Land of Monsters and Rivers

Aw shit here we go again

[fairrytype]

✨Misty Sticker set & Bookmark GIVEAWAY ✨

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[jelloapocalypse]

Visit Original Link

I've been enamored by this post ever since I saw it so I decided to voice it

[splendentgoddess]

FOR PARENTS OF YOUNG KIDS IN THE US!

Someone over on bluesky posted this and I figured I'd better repost it here. It's the pre-RFK 2025 vaccination schedule for babies and young children, ya know, just in case it mysteriously disappears. Save this and give it to your child's pediatrician; tell them this is the schedule you want your child on.

[evilsoup]

“I’m an optimist, in the sense that I think we will build a sustainable future,” Wagner says. “But it’s going to take 30 or 40 years, and by then, it’s going to be too late for a lot of the creatures that I love. I want to do what I can with my last decade to chronicle the last days for many of these creatures.” Decades on from his months spent bound to the rocking chair, Janzen still watches. He records the yearly data, the shifts in dominant species. But today, there is so much less to see. Once, when he and Hallwachs would type up their notes in the night, they would pitch a tent in the living room to protect their computers from thousands of moths that flocked to the blue glow. Now, they work with the house open to the forest air. “I find myself saying, ‘Winnie! A moth has arrived at the light on my laptop,’” Janzen says. “One moth.” Elsewhere in their profession, some scientists are starting to look away. “We know quite a number of entomologists who have experience dating back to the 70s, 80s or 90s,” Hallwachs says. “One of our very good friends – he now does not have the emotional courage to hang up a sheet to collect moths at night. It is too devastating to see how few there are.”

‘Half the tree of life’: ecologists’ horror as nature reserves are emptied of insects

A new point in history has been reached, entomologists say, as climate-led species’ collapse moves up the food chain even in supposedly prot

[bedabug]

truly the most american thing is Big Drink. more than late stage capitalism, more than an unparalleled cultural focus on individualism, more than 9/11 jokes

what binds all americans together culturally is Big Drink

and you might be saying "is this fat shaming" or "but mayor bloomberg outlawed Big Drink in nyc" or "gays are so annoying about their iced coffee" or some other dumb comment but no open your minds, Big Drink isn't just sugary or caffeinated beverages

every day i see one of you hydration bitches (affectionate) on the train with a water bottle so big a toddler could drown in it. that too is Big Drink. we literally invented a bigger beer can (tall boy) in wisconsin in the 60s in the service of Big Drink

anyway i never feel more american then when i have Big Drink in my hands

[dippyface]

[elbiotipo]

why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

[elbiotipo]

If you read ecology books printed in the 70s and 80s, they were absolutely convinced that whales and tigers would not survive the century. There's a whole plot in Star Trek about how whales are extinct actually. Here in Argentina, we were sure that yaguaretés would have gone extinct. It was thought that rainforests would be forever lost, because there was no way that such complex ecosystems would be restored.

Now, you can go to Península Valdés and find that the whale population there is growing year after year, people can see them from their windows. In Iberá, where yaguaretés were extinct for over 70 years, there's now a population of 35 and growing, after being reintroduced just five years ago. As for rainforests?

We've becoming very, very good on restoring them. Natural environments, when given space and time to heal, can return to that they were. And after all, all natural enviroments are managed by human societies. It is up to us to implement a good management, un buen gobierno.

I firmly believe our children and grandchildren will see a restoration of Earth like never before.

Millions of people are working on this. You can learn about it, perhaps even become one of them. Or be a pointless doomer in my ask box. Your choice.

[crabussy]

if there are people who care, it's never a lost cause. at one point, kākāpō, a nocturnal flightless parrot species from aotearoa, were thought to be entirely extinct for decades. until 1977, where booming calls from males were heard on the small island of whenua hou. now, thanks to people who care so much they dedicated their lives to caring, kākāpō numbers are close to 300. despite the setbacks. despite the small gene pool causing infertility and health problems. people cared so fucking much that they survived. this is one of COUNTLESS, countless similar stories. I'm studying ecology so that I can go into conservation and all around me, every day, I see people who care enough to put years of their lives into learning about and solving environmental problems. I don't know man. hope isn't just some nebulous thing. it's tangible if you do something with it.

[ilajue]

call me a dirty communist radical but I think everyone should know if they live near toxic waste

[ilajue]

if youre in the united states and would like to learn new and terrible things about where you live, you can visit the EPA's Environmental Justice Screening map and put in your location or zipcode

click on superfund proximity to see how close you are to a superfund site (location contaminated with hazardous material)

heres Niagra Falls NY! google love canal!

its a good tool to see what environmental factors could be harming your health that you may not know about. this is not limited to toxic waste so look around at it

my favorite is looking at roads. there are some interesting correlations. Here is a map of Buffalo NY with traffic proximity

here it is again but with where people are getting asthma :P

crazy

heres where the people of color live in Buffalo btw

in case you where wondering what the explanatory factor here is, its the 6-lane expressway that they ran through a residential community in the 50s. a redlined neighborhood btw. the road used to be beautiful parkway. thank you Urban Renewal, thank you Robert Moses, and thank you Kensington Expressway

ok heres the link again because now you really want to go look at it lol

[ilajue]

anyways yeah um environmental health issues are super insidious and not talked about enough. i know thinks seem daunting and scary when we talk about environmental problems, things like climate change are huge and all-encompassing. The way you can make the most impact, real tangible impact is by learning about things local to you!!!!

learn about them, talk to other people about them, organize or find a way to get involved with orgs that already exist. grassroots activism is infinitely more effective than they want you to know and its your responsibility to yourself and your neighbors to try to make things better good luck I love you all

[dungeonmalcontent]

One day I showed up to D&D and one of the guys in our group, before we could even start playing, was like "guys, look at this thing I found." And pulled up either this exact map or a very similar one that cross checks environmental hazards from industrial facilities with average income (more detailed than by zip code, it was pretty cool). And we use a big TV embedded in the game table for maps and stuff, which he pulled this up on, so we spent like half an hour looking at where we all lived and going "oh. Shit." And then we sat there a bit kind of ambling through some cool down small talk.

And like, the thing that kind of made it real for everyone was the context of it being on the screen we use to look at world maps for a fantasy game. It was very surreal for some of the guys at the table, the more conservative ones in particular, like they could see the map and it was showing them the forces of Mordor marching to their doorstep. And for a short time they understood that there are actually vast and evil forces in this world that they could defeat with a weapon, they were just large corporations commiting environmental crimes with very well protected CEOs and fantastic lawyers.

[ilajue]

check out your location while you can!!! Part of Trumps immediate changrs includes getting rid of public information sources like this one. I don't know if they will keep this website up for much longer so go on and download any reports or pollution information you might want

[ilajue]

so as of today, February 5th 2025 this website is down. This is coinciding with mass censorship of other government agencies online from the Trump administration. Those who were able to download their data before the removal, keep it and learn it and share it with your peers. Those who did not get the chance, know that there are other avenues and follow them. Information is power and they are trying to take it away from you. Do not let them.

here are some other mapping resources from the notes. this is not everything, but it is a start.

Check the quality of your tap water here:https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/

Check your climate vulnerability here: https://climatevulnerabilityindex.org/

explore historical redlining maps here: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining

this is just the wikipedia page of current superfund sites, take a look and see where your state has hazardous waste sites.

look into the history of your area and TALK ABOUT IT. be annoying and loud about it. don't stop learning and don't stop talking.

[ilajue]

update! here is a clone of the website, thank you @boots-fastened-slip-fashion for linking this in the replies I'm putting it here so it can be accessed along with the other sites :)

[ilajue]

hey! if you're in the notes worrying about how the website is down, you should be rbing this version, which has a replica of the site and a bunch of other resources!!!

[queen-mayhem]

I used to be mad about "whole language" reading approaches in theory but now I work with school-age kids and I am mad about it in practice.

[queen-mayhem]

the word is "commute"

kid: complete?

me: do you see a P in that word?

kid: uh.... compare?

me: where are you getting a P??? sound it out.

kid: com... complete?

me: is that a P after the M? sound it out.

kid: *stares blankly*

me: [oh right, nobody taught them how to do this. fucking hell...] okay, we'll do this together [like it's kindergarden even though you're thirteen years old...]. what sound does C make?

[queen-mayhem]

I am not a reading teacher or a dyslexia specialist but I'm having to do remedial phonics instruction for middle schoolers because nobody ever taught them how SO THEY CAN'T FUCKING READ

[queen-mayhem]

I cannot overstate how much these kids are just making wild guesses when I ask them to read something. Because that's what they were taught to do. If you don't know a word, use context clues and make a guess at what you think the word might be.

Which is a fucking insane approach to reading, by the way, and I could rant about this forever because this makes absolutely no sense and I cannot figure out how the entire educational field was duped into thinking that this makes a lick of sense.

But I also want to emphasize that even kids who are decent readers have this problem. I work with some kids who straight-up can't read, but even my kids who absolutely can read will just guess wildly at an unfamiliar word. Those kids will go back and sound it out if I force them to, because they can read, so they have the necessary decoding skills. But they have to be pushed to do it and reminded several times to quit fucking guessing and read the actual letters on the page, Jason.

[queen-mayhem]

For example. I have a kid who is actually a pretty strong reader - probably one of my best.

The word was "disagreement."

He made a couple of guesses - some nonsensical, but after pushing him to sound out the word, he got closer. He kept saying "dis-age-ment" and "dis-argue-ment."

And I said okay, let's break this word down. Is there anything in here you recognize?

"The beginning is 'dis' and the end is 'ment' like argument, but I don't know the middle."

Great! Let's pull the middle out. I wrote the word "agree" on the page. Do you know this word?

"Age? Argue?"

SOUND. IT. OUT.

"Ag... agriculture?"

Jason the love of god. I drew a line in the middle. Ag/ree. Sound out each part.

"I don't know."

JASON. I wrote them out on opposite sides of the paper. Ag...........ree. What sound does ag make?

"Ag?"

YES GREAT FANTASTIC. Now come all the way over here. Ree. Sound it out.

"Are?"

JASON. R. E. E.

"Rey? Ree?"

Yes, thank you, it's Ree. Put it together.

"Ag...ree? Oh! It's disagreement!"

YES. EXCELLENT. THANK YOU. WHY WAS THIS SO HARD?

[ms-hells-bells]

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have

[queen-mayhem]

#however the situation is better in liberal states that invest substantially more money into education than conservative states

As much as I wish that was the case, "Jason" and all of his classmates are students in a strongly blue state with some of the highest educational spending per student in the country.

I'm not saying the situation is better in red states - I've seen what my friends who are teaching in Texas are dealing with and the situation is dire. I'm just saying it's less of a red/blue or funding issue than you might imagine.

[turtlesandfrogs]

What I was taught growing up: Wild edible plants and animals were just so naturally abundant that the indigenous people of my area, namely western Washington state, didn't have to develop agriculture and could just easily forage/hunt for all their needs.

The first pebble in what would become a landslide: Native peoples practiced intentional fire, which kept the trees from growing over the camas praire.

The next: PNW native peoples intentionally planted and cultivated forest gardens, and we can still see the increase in biodiversity where these gardens were today.

The next: We have an oak prairie savanna ecosystem that was intentionally maintained via intentional fire (which they were banned from doing for like, 100 years and we're just now starting to do again), and this ecosystem is disappearing as Douglas firs spread, invasive species take over, and land is turned into European-style agricultural systems.

The Land Slide: Actually, the native peoples had a complex agricultural and food processing system that allowed them to meet all their needs throughout the year, including storing food for the long, wet, dark winter. They collected a wide variety of plant foods (along with the salmon, deer, and other animals they hunted), from seaweeds to roots to berries, and they also managed these food systems via not only burning, but pruning, weeding, planting, digging/tilling, selectively harvesting root crops so that smaller ones were left behind to grow and the biggest were left to reseed, and careful harvesting at particular times for each species that both ensured their perennial (!) crops would continue thriving and that harvest occurred at the best time for the best quality food. American settlers were willfully ignorant of the complex agricultural system, because being thus allowed them to claim the land wasn't being used. Native peoples were actively managing the ecosystem to produce their food, in a sustainable manner that increased biodiversity, thus benefiting not only themselves but other species as well.

So that's cool. If you want to read more, I suggest "Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America" by Nancy J. Turner

[turtlesandfrogs]

And then I think about:

How we hunted the beavers to near extinction, and a beaver pond effects the soil moisture level, wetlands, etc.

How we banned intentional fires, and now are dealing with bigger, hotter, more dangerous fires. And that one of the tools in invasive species management is intentional fires.

How we have all these invasive plant species invading everywhere, and if people were still allowed/encouraged to "forage" like they did pre-colonialization, that would include removing those invasive species. And people would have eyes everywhere, so the populations of invasive species would not have had the chance to get established.

The land needs people. Leaving it "wild" and "untouched" is actually neglect.

[andhumanslovedstories]

I truly enjoy how much Animorphs is like “here are our young heroes, each with a distinctive trope to fill in the group!” And then it makes you watch how the pressure of each person’s role grinds them to dust. And also they have homework.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#IM SORRY THEY DO HOME FUCKING WORK IN ANIMORPHS??????

Yeah they're students. If they don't keep their grades up or if they miss too many classes (or miss classes at suspicious times) then they risk drawing the attention of the faculty and/or their parents, some of whom are the enemy and some of whom can just make future espionage a whole lot harder. There are multiple missions where they're like "okay, this is incredibly time sensitive but it'll take a full day or longer so it has to wait for the weekend and we'll have to all lie to our parents about sleeping over at each others' houses. It's gonna have to be done at the last minute because we've gotta go to class. Also, remember to get that English paper finished, we can NOT afford to have you grounded right now."

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

They also get disembowelled and/or eaten a lot

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#animorphs#its actually devastating i bever got into these#they wouldve been a million times more up my alley wtf was i reading harry potter for

It's not too late. You can still read them.

[cheerfulomelette]

These have been out of print for an age, and the authors have given their blessings to share the PDFs. Here's everything, including companion/side books and the non-canon Alternamorphs books, in reading order:

Animorphs PDFs : K. A. Applegate : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

All of the Animorphs books by K. A. Applegate, as well as the other books set in that universe. I got them here. I am not the one who collec

[brothermouse-skeleton]

Animorphs books be like

Page 1: I am a child soldier. My every waking moment is defined by fear and paranoia. My dreams are full of unprocessed trauma. The fate of the entire world rests on me and my friends. I failed my geography test because I do not know the difference between Equator and Ecuador. Also, I'm really hazy on the difference between geography and geology. Again, the fate of the world rests on my shoulders.

Page 13: <Now THAT is a sexy monkey>

Page 26: *The dopest animal fact you've ever heard*

Page 27: Do you know about thermals? You do? Too bad, I'm going to explain them again.

Page 36: *fart joke fart joke 90's pop culture reference barf joke*

Page 40: Rachel kills someone with her bear hands. Not a typo.

Pages 3,15,16,25,26,30,33,37,40,44,46,50,55,56,57,60: TSEEEEEEEEEEEER!

Page 47: I willed my bones to melt faster. If there was a single bone in my body in the next ten seconds, everyone I ever loved of cared about would die an excruciating death.

Page 50: Funny alien thinks he's people.

Last page: *The gang goes to Burger King to avoid thinking about their war crimes*

[cobaltegg]

so like, what if you were the last surviving animorph but it's been canonically established that you still had your best friend's DNA in your body

[theweirdwideweb]

[drtanner]

For the love of god, unmute.

[hapalopus]

Animorphs really has a way to turn every scifi trope on its head. "Why do alien invasions always start in America?" Actually the body snatchers first landed in a Middle Eastern farming community where they kidnapped the first guy they saw, read his mind, and concluded that, since he was terrified of the US soldiers who had brutally destroyed everything he knew and loved, the US would be the ideal place to center their invasion. This is revealed in the spin-off "Visser" which is an excellent stand-alone book that can be read without any prior knowledge of Animorphs. And you can read it for free and with the author's blessing right here:

https://files.animorphsfanforum.com/ebooks/pdf/Visser.pdf

[hapalopus]

The reviews are in!

[orchidbreezefc]

okay if we're gonna talk about animorphs turning kinda racist alien invasion tropes upside down, i HAVE to share the 'aliens built the pyramids' bait-and-switch. from a scene in which the kids talk to an alien android:

“So you all pass as humans?” I asked Erek. 

He nodded. “Yes. We live as humans. We play the role of children and then grow older, and eventually our hologram is allowed to “die” and we start again as children.”

“How long has this been going on?” Cassie asked. 

Erek smiled warmly. “I helped to build the great pyramid.” 

“You designed the pyramids?” 

“No, no, of course not. We have never interfered in human affairs. I was a slave. I helped to quarry the stone.

--book 10: the android (marco POV)

like, that's just fucking hilarious. yeah aliens were there but they just carried rocks, the design part was 100% the ancient african civilization.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

It should also get props for having an alien join the human heroes early on in the traditional Someone To Explain The Context And Alien Tech role... except he's a teenager who didn't pay attention in school because he was thinking about girls and sports. Like, yeah, he can hack computers and has a vague understanding of how the alien spaceships work, sort of, but just as often the kids will ask "hey Ax what's the deal with this weird physics portal thing" and he'll be like "well the thing is there was a really cute girl sitting in front of me in class that day. So I have no idea."

[headspace-hotel]

In the future, children will think our ways are strange. "Why do old people always grow so much milkweed in their gardens?" they'll say. "Why do old people always write down when the first bees and butterflies show up? Why do old people hate lawn grass so much? Why do old people like to sit outside and watch bees?"

We will try to explain to them that when we were young, most people's yards were almost entirely short grass with barely any flowers at all, and it was so commonplace to spray poisons to kill insects and weeds that it was feared monarch butterflies and American bumblebees would soon go extinct. We will show them pictures of sidewalks, shops, and houses surrounded by empty grass without any flowers or vegetables and they will stare at them like we stared at pictures of grimy children working in coal mines

[headspace-hotel]

We will be feeding our grandchildren strawberries and raspberries we grew in our gardens, dragging them along to the farmers' markets for tomatoes and eggs and goats milk and pickles and pecans and salsa and sunflower seed butter and jars of honey, as they complain and drag their feet because Gramma always stands around talking to people for like an HOUR

and we will say "When I was YOUR age, fruits and vegetables came from a supermarket and they were bred to get shipped 1000 miles in a truck and sit on shelves for weeks, and they tasted so sour and watery it was like eating paper compared to these ones. It wasn't even legal in some places to grow your own food"

and they will roll their eyes like yeah yeah just because everything was miserable in the 20s doesn't mean I have to have a smile on my face standing in the hot sun while you listen to that one guy talk about his bees FOREVER

But they will go, because there might be baby goats.

[headspace-hotel]

Since I made this post, dozens and dozens of people have left tags telling me that it was the first thing today that made them want to continue living, that it was the first thing that made them consider that they might be okay years in the future, that they might grow old, that it was the first and only post of its kind they'd ever seen—the first post that boldly predicts a future where we make it.

And many other people have been just spitting, foaming at the mouth fucking FURIOUS. How dare I have the audacity to imagine a future where things get better?

Don't I know how BAD things are? Am I not aware of the TERROR and DEVASTATION of climate change and fascism and biodiversity loss? How dare someone be so bold, so callous, as to imagine something other than misery and suicide. How dare someone suggest it will get better. How dare a person propose that there is a future where we will be okay, in the face of so much terror. Hasn't she seen the abyss opening its jaws before us?

Well? What do you think?

Do you think I've seen the abyss?

[onlytiktoks]

[revretch]

I think the dead plants look ridiculously beautiful though??

[southernsolarpunk-deactivated20]

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