Have you seen the new Metazooa browser game? It’s like wordle, but for guessing an animal by drilling down taxonomically. Today’s answer made me think of you!

Yeah, unfortunately I am not a big fan. But I think I am really not the target audience. I would want a game that gives you the option to guess by Latin name, and that would have a much, much more comprehensive list of species that you can guess, rather than a very short predetermined list. Such a thing would be possible to build if you drew on existing databases, but of course, would quickly stop being fun, when >50% of the games are trying to guess some random beetle.

For some reason, the internet thought I needed an ad of the below product.

....thank you, internet?

I really like the idea that one of the weird lurkers of your blog (like me) just hangs around looking for inspiration to write papers about. Like I realize that's not how it probably actually went down, but 2017 to 2022 seems like a pretty reasonable lead time from reading your post to conducting the research to writing and publishing the paper.

In reference to this:

It’s amusing that the original post only got 22 notes (likes), but when I looked at it again it had 19, which I’m choosing to interpret as the authors sheepishly withdrawing their likes in order to preserve their anonymity.

I think they probably just googled the phrase “friends to lovers pathway” before using it as the title of their paper and pulled up my post, or the other alternative being that the post popped onto their timeline when they were in the early stages of manuscript prep, and it was a moment of academic serendipity. I definitely don’t think I inspired the work in any way - just the quote and title. But it’s funny to imagine being studied.

I should say that I don’t necessarily expect permission to be asked if people intend to prosper or advance their careers from my words or art. However, I do appreciate the courtesy of being told that it’s happened. So far I’ve been quoted in a published book, quoted to name an academic paper, a person is actively selling plushies and other merchandise based on a post of mine while claiming that it’s their intellectual property actually, and screenshots of my work are regularly considered hilarious enough to steal but not pay me for. (the cricket post in particular was screencapped, went viral on Twitter some years ago without reference to me, was shared around BBC journalist twitter, and hundreds of people in the media industry said things like ‘lol we should pay this person to write’ …. in the apparent ignorance of the fact that if they had asked I would probably be open to…. Being paid to write……… and all the other times my posts have broken containment to go viral on other platforms for other people, with comments about how I should be commissioned to write a book; obviously that’s a normal part of online journalism and media, and I’m not naive about it, but it’s a bit much to for these people to be enriching their platforms with screencapped content, without the OP’s knowledge let alone consent, and joking about how they should pay for it or would read a whole book about it, when they’re the only people who could actually do something about it in the nightmare media landscape.) And nobody told me about any of these examples, I always find out by trying to retrieve links to my own stuff, or by friends telling me that someone else has gone so viral with my recognisable work that it got around to them.

Anyway if you do use my stuff in your own stuff, do let me know! I’m not here to prosper, but I am here to connect, and I’m quite willing to link your paper (and write a lay summary for free), buy your book or art, make your acquaintance, promote your work, or just add it to my portfolio - because if I ever DID want to prosper from my work here, which I wouldn’t usually consider except that it is evidently peer-reviewed good-enough-for-others-to-prosper-from, all of that would be valuable and helpful for me to know.

Your achievement!

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Very accomplished scambuster!~

Frank, can you make me some beautiful art?

The way I think of it is that one can choose to be beautiful or ugly -- I don't know that I'd characterize myself as beautiful, but I wouldn't have characterized myself as ugly, either. So it's not about being forced to think of oneself that way, it's more that being beautiful is a part of how we think of ourselves. Which I don't necessarily endorse, but I don't think it's a bad thing to have this aspect of our thought patterns. (It's kind of an inchoate and nonspecific "beauty is good" attitude, because beauty is so wide-ranging and so diverse, but I do endorse many of the things considered beautiful, even as I think many people have not understood the point of appreciating these things, nor why these feelings are sometimes painful.)

Autumn asks: maple, fireside

ooh thank you elodie! this made my day.

maple - is there a hobby / skill that you’ve always wanted to try but never did?

Honestly, there aren't many things i've wanted to learn to do that i have never tried my hand at. Definitely not to say that i ever get very good before i stop, just that when get a wild hare to try something, i usually try it. My apartment is full of the remnants of abandoned or infrequently indulged pursuits: dance shoes, sheet music, italian to english dictionaries, watercolors/acrylic paints/colored pencils/bookbinding supplies, etc. etc. etc. It's a little bit embarrassing to be so flighty, but i've mostly made peace with it. And i try to give away my unused craft supplies in the hopes of infecting others whenever i can.

i guess if i had to pick one thing i haven't tried yet, it's probably writing fic. i don't expect that will ever happen because i know i don't have the talent for it, but i really do wish i did.

fireside - if you had your dream wardrobe, what would it look like?

oh god this is something that i think about all the time, but now that i am faced with this question i'm finding it really hard. but probably my dream wardrobe would be about five or more rotating wardrobes depending on mood, including "chrissie hynde on holiday", "fanciest witch in the neighborhood", "italian widow runs errands", and "intensely whimsical beat girl". i contain multitudes.

scientists on tumblr: all humanities people and art history people and historians are just stupid conservatives who think they're better than anyone else and hate sharing knowledge and they aren't nearly as smart or empathetic as good, enlightened STEM scientists, who magnanimously share all their research and would never condescend to anybody. Not even the stupid dumb idiot baby humanities people who just don't get how much better science is than the humanities

sheep are just covered in potential crafting. you can shave the craft materials right off them

(Context, credit, and source below poll.)

Today's poll is based on this thread with notable principles @penny-anna, @elodieunderglass, @elanorpam, and @earhartsease. All of the options above are paraphrased from their original answers.

The full original question:

Can I please ask for your top five theories on why the Ringwraiths become so much more powerful over the course of the LotR trilogy? By the end of the books a single Ringwraith holds an army of 6000 men in paralysing dread from a height of a mile, they're dismaying hosts of men, etc. And in the beginning, they're easily defeated by "jumping behind a tree," "pretending to be in a different room," "getting on a little boat," "man with a stick on fire," etc.

Joann going the extra mile this year.

@elodieunderglass horrible thing with... foot?

Omg y'all

@elodieunderglass in particular needs to see these, bc of the emojis, but I am gonna start using these is2g

These and more, collected here:

[edit]got an answer! they're sandhill cranes vry cleverly tryna catch a thermal :]

i couldn't get an answer on mastodon-

anyone know what kinds of birds thesse are based on their call?

seem to be migratory

also anyone know why they seemed so confused about hwere they should be going?

eventually they did move along, but i didn't see which way as i had gone back inside by the time they left.

recorded in grays harbor county, washington

uhh... bird ppl...

@elodieunderglass maybe?

@elodieunderglass I think you would appreciate this 3D printing project I found for adding legs to an IKEA Lämplig. More images and source files are on Thingiverse, so if you have access to a 3D printer you can make them yourself!

On the topic of the monarchist animals I'm just really curious. What makes the winnie pooh real animals bourgeois? It's not like they own much more than the others. Do they just have bourgeois energy?

(In reference to my addition on this post; https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/748488762087047168/hold-on-lets-do-this-properly-paddington)

In the post I state that none of the stuffed/toy animals in the Winnie the Pooh series are monarchists, but that the real animals are bourgeoisie. Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but it’s still politically interesting to me because nobody ever reads Winnie the Pooh as an actual book. They just draw depressed Disney Eeyore and think they’ve done something.

Owl and Rabbit are real wild animals that live in the Hundred Acre Wood. The other characters in the story are Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals.

The “real” animals (reasonably) consider themselves to be separate from the stuffed ones, but where it becomes unreasonable is how they assume superiority and how they use this to exert authority.

(A charming response about how the stuffed animals view this: Piglet points out that Rabbit is both clever and Has Brain, and Pooh replies that this is why Rabbit “doesn’t understand anything.”)

Owl is characterised by being a bit of a fraud. The stuffed animals respect him for his presumed education and literacy, but even a preschooler understands that Owl can’t actually read. he actively deceives the other characters in order to maintain a higher social status over them. (Actually, Rabbit’s the most literate character in the Wood.) Owl gains relatively little advantage from this status, apart from his belief that he is superior and the pleasure in everyone deferring to him. A notable theme throughout the written series involves characters approaching Owl for advice, based on his self-made reputation of being wise and thoughtful, and him giving explicitly bad advice, rather than admit that he has no idea how to help. Also, they forcibly give him someone else’s house, in such a way that the actual possessor of the house (Piglet) feels he can’t speak up. Pooh immediately offers to Piglet that he move in with him, which even as a kid felt like an incredibly unsatisfactory solution to having the shyest character’s actual house given away to the character who casually lies about everything just to feel superior.

Rabbit is a grown-ass adult real wild animal. He is the social leader of a massively large family and an extended group of hangers-on (he has fifteen or seventeen close relatives, and the extended Friends-and-Relations are a sort of army); he is the only actually literate person in the narrative, so it is understandable that he feels this (although he also believes Owl can read.) literacy and Brain are considered very important in the Wood.

Rabbit believes in his own superiority and believes himself to serve as a sort of cadet to Christopher Robin. In the series Christopher Robin is the ultimate judge, and a kindly ruler; Rabbit positions himself constantly at Christopher Robin’s right hand and wants to be his enforcer. Christopher Robin, who is five and a fairly distracted God, does not really enforce anything. This does not stop Rabbit from trying to organise the entire Wood. It’s frequently mentioned that Rabbit wants to feel important, he wants to be the Boss. A beautiful, beautiful commentary on his character is when he wakes up feeling “important, as if everything depending on him… it was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody said “Yes Rabbit” and “No Rabbit” and waited until he had told them.” Fantastic!

However, we can see where this leads him. In the first book Rabbit is shown being hostile and actively anti-foreign in his approach to other people. When kanga and roo arrive in the forest - sanctioned by Christopher Robin who has received new toys - Rabbit instantly says they have to get rid of them. Like there is NO friendship in Rabbit’s heart here. There is no “god has placed a new friend in the wood so we have to get on with it.”

Rabbit’s anti-immigration stances are funny, and in-character, and shown by the narrative to be wrong and unfair. But they’re pretty unleashed.

His plan is to kidnap the baby and hold it hostage until the mother agrees to “leave the forest forever and never return.”

This is not a normal response to a new character. It is in fact fucking unhinged. Coming from the most normal-adult real animal in the story, it comes out of nowhere. “We have to eliminate them instantly. Take the baby hostage, blackmail the parent and deport them” Rabbit these are war crimes.

Anyway it’s all very heartwarming as Rabbit learns that he likes Baby Roo. (Their relationship grows warmer as Baby Roo says “yes rabbit” and “no rabbit” better than anyone else.) We never really learn why Rabbit is so violently anti-immigration that he instantly jumps to doing crimes, but it’s possible that he doesn’t like the threat to the status quo. Baby Roo, by deferring politely, thus turns out to be a valuable social inferior for Rabbit’s power base.

But in the next book we also get another new character introduction: Tigger. rabbit does not like tigger. In fact, he stops visiting Roo because Tigger lives with them. Rabbit, frustrated by Tigger’s bounciness, also decides to deliberately trick and bully Tigger in order to make him “small and sorry.” The fact that this comically backfires on Rabbit is part of the Pooh-lore storytelling style, of course, but it’s still something obvious even to the preschool audience - that isn’t how you treat your friends.

In conclusion, due to their hoarding of (social) capital and behaviors that prop up an unjustly unequal social system, I think the real animals in Winnie the Pooh are a bit bougie.

When you open fb for the first time in 3 months and are immediately accosted by this nightmare (but you're secretly delighted because you can send something to your tumblr fav @elodieunderglass )

Elder Tubby, inspired by @elodieunderglass's legendary post. Juvenile tubbies and adult human included for scale.