glass–beach:

the point of art is not to be great but to make it transparently obvious that there is something wrong with you

(via nil-elk)


twink-with-an-agenda:

image

Crown him with many crowns 👑

(via goldfyshie927)


reasonsforhope:

reasonsforhope:

A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures.”

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

Reblogging to show the temperature maps that are featured in the original study (and the Guardian article about it), because the visual difference really is so striking and so encouraging.

As you look at these maps of forests vs. temperature trends, remember that the temperature map is showing large-scale, very long-term averages, especially on the temperature map. Because of that, the map data doesn’t reflect how very, very big a difference it can make on a local scale, e.g. those 9°F summer temperature conditions. And those local scale changes are the changes that people actually live in.

This is hugely

Forest Age vs. Warming Maps

A map of reforestation in the United States in the past century. Younger forests are dark green (under 25 years) and light green (25 to 100 years). Forests older than 100 and 200 years are shown in light brown and dark brown, respectively.  The vast majority of older forests are in the western half of the US. The east and southeast, though, are covered in dark green, which is by far the most dense in the large area of the southeast between South Carolina and Louisiana.   There are also pockets of new reforestation in the northeast, around the Great Lakes, throughout the west, and in the Pacific Northwest.ALT
A map of cooling trends in the United States, shown as change per 50 years (that is, change from 1960 to 2010). Areas that cooled down in that time period are shown in various shades of blue, with dark blue being the coolest. Warming is shown in shades of red, with bright red being the warmest.  Most of the country is in the red, and most of that portion is the lightest shade of red, with plenty of dark red hot spots.  However, the midwest and southeastern areas of the US are all cooling - all shown in blue. The cooling is most dramatic in the same area as the resforestation: South Carolina through Louisiana. The cooling effect actually extends substantially beyond the new reforestation areas, by what looks (to my math) like an area of 200 to 400 miles.  There are also pockets of cooling in the west, many of which roughly match pockets of new reforestation.ALT

Pictured: Guardian graphic. Source: Barnes, et al, 2024, ‘A Century of Reforestation Reduced Anthropogenic Warming in the Eastern United States.’ Note: Forest age data from North American Carbon Program. Age estimates as of 2019 at 1km resolution. Temperature data from Delaware Air Temperature & Precipitation Dataset.

Source: The Guardian, February 17, 2024. And the original study is here, from the journal Earth’s Future, first published February 13, 2024.

(Also, btw, for any non-US and/or non-geography people, don’t worry about the fact that there aren’t any forests in the middle of the country. That’s the Great Plains. Like we definitely did turn most of it into cropland, but it’s not supposed to have forests.)

This is huge.

Even the small pockets of new reforestation elsewhere in the country are usually correlated with small pockets of cooling. (And of course correlation by itself does not equal causation, but that’s what the rest of the study is for.)

This is genuinely strong evidence that the massive tree planting campaigns of the last 25 years are going to pay off dramatically much sooner than we thought.

The study found that the coolest forests were ones planted planted 20 to 40 years ago.

That means that trees planted in the 90s through 2004 are in that stage and causing the most cooling right now.

It also means that the ongoing, absolutely massive recent reforestation efforts are going to pay off a lot between now and 2050.

That means campaigns like China’s 2022 pledge to plant or conserve 70 billion trees by 2030. Or India’s annual tree-planting drive, which in 2021 saw 250 million trees planted in just one day. Or Kenya’s new tree-planting holiday, started in 2023, to plant 100 million trees each year.

This study also gives strong evidence that newer forests don’t have vanishingly few benefits compared to old growth forests - they do have benefits (if not as many), just different ones. It also, I would argue, suggests that tree planting efforts don’t have to be ecologically perfect to make a real difference. They certainly were not nailing native plant biodiversity and ecological best practices in the US in the 1930s!

And as we learn (and actually implement) more and more about how to do reforestation right - more biodiversity, native plants only, actual forests and not just tree plantations - the benefits of reforestation will only increase.

(via rapidpunches)


portraitoftheoddity:

wendiana99:

portraitoftheoddity:

Okay– you guys want another cute story about my parents and food?

So my mother is an amazing baker. And as I mentioned in a reblog of the Oranges post, my parents now always keep fresh fruit in the house – particularly bananas (my dad likes them with his breakfast). And whenever the bananas go brown, mom makes (really goddamn delicious) banana bread.

My parents are very avid outdoorsy folks and do a lot of hiking. They live in a mountainous region and basically climb a mountain every weekend (most of the mountains here are under 6,000 feet, but rocky), including in the middle of winter. Because cold and exertion eat through your blood sugar, they always pack trail snacks, and they developed a tradition of bringing a mini loaf of mom’s banana bread that they share on the summit.

Now a few years ago my father was having a midlife crisis and decided he was going to hike a REALLY big mountain. So he signed up for an expedition to climb Mt. Denali in Alaska – the tallest peak in North America. The group he was going with had a trip planned where everyone would be responsible for hiking with and carrying their own gear, so you had to be prepared to hike up a big fuckoff mountain in potentially treacherous conditions with a heavy pack.

My mother was not going on this expedition (she has problems with altitude sickness) but dammit, she was not going to let my dad go get himself killed by being unprepared. So in the year leading up to his climb, she kinda became his personal trainer. They hiked the local mountains a lot and in all kinds of weather conditions, practiced rope training and crevasse rescue techniques, and she made sure he practiced climbing with increasingly heavy packs until he was hauling around 65lbs of weights on his back. Sometimes she would even sit in a sled in the snow and make him pull her. 

When the trip finally came, dad was incredibly excited, and amused that his gear pack actually ended up being lighter than his practice pack. A number of other folks in the expedition had practiced going up a stair machines with weight on their backs, but mom had dragged dad through all the really rocky, treacherous trails around here with ice and water crossings, so he had solid balance from really moving with that amount of weight. Over the course of the climb (which took a couple weeks), half of the hikers ended up turning back (for various reasons), but despite being the oldest in the group, dad was one of the few to summit. 

And on the day he made it to the top, at 20,310 feet of elevation, he pulled out of his pack, wrapped in foil and mostly frozen but intact despite the long trip, a loaf of my mother’s banana bread, to eat on top of the world. Because, he said later, even if she wasn’t there with him, she was the reason he made it to the top.

This is so wholesome.

Can we have the banana bread recipe? 😆

YOU KNOW WHAT?

Yes.

Sift together: 

  • 1 ¾ cups flour
  • 1 ½ cups sugar
  • 1 tsp baking soda
  • 1 tsp salt

In separate bowl:

  • 2 eggs
  • ½ cup canola oil
  • 3 mashed bananas (overripe)
  • 1 tsp vanilla
  • ¼ cup buttermilk (or 1 Tbsp buttermilk powder & ¼ cup water)

Stir with flour mixture slowly.

Fold in: ½ cup chopped walnuts or chocolate chips, as desired. (my mother likes nuts, I like chocolate)

Crumb topping:

  • ½ stick cold butter cut up into small crumbles
  • 1 – 1 ½ tsp cinnamon
  • ½ cup flour
  • ½ cup brown sugar

Mix thoroughly into small pieces. Get in there with your hands. Get messy.

Preheat oven to 325ºF. 

Grease 4 mini loaf pans and sprinkle with flour.

Spread part of the batter in four mini pans, then layer with half of the topping mixture so there’s a layer in the middle of them all.

Spread rest of batter and top with rest of topping.

Bake for 40-45 minutes!

Makes 4 mini loaves that freeze well, and are good for eating on top of mountains.

(via yespumpkindoodlesthings)


traegorn:

debtdeath:

leave-her-a-tome:

image

(source)

There are so many ways to make moodboards, bookcovers, and icons without plagiarizing! As artists, authors, and other creatives, we need to be especially careful not to use someone else’s work and pass it off as our own. 

Please add on if you know any more resources for free images <3

recently found out about openverse which i think aggregates a bunch of creative commons images from flickr, wikimedia, nasa etc… pretty handy

I’m shocked so many people don’t know about my go to – Morgue File.

It’s full of searchable, rights free images uploaded by photographers.

(via cleolinda)


jettkuso:

Real observations since I started wearing a wizard hat daily:

- Brim is so wide that I stay BONE DRY taking walks in the rain

- Brim can be positioned to block the sun from ever getting in my eyes AND keeping it off the back of my neck

- The pointed top part creates an air pocket, keeping my head from getting hot or squishing my hair as it might in a ball cap

- Hat can easily be pulled down over the tips of my ears without looking dumb, protecting them from wind chill

- Strangers say they like my hat, giving me the chance to tell them that I am a wizard

- When you’re wearing a wizard hat, ALL OTHER FASHION CHOICES become secondary, allowing you to branch out with style

Embrace ego death. Stay protected from all elements. Wear a wizard hat.


themostineptthateverstepped:
“ dreadheadfaerie:
“ female-twink:
“Also instead of “problem behaviour” call it “distressed behaviour” for a more accurate picture of what the person is actually facing
”
I can’t reblog this enough, I will do it every...

themostineptthateverstepped:

dreadheadfaerie:

female-twink:

Also instead of “problem behaviour” call it “distressed behaviour” for a more accurate picture of what the person is actually facing

I can’t reblog this enough, I will do it every damn time I see it from now to death.

When someone frames your mental health issues as attention seeking behavior, problem behavior, or any other negatively-coded context, it creates an environment that makes you feel guilty, wrong, and selfish for struggling with things outside of your control. As a result, serious issues are allowed to arise in the absence of support.

(via rapidpunches)


revenantscholar:

lesbian-disaster-academic:

revenantscholar:

lesbian-disaster-academic:

i used to be so good at writing strong, thoroughly-researched, thoroughly-edited essays.

as a kid in hs, my teacher literally came up to me, holding my 40 page essay on the intersection of the European witch hunts and capitalism/exploitation/gender roles (it was supposed to be 7 pages…whoops) and went like “this is literally a master’s-degree level thesis. what are you doing?? you could literally use this as your final dissertation in a master’s program, what the fuck.”

NOW??? NOW?? you’d think I’d be oh so skilled. but alas. i can barely piece together two ideas. adhd skill-regression is so so real. im SOBBING

The skill can come back and it often does. It is not unusual for it skill recedes during stressful and painful times. Maybe you just need more stability/safety/kind people around you.

I have been through something similar a few times in my life with writing, yoga, studying…

Admittedly, my life is always financially and socially precarious, so my notion of stability currently just means “enough money to pay the rent and food for the next few months.”

It is hard to hold onto anything when you have to fight for survival all the time, either materially or emotionally.

Wow, uh. Okay, I’m gonna need a minute to process “It is hard to hold onto anything when you have to fight for survival all the time…”. You’re genuinely rewiring my brain is we speak.

Thank you, this means a lot to hear. <3

Thank you as well. We have to help each other in this hellscape whenever we can.

(via rapidpunches)


shadowmoth:

forget-about-me2:

fangirltothefullest:

jv:

image


Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck google with a 10 feet pole.


Seriously, fuck them. They are breaking the internet BADLY.

Everyone needs to get out of Chrome ASAP. Use duck duck go or any other alternative too.



Jokes on them too, we know how to be petty bitches in reaponse to this. Sit through the fucking 5 second delay and continue to use adblock AND Firefox to spite them.

They realise that 5 seconds of waiting is still better than waiting for, what is it now, 30+ seconds of unskippable ads right?

Friendly reminder that you can add this to your ublock block list to get rid of the five second delay on firefox:

www.youtube.com##+js(nano-stb, resolve(1), 5000, 0.001)

(via cleolinda)


queeoretician:

rotationalsymmetry:

direquail:

I think what bothers me most about how John is talked about in the fandom is the implication that a different (implied: better) person would’ve done things differently and somehow more right than he did.

When the text goes to lengths to explore how suddenly coming into an incredible amount of power in a fatally constrained situation cannot lead to a good outcome.

If you’re putting John in dialogue with the concept of the “magical girl”, which Muir has said he is (a little tongue in cheek, but)–these are young, often profoundly unready people, who often get taken advantage of by the people who give them their powers. And like, yes, John is not a teenager, but I think that’s part of the point, is that at no point is a person really prepared to become as powerful as he did–even before he merged with Alecto. Even when he was fully in control of his powers, even when they were given with honest intent and trust, even when he used them with the best of intentions and tried to do the right thing, there was no way for him to be prepared, especially given the situation he was in.

And it’s funny to talk about how bad John must be in bed, but also, this isn’t a scenario where John is some self-deluding Elon Musk-like villain or loser. He is genuinely trying to do the right thing, in terms of rescuing the Earth’s population, rescuing the Earth Herself, and doing it ethically (see: M–’s insistence that they perfect the cryo containers until they could transport pregnant women).

I really do think this is something people are blocking out, because it is one of the uncomfortable parts of Muir’s message with the series. But ESPECIALLY because the people “critiquing” him as an embodiment of patriarchy and empire are failing to see that part of Muir’s critique is of human vulnerability to power: That is, that power corrupts.

And this even has echoes with Gideon & Harrow’s story! Harrow begins the series in a deeply unequal dynamic with Gideon! And she does horrible things, not just because she is traumatized, but because she is traumatized and has the power to act her desires out on Gideon. She might have the motive (trauma), but that’s not enough without the means (power).

And, yeah, I do have a semi-salty angle on this because people are frequently loath to think critically not just about axes of oppression but individual relationships of power when it applies to them and to people they like. ESPECIALLY when there is a very vocal segment of the fandom that is enthusiastically pro-harassment. It’s very convenient to villainize John and actively dis-identify with him, because otherwise, you’d have to face the question of whether you’d do any better in his place. But the thing is, the mission of revenge he embarks on is a lot closer to many peoples’ hearts than they’d like to consider.

That’s the whole point.

This meta is confusing me with how far off it is from my understanding of the story. Which is:

John SAYS he is well intentioned. John presents himself as being basically just some guy who gets thrown into a situation where he has to do the best he can under difficult circumstances.

But he lies. He is a bullshitter. How John presents himself and what the text reveals about John are DIFFERENT and that’s presumably extremely intentional, presumably you are supposed to notice that they are very different. I’m not opposed to morally gray characters who do horrible things as the least bad option, I was expecting John to be that way (as with the Mistborn trilogy), but John isn’t that way. He’s a Glass Onion kind of character. He’s got a reality distortion field.

He lied about pure Lyctorhood to his followers, forcing them to destroy people they loved when they didn’t have to. He brought them back without their memories and never told them the truth of their origins. He lied about his own vulnerability – everyone was freaked out about him going after Harrow in the River and understood he wouldn’t be fighting the Resurrection Beasts because the existence of Dominicus depends on him, and then when Mercy tries to kill him he’s all “psych! Actually I’m invulnerable!” So he’s just letting the Lyctors fight his battles for him because he wants them to, basically. And it’s easy to miss, but there is that one moment in Nona when he’s recounting the story himself, getting to frame things exactly how he wants them to, and he still lets slip some reason he experienced censure before all the necromancy stuff.

And, this was right at the climax of Nona, it was a big deal: he presents himself as being the savior of the Dominicus system when according to his own words he destroyed the Dominicus system. He personally killed every planet and the Sun. For petty revenge. So he could hurt other people. The people who ran the spaceship program did not destroy the Earth. He did.

And then there’s all these other “hey wait a minute” moments like John being so deeply offended that anyone might accuse him of threatening to nuke somewhere when he was in fact threatening to nuke somewhere.

There are lots of characters who mess up because they’re doing their best under impossible circumstances. John, I mean I can’t say for sure he isn’t trying his best because I don’t know his full circumstances, but the circumstances actually described in the books do not demand that level of dishonesty and general self absorption and destructiveness that we get from John – if he’s doing his best, it’s because of some psychological shit that predates anything talked about in the book, because things like “some other people are organizing a space program in a way I don’t think is ideal” does not require people to destroy the earth and the sun and embark on a 10,000 year long vengeance quest. And then lie about all of it.

Who the fuck knows how someone with ethics would have handled being put in John’s situation. We don’t know. That’s not the story Muir wrote.

(It might be an interesting story, especially if they somehow managed to destroy everything and be forced to hold the pieces together afterwards. I could imagine a great deal of horror arising from that premise. But, that’s not the story here.)

(Anyways, I hope this doesn’t come across as “you’re a bad person if you find John sympathetic”, that’s not remotely my intent. It is disagreement with the meta.)

Thank you for saying this! I feel like the reading OP puts forward (a fairly common reading of John) misses a lot about the story, in a way that I find hard to make sense of.

It’s absolutely true that the situation John was put in was a fucked up one. It’s absolutely true that power has a corrupting influence on people. And there are definitely some wild bad-faith takes on his actions out there (cow wall discourse, I’m looking at you). But saying that it would require an unrealistically virtuous person to make better decisions in his place just seems flatly incorrect to me.


Let me state my position explicitly here: I do not believe that most human beings, put in John’s situation, would choose to kill literally all life in the solar system to pursue vengeance against the trillionaires. His choice to destroy the world for vengeance was a choice, and one that other people in the narrative were begging him not to make.

There’s a really haunting parallel between the NtN apocalypse scene (p. 310):

N— was all, It’s not going to work. This is going to end with the ships launching and G— getting shot, and you’re going to kill millions of people for nothing. We followed you to save the world.

I said, We’re doing that. This is how we save the world. Believe me.

C— said, John, your problem is that you care less about being a saviour than you do about meting out punishment.

I said, C—, I was just your best man!

C— said, You still are. That doesn’t change the fact that you can be quite the most appallingly vindictive person I have ever met.

and the HtN funeral scene (p. 94):

“[…] I never saw her cry except once,” she added in a pointless rush. “The day after. When we put together the research. When she became a Lyctor. I said, There was no alternative. She said…”

[…] She cleared her throat: “She said, We had the choice to stop.

In both cases, the text deliberately draws our attention to the fact that what happened was the result of choices these people made, and that they could reasonably have chosen otherwise. And our story is about the millennia-long consequences of those choices.


I also think that the John-was-doing-his-best reading fails to engage with the role that patriarchy plays in the story.

Given the pervasive misogyny displayed towards Mercymorn in HtN, I really don’t think it’s fair to give John credit for M—’s insistence on reproductive justice in the cryo project.

More significantly (and unpleasantly), a major thread through HtN and NtN is of John (metaphorically) grooming/sexually abusing Harrow and Alecto. Better meta-writers than me have discussed this at length (familyabolisher here; sophelstein here and here; CW rape & incest on all those links), but for our purposes it’s sufficient to say that John calling Alecto “Annabel Lee” is a reference to Lolita, and one that tazmuir (herself a child sexual abuse survivor) has also made in her pre-TLT writing.

This paints the idea of John loving the earth/Alecto in a much darker light, and reinforces the parallels between John’s post-Resurrection colonial project and real-world colonialism’s imposition of patriarchal social structures (mentioned around the 10 minute mark of this Philosophy Tube video). It’s not that it’s easy to villainise John because he’s a man - him being a man is intrinsically tied up in the harm that he does to our (overwhelmingly female) cast.

Aside: I don’t have any good theories about why tazmuir chose for her sexual-abuser villain to be Māori, and I’m a little uncomfortable with this choice as it stands, but that doesn’t make his actions within the story any more excusable.


So to sum up: John made extremely harmful choices even when people around him asked him to choose differently, and he is intertextually positioned as the perpetrator of patriarchal violence. Based on this, I don’t find OP’s reading (that anyone else in John’s situation would have done just as much harm) to be credible.

(As rotationalsymmetry said above, I don’t want this to be taken as an attack on or moral judgment of people who subscribe to John-sympathetic readings of the series. For me, a big part of the horror of NtN was the realisation that this character who had been built up as sympathetic was lying about a bunch of stuff all along. But I do think that these readings are substantively incorrect, and that they do a disservice to tazmuir’s phenomenal writing, particularly around narrator unreliability.)