little-bloodied-angel:

mechalesbian:

there are two types of pet owners:

1. my baby!!! my fucking cinammon apple!!!!!!!

2. naughty boy. ugly. stinky bastard man.

I’m both of them

plantyhamchuk:

samiholloway:

plantyhamchuk:

jordfast-lokispouse:

How much longer until the utopic Solarpunk future where Capitalism is dead and we all live in ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities? Asking for a friend.

Until we make those ecologically sustainable high-tech forest cities ourselves. It’s going to take a lot of us to do it though, so best to spread the word (and gather native tree seeds).

And, like, get started now. Then our “weirdo houses” will be the only thing functioning when everything falls apart!

The only reason why we don’t live in a solarpunk world right now is because no one has bothered to make it yet. 

We’ll have to make it ourselves, and we’ll have to help each other make it. That’s why it is solarpunk. 

Some resources to consider creating or joining or doing:

• Repair cafes – create or join your local repair cafe! Repair stuff, learn how to repair stuff, teach others how to repair stuff.
• Map of Makerspaces – make some things! learn how to make some things! teach others how to make some things!
• Community Garden Map (note that this is US-only, and not a complete list) – join a local community garden
• Support your local farmers / local economy (US only link)
• Support or create a local Food Not Bombs chapter
• Support or create a local Food Not Lawns chapter

Grow food in 5 gallon buckets

• Volunteer for Habitat for Humanity (as a bonus you can learn extremely practical skills)
• Volunteer via 350.org to help the environment / the planet / the place we live and depend on
• Excellent-and-still-growing wiki from reddit’s awesome r/zerowaste community – great resource to learn how to live more lightly on the earth
• Spread the word about solarpunk, especially to engineering students. Show them projects like Open Source Ecology – Global Village Construction Set and Bridges for Prosperity 
• Learn how to Patch a Hole, Mend a Seam, and Fix a Hem

• Learn how to repair a hole in the sole of a shoe
• Learn some basics on passive solar design – clever use of the sun can create extremely energy efficient homes and buildings. You can use these principles to save on energy bills, even if you’re renting.
• Free USDA Complete Guide to Home Canning, 2015 revision – cut down on personal food waste! Learn how to safely preserve food. Very useful if you suddenly harvest / purchase for crazy cheap in season / dumpster dive a ton of perishable food.
• Donate to One Acre Fund, which provides training and capital to farmers (making them more productive and pulling them out of poverty) in various east African countries
• Donate to Bridges to Prosperity, which provides technical expertise, money, and volunteers, to help local people build and maintain their own footbridges in extremely isolated rural areas 
• joining r/solarpunk, and sharing links/ideas/art/music with the community. Also, upvoting stuff for greater visibility. There’s over 900 members!

menderash:

i can’t understand ppl who hate rats. “their tails are creepy!! there’s no fur on them!!!” ??? you don’t have fur on most of your creepy ass body either. “THEY HAVE LITTLE PEOPLE HANDS” YOU HAVE LITTLE PEOPLE HANDS TOO, stop hating. you’re weak. look at their sweet faces. they just want to love u.

aeliad:

kastlekaspbrak:

a-l-l-of-the-l-i-g-h-t-s:

swifternet:

prismatic-bell:

trippin-lazy:

If you are considering meeting up with someone online use this trick identify who really are who they claim to be:

1. Ask them to Skype
2. If they refuse or can’t for some reason ask for a current selfie
3. If they also refuse or can’t do not meet up with them
4. If they provide one ask them to send another with them holding 3 fingers up
5. If they refuse read step 3
6. If they provide a selfie where they show 3 fingers they are probably for real

(If you’re still unconvinced try again with them drawing something in their hand)

I SAY THIS FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY
please spread this message as more and more young people are lured out into situations where they get kidnapped because they weren’t 100% sure the person they were talking to was real.

ALSO IF YOU ARE UNDER THE AGE OF 18 MAKE SURE YOU STATE THE FOLLOWING:

“My [fill in trusted adult here] wants to come too. [pronoun] said we can do our own thing and [pronoun] will just sort of grab [pronoun] own table, but I wanted to let you know. Hey, if you have an adult coming too they could sit together!”

If hearing this freaks the other person out and they decline, TERMINATE ALL CONTACT. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to block. I’m 26 years old and if you tell me you’re coming with a friend or parent for your own safety, I will automatically say “hey, cool. Y’know, if you’re nervous we can just do Starbucks or something, I’m okay meeting in a busy place. That way your [adult/friend] can hang out, too, and they don’t have to pay for [admission, a movie ticket, whatever].” Your safety and comfort is important to me, and is important to any good person you meet online who wants to meet up IRL. In the early 2000s when I first started seeing online safety PSAs, this was a widely-spread tip. Use it.

And for the record, you can use this over the age of 18, too. I still won’t meet people from online except in public places. You never know–that person holding up three fingers and drawing a Pokemon on their palm could be some pervert’s child, niece, nephew, family friend’s kid who was encouraged to take some silly pictures. Always voice-verify and always meet in public, with another person if possible. 

Be smart and stay safe, kiddos. Nina loves you.

This is all so important for everyone and especially my younger followers.

Anyone who is being upfront with who they are and who you can trust will do whatever they need to do to make you and your parents/guardians comfortable. Hence why I am constantly requesting to too-busy-dancing13 to FaceTime her mom…

Please please please listen to this. Not everyone out there can be trusted.

FUCKING SIGNAL BOOST!!

I’m in my 30s. My long-time internet friend is also in her 30s. She lives in Chicago area. When a work trip took me out that way, we arranged to meet up.

In a public place.

With members of her family there.

You’re never too old for this kind of basic safety stuff. Don’t be too casual about it. I knew her for 12 years before we met in person and I was absolutely not insulted that she still wanted that extra layer of protection.

Anyone who blows off your desire to be safe isn’t really your friend and isn’t safe to meet.

sadiepickles:

“Don’t use your mental illness as an excuse” means “Change your behavior, apologize, and do better next time.” 

“Don’t use your mental illness as an excuse” DOES NOT mean “Your symptoms are your fault, your disorder is not even an explanation, and you are a bad person if you behave less than neurotypical”

botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

scientists: we replaced a plant’s secondary cell wall with another primary cell wall, making them Squishy like animal cells, but a little thicker so the plant can still survive!!!

me: nice!! how did that turn out??

scientists: 

i’ve gotten a few responses here asking for some clarification on this paper and why making essentially squishy plants was important enough to make it into the plant science section of nature, one of the most influential journals in the world, and i’d be happy to oblige and break this down a little!!

so to start off, plants have two kinds of membranes around their cells, while animals only have one. one of these is called the ‘plasma membrane’, which is a soft, squishy kind of membrane that we have as animals that just kind of holds everything in. the other kind that only plants have is called a ‘cell wall’, which in plant cells surrounds the plasma membrane to basically hold everything in even more, and is really rigid and hard instead of squishy. the cell wall is made of a strong substance called ‘cellulose’, which you prob have heard of before, which acts as a really strong support structure to hold up the plant and protect the cells. the cell wall has a lot of different functions, but one of the main ones is structural; the pressure between the cell wall and the water inside the plant’s plasma membrane forming ‘turgor pressure’, which keeps the plant upright (when a plant needs water, it’s turgor pressure goes down, and there isn’t enough water in the cells to push against the cell wall to hold it upright. this is what causes wilting!)

now here’s the problem with cellulose: it’s a BITCH to break down. in settings where people are trying to make biofuels and renewable oils from algae and plant materials (and being successful in limited amounts!!), cellulose is the biggest thing keeping the process from higher efficiency, making it harder for those techniques to keep up with fossil fuels. but removing the cell wall altogether wacks out the plant’s turgor pressure, upon which a TON of natural processes and biological functions in plants are based (turns out that maintaining water pressure is really important when you dont have like, blood to keep stuff going!! or a heart to move shit around!!). so we need some kind of hard thing for the plant cells to push against to keep up hydraulic pressure, but it cellulose is too hard for efficient use in sustainable fuels. 

which brings us to this study. im sure u can tell where this is going now. basically, these researchers were like, ‘what if we just added a second plasma membrane?? so its like, thicker, but there’s no cellulose???’. 

this worked well. like, really well. i have made an annotated version of some of their results: 

so in conclusion: this is a really cool paper, and not only did it show that it could be done, but they actually identified a ton of genes and transcription factors that could be modified to make replacement of a plant cell wall possible by other people. 

this is a huge generalization, of course- they have way more data in the paper here if y’all wanna see it for yourselves– but overall??? this technology could be really big in increasing the viability and efficiency in biofuels and sustainable biochemicals to be used in stuff like cosmetics, fabrics, plastics, etc. 

shipping-isnt-morality:

shinelikethunder:

nonbinarypastels:

so, thinking about the discourse regarding romanticizing Problematic things in fic—

when i read darkfic, i do not interpret the things happening in those stories as being romantic. i do not find these things appealing in the sense that they are things i would want to do in my life or have happen to me. no matter how explicitly detailed those stories are, i still do not find those stories to be an idealized version of life i want to strive towards having. i do not look at the things that happen in those stories and think “i want that, that’s something good to have” or at the characters and think “i want to be like that, that’s a good kind of person to be”.  

there is appeal to them as stories and they appeal to me in the sense that i find them entertaining and stimulating, but i do not at any point look at those works of fiction and find my perception at the idea of the same things happening in reality warped by that. i do not enjoy a graphic murder scene in a fic and then leave that story under the impression that murder is a good thing in real life. i do not get off to stories of bad things happening to people and then leave that story thinking it would be good for someone to do those things to me.

this is true even when the dark content in that fic is not condemned within the text. if there is no author’s note stating at the beginning of the story “the things that happen in this fic are bad”, no narrator coming in at the end to give a TED talk about morality, and no point in the middle where a character breaks down the wall, looks into the camera lens and explicity says “my behavior is bad and no one else should copy it” — if none of that happens, i still am able to understand that the content of that fic is not something i want to emulate, i still do not idealize it, i still do not want it to happen to me or to do it to anyone else.

if we define romanticization as “making something look more appealing than it actually is, making something be seen as an ideal” then i have never read a single darkfic — dead dove: do not eat or otherwise — that has romanticized a damn thing because

• can the content of those fics be considered romanticized if i don’t consider the content to be an ideal to strive toward?
• can it be considered romanticized if i don’t see the murder, the torture, the abuse as something that’s appealing outside of harmless titillating entertainment had in a safe environment?
• can it be considered romanticized if my perception of things in fiction does not affect my perception of those things in reality, if it does not make me thing those things are appealing in reality?
• can it be considered romanticized if the author does not consider it an ideal that’s appealing in real life and explicitly tags those fics with things like abuse, rape, etc, making it clear they’re aware of what is happening in the story?

in romanticization discourse, a lot of people are defining romanticization by fiction that features Bad Horrible No Good Things happening but not being explicitly condemned as being bad in the text.

there are two problems with this:

one is that something not being explicitly stated as being bad is not the same thing as that something being portrayed as being good or ideal

and two is that i don’t think the content of a fic has to be condemned within the text in order for us to realize that it’s not an ideal to aspire to because most of us already have a sense of ethics and morality which allow us to hold separate how we feel about things in fiction vs. how we feel about them in real life

• when bad things happen in fiction, do we really NEED to be told that they’re bad in explicit terms?
• when villains exist in fiction, do we really need for the hero to always win and for the villain to always be explicitly punished in the text in order to recognize that they are in fact a villain?
• when fics are tagged as containing abuse or rape or torture, do we really need an additional note that says “not only does this contain abuse, but abuse is bad in case you didn’t already know”?
• when we read these fictions which are rated explicit and marked as being for adults only, do we really need to be treated like children who need to have our hands held throughout the story, reminded at every opportunity that what we’re reading is wrong and nasty and not to be emulated in real life?
• do we not have brains and the ability to think for ourselves? do we not have our own ethics? do we not have our own morality? are we not capable of understanding that just because a fictional character is harmed in a fictional story that it does not mean that harming people in real life and being harmed in return are good things without being reminded of it at every single turn?

i think that MUCH of what makes something romanticized in fiction is not actually the content itself but the perception of readers towards that content. it’s in whether or not they find the content of that fiction to be more appealing than it actually is – to be an ideal they want to have or to be in real lie – and whether they can tell that the content of the fiction contains bad or unhealthy or harmful behavior, whether they can make that judgment, whether the behavior is explicitly stated as being so or not. 

it’s in whether or not a reader has critical thinking skills, media literacy, education about what healthy (and unhealthy) relationships look like, education about what abuse looks like, an ability to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and an ability to know what stories are for them and what stories are not for them and a willingness to avoid the ones that aren’t. 

You know it’s interesting, my knee-jerk reflex was to go “but this is all casually conflating how something is depicted with the hypothetical effects it’s assumed to have on the audience.” Which, yes, technically, to some extent… but only because it’s grappling with the massive equivocation the Fandom Police have silently gotten away with on the level of language itself. The extent of it didn’t come into sharp focus until I found myself frustrated by this post, then realized the roots of the frustration lay much deeper down, not in the post itself but in the problems it’s tackling.

Because IDK about anyone else, but to my ear “this work is romanticizes XYZ” is mostly about the work itself. The attitude it takes towards its subject matter. The way it chooses to present XYZ. As a sentence, it functions the same as “this work bungles the science its plot is based on” or “this work fixates on X to the point of downplaying Y”–it’s a description of how the story’s constructed, not an action the story’s performing on its audience. That’s in contrast to a word like “normalizes,” which means much more than “this work treats XYZ as normal”–it’s a claim of harmful action, an accusation of pressuring and bamboozling people into accepting XYZ as normal, or contributing to wider societal processes that do the same.

No matter how enthusiastically a story presents murder as normal, it can’t be accurately described as “normalizing murder” if not a single person walks away from it with their attitude towards murder the slightest bit changed. OTOH, I don’t think it’d be controversial to describe a show like Hannibal as (deliberately, gleefully) romanticizing murder and cannibalism. And that’s a description that applies totally independently of whether it gave any of its viewers an IRL hankering for human liver to go with their fava beans and Chianti. In fact, Hannibal is a classic counterexample in these arguments because its treatment of horror and taboo is so glammed-up, so unapologetically romantic, without any perceptible effect on audiences’ disapproval of real-life serial killers who gruesomely mutilate and then eat their victims.

But of course that’s the exact distinction antis want to obliterate. And even though I’ve been salty for ages about how indiscriminately they fling around “romanticizes,” “normalizes,” “trivializes,” “fetishizes,” “condones,” “promotes,” “perpetuates,” etc, as though they’re just interchangeable buzzwords that all mean “gotcha,” I hadn’t really contemplated whether that tactic might start obliterating the distinctions between those words for their audience as well. But of course it does. Even for those attuned to the shades of meaning, because after a certain threshold of well-poisoning it’s hard to be sure what anyone else is talking about when they use them.

Incidentally, my reference point for a fandom plagued with ludicrously romanticized, apparently genuine misconceptions about stalking and abuse has always been Phantom of the Opera. Not the fact that people ship the thing–I also see the appeal of shipping the thing! But the fact that traditionally, the mainstream position has been to furiously defend it as Super Duper Great, Happily Ever After, Passionate True Love, against anyone who dares allude to the trainwreck potential of all that murder, deception, controlling behavior, obsession, extortion, emotional terrorism, etc. IDK what the place is like these days, but at the point I was there, it had never not been a cesspit of apologism that extended well into distorted IRL beliefs. In other words, the exact bogeyman antis point at to scare us all into submission.

The thing is… looking back on it, what made it so horrifying wasn’t the worry that it would actively teach that stuff to impressionable teenagers. It was what it revealed about the views a staggeringly huge number of people already held about stalking and romance. Color me dubious about one schlocky Andrew Lloyd Webber musical’s ability to insert those views fully formed into a teenage girl’s head and persuade her of their legitimacy. The musical activated them, sure, and the fandom validated them to a truly disturbing degree, but there’s not exactly a shortage of other places for impressionable young’uns to pick that stuff up. Nuking the entire fandom and the source material from the face of the earth wouldn’t have done a solitary scrap of good for anyone’s understanding of abusive relationships. Just left a lot of teenagers stuck learning the same tripe from romcoms and bodice-rippers, minus the thought-provoking darkfic and the forums where they’d be exposed to counterarguments every time the same old ship wank started up again.

“Nuking the entire fandom and the source material from the face of the earth wouldn’t have done a solitary scrap of good for anyone’s understanding of abusive relationships.”

Wow, there’s my entire view on why anti-shipping isn’t activism in one sentence.