stargabs reblogged
stargabs reblogged
I...tried to make a meme and got carried away and made A Thing that is like partially unfinished because i spent like 3 hours on it and then got tired.
I think this is mostly scientifically accurate but truth be told, there seems to be relatively little research on succession in regards to lawns specifically (as opposed to like, pastures). I am not exaggerating how bad they are for biodiversity though—recent research has referred to them as "ecological deserts."
Feel free to repost, no need for credit
Anonymous asked:
have you defined the meaning of “white woman brain” anywhere and if not, can you? /gen
Many Black and brown feminist writers have discussed this phenomenon and I encourage you to seek out a lot of writing about this subject, because there are a variety of perspectives, but to distill it, white woman fragility brain is a phenomenon that is not exclusive to either white people or to women, but is especially common among those who can weaponize white womanhood, and it consists of the following qualities:
- A view of oneself as a helpless victim that is constantly in threat of being attacked, especially by strangers (even though statistically, this is not the case).
- A refusal to consider oneself as capable of doing harm to others, especially a lack of consideration toward others' body autonomy or consent. (even while being highly concerned about one's own autonomy and consent).
- A generally passive or passive-aggressive orientation toward the world: seeing oneself as a romantic or sexual object to be approached, but never wanting to initiate (or feeling that one never can), never feeling comfortable directly communicating displeasure or one's desires, believing that others instead must guess at it. (and then resenting people when they don't, but never expressing it).
- A tendency to cry, excessively berate oneself, complain about being made to feel "unsafe," or give up when criticized or challenged, especially when challenged by people of color.
- A tendency to associate a person's body type with how much of a threat they are. For example, feeling unsafe around people with penises and expecting a social space to accommodate that fear to cater to you, a fear of people who come from cultures where it's common to speak loudly, a fear of those who are large, assertive, and/or darker-skinned.
- Instinctive fawning-type responses to stress, and a pattern of feigning happiness, agreeability, and ease when one is not genuinely feeling it, and expecting all other people (but especially other women) to feign happiness as well, paired with a deep-seated resentment of anyone who violates this illusion and expresses any negativity (being especially punitive toward women of color).
- Instinctively "smoothing over" conflict between other people before it even begins, even when healthy conflict is necessary and not at all your business-- often performed by gossiping behind other people's backs, triangulating information when it is not yours to share, asking people to alter their behavior in order to avoid a reaction from somebody else, presenting your concerns as if they were somebody else's ("what will people think!"), tone-policing the airing of grievances, derailing hard conversations with more light-hearted topics, and excluding people who are known to be candid and assertive.
Here are some articles on elements of the phenomenon and why it is so dangerous:
Now, I single white cis women out a lot when I am describing this phenomenon, because they have the most to gain from exhibiting these qualities, but make no mistake: this is a pattern that many types of people can and do use. I have seen white trans women use white women's tears to silence critique. I have witnessed women of color being passive-aggressively derailed and silenced by a Black manager who was in a position of institutional power over them. Multiple of the women who sexually harassed me in the story linked above were not white. And LORD knows I see plenty of t boys falling back on this shit, as well as cis men from wealthy backgrounds. It's a mindset that has deep colonial roots and we all must be on the look out for it in ourselves and others, and we must be vigilant in uprooting it.
stargabs reblogged
went to a discussion led by elliot page earlier today and there were many good things said but at one point the other presenter asked him "what's a cool thing about yourself that has nothing to do with being trans?" and he said "uhh this is all I've got going for me" and then paused before adding "if anyone has three oranges, I can juggle"
stargabs reblogged
i would do anything to see megalania in real life
Not up close
sorry hes right next to you now. sad!
tell the other homo floresiensis that this is the scariest thing they can possibly imagine
stargabs reblogged
i'm so sick of being the only person who can make simple connections of how doing a thing to the ecosystem has effects. so so so so sick NO ONE knows the ways of the plants
sorry just venting over how i am so so so small and the task is so so so big
This year, I had a balcony garden.
I wanted to last year but I 'never got round to it'. I kill a lot of plants (not on purpose. ADHD and constant watering is hard, and sometimes it's just me confused as fuck about why I suddenly have x thing happening to my leaves) and kind of felt it was hopeless anyway.
Then I was reading your posts, and how you were seeing biodiversity in even small little hopeful changes. And I was like. Hey. Even if I do kill the plants. They will feed insects for a little, while they survive, and after, I can put them in my compost pile and they will feed more insects, and the flowers (if I get any) will feed bees (which are my special children) and so, even if it doesn't give me food, and even if they die, it might be worth it to try.
I never ate the cilantro. Turns out my flatmate has the soap gene. But it flowered like CRAZY and there were SO many happy pollinators.
I ate so many green onion shoots. The bulbs I still haven't pulled because they just keep giving me shoots to eat.
The mint is going HAM and also the insects loved the flowers.
The cucumber plants went absolutely APESHIT and produced flowers ALL SUMMER, and they were BEAUTIFUL, and I couldn't walk outside without a bee or, occasionally, a butterfly dropping by. It's STILL FLOWERING in NOVEMBER in PHILLY and now I have ladybugs and fireflies. FIREFLIES! I didn't see a single one last year and now they love my balcony and I love them so much. I only got two cucumbers but I don't even care.
I had a bunch of nonedibles in a little greenhouse thing, and they flowered too, and I'd find random bugs (a grasshopper. Huge. Massive) in there hanging out. They died when the greenhouse got blown over but they lasted longer than I ever expected to keep a plant alive.
The birds came by my balcony despite the cat avidly watching them by the window. More types of birds, too. And my little compost box is constantly happy with fruit flies and regular flies and things I don't recognize. I never did get around to buying worms, but I haven't had to because the insects are having a blast in there and every time I think "oh, it'll be full" it is, once again, not full because it has been broken down further.
There is a tiny ecosystem on my 6th floor apartment balcony because you get excited about plants, and it was inspiring enough to get me off my ass. Because even if I didn't eat my plants, you reminded me SOMETHING ELSE WOULD.
The task is so so big. But if my fruit flies can eat an entire watermelon (yes. There was an entire watermelon in my compost bin at one point), I think you and I can tackle this watermelon together.
...Oh...Sheds a single tear that contains so much happiness
stargabs reblogged
vampirism poses the question "what if there was a fundamental, horrible, unending well of want in your soul that, if truly satisfied, would lead to great pain for all those you hold closest and, in turn, their absolute and total revilement of you?" and naturally as a person with no problems I don't relate to this in any way at all.
vampirism also poses the question "what if someone you loved, through no fault of their own, needed something from you, and giving it to them and seeing them happy provided you the greatest joy, and you were the only one who could do it, but at the same time it was slowly draining all your life out of you?" which is also a completely unrelatable idea to me because I'm a normal person with no issues.
for a long time I've been unable to understand what the heck the whole reason people even liked vampires at all or assumed that sexiness was a central aspect of vampires at all, and i leaned WAY harder on 'vampires are metaphors for aristocracy that literally eat the poor' or 'vampires are ravenous undead monsters and the ones that aren't are anamolous' but i think this post put into context how your specific framing of vampires can REALLY WORK in a broader context?
it also made me go 'oh' in a similar way, it helps me really understand the whole idea, kind of like how one time i was discussing different ways to handle werebeasts with a friend and when the possibility of them just being what they are but societal normalization makes it harder and they feel about about rampaging when they get too stressed to handle it all but nothing is wrong with them, people just make it harder than it has to be, and that hit so many buttons for me personally it made me realize 'werebeast as autism spectrum applicability'
I am SO glad that this post is converting people to vampire enjoying. a different, slightly more succinct way I've put it before when having the "I can only see vampires as superpowered landlords" conversation is: yes, when thinking about real life, the rich act the most like bloodsuckers, but I personally prefer using fantasy mechanics to represent subjective emotional realities. and if you've ever heard someone say "god, I just feel like a leech," they probably weren't an aristocrat.
stargabs reblogged
Parents really post stuff like this online and wonder why their kids don't trust them
stargabs reblogged
About a year ago I was sitting in a really shitty corporate cafe and reading a book about medieval astronomy. There was a passage about how when we look up at the sky, we see titanic balls of gas all whirling about according to physics, but when a medieval person looked up at the sky, they saw literal divine clockwork turned by uncountable invisible spirits.
I was sitting in a shitty cafe, and I had a moment of realization. I knew logically that's how people used to see the night sky, but something about that moment just clicked. I felt what I can only describe as intellectual vertigo, as I realized "holy shit the world is really different than it was 700 years ago."
I feel like y'all aren't getting this.
When medieval folks looked up at the sky, it wasn't with wonder or optimism. It was with the exact same boredom that we look at the sky with.
"yep. It's the sky. Stars are pretty."
The fact that they were seeing the divine clockwork of the universe was exactly as commonplace and uninteresting as it is to us. Sure there are some folks that really like the sky, some folks devote their lives to studying it, but to most folks it's just the sky.
It wasn't wonderous or enchanted, it was just the sky. Yeah the heavens are a great machine powered by innumerable spirits. This was exactly as normal as the sky being filled with impossibly large and distant fusion reactors. The heavens were full of living spirits that tended to their divinely appointed tasks, and nobody really gave that much of a shit.
stargabs reblogged
5-star masseuse
stargabs reblogged
I wanted my parents. I wanted my family
stargabs reblogged
I'm begging you to turn the sound on
Spring.
Spring.
Spring.
Spring.
Spring.
✨️GOLDEN.......✨️
Mouse 🐁
stargabs reblogged
Avatar
Geez I wonder why lul
stargabs reblogged
Aragorn to Boromir at the coucil of Elrond
