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Perish

@thesneklordwithwings

Welp, when life gives you lemons they/them Ace Aro Agender neurodivergent

HEY CALIFORNIA PEOPLE!

HURRICANE ADVICE FROM A FLORIDIAN!

Make sure you've got shelf-stable food and water for everyone in the house, including pets. The rule of thumb is a gallon per person per day. Freeze water bottles if you want cold water.

Make sure you have enough meds!

Make sure you have batteries, candles, flashlights, and a manual can opener. 

Make sure your electronics, including backup batteries, are charged. Unplug things you don't want fried in case of a power surge. 

Don't tape your windows, it doesn't help and you'll just be stuck scrubbing goo off of them later.

Put a mug of frozen water in it in your freezer with a quarter on top of it. If your freezer defrosts, the ice will melt and the quarter will sink and tell you you need to throw things out.

Get everything that's not nailed to a foundation out of your yard. That dead branch hanging on by a thread? Time to get it down (it was probably time to do that three days ago, but now’s better than never).

Park away from powerlines and trees if you can. Rain makes the ground soft and then trees fall over.

Have an evacuation plan to a shelter. Evacuate if they’re telling you to.

If you start to flood, don't go in your attic. You'll get trapped if the water rises too high and you can't hack through your roof. This happened to a lot of people in Texas and Louisiana. Get ON the roof.

Be safe, be well <3 

What the fuck?

???? WHAT???

Ngl, "tropical storm in death valley" was not on my 2023 bingo card.

Drainage on our roads is shitty in SoCal, don't attempt to drive through water deep enough to touch your bumpers and don't attempt to walk across moving water, water only as deep as your ankles can knock you down and sweep you away.

Predicted wind speeds are similar to strong Santa Anas, so lock things down like you would for that, though keep in mind that yeah the combination of heavy rain and wind leads to more felled trees than just wind.

Take photos of the inside of your home now; flood insurance fucking sucks here and if you're in a possible flood zone you want as much documentation of your home and belongings as possible in case you need to make a claim.

Freezing water bottles also means you've got a lot of ice in your freezer if power goes out, and safe potable water once it thaws, so freeze bottles of water to have something to keep your fridge and freezer cool and store more water regardless of if you want cold water.

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fill your bathtub/ large containers/ buckets with water so you can flush the toilet if the power goes out. you can check the water level by popping the top off the tank

don’t walk through any standing/flood waters afterwards. they’re nasty and can hide downed power lines

unless there is an emergency do not drive through floodwaters. your car will stall

Fuck self-sufficiency. It's time for Interdependence. Always offer help and always accept it. Cook meals for the people you love. Grow fruits and vegetables and give them to your neighbors. The "independent" person is merely the perfect version of a Consumer, eating directly from the palms of Corporation. Fuck self-sufficiency. Need one another.

i love you lisp i love you stutter i love you pressured speech i love you damaged vocal cords i love you aphasia i love you mutism i love you selective mutism i love you deaf voice i love you apraxia i love you speech delay i love you vocal tic i love you articulation disorder i love you sign language

i hate you societal norm to make fun of speech impediments i hate you “get it fixed” mentality i hate you mocking someone for the way they communicate i hate you “go to speech therapy so your kid won’t be bullied” i hate you i hate you i hate you

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another piece of advice i have for those living with partners or roommates: some days you are going to feel very productive while they seem kind of spacey/distracted/wanting to relax, and vice versa.

a phrase we have implemented is “is it playtime?” because sometimes you dont have the mental battery to be the present adult your partner/roommate is asking of you and need time to relax. also because i think its silly.

if you can communicate that between both parties then you can find a later time that you can work with them or figure out what needs to be taken care of right now. by communicating boundaries of “worktime” “playtime” you can respect each-others energy levels while still picking times to work together and achieve tasks as adults.

i hate seeing people now making fun of those who care about privacy online. i've seen people saying things like "well they already have your data. what are companies going to do with it" and it's like, that's not the point. it's that companies /shouldn't/ be able to have my data and sell it. am i aware they probably already have my data? yes, absolutely. but i'm still going to try and keep them from monetizing it any further, why are we defending companies selling data they shouldn't have to begin with though?

adding this to the post because, 100%, just there's a fire doesn't mean you should pour gasoline on it

I have like ten different ad and/or tracking blockers on my PC and phone... just out of pure spite

Can link it? I wish to hop aboard that train.

Seeing people shoot raptors in other countries is fucking wild to me because we have a whole system of super strict laws governing how you can handle an individual FEATHER off of an eagle, and it doesn't have to even be a dead eagle. One can molt and you can find it on the ground and if you're caught with it the warden will fuck your entire life. What do you mean people are out there shooting them to protect a fucking pheasant. A pheasant??? That thing I have to avoid running over approximately 459 times any time I leave a major highway???

My good friend @prismaticate has asked a very good question here, and while I’m not entirely sure I’m qualified to explain it and would love some input from more qualified sources, my SUPER simplified understanding of why the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 and its numerous modern revisions and addendums have clauses about this included is this:

-It’s basically impossible to tell a feather that’s been picked up off the ground from one that’s been taken from a poached bird

-This used to be a MAJOR problem when bird-feather hats and the like were in high demand back in the day, because several bird species on the edge of extinction kept getting poached in spite of the new laws protecting them since people would just say they “found” any feathers from protected species used in the stuff they were selling, and you couldn’t prove otherwise unless you literally caught them in the act of poaching

-This eventually got SO bad that they had to just make it illegal to have the feathers at all, with certain exceptions made for members of different indigenous groups, or authorized organizations that display them as part of efforts to educate the public about the species they belong to

@zooophagous is this a reasonable rundown? Was there anything I missed/any better sources you might recommend to learn more about this? I know it’s probably far more nuanced than that, but this was kind of the explanation I’d always seen floating around. 😅

That's pretty much the gist of it! Eagles and eagle feathers have more laws on top of that because of their sacred uses in certain indigenous practices, how they relate to legal falconry, and because eagles at one time were highly endangered while at the same time being a national symbol. Where a cop or a game warden may shrug and look the other way if you, say, illegally picked up a chickadee feather from your bird feeder, if they see a real eagle feather they will notice and will be VERY interested in where it came from.

Not long ago here someone was arrested and charged for violating these laws because they tried to sell a plains feather bonnet at a pawn shop, claiming they had "found it while exploring an abandoned house."

The clerk suspected it was real eagle, the warden confirmed it was, and because those feathers are so tightly tracked they were able to locate the family of the previous owners who said the item had been stolen some time ago.

If nobody knows you have it, obviously you can get away with it. But if they see it, or God forbid you try to SELL it, the hammer will fall.

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Im surprised every time people think it's a crazy sounding law, it is genuinely one of the only things preventing a lot of native birds from extinction or any asshole could kill as many as they want and just say they found them on the ground

Wait, poaching wasn’t about the meat, it was about the feathers?

The collapse of bird populations in the USA in the late 1800s thru early 1900s was very much about feathers.

At its peak the feather trade had feathers that were worth more than gold. Commercial hunters would shoot birds out of the sky and sell feathers by the pound, in literal huge crates. Egrets were especially sought after for their beautiful breeding plumage, which was used in fancy hats and accessories. This wrought havoc on the poor birds because they only ever had this plumage during breeding season, so not only were the breeding birds dying, they were leaving next generation's chicks and eggs behind to die of neglect.

Beyond hats, the gentleman's art of fly tying was also a popular art form, more for the sake of showing off one's rare collection of feathers and art than for actual fishing.

There was some meat hunting as well before the banning of commercial hunting, mostly ducks and geese, which also drifted close to extinction as they were taken to be sold in markets.

Even white tailed deer, the ubiquitous animal that's found all over north America in truly ridiculous numbers, came dangerously low. But meat wasn't where the money was when it came to birds. It was feathers.

The Lacey act banned commercial hunting in the United States, putting an end to the constant unregulated commercial killing to fill market stalls with meat (which incidentally is why you don't see venison in most supermarkets in the states. Only farmed deer is legally allowed to be sold.)

And the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it a crime to not only kill a bird, but to even posess a single feather from one. Most people won't buy a hat that would get them arrested if they wore it outside, so the market for feathers was gutted.

Even though feather hats aren't popular in this day and age, nobody is in a hurry to amend these laws, as birds in general are well loved and popular animals and still very much threatened by other stressors such as pollution and habitat loss.

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Something deeply painful is the fact that seasons, especially fall, dont feel the same. Not because of individual maturity but because climate change has impacted the weather patterns so so so much that we cant even experience the same annual shifts that our ancestors have for centuries

I feel displaced, i yearn for the spring, summer, fall, and winter that i can barely remember experiencing

To make things worse, if you’re under 50-60 years old, you can’t even remember what normal seasons were like because you weren’t alive to experience them

In the graph above, you can see how there’s a clear tipping point in the late 1970′s, which is when global temperatures first began to really skyrocket.

I was born in 1997, so about 20 years after this shift occurred. There is an immense difference between the climate now and the climate I remember growing up in, but the way I experienced the seasons in my childhood was already fundamentally different from what the seasons were supposed to be like! My parents were pretty much the last generation to experience a normal climate, and that’s just... incredibly sad

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I am processing this information in a normal way devoid of rabid rage and bloodlust i am processing this information in a normal wa-

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I'm just old enough to remember the tail end of real seasons. I can't express how different it is now.

I think I've heard of this as climate trauma or climate amnesia. And really emphasizes the fact that climate change is an all-encompassing phenomenon

I grew up in LA, so no real seasons.

However, I grew up when the smog was EXTREMELY BAD. So, I want to say, that I experienced environmental change that included improvements which were directly created by legislation.

Yes, I'm extremely distressed and depressed by all this, but I hope we can still affect change.

@ California mutuals: If it hasn't already been said: Try not to walk in flood water. If a power line is down its a perfect recipie for getting electrocuted. Its likely also dirty and full of sewage. Sometimes theres no choice, so if you DO end up walking in flood water, beware: if you see a patch or raft of brown like this, it's fire ants. They all climb on each other to form a raft and it's TERRIFYING (and cool to watch. ) Yes those are ALL fire ants.