first name juniper. last name underfoot

CJ: I forget, do you have lesbian fingers?

me, bringing up my second and fourth fingers: Yes. It's a bit more apparent on the left hand than the right.

me: I conjectured that my mother was stressed during pregnancy and this masculinized me

me: much to the pleasure of American men.

That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

One of the cool things about being a solo developer is that your code doesn't need to be understandable to other people. But watch out!

Also hey, cultural history time: The reason why cats are associated with women wasn't ultimately and originally about women as sly, cruel, or capricious creatures, but about cats as mothers to their kittens. And yes, sure, reducing womanhood to motherhood and a woman's worth to her fertility is Much Bad, but nonetheless I want to stress that the reason cats became the symbol animal of so many goddesses and were associated with women from thereon wasn't over some "cats and women are sly and selfish, dogs and men are straightforward and loyal uwu" dichtonomy.

It was about cats' tendency to go "I am 4kg of whoop-ass and if you try to touch my eight beautiful children I will fucking kill you."

girl help they're putting dev patel in situations again

do chemists ever, like. get extremely fixated on this One Weird Molecule That Will Go Great With EVERYTHING

& then they totter around their lab trying to figure out every possible weird way this molecule can react with other stuff

& eventually they run out of all the obvious candidates, so they start working themselves into a tizzy, b/c what the fuck do you MEAN xeon won't react with my cool molecule. fuck YOU noble gases. i'll show YOU who's boss

& then they waste SO much time and energy pioneering bizarre new techniques to make this reaction kinda sorta work, but in circumstances that ONLY exist in a lab but never ever in nature in a million years

...because i feel like this is my general approach to what is known as "shipping" in fandom circles

@myconetted

Happy black cat day!!

Here are some black cats I've drawn through the years

Salad

horrid yowling! so terrible I thought the cat might be dying & ran downstairs with heart tangibly hammering. I sighted her pressed up against the window, freaking out about an outdoor cat on the other side.

After I and CJ covered the view with flattened boxes:

cat: [skulks & pokes at the edges of boxes] me: idiotic! are you going to worm your way back against the glass to look at the thing that upsets you? partner CJ: wouldn't you? me: D:<

submission for a tshirt design contest (for a prediction market conference I'm going to this summer)

trying to figure out this wip of a unicorn goring an insufficiently pure maiden not sure this painting is going to work out.

it turns out people look pretty goofy being gored by a unicorn. something to keep in mind when you go out in nature

its so brave that you have such a 2012-coded url in this 2024 world

would you call a bear brave for standing in a new construction suburb or would you recognize the unfamiliar world they built around him

FYI: I've decided that my next fiction project will not be serialized. I'll release it all at once, in a completed state.

I'm not going to say much (if anything) about this work until it's been released, but I wanted to make a note of this fact.

In the past, what you saw was what you got: anything I wrote was posted online almost immediately, and if I hadn't posted any new fiction that generally meant I had not written any. This is no longer the case.

You will have to wait some time for this new work to appear. But the wait will be vastly shorter than the wait for Almost Nowhere (6+ years), and closer to the time it took to finish my previous two novels (i.e. months rather than years). I am very confident about this.

I am getting wrecked by the piss side of tumblr

We think of urine as yellow, but this is only apparent if you're peeing into a white bowl, right? Historically you would have peed on the ground, or a latrine, or a non-white container. So probably if you showed someone in the past a yellow and brown image their first association wouldn't be "ew, excrement" the way it would be for the moderns. If you think about it our negative associations with that pair of colors represent a victory in sanitation and civil engineering. Nothing represents the uplifting of mankind as much as the ceramic toilet. Anyway

We think of urine as yellow, but this is only apparent if you're peeing into a white bowl, right? Historically you would have peed on the ground, or a latrine, or a non-white container. So probably if you showed someone in the past a yellow and brown image their first association wouldn't be "ew, excrement" the way it would be for the moderns. If you think about it our negative associations with that pair of colors represent a victory in sanitation and civil engineering. Nothing represents the uplifting of mankind as much as the ceramic toilet. Anyway

the animus of the anima