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SECONDARY BURIAL IN THE RAT’S PRIESTHOOD: WHY WAS CHUCKY CHEESE’S EFFIGY DESTROYED?
Cheese temples are an abundant, frequently excavated type of Neolithic archaeological site. The rat’s priesthood was clearly far reaching and embraced by millions of devotees (as a protector of children, gamblers, and harvests), and yet effigies of the rat himself are surprisingly rare— whether in the form of priest’s anthropomorphic costumes, or automatons. Recent findings, such as the unrecognizably dismantled automaton in Fig. 1, and a rare depiction of the destruction process in Fig. 2, have indicated that Chucky Cheese’s effigies were almost universally deliberately destroyed.
Fig. 1
While human remains and burial grounds are not typically discovered within or nearby excavated cheese temples, the ritualized destruction of Chucky Cheese’s effigies closely mirrors burial practices in which the skull is broken.
Fig. 2
In the authors’ opinions, this may indicate that the rat’s priesthood symbolically continued to bury their god as they once buried men.
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during a trip to Arizona last year I encountered an intriguing mystery...
On the left is a big, toxic darkling beetle in the genus Eleodes. Abundant in the southwest, their quinone-based defensive secretions protect them from most predators (just smelling one made my sinuses burn painfully).
On the right is some sort of large animal droppings containing many Eleodes shells. I couldn’t imagine what sort of animal would eat them and produce such large droppings. I theorized that it was a pellet coughed up by a large bird like an owl or roadrunner, but couldn’t find any info to suggest anything like that is resistant to the beetle toxins.
I still had no idea what was behind these droppings for many months after the trip, but I finally realized the culprit, a beast that I had been lucky enough to encounter while I was there:
It was the the Sonoran desert toad, Incilius alvarius. One of the world’s largest toads, it is apparently immune to the secretions of the darkling beetles in its desert habitat and eats them as a large portion of its diet.
It’s also the toad species known for the powerful psychedelic properties of its skin secretions (though contrary to popular belief, licking the toad is ineffective and extremely dangerous. Consuming the raw toad toxin can easily kill you.) Furthermore, there’s anecdotal evidence that the toads actually require darkling beetles to manufacture their toxin, which makes sense as smaller american toads have been reported to require similarly toxic carabid beetles for the same reason.
TL;DR I found some weird poop with beetles in it and was too dumb to realize until later that it came from the giant drug toads
The holy grail of searching through academic literature is coming across a string of publications that are like:
Here’s An Idea. Smith et al. 2016
Terrible Idea; a comment on Smith et al. 2016. Johnson 2016.
You’re Wrong Too; a response to Johnson 2016. Nelson 2016.
Guys Just Stop Fighting, None Of Us Know What’s Going On; a Review of the Current Literature. McBrien 2017.
Manifesto of the Committee for the Sick and Useless
Those of us with disabilities form an interest group with an immense number of seemingly abled people. Everyone whose culture, beliefs, age, personality, sexuality, language, immigration status or other inclination makes them less useful to society belongs with disabled people in the fight to exist without justification.
The Committee for the Sick and Useless believe it is the innate and inalienable right of all people to:
Do Nothing
Help No One
Feel Awful
And above all else
Be Useless
In this age of increasing productivity and accomplishment, we too often sacrifice the most sacred right of all living things: to simply exist, asking much and contributing nothing. We sacrifice this right not just for ourselves as individuals but for all life on Earth present and future.
Our existence has been made conditional on the work we are expected to do, whether that work is employment, education, or caring for the home. Even plants and animals must now earn their right to exist by producing food, providing beauty, cleaning our air, warming our hearts. The ugly, unpleasant and useless are abandoned.
We, the committee, do not consider ourselves at odds with health, joy and usefulness. Rather we are united with all good and joyful people in our fight against the demand for productivity. Our enemies are those who demand that the land produce wealth, that the workers produce profit, that the sick produce medical certificates, that children grow up and the elderly make themselves scarce.
The right to exist is the foundation of all human rights and duties; it cannot be made conditional, lest all rights be made conditional. We support the right of everyone, everywhere, to live.
In this admittedly revolutionary goal, we have many allies. These include, but are not limited to: queers, cripples, drug users, the unemployed, the mentally ill, the anti-colonial, the incomprehensible, the celibate, the ugly, mutes, mystics, pessimists, mosquitoes, cats, children, teenagers, the elderly, speakers of suppressed languages, and people without a driving license.
This post is from Chapter 31 of Redefining Disability, with very minor edits. If you would like a copy of this or any other chapters from the journal, I will be happy to email them to you.
Wrote up my current project, group-to-group communication, called Space Tube. Can try it out by joining the demo discord servers
if you manage to run across this line without falling into any of the adjacent states, they let you pee in the white house whenever you want
an offsite poll but: have you used the Archive for fic research? you should let them know, so they can point to expanded types of use cases and get more funding!
A fact is a small piece of novel information given for entertainment. While facts have probably existed as long as knowledge, they rose to prominence during the Great Depression, owing largely to their low cost compared to other forms of entertainment, such as travel.
Facts originally were, and largely still are, a colloquial form of entertainment, shared between friends and colleagues, but there does exist a fact industry. Notably, Ripley, originally known for oddities, moved into the fact business in the 1940s, and is still a leading player in the field, with fact museums around the world as well as fact publications, and brands like Guinness and Scholastic have created their own niches. Facts have also been turned into multiple successful board games.
for further information on pocket soup
I just discovered foodtimeline.org, which is exactly what it sounds like: centuries worth of information about FOOD. If you are writing something historical and you want a starting point for figuring out what people should be eating, this might be a good place?
My favorite thing about getting a post massively reblogged is seeing how many people have negative tagging systems. I don't mean "negative" in the sense of "bad", I just mean that instead of tagging something as X, they tag it as not-Y.
Like you'll make a post about how spoons were invented in the 1720s in an ill-fated attempt to settle an argument between four of the five popes, and it gets reblogged and someone tags it "#not naruto".
And it's like, you're not wrong. That post has nothing to do with Naruto! But you can't help but feel proud your post got selected as one of the few non-naruto posts worthy of being included on their clearly heavily Naruto-themed blog.
Though not the purpose of this blog, certain experiences on this website have resulted in a substantial portion of my followerbase with a general interest in hominid body language and a particular focus on the contrasting meaning of smiles between the various hominini both inter- and intraspecific; this one’s for y’all
Because AI image generators create new images by collecting data from old ones, their understanding of what an image is supposed to look like will logically be shaped by those who most frequently upload images online. On a global scale, this means biases towards the wealthy, "western," online, urban/suburban, etc.
"...seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, 'cheese' smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had...
In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions. As we increasingly seek our own likenesses in AI reflections, what does it mean for the distinct cultural histories and meanings of facial expressions to become mischaracterized, homogenized, subsumed under the dominant dataset? In the AI-generated visual future, will we know that Native Americans didn’t smile for photos like WW2 U.S. Navy Officers?"
TUMBLR I HAVE JUST LEARNED SOMETHING AMAZING AND MUST INFLICT IT IN YOU
There is a Japanese water beetle called Regimbartia attenuata. It has developed an incredible adaptation to be being eaten by pond frogs.
It walks out the frog’s butt.
The beetles get swallowed whole, and usually that would be considered Kinda Fatal, but this particular species is just like “DID YOU THINK A FROG’S DIGESTIVE TRACT COULD HOLD ME?!” and proceeds to walk through the frog’s intestines, then presumably stimulate the frog’s hind gut with its legs so that the frog poops. The beetles emerge headfirst and 93% of them survive and live on for weeks afterward.
Apparently some beetles can do this obstacle course in six minutes! (Usually takes a few hours, but some people will speedrun ANYTHING.)
Isn’t that COOL?!
whenever i see a noir detective in the rain i’m like yeah man… that’s exactly where you’re supposed to be
The following text, apparently one of a long series by the same author, was recovered off the coast of Cuba by cephalopod research group divers in local year 120 and was one of the earliest documents to be translated following the excavation of cetacean archives at the Rashid Site in 146 that allowed us to decrypt cephalopod. It remains essential to our understanding of cephalopod infrastructure capabilities and policy.
The chief monobrain is at it again. Evol Nrol has introduced his next grand new vision for the sea and beyond, to great acclaim from his various suckers and the media outlets he just happens to own. 55% of the planet just isn't enough apparently, our lords and masters are still looking for more untouched wilderness to pointlessly ruin. One begins to suspect that they just want somewhere to run away to, and one begins to wonder why. Just like last time, he wants to colonize Lake Baikal, because bad ideas never die, they just camouflage. In case it's not obvious, this will never work, and if it did it would still not work. Let's just glide over the 10 most obvious reasons this is impossible and insane from last time.
1) Lake Baikal is very far away. 2) Lake Baikal is very cold. 3) The water in Lake Baikal is basically poison. Life inside seapods would always be one breach away from rapid deionisation. 4) Lake Baikal either has scientific value, or it has octopus habitation. It can't have both. 5) Lake Baikal has nothing we need. As far as we know the thermal vents in Baikal have nothing we can't get much easier from existing vents, or even by creating synthentic vents. 6) Lake Baikal has too much water to salinify. This is the one they really haven't thought about. We don't have the minerals we would need. The quantity of sodium chloride alone would make a pile the size of Moai mount. Our best way to get the minerals is by evaporating the sea and moving the evaporate over, but at that point we could just as well build the evaporation pool, not build the levees, and just live there. On that note: 7) Clearly nobody's calculated the logistics on moving that much mineral. Have you tried lugging a mountain over land? 10) Lake Baikal is constantly being drained by a river and replenished by other rivers. It takes around 512 years to replace the entire volume of the lake. That's a long time, even by lake standards, at least. Still, anything you put in the water will dissipate at a rate of 1/512 per year at least. And at the scale of the initial investment, the maintenance cost in minerals alone would be unaffordable.
If you really wanted to go with the monumentally stupid idea of filling a lake with minerals to make more sea, there's a much better choice, of course. Lake Tanganyika is more accessible, warmer, smaller, still has thermal vents, and drains slower. In every respect it would be an easier choice, though still entirely impossible of course. But Evol couldn't go with that, because he's tying his consultants in knots attempting to salvage his whole "dredge the Yenisey 1km deep" idea from three years ago, which wouldn't have made sense with Tanganyika, and he's too arrogant to pick a new target to go with the new manateeshit plan. As always, impossible plans like these just vent ink over the infrastructure and housing investment we desperately need and already know how to do.