Oh my god dude look! A new kind of wild beast, right there! It's up to us to name it....... [brows furrow for three hours] Wildebeest

BREAKING: Total Monkey War

face to face

"There is hope in this sense only..." from Once upon a Time in the West by Jan Zwicky

"There is hope in this sense only..." from Once upon a Time in the West by Jan Zwicky

"Norse encounters with North American indigenous peoples seem to have filtered into Irish immrama [tales of a hero's journey to the Otherworld]"

Traditional song-maps of seafaring Tubetube islanders (Papua New Guinea) use birds as measurement "When the song refers to long distances between islands, birds are often mentioned to indicate the relative closeness of land."

CROCODILIAN EARTH MONSTER

"Lukasa, "the long hand" (or claw), is a memory device that was created, manipulated and protected by the Bambudye, a once powerful secret society of the Luba." (nowadays the southern Democratic Republic of Congo)

"A superbly realized line portrait of a giraffe. This artist had the skills of a modern cartoonist." 2,000-6,000 years old, Namibia

"This was first thought to illustrate a battle, but it is now considered more likely to represent the mystical struggle against evil spirits by shamans in trance." Pakhuis Pass, Clanwilliam District, Western Cape, South Africa

This page is unintentionally left blank. We are trying our best to fix it. We are so fucking sorry.

I like when people say someone "oozes charisma" cause imo "oozing" is usually one of the least charismatic things to do

As we turn the page on a new year, a quote from writer Caroline Van Hemert, which has stuck with me even though it didn't make it into her final piece: "Change--even in its most destructive forms--isn't a cue to abandon the future but instead to greet it with greater imagination."

#FossilFriday The beautifully preserved Jebel Irhoud 1 basal H. sapiens skull from Morocco, dated about 300,000 years old

Itinerary for 2025. You heard it here first. Don’t get left behind.

Denys Thompson on how integral poetry/song is for non-literate/non-mass-literate societies

Lucretius, 1st Century BC // scientists, 2013

we’ve gotta revive this trend

saffron vending machine in Mashhad

[developing the keyboard that maximally fucks with language and culture]

googling when the first known European map was made: "6th century B.C., not much known about it. 50 years later another guy made a slightly better one." googling when the first known Chinese map was made: [incredibly cinematic tale of a failed assassin, on the edge of my seat]

Article argues "mistakes" of early contact Aboriginal Australian rock art (guy holding rifle like spear, kangaroo-like horses) a metaphor for us and AI's "superior intelligence." A dead mathematician responds: no, the mistakes come from what's so special about human intelligence

"Until now, however, scholars have paid little attention to petroglyphs with geometric designs that ancient artists incised into the same sandstone outcrops between 9,000 and 3,000 years ago. In some cases, the designs are mere inches from the dinosaur tracks." archaeology.org/issues/janua...

we should all treasure our Newtonian oases

"perceptual distance is essentially perceptual ambiguity relative to form and orientation; perceptual closeness is essentially clarity of geometric form and absence of ambiguity"

hey

He's our hand friend. BACK OFF!

"I was always struck by the fact that Galileo, when he first used the telescope, performed many experiments to convince himself that the instrument only magnified objects; it did not create new objects or distort existing ones." -Heinz R. Pagels, The Dreams of Reason, 1989

I love poetry recorded in earlier decades when recording technologies weren't as "perfect". It usually sounds so much cooler. What are some more examples? www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGky...

oldest photograph of a human, 1838

“Your smart-phone runs on the tears and breast milk of a volcano. This landscape is connected to everywhere on the planet via the phones in our pockets; linked to each of us by invisible threads of commerce, science, politics and power.” anatomyof.ai

Woah! In Portugal's Côa Valley, a Paleolithic artist painted a deer-like figure on a rock wall. Several thousand years later, another artist engraved a rider atop the animal, "a horseman with typical Iron Age weapons".

Woah! In Portugal's Côa Valley, a Paleolithic artist painted a deer-like figure on a rock wall. Several thousand years later, another artist engraved a rider atop the animal, "a horseman with typical Iron Age weapons".

“Trajectory of the tip of a crow’s wing” A wingnature, if you will

@MacStonePhoto

Volubilis, a partly-excavated Berber-Roman city in Morocco (founded in the 3rd century BC, under Roman rule by the 1st century AD) Photo by me, several years ago

Lock screen thread (I was being unwise too frequently)

The podcast I didn't know I needed citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-66-w...

Borges, “The Just” (tr. Alastair Reid)

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." -gb shaw Love good quotes that are also good excuses. Oh, I'm being unreasonable? Well,

"Prehistoric people...not being outside nature they did not copy natural creations that fascinated them but immediately became part of the universal mechanism by creating themselves." -Michel Lorblanchet (fyi, the 1.5 million number is wrong) creators.spotify.com/pod/show/sea...

I've found spider bluesky

“The best way to find out that no two human Umwelten [world-views] are the same is to have yourself led through unknown territory by someone familiar with it. Your guide unerringly follows a path that you cannot see.” jacob von uexell

‘A name is merely the guest of reality.’ – Zhuangzi, 4th c. BCE