Winter is... You know.

Basically into all things Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Anime enjoyer. 30, he/him

[houndswillneverlie]

My first ever cosplay as Laios Touden was so much fun!!! Anime Boston was really cool, and filled with awesome art and cosplay 🥰

Photography by

@northstarhooligan on instagram https://www.instagram.com/northstarhooligan?igsh=NGp3MDhkY3VubjNl

[vultures-nest]

im studying histology and i just like the little guys that work so hard to keep our organisms up and running

[theriverbeyond]

tbh I can't stop thinking about how i went into Hadestown being like "this is a tragic love story based on a greek myth I enjoy :)" and I came out the other side covered in blood being like "this is a thesis about how capitalism inevitably leads to both personal and global ruin, and so we are duty bound to resist it even as we lose, again and again and again. no matter how impossible it feels or how many times we fail and hit a wall and fall, we try again"

[dykegrindr]

imagine your dad is the scandalously young arm candy girlfriend of a private eye who's a little bit flighty and deeply unserious and always wearing some kind of floozy garment well it happened to my friend holly march and worst of all they're both coming to career day

[maryoliveoil]

[taydivorce]

*scrolling tumblr* hmmm. i agree with the sentiment of this post, but the phrasing feels off to me. it doesn’t really have that Reblog factor, you know? *scrolls* oh good, a post that just says “i jerk off till my penis scrweam” . i better reblog this

[headspace-hotel]

I feel that "lawn care" as promoted in the USA can be considered some kind of pseudoscience.

It doesn't have the conspiracy-theory-adjacent qualities of virtually every other "pseudoscience," which makes me hesitant to call it that, but the theory and method of it is still full of totally unsupported junk.

[headspace-hotel]

Where do I start?

I'm a gardener and so are the majority of people I spend time around. If you are mowing 3+ times a week and regularly spending money on fertilizer, soil tests, herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides, you have chosen the most expensive, time consuming thing you could possibly do with your yard. Unless you are a farmer as your livelihood, NOTHING else you could grow is that high maintenance. Nothing.

Most turfgrasses are invasive species. I said it.

The practice of "nuking" your lawn (killing everything in it and "starting over")...If you have a so-called "weed problem" this is probably the worst thing you can do.

Listen to me very carefully: "Weed" seeds are everywhere. There is, at all times, a supply of seeds lying dormant in the soil, waiting for the right conditions to sprout. (It's called the "soil seed bank" and you can look it up.) They are capable of "waiting" for years, even decades. Furthermore, most "weed" species spread by wind, meaning you can't physically eliminate them from an outdoor area unless you...surround your entire yard with an incredibly fine mesh netting and never leave, I guess.

Heavy management will make your "weed" problem progressively worse and worse because those plants are specifically adapted to colonize barren areas that recently underwent disastrous events that killed off most life.

Basically all plants are adapted to live in the company of other organisms, and suffer when there are no other plants around. "Weeds" with deep taproots penetrate into and aerate the soil. Clover puts nitrogen in the ground that other plants need. Low ground covers keep the soil moist and stop the sun from baking your grass to a crisp.

The plant "taking over" your lawn is probably not killing your grass. Your grass is dying and it's being replaced by something more suited to the environment. This is supposed to happen.

Monocultures are notoriously susceptible to disease and mass die-offs. "Oh no a big patch of my lawn is dying!" Yeah, that happens when you plant monocultures. You set yourself up for this.

"Why is there a bare patch in my yard/why won't grass grow well here?" Because in nature, each plant has a relatively narrow range of conditions it likes to grow in, so other plants it might otherwise compete with can stick to their preferred conditions and nobody has to compete directly. Win-win. Not all parts of your yard have the exact same amount of sun, moisture, etc. Expecting the plant life to look the same is unrealistic.

Let me make this very clear: It is fully impossible to "solve" the problem of plants popping up in your yard that aren't your one favored variety of grass. You will be buying herbicides for the rest of your life, and it will get worse, not better, because willy-nilly use of herbicides is leading to plants developing herbicide resistance faster than we can come up with new herbicides.

[headspace-hotel]

@kidpixdeluxe-4

From my limited knowledge of ecology, "but this is what natives have been saying for YEARS" basically sums up literally all work that has been done with ecology in north america

[kayla-denker]

It is wild how pretty much everyone knows, thanks to the "dustbowl", that monocultures are bad. But then they all go obsess over the monocultures that they cultivate in front of their houses and wonder why its such high maintenance and always looking so ugly...

[puppygirllaika]

It's worth noting that we've actually known this since long before the dustbowl. The dustbowl didn't happen because we didn't understand that monocultures were bad, it happened specifically as a result of investment banking.

There are two main non-monocultural agricultural practices that we recognize today: Companion planting, and Rotation planting.

Companion planting is where various different crops are planted in close proximity to each other. This can mean seeding an entire field with multiple different types of seeds, fully mixed together, but this is fairly inefficient as you then typically have to sort the crops out from each other afterwards. The more common form is to plant rows or groups of the same plant next to rows or groups of another, because even if they're not fully intermixed you get most of the same benefits in terms of things like shade, soil moisture, pest control, pollinator attraction, soil chemistry, microbe ecology, and mycelial networking.

Rotation planting is where you plant fields of a monocultured crop, but you regularly rotate out which crop is planted in which field. This means you gain the benefit of much higher planting, caretaking, and harvesting efficiency, but you lose out on some of the benefits of companion planting. However, unlike true monocropping, you still gain massive improvements from soil quality. Rotation cropping, with the right mix of crops planted on the right cycle, still maintains the same or similar quality of soil chemistry and makeup, some of the fungal networks, as well as much of the soil ecology. If fields of different plants are being rotation cropped in close proximity, you also partially retain benefits like pollinator attraction and pest control, and with careful field design you can ensure good shade and water retention as well.

Companion planting predates the agricultural revolution (or is a part of its origin, depending on how you look at it). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors would spread the seeds of edible plants in places where they grew well, and would return to those places cyclically to reap the benefits and spread more seeds, even carrying seeds with them to new places with similar growing conditions. They spread seeds in much the same way they found them, with different plants that grew well together being seeded together. Rotation cropping came later, after the concept of dedicated growing areas has arisen, but it still dates back to the earliest days of agriculture. We didn't understand why it worked on a chemical level, but peoples all around the world found that they got bigger and better harvests, and maintained rich hummic soil, if they alternated between planting grains and legumes on a rotating cycle. So if, for example, you ate a lot of the ancient ancestors of quinoa and peanuts, planting field A with quinoa/wheat and field B with peanuts/peas one year, then planting field A with peanuts/peas and field B with quinoa/wheat the next year, would prevent the soil from becoming depleted.

Due to it's increased efficiency, many societies that valued high agricultural production, especially those in colder climates where food was far more scarce in the winter, opted for rotation cropping due to it's efficiency. this climate divide is a big part of why you see a lot more field-based agriculture in places like europe and northern asia, and less in traditional agricultural practices in equatorial climates like south america and africa. Rotation cropping was popular when people needed more food in less time, and companion planting was more popular in places where harvests were available year-round. During european colonization, europeans brought their rotation-cropping-based agricultural standards to the rest of the world, using warmer climates to produce more that could be shipped back to the imperial core, supplanting the companion planting practices used in those places. That's not to say that rotation cropping wasn't already being used in these warmer climates, it was, and was even the dominant form of agriculture in some warm-climate societies, it was lest less common, and tended to be smaller in scale, mainly due to the focus on production efficiency being less necessary. This was one of the deepest ways that colonialism decimated african and south american cultural practices, it changed what it meant to grow food, at a time when basically everyone grew food.

Colonialism is really the point where we start to see these ancient practices start to change. Colonizers only cared about soil health insofar as it allowed them to produce the crops they shipped back home and sold, which meant that the health of the soil would never be worth more to them then the cost of invading and taking over new land, which they could strip for all its nutrients, strip the people of all their labor, and leave an unprecedented kind of destruction in their wake. This is the birth of one of the most devastating evils in world history: Plantation Agriculture.

Plantation agriculture is where you grow crops for the sole purpose of selling them for a profit, instead of for direct or local consumption. People have been selling crops as long as commerce has existed, but they usually didn't plant massive monocrop farms just to sell off what they produced. Now, plantation agriculture didn't actually start with what most people think of as the colonial period today; the roman empire was creating the first plantations on colonized lands at the height of their imperial expansion, but as with so many things, colonial era europe looked at many of the worst things the romans did and said "hold my beer".

Planting and maintaining a large monocrop takes a lot of work, and before agricultural industrialization (we're getting there), that meant a lot of people. This was made all the worse by the fact that many of the high-value crops being produced by plantations, called "cash crops", were extremely resource and labor intensive. You can reduce the price of resources, of soil nutrients, by invading new lands and picking up and moving your plantation when the soil get depleted. Leave a dead zone in your wake and find new, fertile soil to use, and maybe come back to that once-dead place in 20 or 30 years, after the natural ecology has crept back in just enough to make it usable again, and kill it all over. That's how you save money on the resource. But if you have zero regard for human life or the intrinsic value of entire societies, you can make the labor cheap as well, nearly free in fact. And that's what they did. In order to make the plantations more profitable, in order to make cash crops a viable business, europeans spent hundreds of years enslaving untold millions, if not tens of millions, of people, and destroying countless cultures across four continents to do so.

I haven't gotten to the point yet, but I want to pause here and make sure you internalize this. It was never about a lack of knowledge or understanding. No one planting a monocrop has ever been under the illusion that it is a sustainable growing practice. It is knowingly, intentionally extractive. Extractive of the land, extractive of the environment, and extractive of the people. Monocrops were a way to wring the value out of stolen land and slaves. They were an invention colonialism and mercantilism, the forebearers of modern capitalism. Do not mistake them for the result of ignorance.

And now, back to our history lesson.

We're going to jump forward, through the colonial era, through the era of american plantation slavery, of cotton fields and sugar plantations that brutally stole the lives of millions and decimated the rich, fertile, river-fed lands of the south, and meet a man in the reconstruction era, one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known: George Washington Carver.

If you don't know anything else about him, you'll know him from elementary school as the "did you know black people invented peanut butter?" guy. I cannot begin to describe what an insult this is to his legacy. Carver was what we would today consider a botanist, or an agricultural biochemist. He did not "invent" peanut butter, but he did publish a recipe for it in one of his seventy-some-odd pamphlets which he produced for distribution to black farmers across the south, in order to help fill a massive education gap caused in large part by the USDA offering tons of agricultural education resources exclusively to white farmers.

Carver made countless discoveries about plants, agriculture, soil, ecology, and all number of similar topics, but his most significant contribution to the sum of all knowledge was the nitrogen cycle. Yeah, the whole cycle of the most important nutrient in soil and all living plants? the thing that makes rotation cropping work? that allows us to differentiate crops into nitrogen-takers and nitrogen fixers? He discovered that. His investigations into the root causes of effective agricultural practices lead him to the discovery of the nitrogen cycle, and how some plants, like grains, take up nitrogen from the soil, while other plants, like legumes, draw nitrogen in from the air and disperse it into the soil through their roots. That was all him.

The peanut butter factoid comes from a pamphlet he published on how to make use of nitrogen fixing crops. It was designed to encourage a return to rotation planting among black farmers in the south by creating and publicizing ways to use the crops that were less profitable. He also popularized the use of yams/sweet potatoes in the southern black community because he identified them as a nutrition-rich and highly flood-resistant crop that grew well in the boggy soils of florida, loisiana, and mississippi. Across his 70-ish pamphlets, he published farming techniques, recipes, ways to make value-added farm products, ways to make use of robust but unpopular crops, schedules for ensuring good family nutrition, and even home care tips. He also contributed his work to a series of traveling classrooms, donkey-pulled carts filled with educational materials that would travel around the south to predominantly black farming communities and teach people about all these same things in a hands-on environment. He was not only an incredible scientist, but an incredible scientific communicator, and he gave up a great deal of fame and prestige in favor of dedicating his life to the advancement of the rural black community. But his legacy has been butchered by two intertwined forces: racism, and industrial capitalism.

Much of carvers work, including his discovery of the nitrogen cycle, came about in the late 1800's through around 1920 (he died in 1943, at the age of 79). He lived just long enough to witness his discoveries be deeply and horribly perverted by the newly mechanized world of Industrial Agriculture. His discoveries would be used to fuel the entire industry of phosphorus fertilizers, followed by petroleum chemical fertilizers, which we still use to this day on most of our agricultural lands here in the US.

After the collapse of slavery as an institution, wealthy white landowners looked to new methods to produce large quantities of cash crops while paying a pittance for labor. The methods they landed on were sharecropping and tenant farming. This is where farmers (not landowners) were contracted to live on and work a patch of land, with the landowner taking a "cut" of the final crop (or the profits from the final crop.) Sharecropping was deeply exploitative, and the massive cuts taken by landowners typically left farmers with so little of the crop for themselves that they could not afford to take care of themselves. But, if they wanted to move away and get out of the situation... tough shit. you need money and resources to do that, and they didn't have any, so they were stuck on land they didn't own growing crops they didn't own to make money for someone else. it was the "next best thing" to plantation slavery for land owners, and it gave the owner the power to dictate what was planted, which was always whatever crop was of the greatest market value. And rotation cropping? That just eats into your profit margins.

This got really kicked into high gear when the economy started to collapse, at least for farmers. The boom and bust cycle of the food market that had followed world war one had left many farmers in poverty, and investment banks were more than happy to buy up the land, and turn the homesteaders of the west into tenant farmers, with promises of low crop share "rents" and the possibility that a few years of good harvests would let you save up enough to buy it back. Unsurprisingly, this was all bullshit.

Across the west, farmers found themselves trapped in a cycle of endlessly dinuting the soil in order to plant high-value cash crops like cotton, in order to cover what the bank was owed. As the soil lost more and more nutrients, more and more biodiversity, more and more capacity for water retention, soil turned to dirt, dirt turned to sand, and sand turned to dust, and dust turned to clouds. Some farmers of the era have described pleading with the land owners and the banks to give them a year or two to plant nitrogen fixers, but peas and peanuts don't make cotton money.

The dust bowl was a manmade ecological disaster on such a scale that it threatened the foundations of the United States itself, and it was for that reason that the department of soil conservation was established. Anywhere you live in the US, there's a good chance you have a Soil Conservation District (or just "CD") nearby. The US recognized that the country could quite literally fall apart if soil ecology wasn't preserved at a minimum level. Even still, this is a minimum level, and modern monocropping practices, regulated though they may be, still wreak havoc on the soil and do massive damage to their environments.

This is a bleak topic, and one that is unlikely to see revolution any time soon. But that being said, there's still some things you can do. Learning about the history is a good start. I, for one, highly recommend the book "Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement", by Dr. Monica M. White. It's a detailed deep dive into the deeply intertwined history of black americans and agriculture, from the slave trade and the early slave gardens planted on the edges of plantations, up through the work of Carver, through the often-overlooked rural side of the civil rights movement, through modern day form of black agricultural resistance, like the massive community farm D-Town Farm in detroit.

Beyond educating yourself and others, there's also policy positions you can impact, and your impact can be pretty significant at the local level. Not a lot of people are particularly aware of or knowlegable about their conservation districts, and most CDs include directors or boards of directors that are actually elected by the public. They tend to be small organizations, but can have a great deal of reach and influence in local soil conservation and agricultural policy. Go find the website of your local CD, advocate for programs and policies inside them, campaign for directors, or even run for the position yourself. You probably have a lot less competition then you think, unless you're in a major city with a big environmental movement.

I'll leave you with two things here: a link to the book i mentioned, and a picture of George Washington Carver and his glorious mustache. Take care <3

(end note: none of this is meant to argue against or refute what op or any of the other commenters said. This topic is a special interest of mine, and is something I consider a very important part of this general discussion. I don't think anyone was even implying that the dust bowl is the sole source of understanding on this point, but it seemed like a good opportunity to offer some wide education on this topic. If you read all this, thanks. i genuinely appreciate it.)

[daily-qpr]

Today’s QPR is: Murderbot and Perihelion/ART from The Murderbot Diaries

[cheysu1i]

HAIL MARY FULL OF GRACE (and very cool buttons)

Zoom in and look at all my screens look at em all

God i cant wait for this fucking movie

Bonus crunchy gif

[smeemos]

[smeemos]

five nights at smeemos

[formlab]

Nature loves you, Gizem Akdag, 2025

[gecko-with-a-greatsword]

*guy who doesn't know anything about sports and has never cared about sports in his life* hey did you know womens professional baseball is returning after 70 years and the games are going to be streamed for free on youtube and the season starts august 1st

[gecko-with-a-greatsword]

youtube link

Women's Pro Baseball League

Our time is now. The inaugural season of the WPBL begins August 1st, 2026.

website

[butch-ragh-barkrock]

I think this is so cool and it's awesome they're streaming games for free! I also think it's incredible that this picture is the one they used to advertise the opening day. It's like those videos where someone threatens the camera while their partner shows off their collection of rocks they found.

[werepires]

weemp weemp 🚀

[lesbianelsas]

Sesame Street Memory: Lucy Liu | #ThisIsMyStreet

Lucy Liu shares a heartfelt memory of learning to speak english by watching Sesame Street and finding a family within the cast. Share your favorite Sesame Street memory on social media with #ThisIsMyStreet!

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I was five years old when Sesame Street first aired in 1969. I remember coming home from kindergarten and watching the show in the afternoon, and then, the next day, kids talking about what Oscar had said over snack time (he was the first character for children I saw that was allowed to be grouchy and not be “bad”).

[apatosaurus]

Sesame Street celebrated a neighborhood that was multiracial and multicultural. When I was in preschool, that was my reality, too. Though I did and still do have a lot of cultural racism to unlearn, the extent to which I was able to learn how to be friends and neighbors with a diverse peer group was supported by Sesame Street. To be clear, this is why conservatives have wanted to destroy it from the beginning.

[iheartvelma]

The Mississippi State Commission for Educational Television briefly banned Sesame Street in 1970 with the flimsy excuse that Mississippians weren’t ready to see racially integrated neighborhoods. And that happened in a few other Southern states, including one where the owner of a local NBC affiliate chose to air it, for free, no ad revenue, because he thought people were ready for it — or needed to get comfortable with it. And these state ETV commissions eventually relented after getting a lot of negative publicity.

[pikaole]

Me and mom learned new English word.

[pikaole]

Wow…This is probably the most famous my posts on my Tumblr lol. 

This is what I drew after this situation 👇

[shadowpendragon]

nice tits

[seminaturals]

Thank you Mr. cloud final fantasy for being in the don’t kill yourself ad

[zzoupz]

ive caught myself speaking in 3s like rocky (good good good, etc) irl multiple times and often and idk if thats something i already do but didnt pay attention to until now or if rocky is actually rubbing his nasty carapace off on me

[capt-sievert]

i started doing the "question" thing if that makes you feel less alone

[zzoupz]

it is literally so addicting its like tone tags if they were awesome, observation

[zzoupz]