Studious Octopus

Extra ramblings of a thirty something cephalopod.

[studiousoctopus]

Myself and @and-so-begins after finishing Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity.

 Like...Zelda repressed the memory of losing her favourite toy/Terrako after her mother died that her dad took from her because she needed to grow up I guess. Jeez. 🙃

[studiousoctopus]

Part two of my...things you can definitely see while painting...Layers of Fear. This time it’s a fish, and yeah I guess it’s a lot clearer than the dog.

There was definitely a dog though.

[studiousoctopus]

We started playing Layer’s of Fear over on YouTube, and I stand by my original comment - there’s is definitely a dog when you do the first layer...of Fear!

Edited to add: you can now see the part of the play through when we actually see this in the canvas, since it wasn’t actually until the second episode!

[teddy-stonehill]

This month I’ve decided to participate in an event called “October,” where for every day in October I’m going to experience a day in October.

Here’s the prompt list I’m using in case anyone wants to join me in this challenge:

Next month I’m thinking of trying out the “No November November” challenge, where I’ll refrain from experiencing November for the whole month of November.

[studiousoctopus]

Here's to the first day of participating in October! I went out for a walk, there were crispy leaves and everything. 😂

[and-so-begins]

Mining that rich vein of people who love Death Stranding and know the lyrics to Cifford the big red dog.

[and-so-begins]

We’re playing the 2019 remake of the classic survival horror game Resident Evil 2. Recorded in 1080p at 30fps on the PS4, Peter is playing Leon in the First Scenario and both Peter and Michaela are commentating.

We start off our Resident Evil 2019 play through with rookie cop / incurable flirt Leon S. Kennedy.

Website: http://andsobegins.com/

Michaela’s website: http://www.studiousoctopus.com/

[zerachielamora]

SOMA Vday cards!

[studiousoctopus]

@and-so-begins

[and-so-begins]

Hang in there!

[studiousoctopus]

[studiousoctopus]

Tumblr's adult content ban dismays some users: 'It was a safe space'

Site was platform for some in LGBT community to share their struggles and triumphs

You made the news, Tumblr. :p

[legendarycollectiongalaxysworld]

[studiousoctopus]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2018/nov/30/minister-blocks-export-of-34m-jmw-turner-painting

So, we’re temporarily blocking the removal of a Turner painting from the UK to someone who actually bought it because it’s too important to the UK...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/20/easter-island-british-museum-return-moai-statue

But the UK can’t give other countries back their things because...well...we like how much we get to make money off them? Oh, sorry no - we’re supposed to pretend we’re “taking care of it” better than anyone else could...like the people who would desperately appreciate it as their own history. 

I don’t like to use the phrase “Have your cake and eat” mostly because cake is literally for eating...but this feels very much like we want to have our cake and eat it.

[studiousoctopus]

'It's nothing like a broken leg': why I'm done with the mental health conversation

It’s never been easier to open up – but hashtag healthcare doesn’t help people like me

Really great Guardian article that gets to...really, the main problem I have with I think everything in the UK and maybe the world atm. I think we’re all aware of the problem - and we know the solution as well. It’s money into services that help people and for the government to stop worshipping at the alter of Business.

[airyairyquitecontrary-deactivat]

Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong

For decades, the medical community has ignored mountains of evidence to wage a cruel and futile war on fat people, poisoning public percepti

While I did in fact already know the main points of the article — that weight is not a meaningful measure of health, that heavy people can be healthy and slim ones unhealthy, that dieting is ineffective beyond the short term and actually primes the body to regain weight and keep it on, that most common approaches to obesity reduction just make people feel guilty and gross while ignoring any health benefits they may get from a change of diet or activity if they don’t come with major weight loss — it’s an interesting article with a lot of supporting information. Plus a New Zealand researcher is quoted, so go Kiwi.

[studiousoctopus]

My copy of Sarah Graley & Stef Purenins' @oursuperadventure Our Super Adventure Video Games and Pizza Parties arrived today! I backed their most recent Kickstarter to get this super cute book, with postcards, stickers and pin and it looks amazing! I've been following this comic for...I guess years at this point and if you haven’t been reading it, you should. I backed the original Our Super Adventure printed book in 2015 and even still have the stickers and cards from that. I'm terrible for hoarding cute things and never actually using them up. How could I use them? Ahhh. Anyway! The quality of the print and items is top notch again, and the comic is always amazing - I love their cute, dorky, funny sense of humour and sometimes the little comics almost remind me of myself and my own BF.

Looking forward to the next book maybe in another few years ? and I'm hoping I’ll be able to pick up a copy of the new 13th Doctor Who comic that Sarah did the cover for too - so cool!

[studiousoctopus]

It's time to become a baby cat.

[kawuli]

This person is my new best friend

Farming systems need to fit into their natural and social environment. Sometimes we describe this as a socio-ecological niche.

[systlin]

Caption; 

In a minute.

So, taking it that you said you live in Arizona and “your family has a farm in Chihuahua,” A quick congratulations are in order. You’re an absentee landowner! You’re right at the peak of farming’s social pyramid. Living the dream.

So you probably don’t participate in the day-to-day management, you just collect checks. Pretty common situation for absentee landlords. From that distance, it’s understandable that you have a poor grasp on water, land, and how they play out in various types of agriculture.

But let’s take a step back.

Lots of cultures have used low or no meat diets. The Ganges valley, ancient Egypt, China, much of early Europe, ect.

Notice anything in common there?

They’re all very, very wet. Plants that are edible for humans grow readily.

They also had intense hierarchies where elites could just tell the lower classes they weren’t allowed to eat meat-whether via religious teachings, custom, or just straight-up economic exploitation to where animal protein was unattainable. But that’s a whole different discussion.

On the other hand, lots of cultures have used mostly or all animal diets.

E.G. The Bedouin, Mongols, Maasai, Inuit, ect.

What do these have in common? They’re in places that are either very dry or very cold. Either the plants that grow are very sparse & tough, or none at all.

Humans can only digest specific types of plant matter. We need tender stems, leaves & fruit; enlarged seeds, or energy storing roots.

The entire rest of the plant is inedible for us. Stalk, branch, dry leaves, ect.

And without intense irrigation, the only plants that grow in dry areas are entirely made of things that humans can’t digest. They’re almost entirely cellulose. Tough stalks, fibrous leaves covered in wax and hair, thorns, ect.

That’s why we call these areas ‘scrub’. The only use humans can make of the natural vegetation is to scrub pots.

But…cows, sheep, goats, horses, bison, deer, camels & other ruminants can digest all of it.

That’s what those 3 and 4 chambered stomachs are for. These animals GI tracts are fermentation chambers full of microflora that break long, tough cellulose molecules down into sugars and fatty acids that the cow can use.

We can’t do that. We eat straw, we just poop out straw.

That’s why people living in deserts, scrub & dry grasslands aren’t vegetarian. They’d starve. They kept close to the animals that can digest what grows there; ruminants.

(The oceanic food chain that Inuit & other maritime peoples are looped into is a whole ‘nother discussion.)

Failure to recognize the role of local environment in diet is a major oversight in the vegetarian community at large, so again, no personal blame here.

Traditional vegetarian societies are trotted out to showcase that low/no meat diets are possible. But it’s done w/o recognition as to why ‘those particular’ societies did it, and others did not.

Paying attention to local environment is a huge part of sustainability, and yet sustainability movements don’t always do so well at that.

We can also fall short by failing to recognize that for dry regions, the bottleneck in productivity isn’t land, it’s water.

As an absentee landowner, you may or may not be aware of how much irrigation water it takes to grow vegetables in a desert. Math time.

Let’s start w. cows. Best figures for cow carrying capacity in landscape similar to Chihuahua are for dry part of CO. Double that for Chihuahua’s longer growing season, and 10 cows would need about 73 acres to live on (wild scrub w no irrigation.)

Cool, so we don’t have to irrigate to feed those cows. All we have to do is give them drinking water. How much? A cow needs about 18.5 gal/day, so 10 of them for a year would need about 67,000 gallons.

67,000 gallons is a decent amount of water.

Now let’s look at how much it takes to grow vegetables on that same land.

Most plant crops need about an acre-inch of water per week.

For the non-farmers and absentee landlords following along, an acre-inch is just how much water it takes to cover an acre of land 1” deep.

It’s about 27,000 gallons.

An acre of crops needs that every single week.

Chihuahua’s got this amazing long growing season. So let’s say a veggie, grain, soybean or other plant protein farm in Chihuahua’s got crops in the ground 40 weeks out of the year.

73 acres x 40 weeks x 27,000 gallons/week = 79 MILLION gallons of water.

That’s a thousand times more water.

It takes a thousand times more water to grow an acre of crops for human consumption, than it takes to grow an acre of cow on wild range.

Again, as an absentee farm owner you may or may not be aware already. But for audience at home, most of Chihuahua’s irrigation water comes from the Rio Conchos.

The river’s drying up so hard that it’s the subject of a dedicated WWF preservation project.

“But that’s not a fair comparison. An acre of crops can feed 10x as many people as an acre of cattle.”

Exactly. A crop-only diet can feed 10x as many people. But it takes 1000x as much water.

In places where there’s limited land and a surplus of water, it makes a lot of sense to optimize for land, so there, grow & eat crops.

And in places where there’s a lot of land and limited water, it makes sense to optimize for water, So there, grow & eat ruminants.

It’s really interesting to me that the conversation around vegetarianism & the environment is so strongly centered on assumptions that every place in the world is on the limited land/surplus plan.

You know what region that describes really well? Northwestern Europe.

In many ways, viewing low/no meat diets as the One True Sustainable Way is very much a vestige of colonialism. It found a farmway that works really well in NW Europe, assumed it must be universal, and tries to apply it to places where it absolutely does not pencil out.

[warmdrpepper]