"Plant blindness" was coined as a term relating to the tendency to fail to notice plants in your environment, to view them as unimportant backdrop.

The tendency that concerns me the most is not this per se, but rather the inability to notice plants that comes from the inability to identify them, causing your brain to see the world in terms of "grass" surfaces, "weeds," "flowers" and "bushes" and "trees"

I can identify most wild plants I encounter on sight now—it's hard to even imagine how I lived differently.

The change is shocking. Learning to see plants was not just a matter of adding knowledge to my head, but creating totally new neural pathways. I believe my brain's capability for noticing and processing detail is profoundly increased. I can look much more closely at surfaces and objects and notice and be immediately drawn to small details.

The way I take photos is very different. When I look at outdoor photos from before I learned the plants, they are very broad and zoomed-out pictures of only the most obvious and unmissable features. It really appears like I was stumbling through the world almost blind, able to see big, obvious objects and nothing else.

And when I started learning to identify plants, oh, it was so painful, they all looked the same, and I couldn't even see the small details that set them apart! And there were no good resources or guides! I was fighting for my life!

And it's normal, that's the wild thing, most people go through life not being able to name the common plants that are all around them. This thought is scary and alien to me now, but a couple years ago I was entirely aware of my ignorance and felt no need to fix it. I didn't even know what the trees in my backyard were and I had lived here for 10 years and I wasn't troubled by it.

Reasons knowing the plants is important:

Imagine going to a party and the white suburban stay at home mom with two overachiever kids and white dad who barbeques but doesn’t know how to barbeque and yet is always surrounded by other white Dads who compliment his barbqeuing even though they’re just store bought preshaped frozen patties from Ralph’s or Food 4 Less and while he’s cooking those the white mom comes out and says “okay kids, here’s some pizza!” And she pulls this out and starts telling the kids why its a “fun pizza” and then cries in her master bedroom when no one likes it or finishes it and the white dad is then consoling her why she sobs that she’s a terrible mother and ruined her fourth grade straight B+ sons birthday and thinks her kids hate her but they don’t care but she continues crying softly into her pillow while the children eat poorly cooked burgers with unmelted kraft singles and too much mayonnaise and the only other condiments are two pickles and pepper because the dad calls it his special burger with a secret spice but the spice was just pepper and the kids just keep playing E rated games on their Nintendo Wii while the 17 year old older sister starts cleaning the tragedy up and throwing away uneaten “fun pizza” and whole burgers dejected from the start while she dials Pizza Hut to get these kids an actual birthday lunch and the mother then throws a fit because the daughter did something the kids liked and she didn’t and was the only one making a huge deal out of it and the daughter was then grounded from her TV in her room for only two days and the son went to blow out the candles in his standard birthday cake from food 4 less the mom added strawberries to so she could feel she did something but was still slightly teary and sad because her day was ruined by no one wanting to eat her “fun pizza”

transcut posting 🙏🙏

who up wanting to abandon their physical form

my birthday is in july! :)

living with a tall dude is ridiculous I just turned around and he was walking our cat around on the ceiling

you wouldn't get our bond

he wanted to be included

(ft. hypnoshades shiver and frye (frostbite and solar))

surprise trip to kalos tonight (thanks remus) and jelly baby made a friend

Anytime i see a bunch of pride flags i have to restrain myself from saying "where mexico" bc i doubt anyone will know I'm referencing this

TWITTER / REDDIT USDERS: its considered " GOOD MANNARS " on tumblr to post

oh...... okay.............

oh it’s over over

it's SO over oh fuck

I never draw fanart of anything, but Splatoon is a really good game!

“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult

Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.

There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.

I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.

Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."

Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.

Thank you for this addition!

And, following up on the previous post …

“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship

These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡

reblog and put in the tags what character hugging you would fix you

Gold and paws

I dunno what to call this. It’s a sketch doodle I decided to ink since it’s been waaaayyy too long since I’ve traditionally inked anything, and then I just kept going and decided to put it in one of the frames I picked up at the garage sale. So it’s now ready for the Eurofurence art show. I have a whole panel plus half a table for the art show, so I’m still working on other pieces. Anything you’d want to see from me?

Thanks for enjoying my work! Your comments are appreciated. Learn more about me at AbandonAmbition.com.