Koala bears' fingerprints are so similar to humans' that they can confuse crime scene investigators.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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I just finished raking years of built-up leaves, tilling the compacted soil underneath and planting a bunch of native grass.
Fuck yeah, love to see it! Hope it grows well for you!
CW: Sex toy talk but it's not graphic or depicted at all and is I think a very humorous anecdote. Also drug use
Years ago when I came out as queer polyamorous to my best friend, he was super chill about it. We had a great conversation and he was just incredibly supportive. It eventually led him to telling me a story about how he built some complicated sex equipment for another friend long ago. Like he built a whole room rig / setup for this guy out of metal and rope and shit. Just a monster of a device. I thought that was really cool of him.
That was many years ago. In that time I have had partners and my partners have had partners and largely we all know each other and hang out and it's super chill. Said friend is our honorary straight monogamous dude that hangs with this big group of queer polyam folks and is just part of the gang, it's great and we all love him to death.
Last weekend my partner's partner (my meta) frantically texts because they needed some equipment that I don't really have to work on a project they weren't really telling me about. I was too stoned to really comprehend what they wanted and they were being a bit cagey and told them I'd help them in the morning but they were kinda hyper fixated and wanted help NOW. I just didn't have the ability I was fully couch potato. So I put my phone down and forgot about it.
Later they show up and ask to borrow my car. Sure? I guess? If this lets you continue your hyper fixation project NOW rather than later okay I guess. And also I am too stoned to say no. I trust them so whatever go enjoy whatever you're doing.
It wasn't until the next day I found out what happened. Their project was building a complicated sex toy thing. They needed help and I really wasn't available. So they called our now mutual friend. And the 2 of them were in my buddies garage til like Midnight cutting and welding and shit to build this complicated sex toy thing.
And that's how my best friend has now built 2 totally different sex toy devices in his garage for 2 totally different people. I had no clue when he told me years ago that I would introduce him to someone else who would also lean on his talents but here we are. He doesn't have a particular affinity for sex toys or anything he just likes building shit and likes helping people so I guess when people need a complicated sex toy thing built they know he's the guy.
Anyway I keep laughing when I think about it and I thought it was a pretty wholesome story about community. And sex toys.
Shit sucks sometimes but there are really good people all over who are there to help pull us through whatever. Stick with it comrade.
That is a fun story, thanks!
this is a plant puppy, its name is Pluppy. He's a gift from one of my partners and means the world to me.
And here's a killer song n video: https://youtu.be/I0Vqs1No_ng
Glad to see things are starting to look up!
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Did you know the male angler fish is 1/10th the size of the female and when they mate, the tiny male attaches himself to the side of the female and she absorbs him until he’s just a pair of gonads on her flank. She can absorb multiple males at the same time and choose when to harvest the sperm. Cool shit.
That sounds rad
Know what I'm building my next Lego set with
Absolutely no idea if you know any of this or not but this is a rabbit hole I've been digging down lately:
Been reading a lot about Mesopotamia lately circa 2000bc specifically. It's funny because it highlights just how arbitrary some systems are and just how many things naturally arise out of specialized labor.
Like that Ea Nassir guy from the meme complaint? He wasn't just selling copper ore from a stand he was actually asking people for money, then traveling all the way down the Arabian coast to use that money to procure copper ore, then he'd come back and give his financers their cut of the haul. He was a broker. And the contracts he made to do this work were complicated and had multiple clauses and stipulations.
That was 3300 years ago and it's still how people do things even today. You can't like- fundamentally change the kind of things that would make that operation any better or worse. You need material? Sometimes you go to a guy who has a source and you sign some stuff and give them money to get it for you.
Also the Mesopotamians (and probably a lot of other people) viewed their gods as legal garuntiers. They'd cosign an oath to Marduk or whoever they considered to be relevant to the contract along with the government. Their whole outlook on the super natural was very mundane. "Yes, of course we cosigned the god of justice on our contract. That's his office. We keep our records in his temple too." (Temples apparently did a lot of services we'd have dedicated spaces for today. Some were like healing and childbirth and served the roles of medical facilities. Others, yeah, helped you do legal work or stored money etc. It's all very cosmopolitan).
So I'm looking through more translated tablets for stuff like that. Just seeing how humans have interacted with built systems of relations with each other etc. But, in a lot more ways than you'd think, if an ancient Akkadian person and a modern person had to switch places they'd find a lot of eerly similar things in their new day-to-day lives.
Do you know much about Mesopotamia's religious system? I remember hearing about Inana. Are there still a lot of their legal records left? Love hearing about this.
A little bit! Just the basics and I might have some of this wrong:
They're polytheistic in a very plural way from what I know? Dieties come and go and they tend to have a lot of locational ties. Like a lot. They emphasize a lot about observing the correct festivals and dates for their gods, they sort of treat a god's domain with a specific location or city and vaguely suggest that other countries and lands have their own. That's definitely more unique as far as religions I know about go. Dieties are tied to geography or their believers conquering things for them.
In the earlier periods, every city had a god, and when the cities fought it was seen as the gods fighting. Also it was considered taboo to break the bricks of a city's wall in a war or fued. That uhhhh they didn't hold onto that taboo for long I to the middle/later periods LMAO.
There's also the North/South Akkadian/Mesopatamium language divide with gods. So Inana is what she's called in the South in Sumarian but in the North she's Ishtar in Akkadian. The Sumarians and Akkadians also have some theological differences here and there and the chief diety of the region could change sometimes based on if a certain ruler was in charge and if they wanted to elevate a god they felt represented them, their city or their powerbase etc sort of as an extension of the city-god relationship in earlier eras. And that wasn't just narrative from a ruler either: if that ruler swore under a certain diety and conquered Mesopatamia in /that/ diety's name: that's the main diety now. His guy won Mesopatamia. (I'm simplifying a bit but that's basically what it boils down to).
Also they sort of swore under a personal diety. So you might feel particularly inclined to pray to specific one based on your vibes.
Theology and politics much like many societies were pretty indistinguishable. Almost mundane. Like the geographic ties, legal relationships and rituals also were a very direct sort of physical manifestation of their gods.
Afterlife is interesting too! You go to a better one based on your deeds in the underworld through a series of gates. The less cool dead people eat clay and dust. I've heard it explained from a YouTube lecture from a professor that they sort of saw human souls as needing to wait before going into a new body and they had to be locked in down there so ghosts wouldn't ruin the mortal world by being everywhere.
Ghosts were also accepted as just- real. Kind of treated as pests that should be waiting in the afterlife. If you had a ghost you had to go buy a curse to get rid of it and it was kind of a pain in the ass.
Theres one notable thing where I can think of where one king named Ibbi Sin tried to sort of de-pluralize spirituality in a letter he wrote about some subject worshiping "Spirits" and not properly observing the holidays if then chief god, Marduk, which was not characteristic if spirituality at the time. Didn't end up mattering though because proto-persian people called the Elemites came down from the hills and abducted his ass and kinda stacked the kingdom. As it goes.
Legal records: yeah as far as I can tell! It varries between different dynasties and eras but they were pretty thorough contract writers. Something important to know about their law system is that it's highly class-stratified (no big surprise). The literate gentry were mostly the ones bothering with contracts and punishments were way worse if you were a commoner or a slave. Nothing too special though. Really goes to show how easy access to writing quickly leads to written contracts and documents. Very very useful. I don't know much more about that overall though.
Anyways this is what I've been reading from if it helps: https://archive.org/details/letters-from-mesopotamia.-official-business-and-private-letters-on-clay-tablets-from-two-millennia/page/n4/mode/1up
Also anything with Irving Finkel on YouTube is good. He's the Mesopatamian curator at the British Museum and talks a lot about the writing they have on tablets and takes a very humanizing approach to his work which is really really nice. A couple of hours of podcasts here and there with him that lead me to sources.
Hope some of that helped or was interesting at all! I love writing about it LOL
Really cool to learn more about it! Was there any resistance towards legislation or commentary on it early on? Did they think deities emerged from events because of the geographical aspect? The north south divide is pretty interesting, did it matter in other contexts too? How was law enforcement over there like? The afterlife sounds strange, would this world technically be an afterlife for them too? Is it reincarnation? Did curses affect you in other lives? How'd one go through the process of buying a curse? How did most people view businesses back then? Did the Elamites bring their own businesses with them? Thank you!
-Not sure entirely about laws but every now and then there's mention of a new king establishing or clarifying them. Was probably just standard fare.
-Couldn't guess exactly on their rationale for deities and geography. Overall though, the relation between mortals and gods seemed pretty bilateral.
-Oh yeah! the north/south thing is a major theme in the region from the first empires up until the Roman conquest. Akkadian is a semitic language and Sumarian is a language isolate (might've come from south of Mesopatamia before the sea levels rose at the end of the ice age). Babylon, Assyria, Akkad is all northern and Akkadian-speaking and then there's 3ish major periods of Sumarian rule. They go back and forth. Because Sumarian is an isolate, Akkadian was more often the dominant language used/recorded in Mesopatamia because it could be learned by other peoples in the broader region more easily since they spoke other semetic languages.
In fact, IIRC, Akkadian was even a langua-franca across the wider near-east for a time. Egyptian rulers would send letters to foreign kings in Akkadian for a time. I forgot what period or for how long though exactly. Either way: both Sumarian and Akkadian were written in cuneiform script, and cuneiform was used to record many other languages too which was how archeologists were able to work backwards to translate Sumerian in the first place.
There were some periods where north/south had nationalist connotations. Sargon of Akkad had nationalist tendencies and he was Akkadian. The degree of it varried from king to king era to era etc.
Overall though, linguistically, Akkadian was far more dominant. However Sumarian existed for a while and would become elevated by Sumerian rulers in periods where they were the ones who united the region.
- I don't know much at all about enforcement but j don't think it's anything particularly special??? They settled a lot of disagreements with payment pretty often though from what I kind of know. Mesopatamian Small Claims Court was probably wild. Again though, that's just for the gentry.
-It could be called a kind of reincarnation yeah! They definitely didn't treat the afterlife as a paradise and treated the soul as a kind of essential immutable thing.
-You would buy a curse from a sorcerer. Methods varry and were pretty vibes-based. You could buy a lot from a sorcerer in general. Pretty much just like any other business. There wasn't a lot of codified heresy or no-no's religiously about them as far as I know????? Sometimes you just would go to the local sorcerer for sorcerer things. Like getting rid of ghosts. Or helping your business. Or fighting off other curses a rival of yours put on you. Or you had cancer but didn't know what cancer was because it's 2,000bc and you think you're just possessed.
-Buisnesses went through different phases. A notable period I'm looking at is around 1800BC where you have businesses and proto-guilds running a lot of the economy. That's notable because in most other periods you have the state organizing large-scale commerce for the most part. But in this period it looks like they had a sort of ancient petite-bourgeois situation. Couldn't speak for other eras. Commerce was almost definitely a restricted activity for the gentry but it feels pretty common? Might be a bais because a lot of writing was done for business so that's what's still left.
Still though, from what I understand, population centers were pretty tightly packed with not a lot of small towns or villages. You just had mostly farms and singular estates in the country more so than other places at the time or in history in general. Not sure why. So I imagine commerce and business may have been more ubiquitous than most other places since your dense population centers are that much more dense and you /have/ to go into a city not just a town to sell your stuff? Totally spitballing that one.
-Elamites, from kind of what I know, would trade with the region but I don't know anything about their own businesses. They had hubs in the western zagross mountains that would sell Lapis Lazuli and goods from the east but I don't know how much moving around they did themselves personally. They probably also helped move a lot of tin and other precious metals into Mesopatamia in exchange for food goods. They also had a dynasty or two rule Mesopatamia here and there, you know for fun, as a treat.
Okay that's all my amateur self got. Hope that answers something LOL
Thank you!! These answers are all great, the scarcity of information is a bit disheartening to hear, going to the city being really important then is pretty interesting. Are there any records or reconstructions of cities back in that period? Were there sorcerers marketing themselves in a few sources later?
Yuh!
Yeah I think there's a few good reconstructions of Ur and some of Babylon I've seen. Ur they have pretty detailed street maps of. https://www.penn.museum/sites/journal/9359/
Haven't seen any sources of sorcerers more just references to needing to go to one. There are however whole books preserved that are about divinations for court magicians. Like a whole guide on how to tell the future from the spots on a lamb's liver. It's all very a-matter-of-fact "this is just what you do".
I judt went down a rabbit hole myself about Babylon, which lead to reading about the Whore of Babylon and Aleister Crowley, then the Legacy of Kain games.
Folks we're MesoPOSTamianing LESSGOOO 
Based history hours
The big, thick roots on trees are mostly just structural. The interface where trees actually absorb stuff they need to live is a thin layer under the soil made up of billions of tiny "root hairs". Even humongous, old-growth trees are dependent on this layer of roots so small and ephemeral that they may only last a few days. Where these roots meet the soil there is such a complex mixture of bacteria, fungi, sloughed off tree cells and whatnot that it's impossible to say where the soil ends and the tree begins. This region is called the "rhizosphere".
The exudates that trees secrete into this region produce an electrical gradient that pushes needed chemicals back into the roots. These secretions also support soil organisms. Over millions of years they've co-evolved to the point where trees release chemicals purely to feed them and, in return, they extend the tree's "reach" into the soil and provide chemicals the tree can't make, in some cases literally piercing and growing within the tree's own cells. There's some research now showing that trees (and other plants) can even communicate via chemicals in the rhizosphere. Kind of like how neurons communicate across a chemical synapse.
I love this fact because it inverted the way I think about trees. In a way the forest we see is like a living protrusion of the rhizosphere, with trunks and leaves only serving to deliver sugar, carbon, and other stuff down to where all the action is. I hope it lightens your mood. If you can see a tree now there's a good chance you are witnessing a fungal symbiosis that nobody has ever identified.
Reminds me a lot of how our gut bacteria work, independent organisms that work together with for mutual benefit for both.
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best I can do for something cool lately is I got some sneakers I really like
Hell yeah are they comfy? Whatd you get? I'm probably due for new shoes soon
1080v15 has tons of cushion
Will check it out!
I should show off the SpongeBob Adidas I got
But then my feet will be on the internets
It's warm today and it feels good, plus I got food in the house
Hell yeah, it was 70 here yesterday. Eat something yummy!
I will, take care of yourself too 
I met up with some people I knew from my department in college, hadn't seen either in at least 5 years. They've done a lot more academically and financially than I have, but they find my ongoing plans really interesting.
I made a big bucket planter for my deck and i'm growing potatoes and onions and garlic and maybe some tulips
Just finished getting it set up and filled
Planting will happen imminently
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I got some really ripe and in season mangoes at 16 for 10 dollars and made some amazing mango sticky rice
Hell yeah that sounds rad
i recently reconnected with a school friend i haven't seen in twenty years. she's doing well and finally receiving treatment for a chronic health condition. plus, we write letters now. it's neat!
Thats rad! Happy for ya!
I've made a lot of progress on cleaning up my workshop.
Keep it up!
People don't know this but there's a special tool in The GIMP for owning the libs
Hell yeah brb using this on myself
Two days straight of ghost poops in the morning. I'm saving so much money on toilet paper by fibermaxxing.
Hell yeah I just used a bidet
When I was in high school there was a summer strength program that I tried one day of as a freshman. They did a leg exercise that left me cramping and feeling awful so I never went back and I never did wrestling as a result. I always associated it with thick necked fucking warriors who walked around with swagger like they couldn't be touched.
Well, upon reflection, the leg exercise was the leg press. I'm sure they were putting up numbers, but my legs only cramped because we didn't lower the weight and I had never lifted a day in my life and I had no idea what was going on. It's not like it's an infernal machine made by the devil - I just misused the tool. There's this wrestling class at my BJJ school that I've been going to. I always really prioritize stand up, having spent some time doing muay thai and fighting in competition as well. I did some judo but couldn't commit to it long term. The point being that BJJ gets a reputation for being a bunch of butt scooters who can't stand toe to toe with others and that reputation isn't destiny. You can stand up on the feet if you practice standing on the feet. Anyway, that wrestling class keeps teaching me a lot. There are some curiosities about the sport though. For instance, you have a lot more responsibility for your partner's well being on a takedown. Short of an illegal move in BJJ, you're good to go even if it's applying a submission quickly. In addition, since your objective in wrestling (and this applied to judo as well) is to pin the opponent on their shoulders, a good defense is to fall to your stomach if you're getting taken down. This is barbaric to my brain because I love to have my opponent on their stomach in BJJ. I can just put my arm around their jaw and yank. In neither other sport are you allowed to get your arm around their jaw. And all that aside, even if you get pinned in BJJ, the game's not over because you need to GTFO of there. You have a whole half the sport dedicated to what happens if your plan A doesn't work and you eat shit.
So, in essence, I'm surprised by the wrestling class. I'm in there expecting guys with short hair, stocky builds, and studded piercings to squint at me while they're talking. In no small dose and more than the women and children in an intermediate+ BJJ class are these people hesitant and they need to pause to explain that my swashbuckling, freeflowing style of grappling needs to be contained and boxed to be appropriate for the art. Now, the caveat to this is that there are schools and programs for wrestling that are intense that would have me crying in the corner. But that's just it: there are BJJ and MMA camps that would do the same! I've been to them! It's not that wrestling is this particularly brutal martial art, it's just that the wrestlers you see are the ones that come from these programs that put people through the meat grinder. You can run a BJJ or sambo or sanda program with as much vigor. Therefore there's some relief in the disillusionment of that strength camp and that wrestling program from my school. It was tough and tougher than me, but it didn't eclipse the sun. It was designed for teenagers to succeed. Wrestlers aren't wild beastmen from Mars. If I shine a light into that dark room of my psyche that traumatized me in high school, I find the same dorks discussing grappling theory, smoking weed, and/or flirting awkwardly.
I can joke about how BJJ is for IT nerds all I want, but I still learned how to squat and shoot a takedown just fine at the end of the day. I can keep my fighting spirit even after getting punched, even if my opponent is large, and even when I know they aren't required by the rules to be nice to me. I might even get em from time to time. That's pretty neat.
Hell yeah
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