@swmngpools - Tumblr Blog

i just want to sip wine n look out the window of the penthouse suite at the city at 11pm listening to frank sinatra watching the snow fall is that too much to ask????

swmngpools

i just want to sip cider n look out the window of my house in the forest at 6am listening to bugs and birds sing watching the sun rise is that too much to ask????

am i back?

capricornsicle

Teen Wolf be like:

This is a funny scene

This is a serious scene

This is season 5

spikeface

Let’s not forget “this is a scene set in Mexico”

cinnamonroll-anon

You left him out

swmngpools

hey im rewatching rn, you forgot this is a scene set at night

headspace-hotel

How to begin a sustainable way of life

This is a draft of something I've been writing for a couple months. It is mainly focused on the culture of the USA. Feel free to repost or otherwise share, with or without credit.

Do not tell people what to do—help them do it!

Give the gift of relief from being forced to engage in society’s unsustainable ways of life.

“People need to eat more plant-based foods.” ->Talk about your favorite recipes, give others recipes, cook for them, and grow vegetables and plants in your garden and give them away as gifts.

“People need to repair their clothes.” -> Offer to repair others’ clothes, and teach people how to repair their clothes.

“People need to buy less clothes.” -> Give them old clothes that you don’t want, help them repair their clothes

“People need to buy less plastic stuff.” -> Learn to make things that can serve the same purpose, such as baskets, and give them as gifts. Let people borrow things you own so they don’t have to buy their own.

“People need to stop using leafblowers and other gas-guzzling machinery.” -> Offer to rake the leaves. You can use them as compost in your own garden.

“People need to be more educated about nature.”-> Learn about nature yourself. Tell people about nature. Be open about your love of creatures such as snakes, spiders, and frogs. Do not show awareness that this could be strange. You are not obligated to quiet down your enthusiasm for creepy crawlies to demonstrate awareness that it is weird. Point out at every opportunity how these animals are beneficial.

“People need to use cars less.” -> Offer rides to others whenever you must go somewhere. Whenever you are about to go to the store, ask your neighbor or your friend who lives along the way, “Is there anything you need from the store?”

You cannot control others’ behaviors, but you can free them from being controlled.

If you think to yourself, “But this would be so difficult to do!” ask yourself WHY? Why does your society coerce you into less sustainable ways of living, forcing you to consume excessively? After thinking about this, consider that it is less simple and easy than you thought to make more sustainable choices, so why would you judge others for not doing it?

Do not act alone—act with others!

Environmentally friendly behaviors that can be done alone, without collaborating with or consulting another person, are the least powerful of all. Whenever an “environmentally friendly” behavior is suggested, figure out “How can I give this as a gift?” or “How can I make this possible on the level of a whole community?”

“Personal choices” do not work because every single person has to make them individually. If you are focused on making your own personal choice, you are not focused on others. If you are not focused on others, you are not helping them. If nobody is helping each other, most people won’t be able to make the “personal choice.”

You inherently share an ecosystem with your neighbors

Start with your neighbors, the people physically close to you. You live on the same patch of land, containing roots from the same plants and trees. You can speak to them face to face without traveling, which means you can easily bring them physical things without using resources to travel.

Always talk to your neighbors and be friendly with them. Offer them favors unprompted and tell them about how your garden is doing. Do not be afraid to be annoying—a slightly annoying neighbor who is helpful, kind, and can be relied upon for a variety of favors or in times of need is a necessary and inevitable part of a good community. If you make the effort to be present in somebody’s life, they will have to put up with you on some occasions, but that is just life. We cannot rely on each other if we do not put up with each other.

Simply spending time with someone influences them for good

Every hour you spend outside with your neighbor is an hour your neighbor doesn’t spend watching Fox News. Every hour you spend talking with someone and interacting with them in the real world, eating real food and enjoying your real surroundings, is an hour you don’t spend only hearing a curated picture of what reality is like from social media.

Isolation makes it easy for people to become indoctrinated into extremist beliefs. When someone spends more time alone, watching TV, Youtube, or scrolling social media, than they do with others, their concept of what other people are like and what the world is like comes more from social media than real life. TV and online media are meant to influence you in a specific way. Simply restricting the access these influences have to yourself and others is helpful.

A garden is the source of many gifts

If you grow a garden, you can give your neighbors and friends the gift of food, plants, and crafted objects. This is one of the foundational ways to form community. When you give food, you provide support to others. When you give plants, you are encouraging and teaching about gardening. It is even better when you give recipes cooked from things you grew, or items crafted from things you grew. You can also give the gift of knowledge of how to grow these plants, cook these recipes, or craft these objects.

More on gift-giving

Some people are uncomfortable with receiving items or services as gifts. They want to feel like they are giving something back, instead of having obligation to return the favor hanging over them.

It can help to ask a simple favor that can be easily fulfilled. People generally like the feeling of helping someone else.

When you give someone a gift, it can help to say something like “Oh, I have too many of this thing to take care of/store/eat myself! Do you think you could take some?” This makes your neighbor feel like they are helping you.

When allowing others to borrow items, you might not get them back. Don’t worry about that. It just means the item found a place where it was needed the most. You can ask about the item if you think it might have been forgotten, and this can create an opportunity for a second meeting. But don’t press.

If the person you give to insists upon some form of payment, this is a good opportunity to negotiate a trade.

Ask to be given compostable or recyclable things

Ask your neighbor to save compostable scraps, biodegradable cardboard and paper products, and any other items that might be put to use. Use them in your own compost pile. Or, start a compost pile at the edge of the yard where you both can add to it. Remember that “wet” compost like vegetable and fruit bits needs to be mixed with twice as much of “dry” and “woody” compost like cardboard, leaves, small twigs, paper and wood bits.

Use the front yard for gardening

Overcome the cultural norm that the front yard is only decorative. Use the front yard for gardening so you can be seen by others enjoying your garden, and others can witness the demonstration of the possibilities of land. In the front yard, anything you do intentionally with your land can be witnessed. It also makes you a visible presence in your community.

Grow staple foods

Don’t just grow vegetables that cannot be the core component of a meal themselves. Grow potatoes, dry beans, black eyed peas and other nourishing, calorie-dense foods. Grow the ingredients of meals. You could even build a garden around a recipe.

Invite neighbors and friends over to eat food made from things you grew

Be sure to send them home with leftovers.

Grow plants for baskets

Containers are one of the fundamental human needs. If we had more containers, we wouldn’t need plastic so much. You can learn to make baskets, and to grow plants that provide the raw materials for baskets.

If someone rakes their leaves, ask to have the leaves

If you see someone putting leaves in bags, don’t be afraid to ask if you can have the leaves. More likely than not they will be happy to agree.

Collaborate with neighbors to plant things in the no-man’s-land of the property line

In the border land between your neighbor’s yard and your yard, it is almost always just mowed grass because no one can plant anything without it affecting their neighbor. But these border lands add up to a lot of space. It would be much better if you talked to your neighbor about what would be nice to plant there, and together created a plan for that space.

Give others the freedom to wander

Make it clear that you will not get mad if the neighbor’s kids play in your yard or run across it. Invite the neighbors onto your land as much as possible. Tell them they are allowed to spend time in a favored spot whenever they would like.

The power of the hand-made sign

If there is a yard sale, you always know about it because of the hand-drawn signs placed around. Therefore, a cookout or unwanted item exchange can be announced the same way. In rural areas I have seen hand-made signs that say: FIREWOOD or WE BUY GOATS or EGGS. This is one of the few technologies of community that remain in the USA. If someone who looks to buy and sell can put up a hand-made sign, why shouldn’t you?

Religious people or people with strong political opinions like to put signs everywhere. If they have the confidence and courage to do so, why shouldn’t you?

So if there is a message you would like everyone to see, use the simple power of the hand-made sign. Proclaim “BEE FRIENDLY ZONE!” above your pollinator garden with all the confidence of a religious fundamentalist billboard. Announce to the world, “VEGETABLES FREE TO ALL—JUST ASK!” “WE TAKE LEAVES—NO PESTICIDES.” Instead of YARD SALE, or perhaps in conjunction with YARD SALE, you can write, PLANT EXCHANGE or SEED SWAP or CLOTHING SWAP. Who can stop you?

Someone has to do it for society to change

Some of these ideas might be eccentric, strange, or even socially unacceptable, but there is no way to change what is normal except to move against it. Someone has to be weird. It might as well be you.

swmngpools

my aunt recently got a sign for her yard saying it’s an native garden and she said ever since she put that up she has gotten so many people asking about it.

brightlotusmoon

swmngpools

there’s not gonna be a revolution you stupid slut. there’s not even going to be a resistance

#like who is actually doing that?#this generation is not bold enough #the closest we got was the blm marches in 2020 and that was truly extenuating circumstances

i think if tumblr ppl were into football it would be a very special environment. like college football is experiencing something on the level of destiel canon but no one knows about it

i’ve decided that newsies was not cringe. however the way i acted about it may have been cringe. still under investigation. anyways here’s my fit for the musical theme on dti

the tumblr mobile app is making noises

i love it when my boss complains about how the purple loosestrife isn’t dying and i make a suggestion on switching herbicides and they say something to entertain me and now it’s two months later and they haven’t done anything. i will be taking their jobs trust.

headspace-hotel

many posts i want to make but i don't have the energy to make them in detail or to fend off the foolish misinterpretations.

I must tell y'all sometime about the Hybrid Cattails... Typha x glauca they are so fucking mean to her.,.god forbid women do anything

headspace-hotel

fuck it

there are multiple species of Cattails all around the world

USA's main one is the native Typha latifolia the broad leafed cattail. It likes fresh water

There is another cattail called Typha angustifolia the narrow leafed cattail. It likes brackish (kinda-salty) water. We thought it was invasive for a while but it is probably native too.

Recently, the two species of cattails have started to breed with each other and form a hybrid called Typha x glauca.

The Hybrid Cattail is considered to be invasive.

Wait a minute...

If both parents are native species, how is the offspring invasive?

Well, the theory is, Typha angustifolia likes brackish water and Typha latifolia likes fresh water, so the two species did not have much of an opportunity to meet and form offspring. UNTIL...

In the northern part of the USA, there is lots of snow in the winter, so when humans built roads to drive cars on, they needed a way to melt the snow so it would be safe to travel. So every winter, the northern roads are coated with massive quantities of salt.

But all that salt has to go somewhere...and that somewhere is into the waterways and wetlands.

So, in those polluted waterways and wetlands, a cattail that likes its water salty might have a grand old time. Therefore Typha angustifolia was able to move inland, hybridize with Typha latifolia, and form the hybrid cattail

That's the theory, anyway. We don't really know if it's true.

At any rate, the Hybrid Cattail displays hybrid vigor, the quality seen in some hybrids like mules where the offspring has superior qualities to either of its parents. It is much more aggressive and can grow to 12 feet tall and form MASSIVE stands of cattails that outcompete all other plants.

The Hybrid Cattail has also invented a weird new survival strategy. Cattails, as you may know, grow in the shallow water at the edges of ponds and marshes, and they spread by rhizomes, which are horizontal stems that grow buried in the mud.

Like with other plants, the roots of cattails need access to oxygen so they can do cellular respiration, and the leaves of cattails need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. This is why cattails usually can only grow in shallow water, and why most plants can't grow in water at all!

Wait, did you just say "usually?"

Well first I have to explain how cattails can grow in water. In a strategy similar to many other aquatic plants, cattails have air passages in the parts of their stems and leaves that grow underwater, so there can be exchange of gases needed for cellular respiration and photosynthesis. Make sense?

So cattail rhizomes have air pockets in them. And somehow, for some reason, the hybrid cattails have figured out that instead of growing rhizomes in the mud in the shallow water, they can just use the air pockets to make their rhizomes float on top of the water.

So the hybrid cattails can form enormous floating cattail mats far away from shore—and sometimes they break off from shore and form a floating cattail island in the middle of a lake

That's fucking awesome—

—I mean bad. Because they're invasive. Right? So we have to get rid of them? Right?

Yeah so... hybrid cattails are realy aggressive and dominate wetlands that used to be more diverse...but cattails are not bad. In fact they're keystone species. Lots of birds and amphibians NEED cattails for it to be a good habitat for them to breed. Cattails filter the water, protect against erosion, and they are even useful for just about every human need. The leaves are great materials for weaving, the juice has medicinal properties, the rhizome is starchy like a potato and edible, and the fluff forms great pillow stuffing. Native Americans used cattails for thousands of years.

But state websites and conservation organizations tell people hybrid cattails are invasive and you should kill them.

Hopefully in an environmentally friendly way, right?

...HERBICIDES?

Oh, of course, "be sure to follow the labels and make sure what you're using is safe to apply near waterways." As if people can be trusted to read and take the labels seriously—and as if the companies can be trusted to accurately label their toxic shit, or even test it on non-target organisms like aquatic invertebrates! And anyway, almost all common herbicides are NOT safe to use ANYWHERE near water because they are lethally toxic to aquatic life

Oh yeah by the way

Hybrid and native cattails are fucking impossible to tell apart in the field by looking. Even experts have a 75% failure rate. You have to basically sequence their DNA

so websites tell people to identify the cattails based on "aggressive behavior" even though that is completely subjective

same websites also say "basically every cattail in our state is hybrid"

cool. so a blank check to go killing a keystone species because it happens to be an aggressive super-cattail more powerful than regular cattails.

One site tells the story of how a conservation project rounded up a floating cattail island SIX ACRES BIG and...destroyed it.

wait, isn't this a plant that is edible and useful for literally everything? and you just fucking...wasted it? Six acres? Imagine just...burning six acres of an edible crop that also produces medicine and weaving materials. That's what you just did

imagine a crop that you can grow ON WATER

And it filters the water

I look on google scholar for articles about hybrid cattail. A recent article moans that just going on and killing a bunch of cattail isn't enough to Restore Nature Forever and you have to keep going in there and breaking up the cattail mats and ripping out the cattails to maintain biodiversity

So...nature produced a version of a useful crop that was a keystone part of nature, but now extra vigorous and strong, so that it would actually need to be regularly harvested by humans for biodiversity to thrive the best.

Listen

I think this is the opposite of a problem.

headspace-hotel

this is one of MANY examples where the silly eurocentric idea of "Pure Untouched Nature" and "Land used by Humans for human needs" being totally separate, just falls apart

We will need to harvest the cattails to maintain biodiversity...so why would we use poison on them or rip them out and destroy them, when they can take care of our needs?

Imagine destroying a perfectly good resource only to use farm land in some other place to fulfill your needs, because of silly ideas about Nature not being "For" you.

The cattail offers itself to us in the time of need...

headspace-hotel

This is also an example of how complicated the concept of "invasive species" can actually be

swmngpools

honestly i love the idea of harvesting cattail instead of using herbicides on it to kill it, but is this something that can really be done at a large scale? my company treats cattail at an extremely large scale with aquatic safe herbicides (trust me my boss is very wary of this stuff). many of our units are extremely difficult to access and require amphibious vehicles to treat them. and then we would have to actually distribute the product. not to mention the bioaccumulation of heavy metals.

vangoghcore

by johnkucko

nearlydark

June Lake, August 2024

🎞️Harman Phoenix 200

iminthetunnels

ur future nurse is using chapgpt to glide thru school u better take care of urself

lucyaudley

Yep. This is terrifying. I’ve caught nursing majors, engineering majors, architecture majors relying on ChatGPT to do their homework. These are people who need to know their field well to ensure people don’t die and they’re letting a glorified algorithm cheat them through school. It’s so dangerous

redwinterroses

hey. hi. I work in academia. and there are a lot of student-age folks on this site.

don't do this. don't use genAI. even if your professors give you permission. even if they ask for it or suggest it. if they do anything short of directly requiring it (and I weep, because I've already seen assignments that require it) don't touch that crap. if they do require it, stick it to them. be as maliciously compliant as possible. be a nightmare.

I know it might sound easier right now -- just plug in your assignment and get the answers. you don't care about this class anyway, it's not for your major, you don't see the value of the assignment.

but for your own sake, for the sake of your education and mind, and for the sake of the future world we want to have: learn the stuff. you are not as stupid as the corporate bizzaro kings who want to rule the world think you are, so don't give them reasons to believe it.

and odds are good genAI is gonna give you corrupted info anyway -- more and moreso as the machines cannibalize themselves.

just don't do it. not even "I just do it for XYZ--" no. stop. there is no valid use of generative AI, and even using it for memes or lolz feeds the system and directly feeds the pockets of the people who want to replace you anyway.

aaaaaadhd

Rage reblogging this. Yesterday i got into an argument with one of my college friends who is using chatGPT to do all her work. We're psychology students. The whole group chat laughed my arguments off as if they didn't matter because "she's an artist, of course she's anti-AI" and i had to deal with it. This is a warning. If your therapist graduated in 2023/2024, ask about their opinions on chatGPT. They might lie to you if you ask "did you use it to graduate" directly, but try to make jokes about it and play it cool. If they're into it, DROP OFF. FIND A NEW ONE. Do not trust your brain to someone who didn't bother to use theirs.

men shouldn’t feel bad if their ex girlfriend says she’s a lesbian after ending the relationship. however he should feel very ashamed if she says she’s lesbian, then a few months later says she’s bi. that’s embarrassing and he should have a period is self reflection after that

dragoncarrion

you tell a bitch to keep their cat indoors and suddenly their town is the first in the world to have eradicated every viral, bacterial and parasitic disease, they invented completely harmless cars, dogs and predators dont exist either but somehow the native songbird population is fine since the cats in this place have lost the hunting instinct, there's no pollutants or toxic plants and human cruelty has ceased to exist. and mr mittens has a chip in his brain that will explode if he doesnt go outside 10 hours of the day

skullamity-deactivated20250823

It is for this specific reason that I CANNOT post on our local Facebook group. Every few days there's a post from someone new that that is basically "has anyone seen our outdoor cat? 1.5 years old, usually comes home every day for dinner but we haven't seen him this week. Has someone thought him a stray and brought him inside? Just let him out, he knows where he lives!" and I have to shut the app down to prevent myself from responding .

We live in the country! We have coyotes you stupid asshole! Every night I can hear them in the trees across the street eviscerating rabbits, why do you think your cat can outsmart and outrun a whole pack of them? We also have cars! Parasites! Hawks! People who let their dogs free-roam on their property! People setting out poison! Crop spraying! Active cargo train tracks! If you don't want to be in this cycle of getting a new cat after the old one goes missing several times a year, THEN MAYBE KEEP YOUR CAT INDOORS! And if you don't want to or can't afford keeping your cat up to date on shots, getting it fixed or cleaning a litter box, you don't actually need to have a cat! You can just not have a cat! Nobody is forcing you to repeatedly get new free barn kittens to neglect, you can just get a pet that is more suitable to your circumstances or not have one at all!

Also, to add, because I saw this in the tags:

Farm cats are just as susceptible to being predated upon by coyotes and hawks, getting parasites and also rabies since they are direclty interacting with vermin. Their rates of actually catching and consuming mice are also up for debate.

If you desperately need to control vermin population in a farm scenario, you are better off getting and training a rat terrier who will hunt and kill vermin and bring them to you to be rewarded rather than eat them, are infinitely more trainable and have actual recall, and can be trained to leave smaller livestock like chickens alone the same way you train guardian breeds to not fuck with your chickens. You can also keep them indoors at night during coyote hours and let your guardian dog be in charge.

I know some rescues will adopt out working cats, usually ferals that will not do well indoors, but giving them a fancy title will not keep them safe. If they are outdoors, they're exactly as safe as any other outdoor cat in the area who doesn't have a job, which is to say not at all. Are they safer in the country than in the city where they are more likely to be pancake by a car, just by virtue of there being less traffic? Sure. But it's still not good for them, or your local songbird or turtle hatchling populations.

todaysbird

The really tricky part is that, no matter your viewpoint, there is no outcome where your outdoor cat isn’t negatively impacting the ecosystem. Even if you take good care of them otherwise, even if your area is ‘safe’, even if they’re a working cat.