Inshallah

I always think about how "pest species" of insects ended up evolving to be resistant to DDT--the assumption that the natural world is a solvable engineering problem instead of a dialectic with innumerable non-human things is strong with these people.

As someone who has smiled through gritted teeth and eaten a fair amount of shit for good of country, it is past time for certain people to tie their bibs and start digging in

Something that never ceases to amuse me is when people talk about Emily Wilson's "feminist translation" of the Odyssey, a description that always seems to come as news to Emily Wilson, who simply translated it while female

it's a living

Man, that's gorgeous

While it is certainly true that NIMBYs have been known to oppurtunistically seize on conservation as an excuse, their habit of doing so is a great way of flushing out people who genuinely wouldn't mind if the world were a paved-over parking lot

Basically, if I've read a number of a person's pieces, I should have at least some sense of not just what they like, but what they're willing to fight for and defend. If they consistently won't extend themselves in that direction, there's just not much point in engaging with them

A subtweeting: I do not believe that critics should always (or even necessarily often!) be nice or positive. I do, however, believe that if you want to be a critic, you have to be at least occasionally *for* something, if only so that your being against other things has any meaning at all

3,000 words on the Texas Pleistocene chapter today, covering the departure of Elias Sellards and Glen Evans from the narrative, introducing Ernie Lundelias, and speedrunning a discussion of overkill hypothesis, Texas cave deposits, and non-analogue faunas. God only knows if this is making any sense

Porque no los dos

I find it genuinely astonishing how bad this looks. This is the kind of muddy, indistinct, poorly-lit shot that would make *2010 Shyamalan* ask what the fuck your problem is

The defining feature of American political discourse is that when liberals are out of step with public opinion it is understood as a failure of liberalism; when conservatives diverge from public opinion it is interpreted as an indictment of society.

It's not that women aren't capable of behaving extremely recklessly and stupidly in the reptile hobby (I have seen some do some wildly dumb things firsthand) but there is an Ideology hanging around it that is very hard to miss

This is very much the vibe in Reptile Keeping spaces right now

Quick Citipati

In my first for @theflytrapmedia.com, I wrote about what the sports world can learn from the kink community about consent, communication, & aftercare (this is a gift link but please consider supporting this feminist media collective with a paid sub!):

if you just went by the headline you might think the author was rehabilitating an egomaniacal white supremacist for no reason other than shock value. not so! it's actually to rewrite the "dems should moderate on wealth taxes and trans rights" article for the 1000th time

Actors promoting a film in 2016: "Please tell us about your film" Actors promoting a film in 2026: "You all have slegehammers. We are going to ask which food is more likely to give you diarrhoea then you hit the loser. We are on a moving catamaran and everyone has a tiny mic. Release the lizards"

and also, isn't white supremacy such a profound intellectual error that you should immediately question the basic capacities of anyone who indulges it?

you will save yourself a lot of trouble and grief on any text based social media site by simply remembering that a lot of people can't read.

I would take ‘listen to LIVED EXPERIENCES not your bloodless charts’ if I had literally ever seen a response to ‘what do we do if lived experiences differ’ that did not boil down to either ‘listen to the people I like more’ or ‘charts’

Taxonomy is far from complete but it also is not "complete enough" to warrant the disinvestment seen in ithe field and natural history generally. Museums and herbaria need funds to store, curate, and describe species and taxonomists need to be paid to do it www.nature.com/articles/s44...

It does feel like a lot of people are trotting out, as it were, hobbyhorses in this way

One reason why the Marshall-produced films getting increasingly nervy and neurotic about the idea that people would want to see dinosaurs is so weird

Jurassic Park is a perfect franchise because the question "why would they keep doing this" is answered by simply asking yourself if you would want to go see a dinosaur. Of course you would want to see a dinosaur.

I wanted to write down some notes about my Wonder Woman. 1) Her skin is meant to be a similar tone to the clay that her mothers crafter her from. No inhumanly red looking, but earthly.

More generally, if you want a version of the Odyssey adapted where the Gods play a stronger part in it, I think it's worth thinking seriously about how they can be presented and what role they play in a film's narrative. What does it actually look like for the gods to play an overt onscreen role?

I think something I'm bumping up against in reading discussions about the Odyssey is that there are, to me, clear narrative reasons Nolan chose not to have the Gods in the film more overtly, and they aren't necessarily just that he's uncomfortable with the numinous

"What can be done to force as many of the bombs Donald Trump is scattering around to go off while he's in office, and not afterward" is a question people with power need to be seriously thinking about

This is gorgeous!

I just had to have a go at drawing Jimothy

If you watched The Odyssey and you want to learn more about the historical world in which it's (kind of) set, the last quarter of my book Lost Worlds is all about the late Bronze Age and how it fell apart: www.harpercollins.com/products/los...

Their inability to get this one off the ground has really felt like the canary in the coal mine over there

"Rapism" is one of those words that feels like I've long known it and yet, somehow, have only just seen it articulated. Hard to come up with a better descriptor of Trump II and the broader manisphere that's attached itself to it

Question now is whether California can keep everyone in court through September, at which point Ellison starts getting charged a whole lot of money he doesn't have in the bank.

Interesting to be reminded that Roy Chapman Andrews, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Barnum Brown and H.P Lovecraft were all, in their way, contemporaries, even if the museum men were very unlikely to have crossed paths with the pulp writer

The Russo Restoration, as in so many cases, had learned nothing and forgotten nothing

Yep, looks exactly like a Russo Brothers Avengers movie

You know, Nolan gets a lot of stick for his lackluster color pallete, but at least he basically knows how to light a shot

Something I also appreciate about the Odyssey is that -- because Nolan has a clear Take on the material -- it's a movie that's fun to sit with and chew over how the choices the team made engage with, support or cut against that approach

Also an interesting touch that the Hades sequence is the least monstrous part of that. A "known" part of life, separate and away, rather than evil and chaos rampant on the world.

An ODYSSEY thought I'm trying to articulate: Nolan's conception of the mythologically monstrous also feels like it echoes out of the sack of Troy, which broke the world. Before Troy, Odysseus' world is not one of monsters: they may as well not exist for him. Afterward, they do.

Nolan’s Odyssey’s gods are very modern, the causation between Odysseus actions and the deaths of his men due to the gods are as unclear as the causation between the breaking of Zeus’ law and the appearance of the sea peoples, but they’re still linked in a complex and rich way

“The stadium roars. Shakira's hips defy the indifferent void, a hypnotic pendulum against chaos. Confetti falls like ash from a dying star. I think of the jaguar, watching from the jungle, uncomprehending, and I envy it. This is ecstasy. This is despair. This is halftime.”

There is a visible hunger in a lot of quarters to have Black people (abstractly speaking) be a go-to way of settling political arguments that non-Black people are having, and it is, again, racist

This, from food safety attorney Bill Marler, is so much better than anything I've seen from the FDA.

Vanquished by the baby you washed is some Athena bullshit

Please do cry for me Argentina