That’s a great question! For those of you not familiar with the bends, they’re also known as decompression sickness, and are a risk primarily for scuba divers. The bends happen when nitrogen builds up in a diver’s body and comes out of solution into bubbles when the diver returns too quickly to the surface (and is suddenly under less pressure).
When we scuba dive, we bring air with us and keep breathing throughout our dive. When we do that, we add more and more molecules of nitrogen to our bodies throughout our dive, and our tissues become saturated. Decompression time allows the nitrogen to work its way out of our tissues while still under pressure (so it doesn’t turn into bubbles in the tissues). That nitrogen then moves back into the lungs, where we can exhale it. With enough decompression time, a diver who has spent significant time underwater won’t get the bends.
In contrast, when marine mammals dive deep into the ocean, they don’t breathe compressed air; they hold their breath. Because they only have one breath of air in their lungs while they dive, they don’t load up with nitrogen. No extra nitrogen means no decompression needed!
No decompression time needed when you’re a sea lion!
[GIF description: Several sea lions swimming toward the camera.]
Yeah sure Tumblr is a hellsite but I know someone who wrote a fanfic in the 1990s that someone else didn’t like, so when she was selling printed copies of the zine with the story in it out of her hotel room at a convention, this other woman STOOD IN FRONT OF HER DOOR TO REFUSE PEOPLE ACCESS. Because the story featured a ship she disliked. And I feel like somehow, 10,000 Tumblrs still can’t compare to that level of Extra.
Your periodic reminder that the technology and the scale of distribution changes, the basic impulse to fandom wank does not
i found this blog post because i was trying to google to see if there was something wrong with my accidental pets because i keep having to pick up their fucking legs but no, apparently that’s just normal for the crickets god abandoned
You will often not see Cave Crickets, but know that they are about because of their discarded legs, which litter an infested area. My garage looks the floor of a civil war triage tent, strewn with bloody limbs. But Cave Crickets don’t seem to mind. Limbs are merely an option, and the disposessed continue about their business undisturbed.
Many places have a “forest that shouldn’t be entered.” Even people who are used to working in the mountains feel there is something there. They are suddenly overcome with fear and it becomes the custom to avoid certain places. These places exist. I don’t know what is there, but I think they are real. I’m not a believer in the occult, but the world is more than we can fathom with our five senses. This world doesn’t exist just for humans. So I think it’s all right to have such things. This is why I think it’s a mistake to think about nature from the idea of efficiency, that forests should be preserved because they are essential for human beings …
I am concerned, because for me the deep forest is connected in some way to the darkness deep in my heart. I feel that if it is erased, then the darkness inside my heart would also disappear, and my existence would grow shallow.
Hayao Miyazaki, “Totoro Was Not Made as a Nostalgia Piece”, Starting Point: 1979-1996
The ancient Egyptians famously gave us paper and the pyramids, but were also early adopters of the stripy sock.
Scientists at the British Museum have developed pioneering imaging to discover how enterprising Egyptians used dyes on a child’s sock, recovered from a rubbish dump in ancient Antinoupolis in Roman Egypt, and dating from 300AD.
New multispectral imaging can establish which dyes were used – madder (red), woad (blue) and weld (yellow) – but also how people of the late antiquity period used double and sequential dying and weaving, and twisting fibres to create myriad colours from their scarce resources.
Crucially, the imaging is non-invasive. Previously studying ancient textiles using radiocarbon dating and dye analysis required physical samples to be taken. Read more.
When you’re not sure if somebody is being legitimately forgetful or passive aggressive, and you really don’t want to ask 😒
(ETA: As usual, it’s nobody here. Not into vaguing like that.)
It also struck me as crap funny in a way, that I ended up with the opposite go-to strategy as a kid in the ‘80s: perm the hell out of it, to at least make it look more uniform and less chaotic, when you have no idea how to deal with naturally curly hair 🙄 Besides just keeping it chopped off.
That only started after I was in school, though, and old enough to somewhat safely get my head slathered in chemicals without immediate meltdowns. And it wasn’t all the time.
(Just as glad it was totally socially acceptable to just keep it chopped off when I was little, though. Because I still hate anyone messing with my hair, and it was Meltdown City any time somebody tried then…)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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