Steelthroat

>Anita Sarkeesian in the credits Yeah, no, fuck off and die.

This moment in Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) was when I knew the postmodern deconstruction of our culture was reaching its apex. It’s hard to believe now that this was a real scene.

is folks not gender neutral why did you spell it like that

A train is coming down a track. Everyone on Earth has the choice to either tie themselves to the track, or not. If more than 50% of people choose to tie themselves to the track, the train turns around and doesn't run them over. Yes or no - do you tie yourself to the track?

The giant eye on top of the tower was probably the worst artistic decision Peter Jackson made.

The only drawing of Sauron made by Tolkien himself.

Most people don't understand that the Sun is the hardest place to get to in the Solar System.

Your brain has a circuit that doesn't know you live in a city. Its only job is to monitor whether birds are still singing. Right now, in this room, it is on. The circuit predates primates. Mammals have been using ambient soundscape continuity as a predator-detection system for roughly 200 million years. Birds stop singing when something larger moves through their territory. For most of mammalian history, a forest full of song meant no large predator was nearby, and the cessation of sound was the warning. Your nervous system never updated this software. The Max Planck Institute tested the inverse in 2022 with 295 participants. Six minutes of birdsong dropped anxiety with a medium effect size. Six minutes of traffic noise raised depression with the same. The effect worked on subjects who lived in dense urban environments and had no regular contact with nature. The brain still ran the check. Birdsong sits in the 1,000 to 8,000 Hz range. Your brainstem reads continuous patterns in that band as a signal that nothing dangerous is currently moving through the environment. EEG data shows birdsong at 45 to 50 decibels boosts alpha wave activity by 14.1% relative to silence. Alpha is the brainwave signature of relaxed alertness. Push the same birdsong above 60 decibels and the response flips. Stress markers rise 29%. The circuit only trusts the signal at the volume of quiet conversation, which is exactly the volume birds sing at from a typical distance. Three things happen simultaneously when the brain registers ambient safety. The amygdala downregulates. The parasympathetic nervous system takes over from the sympathetic. Heart rate variability rises, cortisol drops. The posterior cingulate cortex, which sits at the center of the rumination circuit, quiets down. King's College London tracked this through a smartphone study with over 1,200 participants and found the mood lift lasted hours after the sound stopped. People diagnosed with depression got the same response as healthy controls. Most of what gets labeled mental fatigue is hypervigilance running in the background. Birdsong tells the circuit it can stand down, and the brain reallocates the freed compute everywhere else. A quiet park feels different from a quiet office because the parks have sentinels.