by the way (i sadly cant share this document cause it was sent to me personally and i dont think its online) i've been reading a compilation of earliest writings by European settlers about Kentucky and its fucking wild

the main thing they mention is the river cane, everywhere. Cane cane cane cane cane on every page. Canebrakes stretching for miles and miles, dark woodlands of massive trees spaced wide apart with canebrake as the understory

But also they talk a lot about: Huge fields of strawberries that seem to turn red in spring with all the strawberries getting ripe. Raspberries. Groves of American plums, even some AN ACRE big just a huge patch of plum trees. Cherry trees. Huge grape vines growing up one in every four trees. Persimmons and pawpaws. Walnut trees. Hickory trees. Oak trees. And sugar maples. EVERYWHERE. And the canebrakes absolutely TEEMING with turkeys, passenger pigeons and quails

Reading the descriptions of looking out into a valley and seeing herds of 200-300 bison frolicking in the clover and river cane almost makes me want to cry...

It's crazy how much they talk about plum trees because plum trees are so rare now!

Really it's wild seeing how abundant the edible woody plant species and berries just-so-happened to be when Europeans first came. Right?

To me it seems like obvious pieces of evidence that indigenous people were actively cultivating this land. It was a landscape scale agriculture fully integrated with the ecosystem.

Even more so because it started to collapse very soon after settlers came. The sugar maple trees were mostly killed by settlers hacking indiscriminately into them with hatchets for maple syrup making without caring about the trees survival, the livestock running loose destroyed the native clover and cane causing invasive grass to grow back, and the bison...reading about the bison is so sad!

The wasteful slaughter of bison began very early. Lots of writers talk about other settlers killing bison just to say they killed one, or killing several of them and barely taking one horse load of meat from them, or seeing traders killing bison by the hundreds just to take the most valuable parts and leave the body to rot...And the writers knew it was wrong! but they couldn't stop the others from doing it. So bison were basically gone from around Lexington before 1800 :(

Settlers even killed the bison for wool--this was fascinating to me, they described making their cloth out of nettle bast fiber and bison wool. Native Americans also used bison wool for textiles, but as far as I know they didn't kill them for it (tho i reckon they might have used the wool on a bison they killed)...the wool peels right off in big clumps in the spring. Same thing with mountain goats, indigenous peoples would just gather the mountain goat wool when it naturally shed. But the settlers were killing bison to shave the wool off and it said only the young ones had good wool so if they killed a bison that didn't have good wool on it they would just kill another one.

They destroyed the river cane not knowing that bamboo was strong and useful for practically everything. Destroyed the native pastures of buffalo clover, Kentucky clover, running buffalo clover and God knows what other extinct or undiscovered clovers. And now wild strawberries and raspberries are hard to find, American plums very rare, persimmons rare...

The settlers didn't understand this land, didn't try to understand it, they were full of greed and just tried to force their idea of agriculture and their idea of society onto it, and watched in bafflement as the natural abundance and beauty of the land around them fell into decay and ruin from their abuse.

Animals I've seen mislabelled as red foxes on iNaturalist:

Once saw an observation of a mule deer that had been misidentified as a coyote and gotten research grade after "agree"s from two people who were carnivore biologists...honestly people just go through the observations and don't look at them very carefully

Drives me bananas when I’m going through local plant observations.

in my experience going through local plant observations that need ID is usually a total waste of time because 99% of them are some asteraceae bullshit that cannot be identified down to species without like 12 photos of different parts of the flowers leaves and stems at precisely the right time

Or its just like, one photo of a young leaf that could belong to like 200 different things and the photo taker just doesn't know what is needed to identify the species

Identifying plants is either

In California, there’s a big keying manual called the Jepson and you’re pretty much shit outta luck if you don’t have flowers or fruits

singing house of the rising sun at the pub last night and when the song ended the musicians just kept playing while people ad-libbed more verses about various pubs they knew

(with ominous hurdy-gurdy accompaniment): "there is a pub in walthamstow, it's called the fox and mole, but we don't go there (long pause) any more. Because the manager is an arsehole."

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP RSTUVWXY

24/26

Level 1: there are two extremely distinct genders. Male and female. There is no changing this or the traits associated with it.

Level 2: there are two distinct genders and traits associated with them, but you can be born with a Disorder that causes your internal experience of gender to not match your body. This has to be fixed medically.

Level 3: there are perhaps 3 genders, and you don't need to medically transition to be trans.

Level 4: Gender is a human concept. It's a cultural idea we made up to entrap women and boast toxic masculinity. Without culture, all sexes are the same. Animals have sex, humans have gender.

Level 5: Gender is a biological concept seperate from sex that we can observe in nature, and each one comes with its own sets of potential for traits. Most individuals in a species fall within specific ranges of traits typical for their sex, but outliers are not unheard of. Nearly every combination of traits can exist and we don't fully understand what creates the full scope of the gender experience. Overall, there is no wrong way to be a living thing.

Fuck it

i think what bothers me about a lot of "girl power" narratives is that they function on the implicit idea on the idea that women can become worthy of respect. and i happen to think that really caring about women means believing they already are worthy of respect. that historical seamstresses and soccer moms and forgotten sisters and sweet polite little girls and someone's weird grandma matter just as much as the warriors and politicians, even if they, personally, never accomplish anything "cool."

Jeanne Villepreux-Power, the inventor of the clear glass fish tank was a dressmaker before she married and had the free time and energy to devote to her passion for marine biology. But not just any dressmaker – a really good dressmaker. Being a dressmaker was different from being a seamstress; it was like the difference between owning a couture house and being a stitcher for one. You had to start out as a seamstress, but by the time you hit dressmaker, you had reached the top of the occupational ladder 

She literally designed a wedding dress for a princess at one point

And yet articles about her always phrase it like "from being JUST a MERE SEAMSTRESS she ascended to the REAL WORK OF SCIENCE!!!"

I love Josh’s anti-classism so much. I grew up in a single parent household that didn’t have time/the ability to cook. I taught myself as an adult and ended up loving it. I cook with this stuff a lot. Shit, the RealLemon juice ends up in a lot of my cocktails. Sure, I like fancy ingredients when I can afford them and I have things I get picky about using - but I have bad hands, mincing garlic is painful as fuck. There’s a lot to be said for knowing how to work with what you have. Don’t shame people for trying, don’t shame people for feeding their families things that they enjoy.

if you are only a good cook if you have access to premium ingredients at whole foods or above prices then you arent really a good cook

The fuck they coming for my squeezy lemon juice for that shit is literally indistinguishable from squeezing a physical lemon and I have proved this with a direct fucking lick-to-lick test

All of the classism is wrong and literally always a product of ignorance, but they really went out and picked the four products that actually make no discernible difference

Just you fucking try and put shredded parmesan into a chicken breading

Now go get the shaky and some seasoning salt and discover HAPPINESS

Oh, and iodized salt actually exists solely and specifically as a way to get iodine into people because iodine deficiency is a thing you can die of

So if you only use fancy fresh cracked himalayan rock salt or the fancy sea salt and you have been experiencing:

Guess what you might need, motherfucker

The red-winged blackbird’s song is deeply comforting and familiar it’s like walking into the marsh and hearing an old friend

If I went camping and kept hearing shit like this from locations I couldn't identify I would start believing in ghosts

The worst is when they mimic kids crying and screaming and shit, which they do often in zoos because they're zoos

Taronga Zoo in Sydney had an emergency evacuation . . . and the resident lyrebird learned to mimic the evacuation alarm, complete with the "Evacuate now" voiced by a very Aussie sounding human.

Okay that clinches it I fucking hate these birds

Animal designed to cause psychological damage

A lot of fantasy goes with Tolkien explanation of fantasy racism being the result of ancestral grudge.

Then you got Dungeon Meshi which is like:

"Elves and Dwarves hate each other because their respective empires make up 2/3 of the imperial core and are stuck in a cold war as the planet runs out of uncolonized land to grab. Elves are able to live in pastoral paradise because they've horded most of the settings farm-able land and natural capital, displacing and mass murdering any natives in the process. Orcs and goblins are hostile to other races because there the primary targets of an ongoing slavery and genocide campaign. The dividing line between human and inhuman is arbitrarily assigned via a phrenological pseudo-science that quickly falls apart when questioned by anyone who wasn't indoctrinated into it since birth."

Animals I've seen mislabelled as red foxes on iNaturalist:

Once saw an observation of a mule deer that had been misidentified as a coyote and gotten research grade after "agree"s from two people who were carnivore biologists...honestly people just go through the observations and don't look at them very carefully

Drives me bananas when I’m going through local plant observations.

in my experience going through local plant observations that need ID is usually a total waste of time because 99% of them are some asteraceae bullshit that cannot be identified down to species without like 12 photos of different parts of the flowers leaves and stems at precisely the right time

Or its just like, one photo of a young leaf that could belong to like 200 different things and the photo taker just doesn't know what is needed to identify the species

Saul Steinberg, Country Noises.

​lookin right down both barrels of that thang

This is the last thing an ant ever sees

About ten years ago I decided that the next step I needed to take in my life was to accept and explore what it meant to be a failure and to have failed. This infuriated almost everybody in my life and clearly terrified a lot of people. People do not want you to accept failure. They dont want you to like... Sit with and think about it and pick it up and turn it arpund in your hands and really examine it. They want you to keep throwing yourself against the impossible walls until your body explodes! They do not want you to say "alright then, I've failed. What does that mean for me? Im still here. What does the life of someone who has failed look like?"

This makes people very angry and panicky.

My mental health improved in ways it had not in the previous DECADE once I stopped. And. Sat. With failure. And thought about what my failure ... Was. And looked at the structures that produced it and examined them critically.

It is so taboo to fail and admit it openly and talk about it. It is so taboo to talk about or think about failure in an accepting way rather than hiding it shamefully until you experience a degree of success in some area which allows you to present the past failure as "a stepping stone" to your current situation. Fuck that. We are put in positions of guaranteed failure by society every day and then punished and shamed for it. Lets fucking talk about failure