My pigeons sometimes misjudge the distance to the top of my bookshelf and fall into my lamp, helplessly trapping themselves until I rescue them. Their ancestors won wars and this is the best they can do?
Love how learning begets learning, where gaining knowledge about some topic immediately opens up countless more avenues of exploration. My greatest intellectual struggle has been trying to balance depth with breadth, both unfurl themselves with care and attention but the lazy part of me hates having to choose. Honestly I haven't thought too much about the afterlife but my idea of heaven is drinking deeply from every cup in front of me.
Interesting how a lot of most dramatic environmentalist gains of the previous generations are invisible or forgotten. One of my friends knows more about turkeys than anyone else I know, has hunted them his whole life, but was surprised that turkeys were driven locally extinct in the 1800s in Wisconsin and were only reintroduced 50 years ago. No knock against him of course. Seeing how numerous they are across urban and rural parts alike nowadays, so much so they're a daily sight, one would never guess the hills were once so deeply silent.
If a history book that covers a large span of time for a specific location doesn't start with a geography lesson it's not complete - so much of why where and how people live in a location is dependent on the natural environment. The particulars of human life are so deeply physical.
Got to watch woodcocks displaying at the local arboretum a few evenings ago and as strange and flealike as the birds look on the ground, they look twice as strange rocketing through the sky like airborne punctuation. #birds Pretty similar to the McDonnell XF-85 Goblin honestly.
Coconut in black tea is such a gigabrain move, it adds this delightful creaminess to the tea without actually having any cream added. Absolutely delicious.
It's important to limit anthropomorphism lest we lose important details about animal cognition, but I have the strongly held opinion that animals do feel something recognizable as joy when they fulfill their instinctive drives. We know beavers get anxious when they hear running water, does a beaver not then feel relief when she completes her dam?
A frustrating phenomenon is when you find out the fancy version of something is, in fact, genuinely better than the basic cheap version. I got a glass pen recently and I'm almost offended by how much of an upgrade it is, I didn't even know writing could be improved upon. Material culture where higher quality in make and materials often objectively improves the experience is an interesting counterpoint to the tech sphere where a billionaire is using the same iPhone as your bus driver.
The past sometimes doesn't feel too different until you get hit with some phrase like "Cosimo I de'Medici's favorite Dwarf, Morgante, most famous of the Five Buffoons" and multitudes immediately unfurl themselves before your eyes from the implications alone.
Linkedin but instead of your work history it's increasingly precise and localized awards eg. won blue ribbon at the Toad Suck Daze Toad Races of Conway Arkansas
Donkeys (and mules, which inherit the temperament of their donkey parent) are often stereotyped as stubborn, unworkable, or difficult. However those who work with them describe them rather as intensely loyal once you earn their trust, but unwilling to put themselves in danger unnecessarily. A donkey will outright refuse to attempt a crossing it believes isn't safe, where a horse may well attempt and come to harm. A donkey won't be rushed, and a donkey won't carry a load greater than it can bear. It will pause and evaluate before action. As someone who's always struggled to navigate the line between being generous and being exploited, in an environment where work is equal to worthiness, the donkey is an aspirational animal. Carrying the load with dignity, cooperation over obedience, trusting in one's own judgements and strength of will, giving freely as a friend while firmly preserving oneself - all suitable for the beast that bore the Christ to Calvary. Also they are very cute and smart animals. ^^
There's a bit of a side phenomenon where people I know became self conscious about writing quirks they'd had for years as a part of their personal style because LLMs began using them.
For the record my favorite version of this chapter is in the Badger State by Barbara & Justus Paul, which features an introduction by Aldo Leopold that absolutely knocks it out of the park. I wish all my history books began with something like his breathtaking prose about cranes bugling over this glacier-scarred Northern soil.
GOMAD is the gold standard for bulking but it's a bit of a lifestyle commitment (and gut commitment lol). When I was trying to put on some mass I ate large amounts of full fat yogurt and that seemed to work well.
That's definitely true, the logistics of obtaining higher quality components of craftsmanship too were also far less scaled. You look at something like imperial porphyry, a type of purple granite which is hard to work and in antiquity could only be sourced from one mine in Egypt, and how it came to be a symbol of imperial power. It's actually a very honest symbol because in order to get it at those times you would have HAD to have command over a very large and coordinated supply chain and skilled artisans. Same as how in evolutionary theory deer antlers are considered an example of "honest" signalling of superior fitness: a buck is only able to display what surplus minerals he is physically able to gather. It definitely says something interesting about our economy that current "signals" are far more abstract, and our stuff is both more plentiful and more ephemeral.