it doesn’t really matter to me if it’s rooted in cultural exchange hundreds of years ago or if two groups of people made the same food independently in two different distant geographic areas, i love people and food and how food connects us in unexpected ways

I haven't been able to stop thinking about this. There's so much going on here. I genuinely love the conception of gender as mystic autodeism. Gender as divine microcosm. Gender as Great Work. It's gnostic, it's alchemical, it's got notes of bacchanalian worship of the body and the inherent magic of self-discovery. This but unironically.

Shoutout to transphobes for thinking gender is this fucking badass

god this is a mood. in the past few years, i’ve had to move out of my apartment very suddenly 3 times. i haven’t lived in one place for more than a year or so since i was 18. it’s gotten to the point where i just don’t even bother unpacking everything. i still have stuff in my car from my move last march. i don’t put much stuff on the walls, i don’t invest in “staple pieces” (mostly bc i can’t afford them), bc my living situation is so consistently tenuous that it’s just not worth it. and ppl rly do not get that.

Beyond parody that conservatives see a study saying "perhaps we should provide animal companionship to college kids?" and immediately respond with "NOOO PUNISH THEM! HURT THEM! SLAP THEM!"

Their whole ideology is built on normalized cruelty to the point that having cats give college kids some semblance of companionship and affection seems like a radical act that they cannot abide. Like, jesus christ. If you saw a kid asking their parents for a pet and the parents said they should get a slap instead so they don't turn into a "beta", you would not think that's okay or normal. You'd probably recognize pretty quickly that that is abuse and you'd probably call CPS on those parents if you could.

The "I want to hurt people, especially vulnerable people" side of the political spectrum

Republicans claim to be tough on crime. But Republicans also balked at a study that showed that giving prisoners cats greatly reduced recidivism.

Republicans whined that prisoners were being rewarded, while ignoring that many of these men were given companionship and responsibility. According to one man in the study (and I'm paraphrasing), "I can't do anything bad to increase my sentence. I need to keep my nose clean so I can provide my cat with a good home. If I get arrested, they'll take him away and he not end up with a family who loves him." Prisoners were avoiding crimes for their cats, but Republicans considered cats a reward instead.

They want people to suffer.

The cruelty is the point.

The cruelty is the point.

It's always the point for them.

Have any of you heard of the Harvard MIT Pigeon Prank?

An MIT student dressed in a black-and-white striped shirt went to the Harvard football stadium every day of one summer, blowing a whistle while scattering breadcrumbs or birdseed to coax neighborhood pigeons down onto the field. At Harvard’s opening game of the season, upon the referee’s first whistle, it’s said that hundreds of pigeons descended onto the field, causing a half-hour delay. 

Ah yes, classical conditioning put to good use

because this and also because Jurassic Park–related advances in paleontology, et cetera, anyone who devalues the arts in favor of the sciences demonstrably has the wrong end of the stick

Science and Arts are not opposites, they are not rivals, they are the neglected siblings of the egotistical and over-indulged Sports and his best friend Money.

We, as scientist and artists, must unite. Science is an art, and art is a science. We hold hands and we make the world a much better place!

When Interstellar came out, every single undergrad at my university who was doing work for a LIGO project, half a dozen assorted physics majors, and half a dozen engineers all went out to watch it with the explicit intent to talk about the physics of it. It was at an IMAX and we were basically the only people there, and we asked the few who were if they’d be okay hearing us talk during the movie. (They said yes, I think they were interested in what we’d say.)

We also happened to love the movie along the way, but we got deep into the physics of it. Like, deep deep. General relativity shit, the math of causality violation, so much deep niche physics. And then one of the engineers casually commented, “Hmm. None of those are the big problem though.”

All us general relativity people: “Oh?”

Engineer: “Yeah. The real problem was that they needed the really big rocket to get off of earth but only those tiny itty bitty landers to clear a gravitational field so intense it causes massive time dilation.”

All us general relativity people: suddenly and intensely coming to terms with how obvious that was and how badly we missed it

Engineer: “Physicists.” (affectionately derogatory)