weary sharks & long moonlight mode walks
i feel bad for greenland sharks tbh
“Greenland sharks often go blind due to parasites that specifically target Greenland shark eyes, but the sharks don't mind at all because where they live it's so dark anyway.” - brodoswaggins931
There’s way more detail on the ectoparasites that infect the eyes of ~all Greenland sharks here (warning: including some truly grotesque body-horror photos - you can really see the large parasite sticking right out of the center of the shark’s eye).
Greenland sharks are the longest-living vertebrates (clocking in at 250-500 years). They don’t even start popping off babies until they’re over a century old, sort of like Tolkien elves (who aren’t consider full-grown until a hundred years have passed).
I’m forced to assume that, like Tolkien elves, instead of physically aging over time Greenland sharks also just become “ever more weary of the world and burdened by its sorrows.”
Who can blame them, really? Scientists have even found a parasitic barnacle in a Greenland shark’s cloaca, poor thing. I’d be weary too.
How can you tell if a mouse is uncomfortable? Check its facial expression against the official Mouse Grimace Scale, of course
There are good bits, though. A nice walk, for instance.
Or even just the internet. There was this huge thread on r/flashlight where people around the world were leaving their flashlights on in moonlight mode2 in solidarity with a poster who was in the ICU with liver and kidney failure.
It was beautiful.
And even had a happy ending!
This is old news, but the guy who designed the Pringles packaging had his ashes buried in a Pringles can.
Personally, I just want to be made useful - eke out a tiny bit more help to give to the world outta my remains, if possible. My finishing canter, if you will.
"The riders in a race do not stop short when they reach the goal. There is a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. There is time to hear the kind voice of friends and to say to one's self: 'The work is done.' But just as one says that, the answer comes: 'The race is over, but the work never is done while the power to work remains.' The canter that brings you to a standstill need not be only coming to rest. It cannot be while you still live. For to live is to function. That is all there is in living. And so I end with a line from a Latin poet who uttered the message more than fifteen hundred years ago: 'Death plucks my ears and says, Live – I am coming.'" - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Kinda fond of the idea of being donated to a forensic anthropology research facility (body farm) if I really had to choose, but whatevs.
I’ve been bouncing off trying to read Braiding Sweetgrass lately - every time I try to pick it back up, I end up wanting to reread Derrick Jensen’s books instead.
“Every morning when I wake up I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right. I’ve written books and done activism, but it is neither a lack of words nor a lack of activism that is killing salmon here in the Northwest. It’s the dams.” - Derrick Jensen, A Language Older Than Words
It’s like the Cicero/Demosthenes thing. Many years and several careers ago, I had law school professor who told us:
"When someone told Cicero he was the greatest orator ever, he replied: 'No, because when I give a speech, you come up to me and say that I'm a great orator, but when Demosthenes gives a speech about war, you ask, 'Where are the swords?''"
look, everything is complicated, so long as you don’t mind a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life that doesn’t have its splash of happiness &c &c
eponysterical, given that Greenland sharks turn out to be Tolkien elves
the lowest power setting