love is fucking dead. valentines day used to mean something
So for people who don’t know, Seattle Aquarium has a breeding program to try and help save the endangered Pacific Giant Octopus.
They take wild octos every year and put them in a conjoined tank that is separated only by a plexi glass wall full of holes big enough for them to put arms through but small enough that their beaks can’t fit through. Each octopus is given food, healthcare, and enrichment, and the opportunity to get to know each other.
As Valentine’s Day approaches the marine biologists that specialize in octos make assessments of their interactions and judge if the two are compatible for mating or if they are still aggressive toward each other.
If the octopuses have been witnessed being friendly and seem interested, the gate is lifted and they have their day of romance.
But octopuses engage in cannibalism in the wild and any smaller octopus is wary of getting eastern by a larger one… So yeah, if they haven’t been friendly the possibility of cannibalism is very high. And as a program designed to help save the species they aren’t going to risk it. So the octopuses are released (not together) back into the wild and the Aquarium sets about finding a new pair to play match-maker with.
As someone who walked by this aquarium to work for almost a decade, I can attest to how huge a Thing this is around here. We’re always sad when the octopus sex show gets cancelled.
Thank you for the explanation of the conservation program.
[ID: a screenshot of a news headline posted on 2/12/2016. It reads “Attention: the public octopus sex act has been cancelled.” In smaller text the sub-header reads “Seattle Aquarium cancels annual Valentine’s Day mating ritual, fearing cephalopods might turn to cannibalism.” /end ID]
fantasy story: but we grew complacent, indulgent, arrogant, spoiled by this era of prosperity and splendour, and in our short-sighted greed and vanity, we ended it. me at 15: I hate this stupid trope. People aren’t going to just turn stupid and ruin everything just because things have been “too good” for “too long”. Why does this author think that people are inherently stupid and evil? people on social media in 2024: I’m not going to vaccinate my dogs or my children because polio, measels and rabies are so rare they’re not a real threat anyway uwu me at 30: Ah. I see.
The tailors at Colonial Williamsburg made a suit for their cat
The best part is that they were inspired by a diary entry from 1775, written by a 12 year old tailor’s apprentice who had been left unsupervised all day and decided to make a suit for a cat. Here’s a link to the blog post about it, but I’ll just paste the whole diary entry here:
“I had been at work about two months when Christmas came on – and here I must relate a little anecdote. The principal [the tailor] and his lady were invited to a party among their friends…while it devolved on me to stay at home and keep house. There was nothing left me in charge to do, only to take care of the house. There was a large cat that generally lay about the fire. In order to try my mechanical powers, I concluded to make a suit of clothing for puss, and for my purpose gathered some scraps of cloth that lay about the shop-board, and went to work as hard as I could. Late in the evening I got my suit of clothes finished; I caught the cat, put on the whole suit – coat, vest, and small-clothes [breeches] – buttoned all on tight, and set down my cat to inspect the fit.
“Unfortunately for me there was a hole through the floor close to the fireplace, just large enough for the cat to pass down; after making some efforts to get rid of the clothes, and failing, pussy descended through the hole and disappeared; the floor was tight and the house underpinned with brick, so there was no chance of pursuit. I consoled myself with a hope that the cat would extricate itself from its incumbrance, but not so; night came and I had made on a good fire and seated myself for some two or three hours after dark, when who should make their appearance but my master and mistress and two young men, all in good humor, with two or three bottles of rum. After all were seated around the fire, who should appear amongst us but the cat in his uniform. I was struck speechless, the secret was out and had no chance of concealing; the cat was caught, the whole work inspected and the question asked, is this your day’s work? I was obliged to answer in the affirmative; I would then have been willing to take a good whipping, and let it stop there, but no, to complete my mortification the clothes were carefully taken off the cat and hung up in the shop for the inspection of all customers that came in.”
“I was hoping they’d beat me and forget about it but to my horror they stuck my work up on the fridge”
When I was in ninth grade I wanted to challenge what I saw as a very stupid dress code policy (not being allowed to wear spikes regardless of the size or sharpness of the spikes). My dad said to me, “What is your objective?”
He said it over and over. I contemplated that. I wanted to change an unfair dress code. What did I stand to gain? What did I stand to lose? If what I really wanted was to change the dress code, what would be my most effective potential approach? (He also gave me Discourses on the Fall of Rome by Titus Livius, Machiavelli’s magnum opus. Of course he’d already given me The Prince, Five Rings, and The Art of War.)
I ultimately printed out that phrase, coated it in Mod Podge, and clipped it to my bathroom mirror so I would look at it and think about it every day.
What is your objective?
Forget about how you feel. Ask yourself, what do you want to see happen? And then ask, how can you make it happen? Who needs to agree with you? Who has the power to implement this change? What are the points where you have leverage over them? If you use that leverage now, will you impair your ability to use it in the future? Getting what you want is about effectiveness. It is not about being an alpha or a sigma or whatever other bullshit the men’s right whiners are on about now. You won’t find any MRA talking points in Musashi, because they are not relevant.
I had no clear leverage on the dress code issue. My parents were not on the PTA; neither were any of my friend’s parents who liked me. The teachers did not care about this. Ultimately I just wore what I wanted, my patent leather collar from Hot Topic with large but flattened spikes, and I had guessed correctly—the teachers also did not care enough to discipline me.
I often see people on tumblr, mostly the very young, flail around in discourse. They don’t have an objective. They don’t know what they want to achieve, and they have never thought about strategizing and interpersonal effectiveness. No one can get everything they want by being an asshole. You must be able to work with other people, and that includes smiling when you hate them.
Read Machiavelli. Start with The Prince, but then move on to Discourses. Read Musashi’s Five Rings. Read The Art of War. They’re classics for a reason. They can’t cover all situations, but they can do more for how you think about strategizing than anything you’re getting in middle school and high school curricula.
Don’t vote third party unless you can tell me not only what your objective is but also why this action stands a meaningful chance of accomplishing it. Otherwise, back up and approach your strategy from a new angle. I don’t care how angry you are with Biden right now. He knows about it, and he is both trying to do something and not doing enough. I care about what will happen to millions of people if we have another Trump presidency. Look up Ross Perot, and learn from our past. Find your objective. If it is to stop the genocide in Palestine now, call your elected representatives now. They don’t care about emails; they care about phone calls, because they live in the past. I know this because I shadowed a lobbyist, because knowing how power works is critical to using it.
How do you think I have gotten two clinics to start including gender care in their planning?
Start small. Chip away. Keep working. Find your leverage; figure out how and when to effectively use it. Choose your battles, so that you can concentrate on the battle at hand instead of wasting your resources in many directions. Learn from the accumulated wisdom of people who spent their lives learning by doing, by making mistakes, by watching the mistakes of their enemies.
Don’t be a dickhead. Be smarter than I was at 14. Ask yourself: what is your objective?
