@jake4480@c.imSome baby squids can go from hatchling to near-adult in a few hours to a few days, and I'm like, the FUCK, humanity, we gotta raise these things for like, 18 YEARS? 😂 https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/some-baby-squids-ca…
@brentsleeper@sfba.social“How did a sports scene like #MiLB minor league #baseball—with a more than 100-year history of silly mascots, intimate hometown stadiums, and local ownership—get devoured so quickly by #PrivateEquity?”
@bourgwick@heads.socialpeace to mark volman (among many other things) one of my 2 favorite after-school DJs when i was, like, 10. flo & eddie's daily "psychedelic six-pack" was maybe the first place i encountered the word "psychedelic" https://variety.com/2025/music/news/ma
@grumpybozo@toad.socialBuried the lede: this was an exit interview. She is really fully retiring.
Susan Stamberg was like a parasocial Mom to me, as if I needed another one. A warm wise funny presence in my ears since I was a kid.
She sounded very tired. https://flipboard.com/@npr/media-l38pu
@carloshr@lile.clAquí el segundo single del próximo disco de estudio de David Byrne, «She Explains Things To Me»
#DavidByrne
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaHonestly? I couldn’t care less! I’m living my loudest, proudest queer fantasy right now and absolutely loving it! 🏳️🌈💖✨
https://pixelfed.social/p/midtsveen/844676788557967111
@thek3nger@mastodon.socialIn the last couple of months, I've been distracted. Disconnected from the others and me. June was way better. It may be a local maximum. Who knows? But we better enjoy the good times whenever we can.
https://www.davideaversa.it/blog/changelog-june-2025/
@NFL@darktundra.xyzHow an ESPN-NFL deal could change how we watch football, plus McAfee's apology https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6510910/2025/07/24/nfl-espn-red-zone-deal-the-pulse/
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialIn Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading
