19th century autists codified vast systems of literature and culture in order to invent this thing called “nations” that we could then use to kill each other.
Fred T. Jane started publishing Jane’s Fighting Ships, a compendium of data on every warship in the world, in 1898 as a wargaming supplement.
The difference between someone who discourses on tumblr about shipping all day and someone in 1785 who sat in a pub pumping out asinine pamphlets about the hill they’re going to die on in a parasocial fight they’ve started with Burke or Rousseau or whoever over the dumbest drama you’ve ever heard is absolutely miniscule. nonexistent even. brothers in arms seperated by centuries
Vavilovian mimicry is a good illustration of unintentional selection by humans. Although the human selective agents might be conscious of their impact on the local weed gene pool,
such effects go against the goals of those growing crops. Weeders do
not want to select for weeds that are increasingly similar to the
cultivated plant, yet the only other option is to let the weeds grow and
compete with crops for sunlight and nutrients. Similar situations include antibiotic resistance and, also in agricultural crops, herbicide resistance.
Having acquired many desirable qualities by being subjected to similar
selective pressures, Vavilovian mimics may eventually be domesticated
themselves. Vavilov called these weeds-become-crops secondary crops.
…
Another example is rye (Secale cereale), a grass which is derived from wild rye (Secale montanum), a widely distributed Mediterranean species. Rye was originally just a weed growing with wheat and barley,
but came under similar selective pressures to the crops. Like wheat, it
came to have larger seeds and more rigid spindles to which the seeds
are attached. However, wheat is an annual plant, while wild rye is a perennial.
At the end of each growing season wheat produces seeds, while wild rye
does not and is thus destroyed as the post-harvest soil is tilled. However, there are occasional mutants that do set seed. These have been protected from destruction, and rye has thus evolved to become an annual plant.[5]
Rye is a hardier plant than wheat, surviving in harsher conditions. Having become preadapted
as a crop through wheat mimicry, rye was then positioned to become a
cultivated plant in areas where soil and climatic conditions favored its
production, such as mountainous terrain.[4]
This fate is shared by oats (Avena sativa and Avena byzantina), which also tolerate poorer conditions, and like rye, grow as a weed alongside wheat and barley. Derived from a wild species (Avena sterilis),
it has thus come to be a crop in its own right. Once again paralleling
wheat, rye and other cereals, oats have developed tough spindles which
prevent seeds from easily dropping off, and other characteristics which
also help in natural dispersal have become vestigial, including the awns which allow them to self bury.[4]
Huh, I never considered that. Evolution wins yet again
This is what the porn bots are currently in the process of doing
Kind of funny how blog feminism dropped the 90s “funfeminism” thing and got like 6 years before running straight into the “fine then, we’ll be women better ourselves” thing the Second Wave warned about (complete with a side of the same “Hey, I’m a [SFF fandom] woman, and I like transgression and sexual violation in my fiction” stuff, too!)
Making a political cartoon – Donald Trump standing paused before a curtain with two openings, each with a framed portrait besides, one of Grover Cleveland and one of Adlai Stevenson – to send back to the 2006 APUSH DBQ, as part of a warlock’s curse
“Please explain this political cartoon.” —Me
They both fought presidential rematch elections: Stevenson lost to Eisenhower in 1952 and then again in 1956; Grover Cleveland as president lost re-election to Benjamin Harrison in 1888 but defeated him to return in 1892.
[image description: two tweets from bruce bogbutter (@dorkusmalorkus_) posted on 6 May 2023 that read
my dad has been speaking to a royalist on his street and when my dad said we should get rid of the monarchy this bloke said “who would have in charge instead…a load of transgenders?” and im obsessed with the idea that you can either have a king or a council of trans people
and
[ally voice] i would swap king charles iii for a load of transgenders in a heartbeat
/end id]
Uh, what do you think all those tales of the court eunuchs subverting power were about?
Just had a thought that maybe I should look for an occasion to visit with or host an old friend who has a 7 year old now, and was brought to reflect back on all those times in childhood family friends stayed in our guest room or we stopped in for dinner on vacation and I thought “who the fuck is this guy” and then was stuck waiting around forever while my parents had coffee and talked
Taylor Lorenz pivoting to Covid hawkery in a ridiculous Taylor Lorenz fashion seems more likely to set up her haters to link that to everything else she represents in getting it all read out of the media mainstream than advance any of her own interests, but girl can’t help herself.
And it’s like she’s on a mission. “Insisting that people never breathe the same air again is just a natural extension of harm sensitivity norms in queer communities! You should apply your feelings re: one to the other!”
I will say though that yeah, maybe what we’re seeing now suggests that queer community norms around AIDS reflected that its harms were primarily to the small, embattled, and strongly distinct queer community itself, if having unprotected gay sex killed off random elderly people in 1987 you’d probably have seen bareback circuit parties for the purpose
So fairly little of Donald Trump’s presidential term was totally unprecedented, a lot was the kind of stuff one President had pulled before, but it was all kinds of different stuff and different ones.
So the ultimate question is, will that include Grover Cleveland’s trick of getting elected to nonconsecutive terms, having lost an election in the interim?
One of my favorite historical curiosities is 20th century futurists who were convinced they were already living through the Information Apocalypse. “How can the human brain be expected to grapple with sixty-five channels’ worth of cable television?!” Asks some Marshall McLuhan wannabe in 1991. “It’s all a meaningless, maddening pit of context-free stimuli and subconscious impulses!” Buddy, pal, you had no idea what was coming did you.
early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion
ok im obsessed w this tag
once in grade 6 I saw a ‘pottery making club’ in a ditch on the schoolyard- I assume at some point someone realized there was actually good quality clay in the ditch and when I walked up there were about a dozen 12 year olds sitting around the few girls who had brought their water bottles out to mix the clay, and a designated spot to put the finished bowls and tablets, and people going off and collecting sticks to make designs with and i really think that’s the natural state of the human race
In elementary school I learned that you can make paint out of certain sedimentary rocks on the playground if you crushed them and mixed with water and at one point I had up to 25 kindergarten through third graders making cave paintings on the underside of the slides
The nature of man is such that every so often, someone recreates the neolithic era.
90s “electronica” was just a second attempt to adapt gay dance club music to the albums-and-radio-singles recording industry structure after “disco” failed, huh?
I’ve lived through the Spanish Flu, WWI WWII, The Red Scare, The Great Depression, The Korean War, the Teapot Dome Scandal and the Civil Rights Movement! My life is fucking swag bro.
crazy that there are still legit cults doing the time honoured cult tactics and they still work just as well as they ever did, like someone shows up at a compound and sees everyone wearing robes and chanting and they’re like shit mate this looks like a cult! but then they settle in and they’re like oh nah it’s just a place where the leader tells everyone what to do and psychologically manipulates them into handing over their cash and sucking his dick, nothing weird about that, and then five years later they’re like wait, this is a fucking cult!!
