@azhurae - Tumblr Blog

text: [ “Some of you have forgotten that only three years ago you were perfectly capable of writing an essay, writing a eulogy, telling a bedtime story to a child, and it should worry you that powerful companies have convinced us we can’t do things we’ve been doing for 5000 years.” ]

rederiswrites

Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.

It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.

It's rude.

headspace-hotel

speaking of characteristics of old-growth forests, the cycles of great old trees living and dying create effects on the landscape that cannot be fully replicated once destroyed.

there are multiple ways for a tree to die, each with their own impacts on the ecosystem. Many trees die standing, becoming starkly bare pillars of standing deadwood with increasingly fewer branches and more sharply whitened surfaces as the bark falls off and the branches break, the smaller branches first and then the larger ones. Standing deadwood is vital for housing lots and lots of bird species and it also has an undeniable sexiness and charisma

Trees broken by wind, snapping off at some point up the trunk, are often hollow in the middle from heart rot fungi. I don't think the fungi actually kill the tree, since the center of the tree (the heartwood) is dead anyways, but they do structurally weaken it.

One of the most dramatic tree deaths is windthrow. This happens to large trees that are solid all the way through and not easily broken by the forces of wind; instead, the roots are wrenched violently out of the ground, creating a bowl-shaped hole in the ground with a huge mound of twisted tree roots standing 5 or 6 feet tall next to it.

The death of a tree by windthrow feels very sad, because the tree seemed to be thriving up until that point, but the effect on the ecosystem is very fascinating. The hole in the ground where the root ball was torn up creates a shaded, sheltered area, sometimes filling with water to become a small pool. The root ball itself, right next to it, becomes a tall pile of soil and decomposing wood.

When walking in the forest, I often notice strange mounds rising from the layer of leaf litter, covered in lush carpets of moss, like bustling moss metropolises rising out of lowlands that only have scattered moss towns. Elevated from the forest floor, the moss-hills do not become covered with leaf litter. In some cases, these distinctive moss-hills are still visibly connected to the fallen trunk of a windthrown tree; in other cases, the tree trunk has almost completely decayed, and only the mound created by the root ball remains.

I read once in an article that the creation of humps and valleys by the windthrown tree roots is characteristic of old growth forests. That is, the forest has existed so long, with trees living majestically and dying violently in it, that the ground is no longer a smooth plane, but humpy and bumpy and pitted and pooled from centuries of trees dying by windthrow.

My observations seem to agree that these windthrown-tree-humps have unique ecology, particularly in terms of their thriving moss colonies that remain even after the tree that originally died has rotted away. They would create a million little variations on light and moisture level, gathering leaf litter in some places and keeping it away from others. Variations create multiplying amounts of biodiversity due to the increased amount of niches to fill.

Not to mention that hills and valleys increase the total surface area of the forest floor, creating more forest per forest.

lilylizard

The humps and valleys are also called pits and mounds or pillows and cradles! For anybody that's interested in a pretty quick primer on the phenomenon, ecologist Tom Wessels talks about it in the first part of this 3-part series on youtube

joy-haver

This also leads to huge variations in forest structure depending on which tree species were present at different times in the life of that forest.

In my area, one of the first tall trees to shoot up after land is disturbed is the water oak (Quercus nigra. They get 50-70ft tall and 3 feet in diameter in about 50 years. They often have very, very shallow root systems. Because of this, they fall over faster than other trees. They are also more prone to disease, and hollow out from the center faster and more often, and are likely to have dead sections on loving trees, providing even more unique habitat.

So some of our forests that are only 50 years old have old-growth-characteristics because of these trees. And then they fall, or otherwise die, leaving room for our true old growth species to rise up. But the pits and mounds of these fallen early-risers are also shaped differently than those of more deeprooted species. They are shallower pools or valleys, and sometimes form a wall that is perpendicular to the forest floor - completely vertical to the ground.

This is just one example, but understanding it, we can see that the predominance of different species in a forest can drastically change its microclimates and topography! Different species rot in different ways, hollow in different ways, and form different shapes on the landscape. If there are lots of different tree species in your area, then the different proportions they grow in, die in, fall in, and the different timings at which they do so, offer an endless aboundment of variety.

This is why no two forests are the same, and no single wild area is ever truly replaceable, or interchangeable. Because each has developed entirely differently, with so many little factors playing in.

Photo id: 4 photos of a 6ft tall woman standing by an uprooted tree. The wall of roots completely is vertical and flat, perpendicular to the ground, and is several feet taller than her.

analogue-dragon

Hey op standing deadwood has an undeniable what now?

headspace-hotel

SEXINESS

michaelmilkers

i’ve been thinking about this video nonstop since the first time i saw it

the jaunty walk perfectly in time with the music. the tip of the hat the unaware or uncaring bystanders. the shaky camera with random zooming. the fact that this is seemingly happening in a park. this is peak media i can’t get over it

byjove

re: last night’s Incident

if you ever see me post an AI generated image, please assume it is because I am fucking stupid and not because I support and use generative AI. the search results on many search engines and picture sharing websites are absolutely infested with AI and I do my very best to avoid AI generated images but there is always the possibility that I will not notice because, again, I am not terribly observant and I don’t have good eyesight. I know it is frustrating and I know it is my responsibility to look into the image source but things will slip through the cracks, please inform me instead of assuming I know

arimiadev

you should play my bl visual novel I made by myself about cults, killing, and killing cults while it's on sale

You killed him once before. Don't make the same mistake twice. A melancholic boys love visual novel about killing cults and your past confro

mbrainspaz

idk what neurodivergent young adult needs to hear this but you are NOT supposed to give 100% at your job. I've gotten more promotions and raises since I started giving 40-60%, which my evil CEO uncle informed me is what bosses actually expect when they say 110%. My mental health has improved tremendously. I've spent 2 out of 5 workdays secretly writing my novel for the last 2 years and I've never been more respected and appreciated. Also--when you see glaring wasteful errors in the company's operating systems, say absolutely nothing! Embrace inefficiency. It is your friend in this capitalist hellscape.

hunybody

please read this substack about pantone choosing cloud dancer for color of the year 2026

three--rings

No really, you should read it.

themaniacisinthemailbox

weusedtobegiants

All peoples are driven to the point of eating their gods after a time: it's the old greed for a plateful of outer space, that craving for darkness, the lust to feel what it does to you when your teeth meet in divinity, in the flesh, when you swallow it down and you can see with its own cold eyes, look out through murder.

Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems II: 1976 - 1986

twilightarcade

looper

aidashakur

velvetvexations

zoesupreme

sometimes the nut doesn't bring any clarity at all no matter how hard you bust it. the delirium only deepens.

zoesupreme

man...

silentwalrus1

“FMA is bad because it portrays war criminals as sympathetic, likable people” bro that’s the point. That’s the whole point. That is THE point. Did you think Ethnic Cleanser is some kind of special category of person that gets separated away from all the Good People at birth? Did you think there’s some kind of barn full of Genocide Doers that only gets deployed into the general public during world wars? Did you think assholes who do terrible shit in real life are never charming or likable or capable of doing good things and helping people? One of the best parts of FMA is how we the audience realize that some of our core protags have made irredeemable choices, and we have to reckon with the fact that they’re still people, with the unalienable rights and qualities thereof. Sorry if the Problematics aren’t constantly wearing a dunce cap and a list of all their crimes and this makes the media incomprehensible to you