What I was taught growing up: Wild edible plants and animals were just so naturally abundant that the indigenous people of my area, namely western Washington state, didn't have to develop agriculture and could just easily forage/hunt for all their needs.

The first pebble in what would become a landslide: Native peoples practiced intentional fire, which kept the trees from growing over the camas praire.

The next: PNW native peoples intentionally planted and cultivated forest gardens, and we can still see the increase in biodiversity where these gardens were today.

The next: We have an oak prairie savanna ecosystem that was intentionally maintained via intentional fire (which they were banned from doing for like, 100 years and we're just now starting to do again), and this ecosystem is disappearing as Douglas firs spread, invasive species take over, and land is turned into European-style agricultural systems.

The Land Slide: Actually, the native peoples had a complex agricultural and food processing system that allowed them to meet all their needs throughout the year, including storing food for the long, wet, dark winter. They collected a wide variety of plant foods (along with the salmon, deer, and other animals they hunted), from seaweeds to roots to berries, and they also managed these food systems via not only burning, but pruning, weeding, planting, digging/tilling, selectively harvesting root crops so that smaller ones were left behind to grow and the biggest were left to reseed, and careful harvesting at particular times for each species that both ensured their perennial (!) crops would continue thriving and that harvest occurred at the best time for the best quality food. American settlers were willfully ignorant of the complex agricultural system, because being thus allowed them to claim the land wasn't being used. Native peoples were actively managing the ecosystem to produce their food, in a sustainable manner that increased biodiversity, thus benefiting not only themselves but other species as well.

So that's cool. If you want to read more, I suggest "Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America" by Nancy J. Turner

using wizard magic beneath the full moon to charge my blood oxygen and make my heart rate normal………..

we talk a lot about ohhhh what if my calling is to be the greatest mammoth hunter ever and I'm wasting my talents in the modern era but we never think about what if Thog from 30,000 BCE was the only person ever born who could get a sub-7min Donkey Kong Country any%, and he never got the chance. what about thog

These are the questions that I'd really like time travel to answer.

Kind of hilarious to me how poorly the title "Mob Psycho 100" localized to English-speaking areas. To someone whose first language is English, it scans as:

But in Japanese it scans as:

It's a pity they didn't translate it to "Crowd Psychic 100." That would be much closer, and would have saved a considerable amount of confusion.

Also, because English is nuts sometimes, that reminds me of this:

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

an article on the subject for the curious:

Made the worst brownies ever created just now

Chat where did I go wrong

the reviews are in

LOTR + text post

i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious. like in the airbnb i was at i guess it used to be a kids room cause you could see the imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white. like that's a poem already what's the point

you get it. you get the themes. i dont have time to do it justice. just look at it its on the ceiling

Philosophers:

I love the idea of dead gods. Not in the sense of “hey i killed something supernaturally strong” but in the sense of “i killed it and it’s still a god.” It is still worshipped. prayers are still answered. miracles are performed in its name, even as it lies pierced by a thousand swords and burning with chemical fire. even as it drifts through vacuum, decapitated and bleeding molten rock. in cosmic spite of being shot through each eye and hurled into a plasma reactor, it still radiates the power of the divine in a way that primitive death cannot smother. the nature of godchild is not so simple as to be tied to the mortality, or immortality, of any living being.

In science that’s called a whalefall :)

that is horribly accurate of a description, thank you for the terrifying image of Bog.

Now I’m just imagining a corpse of some ancient deity slowly falling apart as it rots but its every little scrap of flesh still capable of performing miracles and people hurredly butchering it for sceaps to have REAL miracles of their own. Medieval snake-oil salesmen actually selling miraculous elixirs made of the dead god, a broken down church bustling with pilgrims wanting to touch and recieve the blessing from some priest(of an entirely different god) who can actually heal anyone but fo a small donation to their own deity. The imagery and religious iconography of the god retaining their mystical power but being adapted to other gods or even claimed as being made by one’s own magical brilliance. Bit by bit everyone takes a piece of it, carnivorous minor gods desperate to be on the limelight like the big named gods, spirits thinking they can become godly, even wizards and magicfolk trying to define and quantify its existence and power through research. By the end when there are no scraps left and only the barest bones remain is it buried in obscurity as its miracles are abused by those of other faiths, by tricksters, and by nonbelievers. Thus the deity’s own faith and religion are lost to time but still not truly dead only waiting to be unearthed unknown eras later by the unknowing and ignorant at the mercy if its remaining ancient authority as a dead god haunting the world. Even as fossilized bones in the dirt, a god is a god and even a god can leave behind a ghost.

Those are very well thought out and compelling cultural effects of a god-being’s death, but one reason I thought of whalefalls is the ecological side of things, the fact that there are whole living organisms that come into existence only for the presence of a dead whale….osedax worms drift dormant in the ocean as microscopic eggs, and they only wake up when they touch whale bone. Then the skeleton of a whale spends years and years as a “garden” of worms that don’t exist in any other kind of environment, and they help maintain a tiny ecosystem out of a body so big it can take actual decades to completely disappear.

Even a deer dying is an explosion of specialized life like that; maggots eat the flesh, everyone knows that, but as the soft flesh is cleared away you get hide beetles that only eat skin and bone, moths that only eat fur, even special kinds of maggots that specialize in the interiors of broken horns, not to mention all the bacteria and fungi pouring out into the surrounding environment as well. In turn, all of these things have their own specialized parasites and predators; larger beetles that prey exclusively on maggots, mites that feed on the eggs of carrion insects, parasitoid wasps, nematodes, a whole food web exploding just around one roadkill skunk. So if you have a setting where gods have always existed and gods can die, then you have to wonder what kinds of things had to have evolved to make a god decompose :)

Might I interest y’all in the Boiling Isles from The Owl House? Whose Titan is the source of magic, its Galdorstones revered for their power? This Titan who is regarded as a religious entity, whose name the Emperor uses to perform crusades? Its beating heart of which has had a cold metal castle built around it, as its knee collects snow as a peak, its toes literally swamped?

An island corpse drenched in boiling rain that very well may be its stomach acids evaporated and condensed- Swimming in a sea of what may be its blood, boiling by what could be the residual, released heat of its decomposing form? All of it, crawling with inhabitants and ecosystems who have evolved to wield magic, because of the latent power the body gives off!

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims) 

the archive/tagged trick is a lifesaver!!

a caveat on op’s caveat is that if your blog/the blog you want to search is older than [whenever they forced everybody into the tumblr.com/user change], most of these tricks will still work whether or not they have enabled “custom theme.”

tumblr works it’s just a closely guarded secret

Yes, if you click someone's username to see their blog and get, say:

www.tumblr.com/marlynnofmany

(the new format), then you can manually change it by swapping the parts around. Move the username to where the W's are, and you're golden:

marlynnofmany.tumblr.com

Behold, new format. If you want to see an archive, just add that to the end:

marlynnofmany.tumblr.com/archive

Try all the tricks! These are good tricks!