*tilting the camera around my wol, who is doing absolutely nothing of note and staring blankly ahead* omggg babyyyyyy you're so perfect I love you sooo muuuuuuch 🥺🥺🥺💞💓💖💝💕

Being a ranger I spend a lot of time alone in the wilderness for hours in the company of one of four co workers.

One such worker for the purpose of this post we shall refer to as Dave.

Dave is a very quiet man. He confesses that if conversation happens too quickly and for too long he gets tired so we often work in silence. He's very polite and good natured but it's obvious that he would happily live and work alone for the rest of his life given the option.

He's very much in the previous generation of ranger, a practical man in his fourties or fifties happy to be kept physically busy for a day and then be sent home with some pay. I had to show him how to use a work issued smart phone.

Meanwhile the rest of the team is made up of the current generation of rangers; openly nurodivergent queer women in their twenties or thirties who work this job because it's the only setting where we can vaguely look sane.

So Dave sticks out a bit. It's really nice when he opens up though because he's an impulsive individual when left to his own devices and has plenty of stories to tell if the mood takes him. I really like working with Dave.

Anyway, one day we've got a job that takes a three hour hike to get to and early on the topic of deer comes up.

I hadn't realised this was the first time we had discussed deer, but blatantly it was. Dave's entire demeanour changes, there's a bit of passion in his voice, but it's also hushed as if he's talking about something sacred.

"Deer are my favourite animal." He says.

I'm also eager to hear Dave talk about himself, so I encourage him to say more.

"I'd love to be a deer myself."

And more

"If a genie offered me the opportunity to become a deer I'd take it. I wouldn't even stop to ask what the price was."

And more

"Sometimes I feel like I'm a deer having a dream about being a human.*

And there I am, a long time commuter to the therian/otherkin community keeping up the encouraging face of someone being politely interested, knowing that this man is straight up a therian with no frame of reference.

And I decided that I wouldn't push the subject outside of the bounds of what Dave is comfortable with, I wouldn't try to teach him the terms "Therian" or "Otherkin" but absolutely I would talk with this man as if he's a deer.

And it's a bit magical really. He's an impulsive individual so I have to talk him out of some risky choices every so often and "this is why deer like you keep getting stuck in fences" has become this magical phrase that allows him to step down from a mistake with a bit of a smile on his face.

stop letting me say whatever i want

The more I read into reports about industrial and transportation accidents the less I feel like “operator error” actually exists

Ok so “doesn’t exist” may be a slight overstatement. A better way of phrasing it might be “operator error is often used as a way of warding off close examination of how systems fail.”

You read about airlines accidents attributed to pilot error, and almost universally you find overworked, overtired people who have to deal with inadequate training, and poorly maintained equipment. Often investigations uncover a pattern of management ignoring problems that pilots regularly have to deal with. Out-of-date terrain data, false sensor readings, confusing systems presentation, fatigue.

The cargo airline industry fights to keep its pilots exempt from crew rest requirements and a fatigued crew crashes a mile short of the runway. Only the two crew on board die, so really it’s no big deal, right?

Amtrak builds a new bypass to cut 10 minutes off the travel time from Portland to Seattle but doesn’t give the engineers enough training to prepare them for it, nor installs adequate signage to warn of a 30mph curve, so on the inaugural run the engineer hits the curve at 80 mph.

Construction on a nuclear power plant runs into trouble and so to make a key pressure-bearing component fit, they install an S-bend around a pipe, which causes falsely water level readings. Operators open a valve to reduce what they think is excessively high pressure in the reactor and it melts down.

And all of these get simplified, either initially, or in perpetuity, as operator error. Because operators are cheap and easy to replace. Firing someone and laying the blame on them is cheaper than reassessing and restructuring a management culture built on passing the buck.

This is an extremely valuable addition thank you selky ❤️

related pet peeve as someone who used to work on industrial machinery: blaming the technique of the person that fabricated it, specifically (nine times out of ten) blaming the welder. Plane crashes, structural failures, car accidents, pressure vessel explosions, nuclear incidents, and even the loss of entire ships and submarines have all been blamed on "bad welds" (i.e. poor welding technique, or welds not conforming to the print) when that's simply a bad way to look at it; it's finding one worker to blame and then not doing anything to fix the problem. In critical applications, there should simply never be a situation where a bad weld causes a catastrophic failure, for three reasons:

so if that's the case, if there are supposed to be reduncancies, why do welders keep taking the blame?

a) Welds are most often made by human welders, especially in critical applications like nuclear reactors, aerospace parts, pipelines, bridges and buildings, and repair/retrofitting of existing parts (e.g. automotive repair, though mostly not auto fab anymore) where the use of robots is unfeasible. this means that all the above issues re: "operator error" apply. There's a human being you can pass the buck to and say "he did it."

b) Welds (or, more often, the surrounding HAZ) are almost invariably the point of failure when a welded part is subjected to extreme stress. If you find your big important contraption (plane, boat, bridge, nuclear reactor, whatever) in pieces and it's cracked along the welds, the welder is going to logically be the person you blame. Not the engineer (or lack thereof), not the QC department (or lack thereof), not the boss that didn't provide adequate time, materials, or conditions to make a cleaner joint, not the fitter who left a huge gap in the fitup nor the project manager who didn't budget for redoing mis-cut parts, not the malfunctioning machine with dodgy voltage controls that the shop refuses to replace because "it still works," not the foreman who was rushing the workers to reduce the amount of billable time spent on each task so that his team metrics would look better - when you see a part fail, it's easiest to blame the person who physically made it, so that's who gets blamed.

Looking for someone to blame is never a good way to deal with the results of a whole system going wrong, because you will definitely just be pointing fingers at the last guy to touch it.

I highly recommend reading There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer, it’s all about this. When a negative outcome happens consistently and can be predicted, that’s not an accident or user error, that’s a failure in safety measures, policy, and engineering, most often done for the sake of profit.

Yuka Orihara/Juho Pirinen (FIN)

"Bowl of Water with Night Sky" 2023 oil painting by David Stanger

i don't even know where to start, already tired of trying to recall when it all fell apart.

another repaint of an old artwork.

Look at my good cows

This was my first time using illustrator :) and I gotta say it was weirdly satisfying ? In a I’ve been drawing with a mouse for 6 hours my eyes are bleeding out why is this line having a life of it’s own but look at those perfect curves and angles kinda way 

A caveat to this study: the researchers were primarily looking at insect pollinator biodiversity. Planting a few native wildflowers in your garden will not suddenly cause unusual megafauna from the surrounding hinterlands to crowd onto your porch.

That being said, this study backs up Douglas Tallamy's optimistic vision of Homegrown National Park, which calls for people in communities of all sizes to dedicate some of their yard (or porch or balcony) to native plants. This creates a patchwork of microhabitats that can support more mobile insect life and other small beings, which is particularly crucial in areas where habitat fragmentation is severe. This patchwork can create migration corridors, at least for smaller, very mobile species, between larger areas of habitat that were previously cut off from each other.

It may not seem like much to have a few pots of native flowers on your tiny little balcony compared to someone who can rewild acres of land, but it makes more of a difference than you may realize. You may just be creating a place where a pollinating insect flying by can get some nectar, or lay her eggs. Moreover, by planting native species you're showing your neighbors these plants can be just as beautiful as non-native ornamentals, and they may follow suit.

In a time when habitat loss is the single biggest cause of species endangerment and extinction, every bit of native habitat restored makes a difference.

shoutout to the guy who ran for "class president" (not a real role at this school) in 7th grade and just put up posters everywhere about how he would bring steam powered rail back. no other policy. hope you're doing well.

hope? clunky. unreliable. gossamer. the moron's emotion. throw out that old garbage, and check out the next big thing: grim resignation to the task at hand. no hope? no problem! grim resignation. someone has to do the awful, filthy work—and with grim resignation, that someone can be you!

oof. this one's doing a little too well with y'all.

dead dove do not eat in practice

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