Honestly the mere fact that some people refer to Daddy Long Legs as “harvestmen” is creepier than 90% of all deliberately created horror but like the worst part is that the alternative is calling them Daddy Long Legs
True harvestmen, and not cellar spiders which are the other Daddy Long Legs, are truly omnivorous- known to eat everything from spiders, to fecal matter, to leaves and fungus… But one of the singularly most interesting habits of a particular European species is their almost symbiotic relationship with beehives– particularly man-made beehives. When a bee dies inside the hives, workers will remove the the corpse to just outside the hive just before dark. And the harvestmen? Well, they live up to their name.
💋🎺💗 it's the #WAPiversary lmao, and Wet Bossa Nova is my first ever mashup! And of course I had to make an animated loop to make it feel fancy lol You can watch it on YouTube here. Enjoy!
Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!
So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you're like 'these are unconnected critters,' right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There's this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we're gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.
And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.
If there's a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they'll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn't much potassium.
And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.
Trees will share so much of their resources, they'll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn't able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!
You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago... but if you scrape the stump it's still green wood. The tree's still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.
I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here's where we get to them.
In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they've developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.
So what do they do?
They feed baby trees.
Baby saplings in an old forest can't reach up to the sun. There's no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can't get on her own, she'll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.
And one of the best parts - she won't just do it for her own species. She'll connect to all kinds of trees, because they're all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She'll adopt the whole forest's children.
Sometimes in forests you'll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil's more fertile from the decomposition.
But no.
They're her children, and she's spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.
I'd like to ask advice for something I didn't really talk about with anyone (apart my therapist), mostly because I respect my father and I don't want to spread bad talk about him but I still need advice, so here I am in anon mode.
Premise:
- I live in Italy
- I've always considered my father to be a smart person with a good heart, empathy and which had a huge positive personal development during the years.
Unfortunately my dad decided to not get vaccinated even if I tried with all my might to give him good reliable info and to debunk all the fake news from the very start of the pandemic with scientific papers, easy explanation, etc.
And yet he has the most weird/twisted ideas on the vaccine and the Covid19 that I haven't even read anywhere (so he must have reached those conclusion by himself and that's even more worrying for me-), which are:
1) "I don't think this virus is as problematic as they say, if it was, a lot more people would have died in percentage". I then asked him if he looked for data on what he was saying and he replied "no, I ask myself those things but I don't care about looking for data, they're not accurate anyway since they didn't test the entire population so you don't know the true percentage". He didn't want to reason on this after saying that, even if I looked for the data.
2) "My body is healthy and already did a good job protecting me from the virus up until now, why should I inject him with the virus? My body has been good up until now and then as a reward I inject him the virus? He doesn't deserve it!". I then explained to him how the vaccine effectively works and he looked me with a puzzled look that very obviously said "that's not how I thought it works".. but then proceeded to say he won't do it anyway because:
3) "I think half the doses of vaccine are a placebo and don't work anyway". I asked him why he thought so and he replied he doesn't believe in politics and in the government; I then tried to explain to him that the politics have nothing to do with science (at least here in Italy) but he was immovable and started talking how there were so many wars based on lies and so he doesn't trust what the institutions tells him to do
4) the only "positive" thing from all his conviction is that he wants to wait September, look how things go and MAYBE he'll get vaccinated...but my hopes are very low, he should also repeat the anti-tetanus shot and already said "I'm not gonna do it" and I'm.. exhausted? I don't know what else I can do to make him reason...
I even explained him that the vaccine is not only useful/made for him but society as a whole, with so so so many people immunocompromised which can't vaccine themselves and he replied "look at you, what society made you with all this sense of guilt towards others" and I was speechless, it's not guilt, it's common sense!! But he didn't listen at all..
But let's get to the other amazing thing that happened! The day before my aunt (my father's sister) was going to get her vaccine shot, they talked to each other and obviously my dad shared with her his amazing ideas! And guess what??? My aunt got even more scared and run away from her vaccine, yeeeey!
Also, it seems that even his dearest friends won't get vaccinated... *sigh*
So I ask: what can I do? Can I even do something?? Even if I tried to give them all the right info, can I do something more??
Dulcis in fundo: I'll have to be with both my dad and my aunt these next three days (from Monday to Wednesday) and I already don't have the energy to argue with them for three days straight, I just hope none brings this up..even though it's the topic of the moment so I won't be able to avoid it I guess T_T
Well, thanks for listening and sorry for the wall of text, have a nice day then.
Alright…this is a complicated one, but I’ll try to make this easy to get through and as brief as is possible to do, which means it will be long, but there’s no helping that. This will be for anyone who questions getting vaccinated, or is trying to convince someone to get vaccinated:
Change your thoughts about this person. Your father isn’t exactly the man you thought he was and this event, which has acted like a catalyst for many, has allowed him to evince all the things he already thought. Also the incredible bungling of this event, the world over, has created an environment of suspicion and fear which feeds into prior prejudices and skepticism. Some of the things he said to you indicate distrust of government, science, and a lack of concern for others. “Guilt for others”? I’m sorry, it’s called compassion, and I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about others. Cope with that realization and move on. You can’t fight ignorance if you’re willing to subvert truth to it. Your dad (or other family member) is just a person, and so you’re better off facing down their issues as a peer, not a respectful child their ego can ignore. Tell them you understand their fears and have information that might help. If they choose to ignore you, then it’s time to get serious.
There are ways to convince a stranger, usually with a sort of “we don’t know each other but I completely comprehend your feelings. Let me answer your questions “ sort of way. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work with alder family, especially a father, in a patriarchy. So wording is important. Stick to the facts and repeat them often so that his brain incorporates them and it ends up being his idea. Repeat it as often as his fact-free news does. The more often a human hears something, the more neural connections are made and memories formed, so if you want this person to live, or stop being a plague vector, repeat the words over and over, until they’re sick of it. Better than being sick with covid.
I’m afraid that this is one of those arguments you should not avoid or put down. This is life or death for everyone. It’s not a joke. So let’s address his concerns one at a time.
Here’s a comprehensive list of facts that attack all the salient points.
This disease isn’t new and wasn’t a surprise. Communicable disease experts have been tracking coronaviruses in humans since the late 1960’s, when the viral strain first made the zoonotic leap to humans. There are labs all over the world who have been studying them and building vaccines for them for decades. All of the current vaccines: Pfeizer, Moderna, Astrozenica, Johnson & Johnson all are built on that data, which is why they could be made so quickly—they had 60 years of data on which to build. In fact, our government was warned of Covid-19’s possible advent back during Obama’s presidency, which is why he built a Pandemic Response Team (which the last president of the USA, Trump, disassembled). In fact, the effort to study coronaviruses has been an international effort, because scientists don’t actually give a damn about country lines, and only care about their field and competition within it. So don’t be surprised that you haven’t heard of them, but scientists “been knew” as the internet says. The FDA here in the USA has a ten year long study program for all new vaccines. Why was covid fast tracked? Because it was an old method and this is a crisis. Does it mean “no one knows what will happen”? No. There were still test groups. I know some who participated. They’re all fine. And also, the format of the vaccines are old. Old. Around for a while. Old method, new virus.
No. It didn’t come from a lab in China. I repeat. It wasn’t lab grown. We now know its genome and it bears absolutely no traces of having been spliced or any of humanity’s ham-fisted tinkering. It evolved.
Reactions to the vaccine are not inherently bad or of concern. They don’t mean the vaccine is bad. Covid kills people because the virus doesn’t yet know how to exist in human bodies. Meaning not only are you dealing with a virus that doesn’t know how to not kill you, you’re also dealing with the body’s overreaction The human immune system essentially goes berserk. Treatment of the virus is not just control of viral spread and damage, but also immune system control and suppression (this is why the lupus medication of hydroxychloroquine was considered as a possible treatment). What this means is, if you already had a strain of Covid-19 in the last year, and the immune system still has a vivid memory of it. When you get the first vaccine shot your body says “oh not that again” and responds, sometimes ferociously. It’s your body arming itself against what is essentially a neutered virus—used as a trigger to get your body making antibodies to protect you. If you haven’t had a strain of Covid in the last year, you won’t have as strong a reaction to the first shot. But you might have a reaction to the second one, because the first was so effective your immune system “got the email” and now knows its enemy, and so it arms itself. The reaction actually proves the vaccine is effective.
Don’t just get vaccinated to protect those who can’t get vaccinated, because there’s a lot more going on, and not enough people are addressing this. Viruses mutate. That’s why HIV was so difficult to build vaccines for. The common cold isn’t one virus, but a group of them that constantly change because we can’t build effective vaccines for all of them and give them to the world all at once, and influenza mutates constantly. Meaning that every time a person gets the virus, they are now a Petri dish for possible new strains, some of which may not be controlled by the current vaccine. Vaccinating yourself creates a barrier and prevents the virus from having access to yet another Petri dish it would use to evolve. We have the covid-19 delta variant now, because people didn’t get vaccinated, and thankfully the vaccine appears to work on it, but the next variant may not respond so well. We have to shut off every possible way this thing can evolve, to effectively kill the virus and shove it out of existence, as we did small pox. This means a worldwide effort to stop it in its tracks. Everyone vaccinated at once against Covid-19.
No one uses vaccines to control, in fact they often use the deprivation of vaccines to control. This is a completely understandable conspiracy. I don’t trust any government on this earth but this is not the way they control you. (They use money and fear to do that.) But here, let me give you some points on that account.
Vaccines carry dead or weakened forms of the virus, ones that can’t breed or spread in your body, just a sort of blue print for your body to use. Immunosuppressed or compromised people cannot get them because their immune systems are not going to respond to that blue print in the same way.
We have annihilated several illnesses from this earth through effective vaccination.
The vaccines aren’t controlled by governments. They’re owned by corporations which are just as bad, but multinational. Each proprietary vaccine is based on multinational data and collaboration, and it is data anyone can get hold of if they know how. You know how you can tell the data is available? Competing companies all have it. At the same time.
Vaccines don’t contain harmful chemicals. If they did, the virus in them would be killed. The things they do contain are either preservatives, stabilizers, or viral uptake boosters designed to help your body use the vaccine better. If you’re really worried about the components in them, perhaps stop eating basically any food on earth, because you get more mercury from a piece of tuna than you do a flu vaccine, and more aluminum from eating salad than you do from a Covid vaccine.
The US military has been given all manner of vaccines and shots for a century, from which they cannot abstain. They don’t get to know what they’re being given. They just get a shot. Look how many of them are still alive. Leading cause of death for veterans is actually heart disease (20.2%), suicide (13.1%), and unintentional injury (12.7%). Not “death by vaccines”.
Your immune system cannot effectively defend itself from something the entire human genome hasn’t encountered. I don’t care if you’re an Avenger, and in the best shape of your life, your body can always use a leg-up. A vaccine is made from the strains that exist in human bodies, which means it gives you effective instruction on how to build your own defenses. Your immune system only works if it can get hold of safe blue prints it can use to build immunity. It can’t do that if you get killed first. Getting vaccinated is how your body can mount an effective defense against something it’s literally not seen.
Do I really need to give a lecture on how governments have used disease to control, colonize, and destroy groups of people, or are we good on that? No? Let’s just say a lot of people think disease is a natural population control for an “overpopulated” world. Allow me to introduce you to the 8 stages of genocide.
The community of people who have researched this virus and pioneered the vaccine don’t have an agenda. They’re virologists. Their entire interest and obsession and expertise is in understanding viruses and preventing loss of human life. I work with some of these people, and just because you don’t understand what they’re doing, doesn’t mean you ought to attach your pessimism to what they do. Is your father an expert in something? How would he feel if someone without that expertise tried to have an opinion? What if it was life or death? That’s how scientists feel right now.
The virus is that bad. It is. There have been 4.09 million deaths world wide, so far, which may not sound like a lot, but really is. Now epidemiologists have a method for calculating what they call “excess death” or the death count above normal, caused by an epidemic. It’s complicated but, we can do some very rough math to get a general idea. In 2018, there were only 57 million deaths worldwide. That’s from ALL causes of death—chronic illness, age, war, famine, and! Communicable diseases like this one. If this one virus accounts for a 7% rise in total deaths? That’s a HUGE increase. And that’s just so far. Let’s be fair and divide it up between 2019 ans 2020. That’s still a 4%increase. (The other deaths may drop a bit, because quarantine kept other diseases down and also kept people home, but it caused a rise in violent death [because abusive people being locked in a home with their victims, is obviously bad.]) And again, it evolves and mutates and will kill more. So saying “They can’t know how many cases we have actually had” is god damn irrelevant, because it continues to evolve. Then there’s the other problem, that many of the people who get it and recover (higher in poorer areas with less health care and certain age groups) end up with debilitating long-term side effects. Meaning covid just became what we call a “comorbidity” or worsening effect, for any other illness they may have had later in life. (Invest in ventilator development if you want to make some money in the coming decades). “Long covid” causes all sorts of problems, like clots, organ failure, and long term respiratory illness. You aren’t dead, but you might end up dead from something that otherwise wouldn’t have hurt you. Not to mention that you’re still susceptible to another strain of covid-19, which might actually kill you. But I can already hear your father saying “yes but they said it would be much worse and it hasn’t been” to that I say, yes, because we all quarantined. “Duh”. We reacted, which controlled it, but some countries in Africa are only just now getting a peak in cases. Meaning the death toll will keep rising. Meaning this is still going on, and if it is, the virus is getting access to more laboratories it can use to evolve out of our vaccination control. Meaning the quarantine will never end.
You want to go back to normal, trust the combined expertise of generations of scientists. Get vaccinated. The vaccines we have not only prevent illness, they lower spread, they lower risks for “long covid” or hospitalization in cases of breakthrough infection or “getting infected even though vaccinated”, they prevent avenues of mutation. This isn’t about politics, or your generation, or the egotistical nuances of the cause célèbre of the decade or whatever party leanings you may have. Right now, in the USA, we have a huge set of outbreaks. Where are they? In states with low vaccination rates. Meaning they’re working on getting rid of their own ideology. However, they’re also taking out people who cannot get vaccinated, people who don’t have access to good information, people who can’t read, and…they’re a perfect place for a virus to evolve and grow new strains that cannot be stopped by our current vaccines.
And if you’re just afraid of needles…say so. Stop being a nitwit and constructing a huge framework of garbage that misinforms just so you don’t have to get stabbed with a needle for .5 seconds. Walk it off. Go to therapy for phobias and then protect everyone around you.
I’m tired of this debate. When the Spanish Flu epidemic happened 100 years ago, the world was desperate for an answer. Desperate. They would have done anything to get a vaccine. In some parts of the world, they are right now. Developed nations, your privilege is showing.
this isnt necessarily good news but i hope we can all agree that if you are attacked by a puma and you kill it with your bare hands it should be socially acceptable to wear the pelt wherever you damn well please
I knew a man once who came to a party wearing a massive bandage across his entire back. I asked what had happened. I could see what looked like blisters on the outer edge of the bandage. He lifted his shirt (a tank top) and showed me the entire bandage. At the bottom I could see what looked like slashes that were tacked closed. I asked him what the hell had happened.
He said, and I quote, “I was attacked by a flaming mountain lion.”
I said, “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
He then proceeded to tell the story. Apparently, he and some buddies had gone camping out in the middle of nowhere. In the night, after they were all very drunk and sitting around the campfire, they began to hear the very specific growl of a mountain lion, and spotted a set of eyes reflecting the fire light. Just in time for the strike, one of the men grabbed a large log from the fire and thwacked the cat with it. The poor cat apparently tackled him and in the tussle, caught fire. While the cat was frantically attacking the first man, my friend jumped on top of it. The cat turned on him and pounced. Enraged by the fire and likely, pain, the flaming cat took off into the woods and threw itself into the river.
The two injured men were then driven back to civilization to recover.
When he finished talking I stood there aghast. I think he thought I was going to scold him for setting a mountain lion on fire. He said “Look our lives were in danger and my friend reacted without thinking..”
“No!” I said. “I am damn impressed. And if you don’t wear those scars with pride, and constantly show them off with a ‘these are my flaming mountain lion wounds from the time I wrestled a mountain lion which was on fire, to save my friend’s life’, I will be extremely disappointed.”
That was almost the best interaction with a person at a party that I’ve ever had, and I’ve been to a lot of parties.
sorry if you've already answered this, but thoughts on kink at pride? ik its a common discourse but im not really sure what to think
The whole point of pride is to defy the homogenizing of sexuality, to rebel against puritanical images of sex, body, and love that were all just systems of control. Kink communities were extremely influential in the advent of PRIDE and the LGBTQIA+ movement. If the argument is “I don’t want to see that” then don’t go. If the argument is “I don’t want my kids to see that” then either don’t bring your kids, or have an intelligent conversation with them about how physically expressing ones self is a right we should all protect, that sex is a normal part of life. You don’t have to go into a lot of detail to inform and protect them. Educate them properly, so that they know how to set healthy boundaries for themselves.
For example, sexual assault in people AFAB is under reported. Why? Because society teaches them first that boys will be boys, and stigmatizes all forms of sex that are outside marriage, and blames the victims. Why? Because it’s a patriarchy. If we had intelligent, grounded, informed conversations with young people about sex, consent, healthy interactions in sex, respect for partners, and removed the shame from these things, they would not feel ill-prepared in standing up for themselves. They would feel supported. They would know how to determine if they are being abused. This is just one example.
What I’ve said before, and will say again: if you cannot be proud of the community as a while, and celebrate the FREEDOM of it, then there is little point in engaging.
Posts like this are written by people who either don’t understand consent or don’t care about it. If you want to fuck people in a dog costume, have at it, but don’t do it in public where strangers never consented to be a part of it. It’s also said by people who see same sex attraction as a fetish. Imagine writing an entire paragraph pretending to respect consent only to demonstrate you don’t give two shits about it when it comes to fetish play in public. Fuck you. And gays, bisexuals and lesbians created pride you homophobic erasing jackass.
And claiming that it’s ok for children to see kink and fetish play? That’s said by pedophiles seeking to groom children.
I’ll also add that no one is “assigned” a sex, it’s observed. No doctor or nurse just decides you’re male or female, they KNOW you are based on defined parameters that never change and this observation is documented the same way any other observation is documented. Do you know how anything works? Because your post shows a complete ignorance of a lot of things.
My sexuality isn’t equal to men in diapers, to men who want to choke their sexual partners, to people who like to dress up as dogs and live in cages, to people who like to be shit or pissed on. So take your pedophilic, rape culture, homophobic bullshit and fuck off.
Replies like the above are written by people who think that “Kink” means people are just out in the street going at it. They want to puritanically shame people into being silent. It’s not rape culture to specifically embrace your sexuality and openly present it in some fashion during a festival for that specific purpose. It’s not misogyny, since afab and women and trans women can also do it. Get off my blog and go read some history. Hiding things never makes a society stronger.
Also, “kink” culture doesn’t equate to deviant. Get a grip. Firstly who sets the sexual standard? The straight cis people who have dominated culture? The gay people who now pigeon hole and try to rein it in? Who decides what kind of behavior is normal? And why should they be allowed to? Secondly, it’s not just about being gay, since again, it was kink sub cultural groups who had a hell of a lot to do with establishing PRIDE as a festival. The whole point is to disassemble stereotypes, heteronormativity, what’s “acceptable” to cis people. It’s about defiance.
Don’t come to my blog and lecture me about a history I watched that you did not. You go celebrate your pride the way you want to. Leave people alone.
The TERFs really are just out in full force, aren’t they?
Why do transphobes think they have a right to speak, like at all? And how are they gonna erase the fact that trans women largely helped to build pride as well? The lack of brain cells..
Largely? By heaven, in some places they were the sole moving force! Not to mention the fact that intersectional feminism teaches us about how race and gender combine to leverage even greater force against trans women of color. My god the suicide rates in trans communities are astronomical statistically! The only people alright with that are people who don’t care and are very pleased when trans people cease to exist. It simplifies things for them. Not only does the glaring flaw in their calculation of reality crease to exist, they can turn around and say “yes that trans person committed suicide, but that’s because trans identity is a mental illness.” It’s disgusting.
Let me share a very serious life lesson with you: if you spend your days stewing and ruminating on how other people run their lives and find their joy, churning inside because you worry their contented ness somehow adversely affects you, manufacturing ways to be offended or identify them as aberrant, then you are a miserable fuck. Please see someone about that.
Terfs have NO idea, none whatsoever of the pain, misery, torture, and vengeance that was leveled by cis people against the gay community as a whole. Take a moment and think. What you’re doing to trans people? That’s exactly what was done to the “gay” community before. You are guilty of the same crime. The very same crime.
Let people exist as they wish to. They aren’t hurting you by existing. If you find out that the person in front of you is different than you believed or imagined, then welcome to life, and may I show you this technique I’ve learned called “walking away”. It’s a marvelous thing. You just turn and go. You don’t want to date a trans woman or man? Then don’t. You don’t have to shame them, mistreat them, slander them, harm them, and work against their rights. That’s what cis het men do, when the pretty girl turns them down. Familiar no?
Wake up and smell the horrific atrocities wrought by your own self-obsessed search for legitimacy.
I have a friend who is a trans woman. She is an herbalist and loves plants and homeopathy as a study. We were looking through some old books and she found one about how to treat AFAB physical difficulties like cramps, PMS, etcetera. I was about to set the book down when she took it from me and looked it over. I admit, I was a bit surprised, and yes that came from a lack of understanding.
She said “I’m getting this one”
I said “oh really?”
“Yes,” she said with a look of contemplation, “I want to know what my sisters feel. It’s important. I want to know how I can help them.”
It offends me that any person would call her ill. It offends me that any person would claim that she is misogynist. It offends me that her femininity or motives are in question. It offends me, that she is told she cannot understand being a woman or what it means, that she is not mindful of her place both beneath the boot of patriarchy and benefiting from it in some ways. That offends me, not merely because she is my friend, but because she is a person and she is due proper treatment because she exists. People who spend time discriminating rather than working toward eliminating discrimination offend me. People who spend time bickering over what makes a woman while my friend works toward helping other women really offends me.
I’ve never gotten anything but rudeness, viciousness and vitriol from a TERF. Trans people have been, by and large, educational, empathic, and taken their time and effort when they shouldn’t have to, to teach people why they should better themselves.
