coolest-capybara

[coolest-capybara]

Cleaning women washing a crucifix, 1938

via reddit

[coolest-capybara]

'A Clutch of Vampires' by Edward Gorey, 1974

[coolest-capybara]

Do you check for trackers and remove them before sharing links?

[coolest-capybara]

One small but extremely annoying effect of Tech Modernization or w/e is how UI contrast is garbage anymore, especially just, like, application windows in general.

"Ooh our scrollbar expands when you mouse over it! Or does it? Only you can know by sitting there like an idiot for 3 seconds waiting for it to expand, only to move your cursor away just as it does so!" or Discord's even more excellent "scrollbar is 2 shades off of the background color and is one (1) pixel wide" fuck OFF

I tried to move a system window around yesterday and had to click 3 times before I got the half of the upper bar that let me drag it. Why are there two separate bars with absolutely nothing to visually differentiate them on that.

"Well if you look closely-" I should not!! have to squint!!! at the screen for a minute straight to detect basic UI elements!! Not mention how ableist this shit is, and for what? ~✨Aesthetic✨~?

and then every website and app imitates this but in different ways so everything is consistently dogshit to try to use but not always in ways you can immediately grok it's!!!! terrible!!!! just put lines on things again I'm begging you!!!!

[coolest-capybara]

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

[coolest-capybara]

The marine eels and other members of the superorder  Elopomorpha have a leptocephalus larval stage, which are flat and transparent. This group is quite diverse, containing 801 species in 24 orders, 24 families and 156 genera (super diverse). 

Leptocephali have compressed bodies that contain jelly-like substances on the inside, with a thin layer of muscle with visible myomeres on the outside, a simple tube as a gut, dorsal and anal fins, but they lack pelvic fins. They also don’t have any red blood cells (most likely is respiration by passive diffusion), which they only begin produce when the change into the juvenile glass eel stage. Appears to feed on marine snow, tiny free-floating particles in the ocean.

This large size leptocephalus must be a species of Muraenidae (moray eels), and probably the larva of a long thin ribbon eel, which is metamorphosing, and is entering shallow water to finish metamorphosis into a young eel, in Bali, Indonesia.

Video: Filmed by Barry Haythorne and Rob Rutgers, HRF U/W Production

[coolest-capybara]

"Whatever is in that flask would fix me" it's piss. Any time you see a Medieval illustration of a guy at a sick person's bedside holding up a flask and peering intently at it, nine times out of ten that specific visual trope is meant to be a depiction of a doctor performing urinalysis. The flask is full of piss.

[coolest-capybara]

I have come into possession of an ornithology book from the 1930's and they had such a way of describing birds back then, modern publishers of birding booking should take note! Here are some of the bangers.

yes, this book refers to the anhinga as a water-turkey

[coolest-capybara]

[coolest-capybara]

i think too many people operate under the assumption that emotions are some frivilous fantasy of the mind and have no impact on the physical world, which is a cute thought when Humans are an animal that can die from being kinda stressed out

[coolest-capybara]

if we could speak with lobsters and understand each other I think they might be able to share some really good wisdom as such a long-lived species.

but then I realized. the problem with such a plan

[coolest-capybara]

Sleeping beauty with black Cat by Si Ziming, 1979-

[coolest-capybara]

okay now that much ado is closed i think it's time i tell u all about fleabenedick

[coolest-capybara]

Yes hi hello where is my production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream where it’s revealed that Titania was, true to Queen Fae form, not waylaid by magic love pollen, but actively trying to fuck with Oberon for fucking with her

[coolest-capybara]

I feel like I need to tell everyone how brilliantly the Globe incorporated a deaf Gildenstern into the 2018 Hamlet and then force all of you to watch it

ok, so Gildenstern is played by a deaf actor, Nadia Nadarajah. he* signs all his lines, and either Rosencratz interprets for him, or the person he’s talking to says something that makes it obvious what he just said, depending. how each character reacts to Gildenstern is completely in-character and often hilarious

Claudius and Gertrude are intensely awkward around Gildenstern. they obviously don’t know BSL so they just gesture emphatically but aimlessly when they talk.

Hamlet, who of course is friends with R&G, *does* know BSL. he starts off by signing fluently whenever he’s talking to them but, as his distrust of them grows, he signs less and less until he’s only signing the equivalent of “fuck off” whenever he talks

Polonius just shouts really loud whenever he tries to talk to Gildenstern

it’s all brilliant and adds another layer of humor and pathos and you should all watch it

*casting at the Globe right now is gender neutral so I’m just going to use the character’s pronouns

[coolest-capybara]

I wrote this in like a rambley freak out at work. Forgive me.

So like the line ~kill Claudio~ is a bit of meme. I have made memes about it. But like, I love it. I love Much Ado, it’s 100% in my top 5 favorite plays (not that I could ever actually decide on my top five), and it has so many killer lines. “I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me.” “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.” “I do love nothing in the world so well as you. Is not that strange?” “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.” “I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and be buried in thy eyes—and, moreover, I will go with thee to thy uncle’s.” But if I really, really think about it Kill Claudio has to be my favorite line in the play because it does so much. It is fucking hilarious line and it’s also so serious and filled with so much meaning.

So, we’re in this scene and Benedick says “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” He’s just told Beatrice he loves her and she said it back! They’re full of this giddy, lovey energy. “Come, bid me do anything for thee.” What she should say is marry me. What Benedick is expecting her to say is marry me. What an audience is expecting her to say is marry me. But what she says is, I want you to kill your best friend. “Kill Claudio.”

The anatomy of the most basic joke can be broken down into two parts: setup and punchline. The setup is usually something innocuous something you would hear and think ah yes I know how this is supposed to end (Two men walk into a bar; Bid me do anything for thee). The punchline, the part that makes it a joke, is the surprise. The story doesn’t end where the audience thinks it’s going to (the third one ducks; kill Claudio). Half of what makes something funny is the surprise. Kill Claudio is definitely a surprise to everyone and can 100% be played for laughs.

But here’s where Kill Claudio becomes more than a joke.

Beatrice knows what she is. She spends the whole play doing whatever she wants, saying whatever she wants, because she doesn’t have any skin in the game. Her life isn’t over if she doesn’t get married. She’s a well-off woman who doesn’t have any parents or anything to inherit, so she doesn’t have anything to lose and really doesn’t have anything to gain either. Beatrice is as free as woman can be in her situation. She doesn’t have any power, but she does have her freedom. Why would she ever do anything that requires her to give that freedom up?

So if we back this scene up from Kill Claudio to Hero’s wedding. We watch the most important person in Beatrice’s life get ruined in just one moment. Claudio breaks his promise to marry Hero, a promise that in Elizabethan England would have been near unbreakable, and humiliates her in the most public way imaginable, almost guaranteeing that Hero will never again find an eligible suitor, which means she will never get married and when her father dies, her entire life and the lives of everyone she loves will be ruined.

Then we come to Beatrice and Benedick. Alone for the first time since they realized how they felt, and they confess their love.

“Come, bid me do anything for thee.”

Beatrice can change her life right here. Hero’s life is ruined and Beatrice can no longer rely on her family to provide for her. But she can marry Benedick, her uncle can make her the heir, and she can save her family. But the person she cares for most would still be ruined.

“Come, bid me do anything for thee.”

The only way to restore a smidgen of Hero’s reputation is for someone to challenge Claudio.

“Come, bid me do anything for thee.”

Beatrice acknowledges something important. Her freedom doesn’t give her power. She can’t issue any challenge. She can’t save her cousin. The only person who would have that power is a man. She says, “Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right her!” and “Oh, that I were a man for his sake! Or that I had any friend would be a man for my sake!”

Beatrice is entirely self-aware. She knows her limits. So when Benedick offers to do anything for her she asks him to do the one thing that might save her cousin.

“Kill Claudio.”

[coolest-capybara]

Honestly though, I love Much Ado, it really feels like ol’ Willy Shakes sat down like “ok, let’s see, I need something light, gotta have something to balance out the histories and tragedies this year. not in the mood for protagonists that are humorously bad at things though. what if I set up a tragedy plot and then made everyone actually communicate with each other and solve problems on purpose.”