kingofspades

WE CAN TRAVEL SO FAR AS OUR EYES CAN SEEEE

Weighing in at up to 700 pounds, the elk stands as one of the biggest deer species on earth. But don’t think that just because an elk is large that it’s slow. A mature bull can run as fast as 40 miles per hour – they’ve even been able to outrun horses in short races.

i saw the protective gear motorcyclists wear and i couldn’t resist lol

Hello! This isn’t a new class but I don’t think I ever actually posted it here, or at least I haven’t posted it in a long time! May I present: the Runekeeper! A new type of caster that focuses on casting runes, the more they understand a rune the more effects they are able to produce from it! Due to Tumblr’s ten image limit I was only able to include the first two pages of the runes, the rest are in the PDF. Hope you enjoy!

[PDF]

Building a fantasy world is like being the world's most specific historian.

oh yeah are we gonna talk about how the basic sand/silt/clay soil diagram is super misleading?

I feel like it's got to be a relic of like, the 1940's that has just stuck around in the same way other outdated models have.

Sand, silt and clay aren't ingredients, they're particle sizes, and no amount of combining them will make soil if there's no organic matter.

I'm looking up soil types and finding websites full of the wrongest statements ever.

Could you explain what's wrong with those statements?

Well, basically, clay, sand and silt refer to sizes of mineral particles.

Clay being the smallest, and sand being the largest. It keeps going—there's gravels, and cobbles, even. (The definitions of these terms are actually very contentious in geology.)

Chalk is not a particle size at all, it's a carbonate rock. Soils that form on top of carbonate rocks are generally pretty alkaline. Alkaline is a "type" of soil but it's got fuck all to do with the previous three.

Peat is what forms when organic matter decays in anoxic conditions in a wetland. It stores carbon. It's neat.

The crucial problem here is that soil is not minerals. It contains minerals, but no amount of combining sand, clay and silt will create soil, ever. Adding sand to a clayey and silty soil doesn't make better soil, it makes some kind of evil, useless concrete.

The organic matter is the crucial component. Even that's understating it. Healthy soil doesn't just "contain" organic matter, it is Literally Alive, full of microbes, mycelium, roots, and bugs.

Soil isn't a substance. You can't create it by stirring up ingredients. It's a living metropolis, almost an organism. It's full of order and communication. Soil is the plants that grow in it and the fungi that breaks down the plants when they die. Ants are a type of fully autonomous soil particle

But the soil triangle isn't saying these are the only ingredients. It's saying what type of soil it is based on percentages. No one thinks Sandy Loam is lacking in organics. But the measure of organics in soil (mulch and compost) is a completely different subject.

Actually to continue depending on what you're using a soil for you can want different percentages of organics. It completely different measurement. You can want a high sand + clay soil that also is high in organics or you can want one low in organics. Depending on your purpose. Such as building up land in a marshy area vs lining a pond.

And you absolutely can make soil. You can turn a sandy soil into a silty soil. You can add something with high organics (such as fresh compost) to clay, and with work, you can turn it into a viable soil. It's a fairly well known process. Use the right stuff and you can have things like rain gardens/bioretention facilities that are 90% sand, but also filled with plants. It's all in knowing what type of soil you're building in and what your end goal is.

It's not that the qualities aren't real. I'm sure it works just fine if you're trying to line a pond...but in the realm of growing things, there are too many books and articles that use these basic terms about silt/clay/sand, and teach people to think about soil that way, but they don't teach what soil is or the living components/aliveness of it, and it causes much grief for everyone involved.

It's another thing where in school people learn simple models and they don't realize there's anything beyond it.

You're not wrong, but you're very wrong. And it's entirely because you don't understand how soil science and people who work with soil professionally use these terms. (Or even very enthusiastic ametuers. I worked with a guy once who'd lost the house in the divirce and had to make a new garden for his prize winning pumpkin seeds. Bet your ass knowing what the soil type was was super important.) Soil science is actually a very fascinating subject.

Soil texture, soil partical size, and soil organics levels are three very different things and you're conflating them all into the same thing because it sounds better. Knowing the type of soil you have will tell you not only what type of plants will grow in it, but also what you can do with it and how you can remediate it if necessary. This is actually highly regulated in the construction industry.

And if you think soil science is only teaching simple models, you've very clearly have never picked up a textbook for a soil science class. There is so much math.

I'm not referring to soil science classes here—I'm referring to the most basic, elementary school education that is all most people get.

I see that the soil triangle makes sense if you take it as a descriptor of one specific aspect of soil, but if the average beginner gardener tries to learn about soil, they will run into lots of confusing sources that make it the main or even the only characteristic of soil.

You may be talking on an elementary level, but you're using very specific terms that mean very specific things. They aren't wrong just because they're for a more advanced aspect of what you're looking at.

And you're average gardner can and should know about their soil composition. You can send your soil in to get tested. If you know what your soil is made of you can be a better gardner and grow better whatever you're trying to grow.

That's exactly the problem though—non-academic sources use terms that mean very specific things as generalized ways to refer to Soil And Its Qualities In General.

Because it's accurate. Knowing what type of soil you have greatly effects what you can grow in it. If you don't know this information you can spend a lot of time and energy attempting to grow things that just can't live in the soil you have on hand. Any half decent garden center should be able to explain this in very easy to understand terms. That website you linked does.

Hmm, respectful disagree. It's misleading to direct gardeners to look at soil particle size as the defining characteristic instead of teaching them about the role of organic matter, living soil organisms, and problems like soil compaction and topsoil degradation.

Most of the structure of soil comes from the organic components of it. Soil doesn't have the properties a gardener needs it to have without significant organic content. It may be helpful to identify your soil as clay, but the importance of this is secondary to identifying compaction and degradation, knowing how topsoil is built, and knowing how organic matter and living organisms contribute to the structure of a soil layer.

The structural role of organic content is most often neglected, even though it is highly important. Home gardeners are taught to intensively till (breaking up soil layers), clean crop residues from their garden patches, use chemical fertilizers, and when they do add organic matter, it's manure or finished compost that doesn't provide the structural base that living roots and plant materials in various stages of decay do.

brucie baby? this brucie baby??

brucie baby lore

Dragons in the modern world I

hot people had a httyd phase when they were younger, i don't make the rules

Hot people are still in their HTTYD phase

we go where no one goes

WIGGLY TOOTHLESS!! {x}

Best quality: his wiggles

I, a lover of these movies, am incapable of scrolling past this without sharing Toothless and his happy wiggles. 

wiggle wiggle wiggle

You know what to do with that big fat butt

🤣 @limesandcoconuts I spittaked

@per4mancecheck you’re welcome 😂

i miss you

What is this 😭😭 it's beautiful

The Star, The Moon, The Sun.

The muses have inspired artist for centuries just like how women inspire us today.

I see a lot of ‘cis’ women say they wish they were androgynous in the way men were or they wish they were pretty in the way men were. This is your sign to go try to do that. You may find you enjoy being an androgynous woman. You may find you no longer identify as a woman. You may find you don’t like androgyny. You will not know until you try. Cut your hair if you’ve always wanted to but have been afraid to. Shop in the men’s section if you’ve been too nervous to. Wear clothing with an androgynous  silhouette. Experiment with binding, take baby steps with compression bras if you want. Wear unisex scents. Live life. Try things you want to try. A lot of cis women do not understand the joys of mens pants and mens deodorant. I think everyone should try both of those things.

(via @monimolimnion)

[screenshot of tags which read: 

#much more comfortable being a woman when I realised it literally doesn’t have to mean anything  #unlock cis+ it’s good for you]

I'm not "giving up" or "being negative" I'm adjusting to my reality - which is actually a lot healthier than repeatedly pushing myself past my limits and then getting mad at myself when it doesn't work.