What’s really cool about this is that cephalopod (octopus, squid, etc.) intelligence evolved completely separately from intelligence in tetrapods (which includes primates, dolphins, crows… basically any other intelligent animals you can think of). Cephalopods are very, very far away from us on the tree of life. For context, you and a starfish are more closely related than you and an octopus. The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods was the so-called Urbilaterian, the hypothetical first animal with a left-right symmetric body. This animal almost certainly had, at most, an extremely simple nervous system, without anything resembling a brain.
All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be dreaming means one of two things. Either
a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).
or
b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.
Needless to say, either of these outcomes would be really very cool.
Cellulite is a female secondary sex characteristic and should be celebrated as a rite of womanhood, not despised or eradicated.
it’s really a secondary sex characteristic?!
It is. It has to do with the way our bodies network fat. Female bodies create sort of a mesh network to support fat (female bodies are MUCH more hardy in times of stress) and it can present as delightfully lumpy. More than 90% of women have visible cellulite, but all women store fat in this manner.
why did no one tell me this?!
You know why :/
Spread this. I only just started to see mine and I started to freak out a bit. More people should/need to know about this
Here’s an illustration of the aforementioned difference in fat storage.
Men’s lattice pattern collagen threads holds subcutaneous fat in a way that, when the skin expands because of the fat storage, it expands evenly. Women’s “pockets” expand unevenly when we accumulate fat, creating that orange peel effect. Our storage pattern means we can healthily store more fat than men. Like a woman with 25% body fat is average, a man with 25% body fat is chubby. Because of that, like OP said, women are hardier in times of stress or famine. It’s also one of the reasons why our bodies can survive pregnancy, which is a massive energy demand on our system.
And there’s absolutely NO “treatment” for cellulite that will work. They are all bullshit designed to separate you from your hard-earned cash. It’s a secondary sex characteristic, it’s perfectly normal and it’s not going away no matter what you do. Like I’m very lean myself and I work out 5~6 times a week, and I still have cellulite. Someone giving a woman shit for having cellulite is akin to giving her shit for having skin. It’s just a mixture of misogyny and corporate greed.
Love your lumpy skin, ladies. It means you are a badass surviving machine shaped by millenia of evolution.
I did not know this, and I pride myself on knowing shit like this.
There’s a bit in Wonder Woman that I can’t stop thinking about. It’s the part where she walks towards General Ludendorff at the gala. He see her and starts walking in her direction as if to attack, then surges towards her and grabs her in a kind of dance hold. She’s stunned, frozen. It’s probably the only time in the film where Diana looks afraid.
Why?
Because she was attacked, but in a way she’s never encountered before. She’s been trained to handle “honest” attacks, where the attacker makes their intentions clear. But here she is attacked in the way women in this world are so often attacked. It’s an unwanted, unwelcome intrusion, a man putting his hands on her without her consent, intruding into her personal space in an aggressive, obtrusive, threatening manner. But to bystanders, they are simply dancing. She doesn’t know what to do. She’s trained her whole life to deal with honest, open attacks, but faced with the sneaky, faux-polite attack of this kind of man, she’s completely lost.
I thought this was a great moment. It reflects the experiences of so many women so well.
On a side note, I mentioned it to my (male) partner afterward, and he hadn’t even noticed Diana’s reaction in that moment. He’s a great guy and a good, kind person, but his obliviousness to her confusion and fear speaks volumes about the different experiences of men and women in our society.
I work at a kindergarten and this is a collection of cute Wonder Woman related things that happened within a week of the movie being released.
On Monday, a boy who was obsessed with Iron Man, told me he had asked his parents for a new Wonder Woman lunchbox.
A little girl said “When I grow up I want to speak hundreds of languages like Diana”
This girl had her parents revamp her Beauty and the Beast birthday party in THREE DAYS because she simply had to have a Wonder Woman party.
Seven girls playing together during recess on Tuesday, saying that since they all wanted to be Wonder Woman they had agreed to be Amazons and not fight but work together to defeat evil.
There is this one girl that refuses to listen to you unless you address her as Wonder Woman.
Another girl very seriously asked the teacher if she could ditch her uniform for the Wonder Woman armor bc she “wanted to be ready if she needed to save the world”. The teacher laughed and said it was okay, and the next day the girl came dressed as Wonder Woman and not a single kid batted an eye.
They are making a wrap-up dance show, and they asked the teacher if they could come as superheroes, they are going to sing a song about bunnies.
This kid got angry and threw a plastic car over his head and a girl gasped “LIKE IN THE MOVIE”
A boy threw his candy wrapping in the floor and a 5-year-old girl screamed “DON’T POLLUTE YOU IDIOT, THAT IS WHY THERE ARE NO MEN IN TEMYSCIRA”
On Wednesday, a girl came with a printed list of every single female superhero and her powers, to avoid any trouble when deciding roles at recess.
I was talking to one of the girls that hadn’t seen the movie, and the next day she came and very seriously told me “you were right, Wonder Woman was way better than Frozen.”
Consider this your friendly reminder that if this movie completely changed the way these girls and boys thought about themselves and the world in a week, imagine what the next generation will achieve if we give them more movies like Wonder Woman.
This is why I want to live in a world where everyone has Wonder Woman.
Sophie Scholl was a German activist who spoke out against the Nazi regime and was a member of a protest group called The White Rose. The group mainly consisted of students in their early twenties who were fed up with the totalitarian rule of the government and distributed leaflets urging their fellow Germans to oppose the regime through non-violent resistance. On 22nd February 1943, after the release of the sixth White Rose leaflet, Sophie was arrested by the Gestapo, convicted of treason and executed that same day by guillotine. She was 21 years old.
Celebrating International Women’s Day (Mar 8th) this week #iwd2016
1. If you’re going to write a smug thunk-piece about the “failure” of “diversity” in comics, maybe don’t use the cover image of a book that’s had 4 collections on the NYT graphic books bestseller list, won a Hugo and cleaned up at Angouleme. Just because you HOPE it’s on the chopping block, oh Riders of the Brohirrim, doesn’t mean it is.
2. I will tell you exactly why Ms Marvel works: it didn’t set out to be Ms Marvel. We were originally going to pitch it as a 10 issue limited series. I had a 3 issue exit strategy because I assumed we were going to get canned. There was no “diversity initiative” anywhere–getting that thing made at all was a struggle. It was a given that any character without AT LEAST a 20-year history would tank. Everybody, myself included, assumed this series was going to work out the same way.
3. That freed us–by “us” I mean the whole creative team–to tell exactly the story we wanted to tell. We had nothing to lose, nothing to overcome but low expectations. That gave us room to break a lot of rules.
STUFF THAT IS DIFFICULT TO REPLICATE AND IMPOSSIBLE TO PLAN:
1. Unexpected audiences. We are at a point in history when the role of religion is at a tremendous inflection point. What I didn’t realize was that the anxieties felt by young Muslims are also felt by young Mormons, evangelicals, orthodox Jews, and others. A h-u-g-e reason Ms Marvel has struck the chord it has is because it deals with the role of traditionalist faith in the context of social justice, and there was–apparently–an untapped audience of people from a wide variety of faith backgrounds who were eager for a story like this. Nobody could have predicted or planned for that. That’s being in the right place at the right time with the right story burning a hole in your pocket. Plenty of other stuff I’ve written and liked has fallen with a huge thud. That’s the norm. Exceptions are great when they happen, but hard to plan.
2. The paradox of low expectations. The bar was set pretty low for Ms Marvel, but because of Ms Marvel’s success, that bar got set much higher for similar books that came later.
STUFF THAT IS ENTIRELY AVOIDABLE:
1. This is a personal opinion, but IMO launching a legacy character by killing off or humiliating the original character sets the legacy character up for failure. Who wants a legacy if the legacy is shitty?
2. Diversity as a form of performative guilt doesn’t work. Let’s scrap the word diversity entirely and replace it with authenticity and realism. This is not a new world. This is *the world.*
3. Never try to be the next whoever. Be the first and only you. People smell BS a mile away.
4. The direct market and the book market have diverged. Never the twain shall meet. We need to accept this and move on, and market accordingly.
5. Not for nothing, but there is a direct correlation between the quote unquote “diverse” Big 2 properties that have done well (Luke Cage, Black Panther, Ms Marvel, Batgirl) and properties that have A STRONG SENSE OF PLACE. It’s not “diversity” that draws those elusive untapped audiences, it’s *particularity.* This is a vital distinction nobody seems to make. This goes back to authenticity and realism.
AND FINALLY
On a practical level, this is not really a story about “diversity” at all. It’s a story about the rise of YA comics. If you look at it that way, the things that sell and don’t sell (AND THE MARKETS THEY SELL IN VS THE MARKETS THEY DON’T SELL IN) start to make a different kind of sense.
