Sustaining a garden required me to get very comfortable with killing plants. I did not expect that going in - if any one warned me, I missed it.

And it's not just the weeds that are constantly intruding and need to be fought back. Sometimes it's the plant that the previous person placed precisely in that portion of the plot that gets the good sunlight and it's just the wrong plant to be taking that space. Sometimes it's the plant that was the right plant but was let grow so wild that it's suckers are going to destroy the rest of the garden unless it is removed. Often it's the many seedlings that were started because, hey, some of them will fail, but now you've gotten good enough that twice as many survived as last year and you don't have room for twice as many.

Plants grow. It's great and rewarding to watch them live out their cycle over the course of a season or years. I work hard to keep them alive and thriving when they're young and not yet established. But there's still so much killing.

listen man, u wanna know a great truth of the universe?

every plant person stands upon a mountain of plant corpses

i have killed endless plants, and once i've mastered one type i inevitably will kill a new type because so many plants have so many different requirements

y'all have no idea how true this is

I am a plant mass murderer

You have to try, and fail, and fail, and fail again. You have to try lots and lots of variations of different things until something works.

It's not even just the learning process, though. I'm trapped in an endless loop of: plant seeds or gather transplants-> plants grow-> too many plants-> some of them die of neglect-> need more plants -> and so on.

I usually lose about half my stock to overwintering cause I can never get arrangements for all my potted plants before the hard freezes hit...

I'm getting it under control though. I have lots of plant recipients now that are more skilled and don't kill my adoptees as much.

Right now my trouble is with the seeds. I launched a huge personal seed starting project this winter and I got HUGE success with some species (jack-in-the-pulpit had near 100% germination!) and huge failure with others (Not a single Scutellaria...)

If you plant 100 seeds you gathered from the wild, it's a reasonable estimate to expect maybe, like, 10-20 plants. BUT you might get 100 plants. Or 1 plant. Or none.

You don't want to be like "Dammit! I wish I had planted more seeds!" But you might end up like "FUCK FUCK FUCK WHY DID I PLANT SO MANY SEEDS"

Oh yeah and the eternal situation of setting out to grow an equal amount of several different species you want to work with this year, but with 1 species you have insane success way overshooting your expectations and with the others you have hardly anything

so you show up to the pollinator garden meeting like "hi here are 50 american bellflowers! and this is Dave. he is a coreopsis. probably"

Digging up a random fern or something before the meeting to round out the selection might make you feel a little less weird about it, but still.

Showing the cis women who make fics about skinny hairless bottom trans men a trans bear with a strap so they get heart attacks

Showing the cis women who make fics about skinny hairless bottom trans men the wiki page for phallo so they get heart attacks

Kinky aroallos and polyam aros are cool and based btw. There is no one “correct” way to have sex. With or without romance, vanilla or kinky, with one partner or multiple — all of these are perfectly normal and beautiful expressions of sexuality! Aromantic liberation requires not only that we dismantle the notion that sex is shameful, but also that we dismantle the notion that there’s only one correct way to enjoy sex.

this company is so frustratingly misleading. They did not bring back the direwolf (Aenocyon dirus). They modified a modern grey wolf (Canis lupus) into having some direwolf morphology. There has been no de-extinction. This is pure hype slop. As a friend said "these are dire wolves the same way La Croix is a fruit".

I still think this tech has the potential to be helpful in a conservation context.... but it says a A LOT that these "dire wolves" look far more like something you'd see in Game of Thrones than any of the most likely reconstructions proposed by scientists who've studied the fossil record.

These pups might get more robust as they age, but right now I'm not seeing anything to get excited about. I just can't help but suspect that this species was chosen specifically bc the public already has the idea of "dire wolf = gray wolf + big", and that this company is using relatively minor CRISPR editing to give the false impression that they're recreating anything that might have conceivably lived 10,000 years ago.

Again, I think this tech is interesting and merits further development (and if jurassic park is the only way they can do that, then, I guess that's what's happening), but it's still extremely misleading to parade these animals around like they've actually 100% cloned a dire wolf.

Really reminds me of Jurassic Park. In the books, Crichton made it very clear that they didn't actually clone dinosaurs. They just combined DNA to make an animal that looked like what people EXPECT a dinosaur to look like, because it turned out that actual cloned dinosaurs were really quite dull and spent most of their time hiding.

Aencyon dirus isn't closely related to modern wolves at all either so it doesn't make any sense to start with a gray wolf. (According to wikipedia they were isolated from the gray wolf lineage for over 5 million years.) we thought they were in genus Canis but turns out it was just convergent evolution and they are a whole other thing

now that I actually read the article, I realize that the lede was buried-- they genetically modified this wolf, and they also cloned 4 critically endangered red wolves

I think the TIME article is really irresponsible in acting like the pups are dire wolves when they don't contain any dire wolf DNA. The "dire wolf" pups are literally just gray wolve engineered to look more like the creatures on Game of Thrones (literally--one of the pups is named Khaleesi)

I remain cautiously optimistic though, because it seems like they are doing actually useful research for preserving existing animals and then putting a Jurassic Park type spin on it for the media.

The Dire wolf thing honestly might just be an attention-grabber to get money off of people that know nothing about ecosystems, and the red wolf might be the actual real purpose of the research. If they've figured out the genetic basis of body size and certain "wolfy" behaviors in wolves, they could make it possible to bring coyote-red wolf hybrids into the red wolf breeding pool without sacrificing the wolf traits

Y'all, just think about guys like Elon Musk. Rich tech bros with a 5 yr old boy's idea of what is cool. This stuff is perfectly calibrated to siphon off some of those techbro's billions, while on the side, being helpful to conservation

Just look at the traits of the altered pups that are highlighted in the article: snout, jaw and limb thickness and heaviness, vocalizations, body size. All key traits that separate red wolves and coyotes.

Here's what the article says:

They're using this technology to bring genetic diversity from red wolf/coyote hybrids back into the red wolf gene pool. As soon as I read "red wolves" I suspected this might be what was happening, and I was right. This could help fix the genetic bottleneck in red wolves and make a real chance for the species to actually return.

this approach is honestly genius

It's like those researchers who have made huge strides in lake ecology with funding they get by "searching for the Loch Ness Monster"

yup exactly

just a quick search of this Bridgett vonHoldt demonstrates that she is a BIG DEAL in the world of canine evolution and genomics. she's worked on groundbreaking publications that have hundreds of citations in some of the most renowned scientific journals. She's the real deal.

whether Colossal is serious and knowledgeable or not, they're working with people who are.

There's a lot of furious people in the notes who clearly did not read the article because they are yelling "THEY COULD BE USING THIS TECHNOLOGY TO SAVE CRITICALLY ENDANGERED RED WOLVES"

Well you see, that's exactly what they're doing

I'm not happy with the confusion caused by calling the modified gray wolf a dire wolf, it further obscures what dire wolves actually were with Game of thrones pop culture bullshit. But I think that it's a solid strategy for sucking up the money of rich idiots who wouldnt otherwise care about animals

I heard through the grapevine that something was going on with Tumblr and people should start backing up their blogs. Does anyone know what's going on this time? I've been away, so once I heard of this, I decided to check back in.

Meta is big mad about Tumblr and everyone who thought Tumblr was dead are shocked to find out Gen Z is using it and since Gen Z is who they're targeting to promote their stuff, Tumblr might start to suffer from the crap-ification that's been affecting all other social media because they're about to start financially fighting for it because Gen Z is their target audience so you can potentially expect more bots and a shittier Tumblr experience as they start to hide the normal stuff behind a paywall.

They have their own taste

in case i don't see ya, good afternoon, good evening, and good night!

ermmm do you guys like steven universe

why is this post completely broken in every way imaginable

Broken notes… deactivated account… removed image….

Finally, we have them all.

In addition: OP’s name is just… gone. No “[insert username]-deactivated[insert a bunch of numbers]” as is the standard for deactivated blogs.

Just the world “deactivated.” Look upon their post, ye mighty, and despair.

It’ll be almost impossible to find this post unless it wanders across your dash.

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

Broken Post Detected!

damn i feel privileged to have run into this

Why does your dad sound like a fae tempting you with forbidden fruit knowing that if you eat some you’ll be trapped in the fae realm

Well, you know, some bathroom graffiti offers insight.

Red marker handwriting on a bathroom wall. Text reads:

“Boss made a dollar Granddad made a dime But that was a poem From a simpler time.

Boss made a thousand Gave pa a cent But that penny paid the mortgage Or at least it paid the rent

Now Boss makes a million And gives us jack Smugly blames the workers For the labor that he lacks.”