He was not thriving, as the people championing the ideal of “freedom” claimed.
He was poisoned.
He was sick.
He was suffering.
“Freedom” would have eventually killed him. A building just happened to do it first.
“Postmortem testing has been completed for Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl that was found down in the courtyard of a Manhattan building a little over a year after his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo was vandalized on February 2, 2023. Onlookers reported that Flaco had flown into a building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on February 23, 2024, and acute trauma was found at necropsy.
Bronx Zoo veterinary pathologists determined thatin addition to the traumatic injuries, Flaco had two significant underlying conditions. He had a severe pigeon herpesvirus from eating feral pigeons that had become part of his diet, and exposure to four different anticoagulant rodenticidesthat are commonly used for rat control in New York City. These factors would have been debilitating and ultimately fatal, even without a traumatic injury, and may have predisposed him to flying into or falling from the building.
The identified herpesvirus can be carried by healthy pigeons but may cause fatal disease in birds of prey including owls infected by eating pigeons. This virus has been previously found in New York City pigeons and owls.In Flaco’s case, the viral infection caused severe tissue damage and inflammation in many organs, including the spleen, liver, gastrointestinal tract, bone marrow, and brain.
No other contributing factors were identified through the extensive testing that was performed.
Flaco’s severe illness and death are ultimately attributed to a combination of factors—infectious disease, toxin exposures, and traumatic injuries—that underscore the hazards faced by wild birds, especially in an urban setting.”
The naturalistic fallacy kills animals in horrible ways. The romanticism of what humans want to think of as a “free, wild, pure life” cannot be allowed supplant the reality of injury, sickness, and death. Releasing captive animals (or keeping them from being recaptured) because it’s “better” for them to suffer untethered than live a healthy, safe, captive life is inhumane and horrific.
Flaco’s life didn’t have to end in pain, sickness, and suffering.
Flaco’s death didn’t have to be tragic.
But once the idea of “freedom” entered the chat, Flaco’s fate was unavoidable.
People who get sick from radiation exposure are faking it for attention, radiation is literally the divine light of creation and it nourishes those who are pure of spirit
Twitter thread by Melissa Caruso about a labyrinthine magical bookstore in Syracuse, NY. Link to the first tweet in the thread; most pictures have image descriptions! Now here are the screenshots of that thread:
And then a hero of the labyrinthine magical bookstores of the world put all the bookstores that people listed in the replies on a map! (Google Maps link)
I’m gonna live in this bookstores endless rooms like a nerdy hella gay Minotaur <3
It Me. Spouse's family has diabetes, so they are all very careful with sugar; I get all the desserts!
Love having hypoglycemia because it means I get to ignore literally all of the fear mongering about how evil and bad sugar is. Homie I need sugar or I’m going into a coma. Give me the sugar pills.
already this has tags in the notes like “#anti ai” but… this is just real life with almost everything. this is like grifter 101 please don’t exceptionalize needing to be critical of chatgpt.
This is literally how job interviews work, by the way, and then everyone is surprised the super-duper confident guy is also an incompetent moron.
This worked on Trump voters, with the added selling point that he’s a piece of shit that gave them permission to be pieces of shit.
According to the company’s website, “Baking Pitchfest 2024” offers a product edition geared toward baking brands founded and owned by people of color across the U.S., and a bakery edition, which focuses on people of color-owned bakeries in the Northeast and Washington state.
“Half mentorship, half competition, Baking Pitchfest is an accelerator program designed to foster greater inclusivity and creativity in the baking world by providing equitable opportunities for People of Color entrepreneurs,” the website states, adding that winners will receive financial support, mentorship, and exposure.
But the initiative has generated outrage amongst conservatives online, who have blasted the competition eligibility rules as discriminatory against white people.
One X user critical of King Arthur Baking’s contest posted an email she received from the company in response to her complaining.
“Helping build joyful, equitable communities that celebrate diversity is an important part of who we are as a company,” the email states, later adding: “We love baking with anyone and everyone. Our simple expectation is that everyone show respect for one another.”
Time to buy more King Arthur Flour!
if i remember correctly, kung arthur has information on their website about navigating baking with brain fog and chronic fatigue, so if you wanna support them but are disabled like myself they have the resources to help you
edit: i did remember correctly (surprisingly)! here’s the link
The King Arthur Flour website is AMAZING and has never steered me wrong. Most of what I know about baking bread comes from there. Also iirc they’re an employee owned company? Also also their burger bun recipes absolutely slaps
They used to be on twitter and really seemed to walk the walk consistently. I know companies can never be perfect, but my interactions with this one has been consistently positive.
If memory serves @copperbadge is a fan of King Arthur and makes his pizza with it often.
Oh, exclusively. I don’t buy other flour if I can get King Arthur, to the point I’ve ordered it off their website when the local stores weren’t keeping it in stock. I wish they sold it in bulk, because I generally buy ten pounds at a time anyway.
It actually surprised me how much the quality of my baking and pasta doughs improved when I started using King Arthur. It’s more expensive than most other brands so it was only in the last few years that I felt comfortable dropping that much cash on flour, but using the right kind and quality of flour really improved my cooking.
Even more than that though, I use King Arthur recipes. When you see photos of my pizzas, it’s their Crispy Cheesy Pan Pizza dough recipe I’m using, with a 50/50 mix of their bread and pizza flour. It’s reached the point where if I want to cook something that involves flour, I check King Arthur first – for example their cheesecake recipe was a really good, really basic recipe for my first try at cheesecake in a while.
If you have access to a local mill, like Barton Springs Mill in Texas, it’s good to at least give it a spin, to support a local business and buy good grain. But King Arthur is the national equivalent of a Local Mill and while pricey it’s not unreasonable, so yeah I’m a big fan.
I do feel a yearning to do that, but I'm way to disorganized -- the best I can do is tubs/drawers/boxes with very broad categories)
ALT
Not to be absolutely unhinged but I think that if I buy enough tiny plastic tubs to continue breaking down every possession I own into discrete categories then eventually I will live in a home where I don’t constantly have a large pile of completely miscellaneous nicknacks in the middle of the floor constantly and forever until I die
so many people do not understand that 1) animals are not people, and 2) they aren’t teaching their animals what they THINK they are teaching them.
dog group on the book of faces, someone is asking for advice on how to get their dog to come to them after the dog is done relieving itself outside. The dog doesn’t like coming to them an they spend ten or twenty minutes or more catching the dog each time to bring it in. Which reminded me of one of many attempts to talk a person through trying to fix exactly this same behavior in *many* other dogs over the years…
Me: So, a quick question for you… does the dog not coming to you and you having to chase them down frustrate you?
Them: Of course!
Me: So what do you do when you finally either catch the dog or get them to come to you?
Them: I give the dog a correction!
Me: So. You get hands on your dog and then you immediately punish them for allowing you to get hands on them. And you wonder why your dog has developed the habit of not coming to you?
Them: No, that’s not… I’m punishing them for not coming when I call!
Me: Which was…. fifteen minutes ago, or so, you said?
Them: Yes, when I first called them!
Me: Dogs brains literally cannot link an abstract thought like that. A thought and a consequence MUST happen within 2.4 seconds of one another, or the consequence becomes linked to the most recent behavior, thought, or activity. So, tell me… how is your dog supposed to understand that you punishing them is for the event fifteen minutes ago when you have made such a concerted, if unintentional, effort to teach them that them getting close enough for you to lay hands on them in the yard means an immediate punishment?
Them: But that’s not what I *meant*!
Me: Doesn’t matter what YOU meant… what THEY learned is that they come to you, and they get punished. Stop punishing your dog for the behavior that you want to see more of.
Stop anthropomorphizing your animals, folks. They don’t think like us. Stop setting them - and yourself - up for failure.
with humans, thanks to the capacity for abstract thought, punishing them basically always produces undesired results.
“Why do Americans celebrate St. Patrick’s Day like that?” “Why do Americans celebrate Cinco de Mayo like that, we don’t even celebrate it in Mexico?” IT IS AN EXCUSE TO GET DRUNK AND EAT FOOD. Every popular American holiday is an excuse to get drunk and eat food. Labor Day. Veterans Day. Memorial Day. Halloween. Valentines Day. Fuck it, Leif Erikson Day. My family celebrates Guy Fawkes Day, for some reason.
Honestly just the idea of royalty is wild to me. You’re just keeping human pets at this point. It’s weird. It’s a weird thing to do. You’re collective pet owners of a bunch of purebreds that are spoiled rotten and think they’re the boss of you.
“We can’t go in the big palace. Yes we own it but that’s Charles’ palace. He’s very nervous and he gets upset if anyone gets into his palace, and honestly it’s not worth dealing with him afterwards.”
“We’re throwing a party for Charles, it’s really expensive but wait until you see how cute they look in their little outfits! (No, we can’t eat any of the food, it’s not for us.)”
Grew up with mine -- even our moms got confused sometimes
Once a trope of folktales and literature, the doppelgänger is now a subject of scientific study. Dive into the tradition and science of lookalikes and discover your odds of finding one yourself.
"In the plausible future, there is going to be a whole generation of humans living their lives in zero-gravity," Chang writes. "This kind of environmental shift will totally reshape our understanding of space and body function."
"When our hands and feet are no longer suitable for the task of controlling our movement in zero gravity, we need a new form of body extension."
"This limb has the ability to automatically anchor to your surroundings, and stabilize your position while floating inside a space station."
"Wave - Hit - Wrap / Automatic Anchoring"
"Just like a snake hunting, uses its whole body to wrap and squeeze."
From the original concept to the final functional prototype, the limb has been upgraded 12 times to ensure every structure on it can cooperate perfectly under its context.
[Editor's note: In the descriptions below, I think Cheng may be confusing the role of flesh versus tendons—it's possible there's a translation issue.]
"Control String – The control string is like our muscles, driving the limb to move."
"The Rubber Band Structure – The rubber band is like our flesh, it doesn't have the ability to move the limb, but functions as a mechanism to prevent the limb from curving too much."
"The Limb Bone – Inspired by the dinosaur tail, connecting with each other by joint ball, which let the limb have the power to conduct heavy load tasks."
"As We Move Towards Evolution"
"This Augmented Limb prototype [seeks to answer] how should we respond to living environment changes driven by fast-developing technologies? When the evolution conducted by nature can't catch up with the speed of how we implement technology to send us into an environment full of uncertainty, what should we do?"
“…but there’s a misconception that digital files are safe forever. In fact, files end up corrupted, data is improperly transferred, hard drives fail, formats change, work simply vanishes.”
As an archivist I can say, with no hyperbole, that digital preservation is a very expensive, very labor intensive, nightmare that we absolutely lose sleep over.
We had Ed... All day long all he did was pop into folks offices and tell the same stories (usually you would hear the same spiel in the morning and afternoon). He just retired and started visiting the office and doing the same thing (HR had to email him asking him to refrain from visiting unless he had been invited by somebody)
This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.
A reader writes:
My company is generally pretty casual, collegial, and “open-door.” An employee on my team (not a direct report, but I review a lot of her work and am senior to her) who seems to lack a lot of common sense about professional norms has a tendency to walk right into my office when I’m working and begin a long-winded question without waiting for me to acknowledge her, make eye contact, or otherwise indicate that I’m available in any way.
I’m trying to be available to answer questions because she’s having a lot of performance issues and has tried to blame me for not “helping her” enough, but the constant interruption is driving me crazy. I’ve tried putting on a show of not looking up from my computer until she’s a few sentences in and acting confused and saying she needs to start over because I was focusing on my work, but this doesn’t seem to faze her at all. I’ve tried wearing headphones and pretending I don’t notice that she’s there (same result) and I’ve tried setting daily meetings with her and encouraging her to bring all of her questions then, but that doesn’t seem to discourage her from coming in 5-10 times per day with one off questions.
I answer this question — and two others — over at Inc. today, where I’m revisiting letters that have been buried in the archives here from years ago (and sometimes updating/expanding my answers to them). You can read it here.
Other questions I’m answering there today include:
CEO assigns work to my staff without talking to me
“After a performance, I came out into the lobby where a middle-aged Dutch woman was waiting to see me. She politely inquired, “What is Hans doing now?” I responded, “Who do you mean by Hans?” “Hans Buruma, my husband,” she said. As she explained it, Hans Buruma was once in charge of mail delivery at the Amsterdam Central Post Office. Three years before, he had attended Heretics (Jashumon), a guest production from Tokyo presented by my theatre troupe at the Mickery Theater. Just after the play began, two men masked in black leaped down into the audience area, grabbed her husband by the arms, and forcibly dragged him up onto the stage. Once onstage, Hans was dressed in a costume and made up, and before he knew it, he had become a character in the play. At least two times during the course of the play, she clearly saw her husband joining other characters who together pulled the ropes. He seemed to be enjoying himself. But when the play was over, Hans never returned to his seat in the audience. The wife waited for two hours, then went to the dressing room, but the members of the company had already returned to the hotel. That night, Hans failed to come home. After two more nights, he still hadn’t returned. By then, the company had left Holland and moved on to West Germany. She thought he had joined the company, that “they hired Hans for his acting skill.” She thought, “My husband is in the play.” Now. after three years had passed, she was pleading with me, “Please give me back my husband.” I had to tell her that I had never heard this story before. Neither I nor anyone in the company knew a middle-aged Dutchman named Hans Buruma. There was no evidence indicating that such a person had been with us during the past three years. When I told her that I didn’t know him, she was on the verge of tears. “Then where is Hans?” she asked. Three years ago–one middle-aged male post-office delivery worker evaporated into our play. In this case, we cannot distinguish where the drama ends and reality begins.”
— Shuji Terayama, The Labyrinth and the Dead Sea: My Theatre, translated by Carol Sorgenfried in Unspeakable Acts: The Avant-Garde Theatre of Terayama Shuji
ALT
ALT
ALT
From the original concept to the final functional prototype, the limb has been upgraded 12 times to ensure every structure on it can cooperate perfectly under its context. 
