From Washington, D.C., the rings would only fill a portion of the sky, but appear striking nonetheless. Here, we see them at sunrise.
From Guatemala, only 14 degrees above the equator, the rings would begin to stretch across the horizon. Their reflected light would make the moon much brighter.
From Earth’s equator, Saturn’s rings would be viewed edge-on, appearing as a thin, bright line bisecting the sky.
At the March and September equinoxes, the Sun would be positioned directly over the rings, casting a dramatic shadow at the equator.
At midnight at the Tropic of Capricorn, which sits at 23 degrees south latitude, the Earth casts a shadow over the middle of the rings, while the outer portions remain lit.
I figured out a simple guide to the alignment chart last night
Lawful: Rules matter more to me than individuals. Chaotic: Individuals matter more to me than rules.
Good: Other people’s well-being is more important than my own. Evil: My own well-being is more important than other people’s.
Neutrals: My opinion of what is more important is determined on a case-by-case basis.
So a Lawful Good character’s guiding moral philosophy might be “I follow the rules because the rules keep people safe, even if they are sometimes inconvenient or harmful to me or other individuals.” A Chaotic Evil character’s guiding moral philosophy would be like “Screw the rules and screw you.”
This is a very succint way of explaining a long post from a few months ago. It is also kind of how it was originally written, and is what I use. No more “Is he chaotic neutral or chaotic evil” questions.
Ever wonder how big wolves are and why running from them is a really bad idea?
This had me so fucked up the first time I worked at the zoo. Because honestly they just look like big German-Huskies when they’re not wild. They look like big puppies. And then… they get close to you… And it’s suddenly kinda fucking terrifying. Like “oh this is the animal that used to scare people shitless.” “This is the animal that used to run through nightmares and poems so much.” And you suddenly fucking get it. As cool as these animals are far away, as important as the animals are in their natural environment, as much as we need them to survive… they’re still pretty fucking terrifying
can you believe these things became our friends
And then people domesticated them and now sleep with them in their beds.
We’re not a species meant to last
I’d actually argue the opposite!
We took these super efficient killing machines and befriended them and now they love and protect us as much as we (ideally) love and protect them
Cats basically domesticated themselves so that they could share in our food, medical care, and affection
In urban spaces, prey species know that there’s a higher likelihood that humans will help you if you’re stuck or injured than them killing or maiming you
It’s just, over time we see trends of our species overcoming environmental pressures that would and do lead to extinction in other species by sharing and forming close bonds with other sentient organisms and just kinda… aggressively community-bonding our way out of it?
For a long time there’s been this pervading idea that we, as a species, are just innately violent and terrible and “sinful” and it’s been that violence that let us survive (see the hunting hypothesis of human evolution). But that’s not what we see
We are, at our core, a species that looks into the face of something other, and thinks “I wonder if they want to be friends?” so long as the individual isn’t actively trying to kill us. Sure, tons of people do awful things every day, but for every terrible act or thought on this Earth, there are a dozen acts of kindness that people do casually for complete strangers
So yeah. We looked at these massive fluffy monsters with the sharp claws and crushing jaws rooting in our garbage just beyond the campfire and thought, the way no other species before or after us has done to the same extent; “They look friend-shaped!”
And they were. And that is how we got to be the dominant species on this planet
“They look friend-shaped!”
I’ve been to this place before! We went for my youngest sister’s birthday, and a bunch of the wolf dogs were used in the filmimg of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. I got a nice kiss on the cheek from one of the she-wolf dogs!
my fave bit of black dog folklore is that in some folklore there is a belief that the first person buried in a cemetery stays there and doesn’t cross over and helps other spirits move on and protects them from evil spirits, now naturally people want to avoid this fate for their loved ones and themselves so they would sometimes bury a dog first and it would return in the shape of a big black dog and protect the newly dead from evil spirits and occasionally the living as well
DELANCEYPLACE.COM 12/18/12 – WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT
In today’s selection – for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:
“Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parchments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ wakes up in the early morning following her ‘first sleep’ and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the ‘first sleep’ on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the ‘first sleep” and the ‘second sleep’ was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn’t always the one long block that we consider it today.
“From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning – the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was perhaps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men ‘do it better’ and women ‘have more enjoyment.’ …
“About three hundred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to fourteen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experiment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.
“That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.
“Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the subjects’ brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feeling after an orgasm. … The subjects in Wehr’s study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.
“Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light – and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows – people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. … [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers – not to mention your average physician – have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong.”
I was researching this a couple months ago! Here are some other links about it:
i do this, i thought it was just me being weird but it sounds like it’s a legit thing!!! i have a nap around 8pm-9pmish, then when i wake up i do all the stuff that i need to do for the next day, watch a few shows, then go to sleep properly. i’m a night owl so am at my most mentally productive late at night, but i have to have the first session of sleep in order to be energised enough to be up that late.
as a welsh person i want you all to accept that W is a vowel because honestly it makes pronouncing acronyms so much easier. wlw becomes ‘ooloo’, wjec becomes ‘oojeck’, love yourselves and stop giving us shit when we tell you welsh has 7 vowels. english actually has 15 vowel sounds but because y’all only use 5 letters you have to rely on a spelling system devised by satan
and please, enough with the “keyboard smashing” jokes. not original, not funny.
yeah, we can actually because the spelling is phonetic. meanwhile english folks have placenames like bicester or keighley or beaulieu, which you have to learn the pronunciation for individually because the rules are so inconsistent. i mean people can’t even agree how to pronounce marylebone but sure welsh place names are the weird ones
fun fact: welsh orthography is actually easy to read if you take your head out of your arse for one minute and learn our alphabet – just like french, or spanish, or korean, because surprise! languages use different spelling systems that are not based on english. novel, i know – and in the 18th century, travelling schools were able to teach people to read and write welsh in a matter of months, so that wales enjoyed a literate majority, a rare thing in europe at the time
fun fact: the english have been taking the piss out of welsh for years, just like they’ve been doing for irish, and scots gaelic, and cornish, and british sign language, and a hundred and one other languages, because evidently the fact that the whole world isn’t anglophone and monocultured and Still Part Of The Empire is a problem, and something that needs to be corrected
(quietly cheers in support of the Welsh, and your language sounds beautiful, too)
drag them, wales!
Go Wales
the thing people need to get through their heads is what the original statement is:
W is a vowel, and LL and FF are single letters not two Ls or two Fs. Saying LL is two letters is as dumb as saying W is two letters just because it looks like two Vs.
We have a different alphabet, it just looks a lot like the english one.
Welsh is, in addition, one of the oldest surviving indo-European languages. It dates back as far as 4,000 years and is one of the few surviving Celtic languages.
Question of Smoke 