A team of UCLA scientists has resorted to posting content on OnlyFans to raise money for research amid huge federal funding cuts to U.S. science. But the videos aren’t of themselves, they’re exclusive recordings of marmots.
“I spend a lot of time waiting for marmots to do things and had the idea one slow morning,” Daniel Blumstein, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UCLA, who leads the project, told Live Science in an email. “When I came back with this idea, one of my graduate students immediately said we MUST do this! So here we are!”
On June 17, the RMBL Marmot Project announced on Instagram that “the state of funding is so bad we are turning to OnlyFans, or as we like to call it 'OnlyMarms’.”
something i didn’t touch on in my previous post bc it was already long enough—someone asked why ethically made clothing is more expensive than it used to be…
everything is more expensive than it used to be. even disregarding trumps horrific tariffs (which you shouldn’t do), inflation will always make things more expensive and in particular the lasting effects of COVID pricing are still ongoing. everything got more expensive, from food to replacement parts for machinery to cotton to lumber to metals that go into making needles and zippers, and so on and that means making things got more expensive.
the only reason you’re not noticing that rising cost in your fast fashion clothing is because shein clothes are made by people being paid pennies per garment, if they’re paid at all, using materials that contain lead and formaldehyde. labor is almost always your highest cost when making clothing unless you’re working with incredibly costly materials or you’re not paying your workers properly.
a single piece of ethically made clothing represents so many materials and so many types of labor. there’s the plant that had to be grown and harvested and then turned into fibers that could then be woven into fabric. the thread, elastic, and any fixings like zippers or buttons or hooks and eyes all have to be made from materials that are mined or grown or made. pigment has to be mined and processed or synthesized for the garment to be dyed or printed and that fabric has to be sewn by humans. not machines. there are many machines involved, from fabric printers to sewing machines to cotton gins to garment presses and more, all of which have to be human operated and/or maintained/inspected/overseen. and most of which have annoying fiddly bits that need to be replaced over and over and over again. all the facilities involved in making the clothing and clothing materials have to be cleaned and maintained and inspected. nearly every time a material or garment changes locations the terms and prices have to be negotiated.
nearly all of this is human work.
this is the miracle of modernity. there are so many processes that have to happen to get a single shirt in your hands and you’d never know because it seems so simple, so easy. and this is what capitalism doesn’t want you to know because there are so many opportunities to exploit the people who make the things we take for granted.
Someone mentioned how they were having a hard time creating a world for their fantasy fiction geographically because they kept reinventing the island of Britain, which also happened to my good close enemy George R. R. Martin. I would like to suggest North Carolina. I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous but North Carolina has an awesome geographic setup for a fantasy kingdom, I think. Inhospitable barrier islands, constantly shifting shoals in the sound, swamps with alligators, venomous snakes and carnivorous plants, lots of very flat and somewhat sparsely populated farmland, foothills, mines, mountains full of mysterious phenomenon that were originally very difficult to navigate and people still get lost in today. It kind of rocks.
Reminder to all bitches: if they’re coming to kill you, make them bring their own shovels. To me that’s what voting is about, that’s what living is about, that’s what stubbornly persisting is about. For a lot of us world is full of people who want to bury you and to despair is to make it that much easier on them to get you in the ground. Fuck em! Don’t just sit there. Don’t just cooperate. Don’t just wisely pontificate about how inevitable your doom is. If anyone is coming to Get You then damn well make them sweat for it.
For those of you looking for these recipes, they’re from Cooking for Engineers. Which should shock nobody. But it’s a great site. Sadly seems to be defunct, but I can personally vouch for the recipes being presented in a foolproof* manner. Not only is the card layout great (honestly, just having the oven temperature right there instead of having to keep trying to find it in the recipe is a game changer), but every step has a photo. None of this “until done” rubbish, it’ll have a photo of “yeah, here’s how it should look, and no, this photo isn’t overly produced”.
And unlike most cooking blogs, the commentariat substitutions are generally competent!
If you’re still not sold on the site, may I add that he once took a pair of calipers to Chili’s to test their claim that “their new Smokehouse Bacon Burgers […] have ‘the thickest bacon you’ve ever seen’.”
Unsurprisingly, his verdict was:
(on Friday, April 13, 2008 at the Chili’s in Santa Clara, California) they served bacon that was (to an accuracy of 1/128th of an inch) 3/16 in. thick (4.75 mm ± 0.2mm) after cooking. […] Does it truly hold up to its claim that it’s the “thickest bacon you’ve ever seen”? My guess is that for most people that’s true, but for me it was most definitely not the case.
So yeah, definitely check out his website, whether you’re a novice or experienced cook, whether you’re an engineer or someone who didn’t even know what a caliper was before you started reading this. I highly recommend starting with the shepherd’s pie (yes, it’s the same one from Joy of Cooking), and either the creme brulee or the biscotti for dessert. The recipe image OP used was for espresso brownies. Presumably roasting your own beans is optional, though.
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*It’s me. I’m the fool. I’m proof that even a fool can follow the recipes.
actually i am gonna give you guys a genuine answer to that. not the anon because they obviously don’t actually care, but the rest of the new followers i seem to have picked up off that youth lib post.
why do i give a shit about social media restrictions? well, i went to the library three months ago with my two teenage brothers to sign them up for new library cards (they just moved) and i was told that under 18s can’t have a library card, even a restricted kids-books-only card, without a parent there in person to give consent.
that’s fucked for abused kids for sure but that’s also fucked for kids whose single mum works two jobs and can’t get to the library while its open. and there is NO good reason for it except to appease parents who want to control what their kids can read.
people coming onto my posts telling me ‘kids should just do X’ have not actually looked into the possibility of doing what they are suggesting. kids now cannot do what you did when you were a teenager even a decade ago. abused kids, disabled kids or kids from low income families ESPECIALLY cannot do those things. they are running out of places to go.
interviews and studies with teenagers repeatedly prove that they WANT to hang out with their friends in real life, and it is getting harder and harder to do it. the internet is one of the only places they can all spend time together, unsupervised, without spending money or getting hassled or moved on by adults.
social media bans won’t fix that. they won’t even keep kids off social media. they’re just going to make life harder for everyone, increase the amount of tracking and monitoring EVERYONE is subject to, and force kids to lie about what they’re doing to any adults that actually DO give a shit about them.
