that's the way it crumbles, cookie-wise 🍪

Happy National Library Week!! A great time to ask everyone you know if they have a library card.

They're also gutting the Post Office, National Parks, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and dozens of other services people rely on.

Notably, these are also the institutions that, from a capitalist perspective, don't really make money.

Which is why our government shouldn't be run like a business. I shouldn't have justify the expense of making sure people can read, because the value of that is self-evident as soon as you stop trying to view a dollar value attached to it. I don't care that having trees doesn't make a profit, because that's not what they're for.

quilt with oak leaf pattern c. 1860.

I have rode the High Speed Trains in Europe.

Once you've experienced them, you will understand the hype. They are also very comfortable and very scenic.

You can go from Amsterdam to Paris in about 3 hours. This would be like going from Mississauga to Ottawa in 3 hours instead of almost 5.

I think "comfortable and scenic" is accurate, but undersells it.

Being in high speed rail is far more comfortable than a plane. The seats are good, the ride is very smooth (no turbulence! no take off and landing! none of anything like that!), and you can get up to find the restroom whenever you want, no seatbelt sign or any of that.

It is so much faster than many other forms of transport not just because of its own speed, but because train stations can be centrally located and easy to get to (unlike most airports), and don't have the excess security theatre of airports that slows down the process. So the entire experience feels quicker and easier from start to finish.

trains are better for the environment by a huge margin than flight and than driving as well. and the scenic element is indeed much nicer -- you get to watch the landscape go by and change, without the stress of driving.

trains are incredibly efficient at moving large volumes of people. there's a reason that much of europe and asia has invested in them, and a reason that we had railroads across north america until the truck and car lobbies essentially ruined investment in this mode of transport.

I'm doing my part!!

I feel like it really adds something to know that this coffee shop was right next to the state capitol building. There is a non-zero chance one of these lattes ended up in the senate chamber.

Congratulations, you've unlocked the secret nerd bonus! I actually ended up texting a friend who specializes in the early Roman empire for advice on designing this special.

Honey and almond are pretty self-explanatory, as honey and nuts both figured heavily in Roman desserts. Cinnamon, meanwhile, means dead rich guy. It was insanely expensive to obtain, and the wealthiest of Romans used it to scent funeral pyres, so that the smell of burning cinnamon would cover the scent of cremation.

I always like to double check screenshots, especially ones that don't have dates. I'm very pleased to say this is both recent (about a week ago as of 3/8/25) and legit!

Imagine having been born in 1905... And all your life it doesn't fucking stop. The Great War, the Spanish Flu, and then you go out of your mind for 7 years. Everyone is traumatised and nothing matters. Then another crash. And then the rise of fascism, and the War to end all Wars didn't and it's 1945 and you're just about still there. You may have fought or ferried the boys from Dunkirk or sabotaged the Nazi occupiers or worked in the factories and put out fires during the Blitz and you're lucky to be alive, because not all your friends made it. But you are and finally, fucking finally, it stops. It stops. You are tough as nails and you can put that strength to work into building something and you do, and people have cars and can buy icecream and you have a pension fund and the kids have money of their own and no nightmares.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

And maybe Gen beta will take it all for granted like the boomers did, but we can give Gen Z and Alpha some peace because we, and Gen Z and Alpha have seen the Dark Times and fuck that noise.

At the start of the Pandemic, my spouse’s grandmother was in an assisted-living home, and of course they were severely locked down, because with no vaccination available and we don’t really know how it spreads and no tests and anyone over 80 is deffo gonna die…. They couldn’t take the risks. So they weren’t even allowed to leave their rooms. Staff brought meals and left them outside the door, and they left dishes outside, and that was just their life for the foreseeable future.

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

And it was just… a really helpful perspective to get. You can survive it, you can become strong enough to live to 103 despite everything, you can become a source of strength and joy for everyone around you.

René Descartes (1596–1650)

Descartes was a late riser. The French philosopher liked to sleep until mid-morning, then linger in bed, thinking and writing, until 11:00 or so. His comfortable bachelor’s life ended abruptly in late 1649, , Descartes accepted a position in the court of Queen Christina of Sweden.

Arriving in Sweden, in time for one of the coldest winters in memory, Descartes was notified that his lessons to Queen Christina would take place in the mornings—beginning at 5:00 A.M. He had no choice but to obey. But the early hours and bitter cold were too much for him. After only a month on the new schedule, Descartes fell ill, apparently of pneumonia; ten days later he was dead.

- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

“Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum.” (English: "I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am") ― Rene Descartes 

#dailyrituals #inktober #reneDescartes @masoncurrey

Guys, queers. Specifically my fellow queers.

I work at a library. We do this thing where, every so often, we weed the collection. It hurts to see books go, but it's necessary to make sure there's room in the library for new materials.

I have seen so much support for the library in text, and I've seen folks pass around those beautiful "queer your library" flyers. Keep doing that. That's great. Nothing wrong with that. But you HAVE to turn your words into action. We MUST remember to actually go to our local organizations and libraries and actually, with our own fucking hands, interact with these materials we want to see more of.

My branch is medium-sized for a library, maybe a little small. We don't have as many materials as I'd like, but we have fundamentals. Tell me why, even with all the verbal support I've gotten from my local community for the library as a resource for our LGBT+ community, every single trans biography and a good chunk of our vaguely queer theory books were on the list. This isn't a scheme to take the books off the shelves, it isn't another bigoted American governmental push. The only thing we look at when we weed is how long it's been since the last time the item was checked out.

Three years.

No one in my community interacted in any meaningful way with the few books on trans life and history we physically had on the shelves for three fucking years.

I promise you the materials you want and need are there, but this isn't a horde. This isn't a static safety net. You have to use them. You MUST use them or, in the future, maybe in three years, they *won't* be there anymore.

This isn't a vague post, there's no one person I'm hinting at or calling out. I'm not even talking directly to anyone who's directly in my line of sight. I just want everyone to hear this. Big library, small library, whatever. Doesn't matter. Please, we cannot be losing our shelf visibility like this.

My library has a shorter "no checkout" span but we do have a bit of leeway as we are trying to build out our diverse collections. This is all generally true though! If it doesn't get checked out eventually it will be weeded!

I’d have to have a very good reason to keep a book that wasn’t checked out at all in the past year, let alone the last 3 years

French senator Claude Malhuret sums up the world made by the current American administration, 5 March 2025

I don't normally post political but guys, this stuff is important

May he plow the Lord’s fields in heaven

Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

I know I've said it before, but--that first point, there, about the "A" profile of his soil? Every time I think of it, I am taken aback with genuine awe.

So this is a picture of the soil horizons. The O profile/O horizon is stuff like fallen leaves, sticks, and so on, which are biodegrading into the A profile. A fair amount of soils might have no O profile at all.

If you are a gardener, the A profile is what you're concerned with most of the time; it's what we also call "topsoil." Your seeds germinate into it, and shallower plants might root into it alone without ever reaching the B profile. Worms and other small delvers live in it. It's what you're amending, what you're testing, what you're tilling, what you're trying to fill up with good microorganisms to work with your plants and provide you with food or flowers or cover.

I see this quote around sometimes, attributed to radioman Paul Harvey: Man — despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments — owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.

Without the topsoil, bluntly, we starve. And there are other problems, in places with a lack of it; without the topsoil, when the rains come, the water strikes hard soil. Hard soil doesn't accept water easily, so instead it pools and runs downhill. That action makes flooding, makes flash floods, makes standing water that carries disease, it contaminates the water table. Cholera is a huge problem in places with a low A profile that receive too much water at once.

We are seeing topsoil depletion across the US. I can't speak for other countries, but the heavy-tilling agricultural habits we've adopted here have obliterated inch after inch of our topsoil; in the 1800s the average depth was fourteen inches! Today it is six. Many suburban lawns have even less. This has knock-on effects we don't even consider on the day-to-day (for instance, there's some suggestion that the lower amounts of various minerals in vegetables and fruits today in comparison with earlier decades might be because of the lower amount of minerals in the soil for the plants to take up into themselves).

And this gentleman took soil that had been that abused and not only returned it to what it had been before the aggressive, destructive European agricultural policy had its way, but trebled that earlier depth.

His land protects the land around it from flooding. His land grows plants less susceptible to disease, because of all the various stressors and pressures those plants aren't confronted with. His land almost certainly has a considerably higher concentration of microorganisms and it would follow that we'd also see greater diversity of macroorganisms thereby.

Honestly, it just takes my breath away.

x

[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

Smithsonian Archives Transcription Center