Daily OpusEverything I write is freely rebloggable. Just keep the source and tell people about my books :D [Until I decide otherwise, my pronouns are Ze/Hir/Hirself. As in "Ze went to the shops to get hir medication hirself". Thank you for the respect.]
We freelancers have a tendency to never truly be away from our work, regardless of the time or day of the week. Especially if like me, your work station is in your home. We work long hours and dedicate ourselves fully to whatever project we have at hand. We loose sleep, skip social gatherings, eat whatever is quick and easy so we can get back to work. I have noticed that there is a sense of pride in general among freelancers that we are so in love with our work that we can dedicate ourselves this way. Passion for your chosen profession is definitely a plus!
However, I have also observed a downside to this part of freelancing. That dedication can cross the line into an unhealthy workaholic lifestyle, and other freelancers actually encourage it. There is an underlying unspoken rule in freelancer culture that if you’re not working, you’re slacking. I’ve seen other freelancers take subtle stabs at their peers for taking time off to see family, to tend to daily life, or to just have a day (or three) to simply BREATHE and do something other than art. Doing things like comparing your work load with others’ work load, making yourself out to be the harder working one. Referring to things like showering, cooking, and cleaning as “free time” or “vacation”. It creates or adds to guilt surrounding work, which is really not a nice thing to do to your friends and peers.
The disclaimer here is that clearly not every freelancer does this, and I think those that do are not being purposefully malicious, so please don’t misread this as an attack. I’m guilty of playing into this myself, we are just falling into a part of the starving artist stereotype; The idea that your chosen craft/art must encompass ALL of your being, every day and every moment for you to truly be passionate about it.
The truth is, there IS life outside of art and work, and it’s not a contest. We are living beings that must eat and sleep, and we are social animals that must have a connection with others. So not only do we HAVE to do things other than art, but it’s also ok to spend time doing other things that make you happy. It doesn’t mean you are less passionate about your work, or that other artists who spend more time on theirs love it more.
And yes, there are deadlines we must work under. But none of us want to be starving artists. None of us enjoy loosing sleep, eating crappy or skipping meals, working our fingers to the bone, letting friendships fall apart… These are not good things. You aren’t a cooler or more a passionate artist for making those sacrifices. So I think instead of putting that lifestyle on a pedestal, we should be encouraging one another to take time to care for ourselves, and to have a life outside of their work. Just like anyone else doing any other kind of work. =)
Do NOT fall victim to this attitude, take care of yourself ALWAYS. You will be better for it, your work will be better for it.
So important. And I find the more I -balance- and schedule my time, take necessary breaks, and allow myself to have FUN and release all that pent-up workaholic energy when I need it, the more productive I am during working hours.
A temperature chart for my fellow Americans who can’t do the Celsius-Fahrenheit equation from memory and for people in the civilized countries who’re too busy making fun of Fahrenheit to do the conversions themselves.
A woman can wear a tuxedo to an award show and be edgy, fresh, cool, and brave, but a man can’t wear a dress.
Boys can have sex with 20 girls and get pats on the back from their friends, but girls can’t do the same thing without being called a slut, a whore, easy, or have every single boy in her general vicinity expect she’ll have sex with them, too.
An “A” on a girl’s report card equals a “C” on a boy’s.
A dollar on a boy’s paycheck is 79 cents on a girl’s.
A boy can complain and people listen, but when a girl does, she’s on her period, she’s salty, she’s whiny, or she needs to stop bitching.
A man is only a man if he’s cisgender and heterosexual.
A boy can say, “I don’t want kids,” and no one freaks out, but if a girl says, “I don’t want kids,” World War Three is about to go down.
If a man says no, he’s not a real man.
If a woman says no, she’s a prude or a tease.
Men have to say “no homo” 17 times before they compliment another man so they won’t be labeled a fag.
The word “fag” still even exists.
Homosexuality is treated like a disease in need of curing.
Bi/Pan/Demi/Trans/Asexual are not acknowledged as real sexualities.
Men who are bi are “actually gay”.
Woman who are bi are “actually lesbian”.
A girl can’t cut her hair short without being asked if she’s lesbian.
A boy can’t wear the color pink without being asked if he’s gay.
Transsexual/Transgender people are demonized, discriminated against, and not taken seriously.
Ninety-eight percent of rapists never spend a second behind bars.
One out of 6 girls will be raped.
One out of 33 boys will be raped.
Many people don’t even believe that boys can be raped.
Many people still believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen.
If I were a man, I would be a more valid feminist.
any rich people following me? did i mention i love rich people. looooooooooove rich people………… love em…… especially love when they give me thousands of dollars out of the goodness of their hearts……….. anyone around here rich and want to do that
Okay. Welcome to ‘why this weird thing is my favorite animal’ masterpost.
This is a Rock Hyrax.
Looks like a cute rodent, right? NOPE. They’re in their own Order with three other species of hyrax, and the closest non-extinct relatives they have after that are… *drumroll* … elephants and manatees. I’ll just leave you with that for a second. Back in the Eocene, there were proto-hyrax of all sizes. Bovids out-competed most of the them, but apparently some stayed tiny and others turned into sirenians and elephants. You can tell they’re related through a few similarly weird similar characteristics - they all have tusky incisors (yes, even that cute bub has them), no scrotum, and toenails instead of claws.
Rock Hyrax are one of the only terrestrial species to basically have suction cups on their bodies. Because they run around on top of rocks all the time, having things to help you grip better is kind of an important adaptation. So they’ve got this weird musculature in the bottoms of their paw pads that retracts the tissue after the paw has been placed, effectively creating a tiny little vacuum chamber. Their one of the only animals that actually sweats on their paws, because it helps keep them moist and make a better seal against the rocks.
Now we get to the fun part. Digestion! In case you don’t know how basic herbivore digestion works, here’s the breakdown. Ruminants have multi-chambered stomachs, where they pass food back and forth to digest it. Hindgut fermenters have pouches in their large intestine where they let bacteria chew on the food for them. Hyrax… do something that can only have made the first dude to dissect them very confused.
That is the digestive system of the hyrax, pulled from a studbook for them. I’ll break it down for you.
The stomach of a hyrax does very little actual digestion. It has two sections, one (1) that is unlined and is for storage - it’s basically anaglogus to the crop of a bird, which, wtf, does not belong in a mammal - and a lined bit that sorta kinda digests something, sorta (2). (3) is the small intestine, which is the only part of this that functions how you’d expect. The hindgut is where things get wonky. (4) is the caecum, which is normally where most hindgut fermenters have the digestion happen. It’s a big sac where digesta sits and buggies nom on it. For hyrax, it does some but not all of it - it circulates the digest around a bunch while it’s in there, for the most surface area of food getting chewed up by buggies. Next, you have two isolated segments of the large intestine (labeled as the connecting colon here) - one with a narrow diameter and thick, bulky walls (5) and one with a wide diameter and super thin walls (6) that is highly specialized in absorbing fatty acids, which are hopefully what some of the food has been broken down into by now. Then you hit the colon, which normally just absorbs a lot of water to produce compact stool, but in hyrax it actually allows for more fermentation. So of course you’ve got to have (7) which is a sac with more weird blind ends to let digesta sit in - unlike in the ceacum, the digesta moves very slowly around in here and doesn’t circulate. Then (8), the distal end of the colon, absorbs most of the newly processed nutrients and it passes through (9) and (10) on the way to the anus.
That was a lot of boring digestion, so have a cute photo of a hyrax. Yes, they do really have tusks, and that’s going to be important shortly.
Okay, so what does that actually all mean. It sounds like it takes forever!
Whelp, it does. About six days for food that goes in one end to come out as poop on the other. It’s incredibly inefficient, partially because of how they digest things, and partially because the forage they survive on is really tough and low in nutrients and has to be very thoroughly broken down for every last bit. That means they have a very low metabolic rate… which means they don’t produce a ton of heat.. which means they’re absolutely useless at thermoregulation and have to sun themselves or hide in the shade to control their internal temperature. What’s a hallmark of most mammals? warm-blood. Efficient thermoregulation. Not needing to behave like a bloody snake to get it right, yeesh. It does mean they often sleep in piles, though, which is cute.
Okay, look back up at those tusks. Do they look efficient for eating grass? Nope! Because nothing about these guys make sense, they never evolved front teeth for clipping grass like most grazing animals so they bite food off with their molars. They’re also born without the bacteria in their stomach they need to do all the boring, complicated digestion above, so the babies have to immediately eat poop in order to acquire it.
I just felt like showing you that photo. Um, what else about these guys is weird? They’re not kosher in the Old Testment, for one. They also have incredibly complex communication: they use trills, yips, grunts, wails, snorts, twitters, shrieks, growls, and whistles and the males sing very complex songs during mating with very distinctive syntax, combining the 21 different sounds they can make into syllables of wails, chucks, snorts, squeaks, and tweets.
So yeah. Weird, tusky, song-singing inefficient hindgut fermenters who also happen to have a crop who can’t stay warm, grow up to 2ft in length and run around in giant colonies on sheer rock faces. Rock Hyraxes!
