in the words of a great sage: “the only difference between science and messing about, is writing it down”

guy who’s really into greasing his hair and listening to elvis, discovers elvis impersonators and “suddenly” starts wanting to impersonate elvis.

we really have to put a stop to this rampant presleyism, it’s harming our children

which cultures are we talking about here? i kinda don’t feel like going through every single set of native american constellations looking for ones that are bears…

if you dig deep enough that’s what almost all place names are, and as stupid as it feels it’s a great way to make fantasy place names feel not stupid.

There are a series of cities on the northeastern coast of sweden that all lie near the mouth of a long river, and those cities are quite literally named [Name of the river valley]-stream, while the rivers themselves are named [Name of the river valley]-river. It’s so profoundly stupid and yet no one ever thinks about it at all.
Luleå, on Lule älv. Piteå, on Pite älv. Umeå, on Ume älv. Etc etc…

i don’t think names in other languages is great evidence, because they could just have adopted the same name regardless, since they presumably adopted the greek constellations as well.

Most cultures used to have their own almost entirely different constellations, the only stuff i think has some overlap is the really obvious simple ones like the southern cross.

can they please bandwagon fairtrade next? it’d be pretty nice if all wine was certified slave labour-free.

i think the core part is why someone has the beliefs they do, does it stem from wanting a better world or is it just “thing bad because it bad”.

If someone just wants the world to be better then they’re probably willing to change their mind and accept other beliefs provided it’s explained to them, and willing to mix and match stuff.
Like “artificial chemicals haven’t been tested for thousands of years so i’m skeptical, but if it has been tested a lot then nomnomnom”

yeah, brown rice is just whole grain rice. It’s pretty sad how we’ve culturally forgotten that you can just fucking eat grains without dehulling them, grinding them, sifting the flour, and fucking bleaching it so it’s white as chalk.

whole grains are great, every sensible food administration is begging people to eat whole grains because it’s such a simple way to massively improve your nutrition

the beer came way, WAAAAAAY before the communal ass sponge, which was a uniquely roman piece of nonsense afaik

and we all know how well the romans managed, in the end.

i think the problem is that people these days wholly associate wheat with bleached core flour, which kind of fucking sucks.

Even just going with whole wheat flour makes a big difference in nutrition

you don’t even need a canoe, just something that’s vaguely water resistant that you can line a pit in the ground with.

And my axe! Oh, that didn’t make two worms, just one dead worm in two pieces…

The fundamental problem is that cladistic terms will kind of inevitably become general descriptors of any lifeform that looks/behaves similarly, which is immediately clear when you look at any scifi/fantasy stuff.

If an alien animal fills the same niche as salmon do on earth, then we’re gonna call it a salmon, and poof suddenly it’s no longer monophyletic.

IMO it’s either basically just lizards, which i think is perfectly fine since dinosaurs and even crocodilians aren’t that reptilian to me.
Or reptile has nothing to do with phylogeny and is instead just a physical description, like “fish” and “tree”.

Really the only thing that seems particularly similar between lizards and crocodilians is that they have a splayed posture and scaly skin, which is kinda like grouping together humans with ostriches and kangaroos because we walk upright on two legs…

we’re also quite weak against… most things, on the whole. It’s more a matter of what doesn’t instantly kill us

they also do a lot of work, try raising yourself onto your toes a bunch of times in a row, your calves will glow like the top element in the oven.

biology is probably the closest we can get to actual eldrich horror, realizing that everything you’ve taken as fact is complete nonsense and in reality all definitions are made up

like fucking hell, both animals and plants are compound organisms that billions of years ago swallowed some bacteria or whatever and it stuck around inside the cells and eventually atrophied into organelles!
And if that’s not bad enough, turns out we’re entirely codependent on bacteria in the stomach, to the point that in the span of a month you can become able to digest new things just because some specific bacteria multiplied a whole bunch, and those bacteria will then make you crave the stuff they can digest.

maybe that’s why octopi don’t have civilizations, they’re too traumatized by the fact that all their relatives are little more than meat plants

like, we’ve historically refused to acknowledge that we’re clearly related to monkeys, imagine how much people would have freaked out if our closest relatives were unable to move!

turns out life doesn’t care what we think, and will merrily do whatever the fuck it feels like

there’s a plant that can just magically grow to look like whatever other plants are near it, some-fucking-how

idk if there are other cool parts, but the one i’m aware of is that their jizzulate is asexual, basically clones (i think). The ferns shed spores which grow into what looks like a leaf on the ground, then those “leaves” have their own more normal sex cells which do the usual thing, which then grow into actual ferns from the surface of the “leaf”.
It’s fucking wild.