GOLDFISH TEETH

Another complaint we get is that when we plant trees, we only plant small trees which isn't equivalent to the ones we chop down. And it's like... the trees are small because they're younger. I promise if you go to the older parts of town you'll see that they do not stay small.

Do they... do they not realize that trees grow? That the act of them growing is what makes them establish root systems that prevent erosion? That them growing is what enables them to absorb carbon dioxide? The growing is what makes them useful!!! And as a fun bonus- young, healthy trees are far less likely to drop a branch on your head!

There's a lot of work that goes into these kinds of evaluations that I don't think people really understand. Like there's a lot of older trees in our uptown area and we love them very much, but they present a hazard to the man-made structures because they were planted with limited knowledge of how to keep them healthy while sharing space with brick.

Tree boss explained it to me once that the older trees have a black mold problem because they just kinda planted them. Because of this, they're root bound. Root bound trees get mold and rot. Sure enough- a big storm happened this summer and one of those trees that looked healthy on the outside came down, hit the roof of city hall, and you could see the decay inside.

There is a way to plant trees near streets and businesses so that the roots run under the structures and I think that he called it a 'root shelf.' But the people who planted those trees didn't have that knowledge, so we try to replace them with proper techniques when we have the opportunity.

But unfortunately, in order to do it properly for the health of the trees and the structures, we have to plant a sapling instead of an adult tree.

A lot of the time, I hear people talking about 'old growth trees' and how they can't stand to see us cutting them down. But the majority of these trees aren't old growth- they're maybe 50-75 years old and weren't planted with the future in mind. So sometimes we cut down an older tree that looks 'fine' from the outside, but the soil sucks or there's an infestation or the storm damage is worse than it looks from the outside.

I once saw Tree Boss just... push an adult tree down by leaning on it and the inside was fuckin' paper.

And its like... welcome to City Planning: where we fix the problems made 50 years ago by people who meant well.

images of foxes with things in their mouths...

— Catherine Price, from How to Break Up with Your Phone

nothing funnier to me than when AI does math wrong. like I get why it happens, it's a language model that's treating the numbers you feed it as words rather than integers and then giving you an answer based on how those words typically appear in a block of text instead of actually performing a calculation. but the one thing computers are genuinely incredible at. you fucked up a perfectly good calculator is what you did, look at it it's got hallucinations

It's alive

Digimon Evolution Lines 103/∞

Frilled Cutter! Elizamon and its path to Ultimate-level is revealed in Digimon Liberator. Elizamon (Virus-attributed) evolves into the Ultimate-level Medusamon with its partner Owen Dreadnought in the comic.

Artwork by Sanosuke Sakuma from the Digimon Card Game (Jyarimon/Gigimon) (recoloured by myself) and the Digimon Reference Book.

if she has no ass, focus on what she'll always still have

...AT THEE!

I did the meme :)

Every single darkstalker really could be a digimon with no design changes

Leaked scene from Alecto the Ninth

Circle avatars were a mistake

Yeah. Who even has an avatar that makes sense in a circle? It's just a waste of space!

screenshot to maintain the punchline since it's still going around

You can survive almost anything through the right combination of:

OP talking to her boyfriend like she's in a shortform video drama

Translation request by @myhamartiaishubris.

English added by me :)

I know most people don't care about anything unless it has to do with the U.S. but can we please start talking about the Canadian election.

Please don't vote for Poilievre. He's basically the Canadian Trump and plans to put in place laws that harm trans youth, and lots of other shit.

Please vote istg this is the only way anything will get better. Poilievre has been kissing millionaires and billionaires asses. He'll make life even harder, and he loves Trump.

Reblogs are appreciated, especially if you aren't Canadian.

that "most fanfiction that gets published as a novel is bad because it's always the weirdest people writing it" post is so fascinating in the way it very clearly eschews any traditional definitions of words to simply use 'normal' as shorthand for 'good' and 'weird' as shorthand for 'bad'

like. i think boring heterosexual women writing boring heterosexual romance novels with standard tropes is extremely 'normal' actually by any meaningful definition of the word. it is literally one of the most conventional, mainstream forms of publishing that exists. there's nothing 'weird' about it, or the people doing it, by any societal standard. what they mean to say is that those books and fanfictions are bad. (which, for what it's worth, i agree - they largely are bad.)

it invokes 'normality' as a moral framework while completely detaching it from its descriptive meaning. it's using these terms as pure value judgments to disguise what's essentially just taste-based criticism.

so the real subtext is about 'weird' secretly meaning 'people I don't respect' rather than anything related to statistical prevalence or social conformity.

what's most revealing about this rhetoric is how it elevates social conformity to a moral imperative without explicitly defending that position. in this case with the post, 'normality' means goodness creatively and in other contexts 'normality' gets used to mean goodness morally.

e.g there are a lot of posts that follow the general pattern of "are you normal about [xyz]". like "sure you say you support neurodivergent people but are you normal about autistic people who stim loudly in public. you say you support trans rights but are you normal about trans people who don't pass. you say you're a feminist but are you normal about fat women" etc etc etc. it's a common type of post; i've certainly shared similar posts before, but it's interesting, right, because ableism, transphobia, fatphobia are in fact exceedingly 'normal'. obviously everyone knows what is meant when someone says 'are you normal about [xyz]'; i'm not trying to be all 'um actually', about it, but it is very interesting that 'are you normal' gets used to mean, literally, 'are you moral'. much like how 'weird' and 'untalented' are used synonymously in the above post, 'weird' and 'immoral' become synonymous in this other context.

the sleight of hand here is in presenting 'normality' as a natural, obvious basis for determining both moral worth and artistic quality. people get to invoke the spectre of 'weirdness' as inherently problematic without ever having to defend why social conformity should be valued in the first place. when they say boring tropey published romance novels are written by 'weird' people (when by any meaningful definition of the word, they're not and in fact the best writers are usually freaks. stop insulting freaks' good name by comparing them to love hypothesis slop!!), they're reinforcing the unexamined premise that 'normality' is the proper standard for judging both people and their creative work.

it reinforces the idea that normality itself is inherently desirable, that deviation from social norms is inherently suspect, and it does this without ever having to openly argue for conformity as a value, because it presents that connection as self-evident.

in the figure of “just a little guy, just a little birthday boy” is the image of 21st century ethics. everyone is constantly trying to like position themselves as uniquely non-agentic, to defer or deny what power they have or can have over others, to self-absolve by adopting an affect of ignorance or victimhood or perpetual adolescence that can be transmuted into moral righteousness

Every professional comic writer should have the same encyclopedic knowledge about their protagonist as my mutuals and I do. It’s really not that hard. All it takes is a 500 issue reading list and a dream.