elliefint

[elliefint]

[elliefint]

I made some frogers I love them so much I need to make like 100 of them

[elliefint]

Sweater by @acefergusonstudio on Instagram

[elliefint]

Almost there....

[elliefint]

That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.

It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.

The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats - but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.

It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true - but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.

They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates - it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.

They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need - it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.

They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.

It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.

Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile - and for that purpose, you count as a cat.

[elliefint]

One of the most memorable speeches I've ever heard was given at my beloved's graduation. They attended a pretty crunchy school natural medicine. They went for acupuncture but they also had many degrees including nutrition, naturopathic medicine, and most importantly to this story: midwifery.

The common consensus across campus was that the midwives operated on their own frequency which is a nice way to say they were usually really weird, even by the standards of a pretty alternative crowd of people. Not weird in a bad way. But weird nonetheless. They straddled the boundary between life and death and it changed them.

I had never experienced a midwife before the ceremony which is why I didn't think anything of the fact that a midwife stepped up to give the graduation speech. My friends nearby had a stir of repressed amusement and elbowing each other which did puzzle me slightly.

The speech began as a story, which I heartily approved of. The midwife related an experience in which a woman told her that during her first birth she had screamed too much and used up her energy in that instead of pushing and the midwife, to the collective masses assembled to watch a solemn ceremony, said, "I told her this time she would need to scream with her vagina."

The audience was slightly stunned by this, myself included. I scanned the crowd to see dropped jaws and wide eyes. It was such a bold statement to make in an academic setting and no one quite knew what to make of it.

The midwife continued unperturbed.

She related that many dads didn't know what to do during the birthing process and that this particular dad chose to chant over and over, "You're gonna be huge, you're gonna be huge," as his wife screamed with her vagina to birth their child. The midwife mused that she didn't know if he was talking to their child or his wife or if he even registered what he was saying in that moment.

Then the subject strayed toward how the student body had strained and striven toward this goal, this endgame that was the result of sleepless nights, hard work, and camaraderie. The speech seemed to have moved onto more solid ground and traditional graduation reminiscences. The crowd settled, thinking the worst had passed.

But as the midwife wrapped up she said, "As you go forth into the world, pushed out by this noble institution to help the masses, just remember one thing," she paused and the audience held their breath while the beat drew out before she finally whispered:

"You're gonna be huge."

There was a roar of astonished laughter as her speech neatly tied their graduation into a metaphor for being birthed unto the world and we finally understood the point of her anecdote.

The speech lives in infamy in all our collective memories. Years later my beloved's dad will still be like, "Remember that bizarre graduation speech?"

And it was. It was bizarre. But I'll say this. I've attended a lot of graduations, and I don't remember any of the speeches half so well as I do that one.

[elliefint]

Hey everyone! Look what I made! I've always wanted to wear interesting novelty belts, but on the ones I've been able to find, the prints are always about, like fishing and baseball and whatever. So I realized that if I wanted to have a belt with something cool on it, I'd have to take matters into my own hands! So I found a printed grosgrain ribbon I liked and looked into how to make that into a belt by attaching to nylon webbing (actually came with one side already attached) and adding the d-rings and the little tip thing. And @yourgrantaire helped me and let me use their sewing machine (thank you so much!) and now I have the world's coolest space belt! I'm so excited!

[elliefint]

You light up my life - 26x32” acrylic on canvas. Available.

[elliefint]

mentally devastated gym bros are utterly correct in their nutritional reverence of the humble egg

[elliefint]

[elliefint]

this is fucking hilarious

[elliefint]

this au got me laying awake at 3am thinking abt steven surviving a job interview

bonus:

[elliefint]

TIL anyone who's going to overwinter in Antarctica has to have had their appendix out. Because removing an appendix that's not causing any trouble just as a precaution is way better than having one that's about to burst when you're on the ass-end of the planet with no way to be rushed to a hospital if shit gets real.

[elliefint]

Reblog with your score

[elliefint]

Listen All Systems Red is so so funny from Gurathins perspective imagine you grew up with Space Socialism and was hired to go help some pal with science but you weren't allowed to go unless you rented AmaTeslas Torment Nexus Alexa Dot and then when you get there you find out a whole continent of people got annihilated by their Tourment Nexus rentals so you take a moment to check yours quickly and find out it already had disengaged its Don't Kill People box, the only thing you've ever been told prevented them from mass homiciding their clients, something that LITERALLY just happened to people you knew a day ago, and when you say to your fellow socialist doctors HEY I think our Tourment Nexus is fucked up and it's files said it killed dozens of people barely a year ago and we should probably get the hell away from it the same doctors are like look at what you're saying. You're hurting the Tourment Nexus' feelings. The Tourment Nexus is just a little construct who likes Netflix Gurathin stop antagonizing it on the plane ride.

[elliefint]

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

[elliefint]

The terms “pseudo-merle" or “merle effect” are only used here because there is no current term for this phenomenon in cats. I’ve used the terms descriptively, not genetically. I’ve used these terms to refer to non-dilute patches on a dilute colour, or to non-silver patches on a smoke, tipped/chinchilla or shaded silver cat.

In cats, there is no clearly identified gene and the effect it appears to be cosmetic only. Observation finds it to occur in smoke, tipped and shaded silver cats where some patches lack the silver undercoat. It appears to be most common on red-silver (chinchilla or shaded silver) cats that have non-silvered patches. It can occur in any breed… 

A pseudo-merle is found in the Topaz breed bred by Iryna Merzlenko (Cattery Nikita'l, Ukraine). These blue/black merle-pattern cats all have the silver gene and cannot all be chimeras due to their frequency. Although they look like a mix of smoke and solid colour, the different colours are due to the silver (inhibitor) gene working unequally in different parts of the coat giving darker and paler areas, but all with silver close to the skin. It appears to be linked to the blue-eye mutation and has occurred in a number of cats (and these are genetically related to the famous blue-eyed “Narnia” with his blue-and-black face, albeit not having the silver gene). Merle colour has been found in every litter with smoke kittens, and is often located on the belly or legs.

The underlying genetics are not yet known. No single mutation has been identified so genetic explanations are based on observation and on “what hasn’t been found.”

Many silvers seem to have some unsilvered patches, or patches where there is only a small amount of silver at the base of the hair-shaft. On those cats the expression of silver is variable, with a patchwork of light smoke and dark smoke areas. This could be due to polygene influences or even an unstable mutation that reverts during cell division i.e. a somatic mutation. For example, in e/e yellow/white dogs, these should have no black at all but often have scattered black hairs or small black patches.

Could white spotting increase the likelihood of merle effect, for example could it cause the coloured patches to clump and scatter as it does in calico cats? Or is it an optical illusion because the silver undercoat and white patches are hard for the human eye to easily distinguish? In tortie smokes, the red seems to be more affected that the black by the merle effect and this suggests that phaeomelanin deposition is more affected than eumelanin deposition (in the same way that the non-agouti gene does not completely eradicate striping in “self red” cats). Where some red appears lighter and some is darker, perhaps the theorised “chaos” and “confusion” polygenes are involved and disharmonize uniformity of hair ticking and clarity of tabby markings.

Leslie Lyons has theorized that “silver” (white undercoat) may not be an exome mutation and that the visual effect is due to clonal differences in the regulation of pigment production or pigment transport. Others suggest that silver is a bit unstable and tends to revert to wild-type. Clonal differences means a change occurs in a skin cell and when this cell divides and multiplies as the embryo or kitten grows, the daughter cells all inherit the change (the change might be subtle or might be dramatic). A single skin cell that somehow suppresses the silver gene could give rise to a distinct patch on non-silver fur. A single patch may break up and move apart as the skin surface increases, resulting in several coloured patches with the gaps filled in by the base colour.

If silver was an exome mutation, it would already have been found as the feline genome is well studied. The exome is the part of the genome formed by exons. Exons are DNA sequences which, when transcribed, remain within the mature RNA in cells of any type and not just transcribed in specific cells as part of cell specialization. Exomes account for a very small percentage of the genome, but exome mutations can have dramatic effects.

The red-silver dapple pattern also seems more common in combination with white spotting, which suggests a link. Unlike true merle [in dogs], this pattern in cats is not linked to recessive white. Because pedigree cats with this pattern don’t meet exhibition standards, there hasn’t been selective breeding for the trait so data is limited.