㋡🥀

Idgaf if you don't want to write essays for school. I don't care if you don't want to write corporate emails yourself. I don't care if you can't draw well, I don't care if you can't write well, I don't care if you just really really want to talk to your favorite fictional character but don't want to RP with a real person because you have social anxiety or whatever

If you're still regularly using generative ai, chatgpt or midjourney or character.ai or literally whatever the fuck, im personally blaming you when my utility prices start going up.

This makes me realize that my family has a bit of a unique thing. On one side of my family, peoples legal names and their casual names are different. From birth. My grandparents just decided that they wouldn’t use the legal (first) names they themselves had given their children. And I don’t mean they shortened the names, the casual names stand on their own. Some* of my cousins are in the same situation. It’s not a big deal, so I didn’t realize that most people don’t do this.

On other side of my family, some* people have a double name but just the first part. Which is not that unusual, I guess. Though one slightly chanced it, so it’s more to their liking, and another uses two (nearly identical) names, their original and a variant for their international friends.

I had also a cis family friend that changed their casual name in their 50′s. And I know of someone who thought their name was too childish, when becoming a teenager. 

So yes! Don’t let your legal name keep you from using a name you’re comfortable with. You don’t have to feel uneasy when people call you. My examples are about first names, but the same goes for last names. Legal names are for legal documents, not much more. When you’re not doing paperwork use something you actually like!

* I recently realized that I don’t know the legal names of all my cousins, just the names they go by. So, ‘some’ might actually be ‘all’.

People take names and especially surnames so damn seriously and act like they’re written in stone but the big secret here is they’re all fake, it’s all made up. David Tennant picked out his name at 16 because his real name was barred from the actor’s union he joined on account of their No Doubles Allowed rule, and he wound up naming himself after Neil Tennant from the Pet Shop Boys of all things, and now many years later his whole family carries on that same made-up name he committed to as a teenager. All names are made up and fake as hell, call yourself whatever feels right.

they need to invent clubbing for boring sober people who don't like loud music or crowded group dancing. what's the "she should be at the club" for this hypothetical not-me demographic.

1980S REIMAGINED LOGOS x

New Scientist

Nectar-loving Ethiopian wolves may be the first carnivore pollinators

Endangered Ethiopian wolves feed on the nectar of red hot poker plants, and may transport pollen from flower to flower as they do so

Ethiopian wolves feed on the sweet nectar of a local flower, picking up pollen on their snouts as they do so – which may make them the first carnivores discovered to act as pollinators.

The Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) is the rarest wild canid species in the world and Africa’s most threatened carnivore. Endemic to the Ethiopian Highlands, fewer than 500 individuals survive.

Sandra Lai at the University of Oxford and her colleagues observed wild Ethiopian wolves lapping up the nectar of Ethiopian red hot poker (Kniphofia foliosa) flowers. Local people in the mountains have traditionally used the nectar as a sweetener for coffee and on flat bread.

The wolves are thought to be the first large carnivore species ever to be recorded regularly feeding on nectar.

“For large carnivores, such as wolves, nectar-feeding is very unusual, due to the lack of physical adaptations, such as a long tongue or specialised snout, and because most flowers are too fragile or produce too little nectar to be interesting for large animals,” says Lai.

The sturdy, nectar-rich flower heads of the poker plant make this behaviour possible, she says. “To my knowledge, no other large carnivorous predator exhibits nectar-feeding, though some omnivorous bears may opportunistically forage for nectar, albeit rarely and poorly documented.”

Some of the wolves were seen visiting as many as 30 blooms in a single trip. As they lick the nectar, the wolves’ muzzles get covered in pollen, which they could potentially be transferring from flower to flower as they feed.

“The behaviour is interesting because it shows nectar-feeding and pollination by non-flying mammals might be more widespread than currently recognised, and that the ecological significance of these lesser-known pollinators might be more important than we think,” says Lai. “It’s very exciting.”

Lai and her colleagues at the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Programme now hope to dig deeper into the behaviour and its ramifications. “Trying to confirm actual pollination by the wolves would be ideal, but that would be quite challenging,” she says. “I’m also very interested in the social learning aspect of the behaviour. We’ve seen this year adults bringing their juveniles to the flower fields, which could indicate cultural transmission.”

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

In some parts of the range, basket makers began to observe a decline in the numbers of black ash. They worried that overharvesting might be to blame, a decline caused by too much attention for the baskets in the marketplace and too little for their sources in the woods. My graduate student Tom Touchet and I decided to investigate. We began by analyzing the population structure of black ashes around us in New York State, to understand where in the trees’ life cycle the difficulty might lie. In every swamp we visited, we counted all the black ash we could find and wrapped a tape around them to get their size. Tom cored a few in every site to check their ages. In stand after stand, Tom found that there were old trees and seedlings, but hardly any trees in between. There was a big hole in the demographic census. He found plenty of seeds, plenty of young seedlings, but most of the next age class—the saplings, the future of the forest—were dead or missing.

There were only two places where he found an abundance of adolescent trees. One was in gaps in the forest canopy, where disease or a windstorm had brought down a few old trees, letting light through. Curiously enough, he found that where Dutch elm disease had killed off elms, black ash was replacing them in a balance between loss of one species and gain of another. To make the transition from seedling to tree, the young black ash needed an opening. If they remained in full shade they would die.

The other place where saplings were thriving was near communities of basket makers. Where the tradition of black ash basketry was alive and well, so were the trees. We hypothesized that the apparent decline in ash trees might be due not to overharvesting but to underharvesting. When communities echoed with Doonk, doonk, doonk, there were plenty of basket makers in the woods, creating gaps where the light would reach the seedlings and the young trees could shoot to the canopy and become adults.

In places where the basket makers disappeared, or were few, the forest didn’t get opened up enough for black ash to flourish. Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.

"Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A reminder that humans are, in fact, an important part of the ecosystems we inhabit. We *can* be a benefit to the ecosystems that support us, and that our absence *can* be detrimental to the other organisms that we evolved with and lived alongside for thousands of years.

Just found out one community association near me has a community toy library. Basically a community toy store where you sign out toys like you would library books.

And it really woke up how badly I want a library economy.

Makeup/dress up libraries in place of salons and make up stores- borrow this makeup for a few months bc you like purple highlighter right now, sign out hair accessories or jewlery, sign up for a haircut/makeup day with a vollunteer that you mesh with, etc..

Toy libraries to replace toy stores, holidays and birthdays now bring you down to borrow bikes and stuffed animals that have been loved by others, to borrow dolls and dollhouses and their endless closests and accessories.

Craft libraries filled with sewing machines and looms and supplies to make things, classes to learn how to do it, making clothes for friends never been so easy because the endless amount of patterns available. The craft clubs that would bloom from it. The ceramics and painting and welding art that could come out of it if we just all had time and access.

Engineering and woodworking libraries. We could be living in a real animal crossing Era of furniture! The weird and cool lighting and other oddities that would come from it!

Clothing libraries that are busy during the season change but also regular shopping. I dont use this dress I love anymore so I'll return it to the library and get something in this new color pallet for myself.

Kids libraries that yes, filled with toys but also cribs, highchairs, walkers, jumpers, pumps, bottles, cups, etc.. things that kids use less then a year at a time and never really get fully used before passing it onwards. Oh to be able to borrow a well loved crib or rocking chair for your newborn

A leafy shelter from the chilly spring showers 🌧️🌸

Itty Bitty Spring Dragon Stickers ♡