books & not books

non-exhaustive list of interests/possible subjects of this blog: speculative fiction, history, ecology, theater, animation, Russian language, acrobatics, historical armor technologies, costume construction, narrative construction, baking, stage combat, skating (ice), hockey (ice), illustration (scientific), illustration (maritime), illustration (all), urban planning, mycology,

[hope-for-the-planet]

First-of-its-kind study definitively shows that conservation actions are effective at halting and reversing biodiversity loss

A new study published online today, April 25, in the scientific journal Science provides the strongest evidence to date that not only is nat

From the article:

“If you look only at the trend of species declines, it would be easy to think that we’re failing to protect biodiversity, but you would not be looking at the full picture,” said Penny Langhammer, lead author of the study and Executive Vice President of Re:wild. “What we show with this paper is that conservation is, in fact, working to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. It is clear that conservation must be prioritized and receive significant additional resources and political support globally, while we simultaneously address the systemic drivers of biodiversity loss, such as unsustainable consumption and production.”

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.

[aetherograph]

We fixed it. We did fix it and we can fix it and we are fixing it and we WILL fix it!!!

Forty years ago there were zero condors in the wild.

There are over 300 condors now, free and wild and breeding by themselves without our help.

We did that. We did. Lots of people said "that's stupid, you won't succeed" but people made condor puppets and they said "fuck you we're gonna try anyway" and they fed the babies and raised them up wild and did their best with their big human brains and human cooperation and WE FIXED IT!!!!

YOU ARE NOT THE FIRST GENERATION TO CARE.

YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY PERSON WHO CARES.

IT IS NOT HOPELESS.

WE CAN FIX IT!!!!

[elexecution]

there are too many things happening this summer that i'm thinking we are going to need an extra 6-12 months of june and possibly another 3-4 months of july. probably no extra august as the problem should hopefully sort itself out by then. we are also looking into extending the day night cycle to 55 hours and extending the human lifespan to 10000 years.

[briannyssey]

also i seem to have developed a reputation among my family for being willing to die on any hill. This is patently absurd. Im willing to die on specific hills, of which there are many and in locations that strike witnesses as odd and arbitrary

[shutyourmoustache]

When my mother forgets a word, she is the queen of coming up with new words. Words that would take a third National Treasure movie to fully decipher. I was talking to her yesterday, and she said this: “You know the time for los jibbities is coming up. You must be so excited!” Oh, is it time for los jibbities already? I must have missed it on my calendar. Are we celebrating something? “Of course! We should all be celebrating, shouldn’t we?” OK, so los jibbities is a happy thing. It’s not like something is giving you the heebie-jeebies, which would have been my one and only guess. “Los heebie-jeebies? Now you’re making things up...and this is my show.” You’re right. The time for los jibbities is coming up. Is this a season? “Yes, the season for love. The season for pride.” OK, los jibbities. “Yeah, sound it out.” Los…jibbities. LGBTs! “Sí, mira cuz you’re gay!” “You couldn’t just say pride season? You couldn’t just… *laughs*

[party-gilmore]

HAPPY LOS JIBBITIES EVERYBODY!!!

[spankerella]

@ perfectunion

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[theonion]

[rabbiteclair]

auto immune disorders happen when the immune system ignores regulatory factors and begins attacking healthy bodily tissues, due to what scientists refer to as "sheer love of the game"

[longingforrotkehlchen]

"So the legend is true. The cylinder-wielding bird stalker does exist!"

Waldkäuze 🐣 (tawny owls) im Büsnauer Wiesental, Vaihingen.

[rarestsparkle]

i recommend telling yourself “this isn’t an experience i want to keep having” and stop entertaining things that are really detrimental to your health and don’t benefit you in anyway.

[the---hermit]

"Writing digital notes is faster and makes you more productive", sure whatever, but can you make medievalesque marginalia to point at important stuff?

[polyamorousmood]

It really says something that a lot of monogamous people consider polyamorous and aromantic to be "opposites" but every polyam person I know took one look at aromantics and said "they're just like me for real"

[silosworld]

Poly folks x aro folks in the sense that "alloromantic heterosexual monogamous people view love and sex as an entirely different entity than me, and that makes life kinda strange"

[rincent-van-uggh]

[aromanticofficial]

official aro-polyam solidarity post

[stealingpotatoes]

i don't know what older adults were on about when they said being a teenager was good <3

[leewardly]

Installed LibreOffice onto a new device, which I'd forgotten would mean that I once again need to add a bunch of words to its internal dictionary. A lot of those are proper nouns (...my own surname) and technical terms, which, like. Sure, that's to be expected.

(A little arbitrary at times. Why the hell do you not include "deoxyribonucleic" but suggest I might mean "oligonucleotide" in its place -- okay, well, I see that Tumblr's spellcheck has the same quirk, so if someone can explain that to me, that would be awesome.)

Anyway. The point is. The whole process has made me rediscover my favorite aspect of the LibreOffice Writer internal dictionary: it doesn't censor cursing. Does it know "pissclown"? No, but it readily suggests I might mean "piss-clown" or "piss clown." No pussyfooting around in the LibreOffice dictionary. Yes, it does suggest "duckweed" in place of "fuckwad," so maybe there's a tiny bit of pussyfooting, but the dictionary includes "fuck" from the start. It's not a suggestion, but it's always an option. Love a software program that's built with the assumption that I am a whole entire person making intentional choices with my word processing.

[cryptic-curation]

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

Some of the bleach burned thru the shirt bc this was my first time bleaching anything ever, but it kinda adds to it.

[clonerightsagenda]

I think this is just a trend everywhere but I've been very frustrated this week by how much admin work is being outsourced to me as the patient/customer.

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

I feel like at a certain point these constant fetch quests become unreasonable?? Is it too much to expect these groups to communicate with each other instead of making me run back and forth between them???

[clonerightsagenda]

Made this post and then the new property manager (who started on Monday and only finally emailed us today because I sent a vaguely professionally hostile email to her boss because I hadn't heard anything and was not convinced she existed) asked for a list of open action items which her predecessor should have had but apparently wasn't keeping track of, which I learned when I met her boss and provided her with the list of open action items, which I guess tragically died in a fire in the last 2 weeks since she was sitting at my kitchen table, being menaced by the skull. How many people's jobs am I doing now

[hlahlahlahlahly]

Executive Function Theft

The phrase arrived in my head so completely formed and concrete that I couldn’t believe it wasn’t already established in the lexicon, but at

[clonerightsagenda]

It has a name!!!

[pocketss]

Ummm she's literally sensitive :/

[azspot]

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

[santhipoma]