with the state of social media right now, it is doubly important to archive pages. please add the wayback machine extension to your browser and set it to automatically archive the pages you visit. i’d also recommend setting it to archive outlinks, since many pages require you to click links to get the full context, especially on social media.
Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.
Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.
Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.
You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.
As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.
Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.
This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.
A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.
Hi!! I'm trying to get over my overwhelming fear of crane flies, is there any way you could supply some fun facts about them? Specifically pedicia albivitta but there's so many species and not a lot of information I can find about them
Well for starters all crane flies are entirely harmless. They don’t have mouthparts capable of biting and can’t sting or pinch or anything. If they fly at you it’s because they don’t see you or register you as something to avoid, not because they’re attacking or have any reason to land on you.
Despite common belief and sometimes being referred to as mosquito hawks or skeeter eaters, they do not eat mosquitoes, and are in fact incapable of eating them because they don’t have the right mouthparts.
Most adults don’t eat at all, but if they do, they eat nectar, pollen, or sap, or just drink water. They really only live long enough as adults to breed (1-2 weeks), so there’s not much need to feed.
Some aquatic crane fly larvae are thought to eat mosquito larvae, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a reliable source on that. Larvae can be either aquatic, semiaquatic, or terrestrial and what they eat depends on their environment, but mostly I’ve seen that they’re detrivores, so they help with soil health like other decomposers. They’re also a big source of food for other animals like predatory insects, spiders, frogs, fish, and birds. Probably bats, too, I imagine. So they do play an important role in ecosystems!
Also they can be really beautiful! Some of them even mimic wasps with pretty black and yellow stripes. I’ll show you my fav species, though, the eastern phantom crane fly:
What a beauty! Look at those stripey socks. Adorable.
Also they sometimes hang from foliage in the cutest way:
