i wake up. i go to work. i see man made horrors beyond comprehension. i go to sleep

I am going to start chewing on myself

Dusky Grouse in Display - by Jen Hall (teagden) on Flickr. Original post: x

Baird's tapir Tapirus bairdii

With yellow-headed caracara Daptrius chimachima

Observed by infinitaselva, CC BY-NC

Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia: vol. 2 - Insects. Written by Dr. Bernhard Grzimek. 1984.

Internet Archive

1.) Orchesella cincta

2.) Onychiurus sp.

3.) Campodea staphylinus

4.) Abax ovalis

5.) Notiophilus rufipes

6.) Penthetria holosericea

7.) Tipula scripta

8.) Red wood ant (Formica rufa)

9.) Geophilus sp.

10.) Brown Centipede (Lithobius forficatus)

11.) Polydesmus complanatus

12.) Julus sp.

13.) Glomeris marginata

14.) Pardosa palustris

15.) Nothrus silvestris

went hiking yesteray for longer than i expected to and didnt bring any food so when i stumbled upon an agarita bush i ate them all like a starving bear

In this book you focus on the idea of gender as a global ‘phantasm’ – this charged, overdetermined, anxiety- and fear-inducing cluster of fantasies that is being weaponised by the right. How did you go about starting to investigate that? Judith Butler: When I was burned in effigy in Brazil in 2017, I could see people screaming about gender, and they understood ‘gender’ to mean ‘paedophilia.’ And then I heard people in France describing gender as a Jewish intellectual movement imported from the US. This book started because I had to figure out what gender had become. I was naïve. I was stupid. I had no idea that it had become this flash point for right-wing movements throughout the world. So I started doing the work to reconstruct why I was being called a paedophile, and why that woman in the airport wanted to kill me with the trolley. I’m not offering a new theory of gender here; I’m tracking this phantasm’s formation and circulation and how it’s linked to emerging authoritarianism, how it stokes fear to expand state powers. Luckily, I was able to contact a lot of people who translated Gender Trouble in different parts of the world, who were often gender activists and scholars in their own right. They told me about what’s happening in Serbia, what’s happening in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Russia. So I became a student of gender again. I’ve been out of the field for a while. I stay relatively literate, of course, but I’ve written on war, on ethics, on violence, on nonviolence, on the pandemic… I’m not in gender studies all the time. I had to do a lot of reading.  There’s a lot of focus in the book on how the anti-gender movement has moved across the world in the past few decades, and how it’s inextricable from Catholic doctrine. It was clarifying for me; domestic anti-trans movements in the UK mostly self-identify as secular.  Judith Butler: In the UK, and even in the US, people don’t realise that this anti-gender ideology movement has been going on for some time in the Americas, in central Europe, to a certain degree in Africa, and that it’s arrived in the US by different routes, but it’s arrived without announcing its history. It became clear to me that a lot of the trans-exclusionary feminists didn’t realise where their discourse was coming from. Some of them do; some people who call themselves feminists are aligned with right-wing positions, and it’s confusing, but there it is. There’s an uncomfortable history of fascist feminism in movements like British suffragism, for instance. Judith Butler: Yes, and of racism. But when Putin made clear that he agreed with JK Rowling, she was probably surprised, and she rightly said, ‘no, I don’t want your alliance’, but it was an occasion for her to think about who she’s allying herself with, unwittingly or not. The anti-gender movement was first and foremost a defence of Biblical scripture, and of the idea that God created man and woman, and that the human form exists only in this duality and that without it, the human is destroyed – God’s creation is destroyed. So that morphed, as the Vatican’s doctrine moved into Latin America, into the idea that people who advocate ‘gender’ are forces of destruction who seek to destroy man, woman, the human, civilisation and culture. 

Okay. This is a pretty big deal in the world of mycology. Historically fungi have been divided up into either parasites that siphon resources from plants, mutualists that cooperate with them, or saprotrophs that break down decaying organic matter (plant and otherwise.) The genus in question, Mycena, has traditionally been made of saprotrophic species feeding on decaying wood.

However, what scientists are observing is Mycena fungi displaying primitive mutualistic behaviors, specifically providing living plants with nitrogen and getting carbon in return from a living partner, or getting to chow down on the plant's remains once deceased. This shows a significant level of adaptability that hasn't been observed in fungi beforehand, though given how much we don't know about fungi there's a good possibility this isn't an unprecedented event.

It doesn't surprise me one bit that we're seeing this in Mycena. These fungi are especially opportunistic; in fact, that mushroom growing out of a frog's skin that we saw a while back was also a Mycena species. Perhaps we need to add bonnet mushrooms to raccoons, dandelions, and other hardy generalists as symbols of scrappy survival in spite of environmental pressures.

Granular Glass Frog (Cochranella granulosa), adult and eggs attached to leaf overhanging water, family Centrolenidae, Costa Rica

photograph by Kevin Venegas

buying sily little animal gachapon is my new obsession

can we just have, like, any feminist movement whatsoever. did everyone just stop caring?

sowing the seeds of discord and insubordination in my workplace

what the scallop

hunk of parmesan: i'm getting so small! 😁 keep going! i wonder if i can get even smaller 😯

microplane, getting more and more delirious with lust as my knuckles get closer to it: he's ruight

Encyclopedia of the Animal World, vol. 14. Published by Elsevier International Projects. Illustration by Maurice Wilson. 1972.