falling petals

Glenn Barr: Tomorrow’s Child.

Faith. Her name alone invokes awe. ‘Faith.’ A set of principles or beliefs upon which you’re willing to devote your life. The Dark Slayer. A lethal combination of beauty, power, and death.

Eliza Dushku as Faith Lehane in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003)

A couple Insta doodle requests from yesterday. More to come tho :)

Alexander Skarsgård – Free Your Mind – Cut Copy (x)

How Cut Copy got Alexander Skarsgård in their video - Dan Whitford:  “Basically we did a show in Rio and Alex Skarsgard actually came down to the show and demanded to come backstage after. He wanted to see us because he wanted to tell us what a massive fan he was. He was telling us this story about how he was shooting a series called Generation Kill in the Kalahari Desert without a break for like four or five months and while he was there his one link back to home was listening to our second record “In Ghost Colours” on repeat. It just took him back to being in Stockholm and partying. The life he was missing out on was represented by that record. So he had this emotional attachment to that album and was a massive fan and he basically came backstage to tell us all this. We ended up hanging out and having this crazy night. The next day he introduced us to his family. He comes from a big family of actors, obviously his Dad’s a massive actor, who were all there with him at the same time. We somehow became best buddies just from hanging out in this 24 hour period and said “if we’re ever in the same place again let’s hang out”. We had such an awesome time.

So when we were thinking about making a video for this new record we thought we’d ask him and see if he would be interested in doing it. Like, no pressure, but if you were up for it that would be awesome. We sent him the song, he loved it and he said “I’m in, let’s make this happen”. It was a very organic thing. I guess like a lot of the stuff we’ve done it’s via people we know or through friends. It was just amazing in this case because that friend happened to be this big shot Hollywood actor who people are quite fanatical about. He’s got quite the set of abs on him. It’s funny, towards the end of the day when all the staff were packing up, the ones that were left was this group of like six or seven different make up girls and hair stylists who found a reason to stick around. Everywhere he went he had this entourage of girls following him around just being like, “Skkkkaaaarrrrsssgggaarrrdd””.

Pedestrian TV (x)

hold me

ran, the norse goddess of the storms and the sea 🌊

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

The abundance of lichen in Finland is... debatable. According to economic standards, there's enough for commercial harvesting (which is done by harvesting 20-30% in a given location, then harvesting is banned from that specific location for the next 5 years. At least this is how things go in theory...). However, there's a constant issue of reindeer not having enough lichen to feed on, since reindeer are always herded in the wild. This leads to reindeer herders having to give them species-incompatible supplementary feed.

Personally, if the native species don't have enough food to feed on in the wild, to me that would be a better standard to measure the economic viability of harvesting lichen for other purposes with.

Also there's a constant issue of poaching lichen from the wild for which culprits are almost never found. Part of it can be simple issue of ignorance or thoughtlessness. But undoubtedly there are people doing it for commercial purposes, knowing it's not part of the "jokamiehenoikeus" ("everyman's rights", which gives Finns moving in nature the right to pick berries and mushrooms or whatever pinecones they find on the ground in the woods for their own use).

Thats terrible, but I'm not surprised, I suspected it might not truly be sustainable.

Yeah. Harvesting this stuff on industrial scale to be sold for arts and crafts is not acceptable.

Do not buy reindeer moss.

Nerene Virgin, 1946-2024: Many Torontonians and their kids are familiar with the popular show Today's Special which ran from 1981-1987. Among many other things, Nerene also hosted Eye on Toronto for CFTO. Unfortunately, she passed away in Burlington on January 15, 2024. Here she is pictured with co star of Today's Special, Jeff Hyslop who is now 72 years of age.

Credit: Toronto Past Archive.

Vow 🪝

Stills from "Booky Makes her Mark" (2006)

Mermay Gems: Opal!! 💕

Tiny cozy spaces☕ It was pretty fun trying to draw things in this sort of cozy-pixel-art-game perspective~

Calcifer~

check out my shop!

illustration commission for @belovedblabber of John 🔥 Better mind yourself, if you're looking to make some deals... commission info here