Is it June already?

As my long-time readers are well aware, this whole “posting daily” thing is a new development for me as of 2022. I’m figuring out how to manage my ADHD, but I’ve had some difficulty balancing daily posting with other things, like writing posts that are actually good, writing fiction, housekeeping, and so on. All of this is to say that I’m still not great at delivering on themed content as much as I’d like to, so I’m going to do some of that this month.

In our rather interesting tradition of designating months for awareness of particular causes, it seems that June 2022 is the month for at least three issues that I feel I ought to address. The first (in order of my becoming aware of it) is Pride Month – an international celebration of the diversity of human gender and sexuality, and a time for furthering the cause of ensuring human rights for LGBTQIA people. In particular, I want to talk about the ways in which the United States is becoming more dangerous for trans people, because there’s a lot happening in that area, and it’s quite frankly horrifying.

The second is Canada’s National Indigenous History Month, for which I’ll be writing about the contents of one or more of these reports. Someone I follow on Twitter made a general request that settler types do so, and that’s a good enough reason for me. That said, it’s not the only reason. There’s been a lot of news in recent years demonstrating just how much of a façade Canadian “niceness” turns out to be when it comes to its indigenous population, and I think that the citizens of one or two other countries would do well to consider how these lessons might apply to their own homes.

The third is Gypsy, Roma and Traveller History Month in the United Kingdom. I have to admit I know very, little about these groups of people. For one thing, in the U.S. and other parts of the world, “Gypsy” is considered a slur, but apparently it’s been reclaimed by at least some groups in Europe, similar to how some Native Americans refer to themselves as “Indians”. Terminology is important for interacting with, and talking about people, but in my opinion it doesn’t count as learning about their culture, so much as showing the bare minimum of decency to one’s fellow humans. So I’m going to learn more, and write about it.

I think I had intended to have one of these published today, but subjects like this fall into the category of “if I’m going to do it, I should take the time to do it as well as I’m able. For me that means allowing myself to not rush the job, so instead you get this I.O.U. for posts on these topics some time this month.

In the meantime, I hope you’re all doing as well as possible as we head into the summer. News about the state of the world continues to feel relentlessly grim, so I hope you are all taking time to do things that are important to you. We’re fighting for a better world because we believe, at least in part, that those humans who come after us deserve a habitable planet and a just society, in which to lead fulfilling lives. That means that we also deserve to lead fulfilling lives, to whatever degree we can in the world as it is today. Do things that are fun. Do things that make you proud. Do things that give you meaning. It’s part of your duty to yourself.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

I learned two new things about termites today!

Ok, so the first thing I didn’t know was that termites are a type of cockroach. I had no idea.

The second thing – and this honestly makes a lot of sense, given what we know about termites – is that they apparently cross oceans every now and then.

Termites are a type of cockroach that split from other cockroaches around 150 million years ago and evolved to live socially in colonies. Today, there are many different kinds of termites. Some form large colonies with millions of individuals, which tend to live in connected tunnels in the soil. Others, including most species known as drywood termites, form much smaller colonies of less than 5000 individuals, and live primarily in wood.

Researchers from the Evolutionary Genomics Unit at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University (OIST), alongside a network of collaborators from across the world, have mapped out the natural history of drywood termites—the second largest family of termites—and revealed a number of oceanic voyages that accelerated the evolution of their diversity. The research, published in Molecular Biology and Evolution, shines light on where termites originated and how and when they spread across the globe. It also confirms that some species have, in recent centuries, hitched a ride with humans to reach far-flung islands.

“Drywood termites, or Kalotermitidae, are often thought of as primitive because they split from other termites quite early, around 100 million years ago, and because they appear to form smaller colonies,” said Dr. Aleš Buček, OIST Postdoctoral Researcher and lead author of the study. “But very little is actually known about this family.”

Dr. Buček went on to explain how, before this study, there was very little molecular data on the family and the little understanding of the relationships between the different species that was known was based on their appearance. Previous research had focused on one genus within the family that contains common pest species, often found within houses.

To gain overarching knowledge, the researchers collected hundreds of drywood termite samples from around the world over a timespan of three decades. From this collection, they selected about 120 species, some of which were represented by multiple samples collected in different locations. This represented over a quarter of Kalotermitidae diversity. Most of these samples were brought to OIST where the DNA was isolated and sequenced.

Every now and then, I learn about a research project, and am given a new appreciation for the amount of work some scientists will do to expand our knowledge. There’s a degree to which some of this sort of thing can be less work than it necessarily sounds like. If I said I caught and measured hundreds of turtles every year, that could be just a couple weeks of work. That would be followed by a much longer period of analysis and whatnot, but a fairly small team can collect a lot of data in a very short time, if they know what they’re doing.

Doing it over 30 years, however, requires patience and persistence that I find admirable, not to mention reliable access to resources (funding educational and research institutions should be treated as a public investment in the future).

By comparing the genetic sequences from the different species, the researchers constructed an extensive family tree of the drywood termites.

They found that drywood termites have made more oceanic voyages than any other family of termites. They’ve crossed oceans at least 40 times in the past 50 million years, travelling as far as South America to Africa, which, over a timescale of millions of years, resulted in the diversification of new drywood termite species in the newly colonized places.

Furthermore, this study has cast doubt on the common assumption that drywood termites have a primitive lifestyle. Among the oldest lineages in the family, there are termite species that do not have a primitive lifestyle. In fact, they can form large colonies across multiple pieces of wood that are connected by tunnels underground.

“This study only goes to highlight how little we know about termites, the diversity of their lifestyles, and the scale of their social lives,” stated Prof. Tom Bourguignon, Principal Investigator of OIST’s Evolutionary Genomics Unit and senior author of the study. “As more information is gathered about their behavior and ecology, we’ll be able to use this family tree to find out more about the evolution of sociality in insects and how termites have been so successful.”

“They’re very good at getting across oceans,” said Dr. Buček. “Their homes are made of wood so can act as tiny ships.”

The researchers found that most of the genera originated in southern America and dispersed from there. It takes a scale of millions of years for one species to split into several after a move. The research also confirmed that, more recently, dispersals have largely been mediated by humans.

A good portion of my life has been spent learning about the ways in which humans move other species around, and the damage that can do. It’s neat to learn about species moving themselves around, over such vast distances.

Friday Film Review: Everything Everywhere All at Once

So, uh, this movie is about me.

I mean, it’s not about me. It’s about fictional characters played by people who are nothing like me.

But it could be about me, or you know, it might as well be about me.

I’m gonna start over by going back in time about 45 minutes to when I started this blog post. Bear with me a sec.

When I first started dating Tegan, back in 2013, I had a well-established dislike of horror movies. I’d seen a few, but I didn’t enjoy them, or the visions that they planted in my brain. It just seemed like a way to torture myself for no real gain. Kinda like watching Requiem for a Dream. Tegan convinced me to watch Cabin in the Woods, which is absolutely a horror movie, but it’s also more than that. It’s an interesting story about the “true origin” of humanity’s horror, from ancient monsters to modern-day slashers, with quite a bit of comedy worked in. It changed my mind. It’s not that I don’t enjoy horror movies, it’s that I don’t enjoy the ones that are horror without a meaningful or interesting plot. Cabin in the Woods is currently tied with Tucker and Dale vs. Evil as my favorite examples of the genre, and there are a few others that I like. They’re all ones that have horror as one part of an otherwise compelling story. It’s a central part, but it’s not the only thing going on.

I have similar feelings about movies that deal with intense emotional trauma and/or suffering. The aforementioned Requiem for a Dream might as well be a horror movie like the Jason series. It’s a cautionary tale about drugs, but it feels more like one of the Hell Houses that Christian fundamentalists use to scare each other about Damnation- grotesque and empty.

Tegan has now convinced me to watch Everything, Everywhere, All at Once, and it is a ride. The two paragraphs before this are the introduction because this movie starts out like it’s going to be about the grinding misery of a disappointing life. It shows us a person who’s constantly distracted, constantly in doubt, constantly failing, and seems to be unable to hear her family half the time when they’re talking.

It… It hit close to home. It’s not my life, but it’s what my life has felt like many times. I’m not going to lie – as the beginning progressed, I was very tempted back out. The thing is, it’s not not about that misery, but as with the best horror movies, there’s so much more that you only get a taste of that misery before things go in a literally improbable  and often hilarious direction. You never really have time to consider it again, except when it matters.

Which reminds me – have you read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? If you haven’t, you should. I’m sure it has it’s bad moments, but it really is a phenomenal work of storytelling, comedy, and imagination. I also suspect that it may have been an inspiration for Everything Everywhere All At Once. Specifically, a ship called The Heart of Gold. If you know, you know. If you don’t, you should at least read the first book in that series. Run along now!

Anyway, I was thinking about those similarities, but as the plot moved along, I suddenly felt like I was watching a version of the movie MirrorMask, but from a parallel universe, or maybe a universe that’s like almost parallel, but a little wobbly, so it bumps into ours from time to time.

MirrorMask, for those of you who don’t know, is a delightfully surreal fantasy movie from the mind of Neil Gaiman, in which a girl who escapes the turmoil of her life through art, finds her self pulled into a dying magical world populated by things she has drawn, and by strange, eccentric versions of the people in her life.

It sort of feels like a mix between Alice in Wonderland (I hope I don’t need to summarize that for you), and The Neverending Story (which would take far too long to summarize here), but it also has a bizarre and at times revolting sense of humor, as a multiverse of limitless possibilities vomits forth strange versions of the main cast that I guarantee you are not expecting. In a way, the sense of humor reminds me of what you’d encounter in a movie like Time Bandits.

Time Bandits is a movie directed by Terry Gilliam, starring the cast of Monty Python as well as a great many other people. It follows the story of a boy who’s caught up in a metaphysical heist, and is dragged through time, space, and different plains of reality. It’s a sort of zany, modern-day theodicy, with an ending that – to me – felt as unfulfilling (and entirely appropriate) as the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a – ok, this time it was a joke. You may have noticed a theme in this review, jumping from one thing to another? Each one forms a connection to the next, and that to another beyond it in a never-ending chain. Did I mention the Neverending story already? Yes I did. I’m very sorry, but I lured you in with a movie review, and ended up trapping you in a creative writing project about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), I’m so very sorry, but this movie (you know, the single movie of which this is a review?) hit me pretty hard. It’s a phenomenal movie. The casting is amazing, and the acting is amazing from everyone involved (It also has a flavor of Kind Hearts and Coronets. If you know, you know.)

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a movie about a mother and a daughter who both have ADHD, and don’t know it. I honestly don’t know whether either of my parents has ADHD, but looking back I can see how it affected my childhood. I don’t have kids, and I don’t expect to, but I can empathize with a parent’s desire to keep their children from making the same old mistakes. How could anyone not? Every time I learn something new, I want to tell the world, because knowing feels so much better than not knowing. I also want a world with less pain. I want a life with less pain. Who wouldn’t? If I knew a way to make that happen, I’d do it in a heartbeat, but in the meantime, I also understand the desire to just… be numb. To be at peace. Have the noise just stop for one damned second. This paragraph is what this movie is about.

As a kid, I lost myself in things. Things that put me into a state of flow. Things that made me forget who I was, and what my life was like. I want to be clear – my life was good, compared to a lot of people, even in the small schools I went to. This isn’t me saying I come from a background of hardship, because I really don’t. Looking back, I know there were times we were tight on money, but never tight enough that I noticed it. That shouldn’t be a privilege, and it doesn’t have to be. It can and should be the norm, and that’s basically the core of this blog. The-

Fuck. I got sidetracked again.

There’s one more movie I want to bring in, and that’s how we’ll wrap this up. I’ve talked about all these other movies that started playing in my head as I watched, but this is the one I really want to compare it to.

Arrival.

I’m not going to summarize the movie. You’re safe from that now. All I will say is that it is one of those rare movies that makes you feel like your mind is being opened to just a hint of how huge and strange our universe is. To harken back to The Hitchiker’s Guide, Arrival is a little bit like the Total Perspective Vortex (on the planet Frogstar B). It gives you a taste of what it would be like to remember your future as you remember your past, existing in your entire life at every moment. Everything, everywhere, all at once.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is another Total Perspective Vortex movie, in more ways than one. It’s not a coincidence that I find this movie so relatable, and I’m not declaring it to be about ADHD just because it feels like this movie about a Chinese-American family is also about me. Like all original works of art (am I gonna get flamed for this?), the movie is about the people who who created it, and they say it’s about ADHD.

So I started doing some research. And then I stayed up until like, four in the morning, just reading everything I could find about it, just crying, just realizing that, “Oh, my God, I think I have ADHD.” So this movie is the reason why I got diagnosed. I got diagnosed, I went to therapy for a year and then went to a psychiatrist. And I’m now on meds, and it’s such a beautiful, cathartic experience to realize why your life has been so hard.

I’m intensely jealous. For those of you who’ve never tried, getting diagnosed with ADHD is still extremely difficult, at least as an adult. In Ireland, where I live, it’s functionally impossible for me, or for Tegan. The public system can’t accommodate, and the private system only gives a shit about rich people.

Watching Arrival for the first time was a revelatory experience. I consider it to be one of the greatest science fiction movies of all time, and Everything Everywhere All At Once now stands along side it. I’ve never cared about the Oscars before (and I don’t really now), but I think this ought to win Best Picture.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

So stop me if you’ve heard this one. A Buddhist monk is walking down the street in New York, and seeing a hotdog stand, decides he will get one. He approaches the stand, looks at the vendor, and says, “Make me one with everything.”

The Sharkcano has erupted. I repeat: The Sharkcano has erupted. This is not B movie.

So I vaguely remember hearing about the “sharkcano” once before, but I definitely needed a refresher. It’s an underwater volcano in the Solomon Islands, and in 2015 it was discovered that there were a number of sharks and other fish living in the crater of the volcano, where the water is both hot and acidic. We’re talking temperatures of 40°C/104°F or higher, if I’m reading this paper right. Long-time readers will know that one of the concerns with a warming climate is that hotter water can hold less dissolved oxygen, meaning some fish – especially the larger, more active ones – will have to find cooler water, or suffocate. From what I can tell, the fact that the crater is near the surface, and there’s a lot of thermal activity there, means that the water mixes around more than usual, so I’d guess that that raises the oxygen level. I suppose it’s also possible that the fish there somehow need less oxygen? I really don’t know. Regardless, I hope the sharks and everyone else living there knew their home well enough to flee, because it has erupted. I honestly expect that they’ll be OK, because this isn’t the first time.

Named after a sea god of the Indigenous Gatokae and Vangunu people, Kavachi is located about 15 miles south of Vangunu Island, part of the Solomon Islands east of Papua New Guinea. It’s one of the most active underwater volcanoes in this part of the Pacific and has been erupting nearly continuously since at least 1939, when people living on nearby islands first recorded an eruption, according to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Global Volcanism Program.

The volcano is also known by the name Rejo te Kvachi, which means “Kavachi’s Oven”—a fitting moniker for the superheated lava, steam, particulates, rock fragments and sulfur that sometimes reach the water’s surface. Scientists believe the volcano’s summit is roughly 65 feet below the water; Kavachi’s base is on the seafloor, about three-fourths of a mile below sea level, per NASA.

Over its recorded history, Kavachi has created a handful of ephemeral islands that have spanned up to a kilometer in length. But the ocean’s waves have always eroded and washed these islands away. It also produces dramatic phreatomagmatic eruptions, in which superheated magma and water interact to create violent, steamy explosions.

“Sharkcano” earned its nickname after a 2015 expedition found two species of sharks, along with active microbial communities, living within the volcano’s crater. Using a baited drop camera, an international team observed scalloped hammerhead sharks (Sphyrna lewini) and silky sharks (Carcharhinus falciformis) living in the hot, acidic water. Kavachi is a “fascinating natural laboratory” that “remains full of mysteries to explore,” according to the researchers, who published the results of their exploration in the journal Oceanography in 2016. NASA has been tracking Kavachi for some time, taking equally spectacular photos of eruptions in 2007 and 2014.

When I played Subnautica, I thought that the “lava lizards” that lived in and around underwater volcanoes were pretty far-fetched  as life forms went, but this is honestly closer to that than I realized could exist. The 2015 paper I linked above points out that higher temperatures and higher acidity are both major concerns for the survival of life in the ocean in the coming years. Last year’s heat wave killed hundreds of millions of sea creatures on the west coast of North America, and I think it’s fair to say we’re going to see more of that. It’s nice to know that life – even life that’s familiar to us – is possible even in an acidic stew like that.

Even so, I think I’ll keep trying to prevent those conditions from becoming commonplace around the world.

The image shows six images from the underwater volcano Kavachi. The top left image is blue, and shows streams of bubbles rising from cracks in the sea floor. The next image over shows a microbial mat, followed by a picture of a bluefin trevally. The bottom three images, left to right, are of red snappers, a scalloped hammerhead shark, and a silky shark. The fish pictures all show yellow, cloudy water.

2. (A) Oblique view of a line of bubbling gas along the outer edge of Kavachi’s crater with orange, cloudy plume fluids in the background. (B) Downward-looking view of a microbial mat on the summit of the Southwest Extension. (C) Bluefin trevally, (D) snapper, (E) hammerhead shark, and (F) a silky shark observed using a baited drop camera deployed inside the crater.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: True Facts about nudibranchs (and a little Oceanoxia lore)

Can washing machines get trichobezoars? Raksha has been gone for a while now, but she’s still managing to clog drains from beyond the grave. Anyway, today involved an unexpected flood followed by turning the apartment into a sauna to dry out the particle board flooring under the linoleum flooring in my oh-so-well-managed flat. I believe we managed to stem the tide in time to prevent any water leaking down to disturb the neighbors, but it was by no means a sure thing. Then, right before I was gonna make supper, I got sidetracked by writing a thousand words or so in my current fantasy novel, and then suddenly it was late and I had to cook. Time is vastly overrated. I want a refund.

All of this is to say, here’s a video I thought was neat

Fun fact – the banner of this blog is from the background of its original home, and I took that photo on the same day as I shot the nudibranchs in the banner that’s still there.

Infographics: Emergency alternatives to formula

I’m afraid I have to admit – the novel I’m working on seems to be draining all of my creative energy. It’s like my brain switched tracks, and now it can’t think about nonfiction. It’s taken me a while to get into a groove with the blog, and now this novel just slammed into my brain out of nowhere. I think I was as ready for that as I was ever going to be, but it means that I’ve got to figure out a new way to go about things. Hopefully I’ll get that dealt with sooner rather than later, but for now I think this is useful information for people to have, in light of the U.S. baby formula shortage

EDIT 20/05/2022: Hey, so problems with the content I posted here arose, and the person whose material I linked here has given an update. In hindsight, ignoring the red flags that Katydid mentions in the comments was a mistake, and I’ll try to do better next time.

I just realized both op and the commenter are insane trad christains so im deleting my reblog (because im not platforming their shit – this is ALSO why im censoring their URLs I’m not going to give them traffic) and instead reposing it with the following links/information:

1) The WHO still actively hosts a guide on how to create safe milk substitutes when access to breastmilk/milk substitutes are unavailable on the Institutional Repository for Information Sharing (iris). The guide is called “Infant Feeding in Emergencies: A Guide for Mothers”. Relevant information starts on page 38.

2) Here is a link to the archived guide WITH THE CAUTION that I was not able to find out why its no longer provided by the WHO or iris. It could be that the information is out of date. I am only sharing it because I think the visuals may be helpful for people who have trouble reading written directions. Consult the above link first, then refer to this guide only if you need clarification on how to perform certain actions. Link to archive.

3) The language in that second comment throws up so may red flags. I cropped it to only the information needed to understand the context of this post because I find it immensely suspect. The repeated allusions to 2020 for no apparent reason (but I can guess why, as an infection disease scientist) come across as loaded or dog-whistely. I would advise against sharing the OP for that reason. But because the information being provided is important and not well known, I’m making this alternative post for people to reblog.

4) The implication that the WHO is censoring information based on a 404 page is a really flimsy and extreme conclusion to jump to. The “Infant Feeding in Emergencies” guide I linked above also goes to a 404 page on the WHO’s main website – but again, can be accessed through iris instead. So no, the information on how to feed infants in a food crisis is not being censored by the WHO.

5) A more likely cause for the guide disappearing is that the link broke and they didn’t fix it. If you look at the original URL it indicates the guide was posted in a subcategory on the WHO’s website about International Crises, specifically in the Middle East. If you try to type in a shortened versions of that URL (specifically https://www.who.int/hac/crises/ or the slightly modified http://www.who.int/hac/crises/en/) you’ll see that the subdomain that was present with relevant info breaks around 2020. In fact, while testing this hypothesis, I came across this information page in a November 2021 version of the URL https://www.who.int/home/cms-decommissioning (which I was redirected to automatically from http://www.who.int/hac/crises/en/):

The image is an error page that reads as follows: We have revamped our website. In 2020, our web migration project tackled over 180,000 pages of content and over 200,000 publications. Much of our content has been updated, made more dynamic, and may no longer be found in the same place. If you are having problems finding content, please try: -search for publications in our new Publications Hub - find content in Health Topics - Look for content in Teams - Find Disease Outbreak News in our new emergencies section - Brows by Initiatives - Look through WHO Activities - Sort by

There is no nefarious conspiracy theory. The link simply broke – as many many many many links do on the internet. The second commenters reply is proven bunk by a little bit of fact checking.

sorry for the long post, but I think the information on infant nutrition substitutes is genuinely useful, lifesaving info – but i’m not going to give more people with dangerous ideological views spouting nonsense a platform.

So yeah. Sorry about that, but hopefully the information this page now contains will be useful!

A video on part of the ADHD experience

I think it’s pretty common, in any area of activism or advocacy, to get passionate about something before you fully understand it. We look back on things we did years ago, and while we understand our reasoning at the time, we also can see how we’d do that differently today. Writing that sentence out, I think it probably applies to most aspects of life. It’s part of what we are, and it always will be, no matter how much we cringe at some of our memories. I think that kind of reflection is also an important part of who and what we are, and we live in a world that doesn’t often allow us to have time for it.

There are some things in this video that don’t fit my life one to one (I think that’s part of why I haven’t seen more than one or two videos from this channel, but some of this hits hard.

That feeling she describes – like I never get to actually have time off, because I haven’t “earned” it. That’s part of what made my salaried work at TERC so difficult towards the end – it wasn’t that I was doing worse or less work than others necessarily, it’s that the way I did it meant that I never really got time off, and no matter how many different techniques I tried to keep my brain in line, they’d only work for a short time, because they became a sort of hobby in themselves, until they just stopped working.

I’m working on a new novel now, in addition to this blog and my other fiction projects, and it’s going well. I’ve been able to maintain daily posting and work on fiction projects, all without burning out. That didn’t just happen out of nowhere – it happened when I managed to convince myself that time spent writing really, truly counted as “work”. I don’t know if I’ll be able to make ends meet with this. I am incredibly lucky in that I have a couple years in which there are almost no external forces determining my schedule, and while it took me a while to get into it, I’m finally able to write. I finally have the time and the energy to do the work that I want  to do, at my own pace. If I’m honest, the thought of having to go back to the way things were is horrifying. For all the good things in my life, it often didn’t feel like living. It felt like I was waiting to get my shit together, and then my life would start.

It felt that way all through my 20s, and most of the way through my 30s, even when I had a good job, a decent income, and good benefits. I got a brief taste of this life back in Somerville, when I took a little time off after leaving TERC, but I also had the threat of the U.S. healthcare system hovering over me. A big part of why I care so much about building a world where people get free time to themselves by default, is that that seems like the only way that people will ever be able to pursue happiness.