Plains

Artist: Andreas Rocha TCG Player Link Scryfall Link EDHREC Link

trains are extremely sexual actually, have you seen couplers????

thats nothing, check out this scharfenberg coupler

First they fuck, then they kiss

Dan Hays is a British artist known for painting landscapes that mimic low-resolution digital images, often working pixel by pixel. Colorado Snow Effect 4 is part of his ongoing exploration of how technology influences perception. The painting features a snowy landscape rendered in a way that resembles pixelated digital imagery, blurring the line between traditional and digital art.

I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.

I got an A on that paper.

Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.

This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.

You will never learn to bullshit.

And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.

For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.

I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.

Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.

I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.

Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.

For my senior year of AP English, I was assigned reading over Easter break. We were instructed to read The Old Man And The Sea, and save the rest of the short stories in the book for the first week back.

Unfortunately, what I heard was "read everything BUT The Old Man And The Sea."

Double unfortunately: the first day back was a test, on The Old Man And The Sea. Which I had read exactly zero words of. It was, notably, a short essay test. It wasn't multiple choice or fill in the blank. It was designed to require deliberate answers from scratch, entirely out of your own head, with nothing to go on BUT what was in your head.

And in the course of about 45 minutes, I was able to use the questions of the test itself to piece together a vague enough sense of how the story went to bullshit my way through other questions. I gave wide, thematic answers that were extremely light on details, since I did not know any of them, and did not even know this test would be happening until it was in front of me. An essay test for an AP-level English class.

I had a starting point of zero information, and an essay test about the thing I was supposed to have read.

I bullshitted my way to a B+ on it.

On a test I should have gotten a ZERO on.

It's been 16 years since I took that test.

I couldn't tell you a damn thing about The Old Man And The Sea.

But you better fucking believe I still know how to bullshit, and when someone is trying to bullshit me.

The power and utility of knowing how bullshit works CANNOT be overstated. It is one of the most important skills you can ever have.

My favorite part of this is the little “Yet I’m still failing” at the bottom of the screencap. It’s not yet occurred to you to change something you’re doing? Maybe try not using ChatGPT?

john rocco

Iridescent Green Mexican Obsidian Arrowhead

some of my favorite woven tapestries, by Cecilia Blomberg:

Point Defiance Steps

Mates

Rising Tides

Vashon Steps

WOVEN TAPESTRIES???

WOVEN TAPESTRIES?!?

WOVEN TAPESTRIES!!!

This is the kind of messaging you really want to be seeing from the global hegemon

today someone asked me what my favorite even-toed ungulate is… god, who could decide?

this was ignorant of me to post. of course its the muskox

and here comes my favorite boy…

okay. some of you must surely be getting tired of seeing me say this but i literally cannot help myself- THAT IS AN ICE AGE GOAT. THAT CAN GET TO BE 800lbs BIG.

we called them musk-ox because we thought they must be some kind of cow thing, but they are actually a goat thing; this is to a normal wild goat what a woolly mammoth is to a normal elephant, only these things survived.

and i absolutely cannot help myself because of the tizzy my brain goes into over the twin facts of

1: ice-age megafauna that is still alive! and

2: EIGHT HUNDRED POUND GOAT

you can see the goatishness a little more in their babies

i just, i am crazy over the fact that these guys are still alive on our planet

A quick, scribbly little comic about snakes.

bonus:

This also means they can spy on straight people just to make sure they aren't lgbt. This is not just against gay people, it's a cover up for violating human rights. It's never just against one group of people, it's always about controlling the masses while blaming a group of people so nobody looks at the root of the problem.

Mainland She Oak Skink (Cyclodomorphus michaeli), mother with pups, family Scincidae, eastern Australia

photograph by Ken Griffiths

dandelions deserve more respect than they get

you say “weeds” I say “widespread non-native edible plant and early-blooming pollinator resource that is not considered invasive because it behaves politely and does not cause deleterious ecological consequences”

The dandelions aren’t gonna fuck you bro

they have and they will

Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?

The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.

conservatives have fully lost the plot its actually extremely normal for little kids to pretend to be animals. it's a pretty essential part of their mental development and helps them practice creative skills actually. if a kid comes up to you and says "I'm a kitty cat" you don't need to reality check them. it's fine actually. the correct response is to say "are you? have you caught any mice today? what kind of kitty cat? do you have orange stripes? should we have tuna salad for lunch?"

I mean it's entirely possible that they'll take one bite of your tuna salad and say "hmm. I don't want to be a cat anymore i think"