leeshuwen ✽

side-questing on my side-quest

[RT @RT_com]

Famous gorilla Kiyomasa falls into deep contemplation after spat with mate — caught on camera in Japanese zoo

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

miss you. (the money i spent)

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

life is so fleeting

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A mother sperm whale came up from half a mile down with a giant squid still in her mouth. A diver named Ludo caught the whole thing on camera. Nobody had ever filmed this before in human history. That was last September.

A Smithsonian scientist named Michael Vecchione confirmed the species. It was an adult giant squid, an animal so hard to find alive that for a century we mainly knew it from beaks pulled out of dead whales and the occasional body that washed up on a beach.

We have known these two fight for centuries. Sperm whales kept surfacing with large circular marks on their heads that matched the suckers on giant squid arms. Their stomachs were full of squid beaks, the one part of a squid that cannot be digested.

The evidence was everywhere. The event itself had never once been seen.

This hunt happened in complete darkness. The whale was far deeper than any sunlight reaches. She found the squid the way sperm whales always do, by making sounds that bounce off things around her. Her clicks hit 236 decibels. A jet engine runs at about 150. She is the loudest living animal on earth, and those sounds are how she sees in the dark.

Her brain weighs seven kilograms. Five times heavier than yours.

For a sperm whale, this was a routine meal. One whale eats four to eight hundred squid every day. The whole species eats about 110 million tons of squid every year, more than every fishing fleet on earth pulls out of the ocean combined.

In the full uncropped video, you can see her baby swimming right next to her. Sperm whale calves do not go deep on their own. They only dive when their mothers bring them. She was teaching the baby how to hunt. That detail is the one that stayed with me.

[a 🇫🇲 💔 @axpente]

Gerçekmiş kanım dondu

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The flat stripe on your towel is called a dobby border. It's the only part of the towel engineered to NOT absorb water.

The rest of the towel is terry cloth. 300 to 800 tiny cotton loops per square inch, each one pulling moisture off your skin through capillary action. A standard bath towel absorbs about 800ml of water per square meter in under 10 seconds. The loops do all of that work.

The dobby border has zero loops. It's a flat, dense weave that serves one purpose: structural integrity. Without it, the constant agitation of a washing machine would cause the terry loops at the edges to unravel. The border anchors the fabric so the loops stay intact.

It also solves a shrinkage problem. Terry loops shrink at different rates than the ground weave underneath them. The dobby border is dimensionally stable, so it prevents the ends from puckering or warping after dozens of hot wash cycles.

Hotels figured this out decades ago. The flat surface takes embroidery and woven logos cleanly. A looped surface can't hold that detail. That's why every Marriott, Hilton, and Four Seasons towel has their branding woven directly into the border.

The dobby loom that makes this possible has existed since 1843. The mechanism controls individual warp threads independently, creating geometric patterns without needing a full Jacquard setup.

Three jobs at once: preventing fraying, controlling shrinkage, and giving hotels a place to brand their towels. The part that feels wrong is doing the most work.

[Kirsty ❤️‍🔥🪩 tayriana 🫶🏻 @mirrorball1397]

I am so grateful to have grown up with Lizzie McGuire, Hannah Montana, That's so Raven, High School Musical, Wizards of Waverley Place, Suite Life of Zack and Cody, Zoey 101, H2O Just add water, Camp rock, the sleepover club......what do kids even have today

[throwbacks @solelynostalgia]

hannah montana performing ‘this is the life’ 20 years later

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

The actual research is wild. Every time you push down a feeling, your brain has to choose between suppressing that emotion and recording what’s happening around you. It picks the suppression. The memory doesn’t get saved.

A 2000 Stanford study confirmed this: people told to hide their emotions while watching a film remembered far fewer details than people who just reacted naturally. Suppressing emotions uses up mental energy, and that leaves less brain power for saving new memories.

Brain scans show why. A 2012 study found that suppression quiets the hippocampus (your brain’s memory-recording center) right when it should be saving information. The two brain regions that normally team up to lock in memories stop talking to each other.

Over time it gets worse. Suppression keeps cortisol (the stress hormone) elevated, and cortisol shrinks the hippocampus. Chronically stressed people can lose 10 to 15% of its volume. Just three weeks of high cortisol can shrink the tiny connection points between brain cells by about 20%. The good news: studies show this shrinkage can partially reverse once stress levels drop. Not necessarily permanent.

A Finnish study of 1,137 older adults tracked over roughly a decade found that habitual emotion suppressors had nearly 5x the risk of developing dementia, even after controlling for genetics, smoking, obesity, and education.

There’s a better way to handle emotions that doesn’t cost you your memory. It’s called cognitive reappraisal: instead of bottling the feeling, you reframe what’s causing it. (“This meeting isn’t a threat, it’s practice.”) A 2003 Stanford/UC Berkeley study found reappraisers had more positive emotion, better relationships, and higher wellbeing. Suppressors got the opposite on every measure. And reappraisal carries zero memory cost.

The difference comes down to timing. Suppression kicks in after the emotion has already fired, so your brain is fighting its own response while simultaneously trying to record the moment. Reappraisal changes how you interpret the situation before the emotion fully activates. Same event, same person, but your hippocampus stays free to do its actual job: recording your life.

[Bitcoin Malaya @bitcoinmalaya]

https://t.co/Y84Oxc7e5s

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

dandans have no healthy friendships and it shows lol

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

JONGWONNIE HE SAID

[ً @coffeecoughe]

kim sungwoon: i have 28 years of experience but since other chefs have way more we had to do the errands
ahn sungjae: it's only right that jongwon-ie had to run around

40+ year old ahjussis being the maknaes during team battle 😹 #culinaryclasswars2

[mariana Z @mariana057]

I love the phrase "bear with me" because it can either mean "be patient" or "the zoo heist was a success"

[kendall @internetfairie]

yeah im chronically online but im also chronically outside how many of you can say the same

[Crazy Vibes @CrazyVibes_1]

I wore it to chemo this morning. The nurse, Angela, the one who's been with me through all eight rounds, she touched the sleeve and asked if someone made it for me. I told her I made it myself, finished it yesterday at 2 AM because I couldn't sleep thinking about today's scan results. She got quiet for a second, then said, “that's the bravest thing I've seen all week.”
I didn't feel brave. I felt terrified. But I needed something to wear that felt like armor, like I'd built protection with my own two hands. Bought the pattern and the softest cotton blend I could find from this shop that includes these little encouraging notes with every order. Mine said “you've got this.” I cried reading it at the post office.
Spent three weeks working on this cardigan between appointments and bad days, and there were so many bad days. My daughter wants me to sell some of my finished pieces through to help with medical bills, but I can't let this one go.
Dr. Morrison came in twenty minutes ago. The tumors are shrinking. He used the word “remarkable.” I'm sitting here in this cardigan I made stitch by stitch while poison dripped into my veins, and I'm still here. Still breathing. Still making things.

Credit - marta hanger

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

it’s hard to downgrade from a dyson…

[🦋 @seasonlipatr]

i will never get over dua lipa's training season royal albert hall performance.

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

everyone just discovering son jongwon when we've been watching him on please take care of my refrigerator for months before culinary wars – is this how it feels to be a founding fan?!? he's so great, isn't he?!??!

[leeshuwen ✽ @tweedledos]

that was a great poop

[ً @prinkasusa]

being religious doesn’t mean you’re a good person. faith without kindness is just performance. beliefs don’t matter if they’re not reflected in empathy, accountability, and how you treat people when no one’s watching. character shows up in actions, not in labels or rituals