#Blog of Interests

[bonefall]

Is there beef with the Holstein cows and you or what was that joke lol

It's kind of wild It's just never come up on this blog before, but I HATE holsteins. Bottom 10 cow breeds for me. I hate how they're so common they account for the majority of milk produced. I hate that they're the "default" cow to the point where some don't even know cattle HAVE other colors. I hate their tiny horns (IF THEY EVEN HAVE THAT. LOSER ASS HORNLESS COW) and their painfully massive udders.

Legit I'm trying so hard to not launch into a No Mouth Must Scream style AM speech-- shoot my hand slipped.

(AM speech about why i dont like holsteins below the cut)

For starters, I have to give a brief lesson on what these terms mean; the "Holstein" is the American strain of the "Frisian" breed. Frisians are an ancient breed from Frisia, in the north of what we now consider the Netherlands. Crosses between the breeds are "Holstein-Frisians."

(There’s even more to this but im keeping it as simple as possible. Also one of my friends is Frisian and she is probably going to kill me for describing it like that.)

Historically, livestock was adapted to the environment they lived in. Frisians were bred by the Frisii people for hundreds of years in extremely grass-rich, lush, flat environments. The "polders" of the northern parts of the Netherlands. They're huge and eat a LOT of food.

Traditional Frisians were developed to produce as much meat and milk from a single individual as possible, without compromising the health of the cattle with constant inbreeding to get quick gains. We are talking about a breed that is over 2000 years old. They had the perfect environment to make The Ultimate Food Cow and by god they did it. I can respect that.

So, take that, drag it across an ocean to a place that does NOT have polders, and add the rapid enshittification of capitalism to it. BAM you've got a fucking holstein.

There is ONE goal for "improving" the holstein. Make More Milk. As long as the black and white milkbag leaks enough, nothing else matters. Health? Fertility? Feed ratio? Ability to not die of infection? WHO CARES. MILK LINE GO UP.

Over 90% of holsteins are inbred to start with, because Milk Line Go Up. To the tune of having an average COI of 8%-- where extreme negative effects (think Hapsburgs) start to crop up around 10%

Holstein bulls are aggressive bastards (many dairy bulls are), so no one wants to keep intact males in their herds, meaning most cows are artificially inseminated

Not being limited by the natural lifespan of a living bull means that the same stud can keep having direct offspring for decades after his death

Toystory the bull had 500,000 calves before he died, and hit over 1 million offspring in 2015. That's ONE animal and to put this in perspective, there are 9 million holsteins in the US.

DON'T WORRY IT GETS WORSE

Not only can 99% of holsteins be traced back to just two bulls-- 99% of male holsteins share one of two exact Y chromosomes with those two bulls.

The gene pool is so small that it's equivalent to about 60 individuals. Warrior Cat allegiances are larger than that. That's barely bigger than modern ThunderClan.

"Massive lack of genetic diversity" does not begin to capture the existential dread of this situation. Mark my words, WATCH, when the Bird Flu finally mutates a strain that rips through a mammalian population, it's gonna be in the USA and it's going to be through our dairy cattle.

This is not prophecy or me laying a curse on the land, this is the natural consequence of basing the stability of US milk production on the equivalent of 9 million clones of two classrooms worth of individuals, and then packing them in close quarters

And we don't have to wait for doomsday for the impacts to be apparent on the cattle themelves

Holstein fertility has also dropped by half since the 1960s when the intensive inbreeding really kicked into high gear

Because their whole body is dedicating all of their resources to milk production, they have a notoriously "bony" frame.

Show judges, however, like this because they think that's a very "feminine" look for a 1600 pound ruminant. Very normal thing to think.

Like. I don't know if i can communicate this to people who don't look at cows a lot (it's not quite as obviously dramatic as a pug skull) but here is a comparison of an "ideal" show holstein and an "unselected" holstein from a herd that's been established as a sort of "control group" for what they looked like back in the 1960s;

The way that the artery on the "modern" cow's belly runs to the udder like a big pink worm freaks me out the most ngl

The udder also bulges out from between the back legs

The show cow is so thin

And then compare these both to a Holstein-Frisian cross who leans more on the Frisian side;

Proper weight, developed legs. Its biggest "problem" is actually just the udder shape-- deep udders, which "hang" low like that, aren't optimal for milk-focused breeds because the higher away from the ground the less chance there is of infection. In that department, the "unselected" holstein clearly outclasses the holstein-frisian.

But it probably won't be surprising to hear that the "show holstein," with its massive, swollen udder, is SUPER prone to infections such as mastitis.

But it is also just more prone to getting sick generally

And, to keep up with these insane demands, holsteins need a TON of food. You aren't going to just turn these things out into a pasture and be done with it. Even its ancestor the Frisian needed premium Dutch polder grass to be such a good cow-- crank that up to 11 with these Monuments to Humanity's Hubrice

The Texas Longhorn developed in semi-feral conditions and can eat a bush to become the best thing in a 10 mile radius. The Scottish Highland was iron-forged in upland moors with a steady diet of turf and rain.

Meanwhile if a Holstein has less than 5 homemade meals a day without poland spring bottled water it will die to death.

And the WORST part? You have to use these if you want to make money in dairy farming. It's WAAY too expensive to just run a suboptimal farm. Their milk isn't great, but they sure do make a lot of it.

...so Holsteins and Holstein-Frisians (and other "super efficient" breeds) have absolutely decimated heritage cattle. The American Milking Devon is a deep reddish brown with gorgeous horns and low maintenance; rare. Randall Linebacks are painted with lines of white speckles down the back and can be used for any purpose; critically endangered. The Niata was a pug-faced cow who could fight jaguars; extinct.

And THAT'S what makes me hate them most of all. I LOVE cows, but whenever I see a reference to one, it's a holstein. It's always boring black and white splotches with big pink udders. They're practically synonymous with "cow" when their homogeniety is actually hiding much cooler breeds from you.

Did you know cows can be tiger-striped?

And that England has its own type of longhorn?

Or that cow horns can twist upwards like an antelope?

And that they can have REALLY LONG ears?

And that they can be blue?

And that's not even getting into some of the cows that have gotten a small crumb of attention lately, such as Highlands, Ankole-Watusi, and Texas Longhorns. There's so many cool cows out there! And they're all really different from holsteins! MOST of them are also a lot healthier and produce tastier milk and meat!

TL;DR yeah i don't like holsteins and I like sniping at them. For reasons both legit and petty.

[tactfullyinappropriate]

It's like we all collectively forgot as a society that friendship and just connection in general takes effort. Even if you meet someone you immediately click with, it takes hanging out about 20 times (!) to become friends. And guess what, some of those 20 meetings might be awkward or unimpressive.

We all want to reap the benefits (having a friend circle, having a partner, getting married) without doing the work (going to events, interacting with people, learning to handle conflict maturely, dating). Myself included. If I could, I'd never leave the house or go on another mediocre date again... except, that's part of the process.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, the cure to the loneliness epidemic is touching some grass and building tolerance for tedious in-person interactions.

[aphel1on]

AuDHD is so funny sometimes like what do you mean my hyperfixations/special interests will last for years on end or possibly forever but they will cycle out every month or two with absolutely no transitional period or warning. like i will think about the same topic every day obsessively for 46 days in a row and on the 47th day with no visible cause adhd brain goes "ok! bored of that now" and autism brain goes "dw i got something queued up for ya" and i blast into full blown obsession on some other topic whose mental file folders haven't opened in 9 months. brain's out here treating hyperfixations like a crop rotation. once the dopamine runs out it cycles in another one but once something's in the rotation it never ever leaves. last summer we brought in one from when i was 11. it's so funny to me but frustrating too bc like. i cannot stress enough my inability to predict or control this. or how completely abrupt and random it can be

EDIT: seems this is more common among ND people than i thought, and probably not limited to AuDHD specifically :] i was just describing my own experiences and didn't expect this post to blow up, so don't take me for an authority, but i'm glad it resonated with so many of y'all!

[sexhaver]

every time i see what the Duolingo owl is up to or whatever Arby's latest crazy crossover is i get war flashbacks to the Denny's tumblr circa 2012ish. we could have stopped this. we saw a fish evolving legs and kept shoving it back into the water and it kept coming back and now we're drowning in legged fish. we should have stomped it into paste.

[desultory-suggestions]

People who love you shouldn't make you feel ashamed of your interests and hobbies. What you enjoy is wonderful, even if it's uncommon, complicated, stereotypical, etc. Please keep sharing your lovely energy with the world.

[fumifooms]

Omg guys he just genuinely likes bugs and mollusks and critters 😭💘💔 Forced to noble when he just wanna crouch and watch things skitter in the dirt…

[hellsitegenetics]

Hi i classified all your insects for you :)

Lepidoptera: 56

Hymenoptera: 8

Coleoptera: 25

Megaloptera: 6

Ephemeroptera: 2

Diptera: 20

Trichoptera: 2

Dermaptera: 1

Hemiptera: 4

Neuroptera: 1

Mecoptera: 2

Arachnids: 2

I find this interesting because the amount of species, despite being ‘random’, is still biased towards butterflies and moths, despite beetles having about twice as many species. Do people speak too much like moths? Who knows.

Can I get a mantis someday I love mantids

i was going to say thank you for the headache but with enough neurodivergency in your head and enough love in your heart anything can be a joyous whimsical endeavor. godspeed soldier

[friendsimulator]

"Why did you blaze this"

For the bit??? Let me live

[godplskillmexd]

someone kidnapping me would fix me. i’m not joking. please get me out of here. please save me

[dunmeshistash]

Airport

[cannedbabs]

I might be Kirby posting here-and-there. Flings Metadede at you. Go, my scarab 🫱- - - -🪲

[thefallling]

Dearest fellow tumblrinas, Do I have a poll for you!

Got curious.

Anyways please reblog for larger sample size

If you do I'll give you a big hug :D (with consent)

(ok just now realizing it says "less that 100" I mean less than! oopsies

[noodles-and-tea]

hello honored tumblr artist noodles and tea have you heard of the podcast The Magnus Archives, and if so, do you have any thoughts on it

I love tma!!

[anghraine]

It's always been intriguing to me that, even when Elizabeth hates Darcy and thinks he's genuinely a monstrous, predatory human being, she does not ever perceive him as sexually predatory. In fact, literally no one in the novel suggests or believes he is sexually dangerous at any point. There's not the slightest hint of that as a factor in the rumors surrounding him, even though eighteenth-century fiction writers very often linked masculine villainy to a possibility of sexual predation in the subtext or just text*. Austen herself does this over and over when it comes to the true villains of her novels.

Even as a supposed villain, though, Darcy is broadly understood to be predatory and callous towards men who are weaker than him in status, power, and personality—with no real hint of sexual threat about it at all (certainly none towards women). Darcy's "villainy" is overwhelmingly about abusing his socioeconomic power over other men, like Wickham and Bingley. This can have secondhand effects on women's lives, but as collateral damage. Nobody thinks he's targeting women.

In addition, Elizabeth's interpretations of Darcy in the first half of the book tend to involve associating him with relatively prestigious women by contrast to the men in his life (he's seen as extremely dissimilar from his male friends and, as a villain, from his father). So Elizabeth understands Darcy-as-villain not in terms of the popular, often very sexualized images of masculine villainy at the time, but in terms of rich women she personally despises like Caroline Bingley and Lady Catherine de Bourgh (and even Georgiana Darcy; Elizabeth assumes a lot about Georgiana in service of her hatred of Darcy before ever meeting her).

The only people in Elizabeth's own community who side with Darcy at this time are, interestingly, both women, and likely the highest-status unmarried women in her community: Charlotte Lucas and Jane Bennet. Both have some temperamental affinities with Darcy, and while it's not clear if he recognizes this, he quietly approves of them without even knowing they've been sticking up for him behind the scenes.

This concept of Darcy-as-villain is not just Elizabeth's, either. Darcy is never seen by anyone as a sexual threat no matter how "bad" he's supposed to be. No one is concerned about any danger he might pose to their daughters or sisters. Kitty is afraid of him, but because she's easily intimidated rather than any sense of actual peril. Even another man, Mr Bennet, seems genuinely surprised to discover late in the novel that Darcy experiences attraction to anything other than his own ego.

I was thinking about this because of how often the concept of Darcy as an anti-hero before Elizabeth "fixes him" seems caught up in a hypermasculine, sexually dangerous, bad boy image of him that even people who actively hate him in the novel never subscribe to or remotely imply. Wickham doesn't suggest anything of the kind, Elizabeth doesn't, the various gossips of Meryton don't, Mr Bennet and the Gardiners don't, nobody does. If anything, he's perceived as cold and sexless.

Wickham in particular defines Darcy's villainy in opposition to the patriarchal ideal his father represented. Wickham's version of their history works to link Darcy to Lady Anne, Lady Catherine (primarily), and Georgiana rather than any kind of masculine sexuality. This version of Darcy is a villain who colludes with unsympathetic high-status women to harm men of less power than themselves, but villain!Darcy poses no direct threat to women of any kind.

It's always seemed to me that there's a very strong tendency among fans and academics to frame Darcy as this ultra-gendered figure with some kind of sexual menace going on, textually or subtextually. He's so often understood entirely in terms of masculinity and sexual desire, with his flaws closely tied to both (whether those flaws are his real ones, exaggerated, or entirely manufactured). Yet that doesn't seem to be his vibe to other characters in the story. There's a level at which he does not register to other characters as highly masculine in his affiliations, highly sexual, or in general as at all unsafe** to be around, even when they think he's a monster. And I kind of feel like this makes the revelations of his actual decency all along and his full-on heroism later easier to accept in the end.

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*The incompetently awful villain(?) in Sanditon, for instance, imagines himself another Lovelace (a reference to the famous rapist-villain of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa). Evelina's sheltered education and lack of protectors makes her vulnerable to sexual exploitation in Frances Burney's Evelina, though she ultimately manages to avoid it. There's frequently an element of sexual predation in Gothic novels even of very different kinds (e.g. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho and Matthew Lewis's The Monk both lean into this, in their wildly dissimilar styles). William Godwin's novel Caleb Williams, a book mostly about the destructive evils of class hierarchies and landowning classes specifically, depicts the mutual obsession of the genteel villain Falkland and working class hero Caleb in notoriously homoerotic terms (Godwin himself added a preface in 1832 saying, "Falkland was my Bluebeard, who had perpetrated atrocious crimes ... Caleb Williams was the wife"). This list could go on for a very long time.

**Darcy is also not usually perceived by other characters as a particularly sexual, highly masculine person in a safe way, either, even once his true character is known. Elizabeth emphasizes the resilience of Darcy's love for her more than the passionate intensity they both evidently feel; in the later book, she does sometimes makes assumptions about his true feelings or intentions based on his gender, but these assumptions are pretty much invariably shown to be wrong. In general the cast is completely oblivious to the attraction he does feel; even Charlotte, who wonders about something in that quarter, ends up doubting her own suspicions and wonders if he's just very absent-minded.

The novel emphasizes that he is physically attractive, but it goes to pains to distinguish this from Wickham's sex appeal or the charisma of a Bingley or Fitzwilliam. Mr Bennet (as mentioned above) seems to have assumed Darcy is functionally asexual, insofar as he has a concept of that. Most of the fandom-beloved moments in which Darcy is framed as highly sexual, or where he himself is sexualized for the audience, are very significantly changed in adaptation or just invented altogether for the adaptations they appear in. Darcy watching Elizabeth after his bath in the 1995 is invented for that version, him snapping at Elizabeth in their debates out of UST is a persistent change from his smiling banter with her in the book, the fencing to purge his feelings is invented, the pond swim/wet shirt is invented. In the 2005 P&P, the instant reaction to Elizabeth is invented, the hand flex of repressed passion is invented, the Netherfield Ball dance as anything but an exercise in mutual frustration is invented, the near-kiss after the proposal in invented, etc. And in those as well, he's never presented as sexually predatory, not even as a "villain."

[sleepiestoken]

i've just pulled out some interesting quotes from the metal hammer article for myself and anyone else interested. anything bolded for emphasis by me.

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George Lever [Sleep Token producer 2016-2021]: The starting point was removing this idea of the music you listen to being related to the person making it. By being anonymous, the listener is forced to relate to what they're actually hearing.

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James Monteith [Tesseract guitarist/publicist at Hold Tight PR]: I was approached by Tom Quigley, who was a scene regular and ran a few blogs at the time. He said he was working with this new band, would we maybe be interested in doing their press? We ended up talking for an hour, and he rolled out the whole concept, the imagery and everything about it... other than the music.

George: The lore/narrative was pretty loose still, but it definitely existed.

James: There was nothing specific as such, more this idea of creating an occult vibe and feeling, led by this prophet-like character who leads a religion.

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George: A lot of the first EP was actually us trying stuff out. We recorded the drums on a whim at Monnow Valley Studio in Wales. I introduced him to one of my friends, who actually still drums in them now.

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James: We always got requests [for interviews], but the band said from the start they were anonymous and wouldn't do them. It helped create more curiosity because nobody could get access to them.

Matt Benton [Metal Hammer writer]: You can't do an introductory piece without an interview. We managed to get an agreement for an email interview with Metal Hammer. Even then, the band knew they didn't want a voice.

Matt: It's one of only a few interviews they've ever done. It's something I'm glad exists, because it's like getting the Word Of God.

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George: I had freedom to offer interpretations of what I was hearing. It was a very fortunate combination of personalities and ideals. There was never any, 'We're going to take over the world' -type chat. It was more, 'Do we like this? Let's do more of that.'

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Nathan Barley Phillips [co-founder of Basick Records]: Trying to keep some sense of anonymity was a real mission. Particularly getting them to and from the stage [at Great Escape festival 2018] without anyone seeing who they were.

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George: We did Sundowning in three months - we went from demo to final master being released in just 12 weeks. We didn't have days off; we'd do seven in the morning until seven, eight or even nine at night every day for three months. We were in each other's pockets; we'd go to the gym together, swim, do the sauna... All this stuff to recover from being sat down all the time. There was a lot of time to spend holistically being friends making this record. We didn't know how to make this thing, but we had a confidence that we'd get there in the end. That's my favourite three-month period of my life.

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George: We started making [TPWBYT] and the first day was when lockdowns began. Tomb... was tough for all of us emotionally. There were lifestyle pressures as a result of the lockdown that made it not very conducive to making art that is supposed to be welcoming. A lot of those songs are, in one way or another, about love, love being lost or remorse, they are compassionate tales that are designed to bring the listener towards the artist. It's hard to do that when it feels like the world is going to end.

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Matt: I've got friends in merchandising and they say Sleep Token shift more merch than any other UK heavy band - more than even Iron Maiden.

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Nathan: Bands like Ghost and Sleep Token aren't successful because they wear masks. They're successful because they write great music. Masks don't mean anything if the music isn't any good.

Matt: I'll be interested to see, when the first official TV movie of the band gets made, the difference between the reality of what happened and the story that gets told. In a way, the myth becomes reality.