Pinned
This is just a note that if you like an image description of your post, you can add it to the original post, with or without credit. In fact, it’s actually more convenient for users to have the ID on the original. If there’s anything that you don’t like about the ID that would keep you from adding it to your post, absolutely feel free to change anything. People who add IDs only want to make posts more convenient.
UM GUYS. I JUST NOTICED A CRAZY ISSUE W THE TUMBLR UPDATE.
YOU CAN SEE THE ICONS OF ANONS SOMETIMES.
The way I was able to recognize several anons in one of my inboxes bc of this error. Oh my god. Guys. This isn’t supposed to happen.
Weighing in to say:
The profile pictures I see next to anon asks are profile pictures that belong to other, non-anon asks in my ask box also. Some info
Which is still a bad bug! Considering it makes it look like a long-time follower of mine sent me a spam ask.
And is worse if, say, one of these was anon hate.
But it's NOT the anon's real identity. It's a neighboring ask asker's identity
So if you have anon hate in your inbox that looks like it's attributed to your dear friend, who sends you lovely asks all the time, it was Not them.
Thanks @thepatchycat for being a test subject. As you can see the icon being attributed to this ask is NOT the patchy cat
The pictured icon belongs to @watchingforcomets who sent me a nice ask about nail polish yesterday which I have not yet answered!
(This post is brought to you by the fact that tumblr are, hilariously, claiming that 50% of current users are gen z, and i wanna see how accurate claim that is.)
Spotted or Tiger Quoll (Dasyurus maculatus), family Dasyuridae, order Dasyuromorphia, found in eastern Australia
Threatened.
photograph by Charles Davis
heart shaped forget-me-nots
OH babey!!!! YES!!! WOOHOO!!
Mini temp update: v16.23 (I'll make it v17 when I'm finally done) has some more fixes to it - search pages should now be functional and a bug or two was fixed. If you find any more bugs in this new version let me know below or with screenshots
This is not the final version, only the dashboard and search pages have been changed so far!!
💙💙💙
The thing about ADHD is that the "lack of reward chemicals in your brain" doesn't just mean that you don't want to do any tasks that don't feel particularly yummy :(, it means that your brain will look at chores and tasks that need to be done like "doing this would be painful and tedious for absolutely nothing to gain from it, Do Not Do That." The same thing that your brain tells you about everything else that would feel really bad and hurt the entire time that you're dying. The part of your brain that stops you from doing the thing is the same part that keeps you from shoving your arm into a wood chipper.
With unmedicated, unmanaged ADHD, "I have to do this assignment or I fail and my life will be ruined and I die" feels like a SAW trap, every single time.
Articles written by neurotypicals will be like “ADHD children find the external motivation of the SAW traps is very effective. Here’s how to build SAW traps to maximize their productivity.”
Genuine question: what would be the ADHD-haver recommendation for this? Other than medication, I mean.
As someone who has experience unmedicated ASMR for 30+years:
Medication.
No, seriously. Nothing works. Some strategies or tools may work for some time, while they are something new so your brain gives you some sweet sweet serotonin because of that. Then when they become routine and the serotonin kick goes away and that's it.
Actually, a few weeks ago my very-much-non-ADHD partner came up with THE BEST metaphor for this. ADHD has a very specific, very physical cause. Like myopia.
Medication for ADHD is the only thing that will make your brain produce the same chemicals non-ADHD people have by default. Everything else is just tricks to make your brain temporarily kick up the serotonin factory, but there is no way to make it permanent.
Trying to manage your ADHD without medication is like trying to manage your Myopia without glasses. Sure, you can try. Sometimes it may work. It absolutely won't work most of the time 🤷
It truly is that way. I’ve been medicated since I was about 7, because yes it was that bad, so much so that my mom sent 6 year old me to school with coffee in an attempt to create a similar effect (my teachers didn’t even let me drink it).
When I became an adult and had to remember to get my own meds, it became a nightmare. It’s a hideous feedback loop of forgetting and hating it and needing your meds to remember. During the shortages I’ve ended up off my meds for multiple months, and it’s straight up torture. It’s nothing but being trapped in my own head dealing with SAW trap after SAW trap. It’s hell. I’ve never been more suicidal in my life than I was dealing with my own brain minus the serotonin my meds wring out of it.
If you’ve got ADHD (or think you do) and you are not managing, I urge you to get thee to a doctor who can diagnose you and treat you. There really isn’t another way that will work long term. You don’t necessarily have to go on stimulants if that scares you - sometimes some antidepressants are enough to bump up your serotonin, some people use a blood pressure med called Wellbutrin, sometimes you can get by at very low doses. Theres options.
"In an unprecedented transformation of China’s arid landscapes, large-scale solar installations are turning barren deserts into unexpected havens of biodiversity, according to groundbreaking research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The study reveals that solar farms are not only generating clean energy but also catalyzing remarkable ecological restoration in some of the country’s most inhospitable regions.
The research, examining 40 photovoltaic (PV) plants across northern China’s deserts, found that vegetation cover increased by up to 74% in areas with solar installations, even in locations using only natural restoration measures. This unexpected environmental dividend comes as China cements its position as the global leader in solar energy, having added 106 gigawatts of new installations in 2022 alone.
“Artificial ecological measures in the PV plants can reduce environmental damage and promote the condition of fragile desert ecosystems,” says Dr. Benli Liu, lead researcher from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. “This yields both ecological and economic benefits.”
The economic implications are substantial. “We’re witnessing a paradigm shift in how we view desert solar installations,” says Professor Zhang Wei, environmental economist at Beijing Normal University. “Our cost-benefit analysis shows that while initial ecological construction costs average $1.5 million per square kilometer, the long-term environmental benefits outweigh these investments by a factor of six within just a decade.” ...
“Soil organic carbon content increased by 37.2% in areas under solar panels, and nitrogen levels rose by 24.8%,” reports Dr. Sarah Chen, soil scientist involved in the project. “These improvements are crucial indicators of ecosystem health and sustainability.”
...Climate data from the study sites reveals significant microclimate modifications:
The scale of China’s desert solar initiative is staggering. As of 2023, the country has installed over 350 gigawatts of solar capacity, with 30% located in desert regions. These installations cover approximately 6,000 square kilometers of desert terrain, an area larger than Delaware.
“The most surprising finding,” notes Dr. Wang Liu of the Desert Research Institute, “is the exponential increase in insect and bird species. We’ve documented a 312% increase in arthropod diversity and identified 27 new bird species nesting within the solar farms between 2020 and 2023.”
Dr. Yimeng Wang, the study’s lead author, emphasizes the broader implications: “This study provides evidence for evaluating the ecological benefit and planning of large-scale PV farms in deserts.”
The solar installations’ positive impact stems from several factors. The panels act as windbreaks, reducing erosion and creating microhabitats with lower evaporation rates. Perhaps most surprisingly, the routine maintenance of these facilities plays a crucial role in the ecosystem’s revival.
“The periodic cleaning of solar panels, occurring 7-8 times annually, creates consistent water drip lines beneath the panels,” explains Wang. “This inadvertent irrigation system promotes vegetation growth and the development of biological soil crusts, essential for soil stability.” ...
Recent economic analysis reveals broader benefits:
Dr. Maya Patel, visiting researcher from the International Renewable Energy Agency, emphasizes the global implications: “China’s desert solar model could be replicated in similar environments worldwide. The Sahara alone could theoretically host enough solar capacity to meet global electricity demand four times over while potentially greening up to 20% of the desert.”
The Chinese government has responded by implementing policies promoting “solar energy + sand control” and “solar energy + ecological restoration” initiatives. These efforts have shown promising results, with over 92% of PV plants constructed since 2017 incorporating at least one ecological construction mode.
Studies at facilities like the Qinghai Gonghe Photovoltaic Park demonstrate that areas under solar panels score significantly better in environmental assessments compared to surrounding regions, indicating positive effects on local microclimates.
As the world grapples with dual climate and biodiversity crises, China’s desert solar experiment offers a compelling model for sustainable development. The findings suggest that renewable energy infrastructure, when thoughtfully implemented, can serve as a catalyst for environmental regeneration, potentially transforming the world’s deserts from barren wastelands into productive, life-supporting ecosystems.
“This is no longer just about energy production,” concludes Dr. Liu. “We’re witnessing the birth of a new approach to ecosystem rehabilitation that could transform how we think about desert landscapes globally. The next decade will be crucial as we scale these solutions to meet both our climate and biodiversity goals.”"
-via Green Fingers, January 13, 2025
it wont let me do shit bc i apparently have 81 gigs of apps clogging my c drive, but my largest app is 0.4gb?????? its not system applications either because system is its own segment of storage. wadda hell are you talking about
guys i installed a program to show me exactly where the data is hidden and i think i found it and youre never gonna believe it
todd howard im fucking coming for you
"thank you random microsoft customer support agent" we all say in unison
Hannah Arendt, who fled Germany in 1933, later wrote that long before Jews, Roma, gays, Communists and others could be herded into death camps, they had to be “denationalized” — excluded from the society that guaranteed their legal rights. Enlightenment thinkers had posited that just by virtue of existing, each person has inalienable rights. Arendt, however, observed that the “right to have rights” could be guaranteed only by a political community. Without a state to claim them as their own, people have no laws, no courts and no political mechanisms for protecting rights.
Arendt once said that “the generally political became a personal fate when one emigrated.” As a stateless person, she experienced that loss of rights — unable to get papers, hiding from the police, interned as an enemy alien in France — before making it to the United States. She was lucky. Her friend Walter Benjamin committed suicide in his eighth year of exile, when the French authorities blocked him from crossing the border ahead of advancing German troops...
A country that has pushed one group out of its political community will eventually push out others. The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place...
The message, consistent and unrelenting, is that trans people are a threat to the nation. The subtext is that we are not of this nation...
The rights the Trump administration is taking away from trans people are relatively new. Only in the past few decades, for example, have clear legal procedures existed for changing the gender marker on identity documents, and only in the past few years have federal and some state authorities made the process fairly easy. But before transgender, gender-nonconforming and intersex people were recognized as a group — or groups — of people who had rights, many could blend in, fly below the radar. Now, in their new rightlessness, they are exposed...
Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. I was once detained in Russia after a routine road check because an officer thought I was a teenage boy using his mother’s driver’s license.
It’s not just American identity documents that are being scrambled. Like all things American, Trump’s denationalization campaign affects people far beyond the United States. In late February, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued visa guidelines, ostensibly designed to keep foreign trans athletes from competing in the United States, that seem to direct consular officers to deny entry to anyone whose gender markers appear different from their sex assigned at birth.
The new regulations require visitors, when filling out the paperwork to cross the border into the United States, to indicate the sex they were assigned at birth. Lucien Lambertz, a German curator who is trans and was planning a professional trip to the United States, told me they worried that they would be denied entry if they complied, indicating a birth sex different from the gender marker in their passport, but also if they didn’t comply.
Lambertz emailed the Foreign Ministry in their country to ask for guidance. “The issue is the subject of tense discussions here at the ministry, and your concerns are absolutely understandable,” the response read, in part. Ordinarily, the Foreign Ministry would suggest asking the U.S. Embassy, but by doing so, as the letter noted, Lambertz “would then ‘out’ yourself to them.”
Trans and nonbinary Germans fear that their country’s incoming conservative government may take its cues from the Trump administration. Far-right parties, ascendant in Germany and other European countries, have made the specter of “gender ideology” a centerpiece of their politics.
“Something has changed,” Heinrich Horwitz, a German choreographer, told me. Horwitz, who is nonbinary, was recently assaulted at the main train station in Vienna. The attacker was demanding to know whether Horwitz was “a girl or a boy.” Before they could make out what the attacker was saying, Horwitz instinctively tucked the Star of David they wear around their neck inside their shirt. “I thought that would be safer.” Horwitz, who was born in Munich in 1984, is the child of a Holocaust survivor. “I grew up with this idea that I could always go to the U.S. if the Nazis came back,” they told me. That no longer seems like an option.
You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population, the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights, the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. (Trump spent about five minutes of his recent address to Congress specifically attacking trans people and 10 minutes attacking immigrants; the Democratic rebuttal mentioned immigrants once and trans people not at all.) Then I finish with the standard exhortation: The attacks won’t stop here. If you don’t stand up for trans people or immigrants, there won’t be anyone left when they come for you.
But I find that line of argument both distasteful and disingenuous. It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say this:
i think i was born to be a tour guide for a whale watching program for the explicit reason that i dont particularly give a shit about whales that much. like theyre neat and beautiful and great creatures but most of the time when you go whale watching youre never watching a whale. this is where i come in to infodump at you about various seagulls, petrels, perhaps even an albatross, or point out the various jellyfish floating just beneath the surface and pontificate about the wondrous nature of the life cycle of a cnidarian. i think every whale watching tour would be incredibly successful if they had someone on the crew who went to smoke a cigarette when a whale showed up and then when they werent showing up appeared to gush at you about pelagic loons.
Ok, I now need to go whale watching with you.
take my hand and i shall show you a world of beauty to be found in the most insignificant looking grey birds you could possibly imagine
behold! a pirate. these dumb bastards will steal fish out of a seagull's idiot mouth because why bother catching your own fish when there's a perfectly good idiot who's slower and less aerially graceful than you
Madison Brown for Selkie
ok like kakapo are great and all, i love them dont get me wrong but takahē are by far the best endangered new zealand bird and quite possibly THE Best Bird?
you cant really get any better than this. criminally underrated
Even better, we thought it was extinct for 50 years, and then we just found a whole bunch in a meadow. We lost a bright purple flightless bird the size of a large chicken for 50 years.
They look like globes. World birbs
