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ok im about to think about the Character!! im so Excited 😊😊

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"you sound smart" that's because i've spent years doing academic writing to the point that it's my default cadence plus or minus the use of profanity as a tone indicator

"you sound stupid" that's because i'm dumb as fuck

So, the thing about Don Quixote.

The thing about Don Quixote is that he tilts at windmills - tilts in the archaic sense of ‘charge at with a lance,’ because it’s the story of a guy who read so much chivalric romance that he lost his mind and started larping as a knight-errant. He was, if you’ll pardon the phrasing, chivalrybrained.

The thing about Don Quixote is, sometimes people take it as this story of whimsical and bravely misguided individualism or ‘being yourself’ or whatever, and they’re wrong. If it took place in the modern day, Don Quixote would absolutely be the story of a trust fund kid who blew his inheritance being a gacha whale until his internet got cut off so now he wanders around insisting that people refer to him as ‘Gudako.’

But the real thing about Don Quixote is that it was published in the early 1600s, and the thing about the 1600s is that Europe was one big tire fire. This is because 1600s Europe was still organized around feudalism (or ‘vassalage and manorialism’ if ya nasty), which assumed that land (and the peasants attached to it) were the only source of wealth. And that had worked just fine (well, ‘just fine,’ it was still feudalism) for a long time, because Europe had been a relative backwater with little in the way of urbanization or large-scale trade.

That was no longer true for Europe in the 1600s. The combination of urban development, technological advances, and brutal Spanish colonialism meant that land was no longer the sole source of wealth. Sudden there was a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners, and another new class of downwardly-mobile gentry who simply couldn’t compete in this new fast-paced economy. Cervantes saw this process with his own eyes.

One of the symbols of this new age was the windmill, a complicated piece of engineering that was expensive to build but would then produce profits indefinitely - in other words, a windmill was capital.

The thing about Don Quixote is, when he tilts at windmills, he has correctly identified his nemesis.

I reblogged this earlier without comment as food for thought, and a lot of you liked it, so now I'm gonna argue against it. It's really good! And it would be 100% correct if Don Quixote's name was William Fitzgerald and he was from Lincolnshire. But his name is Alonso Quixano and he's from La Mancha.

We're not in England. We're in Spain.

And the thing with Spain in 1600 is it displays a distinct LACK of capital, despite the ludicrous amounts of money concentrated in the hands of the very very few. Ironically, Spain's brutal colonialism drained all the silver of Peru to NOT build windmills. The Hapsburgs and the aristocracy spent it all on pointless constant warfare, art and architecture which looked great and did fuck-all, and the consumption of imported goods. They invested nothing on production (except wool! they did invest in that for a while; too bad the sheep trampled the fields at every migration and ruined Castille's grain production, forcing everyone to import their staple food), nothing on infrastructure, left agriculture primitive if not ruined, fully abandoned local industry, and ended up horribly indebted. The Empire where the sun never sets strangled itself with all this wealth, for which millions of people had been summarily murdered or slowly worked to death in the silver mines of Potosí. And it did not convert that wealth to capital. Its creditors did, though.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it didn't have a new class of business-savvy, investment-minded upwardly-mobile commoners. (At best it had a few rich merchants in Seville and Cadiz, who made tons of money by selling to a market that was obliged to buy from them, and they didn't need to be business-savvy, just connected enough to secure the position.) It didn't have landowners finding new and efficient ways to exploit their land and the people who worked it. And it didn't have highborn nobles threatened by the upward mobility of their social inferiors.

Because the thing with Spain in 1600 is that there was no upward mobility. Only downward. This is where the picaresque novel was born (Don Quixote wouldn't exist without it), and the picaresque protagonist is a little guy who tries and tries to rise from the gutter, but the world won't let him. The game is fixed. He can cheat all he wants, the system will always cheat more.

The thing with Spain in 1600 is that it's not just rogues who fail to make it, it's everyone. Everyone tries to make a buck, and everyone fails. Everyone gets poorer and hungrier and more desperate. The population dwindles. (Exceptions: the upper echelons of the aristocracy in whose hands the silver directly flows, the aforementioned merchants who sell goods to Spanish America, a handful of artisans like silversmiths and painters who nevertheless remain precarious like all artists ever, various officials who enjoy big salaries and bribes, and of course, as always, the Church.)

Spain did have a class of downwardly-mobile gentry, because land started concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer owners: the upper nobility and the Church. So everyone else, from self-governing peasants to moderately landed gentry, found themselves with less or with nothing. But Don Quixote was not one of the moderately landed gentry. Don Quixote was lower than that: he was a hidalgo, a knight of the battlefield.

Hidalgos had little or no land, no money, and no access to all that silver. All they had was a tax exemption (a useless privilege when you earn nothing that can be taxed anyway) and the right to bear arms, which they often couldn't afford. But here's the thing with hidalgos, they weren't impoverished because they were competing with capital. They were impoverished because they never had any wealth to begin with, and the last time their military services were needed and rewarded was back in the Reconquista. The Hapsburg wars were waged on credit, and no one made a fortune out of them (certainly not Cervantes!) except Spain's creditors.

Like so many others in Spain in 1600, hidalgos were poor already, and failed to move upward, and as food prices did exactly that, they went hungry. Spanish literature, from picaresque novels to Don Quixote, makes fun of hidalgos, portraying them as conceited and comically minor nobles who remain poor because they're too proud to work like normal people. And while that's a stock character, a caricature, there was definitely some truth behind it, and there were plenty of hidalgos with this worldview in real life.

So who is Don Quixote's nemesis? Capital? Industry? Windmills? Nah. A good answer would be honest work for honest pay. That's what the literary hidalgos dreaded most of all: they imagined quests and duels and fields of honour because they couldn't imagine getting a job. Another good answer is Hapsburg Spain itself, the empire where the sun never sets and pretty much everyone's the worse for it, including the overwhelming majority of Spaniards. I have a more poetic answer, though.

Don Quixote's nemesis is the mountain that eats men: the silver mines of Potosí, in today's Bolivia, where millions died for the glory of Spain, only for Spain to go bankrupt, and its own population to get impoverished. Potosí, from where a river of silver flowed through Spain, without enriching it, immediately passed to its creditors in the Low Countries, England, France, etc, and then these creditors turned it into capital, and thus were able to build modern Europe. Potosí, the mountain that ate 8 million people in 3 centuries, just so that Europe could get the funds to murder hundreds of millions more through colonialism and imperialism of unprecedented scale. Potosí, which made Spain's ruling class think they can afford all these wars (spoiler: they couldn't), and didn't spare a thought on how people could live. And the people lived badly.

If Don Quixote could tilt at that, how beautiful it would be! Still completely pointless (you can't deal with systemic problems by tilting at them, as the book eloquently shows), but how beautiful.

…And perhaps Sancho could take advantage of the hubbab and steal an ingot for himself. Poor sod deserves it.

“If I were to pay you, Sancho,” responded Don Quixote, “according to what the greatness and nobility of this remedy deserve, the treasure of Venice and the mines of Potosí would not be enough.”

This is horrifyingly true.

If you get a captcha asking you to identify the tents or the RV's, request a new captcha. Stop snitching now includes making sure you're logging in online ethically I guess?

Btw you can purposely fuck these up and it does still let you through sometimes. Try to fuck it up where you can.

my brutalist son just killed my rococo son with his gray concrete alphabet blocks

did i love enough?

i think the single greatest example of environmental storytelling in video games is in Unpacking. it's a game with no dialogue that consists entirely of unpacking your stuff out of moving boxes and placing it into the correct places around the place your character is moving into. there are a lot of subtle storytelling beats, like the same stuffed animal coming with you through every single move, but there's one level in particular that takes place right after your character graduates college and moves in with her boyfriend that goes normally at first.

but then you get to your framed diploma.

you go to hang it on the wall in the kitchen, but there's a bigass painting already there that you can't move (presumably your boyfriends) that takes up the entire wall.

you go to hang it on the wall in the living room, but there are already a bunch of posters there - again, presumably your boyfriend's. there's clearly space for your diploma if the posters were scooched closer together, but again, you can't even move them.

with a growing sense of dread and desperation, you move to the bathroom. this room has the only wall space in the apartment for you to hang your diploma: directly over the toilet.

but if you try to place it there, it gets a red outline, indicating that it's in the "wrong" spot and the level won't finish.

you go to the bedroom.

there is no wall space.

you click under the bed.

the level finishes.

the next level has you moving back into your childhood bedroom.

— Andy Marra, The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition (via a-witches-brew)

the role of the person in the passenger seat is not only navigator but secretary as well. you have to type up the drivers messages to random ladies on facebook about cbd cream & google whether that billy joel song was the theme song for that show or not

you also have to provide a henchmans disdainful scowl at whoever the driver is flipping off in the target parking lot

other assorted roles may include

Don't forget the Tommy Gun

You should never forget the Tommy Gun

y'all ever reach the end of google

I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.

I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.

This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests

@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.

Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches

And THEN.

I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.

HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.

I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."

Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.

I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.

It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research

There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA

Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."

The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.

It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.

I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.

Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.

The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.

Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.

@motherfucking-dragons

it's called the Alabama Canebrake Pitcher Plant and there are, in total, 11 known sites where it still grows.

in general i'm feral over the carnivorous plant variety of the Southeastern USA. we have SO many super-rare carnivorous plants!!!

Protect the wetlands. Protect the canebrakes because the canebrakes protect the wetlands.

Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.

For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?

Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.

I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.

The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.

It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.

plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.

There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.

Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.

The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.

This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.

Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?

I know about reproducing plants from cuttings, rhizome cuttings have proven doable with this species.

Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?

A lot of people are asking how to distinguish Rivercane from invasive bamboo species. This link should help you!

Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:

Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.

European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?

In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.

Books that talk about Rivercane:

By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.

On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.

i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.

Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman

She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.

I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!

Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.

Someone research the material properties of this stuff ASAP. It's insanely strong.

Hi everyone, it's the river cane post again!

Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!

These videos barely have any views or comments, but y'all can help! We can spread the knowledge.

Papercraft commission of Hawkeye and Klinger from M*A*S*H!

Getting commissioned to make characters from this series was a delightful surprise! I knew this show was influential and enormously well-loved, but not much else, so it was fun and interesting to find out more about it as I drew. Plus, y'all know I always love making art of characters dancing! ^__^

ahhhhhh if only i had eaten that japanese radish when i had the chance. dies

VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.

Please check on the fish doorbell once in a while :)

I just looked, and there are 170 other people on there, also checking to see if there are fish waiting.

Please remember, if ever you are tempted to make a sweeping statement about human nature, that on this night in March, 2024, while war rages, there are 171 of us looking to see if a fish needs us to ring a doorbell.

Plenty else is going on, but also that.

(PS, the site says that the busiest times for fish are sunrise and sunset, which for now are at about 6:30, AM and PM, local time. Local time in Utrecht is 1 hour ahead of GMT, 5 hours ahead of EST, if that helps. I'm going to try to remember to check back again around 2 AM my time, when it will be morning for the fish!)

look dawg, the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute was an important moment in the Holocaust, but I feel like ever since goyische tumblr learned about it it's literally all they talk about. People have just instantly latched onto it because it's something that makes them feel connected. "Those famous pictures of Nazi book burnings are them burning gay and trans research" comes off as less of recontextualizing history and more of "omg that's me! I'm famous!". The fact that it's brought up in every conversation about the Holocaust now, even when the discussion is about the specific persecution of other groups, is highly suspect. When Jews talk about the Holocaust, we don't view the victims as people like us. They are us. They're our parents and grandparents, our great- uncles and aunts. In every generation we must see ourselves as if we left Egypt

JKR is engaging in Holocaust denial, but it's a soft sort of denial. Someone told her the Nazis hated trans people, and she responded "nuh-uh" because she didn't want to believe trans people have been around for that long. It's bad, sure, but we already knew she was a shitty person. I think it's a better opportunity to discuss the process of radicalization and closed-loop ideological thinking than to shit on the internet's favorite punching bag with your new favorite factoid. Jews right now are experiencing violent antisemitism. Bomb threats, death threats, rape threats have become the norm for a lot of us, but I have yet to see that discussed with the same fervor as JKR being shitty for the gajillionth time. If you truly want to make yourself a part of the living history of the Holocaust, you have to understand how to fight for what's important. You have to learn how to protect what you love, not just destroy what you hate. It's very important not to lose the plot here

It's crucial that we remember that the book burnings were primarily about Jews. Joseph Goebbels proclaimed in Berlin "The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path...The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character." The German Student Union described book burnings as a "response to a worldwide Jewish smear campaign against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values." Science, study, reason, progress were all seen as Jewish plots to destroy society (wonder where else we've seen that). Magnus Hirschfeld was persecuted because he was gay and his Institute was full of gay and trans people, yes. But it was also because he was a Jew, and a man of science who was pushing the boundaries of medical care for LGBT people. Just. something to think about

People need to understand what else was getting burnt in those book burnings.

Because it wasn't just Magnus Hirschfeld's work.

There were Torahs and sefarim that were thrown into those fires. There siddurim and talmuds and tefillin that set alight.

Anything and everything related to Jews and our Jewishness was burnt.

Books both fictional and non-fictional were set ablaze simply because the author was Jewish.

It was the Jewish part that was the crime and worthy of the fire in the eyes of the Nazis.

genuinely one of the saddest parts of this new era of the internet is how hard it is to rick roll someone now. with people's attention spans shortening so much, they wouldn't even get through the first few bait seconds before clicking off the video. like i saw a comment that ended with "btw i made all of this up" and the replies kept treating it so seriously because none of them finished the entire 4 sentence comment. and We're no strangers to love You know the rules and so do I (do I) A full commitment's what I'm thinking of You wouldn't get this from any other guy I just wanna tell you how I'm feeling Gotta make you understand Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Never gonna make you cry Never gonna say goodbye Never gonna tell a lie and hurt you