“Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is dull. Worldbuilding literalises the urge to invent. Worldbuilding gives an unneccessary permission for acts of writing (indeed, for acts of reading). Worldbuilding numbs the reader’s ability to fulfil their part of the bargain, because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there. It isn’t possible, & if it was the results wouldn’t be readable: they would constitute not a book but the biggest library ever built, a hallowed place of dedication & lifelong study. This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the worldbuilder & the worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.”
“The word loot is taken up from the Hindi word
lút — similar to “plunder” or “booty” — which first appears in Anglophone contexts in 1788 in a handbook on “Indian Vocabulary” for English colonial officers.[1] In
loot’s first recorded appearance in the English language, it describes how an officer managed to gain consent and gather recruits for subduing Indian resistance: “He always found the talismanic gathering-word Loot (plunder) a sufficient bond of union in any part of India.” The racialized idea of an “Indian” identity did not yet exist outside the minds of the colonizers, but a natural racial tendency, one overcoming tribal, religious, and cultural differences, could be “revealed” by the offer of plunder. In other words, a deviant relationship to property is the “sufficient” attribute that unifies and defines an otherwise disparate group under the sign of race. The earliest appearances of the gerund
looting, meanwhile, refer to “hirsute Sikhs” and “Chinese blackguards.”[2]
Looting is a word taken from a colonized people and used to denigrate and racialize riotous subalterns resisting English empire. It would from the very beginning refer to a nonwhite and lawless relationship to property.”
–
In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action, Vicky Osterweil
Pataphysics is the science of imaginary solutions, which symbolically attributes the properties of objects, described by their virtuality, to their lineaments
—Alfred Jarry,
Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician
An early June heat wave has broken records and ignited wildfires in Western Europe, leading to concerns that this could be the new normal as the climate crisis makes extreme weather events like heat waves more frequent and intense.
Spain experienced temperatures that it normally doesn’t see until August, according to AP News, while France saw its earliest heat wave on record since 1947, as France 24 reported. The European heat wave came as much of the U.S. also sweltered under unusually warm temperatures for June.
“As a result of climate change, heatwaves are starting earlier,” World Meteorological Organization spokeswoman Clare Nullis told The Independent of the heat wave. “What we’re witnessing today is unfortunately a foretaste of the future.”
Temperatures in France spiked Friday and Saturday, with 11 different areas breaking June records on Friday, as France 24 reported. The coastal town of Biarritz broke an all-time record by hitting 41 degrees Celsius on Saturday.
Meteo France climatologist Matthieu Sorel predicted more record-breaking temperatures and called the heat wave a “marker of climate change.”
More than sheep had to be evacuated in Spain, where wildfires have forced hundreds from their homes, The Washington Post reported. The largest fire is in Zamora, in the northwest of the country, and has burned through 74,000 acres, AP News reported Monday. The fire was ignited by a lightning strike Wednesday and was fanned by a combination of high heat, a period of low rainfall and high wind. Around 15 villages in the region of Navarra were also evacuated as a safety precaution in response to the fires.
Spectacle floods into my eyes whenever I watch a wildlife documentary. A vortex of small fish is gradually picked off by waves of oceanic predators. Snakes chase after marine iguanas. Giraffes clash at sunset.
While the nature shows I grew up with were more like didactic lectures, their modern counterparts — all of which seem to have the word “Planet” in the title — have the bombast of summer blockbusters. Technological advances are partly responsible. Wild creatures are difficult to film, and when footage is fleeting and scarce, narration must provide the intrigue and flair that the visuals lack. But new generations of sophisticated cameras can swoop alongside running cheetahs at ground level, zoom in on bears cavorting on inaccessible mountainsides and capture intimate close-ups of everything from wasps to whales. Shots can now linger. Nature documentaries can be cinematic.
But in the process, they have also shoved the square peg of animal life into the round hole of human narratives. When animals become easier to film, it is no longer enough to simply film them; they must have stories.
Nature shows have always prized the dramatic: David Attenborough himself once told me, after filming a series on reptiles and amphibians, frogs “really don’t do very much until they breed, and snakes don’t do very much until they kill.” Such thinking has now become all-consuming, and nature’s dramas have become melodramas.
We could, instead, try to view them through their own eyes. In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noted that every animal exists in its own unique perceptual world — a smorgasbord of sights, smells, sounds and textures that it can sense but that other species might not. These stimuli defined what von Uexküll called the Umwelt — an animal’s bespoke sliver of reality. A tick’s Umwelt is limited to the touch of hair, the odor that emanates from skin and the heat of warm blood. A human’s Umwelt is far wider but doesn’t include the electric fields that sharks and platypuses are privy to, the infrared radiation that rattlesnakes and vampire bats track or the ultraviolet light that most sighted animals can see.
The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense.
I should not know who Pete Buttigieg is. In a just world, the name Bari Weiss would mean as much to me as Nordic runes. This goes for people who actually might read Nordic runes too. No Swede deserves to be burdened with this knowledge. No Brazilian should have to regularly encounter the phrase “Dimes Square.” To the rest of the vast and varied world, My Pillow Guy and Papa John should be NPCs from a Nintendo DS Zelda title, not men of flesh and bone, pillow and pizza. Ted Cruz should be the name of an Italian pornstar in a Love Boat porn parody.
Fantastic essay here. We should be able to play twitter in different game modes AND on geographic servers.
A plump larva the length of a paper clip can survive on the material that makes Styrofoam. The organism, commonly called a “superworm,” could transform the way waste managers dispose of one of the most common components in landfills, researchers said, potentially slowing a mounting garbage crisis that
is exacerbating climate change.
In a paper released last week in the journal of Microbial Genomics, scientists from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, showed that the larvae of a darkling beetle, called zophobas morio, can survive solely on polystyrene, commonly called Styrofoam.
The findings
come amid a flurry of research on ways bacteria and other organisms can consume plastic materials, like Styrofoam and drinking bottles.
Now, the researchers will study the enzymes that allow the superworm to digest Styrofoam, as they look to find a way to transform the finding into a commercial product.
Industrial adoption offers a tantalizing scenario for waste managers: A natural way to dispose and recycle the Styrofoam trash that accounts for as much as 30 percent of landfill space worldwide.
Among plastics, Styrofoam is particularly troublesome. The material is dense and takes up a lot of space, making it expensive to store at waste management facilities, industry experts said. The cups, plates and other materials made from it are also often contaminated with food and drink, making it hard to recycle. Polystyrene fills landfills, where it can often take 500 years to break down and decompose, researchers have found.
As the garbage crisis escalates, scientists across the world are trying to find bacteria and other living organisms that naturally dispose of plastic waste.
In 2015, researchers from Stanford University revealed that mealworms could also survive on Styrofoam. The next year, Japanese scientists found bacteria that could eat plastic bottles.
In April, researchers from the University of Texas found an enzyme which could digest polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic resin found in clothes, liquid and food containers.
But it’s what I call “The Valley Filled with Clouds” technique. You’re at the edge of the valley, and there is a church steeple, and there is a tree, and there is a rocky outcrop, but the rest of it is mist. But you know that because they exist, there must be ways of getting from one to the other that you cannot see. And so you start the journey. And when I write, I write a draft entirely for myself, just to walk the valley and find out what the book is going to be all about.
Incheon International Airport is located thirty miles west of Seoul, South Korea. Construction of the facility began in November 1992 on reclaimed land between Yeongjong Island and Youngyu Island, and took eight years to finish. As of 2019, the airport is the 14th busiest in the world with more than 71 million yearly passengers.
Antarctic sea ice has gradually diminished over the last few decades, as surrounding oceans have grown warmer and northward winds stronger. This Timelapse shows a ~18,000 square kilometer (7,800 square mile) area near the Ross Sea. In the last decade, Antarctica lost an estimated 252 billion tons (229 billion metric tons) of ice per year.
On the occasion of Paxos Biennale 2022, Greek visual artist The Krank has completed a 1,000 square-meter land artproject near the Mongonissi bay in Greece. Titled ‘Footprint’, the large-scale installation is a poignant metaphor for humanity’s continuing and devastating impact on ecological systems worldwide. To create this impressive work, the artist worked silently for 15 days, shaking up the island of Paxos with his bold and touching message.
Plastic pollution in the oceans. Microplastics. Oil spills. Each of these items is already a distinct crisis. But researchers in the Canary Islands have coined a term for a new type of pollution they are finding in their studies: plastitar. According to the scientists, plastitar is washing up around shores of islands and consists of tar balls, often found after oil spills, and microplastics.
“No longer is the presence of plastic in the environment limited to microplastics or a bottle in the sea,” Javier Hernández-Borges, associate professor of analytical chemistry at the University of La Laguna in Tenerife, told The Guardian. Hernández-Borges coined the term plastitar. “Now it’s giving rise to new formations; in this case, one that combines two contaminants.”
Scientists first noticed the tar balls coated in plastic fragments two years ago and have now shared this worrisome finding in the journal Science of the Total Environment. The discovery joins other new formations of plastic pollutions taking over the marine environment, including pyroplastics (melted plastic pieces that resemble rocks) and plastiglomerates (the accumulation of melted plastic, basalt lava pieces and coastal sediments).
As for the newly defined plastitar, it consists of tar balls, or pieces of sticky, hardening tar from oil spills, that collects plastic fragments in the water.
“It acts like Play-Doh,” Hernández-Borges explained. “And when waves carrying microplastics or any other kind of marine debris crash on to the rocks, this debris sticks to the tar.”
Excited to share new work for New York Times bestselling and Eisner award-winning creator Jeff Lemire (Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, Black Hammer, Gideon Falls) — the publication design of a limited, and oversized hardcover edition collecting the bestselling MAZEBOOK series (published by Dark Horse Comics). Bringing the Mazebook to life through design, the publication features a cloth cover with embroidery, foil stamping, a color ribbon and gilding, signed tip-in plate and a rich backmatter section featuring illustrations by guest artists and Jeff’s notes on the creation of Mazebook.
This caps the creative journey we embarked on when I joined Jeff and Dark Horse Editor Daniel Chabon to develop the publication design and visual identity for the landmark, best-selling series.
Every once in a while I have a thought or memory pop in my head I can’t shake. This time it was from my high school photography class. We had to pick a photographer and duplicate his or her style for our final project. I was upset with myself for choosing someone at random and not doing to research like I was supposed to. Mainly because I picked the HARDEST photographer to emulate. In fact, I remember my teacher saying interesting, me going home that day immediately booting up the internet and seeing the world of hurt I was about to be in. Of course I couldn’t remember his name right away, so I just spent over an hour looking up “famous photographers with two black and white pictures in one”.
Anyway, here’s to Jerry Uelsmann and double exposure!
The 17th century philosopher John Locke is a key grifter thinkfluencer, and his “labor theory of property” is key to understanding the libertarian mind-palace.
Locke says that property arises when the empty, unimproved natural places are mixed with human labor. You own your body, so you own its labor and the fruits of its labor. No one owns an empty place, so when you influse your body’s labor into a place, it becomes yours.
There’s only one teensy problem with this: there are no empty places. Locke’s empty places always — always — turn out to be either a commons, or a place that colonized people are slaughtered for.
In other words, “a place no one is using” can be “a place everyone is using” (a commons) or “a place brown people are using” (a colony — often also a place held as a commons). The labor theory of value always involves some mix of genocide and enclosure.
The Libertarian mind-palace is a place where there is no coercion, only agreements entered into by free people acting according to their own lights.
Now, maximizing peoples’ ability to act according to their wishes is a laudable goal.
The mind-palace part comes in when you go through the intellectual contortions and outright fabulations necessary to find a place where Locke’s labor theory can play out without the taint of coercion and conquest.
This is why junk science like Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (a paper describing the universal collapse of commons, which presents zero historical evidence for its position) are so popular.
Not because they’re true, but because Lockeans wish they were, because that means that all those Olde Worlde types who enclosed lands, declaring them exclusive property weren’t stealing community lands — they were rescuing them from the “tragedy.”
That’s why there’s still pathetic fools who claim enslaved people fought for the Confederacy, or that the Civil War was about resisting Big Government coercion. Otherwise, the present-day distribution of wealth is the result of a historic act of monstrous coercion.
It’s why there’s such a strain of white supremacy in Libertarian thought, because if the people who lived in the “New World” weren’t really people, then taking their lands wasn’t theft, an original sin that taints all the property rights descended from that theft.
Then there’s the problem of economic coercion: the fact that we’re all born with different amounts of wealth and opportunity means that some of us are willing to clean houses, and the rest of us can get our houses cleaned.
If our housecleaners, sex-workers, gardeners, soldiers, meat-packers and Uber drivers are only willing to show up for work because they were born without the chance to be on the buy-side of that trade, are we truly maximizing liberty?
Yes, but only if you believe in eugenics. If you believe in eugenics, then some of us are born with the built-in oomph that makes us able to rise above our stations, or maintain the station bequeathed us by birth.
The disembodied hand of the market rests on the planchette of an invisible Ouija board that swings towards those of us with the
oomph and allocates capital to us so we can raise the general prosperity.
The eugenics part comes in when you explain away the male, high-born whiteness of the majority of oomph-havers as just the way oomph got distributed by genetic chance.
The absence of melanin or vaginas in the board room isn’t evidence of discrimination, it’s evidence of the typical oomph-shortage that accompanies vaginas and melanin. The rare exceptions are proof that if you do have oomph, you get to rise too.
All of this explains how a movement focused on “liberty” can be so anti-worker, so shot through with white supremacy, so pro-colonialist, so sexist — how its archdukes could condemn “coercion” and delight in Pinochet’s death-squads.
Libertarians aren’t (usually) stupid and this contradiction gets to them. They know they’re on stolen land, reliant on coerced labor, and the freedom they cherish for themselves has most other people agitating for rules that move some freedom onto their side of the ledger.
That’s the origin of the Libertarian Exit movement(s), separatist projects that seek to find a truly empty land, or a land that can be non-coercively acquired (through a free purchase from a rightful owner) and undo the original sins of property.
The history of these exits is beautifully and wonderfully documented in Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age, a new book by Cornell historian Raymond B Craib for PM Press.
Craib’s work focuses primarily on Michael Oliver, a Holocaust survivor who made a fortune selling gold coins to American preppers who shared a mass delusion that the end of the gold standard meant impending civilizational collapse (Oliver shared this belief).
Oliver mobilized his sizeable fortune — and those of his friends in the Libertarian Exit movement — in a string of doomed, chaotic bids to create a Libertarian free state in various basket-case dictatorships and decolonizing islands and reefs.
These efforts sparked chaos in the lands where they were tried, including a civil war in the Solomon Islands. Oliver’s tale reads like a Libertarian version of Heart of Darkness, as a man’s driven quest for “freedom” puts him in the company of assassins and gunrunners.
It sees him aligned with ex-US spooks who ran dirty wars and dirty ops, and even ends with trafficked Vietnamese indentured slaves coming to a “free island” paradise to work as farm-hands — all in the name of “liberty.”
Oliver was smart, there’s no question of that. Smart people are great at talking themselves into terrible deeds, and Oliver and his fellow libertopians were no exception, espousing the absolute morality of noncoercion while engaging in great crimes against humanity.
When all you’ve got is John Locke’s hammer, everything looks like empty lands. The thought-experiment of a coercion-free life where the marketplace of free exchange produces the most wealth and freedom our species can create always founders on reality’s shores.
In reality, such a system favors those who coerced their grubstake from others with land-seizures and genocide — or it favors their descendants. The sprinkling of arrivistes from disfavored minorities in the top decile of wealth distribution doesn’t change that.
Craib’s final chapters deal with Oliver’s progeny: seasteaders, space explorers, cryptocurrency secessionists. In these chapters, we see the same tragedy play out, as gross inequality at the game’s start is reinforced as soon as play begins.
We see that the platonic ideal of a place where you can swing your arm as hard as you like without ever having to worry about bopping someone else’s nose is a fantasy: your cryptocurrency roasts my planet, your seastead needs to import workers subject to economic coercion.
And, of course, your Mars colony will need janitors. This was the theme of my novella “The Martian Chronicles,” in which the second ship of Libertarian Exit Mars colonists hit apogee and receive a shocking communique from the first ship’s personnel.
That first boatload has landed in an empty place and mixed their labor with it, so it’s now theirs, and if the second wave expects to live there, they’re going to have to do all the menial work the first wave disfavors. How else? TANSTAAFL, baby.
(Escape Pod recently dramatized that novella in a two-part reading by Adam Pracht):
Right on schedule, Elon Musk has proposed debt-based financing for Mars colonists — colonists who will doubtless find themselves in the offworld descendant of a Tesla factory:
A dangerous workplace where human workers try to escape being maimed by janky robots while enduring vicious union-busting and absolute disregard for epidemiology, overseen by a “founder” who paid the actual company founders to stop calling themselves that.
The original sins of property — genocide and enclosure — can never be washed away. The desire to found a land where your luck (of achievement and/or birth) is untainted by coercion is understandable, but doomed.
Every time someone to live this dream, they take a bunch of bystanders down with it.
[Image ID: The cover of the PM Press edition of Raymond B Craib’s ‘Adventure Capitalism: A History of Libertarian Exit, from the Era of Decolonization to the Digital Age.’]
“When people have found themselves in possession of an abundance of goods, they have generally seen those goods not as resources to be deployed in the service of economic expansion, but rather as so many excuses to throw gigantic parties, like the ones that presumably took place at Göbekli Tepe or, for that matter, at Stonehenge. In many cultures, giving away or even ritualistically destroying one’s possessions at festivals has been a common way to show one’s worth. That people all over the world continue to spend their meager incomes on elaborate marriage celebrations and funerals is something mainstream economists can understand only as anomalous.”
“When I hear that we “should eat like the humans of the Paleolithic,” my initial response is: Which humans of the Paleolithic? This epoch—which ranges from 2.5 million years ago to around 12,000 years ago—began with Homo erectus in Africa and ended with Homo sapiens everywhere. Which diet, exactly, are we supposed to be following? The Paleolithic Arctic Diet, composed mostly of marine meat? The Paleolithic Amazonian Diet, made of tubers and fish? Or perhaps, as Gustin and Saladino claim, we should order from the Hadza menu of baboon and honey.”
“The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for “hill,” for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this “grammar of animacy,” it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an “it” or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans. By contrast, in English, writes Kimmerer, there is no way to recognize the “simple existence of another living being.” If you’re not a human subject, by default you’re an inanimate object: an “it,” a “mere thing.” If you repurpose a human concept to help make sense of the life of a nonhuman organism, you’ve tumbled into the trap of anthropomorphism. Use “it,” and you’ve objectified the organism and fallen into a different kind of trap.”
— Merlin Sheldrake,
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures (via probablyasocialecologist)
Australian bushfires are a regular occurrence that have shaped the landscape of the continent over millions of years. However, because the most destructive fires are usually preceded by higher temperatures, global warming has increased — and is predicted to continue increasing — the frequency of blazes. This Timelapse shows ~ 3200 square miles of Western Australia with scorched areas gradually growing over the last few decades.
AGL, the country’s biggest coal generator and biggest polluter, has been forced to abandon its ill-considered plans to split in two and keep burning coal for another two decades and more. And it has been forced to do so by shareholder activism.
The fact that coal has been such a touch pad of political debate in the past decade makes this stunning victory by the activist billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes even more remarkable.
For one, it shows that resistance to the green energy transition and science-based climate targets is moving from dodgy back-room political deals and street-based protests, to the plain daylight of the boardroom and financial markets.
Australia now has two of the world’s most powerful and deep-pocketed green energy activists in Cannon-Brookes, the third richest person in the country, and Andrew Forrest, the iron ore billionaire who is the second richest person in the country, and who is making a huge push into green hydrogen and green ammonia.
Cannon-Brookes and Forrest are already working together on what will be the world’s biggest solar plant and battery storage facility, the $30 billion Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory. And they are both damning in their assessment of those who propose new fossil fuel projects.
Yes, we still have conservative politicians, media and “think tanks”, cheered on by Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart from the sidelines, still prosecuting the case for coal, and smearing their faces in coal dust, feigning interest in the future of the coal industry workers.
But the federal election, barely a week old, amplifies the green energy shift. At least 55% of people voted for stronger climate action, and at least one quarter for a lot more than that – the supporters of the Teals and the Greens demand science-based targets, and to act on them.
It’s likely that AGL saw the writing on the wall from the election result, and realised it was kidding itself if it thought it could keep on burning brown coal up to 2045 and retain customers at the same time.
Up until recently, the record-holder was the “Methuselah” bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains, which has been dated as 4,852 years old, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. However, a contender from another hemisphere is coming for its crown: an alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) in Chile known as the Gran Abuelo or great-grandfather tree.
“It’s a tree that’s very, very close to our hearts,” Jonathan Barichivich, the Chilean environmental scientist behind the claim, told Science.
The alerce, also known as a Patagonian cypress according to National Geographic, is a species of tree native to Chile and Argentina with a reputation for being the second longest-lived species of tree after the bristlecone pine. This specimen in particular is located in a ravine in Chile’s Alerce Costero National Park and is more than four meters (approximately 13 feet) wide, Science reported. It also stretches 196 feet into the air, according to Live Science.
Barichivich used a unique method to determine the tree’s age, Science reported. First, he used an increment borer to extract a sample of the wood without harming the tree and counted around 2,400 rings. Then, because the sample did not reach the tree’s center, he used models to estimate the tree’s age.
The result? The tree was likely 5,484 years old and had an 80 percent chance of being more than 5,000 years old, surpassing Methusala.
When Michael Doall was a teenager, he hated seaweed, and so did everybody else he knew on Long Island. It was an icky nuisance that brushed against your legs at the beach, fouled your fishing hook and got tangled around the propeller of your boat. Only later, as a marine scientist and oyster farmer, did he develop a love for sugar kelp, a disappearing native species that is one of the most useful seaweeds. Now he is on a mission to bring it back to the waters of New York.
He grew up on, and in the waters of, the South Shore of Long Island with a mother who considered a beautiful day a fine excuse to take him to the beach instead of school. He helped his family with an ambitious home garden in Massapequa Park and got a master’s degree in marine environmental science before becoming a shellfish specialist at the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University.
From there, his passions steered him into sustainable aquaculture and oyster farming, which began as a side gig to his academic pursuits. Seaweed farming is a kind of happy accident. “I love being on the water, and I like to grow things that help the environment,” he said. “Kelp farming lets me do both.”
Sugar kelp has become the seaweed of choice for New York aquaculture, though it is still in an experimental phase. In addition to being a native plant and a tasty vegetable, it cleans the oceans, capturing carbon and nitrogen from the water and helping to prevent ocean acidification and harmful algae blooms. Every acre of kelp planted removes nitrogen (a pollutant from human waste) from the water at 10 times the rate of the nitrogen-reducing septic systems now mandated for new homes in all of Suffolk County. Farming kelp doesn’t interfere with recreation because its growing season begins in December and ends with a dramatic burst of growth in May, just in time for it to be harvested and out of the water ahead of boating season.
Weaponized SciFi: Produced and broadcast a radio play based on War Of the Worlds by HG Wells that caused (disputed amounts) of nationwide panic
Peaked Early: Co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in possibly the greatest film ever made at 26, which was a huge box office bomb at the time
Didn’t Throw Hitler off a cliff when he had the chance: During a 1970 appearance on
The Dick Cavett Show, Welles claimed to have met Hitler while hiking in Austria with a teacher who was a “budding Nazi”. He said that Hitler made no impression on him at all and does not remember him. He said that he had no personality at all: “He was invisible. There was nothing there until there were 5,000 people yelling sieg heil.”[168]
Could have spared the US McCarthyism: For several years, he wrote a newspaper column on political issues and considered running for the U.S. Senate in 1946, representing his home state of Wisconsin—a seat that was ultimately won by Joseph McCarthy.[166]
Magician (Allegedly): He was a lifelong member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians and the Society of American Magicians.[172]
Okay so for that last one:
That’s Orson Welles in the black tux, my grandfather in the white jacket, and my grandmother who Welles is ‘levitating’ in this trick.
Again, grandpa in white and Welles in black.
My grandparents leased magic equipment to Welles and contracted to assist with his stage show in Vegas for a 3-7 week run at the Riviera for a hundred bucks a week in 1956.
So, for at least that long, Welles was something of a magician.
This article indirectly criticizes the characteristic of modern science to treat life as one giant algorithm. Individual behavior, whether human, beaver, oriole or shark, are ignored, because that individual behavior doesn’t “fit.” I’m adamant, a bit bitter, and a jerk about this because of my recent hospitalization. What I did or wanted wasn’t important; only the algorithm was. Modern science is going to kill science, sooner than later. (Yell at me scientists, but if you take me on one-on-one, I promise that you will regret doing so. Think of tail between legs.)
Excerpt from this story from
The Revelator:
Animals have individual personalities, can adapt to changing conditions, and can make decisions based on social learning in ways that shape shared human-wildlife spaces. That means they can play an active influence in their own conservation, argues a new paper published in Conservation Biology.
According to the authors, wildlife conservation and management could improve the outcomes of interventions such as translocations, reintroductions and resolving human-wildlife conflicts by explicitly acknowledging these traits — described as “animal agency.”
“Animal agency is an emerging way of seeing animals as ‘helpers’ in their own conservation efforts,” says Matthew Hayek, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University and the paper’s senior author. “Rather than working against their own idiosyncratic behaviors, conservationists are paying attention to individual animals’ quirks, seeing differences between small groups, and increasingly working with them and achieving better outcomes.”
But according to the paper, wildlife conservation management usually overlooks the concept of animal agency and prioritizes, as the authors put it, “metrics that treat animals primarily as quantifiable stock.”
Animals have individual personalities, can adapt to changing conditions, and can make decisions based on social learning in ways that shape shared human-wildlife spaces. That means they can play an active influence in their own conservation, argues a new paper published in Conservation Biology.
According to the authors, wildlife conservation and management could improve the outcomes of interventions such as translocations, reintroductions and resolving human-wildlife conflicts by explicitly acknowledging these traits — described as “animal agency.”
“Animal agency is an emerging way of seeing animals as ‘helpers’ in their own conservation efforts,” says Matthew Hayek, assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University and the paper’s senior author. “Rather than working against their own idiosyncratic behaviors, conservationists are paying attention to individual animals’ quirks, seeing differences between small groups, and increasingly working with them and achieving better outcomes.”
But according to the paper, wildlife conservation management usually overlooks the concept of animal agency and prioritizes, as the authors put it, “metrics that treat animals primarily as quantifiable stock.”
To understand this gap, the authors reviewed 190 published evaluations of policies and programs and identified three underlying assumptions that may undermine their results.
First, the policies presuppose that animals from the same species all “behave uniformly” and that behavior mostly remains the same in different contexts.
Second, they assume that animals will revert to an “idealized state of wildness” when they are placed in appropriate wild habitats.
Third, the policies conceive of relationships between humans and wildlife in a narrowly biological or economical way and downplay cultural relationships between humans and animals.
But animals are not mathematical formulae that provide the same answer every time. If they deviate from wildlife managers’ assumptions, they can inadvertently undermine human-established conservation goals.
Fossil fuel investors are adopting a bold new legal tactic in response to efforts to limit global warming: They are going to private international tribunals to argue that climate change policies are illegally cutting into their profits, and they must therefore be compensated. Now governments are scrambling to figure out how to not get sued for billions when enacting climate policies.
Termed “investor-state dispute settlement” legal actions, such moves could have a chilling effect on countries’ ability to take climate action. Consider this case from 2017: Nicolas Hulot, France’s environment minister at the time, drafted a law that sought to end fossil fuel extraction in the country by 2040. In response, Vermilion, a Canadian oil and gas company, threatened to use such a settlement provision to sue the French government. In the end, the French law was watered down to allow new oil and gas exploration even after 2040.
When these legal actions move forward, the results tend to benefit oil and gas interests. A recent report on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) actions found that when such cases were decided on by their merits, fossil fuel investors emerged victorious 72 percent of the time — earning, on average, $600 million in compensation.
According to a paper published in Science last month, more ISDS claims could soon be coming. That is because of the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), a 30-year-old international energy agreement that has been ratified by 50 countries, mostly in Europe. The treaty calls for “fair and equitable treatment” of investors and “payment of prompt, adequate and effective compensation” in case governments take over their assets — clauses that fossil fuel investors could use to threaten ISDS legal action against new climate regulations.
Discussions are ongoing in Europe to “modernize” the ECT to take climate goals into account. But recently, Pascal Canfin, chairman of the European Parliament’s environment committee, announced that the negotiations haven’t been productive and that the ECT will likely “continue to be used by investors to sue states taking climate action.” Now, Canfin is calling for all European Union countries to mount a “coordinated exit” from the treaty.
Laura Létourneau-Tremblay, a doctoral research fellow at University of Oslo working on international investment law, explained that if states have to compensate fossil fuel companies under ISDS provisions for transitioning away from fossil fuels, it could “prevent governments from taking ambitious climate actions… [There are] real concerns as to whether the ECT is compatible with the net-zero energy transition.”
The potential for fossil-fueled ISDS actions are also baked into U.S. trade deals. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), for example, includes stipulations of “fair and equitable treatment” of foreign investments, which could be used to thwart ambitious climate agendas.
The European Parliament has voted in favor of effectively banning the sale of new fossil fuel-powered cars in the European Union (EU) beginning in 2035. The vote confirms the support the lawmakers expressed last year for the European Commission’s proposal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from new vehicles by 100 percent by 2035, reported Reuters. The vote comes ahead of talks with EU member countries about the final law, which is part of a larger bundle of climate change measures.
European Parliament Environment Committee Chair Pascal Canfin, a French Member of the European Parliament (MEP), said stopping the sale of emissions-producing vehicles was “a historic decision that will lead us towards a new era of climate neutrality. It is a major victory,” The Guardian reported.
The vote rejected an amendment that would have included 90 percent of cars instead of the agreed upon 100 percent.
MEPs also rejected a proposed amendment to allow automakers to purchase credits for “e-fuels” — synthetic fuels consisting of sequestered carbon and hydrogen from renewable sources — reported Bloomberg.
“We don’t think that politicians should decide if the electric vehicles or synthetic fuels are the best choice. I personally believe that most consumers will buy an electrical car if we give them the necessary infrastructure and that’s what we need to do,” said German lawmaker Peter Liese, as CNN Business reported.
The final law — part of the EU’s “Green Deal” — has yet to be negotiated between MEPs and ministers from the 27 EU member governments, reported The Guardian.
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia has grown sixfold since the 1980s, it’s population exploding from 1.3 million in 1984 to more than 8 million today. As a result, the metropolis continues to sprawl outward from the Klang River and now covers more than 1,000 square miles (2,800 square km).
As the city of Las Vegas grows, Lake Mead, its water supply, shrinks. In the mid-1980s, the Vegas metropolitan area was home to 438,000 people, and today that population has ballooned to upwards of 2.2 million. Consequently, the lake’s water level has dropped from 1,225 feet in July 1983 to 1,059 feet in May 2022 — the lowest since it first began to fill in 1935.
[Image ID: The cover for the Farrar, Strauss, Giroux edition of James Bridle’s ‘Ways of Being.’]
It’s hard to pin down the thesis of James Bridle’s Ways of Being, published today in the USA by Farrar, Strauss, Giroux — it’s a big, lyrical, strange and inspiring book about the “more than human world” — a world that encompasses the worldview of animals, ecosystems, and software.
[Image ID: A photo of James Bridle’s ‘Autonomous Trap 001’ installation. It depicts a compact car in an empty parking lot, inside two concentric salt circles, the inner circle is a solid line, the outer circle is a dashed line. The photo is taken from a high point overlooking the parking lot, and encompasses rolling green hills and distant snowy mountains in the background.]
Bridle, an English artist and technologist who lives in Greece, pulls on so many threads to tell this tale. Some will be familiar to people who encountered some of his viral work, like the homemade self-driving car he “trapped” in a salt-circle that simulated the unbroken lane-markings the car was trained to respect.
[Image ID: A still from the now-deleted Youtube children’s animation ‘BURIED ALIVE Outdoor Playground Finger Family Song Nursery Rhymes Animation Education Learning Video,’ depicting two rows of cartoon characters such as Elsa, Spiderman, Venom, Hulk and the Joker; the forward row has been buried up to its necks.]
Or his investigation “Something is wrong on the internet,” which revealed a vast web of incredibly disturbing children’s animation and programming, much of it automatically produced, that had taken over kids’ Youtube and was absorbing billions of hours of viewing time worldwide:
These are two of the threads woven into Ways of Being: that two “inanimate” objects — a homebrew self-driving car and a recommendation algorithm — both have distinct worldviews (Bridle uses the cybernetician’s term umwelt) and these worldviews create desires, which impact us.
The impact is bidirectional. Our own umwelt and desires impact these inanimate objects, too; we are inextricably tangled up with them. Their actions result from our actions, and our actions result from theirs.
This dynamic doesn’t stop with recommendation systems or autonomous vehicles. The whole world — from microscopic organisms that are neither animals nor plants to birds to primates, to plants and the fungi that interpenetrate and coexist with their root cells — is part of this phenomenon.
Indeed, the interconnectedness of everything is so profound and so undeniable that any close examination of any phenomenon, being, or object leads to the inescapable conclusion that it can’t be understood as a separate, standalone thing, separate from everything else.
This kind of abstract claims of interconnectedness aren’t new, but Bridle ranges far and wide to find concrete and marvellous ways of illustrating it. Many of his examples come from cybernetics and computer science, describing the ways that computers transcend their limits when they are combined with noncomputers. These examples range from random number generators that use lava lamps as seed values to analog computers that use actual water to model fluid dynamics to computer-human collaborations.
But these technological examples lead smoothly to examples from the natural world, where Bridle finds a wealth of category-confounding phenomena, including things that can only be called “language,” “democracy,” “negotiation,” and even “intelligence.” These examples include elephants and tree roots, far-ranging wolves and river watersheds.
Bridle wants us to understand that our convenient categories are not just useful handles that empower us to grab onto abstract concepts — they also limit us, by forcing us into umwelts that are walled off from the most powerful, useful ways of relating to the rest of the world.
One of Bridle’s most provocative moves is mixing of the natural and the technological worlds, which he pulls off in a way that is implausibly convincing. Computers are actually a very good way of understanding nature. The models of networks that we built after the emergence of the World Wide Web turn out to shed light on the webs of nature that had been right there all along.
New technological endeavor, such as machine learning systems, likewise illuminate concepts that have been missing from our understanding of the natural world. The fact that we can build systems that we can’t interrogate or fully understand — but still find useful — is a way of settling the most troubling aspect of the collapse of our categories argued for in the book’s first half.
Finding ways to co-exist with systems we can’t fully explain or control — finding ways to collaborate with those systems — is an ancient idea, one that connects well with indigenous ways of being and ancient animist practices. It’s also the underlying premise of cybernetics — the use of feedback mechanisms and sensors to understand the wider world.
Sometimes cybernetics seeks to steer the world — in the same way that a beaver builds a dam, or a First Nation uses controlled fire to tend to ancient forests, or the way that we build seismic dampers into our tall buildings. But just as often, cybernetics simply seeks to accommodate the world, the way livestock run away from a volcano before it erupts, or the way a First Nation moves from a summer settlement to a winter one, or the way we respond to weather forecasts by changing our weekend plans.
Thus, drawing on cybernetics, Bridle builds a bridge to the “more than human” world, where a kind of personhood can be imputed to machines, the environment, animals, and plants — a personhood, moreover, that can never be separated from our own.
Bridle argues that every time our human societies has expanded their view of personhood — of the right of something to be respected on its own terms, rather than because it is beneficial to “real” people — everyone has benefited. The extension of personhood to enslaved and colonized people, to women, to children, and, in limited ways, to animals, was universally beneficial.
Again, Bridle moves from this abstract idea to a broad swathe of concrete examples. One of my favorites is the story of the Gitmo iguanas. For decades, the people whom the US government has imprisoned and tortured in Guantanamo have been denied access to the US courts. US government lawyers argue that Gitmo is outside of the jurisdiction of US law, and thus a place where humans have no right to legal protections.
That started to change in 2007, when Reuters reporters tipped off detainees’ lawyers to the fact that Guantanamo soldiers were prohibited from harming the endangered iguanas on the base, subjected to penalties under the Endangered Species Act. This led the detainees’ lawyers successfully arguing to the Supreme Court that Gitmo was within US legal jurisdiction.
Bridle describes this as “the iguanas speaking for the humans,” or, more prosaically, the decision to protect iguanas — not because we find them pretty or delicious or useful, but because they deserve rights on their own terms — increased the protections for people, too.
Ways of Being is a book that argues against systems of control and category, and for systems in which everything is understood to be connected to everything else, valuable both on its own terms and because we are part of it and it is part of us.
It’s a book that doesn’t come to a crisp articulation of this thesis, because it is a book that argues against crisp articulations themselves. It is broad and weird and complicated, delightful and poetic. At one point, Bridle recounts how, during a lecture, he briefly and radiantly understood quantum mechanics. It was a transcendant but fleeting experience.
At many points in Ways of Being, I had similar experiences — moments of illumination and understanding. In retrospect, I find myself struggling to describe these moments. But that is Bridle’s point, after all. The inability to define the universe is, in the end, a feature and not a bug.
“But there came a point when I had to turn off the radio play running in my head. I was never going to hear these lines; I was going to
watch them. My old way of working was irrelevant. I was writing for a language that only existed visually. I had no idea if my jokes would work.
I needed people who knew better than I did. Enter: Alexandria Wailes and Anne Tomasetti, my directors of artistic sign language. An ASL director is a creative collaborator who functions almost like a dramaturge. Alexandria and Anne are both Deaf and artists themselves, with extensive theater backgrounds, who have a deep understanding of Deaf culture and history. We circled up, using my script as a launching pad to bring the language to life.”
At our first meeting, Alexandria and I spent five hours at the kitchen table, working on the translation line by line. She would ask about the subtext, what the character was feeling, my intention behind every exchange. She would show me possible sign choices, and we would discuss their meaning. Sometimes a sign didn’t feel right, and we would change it. Sometimes the English line changed instead. I watched Alexandria sign a line of Ruby’s, “Do you want me to die here?” and the sign for “die” didn’t capture the anger I wanted the character to feel. I needed something sharper, more staccato, that would help the actress channel rage. We played around until Alexandria found, “This is killing me.”
Throughout this process, Alexandria took notes in ASL gloss — a form of notation for ASL that uses English words along with diagrams and drawings. She made videos for the actors. But mostly, it was muscle memory. She was keeping the language in her body.
The Aral Sea, located on the border of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was once the fourth largest lake in the world. This Timelapse shows how water levels here have gradually decreased.
In the 1960s, the rivers that fed the Aral were diverted to irrigate newly created cotton fields in the adjacent Kyzylkum Desert. By 1997, water volume had declined to 10% of its original size, and recent satellite images show its entire eastern basin dried up.
Excerpt from this
New York Times essay authored by Zeke Hausfather, a contributing author to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, the climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist with Berkeley Earth:
Trees are our original carbon removal technology: Through photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air and store it. They have lately been touted as a climate savior, a way to rapidly reduce the carbon dioxide that has accumulated in the atmosphere as we cut our emissions. A “trillion trees” initiative was launched with much fanfare at the World Economic Forum in Davos back in 2020, and it was one of the few climate solutions embraced by the Trump administration. Planting trees and protecting forests are a major part of many corporate efforts to offset emissions.
But there’s a catch. Carbon dioxide removed from the atmosphere is only temporarily stored in trees, vegetation and soil, while a sizable part of our emissions today, will remain in the atmosphere, much of it for centuries and some of it for millenniums to come.
Trees can quickly and cost-effectively remove carbon from the atmosphere today. But when companies rely on them to offset their emissions, they risk merely hitting the climate “snooze” button, kicking the can to future generations who will have to deal with those emissions.
We have a saying in the climate science world: “Carbon is forever.” Around 20 percent of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere today will still be in the atmosphere many thousands of years from now. This means that to effectively undo emissions, the carbon we take out of the atmosphere needs to stay out. There is a real risk that, in a warming world with more wildfires, with pests preying on trees and with drying soil, carbon in tree plantations could end up back in the atmosphere sooner rather than later. For carbon to be permanently removed by planting trees, forests would have to remain in place for thousands of years. On top of that, the trees would have to be planted on land that would have been forest-free for those same thousands of years had the trees not been planted.
Доделывать можно бесконечно, пожалуй смирюсь с несовершенством и остановлюсь на этом варианте.
В целом я довольна, как шла работа: я следовала своим предыдущим выводам, мне в большей степени удалось быть эффективной и последовательной и не проваливаться в детали на ранних этапах (например броситься чистить заусенцы или переводить в вектор форму, которую потом захотелось бы переделывать).
Из выводов на будущее —
1) Стоило использовать референсы и активнее делать research также и на второй фазе амбиграммы, где на готический скелет наращивались кудри.
2) Я хотела сделать росчерки живыми и органическими. Даже эта задача не отменяет потребности в подобии системы, ритме, и даже структуре (сначала построить, потом сломать), которые в свое время позволили бы мне не запутаться в этих завитках.
What we’ve gotta understand is that “the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults” and “the modern Internet is abolishing space for children” are compatible phenomena. Neither group is being favoured: the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for adults (i.e., because grown-up topics aren’t advertiser friendly)
and the modern Internet is abolishing spaces for children (i.e., because online communities which consist principally of people who have no money are hard to sell things to). The Internet that contemporary corporate interests are trying to build isn’t a space for
anyone – it’s the digital equivalent of an Ikea showroom.
Shanghai, China is enormous, but it hasn’t always been that way. In recent decades, the city’s population and urban footprint have exploded. When this Timelapse starts in 1982, the population was estimated to be 11.8 million, and now it’s roughly 24.4 million.
Earlier this week, residents of Shanghai emerged from their homes after a two-month COVID-19 lockdown. However, negative tests are still required for people to enter many public places throughout the city.
Dubai has changed drastically over the last few decades. In the 1980s, the UAE city’s population was about 370,000 and its shoreline was mostly natural with some man-made harbors. As of 2020, 3.4 million people lived in Dubai and many artificial islands were built along the shore. Palm Jebel Ali, Palm Jumeirah, and the World Islands are some of the largest island projects, collectively using over 400 million cubic meters of reclaimed sand to construct.
Shanghai, China is enormous, but it hasn’t always been that way. In recent decades, the city’s population and urban footprint have exploded. When this Timelapse starts in 1982, the population was estimated to be 11.8 million, and now it’s roughly 24.4 million.
Earlier this week, residents of Shanghai emerged from their homes after a two-month COVID-19 lockdown. However, negative tests are still required for people to enter many public places throughout the city.
Net zero goals alone are insufficient to reduce carbon emissions in line with Paris goals and curb corporate transition risk. We provide a relative ranking of the emission reduction targets of 15 of the largest listed oil and gas companies based on our “Hallmarks of Paris Compliance” (majors plus Equinor, Occidental, Repsol, Devon, EOG Resources, EQT, Suncor, and Pioneer).
Tier one includes those with absolute reduction targets including Scope 3 emissions
Tier 2 companies are those with scope 3 emissions reductions on an intensity-only basis.
Tier 3 includes companies with only operational intensity (Scope 1 & 2) emissions reduction goals.
Setting appropriate targets is just the first step; the approach to achieving emissions reductions must be credible to ensure that both stated reductions occur and that shareholders’ exposure to transition risks are not increased.
Asset divestments must not be used to justify continued investment in new fossil assets.
The ability of emissions mitigation technologies such as CCUS and “nature-based solutions” to deliver stated reductions must be scrutinised.
3rd Party offsets may not actually lead to emissions reductions.
Lake Urmia is an endorheic salt lake in northwestern Iran. It was once the sixth-largest saltwater lake on Earth with a surface area of 2,000 square miles (5,200 square km), but by 2017 had shrunk to 10% of its original size due to drought and damming of inflow rivers. The lake’s red-orange color comes from a high concentration of halophiles, or “salt-loving” bacteria and algae, which have pigments ranging from pink to deep red.
The Brickpit Ring Walk is an urban nature park and walkway in Sydney Olympic Park, New South Wales, Australia. The 1,804-foot (550-m) elevated walkway is built above a former brick quarry, now water storage facility and habitat for the endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog. In this Overview, bright green algae swirls on the surface of the storage pond.
New Mexico’s largest polluter, the San Juan Generating Station, is set to close in September 2022. In 2031, the neighboring Four Corners Power Plant will also be retired. These closures will greatly reduce toxic emissions, smog, and soil and groundwater contamination. The region will experience immediate health and environmental benefits after the closures, but the impact on local jobs remains uncertain. We flew with San Juan Citizens Alliance, Tó Nizhóní Áni, and Western Environmental Law Center, providing a platform for forward-thinking conversations and problem-solving. These groups are working to ensure the economic transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy is just and equitable for residents and plant workers, the majority of whom are Native American. Some of the pre-disturbed land we flew is ideal for solar electricity generation and already has infrastructure in place. Three solar projects in the region are in the works! Solar could replace the dirty power plants, providing the community with an environmentally friendly and economically stable industry.
On the flight, we also examined abandoned oil and gas wells, which leak massive amounts of methane and other toxins. Our partners are working with the BLM to identify orphan wells so that remediation can begin. Communities in the Four Corners region deserve clean air, land, and water. The closure of the generating stations and plugging of abandoned wells is part of the worldwide transition away from polluting fossil fuels and towards clean energy.
EcoFlight has flown politicians, conservationists, land-managers, faith groups, and health organizations over California’s Salton Sea for 5+ years, examining and advocating for solutions to the rising concerns of toxic lake-bed dust. This year, flights had a new focus - implementation of exciting new lithium mining technologies in the Salton Sea! The valuable mineral - essential for cell phones, electric vehicles, and batteries - is extracted from underground brine, which is a byproduct of nearby geothermal plants. This new process is much less degradative than the more common - and highly destructive - open pit lithium mining. The Salton Sea is one of the largest lithium stores in the world, containing up to six million metric tons.
We flew with our partner, the Audubon Society, and officials from the California Energy Commission, Natural Resources Agency, and Labor and Workforce Development Agency to help them learn about the mining proposals and how the resource can be developed while protecting the Salton Sea’s dwindling bird and wildlife habitat. Also on board were representatives of General Motors, who is partnering with the lithium producers at Salton Sea as they ramp up their electric car production. This partnership ensures access to lithium and promotes environmentally friendly, closed-loop sourcing. The Sea’s immense storage of “white gold” could provide massive economic revenue and hundreds of jobs for Imperial County, which currently has the highest unemployment rate in California.
And this tells us something about design. Humans can do it. But nonhumans also do it, all the time. Think about evolution. It’s design without a designer. And in a larger sense, nothing is un-designed. There is no such thing as unformatted matter, waiting for someone to stamp a for on it.
Timothy Morton. 2021.
All Art is Ecological. London: Penguin Books.
So the ideology was that: use sounds as instruments, as sounds on tape, without the causality. It was no longer a clarinet or a spring or a piano, but a sound with a form, a development, a life of its own.
[image ID: Text reading Texas State Aquarium staff stated that the animals have been getting a little restless. One of the employees had an idea to let some of the land animals spend time with some of the sea animals, and it has worked out brilliantly.
Putting the sloths near the dolphins was the biggest surprise of all. The dolphins are absolutely delighted with the sloths, and the sloths, normally very quiet animals, have been squeaking replies back to the dolphins for hours at a time. Who would have guessed these two species would be such a great match?
There is a photo of two dolphins in a large pool, their heads peeking out above the water to look at a brown sloth, who is hanging on a branch. End ID]
As alien species encounters go, this is like the absolute best possible outcome
Okay but in the video the dolphins swim upside down like they’re imitating the sloth and it’s real cute.
THANK YOU FOR FINDING VIDEO! IDK WHY I DIDN’T THINK TO CHECK YOUTUBE! THIS VIDEO IS AMAZING!!!
Here are even more animals visiting each others!!
Oh my gosh, thank you for sharing this! This is so precious!!!
lmao all the animals are all like What, In the name of FUCK? Is THAT?
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