This is relevant once again. I apologize if you are a real human getting blocked/reported.
same energy
no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out - we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not - I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input
When a student copies an essay online instead of writing it and then painstakingly changes every word to a synonym until the text no longer makes any sense...
call that the Ship of Thesaurus
Any educator who doesn't feel this on a visceral level has never had to experience the psychic pain of reading the phrase "Unused York City."
A lecturer at Middlesex University in 2014, Chris Sadler, coined the term "Rogetism" for these. Perhaps the best:
ALT
I'm trying to hide my plagiarism but the clapping of my sinister buttocks keeps alerting the lecturer
ABCDEFGHI KLMNOP RSTUVWXY
23/26
Day old chicks are so funny, they just fall asleep so easily
youll have to excuse them... it is very tiring to be small and tiny
me: i don’t want to see jellyfish so i will blacklist the tag #jellyfish
people with no common sense: je11yf1sh, je11¥fi5h, j*llyf*sh, je//ÿf!sh, j3ï||yf¡sh, gel lee fisk
result: cannot account for the sheer amount of possible ways to alter the word jellyfish
conclusion: i have to see jellyfish now.
Once again, tumblr is not tiktok, tag properly.
i enjoy that every single human’s reaction to penguin is unrestrained delight
And penguins lack large terrestrial predators, so their reaction to humans tends to be, “HELLO STRANGE GIANT PENGUINS, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? DO YOU HAVE ANY FISH?”
I will reblog this on my deathbed.
Please let him science 🐧
Yeah, that doesn't prevent pregnancy.
Dfgajagakala it’s so you don’t get a UTI 😂
*facepalm* So, given that sex ed in the US is a tire fire:
Vagina-having people have a shorter urethra, which means we’re more prone to UTIs because the bacteria doesn’t have to travel as far to get up into your bladder and cause a problem.
Which means if you’re exposing your bits to bacteria (as with sex), peeing will flush out bacteria in the urethra. (Urine isn’t actually sterile - that’s a myth - but you’re *supposed to* have a little bit of bacteria - that’s how bodies work. But it still flushes things out that shouldn’t be there.)
Oh! You should ALSO pee after you masturbate, especially if it involves penetration with fingers/toys/etc
So I’ve blocked like five transphobes on this post, which I feel should have been relatively uncontroversial.
If you’re one of the people saying “You meant ‘women’”, fuck you. I meant “people who have a vagina, regardless of their gender or lack thereof”, and you can go fuck yourself with a cactus.
And you should pee afterward, so you don’t get a UTI.
Pee within thirty minutes of sex or masturbation, too, per my college doctor who saw the UTIs so often that she diagnosed mine while I was booking my appointment over the phone. (We ran tests too, she was just, ahem, intimately familiar with the problem.) She also recommended that people with penises do it too, because the threat doesn't vanish just because you have a longer urethra.
So, please pee after sex!
I think the most unintentionally pretentious part of me is I genuinely forget that most people do not have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of mythology and folklore. I literally just assume most people know at least the name of every Greek god. My mom and I were watching the Banshees of Inisherin and at the start, she asked "Do you know what a banshee is?" and I was so stunned because it would never occur to me to ask that question because I would never assume the average person doesn't know what a banshee is. The average person knows what a banshee is right. You know what a banshee is right. You know the names of the greek gods right. You know that norse myth where loki fucked the horse right. Right. RIGHT
Actual conversation I had last week:
Coworker 1: - so I've suggested we name the project Charybdis
Me: haha yeah, because [stuff relating to the project and to mythical monsters], and if the sister project goes ahead too we can call it Scylla
Coworker 1: exactly my plan
Coworker 2: what in the actual living fuck are you guys talking about
I have a pet rat named Garrett who is an agouti, meaning he’s brown on top with a grey belly. I have brown dog stairs for the rats to leave their cage with that i keep on top of the cage, which is a place they aren’t supposed to go. Being on top makes it hard for me to reach them and get them back cause the cage is 6 feet tall and I am not. Anyway, one time Garrett climbed up on top of the cage and I was so distracted by his siblings I didnt see him escape until I noticed movement above my eyeline. I looked up and saw him, and he was on the dog stairs, and he saw me see him so he just closed his eyes and flattened himself down to the stairs. That’s when I realized he knows colors. He knows the stairs are brown. He knows he is brown. He tried to fucking camouflage himself right in front of me the little shit
touching grass isn't enough some of y'all need to drive out to the countryside and look at the stars
this post was aimed at the discourse-addled and terminally online, but i'm glad it's reaching an audience of people who are just excited about stargazing in general
sparklecryptid