eye out, then dropping the tape measure and running out of range before the tape respooled?
-pissing your pants sucks so bad. it stings. and it seems to take so much longer to dry than a water spill does
-you’re still a person, every year of your life. everyone says you’ll be different when you grow up. and every grownup is so strange, so distant, so unsympathetic and illogical and dismissive and alien. you wonder what could ever make you that different. you wonder why no one can explain.
The “extremely specific pretend game scenarios” turned out to be an early sign that one of my BFFs was a lesbian, but since I myself am straight, I didn’t understand why she was so much more into Princess Leia than I was (my bae was Han Solo) until much later. 😂
If I may:
The absolute betrayal of someone trying to put stuff in your stroller. That’s MY space! I’m not trying to wedge MY wallet uncomfortably against YOUR ass.
Having an adult jump to swipe something away from you and thinking, offendedly, “I wasn’t going to eat it! I was just smelling” (detergent, candles, etc)
This scraped knee is actually literally the worst thing that has ever happened to me so can you give me a minute here??? (scraped my knee as an adult two years ago and it sucks worse than you remember)
Mistaking someone else for your parent/neighbor/etc because their legs look the same and that’s just about all you can see from the ground 
Adults having no idea what you know or don’t in general (explaining that you’re not a baby and you know how to tie your shoes at 10 actually). I had a lot of adults assume I didn’t know what figurative language or sarcasm meant because I started using them super early so I ended up patiently explaining to adults that “gone to the dogs” was what’s called a “figure of speech” and what that meant. Made an annoyed and embarrassed teacher’s aide sit through this after she patronizingly sneered “ooooh, did SOMEone see a PUPPY?”
The voice adults use to patronize children that sounded like nails on a chalkboard to me even when I was a children deserves its own bullet point
Why does every adult immediately ask me “how’s school?” Can’t you talk about anything else? Plus maybe I don’t like it that much! I don’t ask you how’s traffic or your jerk coworker. Ask me my favorite animal or something.
Lots of adults have no idea how to talk to kids part II: did anyone else have a fairly obvious physical characteristic that adults loved to comment on? Tall, ginger, freckles, green eyes, etc. Even if it was a compliment, it got super old having your dentist/pediatrician/summer camp counselor/new teacher all say almost the exact same thing.
The helplessness of having to kill an afternoon going places that really have nothing for you (bank, car dealership, etc) because the big people couldn’t find a sitter/didn’t try
Climbing up on the counter to get things from the cabinets because your head barely reaches the counter and there’s no stepping stool
Why do adults think that I’ll automatically like playing with so-and-so’s kid just because we’re the same age? He plays really rough and shoots down all my ideas for games. Can we leave???
Why are there no good snacks in this house? I don’t WANT -5 calorie fat-vaporizing diet popcorn I want REAL FOOD.
Especially around age 12, trying not to mention or allude to the fact that you know what sex is (adult stuff! Forbidden Knowledge) in front of adults … which your best friend‘s parents find hilarious because they definitely know what sex is. See also: knowing swears and censoring yourself in front of the adults so you don’t get in trouble in a weird mirror image version of not swearing in front of the toddler 
The thing I remember the most is being told I was 'dramatic’ about things that would later be classified as Symptoms of Disorders and Diseases that I had my whole life, and some of them were things that the adults in my life knew that I had. Yes, the sun really does hurt my eyes so bad I want to throw up, actually. Yes, it really did take 4 months for the tendons in my foot to heal and no I was not just trying to get out class early. Yes, it really does make me feel very sick when I am forced to eat things with aspartame in it.
This goes hand in hand with pushing for only queer people to play queer roles. Which in theory sounds like a good thing to push for authentic representation when so much of the past stuff was bad.
Except the actual real world outcome has become queer leftists abusively dog piling any actor they deem “inauthentic” leading to actors being forcefully outed against their will before they were ready in an attempt to make the abuse stop. Including children. People have been justifying psychologically tormenting literal children for not publicly disclosing (and being firm and set in) their gender and sexuality in order to work.
In many wants it’s set back queer media and made people just as afraid of queer roles ruining their careers and their lives as they were when bigots were doing it. Which is not an improvement to the situation! It’s really only giving cover to people who want none of this to exist.
We could have just praised the process we wanted to see. Personally I love seeing Jim Parsons take that big normative sitcom money and fucking off to make emotionally powerful queer films with it casting queer actors whenever he can. But praising that will always be more constructive than bullying Kit Connor. If Daniel Craig wants to spend the rest of his career making charming gay detective movies about helping marginalized woman get revenge on abusive rich assholes, then I don’t care what his sexuality is because it’s still pushing queer media far forward.
We could have positively addressed rainbow capitalism by supporting queer-owed business. We could have accepted that mainstreaming queer iconography at Target (much of it designed by queer people who got to pay their bills making it) would make space for people buying that small batch t-shirt at Pride. It’s not like people only ever buy one t-shirt in their life.
A closeted-for-safety trans boy buying his first binder at Target could have created an opening for the next one to be from Shapeshifters. Instead he may never get the chance to know what it would feel feel like to take the first step because the wrong packaging could endanger him and the (fair) price mightbe unaffordable.
We can’t built perils into doing better. We can’t keep calling nigh-impossible next steps"the bare minimum" and tearing into them for every imperfection if we want people to do them at all. At minimum that’s a burnout machine. At worst it gives bigots leverage to maker sure we have nothing. Kindness and enthuses support of what we want to see happen makes way more progress.
Unfortunately many leftists are still so stuck in the purity-sin-redemption mentality, even when they surface-level reject Christianity, that instead of growth and change everything keeps getting treated as blasphemy unless it’s perfect. Even though perfection is impossible. So the whole well is primed to be poisoned by the people who genuinely hate us.
You know, as the concept of “zombifying fungi” becomes more and more popular, I notice it still referred to everywhere as like a “brain parasite.” So I guess a lot of people overlooked or forgot how in 2019 it was discovered that cordyceps and other similar fungal parasites leave the brain and nervous system completely untouched. They only control the muscles. They use chemical signals to make the muscles flex in real time where they want to go :)
It’s funny how many people are replying “but that’s worse!” like you didn’t know that’s exactly why I put a smiley
