one of my favourite things about youtube is that people wanting to educate you about the world are free to do so. They will present their information in engaging ways to try make it stick. I have learned more about world conflicts and the history of colonialism in the global south through youtube videos and source links on wikis than I ever could have with books. Books about these subjects arent scarce by any means but the effort to entry is a lot higher than "sitting down and looking at a thing on a screen on a whim." Recently a really good youtube educator, Cogito, put out a video on Haiti and how the country is in such an underdeveloped, overexploited state. He covered the history, how the slave revolt managed to overthrow the French and how France and the US has been constantly and ruthlessly forcing the country into underdevelopment as retribution since through tax laws, embargoes, supporting and maintaining autocratic dictatorships in the name of anti-communism, culling livestock suited to island conditions to extinction, and taking over government positions with US based NGOs in efforts to keep the minimum wages sweatshop low.

This video covers a lot I recommend watching it if you want to know more about Haiti.

But before that, 4 months prior, another educational youtube channel by the name of 'RealLifeLore' put out a video on Haiti. I just want to contrast the thumbnails and titles for these and you might see the issue I take here.

They love showing up next to eachother and I just want to draw attention to the contrast in... everything, really. The visual language used in the thumbnails. "FAILED STATE WITH SKULL OVER RED ISLAND AREA" contrasted with "Dominican Republic in green with VERY NICE beside it." This tells me nothing except that the creator of the video thinks of this as a dicotomy but doesnt care why outside of how well they can engage with international trade. The Cogito video on the other hand, it shows Haiti as it's own nation. It shows the most populous region covered in red lines because that is where the majority of gang conflicts are happening. It has a picture of Papa Doc, the despotic leader that was supported by the US and France for 20 years before his son took over and was eventually overthrown. It shows Bill Clinton who is a major reason why haiti was treated the way it was throughout the 90s and up until the 2010 earthquake. And it shows one of the paramilitant gang leaders with a gun. I shouldn't need to say more about the video's titles. Look at them. "Haiti is collapsing, here's why" is very straight forward and tells you what you might want to know if you did want to know why Haiti is Collapsing. He will tell you the reasons why the nation state is not doing well and he liekly wont sugarcoat it. Seeing at this in comparison to "Why Haiti is DYING and the DR is BOOMING" really lays it down that this is going to be a comparitive video, this is going to tell you about statistical numbers and GDP and economies. The history and politics are merely footnotes compared to THE NUMBERS because it's going to talk about money and military statistics and how "law and order will need to be restored by international military intervention that isnt to enforce labor exploritation we promis." This is just what I get from the first impressions alone but I have watched both of these videos. They are incredibly stark in contrast in how they talk about the same subject. RLL seems to be completely unable to be critical of the US/French hedgemony over Haiti or the UN and several NGO's godawful responses to several crisies.

Why am I posting about this? because I think it's worth mentioning. If you have the time and patience you should go watch them both. heres the RLL video since I linked the Cogito one first because the Cogito one is simply better. It's actually empathetic and looks at the actual roots of problems instead of reading a wikipedia article at you over some stock illustrations panning around slowly. He talks about the people involved and the ideologies of the various leaders and their allegiances to different global powers instead of just jerking off about GDP and freedom burger index numbers while tut-tuting Haiti for being politically unstable and violent for having a few earthquakes and tropical storms. RLL feels like US-centric reddit-style sensationalism dressed up in facts and stastics to assert how right he is that "this is gonna be 'The North Korea of the Carribean'" (A lot of american/british geopol youtubers love calling the more impoverished of two nations split by colonial powers "The North Korea of x") Now I personally do not like receiving any kind of news about international community crises from US based media sources since they are currently profiting off and supporting the genocide of a colonized populace in the middle east by a rogue nuclear-armed apartheid colonial ethnostate. But that's just meeeeeee.

Hey sniff fans can you guys draw sniff like this more

Some legitimately great expressions from episode 19 of Moomin: Adventure Diary; Hidden Love of Little My.

dragon sniff..........,..

May he bring you good luck and good fortune for the new year :)

An extraordinary c. 500,000-300,000 year-old Acheulean handaxe knapped around a fossil shell. The shell’s central placement has often been described as an example of early artistic intent. Handaxe knapped around a fossil shell, identified as the Cretaceous bivalve mollusc Spondylus spinosus, located centrally on one face.

Aesthetically pleasing to our modern eye, recent research suggests the handaxe ‘was likely an average utilitarian tool’ in the eyes of the Acheulean toolmaker.

As much as I kind of resent the 90s series for exaggerating/over-adding Sniff's cowardice for most of his appearances, I think this scene in the Comet in Moominland movie is so fascinating to me within the context of his character in the adaptation.

The absolute gall he suddenly develops in this garnet pit is astounding. He bears his teeth at a monster for the first time. He isn't afraid of this thing, he's more concerned about getting out of the pit with his precious gems. He's angry and determined to leave this place with something valuable. He argues with his friends over leaving the garnets because to him it is more important that he leaves with them than if he even survives this encounter. (To him,) his friends aren't helping at all, they're just telling him to do the exact opposite of what he really wants while standing up there doing nothing, he sasses Little My herself for not helping.

Sniff's seemingly endless determination and desperation to get what he wants even in the face of danger and hopelessness is one of the core traits of his character that is severely understated. It could be characterized either as a self-destructive greed or an unrivaled determination and optimism to achieve his goal in life, perhaps even both at the same time. He just has to keep his gems, otherwise what's even the point?

What's even the point.

He does and I wrote a thing about how his symptoms manifest and how he copes.

Sniff from The Moomins has OCD!

After the incident with the lizard in the ravine full of garnets in Comet in Moominlamd, Sniff's OCD caused him often had intrusive thoughts that he was carrying a garnet still, and the lizard was coming to get him for it. This manifested in compulsive rituals like emptying bags he was carrying and checking their contents, or not wanting to wear clothes with pockets because he always felt like he needed to check if he was carrying garnets.

He also had other rituals his friends were aware of and weren't too disruptive to his life, like checking repeatedly if doors are locked or forgetting if he has washed his paws and wanting to wash them again, or a hundred little things he did every day without really thinking about, but the worry about carrying garnets was becoming a real problem for him. Luckily, once he confided in his friends that he thought it was a problem, after Little My had made fun of him for checking his backpack a third time, and moomintroll pushed back against her. He didn't want to be an inconvenience to his friends after all.

Luckily Snork had read a book on mental health, and was able to give Sniff some methods to manage his intrusive thoughts, like waiting five minutes to do rituals like checking if he is carrying a garnet when the urge strikes him, and not beating himself up about it if he gives in and does have to check, or distracting himself by drawing or reading. Eventually he was able to get over his fear of the lizard from the valley, though he thought it was curious that it affected him more than the comet. He still worries about silly things like locking doors and paw hygiene though, but he allows himself these less disruptive rituals, since he can work on the parts that negatively affect him the most, but he doesn't need to suppress how his mind works. Of course there are some thoughts that distress him that he doesn't have any ritual that can help, so his friends don't know about them, but he's not ready to talk about them yet.

You know what I havn't heard anyone talk about yet?

The fact the Rito use what look like their own simplified version of compound bows.

So - for anyone who doesn't know archery, there's different types of bows you can use. The type you'll usually see in media is a long bow. (There's also flat bows, recurve bows, crossbows, etc.)

A compound bow is a more modern bow - and the most common type you'd probably use now days if you joined an archery club.

You can see the familiarities - the wheels, the supports, the shapes. The Rito bows are like a wooden version.

So why is it interesting? Well - they made the design choice to chose a more modern bow style rather than a more traditional one like a longbow dispite the fact the enviroments aren't modern. So this was a very specific design decision they made. Why are compound bows more commonly used now days? Because they take less strength to pull and fire. Simple as that. To shoot a long bow, you need very good upper arm strength. Compound bows distribute the pressure to make them easier to wield if you don't have that.

Birds have hollow bones so that they can fly, and the Rito warriors seem to mostly have slender builds for dexterity. The liklihood is that they don't have incredible muscle strength. So using compound bows makes perfect sense. They can also be lighter, because a long bow or a flat bow must be made of a solid piece of wood so it can bend without breaking, but a compound bow is usually made from hollow pieces of metal (though theoretically could be made from wood), because they don't have so much pressure on them. So they'd be able to be flown around with much easier.

This probably isn't of any interest to anyone, but it was something interesting I noticed that I wanted to share!

people have got to stop overusing existential/cosmic horror when it comes to animals just Experiencing Things

like flies know what a human is. they know they are very small and other animals are very large. they've lived around megafauna as long as there have been flies. having animals the size of mountains to them is just normal.

Simple lifeform facts I take for granted that I've now seen blowing people's minds on here:

That sea urchins walk around and have mouths with teeth on their undersides

That corals are related to jellyfish

Barnacles being related to crabs and shrimp

Ants being an offshoot of wasps

Termites being totally unrelated to ants and all similarities just being convergent evolution (they're actually a group of cockroaches, but even science didn't know that part until a few years ago)

Starfish having an eye at the end of each arm

That the bodies of ticks and mites are also their heads, essentially big heads with legs (they even frequently have eyes way up on "the body")

Sperm whales have no upper teeth, and also their bodies are flat from the front

Goats also having no upper (front) teeth

Tapeworms having no mouth at all and just absorbing nutrients over their entire body surface

That flies are bigger pollinators than bees

That moths are bigger pollinators than bees

That wasps are just as important pollinators as bees (more important to many groups of plants) and when we say they're "less efficient" at it we just mean individually they get a little less pollen stuck to them.

That honeybees are nonnative to most of the world and not good for the local ecosystem, just good for human agriculture

That earthworms are also nonnative and destructive to more habitats than the reverse

There being no hard biological line between slugs and snails; all slugs aren't necessarily related to each other and there are gastropod groups where some have shells and some don't

That ALL octopuses (not just the blue ring) have a venomous bite

Most jellyfish and sea anemones being predators that eat fish

"Krill" being shrimp up to a few inches long and not some kind of microbe

Blue whales therefore being the deadliest predators to ever evolve as they eat up to several million individual animals per day

That krill are still "plankton" because plankton refers to whatever animals, algae and other organisms are carried around by the sea's currents, not to any particular group of life or a size category

Fungi being no more related to plants than we are, and in fact more like a sibling to the animal kingdom if anything

Venus fly traps being native to only one small area of North America in all the world

Parasites being essential to all ecosystems

Leeches not having a circular ring of teeth anywhere

That algae is not a type of plant

That most seaweed is just very big algae

That enough wood ends up in the ocean that plenty of sea life evolved to eat only wood

Speaking of which the fact that the "ship worms" that make tunnels in wood are just long noodly clams

Butterflies technically just being a small weird group of moths we gave a different name to

That insects only get wings once they reach maximum size and therefore there can never be a younger smaller bee or fly that's not a larva

Spiders not being any more likely to kill their own mates/young than just a cat or dog might, for most species maybe a lot less often?

Late night moomin thoughts are on the brain (ramblings below cut)

Ok so I have this rather elaborate headcanon for Snufkin's childhood; Joxter peaced out early on but left the hat as a gift. Snufkin was raised as a Mymble until he was 5 and so fed up with the crowded house and being treated as a girl (trans ftm) he runs away to live on his own. During this time he picks out a name for himself and presents as a boy! Mymblemamma entirely forgets about his existence but Little My recognizes him when he comes back to Moominvalley.

I have so many thoughts about Moomin and Snufkin's relationship but in my hc they sort out their dumbass pining after a few years as they both mature. I also have been thinking about them as older adults, Snufkin agreeing to move into a house with Moomin (though he still travels and is frequently not home) and it's a huge thing that he feels comfortable enough in his love with Moomin to be tied down in such a way.

I enjoy the idea of Moomin always being shorter than Snufkin until he hits a growthspurt in his mid/late teens and all of a sudden is taller than Snufkin when he comes back in spring. Oh also Snufkin has chronic pain and uses a cane as he gets older because I said so !!!

DJ bunny rabbit has got the whole club burrowing into the soft loam of the dance floor

Dog Girl Elizabeth Holmes convincing you to invest in Therianos, her startup that can tell if you're a good girl from a single drop of your

Anyway you ever think about the contexts in which the scientific method is treated as a virtue? Like logically, the scientific method is, at least in abstract, water tight. That's why when people are showing misapplication of science by systems and institutions it's pretty much always that their argument shows how an aesthetic or gesture towards scientific soundness has been used in an unscientific way or to create an unscientific result. This I think drives the common technocratic impulse that "if only experts ran everything, everything would be fine" - if a state upheld science in earnest as its utmost virtue, it would be infallibly logical and therefore generally infallible. But do we want the state to be infallible? I don't want to just argue that the "science" of economics is bunk because rigorous economic science, materialist analysis frequently refutes the basic conclusions of what most economists treat as a given, I want economics to not be taken as an implicit authority that is allowed to rule and govern the lives of human beings and the general health of the planet because what is moral, sustainable, and creates the most equity and happiness is not necessary based in what can be proven on a whiteboard. Idk

Liberal Dissociative Amnesia

The Cass Review is the most discussed political topic among trans people in the UK right now. The 388 page report by Dr Hillary Cass examines the gender services available to young people in the UK and concludes that young people are being let down, gender services need to be taken out of reach for trans people under 25 and a new system which urges avoiding transition at every turn needs to be created which will refer people at age 25.

I just watched Michael Walker on Novara Media say "I think there are some very difficult questions here that I really don't know the answer to", and I find myself baffled by statements like this. I did actually understand in watching what specific questions he thought were "difficult", and I think someone could probably answer them pretty effectively to a standard he was happy with if he had a well informed trans person who he trusted in his life. The problem is, the whole segment was presented with as much equivocation and both-sidesing as possible, this constant air of "what if"

I feel like I'm observing a dissociative amnesia that people like this run into when discussing something that people they can easily see are bigots have declared to be scientific and complicated and requiring serious scrutiny. The Novara team understand the broad wave of anti-trans attacks happening across much of the world, particularly America and Britain, right now, even if they won't necessarily call it genocide - so why does this story exist completely devoid of context? Why is it suddenly time to ask "difficult questions"?

Walker wonders out loud about people on a spectrum where at one end people would have always been cis under all circumstances and on the other they would have always been trans, and in the middle of course are people who might transition if it's easier and there's less stigma. His point as far as I can tell is that somewhere in there it could get TOO easy to transition and then people will do it and regret it. Do I need to bother saying this is why we have informed consent?

It's like the people trying to wipe us out are playing Simon Says with the most progressive of our liberal media. The progressives can see bigotry for what it is most of the time and then somehow suddenly it becomes ✨special science bigotry ✨ and, perhaps because there's an institutional weight behind it, perhaps because it claims to be a serious study, or perhaps just because of the aesthetics of intellectualism the progressive journalists mysteriously forget about the whole wider context of transphobia around the world and have to apply rigorous journalistic standards to it.

"There's social contagion!" "No that's bigotry"

"They're just undiagnosed autistic people!" "No they're trans AND autistic"

"They're coming after the kids!" "No, that's age old queerphobia"

"✨Simon Says ✨ there's social contagion!" "oh well this warrants very careful discussion, I need to think very hard about this before taking a side here, it's a toxic culture war debate and we must remain ✨rational✨ when discussing issues like this..."

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.