Similarly, it was also really common for free Black people to be kidnapped in northern states and enslaved.

Solomon Northrop, if you have seen Twelve Years a Slave (and everyone needs to, we need to make it part of every high schoolAmerican history class), might have been captured again. Wiki gives the only reason that this is unlikely that he was probably too old at that point to be worth it. His kidnappers faced no consequences.

I wonder how many people saved up to buy their freedom “legally” and were taken back. There are so many stories we’ll never know.

I married a trust fund kid and then got saddled with his credit card debt after he dumped me.

Got to go on nice expensive vacations, ate ridiculous food on the top of Harrod’s in London. Now I’m making pillows out of old t-shirts because I don’t have a mattress.

The big lesson I learned is that it actually does not matter how smart, talented or hard working you are. It’s about having rich family.

Dune 2 walked so that StarCraft could run.

Mental health in America is this fucked up mess of paternalistic bullshit. The nature of struggling with mental illness somehow invalidates your ability to advocate for yourself. You are “crazy” so your suggestions on what you think effective care might be do not count. Mental health facilities are allowed to lie to you, too - you are treated like a child.

I would love something like what 988 promises. I have PTSD. I have moments where I have flashbacks, I have nights where I cannot sleep because my body floods me with the panic chemicals. I would love the ability to call a number late at night and have someone listen to me, to maybe gently work my way through visualization exercises, to help calm me down. I’m not so mentally ill that I am a child that can not be trusted to know what I need, I am a person who has suffered severe abuse and has a brain that sometimes sees a certain street sign or smells something and then I am a 14 year old trying to get someone to listen to me. I need help regulating sometimes - I don’t get why this is an impossible ask.

The closest thing I have gotten to that was a random person on Washington’s child protective services line, oddly enough.

It would have been nice to have that comfort last night. Instead I drank.

NASA should never have started subcontracting/giving work to private companies like SpaceX and Boeing. NASA’s talent takes pride in their work and does things well. Private companies are incentivized to cut corners, which you cannot do with spaceflight.

It’s been a problem for a while. Those o-rings that failed with the Challenger? Made by a company run by the FLDS child rape cult.

It is most definitely unpopular in real life. I don’t think most people who haven’t interacted with it have any idea how terrible it is.

As I call different mental health agencies to get the sexual abuse of children at a “hospital” investigated, I keep hearing “if you are in crisis, please hang up and dial 988 to speak to a trained crisis counselor” on the voicemail boxes. Funny, I’m trying to get the place that gave me this trauma shut down. What would probably help me never go into crisis again would be someone closing the child torture facility - that would very much soothe my brain.

The ID badge I had when I worked at a middle school had it. There are billboards and posters everywhere advertising it.

“At least institutionalization keeps people alive!” 🤡

People should also in general stop with the “You should speak to a therapist” shit - guess what, therapy ain’t free! It’s never helpful advice.

I know about the types of communities you are talking about, but there is a difference between people who purposefully put animals together to cause them to kill each other for entertainment and taking striking pictures of natural predation.

I just watched a video of an Australian water rat eat the heart of a toad, as an adaptation to prey on invasive species with mostly toxic organs. That is pretty cool, and the shock value helps with the educational aspect.

There’s a difference between that and “let’s put a snake and a spider in the same confined environment to watch them kill each other for fun.” Or god, the monkey torture people.

Animals eat each other, and learning about them will require confronting this fact. I think this photo is educational, not lurid. Most people know very little about spiders, and I hope that my posting this picture got people to think more about the natural world. It is shocking, it does provoke a visceral reaction, but it also prompts questions. I am probably going to use it as a phenomenon to explore the next time I work with a student on biology.

Saw that shit in theatres. As well as Baby Geniuses 2 and Meet the Spartans.

Spiders routinely hold onto 100x more than their weight. Are you basing any of this on a knowledge of invertebrate biology? Ants can do similarly impressive feats - that’s something I will stand firmly by, as someone who’s name is in papers in ant research.

My actual degree is in physics too, and I’ll say that often things that seem counterintuitive are entirely supported by physics ;)

Yeah, but how survivable is making indie games? Unless you make it big, you aren’t paying rent that way.

Here’s one eating a frog.

What specifically about the physics of the situation is making you suspicious? I’ve worked in an invertebrate lab, admittedly primarily with ants, and nothing about this raises alarm bells.

Yeah. My spider book was given to a middle schooler more than a year ago :(

The sizes make sense - the turtle is on the smaller end and likely a juvenile, but both seem appropriately sized - the spiders can grow that big, especially if female.

I found this in a group for spider enthusiasts - these are the kinds of geeks that will look at a spider leg and get it down to class. AI is not good at generating invertebrate species specific traits yet. While this is pretty spectacular - not a daily event - these are both species that can be found in the same area, and these spiders will attack vertebrate pray.

This is not AI.

Yeah, many larger spider species will go after smaller vertebrates. Goliath bird eaters (South American) will go after snakes much larger than they are - despite the name, they aren’t inclined towards birds though.

Calories are calories.

Nope, southern US. Found in a local group.

I missed the “for.” There’s a serious lack of mpreg daddy dom fiction.

Like how the 2018-2021 Honda Civics shipped with non functioning AC because they used the wrong type of refrigerant? They’ve also trained dealerships to deny the warranty!

It’s been in the 90s all week - I risk heat stroke in my fucking car going to work!

A goal of mine is to ensure that my library is preserved in some fashion after I die, because I do believe it would be valuable. Many of the books I have are out of print, rare, and obscure. I have a fantasy of a library room set aside with my collection - a couple of comfortable chairs in a little nook.

Especially with the way that AI has polluted information sources online, I think having a collection of the printed word which is guaranteed to be vetted and written by humans would be useful. The religious material I think also could be helpful in preserving history - eg, I have versions of Mormon books which are likely not consistent with current doctrine.

My apartment is 60% books. I don’t have enough bookshelves, I have most loaded to the point where they are bending and there are piles of books stacked on top. Stacks and stacks and stacks.

I think my library is almost an art project at this point. I thrift a lot, check out library discard sales and have a bunch of things I bought when you could get books on Amazon for a penny + shipping. I often pick up 5-10 a week, because at the thrift shop that’s maybe $10 at most. (Goodwill is getting precious, but the really ratty ones are often prime spots.)

Very little fiction. Mostly textbooks and history and language and arcane computer things and strange religious literature and philosophy and paranormal arcana. Obscure things - I mostly collect things that I wouldn’t normally be able to find in a library.

My ex hated my books and wanted to work out a deal where I’d have to give up two for every one I took in. Now I am free to live in a pile of stacks. I don’t care if it looks “messy” or “cluttered.” It represents my mind.