postcard c1910

I shall pass through this world but once, any good thing therefore I can do, or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer it or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.

Grizzly 399 is so cool! I went to her Wikipedia page intending to screenshot interesting facts about her, but I would really recommend you go check out the whole thing for yourself.

Grizzly 399 lives in close proximity to humans but has never caused problems or attacked a human - she has taught her many cubs important skills like looking both ways before crossing the road. She has had more triplets than is normal for grizzlies, and is far better at keeping triplets alive than less experienced mothers.

She had 22 progeny, (though not all survived) including Grizzly 610, who in 2011 adopted one of 399’s triplets along with her own two cubs. 399 previously went viral on social media for keeping her quadruplets alive through two seasons, despite bear cubs only having a 55% survival rate.

A beast crushing it on adapting to become more fit for her environment and passing on knowledge to her progeny. Top-tier animal.

Vintage Thierry Mugler Spring 1990 Rainbow Leather Jacket

Loustat in After the Phantoms of Your Former Self

Lestat in The Thing Lay Still

The Joshua tree is on its way to extinction because so-called green energy companies want to keep the death machine of civilization going by installing large swaths of solar panels over the desert floor, a big metal blanket that will kill everything it covers: the desert tortoise, the sage grouse, the hawks and snakes and beautiful flowers that have flourished for thousands of years. Gone. Gone.

All so that we can keep the dead heart in the rotting corpse of industrial civilization beating into the next decade. These are the "good guys" btw, these are the "renewable" "carbon neutral" options: covering the desert in miles of metal and microchips until every living being without a bank account is dead.

People in the notes: “You dumbass. Don’t you know we need to keep producing the exact same amount of energy we do now or all of humanity will die? We either maintain the world capitalism build or we all live in caves and die from an infected wound when we’re 26 years old, those are the only two possible societies.”

Gonna need some more info on this but like, why aren't they putting them above parking lots. That's seems like an obvious move.

The mining practices involved in producing solar panels/batteries are deadly to humans and to the earth. The cobalt mining going on in the Congo is one of the grossest human rights violations globally.

Putting solar panels over a parking lot (instead of covering open habitat) would benefit the Mojave and Sonoran deserts comparatively, but it would still be at a human and an environmental expense--shifting from coal mines to solar just exports the exploitation and death.

So what do you recommend?

No, really, what do you recommend?

Shall we draw toxic nuclear rocks from within the earth via mining, rocks which cannot be recycled like cobalt can and will have to be buried somewhere for ten thousand years? Is that your solution? Maybe you think the uranium fairy delivers nuclear rods from outer space and that nobody is harmed by nuclear mining or nuclear energy. Yeah, that’s probably it.

There is NO form of energy that doesn’t involve human and environmental exploitation in some way. There are forms that are less harmful and forms that are more harmful. That’s it. We need to regulate the supply chain to deal with human rights abuses, for sure, but you know what happens to land after it’s mined for uranium? I do, because they were talking about doing it at the Grand Canyon. IT BECOMES UNINHABITABLE. YOU CANNOT RESETTLE A PLACE THAT HAS BEEN MINED FOR URANIUM DUE TO NUCLEAR CONTAMINATION. Or, no, let me rephrase. You SHOULDN’T resettle a place that’s been mined for uranium. In reality, that’s where poor people go. Who cares if they die horribly of cancer, right?

So what do you think we should do? Go ahead, I’m waiting for your magical solution.

Despite your tone, which comes off as pretty hostile, I'm gonna assume we're coming from a similar place--that we both care about and have deep concern for the wellbeing of humans and the planet.

Solar is destructive on a human rights level, and on an environmental level. It requires large quantities of minerals to be extracted from the earth at a rate that is not sustainable; cobalt in particular comes from a slave industry. To sweep this under the rug is not acceptable; as it stands, it is unethical to support the expansion of solar.

We should care about all people impacted by extraction--be it coal, cobalt, lithium, or uranium. These practices are unsustainable. Our industrialized world is unsustainable.

The answer is not to shift from one harmful industrialized extraction process to another, the answer is to move away from these systems.

If we wish to decolonize, we need to radically shift our relationships with the earth and each other, and we need to acknowledge that the foundation of where we are now is based on exploitation of humans and the earth. There is no magic solution that makes our modern society sustainable.

If we are to shift, we need to create place-based systems of interdependence that focus on providing for and caring for those around us as directly and deeply as we can. We need to focus on whole food systems, communal living and community support networks, and building an understanding that our convenience, our lifestyles, and even our lives, should not come at the expense of the lives of others, whether they live near us or abroad.

So your solution is buzzwords. Got it.

The problem with "there is no magic solution that makes our current society sustainable" is that there is also no solution that takes us away from our current society without enormous death.

The planet is now interdependent to the point where famines will occur if we stop being able to ship food around the world. Without our information network, we can't talk to people around the world... risking the resurgence of nationalism. The very necessity of banding together as communities becomes far more difficult without the internet and phones, unless we want to once again see polarization in small communities against people who are different (moreso than we have now). ("How did we get by without smartphones in the past, smartass?" you ask. Well, ask some queer or disabled people who were driven out of their small, well-integrated communities and had to go live somewhere outside the existing mutual aid networks they knew, because those communities closed ranks against them.)

It seems to me that maybe we could get cobalt without slave labor. It'd make it more expensive, sure, but "it's dangerous to mine it" sounds to me like a thing where you give people a fuckton of money to do it so they can retire young, and also you work real damn hard to recycle it. ("Recycling toxic metal is also dangerous! People have to be exposed to dangerous fumes!"... there a good reason why we couldn't design drones to do this work via remote control by human hands that aren't near the fumes?) And maybe we could come up with solar energy that doesn't rely on cobalt. Maybe batteries without lithium.

Personally, I'm fond of a concept where you run a giant pipeline of salt water into inland desalination plants that work off solar energy, utilizing lenses to focus the sun so the water boils, goes through steam turbines to recapture energy, then collects via condensation on the other side, desalinated. This might cost more energy than it recaptures, at first, but I can imagine a scenario with turbines all along the way to capture energy from the movement of the water. ("What about the fish?" you ask. Filters, and pulse the pumps so that the fish hve the opportunity to get away from the suction. Do your environmental studies to figure out the best places to put your source points, but the advantage to having more clean water inland probably outweighs a lot.) You can even split off the pipeline to give some areas a separate saltwater water system for their swimming pools and water features, so you don't have to burn drinking water so that people can have a place to swim. ("What if the pipeline breaks?" That's bad, avoid it. It's not nearly as hazardous as an oil pipeline, but it's still gonna fuck up anywhere that it breaks, so build the goddamn thing with sensors to detect sudden drops in pressure, cutoff valves, and do shit like dig a channel with a concrete pipe instead of running it overland where it could rain down on and poison land people grow food on or something. Still worth doing.)

What about wave turbines? Wind turbines? We have the technology to do these things without significant impact to wildlife (if we actually use said technology is more iffy). They actually succeeded in getting energy out of a fusion reaction last year!

Look, humanity is actually pretty fucking good at figuring out technological solutions to problems. It's the social problems we have a hard time with. I don't believe we can't come up with a solution to getting energy in ways that don't do serious harm to the Earth. But I do believe that "place-based systems of interdependence that focus on providing for and caring for those around us as directly and deeply as we can" are also things we need.

There actually already is a form of solar that uses glass instead of cobalt, but “all technology is evil actually” chucklefucks don’t want to hear that, especially because it provides a two-for-one solution (you don’t need as much electricity for lights if you have…SKYLIGHTS!), and we can’t have that.

Millions of people would be dead in a week if we switched to no electricity tomorrow. Before you can do that you have to move approximately a third of the American population because their homes would be instantly uninhabitable (parts of Arizona and California, most of Texas, huge swaths of the Deep South). And then do it all over again in November (New England, northern Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Michigan, northern Ohio, the Dakotas….). Where do we put all these people? Or do we just leave them to die of heatstroke/hypothermia?

Nuclear fanboys love to go "but the cobalt mines!" As if uranium is harvested from self cloning trees like bananas. Every problem in cobalt mines is present in uranium mines. One of them is also one of the strongest carcinogens on earth. It's really simple math.

As a nuclear fanboy, uranium is a fucking shitty fuel. It's rare, inefficient, and is basically useless for power generation after only 5 percent of the energy in it has been used up AND leaves a fuckton of irradiated cooling water to deal with with an obscenely long half life.

Thorium based molten salt reactors are the future. The only reason uranium was used as a reactor fuel for so long, despite the fact that thorium molten salt reactors were found (In the fucking MID 60S might I add!) to be more efficient and safer, was because you can use uranium reactors to enrich weapons grade plutonium to make nukes. That's it. That's all there is.

Incidentally, thorium is a byproduct of lots of heavy metal industrial processes, and if we switched over completely to molten salt reactors for all our juice, we could fill 100 percent of America's current energy requirements for 1000 years with zero carbon emissions. With the amount of thorium we CURRENTLY have stockpiled.

Hang on, back up, you’re telling me. There is. A form of nuclear energy. That is functionally UPCYCLING. And removes unsafe waste by using it for a needed purpose. And leaves behind a product with basically no half-life whatsoever by comparison to other radioactive fuels.

And we have known about it for almost sixty years. And chose not to use it, on purpose, because it can’t make fucking WEAPONS??????

….that is pitifully on-brand for this country, actually.

I want to do more research on this because any time something sounds like a solution to more than two problems at once I get suspicious (no offense, previous poster, just. You know how Tumblr is with information sometimes). But like…if this is actually true, then yes, we should be doing this. There’s still the issue that eventually we hopefully won’t need those heavy metals anymore and that would eliminate the supply, but that’s so far down the road we could easily have stuff like solar sails doing this stuff off-planet entirely by then.

One of my favourite things in recent years of peace and environmental activism has been starting to work more closely with Trade Unions. Because they utterly drive home the "you can't just magically change the system lots of people dying".

The current system *is* broken, but also millions of people rely on the, hugely exploitative, massively problematic, current fossil fuels and tech industry for basic survival. Similarly millions rely on the military-industrial complex. Choosing where to work is a privilege, and for the majority of the world, those choices are non-existent or hugely limited.

In the current system, if the only job in town is the factory making munitions, or the cobalt mine, thats what you do - regardless of the risks and dangers.

But also, in the current system if you take those away without putting something else in place people will also die.

To minimise unnecessary death and suffering, we have to talk about a just transition to a better system. AND THAT MEANS GOING THROUGH THE BETTER-BUT-STILL-TERRIBLE ONES ON THE WAY.

Ideological purity is harmful. Our goal is not an immediately perfect system, but to make the most radically beneficial changes possible, in the shortest time possible, while not consigning vast numbers of people around the world to catastrophes just as devastating as the climate crisis is currently producing.

You know why

Lestat and Louis in In Throes Of Increasing Wonder

Commenters are the real MVPs

mother is mothering

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

I saw an ask on here earlier for someone else. But I want to give an answer as well. There is one thing that the series has done better than the movie, or the book, in my opinion.

(Spoilers for all 3)

This so much! No way would Lestat have not smelled the poison or like in the movie not realize the boys were dead.

my heart goes out to anyone whose abuser, rapist, or traumatizer in any respect is someone who has really common features/haircuts/facial hair styling, a really common name, or a very distinct but still common style of dress or make-up for your area.

the hyper-vigilance and constant pattern matching of ptsd, esp earlier in recovery (early as a relative term & recovery isn't linear of course) for a lot of survivors it'll burst you with adrenaline every time someone looks & dresses like them or has the same name and that can be so annoyingly often.

#luckily i made a friend with the same name as my abuser and now i think of my friend when i hear it not my abuser

honestly that's so wonderful.

if anyone in the notes/tags is struggling with this a lot right now, something I did to desensitize myself to it in a safer context (than randomly having your body react to real people who are just strangers who have no actual connection to the person who traumatized you) was to find a movie or show or podcast where one of the characters/hosts has the same name, and just listen to a bunch of it.

It builds a new association over time, and even at the start it is not as (if at all) triggering because

I can't guarantee it will work for everyone (or even anyone outside of myself) but it did genuinely help, so it might be worth a try if the trigger is really interfering with your life.

-monet in bloom, 2022

Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, Pittsburgh, PA

I feel like the reason certain dog-lovers insist cats are evil is because they read their body language as if they were dogs. So here’s a very basic guide to common “mean” things cats do that actually aren’t mean at all if you know what they’re thinking.

Rolling and exposing belly- attacks you when touched Does not mean: Give belly rubs! - haha I tricked you!  Actually means: I’m playful! If you reach for my belly I’ll grab your arm and bite it because I think we’re playfighting! 

Lazily exposing belly - still attacks when touched Does not mean: tricked you again! Actually means: I’m showing you my belly because I trust you. Please don’t break that trust by invading my personal space. I might accept a belly rub if I’m not ticklish and I know you well. Snapping at you while being pet Does not mean: I suddenly decided I dislike you! Actually means: You’re petting me in a way that gives me too much restless energy. Please focus on petting my head and shoulders instead of stroking the full length of my back next time.

Is in the same room but makes no attempt to interact Does not mean:  I’m ignoring you Actually means: We’re hanging out! I’m being respectful by giving you space while still enjoying your company. Slapping/scratching your hand when you try to pet them Does not mean: I hate you! Actually means: You’ve failed to establish that we’re not playing, or the way you’re approaching me scares me. Be calmer, speak more gently, make eye-contact and blink slowly at me before you try again.

I love this post omg, thank you so much. As a lifelong cat person, dogs perplex me because they’re so completely different behaviourally.

I love dogs too but, I’ve been trying to tell people, you canNOT treat cats like you treat dogs. They arent the same animals and have very different personalities

P.s.: people often pet cats way too hard. Dogs like a firm pet or a pat on the belly, cats dont have the same bone structure and are more flexible than dogs so what you’re doing probably hurts them

Sitting and staring Does not mean: I am challenging you/plotting your demise/just generally evil and creepy. Actually means: I am a desert-adapted species, so my natural tears are very thick and keep my eyes moist for a nice long time. I do find people interesting and enjoy watching them.  I just don’t need to blink very often!

Staring and blinking slowly Does not mean: I’m smug and think I am smarter than you. Actually means: I like you! But I don’t need to get up in your face to show it.  I can just sit over here and blow kisses at you to show you I am glad you are around!

It’s very frustrating for me when people expect cats to act like dogs, or act like they’re deceitful.  They aren’t!  They just AREN’T DOGS.

Hanging out while you’re on the toilet Does not mean: I’m a freak and I think you’re funny looking! Actually means: You’re a part of my community, so I’m watching your back while you’re in a vulnerable position!

Bringing you dead (or living!) wildlife and dropping it in front of you

Does not mean: I hate you and think it’s funny when you scream! Actually means: I never see you hunt and I’m worried you’re not eating enough. Please eat this meat (if dead)/please take this opportunity with easy prey to learn how to pounce and kill so you can eat (if living)!

Tail wagging/flicking/lashing

Does not mean: I’m happy or excited!

Actually means: I’m annoyed or upset at something that’s happening.

Disclaimer: I have personal experience with a cat that flicks her tail when she’s cuddling with me, meaning that she’s content; this does NOT mean that your cat is the same way, learn what your cat’s tail movements mean!

Bold Colors and Historic Details in a Victorian Apartment

It's missing them hours 💕💕💕

We need everyone's help right now to protect the rainforest and Indigenous People

The Amazon Rainforest is under a massive threat. I know you've heard this a million times, but this is different. There is a piece of legislation that will decimate the rights of Indigenous people of Brazil, who have been protecting the rainforest. It's unfathomably bad. It has majority support. And they're voting tomorrow. As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

The thing you can do—and I know this sounds overly simple—is sign this petition—and tell your friends to do the same: SIGN HERE.

As reported here, the Bill allows "the Brazilian government to find energy resources, set up military bases, develop strategic roads, and implement commercial agriculture on protected Indigenous tribal lands, without any prior discussion with the affected peoples."

Again, this bill has majority support. You may be wondering, why will a petition signed by people who don't live in Brazil make any difference? Because it will give those opposing it political air cover. It will show the world is with them.

But we need a LOT of signatures.

Please do this simple act and spread the word.

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong so let’s fix it

If you weren’t here for part one, lemme sum it up real fast:

Okay, all up to speed? We’re being served 80s throwback stuff with the serial numbers scratched off, re-labeled as yo totally 90s. What we’ve got now isn’t completely wrong, but I’m telling you, there’s so much gold left unmined.

As we saw in part one with Memphis Milano, these things get messy. Trends don’t start and end neatly every ten years. The first wave of 90s throwback attempts focused on the early part of the decade, and nobody since really pushed to represent the other seven years. Well, if you really wanna do something, I guess you gotta do it yourself.

I have suggestions. Get your flannel ready, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.

Analog Grunge

SURRRRRRRGE or uh, Grunge, is probably the look that defines the decade best. The big kickoff point here is Nirvana - after a shiny pop-dominated music scene in the 80s, Nevermind was like a breath of fresh smog.

Your design has to look like it survived a nuclear blast, then was run over by your parents’ Buick a couple of times.

If there’s a Comic Sans for the 90s, it’s “distressed typewriter font.” Seriously, it’s mandatory. When I pulled images for this post I could not escape typewriter fonts. I don’t think you couldn’t call yourself a respectable designer without it. Just look at how much mileage old-timey typewriters and label makers got:

Hell, it’s the giant X in The X Files!

I think another component to Grunge is sort of an anti-digital, pro-analog message. My pet theory is home computers went from being a semi-common novelty in 1990 to an essential gotta-have-it purchase in every American home by ‘99. Desktop publishing apps made it almost too easy to make pixel-perfect, clean, uniform designs. Digital photography and scanners meant you could now publish full color photographs with ease.

But digital perfection is the enemy of Grunge. Analog means authenticity.

So you had a whole gaggle of designers running in the other direction. Sure you could use a computer, but your work absolutely had to look like it didn’t come from one. As much as possible, incorporate hand-drawn artwork, scribbles, dust and splotches. Write text with chicken scratch if you have to. As much as you could make your multimillion dollar ad campaign look like it came from the margins of some high schoolers’ math homework, the better.

Factory Pomo

Not everyone was running away from digital, though. Many designers were embracing computer apps - and I think that’s where Factory Pomo first came into being. Coined by designer Froyo Tam (that’s their logo up above!) Factory Pomo is one of those things that once you see an example, you can’t stop seeing it.

Want your logo to look futuristic and modern? Stick it in a circle and put some triangles around. Invert half the colors, then another half.

Max Krieger has a great writeup on the probable inflection point: Tomorrowland. As the story goes, Tomorrowland at Disney - the part of the park meant to look like it’s from the future - would very quickly look very outdated each time they tried to update it. Instead, in 1994 they decided to own being outdated. They came up with a ridiculously fun “timeless” futuristic look, mixing industrial design with Jules Verne. Factory Pomo’s signature was all over the blueprints.

The look quickly escaped the theme park and was especially prevalent in the booming mid 90s home computer market. It’s the Packard Bell cyborg, it’s the logo in Video Toaster. If you caught that The X Files logo earlier is both Factory Pomo with the tall type and X in a ring AND Grunge with the typewriter X in the background, you win 5 bonus Pogs. 

EDIT: aaaaaaa How could I forget the most famous example! The “Always Coca Cola” ad campaign!

And it’s a stretch, but one could draw a line between Factory Pomo’s inverted black and whites and the Ska movement’s two-tone checkerboards. Maybe. Possibly. I’d have to call Tony Hawk to double check. 

Back to Froyo Tam for a second, but that bit about them coining the term? That was in 2017. “Factory Pomo” didn’t have a name for like… 25 years. How’s that possible, you may wonder? Weren’t designers following a defined style? Well, yes and no. I think people were designing stuff to look a certain way, but it’s less a game of “this is what the aesthetic looks like” and more like a game of telephone.

If you do an architecture tour in a major city, you’ll learn that every building and skyscraper is classified to a specific architectural movement. Every building that is but ones built in the last 20-30 years. Newer buildings have to wait a few decades for official classification. Historians need time and perspective to figure out what emerging trends in architecture are going on, whose work influenced who, that sort of thing.

Designing a logo for Slim Jims or Cherry Coke takes considerably less time than constructing a skyscraper, but I think the same principle holds true. It’s really difficult to tell what’s a trend and what’s a fad when you’re living in the moment. I couldn’t tell you what’s the defining aesthetic for the 2020s right now. It’ll be obvious in 2053, but right now, no clue.

Enough time has passed between the nineties and today that we can pick this stuff apart easily. Maybe if you’re lucky, you can be the first to classify these design movements, too.

Working on a part three! I’ll look into a few other trends and address the big question– Is the Y2K aesthetic actually a 90s thing? More to come.

*A ton of these examples above are from the CARI Institute, which you should totally check out, they’ve been cataloging this stuff for years.