helloo world! it's a lovely rainy sunday morning and i'm lazing around a little bit before i have to start studying zz. i've been doing pretty decent lately! been hanging out with friends n having fun even though the grind never ends lol,,, but all things considered the stress is still manageable! i really miss being free and unemployed though dang i can't wait for the year end holidays
i've been getting back into aquascaping and aquarium keeping again as a fun lil hobby/coping mechanism heh and i feel like expanding my tank collection to isopods! saw this listing online where someone was giving away their enclosures for free and i was like omg i need to get in on this... so i went down a crazy isopod rabbit hole heheh. well turns out the seller never replied me but ill keep an eye out for more opportunities to start my isopod journey yipee! i find them really cute and i think it's great that they're low maintenance bc i can't handle that much rn
speaking of critters i was recently recommended this yt vid on aesthetics and why people have such different instinctual reactions towards different insects like butterflies vs centipedes and it was so interesting to learn about! apparently a lot of it has to do with these 4 pillars of aesthetics: complexity, prototypicality, gestalt and symmetry. idk i find it so interesting and i think its always good to understand where emotional reactions stem from bc ive been trying to be more Ok with bugs and things im scared of too. to me its important to be kind to the creatures u share the world with and sometimes i feel like we are too ok with ascribing value to creatures based on their "usefulness" to humans or how nice they look. Hm! i mean im just as scared of cockroaches as the next person but people go so overboard with their hate sometimes its like dang they didnt ask to be born this way either
and tbh we gotta get rid of this anthropocentric way of viewing nature Hey they all have their place in the natural world even mosquitoes and cockroaches and ants and whatever pests - they're only invasive or harmful because we've provided the conditions for them to be so. also! i feel like this reliance on emotional and instinctual triggers to guide moral judgement can easily trickle into other aspects of our lives - like how we view people different from us or unfamiliar things. yeuppp sorry i got carried away but ive been thinking about this for a while wow i really admire entomologists and people who devote their lives to study the things that don't get much love usually. thats a kind of coolness i aspire towards
- j