““When they mentioned that this was a terrorist organization, I said ‘Well, then count me as a Mom for Liberty,’” Haley proclaimed to the sold-out crowd. She was met with roaring applause.”
i learned that in India, there is a species of giant squirrel that have multicoloured fur, with with varying shades of orange, maroon and purple. Their bodies measure 36in from head to tail – double the size of their grey relatives – and they can leap 20ft between trees (x)
Some more pictures of these funky dudes cause they’re so pretty
Oh, and they’re very cleverly called Indian giant squirrels or Malabar giant squirrels
Since twitter no longer allows people without accounts to view anything at all, would it be possible for you start also posting those "inking the comic now, may be ready in an hour" type of updates here on tumblr as well?
Secondly, I didn’t know Twitter was doing that, and my goodness, Twitter is going all the way out of its way to reduce its own relevance, isn’t it? A big reason it had reach in spite of a relatively small user base was because of how it could be referenced and shared around. “Users only can see” is an absurd call.
welcome aboard the astral express can i uhhhhhh take your order
[image is an illustration of the astral express crew piled up on top of each other: Himeko casually hoists Welt over her shoulder, who’s squinting at a newspaper and pouring coffee into her cup. Dan Heng sits on Welt’s back, deadpan and holding a giddy March in his lap, who’s got Stelle balanced on her shoulder. Stelle is holding Caelus over her shoulder; both trailblazers look slightly confused. Pompom waves from the top.]
You know how people buy boxes of ladybugs to release in their yard to get rid of aphids
Picture this: slew of missing people from all over the world, just vanishing in small groups. Serial killer ring, some say. Some kind of widespread natural disaster, say others. The statisticians shrug and point out that people go missing all the time and one expects peaks and troughs in random data. Sometimes a lot of people are going to go missing and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything weird.
Everyone turns out to be wrong. It’s alien abductions. Aliens are coming to Earth, pinking up random groups of humans and not bringing them back.
Turns out aliens are trying to settle a new planet and there’s a problem with a bunch of prey animals breeding out of control and upsetting the ecosystem. They can’t wipe them out wide scale without destroying complex environments, and the predators aren’t keeping on top of them. “Hey,” says some random bureaucrat who’s had Project: Deal With The Alien Deer Issue dumped on their desk and hasn’t taken an ecology class in four decades, “you know what species I hear are really, really good at clearing other animals out of the environment?”
‘Hey, what do we do if the population gets out of control?’ ‘It’s fine, we’ll import some of their natural predators from the same planet.’
“Plant blindness” was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.
The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of “grass” surfaces, “weeds,” “flowers” and “bushes” and “trees”
I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it’s hard to even imagine how I lived differently.
The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain’s capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.
The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.
And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn’t even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!
And it’s normal, that’s the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn’t even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn’t troubled by it.
Reasons knowing the plants is important:
Baby trees pop up everywhere but they get sadly mowed down by people who can’t see them.
Likewise, if only you could recognize the plants you were mauling with that weed-whacker—STOP don’t destroy the milkweed, black-eyed susan, purple coneflower, and goldenrod! Every place has biodiversity but our management tactics are to ignorantly raze everything.
Wild fruits and other foods!
There could be a rare plant in your back yard and you wouldn’t even know it! (This happens more than you think…)
If only we were knowledgeable to see and take care of what is in the world around us already, instead of going to the Home Depot to buy plants, the world could be a flourishing place…
Twitter: what level of enshittification are you on? Tumblr: I dunno, 4, maybe 5? We took away the ability to easily go directly to an individual post off the dashboard and we’re still trying to Pivot to Streaming Twitter: you are like little baby. watch this Twitter: [BANS READING POSTS]
