But all of this is itself awfully abstract. We have not mentioned Christ, who slams reality into place around us in a way that makes all talk about existence and being seem like evasions. I call myself a Christian because those abstract ideas about God are not enough. They don't touch suffering, about which we have much to discuss, and they don't take into account human relationships . . . You might say I am a Christian despite my understanding of God. Because I have known Christ.
Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian
for those like me who cannot install alternative android forks on their phone because the phone in question is thoroughly unrootable, I would recommend downloading anyapk on your phone while you still can. In their own words:
anyapk is a lightweight Android application installer that bypasses Google's developer verification requirements by using local ADB (Android Debug Bridge) connections. Smoothly install any APK file on your device without restrictions, gatekeepers, or corporate approval.
If you're reading this after Google's lockdown date and are unable to install anyapk the regular way, there is a method outlined on the github linked above which tells you how to install anyapk on your phone by plugging it into a computer with ADB installed on it. Once you have anyapk on your phone, you will not have to do that ever again (unless you delete anyapk off your phone)
[Description for the second image: a post from jrepin that reads:
"Sideloading" is the rentseeker word for "being able to run software of your choosing on a computing device you purchased". There is no reasonable case for an operating system developer having a say over what programs you run on your hardware.
--Eugen Rochko of Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115093185284473606]
Today I learned native lupine is nitrogen fixing!? I had no idea but I recognized those root nodules & did some research - theyre a good choice for so many disturbed areas
Fun fact — many are also edible and used as a food crop similar to soybeans worldwide (but some species are toxic so don’t try it out without doing your own research). Also, people with peanut allergies should be careful with eating lupine products as there’s the possibility of an allergic reaction
Hope you don’t mind me jumping on this post because I was literally just talking to someone about this, but if you’re in the US and going to plant lupines, please make sure they’re the ones native to your area! There are tons of different native lupines in the Western and very Southern parts of the US, but only one in the whole Northeastern and Midwestern US
The sundial (Lupinus perennis) is our only native lupine and is the only host plant for the endangered Karner Blue butterfly. Unfortunately, most people don’t realize how rare it is because they see lupines all the time! They’re all over roadsides and railroad tracks and sold at every nursery! Unfortunately they are bigleaf (or western) lupine (L. Polyphyllis), which outcompete or hybridize with our sundial lupines. Karner Blue butterfly caterpillars aren’t able to use bigleaf lupines or their hybrids as host plants. This further destroys any remaining habitat these butterflies have
It makes me so sad when people are happy about planting lupines for Karner Blue butterflies and I have to ruin it by telling them that despite what the advertising/label/employee/friend said, they actually have the wrong species 😕 So I want to share so more people know!
As promised, we're going to dive into some best practices for searching on JSTOR. This'll be a long one!
The first thing to note is that JSTOR is not Google, so searches should not be conducted in the same way.
More on that in this video:
Basic Search on JSTOR
To search for exact phrases, enclose the words within quotation marks, like "to be or not to be".
To construct a more effective search, utilize Boolean operators, such as "tea trade" AND china.
Advanced Searching on JSTOR
Utilize the drop-down menus to refine your search parameters, limiting them to the title, author, abstract, or caption text.
Combine search terms using Boolean operators like AND/OR/NOT and NEAR 5/10/25. The NEAR operator finds keyword combinations within 5, 10, or 25 words of each other. It applies only when searching for single keyword combinations, such as "cat NEAR 5 dog," but not for phrases like "domesticated cat" NEAR 5 dog.
Utilize the "Narrow by" options to search for articles exclusively, include/exclude book reviews, narrow your search to a specific time frame or language.
To focus your article search on specific disciplines and titles, select the appropriate checkboxes. Please note that discipline searching is currently limited to journal content, excluding ebooks from the search.
Finding Content You Have Access To
To discover downloadable articles, chapters, and pamphlets for reading, you have the option to narrow down your search to accessible content. Simply navigate to the Advanced Search page and locate the "Select an access type" feature, which offers the following choices:
All Content will show you all of the relevant search results on JSTOR, regardless of whether or not you can access it.
Content I can access will show you content you can download or read online. This will include Early Journal Content and journals/books publishers have made freely available.
Once you've refined your search, simply select an option that aligns with your needs and discover the most relevant items. Additionally, you have the option to further narrow down your search results after conducting an initial search. Look for this option located below the "access type" checkbox, situated at the bottom left-hand side of the page.
Additional resources
For more search recommendations, feel free to explore this page on JSTOR searching. There, you will find information on truncation, wildcards, and proximity, using fields, and metadata hyperlinks.
It has a huge variety of historical recipes from different regions, taken from manuscripts, transcribed and translated, and a whole section of notes about the context for the recipe. It's really fun and I AM going to try a couple of these recipes.
Look at how this lamb recipe is presented:
This is just such a fun way to learn more about historical foodways and discover traditional cuisine.
Look at all the filters you can use:
Maybe if I can forage some good blackberries this year, I can make a 300 year old recipe for blackberry wine!
it was a good week for testing which meant it was a slow week for me. most of my job is fixing the machine when it goes down. if it doesn't go down, i don't have much to do.
fortunately neither did marc. in a site full of ornery old bastards, he's the oldest and the orneriest, so it goes without saying that i enjoy spending time with him. he reminds me of my grandpa. hell, he reminds me of a lot of people. i've befriended enough grumpy old men that i've got a sort of momentum to it now - you know how it is, when you meet someone that reminds you of someone else you really like. you get to start that friendship off half built, because you already have an idea of how to like that guy, and some of that old warmth can be brought to the new friendship. a little ember to start the stove up with.
(i think that's one of the really undersold beauties of getting older. you stop viewing people as strangers and more like remixes of friends.)
anyway, i was sitting next to marc and we were talking about the future. i've got my eye on having kids sometime soon (year or two? hopefully?), and he's very happy for me. i've tried asking him for advice, but all he says is that he didn't do a great job with his own kids and they still turned out okay, so i should stress less and trust myself more. i hope he's right. he believes it, at least, and it's a hell of a thing to have the faith of an old man. his faith is hard won.
as for his plans, he's retiring at some point in the next six months, and is hoping to sell his home and buy something in florida. he's republican, so he views the state as paradise, and i'm not inclined to even try talking him out of it. it's his dream, you know? i know for a fact my paradise would be a lot of people's hell. life's funny like that.
still, we kept going on, and it was a good time, and then he reminisced about the last time he got close to quitting - back around 2020. our job required getting vaxxed, and he refused, and there was a big kerfuffle about it before the job actually backed down. i know there's not a lot of sympathy for the unvaxxed out here, but the man's 62. you get the shot when you're under 30 to protect the people around you, but when you're over 60, you're just getting it to protect yourself and it's hard to be mad at someone for kicking their own ass.
still gave me pause though. i knew he wasn't going to take it well, but half the job of collecting curmudgeons is keeping them around, so i said
hey. i'm sorry they bent your arm over it, but.
but.
you should really get that shot.
and he looked over at me, and i looked at him, and he actually spat. not on me, just the concrete, but it was enough to show that he was mad. then he walked away, as abrupt as anything.
i felt bad about it. i wasn't sure what i'd expected, when he was willing to lose his job over it before, but i'd been so invested in his dream of retirement - the idea of him sipping margaritias on a beach next to his wife, the wife he calls every day during lunch, the wife he says is the one thing in life he ever got right on the first try. the wife that almost divorced him back when he was in the airforce because he just wasn't home enough.
(but he can be home now.)
and then he mentioned the vax thing, and it was like seeing a pin hit a balloon. he works out every day and takes all sorts of crazy vitamins and is generally committed to getting the most out of his pension and his life. i didn't want this dumb weak point to be his achilles heel.
---
i wasn't actually sure how long marc would be mad at me. i've seen him stay mad at some people for weeks. i wasn't sure if being friends would make that time go up or down.
it went down. i'm glad it went down.
he stopped being mad about two days later. we were doing front end maintenance one morning, and it was just that simple mechanical rhythm - hex key, replace the anode sheets, punch some off-gassing holes, oil it up, put it back in - that put things at ease. it always does. people working there are too busy to remember grudges, and it has this sort of mandatory practical communication that helps smooth things over. it was going great, and then out of the blue he said babs, you gotta be careful giving advice. those shots come with complications. what would you do if i got that shot, had a stroke, and died?
and i don't know what answer he was expecting, but i just told him the truth, which is that i would be devastated. i'd feel like i killed him. i thought that was a pretty normal response, but he looked taken aback. he asked why i said it then, and i said i'd have felt the same if he died of covid. that's just life. sometimes, there's no way forward that doesn't risk some kind of regret.
we finished the tube after that, in a silence that felt heavier than peace but lighter than anger. it felt like the ball was back in marc's court. like it would be rude to take that turn from him.
we parted ways with a nod and didn't speak until the next day.
---
i was doing spreadsheet work when he found me again. standard paper engineering - thinking of things we might need and ordering them in batches, months ahead of time. it always feels a little like plugging holes in a dam with my fingers.
but he popped up, and we didn't even exchange pleasantries. he just said i'm gonna die one day, and you can't blame yourself for that.
which is a hell of a thing to just tell someone right off the bat.
so i said what
and he said babs, i am in my 60s. something is gonna get me eventually, and whether it's covid or heart disease, or a stroke, there will be something you could have said or done before. and that's okay. it's not your job to make me live forever.
and you know, he actually made a lot of sense. so i said
okay.
i'll keep your business yours. i just
you were talking about your retirement before this. and i want that for you very much. you've worked hard for 45 years, and you deserve a break. we're getting to sick season, and it would be the saddest fucking thing in the world if you got this close to winning the race then tripped in the last ten feet.
and we sat there a few moments longer. i wasn't sure what to say, and i wasn't sure what he'd say, but eventually he just shrugged and said
yeah
then he left. i figured that would be the end of it.
---
i did front end maintenance yesterday, after being gone a week. it's one of my favorite things to do. i like working with my hands. i really like working with my hands. i'm glad i went to college, but in a different life, i think i could've made a better electrician than an electrical engineer.
and at one step, when we were both hoisting the plate back onto the machine, his sleeve rode up, and i saw two bandaids on his arm.
we finished the install, and i was ready to go back when marc actually stopped me.
i got the shot, he said, almost embarrassed. like he'd been caught. and i knew he was gonna say something dumb about it, so i just cut him off by giving him a hug.
i was relieved. hugging old men is kind of like picking up cats. if they like you a lot, they'll tolerate it, but that's about it. we sat there maybe three beats before his hands went up, and then he gave me one overly-hard thump on the back. in my experience, this is how old men tell you that they're done, so i let him go.
carla talked me into it, he said, almost defensive. his wife. his one good decision.
tell her i said thanks, i said back.
trump got the shot too, he said, less defensive, but oddly pleading. like he was consoling himself.
like he was nervous.
then it's gotta be safe, i said, and he looked up at me, strangely searching, strangely vulnerable. i don't know exactly what he was looking for, but i guess he found it because after a few moments his shoulders relaxed.
Pre-manufacturing cultures will really be like, here is the most elegant and gorgeous outfit you can imagine, and it’s achieved entirely with rectangles, ropes, and pins.
Over and over again, across the world, in cultures that never even knew of each others’ existences. Just, rectangles, knots, and pins. And I love that for them.
if you read about any biology you can quickly lose touch with what is astonishing and miraculous vs what is mundane, from animals that steal chloroplasts to become photosynthetic, to cloning technology being old hat, to trees that didn’t biodegrade for tens of millions of years, to naturally occurring lateral gene transfer between vastly different species, to the creation of gametes from adult cells, to the ability of some cancers to induce blood vessel growth, to desert shrimp that lie dormant for years, to the sensitivity of human touch receptors, to the fact that human hardware has a latent ability to see UV but their corneas block those wavelengths, to birds that echolocate and live in caves, to human skin being covered in enzymes that destroy RNA, to individual trees becoming genetic tapestries branch by branch, to life forms that gain energy from the electron potential of metals in their environments, to plants that recognize their siblings and adjust their behavior accordingly when growing next to them, to metamorphosis
which is to say. All of it is miraculous. and all of it is mundane. biology is Chaos vs. Order locking horns forever
not everything in a story has to or should be "realistic" but in my opinion there's a level of illusion that should be maintained, and I think that's the actual problem that many people try to pinpoint with the "unrealistic" criticism. Dialogue shouldn't be written like an actual transcript of human speech, but should contribute to the illusion of a real person speaking. A character is a tool of the story, not a narrative, but we're trying to maintain the illusion that they are a person. Worldbuilding should exist to serve the story, not to be a perfect simulacrum of how every aspect of nature/society etc. would actually play out for real. But there should be the illusion that it could be real, that organizations and systems would operate in such a way, that people might behave in such a way.
in conclusion: "Is this realistic?" <<wrong question. "Does this serve the illusion or disrupt it?" <<now we're talking
girl who sat next to me at the coffee shop had that Tortured By Computer Work look in her eye so i turned to her and was like Are u doing research? and it turns out she (white) just started working as an indigenous liaison for an ecological wellness surveying company (hired bc she worked with the local nation for a year) so i was like OMG can i share resources with you. and whipped out my 1 million notes and academic papers on ethical Indigenous-settler relations/research and Indigenous perspectives on ecological restoration. she was like omg are u sure this is basically a whole course for free and i wanted to tear my shirt off liek YES!!!! I WANT TO PROMOTE LOW BARRIER EDUCATION TO ADVANCE DECOLONIZATION AND RECONCILIATION!!!!!!!!!!! STEP IN2 MY GOOGLE DOC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
here's a googoodrive folder containing learnings on Experiential Learning in Ecological Restoration annnddd Research Practice in Indigenous Contexts. each course folder contains a "![Course number] Notes" document as well as PDFs of all the text-based readings that the notes draw from :-)
i plan 2 make accessible the learnings from my other classes too but i think ill only have time to do all that anonymizing & reformatting once i graduate in a few months lol
I mean you meet these young people trapped in their classrooms or nuclear families in paved over neighborhoods, you are going to see them at the lowest points of forced routine, atomization, gutted autonomy, academic stress, you are going to see them at their worst. you’re going to see addictive behavior. bad social skills. lashing out. uncreativity. laziness and distraction. they do look totally cooked.
you need to take them into the woods
I do outdoor education work, and within minutes of any elementary to middle schooler getting free permission to mess around with their friends in a clearing, they’re curious and driven again. they’re asking each other questions and yeeting pinecones at trees (science) and using their bodies. sometimes for evil. as is developmentally right. they want to know the names of birds! they want to teach someone pokemon! they want to build stuff and kick stuff and tackle each other and you into the snow!
they’re basically fucking institutionalized for 90% of their lives but their spirits are alive. you need to take them into the woods you need to treat them like animals with powerful inner lives and they’ll show you they are.
and you, if you feel like you’re relating too much, remember that you can also take YOURSELF to the woods
