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115 books
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158 voters
Sharon
https://www.goodreads.com/charon
The reframe for the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is this: “Who or what do you want to grow into?” Life is all about growth and change. It’s not static. It’s not about some destination. It’s not about answering the
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“This smorgasbord of eyes brings with it a dizzying medley of visual Umwelten. Animals might see crisp detail at a distance, or nothing more than blurry blotches of light and shade. They might see perfectly well in what we’d call darkness, or go instantly blind in what we’d call brightness. They might see in what we’d deem slow motion or time-lapse. They might see in two directions at once, or in every direction at once. Their vision might get more or less sensitive over the span of a single day. Their Umwelt might change as they get older. Jakob’s colleague Nate Morehouse has shown that jumping spiders are born with their lifetime’s supply of light-detecting cells, which get bigger and more sensitive with age. “Things would get brighter and brighter,” Morehouse tells me. For a jumping spider, getting older “is like watching the sun rising.”
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
“Difference can be a gift. Being ace can mean less interpersonal drama and more freedom from social norms around relationships. It is an opportunity to focus more on other passions, to be less distracted by sexuality, to break the scripts, to choose your own adventure and your own values.”
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
“Recovery" is everything you do outside the gym to take care of yourself: eating, sleeping, stretching, managing stress. Another oversight of the "workout"-based type of exercise is that it does not teach us to care at all about this stuff. If you're like me, you might have even been conditioned to believe, for instance, that eating a nice big meal after a workout would be "wasting the workout." In reality, the *opposite* is true: if you don't eat enough, you are only setting yourself up for an unfair and unnecessary amount of soreness. And this is true of all recovery dimensions: if you don't sleep, or if you don't manage your stress, you will be miserable trying to build muscle.”
― Liftoff: Couch to Barbell
― Liftoff: Couch to Barbell
“Normal is often treated as a moral judgment, when it is often simply a statistical matter. The question of what everyone else is doing is less important than the question of what works for the two people in the actual relationship. It matters that everyone’s needs are carefully considered and respected, not that everyone is doing the same thing.”
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
― Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
“There is a wonderful word for this sensory bubble—Umwelt. It was defined and popularized by the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll in 1909. Umwelt comes from the German word for “environment,” but Uexküll didn’t use it simply to refer to an animal’s surroundings. Instead, an Umwelt is specifically the part of those surroundings that an animal can sense and experience—its perceptual world. Like the occupants of our imaginary room, a multitude of creatures could be standing in the same physical space and have completely different Umwelten. A tick, questing for mammalian blood, cares about body heat, the touch of hair, and the odor of butyric acid that emanates from skin. These three things constitute its Umwelt. Trees of green, red roses too, skies of blue, and clouds of white—these are not part of its wonderful world. The tick doesn’t willfully ignore them. It simply cannot sense them and doesn’t know they exist.”
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
― An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us
Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge
— 26884 members
— last activity 16 hours, 16 min ago
An annual reading challenge to to help you stretch your reading limits and explore new voices, worlds, and genres! The challenge begins in January, bu ...more
Sharon’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Sharon’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
327 books
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77 friends
797 books
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10 friends
2,244 books
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153 friends
472 books
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88 friends
448 books
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31 friends
2,407 books
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80 friends
1,134 books
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11 friends
1,092 books
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122 friends
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