kind of a mess

I hope everyone understands, when I say “most endangered habitat on earth”, I mean temperate grasslands.

They’re more endangered than tropical rainforests, coral reefs, the arctic tundra, all of those go-to environments that get more of the spotlight.

Where I live, maybe 25% of the prairie remains in a natural state and that number is dropping. Even these fragments are mostly missing the keystone species that maintain their health, like bison, wolves, and prairie dogs. I know this is the case for other grasslands like the pampas and steppe as well. Vast lands empty of many species that used to call them home.

If you live on temperate grasslands, hold onto them tight, because they’ve been exploited like no other land and most people don’t even know how far the devastation goes.

please please pleaseeee listen to this post and learn the value of temperate grasslands. it makes me very sad that not only have these landscapes been destroyed by colonizers, but even most of the people who live there now don’t see their value. when i say i love midwestern landscapes, people call me crazy just because they’ve never seen the beauty of the tallgrass prairie :(

Just found out my facebook birding group is public because my cousin (a lawyer who is not into birds) casually said to me “saw you couldn’t identify a willet the other day… pretty embarrassing”

To: professor@schoolname.edu Subject: CLASS3290 Question

are you mad at me

Yes

Sent from my Galaxy Dishwasher

everyday I pray Zillow makes a comment section

it would be the most fun gay people have had since the golden age of disco

shirt that says ive been rejected from literary magazines you've never heard of

you ever just sit and realise u can’t remember 80% of your childhood? like … what happened? who am i ..?

Many people in the comments are saying “trauma”, but this is actually a very normal occurrence. It’s called Childhood Amnesia, and it’s a process which, as the brain reorganizes itself for cognitive thought that is developed in late childhood, it changes the Accessibility of those memories during recall. Many childhood memories are available to the person, but they will not be remembered during regular recall activity, you have to “trick” your brain into remembering with different tactics.

This is because there are two parts to memories - their encoding and their recall. The encoding determines their availability, their recall determines their accessibility. The reason why trauma memory and childhood amnesia are different is in this distinction. Trauma memory is often encoded differently, bypassing to the limbic system where it is stored as intrinsic memory. It can’t be recalled because it was never encoded. Childhood amnesia, however, seems to indicate that the memories are encoded, but we lose access to them as we age. This is most likely due to the development of brain structures that fundamentally change our encoding and recall of memory as we get older.

This is an important distinction, because trauma memory is “stored in the body”, i.e. you get triggers that send your body into a cascade of uncontrollable feelings, sensations and reactions. Whereas childhood memories won’t generally do that, they are just recalled at odd times with odd associations.

reblogging this because I’ve legit seen people freaking out when they realised they can’t remember some of their childhood, thinking they might have some repressed trauma.

I love Matilda because it's a story about a child who sees injustice around her and gets mad about it and questions why things aren't fair, and instead of the ending being that she learns how the world works and that life isn't fair, she catapults one of the adults who abused her out of a building with her mind

"I didn't know my government could do this" is a wild statement to me not only because I've grown up being aware of many war crimes and genocides done by the USA and other such countries, but that information is really not that hard to find. People complain about their education system a lot but there are thousands of books, documentaries, essays, articles- hell, even videos -about the numerous atrocities committed by the USAmerican government that they should be looking for. The main thing people tell others to do is educate themselves. I'm just.

Also that's the thing- we grow up knowing about it! Where I live, so many times have they started construction somewhere and found piles and piles of bones, and everyone's like "yeah, probably from the dictatorship" like that's Normal!! And then you walk up to an USAmerican and they'll be like "never even knew there was a dictatorship there"- you caused it!! We joke here about how everyone has a dead, missing or tortured family member because of the sheer amount of people we lost to the regime and you don't know anything about it??

And that's not the only time the USA has done one of its "interventions" here! And it's not the only country responsible either! France, the UK, Portugal, Spain, I could go on! And these issues are not in the past, specially not for black and indigenous folks here! These are issues of our present, of our day to day lives, but the ones responsible for it can ignore it their whole lives.

Tara Hardy, from “Salt in the Wind”, My, My, My, My, My

"Walkable city" is not "City where to have to walk everywhere."

"Walkable city" is.

People get so caught up in the "Walkable" part of the term and like to spout "Walkable cities are abelist because not everyone can walk".

Bitch. The modern city structure is abelist because not everyone can drive. And classist because not everyone can afford a car and it's pretty damn impossible to get a job if you don't have a car.

Walkable cities are cities where people can reasonably get from pointA to pointB without requiring a motor vehicle.

"But fae. Disabled people have issues using the paths in modern cities." Bitch abled people can barely use the paths in modern cities. That's kind of the fucking problem.

Also walkable cities have fucking benches. Not only for disabled people. But sometimes you just twist your ankle and need to sit for a moment.

"Put fae. If you have benches, homeless people will sleep on them."

Then get fucking housing for the homeless. Problem solved. They'll sleep in their nice warm homes instead of on the benches.

-fae

—

Ilya Kaminsky’s attempt to break language, to read it backwards, with his translation here of Genesis 1.1-3 in “Of Strangeness that Wakes Us”

so: masking: good, unequivocally. please mask and please educate others on why they should mask to make the world safer for immune compromised people to participate in.

however: masking is not my policy focus and it shouldn't be yours, either. masking is a very good mitigation against droplet-born illnesses and a slightly less effective (but still very good) mitigation against airborne illnesses, but its place in the pyramid of mitigation demands is pretty low, for several reasons:

here are my policy focuses:

the last thing to note is that these things stack; upgraded ventilation systems in all public buildings mean that students and employees get sick less often to begin with, making it less burdensome for students and employees to be absent due to sickness, and making it more likely that sick individuals will choose to stay home themselves (since it's not so costly for them).

masking is great! keep masking! please use masking as a rhetorical "this is what we can do as individuals to make public life safer while we're pushing for drastic policy changes," and don't get complacent in either direction--don't assume that masking is all you need to do or an acceptable forever-solution, and equally, don't fall prey to thinking that pushing for policy change "makes up" for not masking in public. it's not a game with scores and sides; masking is a material thing you can do to help the individual people you interact with one by one, and policy changes are what's going to make the entirety of public life safer for all immune compromised people.

You know the hierarchy of controls?

If you can, eliminate the threat. With Covid, that would have looked like stopping it before it spread.

Next best is trying to substitute things for the threat. This is where a sterilizing vaccine would be.

Next best is to create things to prevent workers from contacting threats. This is where most of the options above fall — they are the best options we have right now. Internal air purification is great! The virus doesn’t come into contact with people. (We put an air purifier in my kid’s classroom for a couple years and got sick twice. Once per year. This year they opted to not use the air purifier and we’ve never not been sick. I’ve been sick four times this year. Good air filtration is supposed to be a little more effective at protecting disease spread than everyone wearing a surgical mask.) Everything else proposed above keeps sick people away from non-sick people and let’s people know that they ARE sick so they can avoid getting others sick. A+ plans.

Next best is administrative controls — keeping people away from danger with rules. This includes the lockdowns and the (much disproven) six foot buffers. People can choose to expose themselves to danger and DO when the alternative is inconvenient so it’s less effective than the physical separations above.

Last and worst is PPE. When you have to rely on PPE you’re in a bad place. The risk is on people following a rule on wearing gear that may be inconvenient, uncomfortable, and unattractive. Even if everyone is highly trained and highly motivated to comply PPE compliance tops out at about 85% — and that’s for people who have certifications that require compliance and a culture of safety and and and. PPE is great! But it shouldn’t be where protective measures stop.

My ideal aesthetic is what I'm calling "sexy tomboy". That is to say, I am 100% femme through and through, but I want to look like what a straight man's idea of a "masculine woman" is. I wanna be masc in the way that LaCroix is fruit flavored, just a little extra something to make things a little more interesting

This you?

I don't think I'll ever recover from this one

i have been constantly in tears over this newly hatched duck i found on instagram last night

@ashmarinez @shylighthi the duck.

The duck

I was going to transcribe this, but looked it up instead after seeing the username. Brown Butter Brownies from Broma Bakery!

The single serve double chocolate chip cookies that I pretty religiously make like four times a week are from Broma Bakery and they are so decadent and rich and amazing, I def recommend their recipes.

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

Please, PLEASE use Libby. OverDrive. Hoopla. CloudLibrary. Kanopy. Flipster. Freegal. Transparent Language. Mango. Jstor. Your library would not offer it if they could not afford it, and we afford things by reporting the number of people who use that service, so if you don't use the service we can't afford it. It's a cycle. Keep it going, keep using it, and we'll keep providing because we'll be able to justify the cost to the bean counters in government.

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Sometimes, people are really great.

This is also an example of picking One Thing and putting most of your Better The World efforts there. We have so many different important issues to care about and act toward, and it’s tempting to try and do a Little for Many Things - and I’m not saying that little bits of effort don’t add up! They do. But often you’ll make a bigger impact (and possibly have less compassion/activist fatigue) if you direct the majority of your efforts toward one or two things.