so so sad to me that when karkat acts as if hes doing gamzee a favor by being her moirail... the readerbase just agrees with him. you guys think hes right? about anything? ever?
yes ardata is “evil” yes i want all three of them to be stuck with each other in an increasingly absurd, sitcom-esque scenario.
I snuck hunter/titan/warlock symbols into cirava, marsti and ardata’s poster illustrations (respectively) but being honest cirava and ardata should switch. the hunter symbol just looked better on their shoe.
Zhen psycholonials constantly dodges questions about what their ideas are or how they work, in the same way they obfuscate/misdirect/minimize in other situations where they feel vulnerable (as does hussie irl as we discovered last year.) This aversion to ideology is what the kankri stuff was about imo, and it’s also consistent with what we’ve seen from hussie as an author (and from other graduates of the 2000s online.)
You may think “well isn’t this the revolution game.” But all of zhen’s loudest outbursts directly follow conflicts with abby, they are outlets for the personal before they are ideological (much like the entire game, is my point.)
I guess this is saying we have some evidence we shouldn’t read for intentionality. It’s not that ideology doesn’t exist here, but it’s underdeveloped. His characters live in worlds where inaction is excusable because there are no problems that can be solved, so the best thing you can do is live your life. Very American! I don’t know that it’s a real send-up of the problem more than it is the story of having that world-view & struggling to justify it.
And this sounds critical and it is. But it has some value as a look into how privilege can be callousing, here beyond the end of history. Maybe.
Reading many many articles on jstor about mycorrhizal symbiosis and I have discovered a pattern that makes me want to run around and scream and throw things and bite things because There Is Something Here but the individual researchers don't appear to have Connected the Dots and uhh. And uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. hhhhhh
Researchers: We know that most plant species form mutualistic mycorrhizal associations, but sometimes the association actually is harmful to the plant and we don't know exactly why but we think that soil fertility has an impact.
Also, there's a small subset of plants spread across many families that actively resist colonization by mycorrhizal fungi. What is up with those guys? And sometimes mycorrhizal fungi appear to become parasites of otherwise "non-mycorrhizal" plants. Or are they parasites? Is there a spectrum of "parasite" to "mutualist partner," or is one partner making an "investment" that will later be "paid back" by the other, or what?
Me, looking up the species being studied with increasing wonder and disbelief: Oh my god. Succession. It's succession.
I noticed something first in a study that noted the wide discrepancies between studies on the effects of mycorrhizal associations in the same species.
Buckhorn plantain was shown in two studies to benefit greatly from mycorrhizal symbiosis, but in two other studies, it was shown to be detrimental. The writers that pointed this out thought that this was explained by the soil fertility differences in the studies—the fungus helped in poor soil, but in fertile soil, it hurt the plants.
Now here's the fascinating part: Buckhorn plantain is a very common "weed" species. It grows in very hostile environments and is often among the first plants to take hold in a barren, compacted clay soil.
So I looked up a list of the common non-mycorrhizal plants and was staring like O_O at my computer because, (excluding parasitic plants and weird epiphytes with no roots etc), the list was dominated by genus names I recognized: Amaranthus, Phytolacca...
WEEDS! They're weeds! Or what we casually consider to be weeds. They're typically ruderal species, that thrive in disturbed areas. They're the first phase of secondary succession.
So I kept looking at more studies, and I found one soon that examined Amaranthus retroflexus, or redroot pigweed. That one is considered probably the worst agricultural weed in my area. It will easily form a totally homogeneous mass in a newly tilled garden patch. It completely takes over every patch of newly turned soil in our yard. Terrible!
Anyway, the study found that mycorrhizal associations do form with redroot pigweed, but they are detrimental to it. And I thought...wait a minute.
Does this mean that after an ecosystem has been "healing" for a certain amount of time, the mycorrhizal network starts sucking the life out of the "early" successional species and boosting the species belonging to the next phase??!?!?
Basically all the research has been done on climax forest, on domesticated crops, or on, like, individual species of plants in individual pots.
Which is understandable, because we barely know anything about this yet, but I desperately want to see if a pattern emerges if you study a field returning to forest over 10 years and which plants are being helped/hindered by the fungi, and how that changes over time.
Obviously you'd need to study it more. A LOT more. Because there's a LOT to study. But it seems like the first plants to take over a barren area tend to be the ones that are harmed by mycorrhizal associations.
This could either be seen as non-mycorrhizal plants evolving to thrive only where an existing fungus network doesn't exist yet, or the fungi evolving to be more parasitic on the plants that are "taking" lots of resources from a space that could support more suitable hosts
...Which makes sense, because the fungi are going to be more successful long-term attached to a tree than an annual pigweed, so once conditions improve to the point where the environment COULD support a tree, the fungus network is going to be like "aight get out of here" to the weedy annual plants
Which means that the r/lawncare people who are dumping fungicide on their lawns...
...oh no
Why this is blowing my mind:
It further supports the idea that intensive management of an area makes the plant community "weedier."
It also explains why Pokeweed, Redroot Pigweed and Purslane pop up readily in a newly tilled patch of soil but not in the soil immediately surrounding it (something I've been observing, and that i've been perplexed by, all year long). In areas with an existing robust fungal network they either die or are outcompeted.
You could design an experiment where you measured the impact of fungicide on plant communities and see if killing fungi without physically disturbing an area has the same effect (pigweed explosion)
We need to do Crabgrass and Prostrate Sandmat next.
brb googling "how to do undergraduate research"
my mind has been a little hamster ball lately, escape takes the first 11 hours of the day, tasks can’t be completed from inside the prison !
