no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened
it’s such an unreal experience
like
you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face
and
you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is
it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing
But You Are Not Seeing Anything
Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.
But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.
So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.
Brain is like “there’s a hand there”
Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”
Brain is like “nice”
but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best
Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
we once went spelunking, and a our guide said that once he was in a cave with a stream, so he could hear running water, and his brain was like ‘oh, running water? that means there must be Ducks out there’. and he saw like…low light shadows of ducks. that his brain just Put There.
As a cave guide: we call that ‘cave blindness’! True darkness absolutely wigs your brain out – we’re such visual creatures that after a while our brain throws a hissy after not seeing anything. Sensory deprivation is a very real kind of torture. We have a huge, deep cave system at work and there are a lot of places where you’re hundreds of meters in solid rock in this tiny, dark, still space.
I like to turn my torch off, sit down with my back against the wall, and wait to see how long it takes before I start seeing things or feeling like the ground is moving, or hearing things. Because I know I’m not – I’m in complete darkness, utter silence, sitting in rock that hasn’t moved in hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
Proof that brains are Ridiculous and over-react to a lot of stuff!
I want to add to this that people who lose their hearing as adults have reported hearing music “being played loudly from somewhere”, and other auditory hallucinations, bc the brain will just panic and put your brain’s ipod on *fucking shuffle* if it’s not getting any input
Ruby Bridges was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana during the New Orleans school desegregation crisis in 1960.
This movie made me cry, I was so heart broken by how Ruby Bridges was treated! She was only 6, but was so strong. She is a very brave girl and she did not care what the white folks called her.
People are simply disgusting to minimize people by skin color!
Ruby you might not think you’re a hero… But to other people you are! You are A HERO and you are A PERSON WHO MADE AMERICA CHANGE!
this is white culture, this is their history, this is their legacy…being enraged at a damn baby just because she’s black.
she’s still alive by the way
Ruby Bridges in 2010
“As Bridges describes it, “Driving up I could see the crowd, but living in New Orleans, I actually thought it was Mardi Gras. There was a large crowd of people outside of the school. They were throwing things and shouting, and that sort of goes on in New Orleans at Mardi Gras.“ Former United States Deputy Marshal Charles Burks later recalled, “She showed a lot of courage. She never cried. She didn’t whimper. She just marched along like a little soldier, and we’re all very very proud of her.“
U.S. Marshals escorted Bridges to and from school
As soon as Bridges entered the school, white parents pulled their own children out; all the teachers refused to teach while a black child was enrolled. Only one person agreed to teach Ruby and that was Barbara Henry, from Boston, Massachusetts, and for over a year Henry taught her alone, “as if she were teaching a whole class.”
Every morning, as Bridges walked to school, one woman would threaten to poison her; because of this, the U.S. Marshals dispatched by President Eisenhower, who were overseeing her safety, allowed Ruby to eat only the food that she brought from home.
Another woman at the school put a black baby doll in a wooden coffin and protested with it outside the school, a sight that Bridges Hall has said “scared me more than the nasty things people screamed at us.” At her mother’s suggestion, Bridges began to pray on the way to school, which she found provided protection from the comments yelled at her on the daily walks.”
THIS SHIT WAS ONLY 58 YEARS AGO. PEOPLE WHO PARTICIPATED IN THIS RACIST TERRORISM AND ACTS LIKE IT ARE STILL ALIVE, AND THEIR KIDS ARE IN THEIR 40′S AND 50′S.
DON’T LET RACISM APOLOGISTS GET AWAY WITH “WHY ARE YOU LIVING IN THE PAST,” BULLSHIT ARGUMENTS. WE ARE LITERALLY STILL DEALING WITH THE FAMILIES THAT FORMED HATE MOBS OVER BLACK CHILDREN ATTENDING SCHOOL WITH WHITE KIDS.
This is your reminder that if someone uses the words “that was a test/I was testing you/you passed” in reference to their weird behavior or to brush off a fight you had with them?
That’s a red flag.
RUN THE OTHER WAY.
If they do something that makes you angry and you react accordingly and they tell you “I was testing you to see how’d you react” they are PURPOSEFULLY baiting you.
If they allow you to think something awful is happening (usually like they are cheating) and you blow up about it and they say “I was checking to see if you are jealous” they are PURPOSEFULLY trying to push your buttons.
If they invade your privacy (checking your phone, sneaking on your computer) and say “I was testing you, you passed, there’s nothing on your phone” when you catch them, they are PURPOSEFULLY going out of their way to find something to pick a fight.
Healthy relationships do not involve partners that manufacture “tests” to check the other partners commitment.
Healthy relationships do not include pushing the other to the edge just to see what they will do.
Healthy relationships DO NOT INCLUDE excusing terrible behavior by saying “I was testing to see if you loved me”
Labeling actions as “this was me forcing you to prove you feel (this way) by making sure you will act the way I think you should” is manipulative at best and can very easily turn abusive in about a million different ways.
Fail their test. Walk away. Leave them to their toxicity.
It’s not worth it.
“Pop quizzes” are for school, not for relationships.
Finnish soldier gets separated from the rest of his unit but he’s the only one carrying the emergency amphetamines for the unit, takes too many and goes on a one man rampage for like 2 weeks straight giving the opposing Soviet soldiers nightmares for decades. Oh and he did it all on skis.
Did he survive?
Yes, during his methed up 2-3 week rampage he got injured by a land mine, travelled 400km on skis, and only ate pine buds and a Siberian Jay that he caught which he ate raw. When he made it back to Finnish lines he was taken to a hospital where it was found his heart rate was nearly 200 beats per minute and his weight had dropped to 43kg (94.7lbs).
His name was Aimo Koivunen if you want to look him up
Those are the eyes of a man who has seen god and laughed
i don’t know whether the russian agitprop bloggers are back under new names or whether there’s a fresh new footbullet brigade who actually bought their nihilistic message, but in the end it doesn’t matter
anyone telling you that, if you hate the way america is turning into a fascist puppet state, you should do nothing, is an enemy
anyone telling you that exercising your rights as a citizen is a bad thing, and that you should totally stick it to the man by sitting around with your thumb up your ass fantasizing about ‘burning it all down’, is a dangerous enemy, or dangerously stupid
and anyone who actually tries to get you to make real plans to go out and blow shit up, do murders, start fires, and get a lot of gung-ho idiots and innocent bystanders killed, is a literal felon, and either it’s a sting or they’re a terrorist
i don’t care if the thought of being a gun-toting shoot-first patriot sounds a-ok to you as long as you’re a leftist gun-toting shoot-first patriot, i am telling you, as Internet Dad, Local Calm Person, and Guy Who Has Seen This Shit Before, put the hateboner back in your pants, wash your hands, and go do what real americans do when they want freedom and progress: VOTE.
Frankenuff’s Castle 