Pigeons&Dandelions

@pigeonsanddandi is me and @XRPosse is my husband and I doing an #NFT art project together.

@HannahWardEdu Just read the synopsis. The villain being called Lord Carnal is pretty hilarious.

This was the bestselling book for months in 1900 when it was published. It took the country by storm. It had everything; pirates, a mail-order bride with a royal secret, haunted woods, and all of the excitement of colonial Jamestown in the 1620s (with some of your favorite historical characters showing up for an appearance). I hardly ever hear about this book when people are talking about great classics to dive into. It holds up super well as an adventure and a romance and a historical fiction piece and a mystery. It's great for teens (looking for a read aloud for your older kids maybe)? It's a surprisingly accessible and fun read. You won't regret it.

A woman I know found out her coworkers had a group chat without her. Not unusual. Happens all the time. What made it different was that she was the one training most of them. Helping with resumes. Covering shifts. Fixing mistakes quietly so no one got written up. She found out by accident when someone sent a screenshot to the wrong thread. Her name was in it. Not in a dramatic way. Just jokes. Eye rolls. “She tries too hard.” “Why does she act like the boss?” The next day she showed up the same. Smiled. Helped. Answered questions. But she stopped volunteering. Stopped staying late. Stopped reminding people about deadlines. Three months later the department was a mess. Management asked her why she wasn’t “stepping up” like before. She said, calmly, “I realized I was the only one who thought we were a team.” That’s it. No confrontation. No meltdown. Just withdrawal. And the wild part? People only notice your value when you stop giving it for free.

Kurt Vonnegut speaks about this: “OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything. What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them. Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more pals to tell dumb jokes to. A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys. But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man. When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this: “You are not enough people!” I met a man in Nigeria one time, an Ibo who has six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family. They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages and sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle to it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.” Wouldn't you have loved to be that baby? Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian

One of my favourite myths has to be that of the ‘Barometz’ or ‘The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary’ (also called Borametz, or Scythian Lamb). This creature was a medieval European legend about a mythical zoophyte (plant-animal hybrid) from distant Central Asia (Tartary). A living lamb grew attached by its navel to a short, flexible stem rooted in the ground. It had flesh, blood, bones, and wool, could bleat, and grazed on grass within its reach. Once it consumed everything nearby, both lamb and plant died. Popular from the 13th to 17th centuries (mentioned by Mandeville, in encyclopedias, and botanical texts), it likely arose from misunderstandings of cotton plants or the woolly fern Cibotium barometz. 🎨 'The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary' by Jessica Roux

Michael Zulli (1952-2024) was an American comic book artist and illustrator, known for his realistic, organic style and deep connection to nature, with a level of detail that was uncommon in the medium.

You’ll hunt him. Condemn him. Set the dogs on him. Because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A dark knight.

Anthony Hopkins ne trouvait aucun exemplaire du livre à Londres. Il s'assit alors sur un banc de métro. C'était en 1973. Hopkins venait d'obtenir un rôle dans un film intitulé *La Fille de Petrovka*, adapté d'un roman du journaliste américain George Feifer. Comme tout acteur sérieux, il voulait lire le livre original. Il passa une journée entière à fouiller les librairies de la célèbre Charing Cross Road à Londres. Rien. Le livre était introuvable au Royaume-Uni. Frustré et épuisé, Hopkins entra dans la station de métro Leicester Square pour prendre le train et rentrer chez lui. C'est alors qu'il remarqua quelque chose sur un banc. Quelqu'un avait oublié un livre. Il le ramassa. Le retourna. *La Fille de Petrovka*. Le livre exact qu'il cherchait depuis le matin, abandonné sur un banc de métro dans une ville de huit millions d'habitants. Hopkins n'en revenait pas. Il l'emporta chez lui, le lut et remarqua quelque chose d'inhabituel. Les marges étaient remplies de notes manuscrites à l'encre rouge. Des annotations. Quelqu'un avait soigneusement annoté tout le livre. Il n'y pensa pas plus. Il utilisa les notes pour mieux comprendre son personnage, se prépara pour le rôle et rangea discrètement cette coïncidence parmi les étranges moments de la vie. Quelques mois plus tard, Hopkins se rendit à Vienne, où le film était tourné. Un jour, sur le plateau, on lui présenta un visiteur. George Feifer. L'auteur du livre. Ils parlèrent du film, des personnages, de l'histoire. Puis Feifer mentionna quelque chose qui laissa Hopkins sans voix. « Je n'ai plus d'exemplaire de mon propre livre », dit Feifer. « J'ai prêté mon exemplaire personnel à un ami il y a des années. Il contenait toutes mes notes dans les marges. Il l'a perdu quelque part à Londres. Je ne l'ai jamais revu depuis. » Hopkins sentit ses cheveux se dresser sur la nuque. « J'ai trouvé un exemplaire », dit-il lentement. « Sur un banc dans le métro. Il est rempli de notes manuscrites. » Feifer le regarda avec incrédulité. Hopkins alla chercher le livre et le tendit à l'auteur. Feifer pâlit. C'était son exemplaire. Son écriture. Ses annotations. Le livre personnel qu'il avait perdu des années auparavant – oublié par hasard sur un banc de métro, au moment précis où Anthony Hopkins, l'acteur qui en avait le plus besoin, s'y asseyait. Dans une ville de millions d'habitants. À travers des milliers de rues. Parmi des centaines de stations de métro. Le bon livre. Le bon banc. Le bon moment. George Feifer a retrouvé son livre perdu. Anthony Hopkins a gagné une histoire qu'il raconterait toute sa vie. Carl Jung appelait cela la synchronicité – l'idée que les coïncidences significatives ne sont pas aléatoires, mais font partie d'un schéma plus profond tissé dans la réalité. Hopkins a toujours été fasciné par cette idée. Il a parlé d'apprendre à simplement s'émerveiller de la vie. « Je ne sais pas s'il existe un plan directeur », a-t-il dit un jour. « Mais parfois, il se passe des choses trop parfaites pour être expliquées. » Peut-être était-ce de la chance. Peut-être était-ce le destin. Peut-être était-ce l'univers qui souriait discrètement. Ou peut-être, juste peut-être, certains livres sont-ils destinés à trouver leurs lecteurs. Et certaines histoires sont-elles destinées à être racontées.

Some cards I did more than one. Which do you like better. Also I'm finding my writing cringe but hey I'm not a writer.

Revisiting old art. King of Cups. Artemis. Real Mugwort, known for enhancing perception of dreams.

Dilly Queen.

Pair of rare black wolves caught on camera in Polish forest by wildlife researcher 🐺

Can attest to yarn work being mostly about playing with color

This might be the most fascinating thing you’ll read today. When Vincent van Gogh moved to Paris in 1886, he was suddenly exposed to Impressionism's colors, which radically changed his palette. So, to experiment cheaply with colour harmonies before trying on canvas, he used small balls of coloured wool. He would arrange them in different combinations to see how hues interacted. The balls of wool were kept in this red cardboard box, which is preserved in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. These wool balls helped him transition from the darker Dutch palette to the bright colours we associate with his Paris and Arles works. Such a practical way to test contrasts and harmonies without wasting expensive oil paints. Brilliant!

THE COGNITIVE COLLAPSE We are witnessing the first documented case of mutual intelligence degradation between humans and machines. This is not theory. This is peer-reviewed science. Texas A&M, UT Austin, and Purdue just proved that AI systems trained on viral content lose 23.6% of their reasoning ability. Long-context comprehension collapses by 38%. Even after retraining with 4.8 times more quality data, a 17.3% deficit remains permanent. The models are forgetting how to think. MIT tracked 54 humans using ChatGPT for four months. Result: weakest brain connectivity of any group tested. When asked to write without AI assistance, 78% could not recall a single passage from essays they had written minutes earlier. The humans are forgetting how to think. Nature published the mathematical proof: AI trained on AI-generated content undergoes “irreversible defects.” The tails of the distribution vanish. Nuance disappears. Everything converges toward the median of whatever the algorithm rewards. Now connect the system. Platforms optimize for engagement. Engagement-optimized content degrades AI training data. Degraded AI produces degraded content. Humans consuming and delegating to these systems experience cognitive decline. Those humans produce content that becomes training data. The feedback loop is closed. Both intelligences are degrading together. 560,000 weekly ChatGPT users now show signs of psychosis according to OpenAI’s own data. Websites blocking AI scraping tripled in one year. AI incidents increased 56.4% in 2024 alone. The information ecosystem that built modern civilization is consuming itself. This is not a technology problem. This is not a human problem. This is a coupled system approaching a phase transition where the quality of thought itself becomes the scarce resource. The organizations and individuals who secure access to genuine human intelligence and uncorrupted information will define the next era. Everyone else will wonder what happened to their ability to reason.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Read the full article here open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

First thought?

Which song has a bassline that blows your mind?

"I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things." —Douglas Adams

Obviously I love this

Here is Roger Ebert's first paragraph of his review for "The Mummy" and it is why he was the greatest film critic to ever live