cheerfulomelette

[cheerfulomelette]

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

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[cheerfulomelette]

i lead a youth outdoor skills afterschool program every week and some of the kids are from a christian school & some are from a public school and on the bus this week one of the kids announced that she doesn't believe in god, which really perturbed the other children, and they all started discussing & then debating and talking over each other so I said, "Hey everyone, if this isn't a conversation we can have calmly and kindly, we will have to change the topic."

I watched these ten years olds (and one eight-year-old) all take a moment to emotionally regulate, and then they took turns and gave everyone a chance to speak until they all finally decide on their own without any guidance from me that they simply would not agree on this and to move on. the next topic was what forms mountain ranges.

once again I am here to tell writers to please avoid writing 10-year-olds like 4-year-olds like I so often see because they're out here having theological debates with more empathy for each other than most I've seen on this website

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This might be a very controversial take but Sybil being fat with no hair and Adora being weird about golems and Granny being old and a virgin and Magrat being ugly and Agnes being fat and Nanny being Nanny and Cheery existing does more for feminism than 90% of intentionally "feminist" media produced in the past 5-10 years actually

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Pre-menstrual depression is always depicted as like "He He! I had a box of icecream bars and cried while watching the Titanic!" But in reality, it's more like, "I'm standing the edge of an abyss. There is nothing good inside of me, I'm filled with rage and desperation."

It's crazy that being told how to deal with that is never a part of anyone's menstrual sex education.

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"The difference is that my conception of optimism isn't so fucking lazy — it's more synonymous with 'grit.' For some, optimism is mere cheeriness pasted on top of indulgent ignorance, wielded as a blunt instrument against objection. For others, it is work. The coming years are going to take a lot of work. A lot of grim, bloody-mouthed, hard-fought optimism — an optimism that doesn't look sunny, but which declares: we have no choice, the future must be won. An optimism that declares: I will outlast you, and spit on your grave. An optimism that says: This is who I am, and you cannot take that from me."

—Kerstin Hall, "A Small Hall, Refurbished"

[cheerfulomelette]

Gosh.

Must be rough for them.

[cheerfulomelette]

As of December 2024, The Cook Islands' Palmerston Atoll was declared entirely rat free. This was after significant eradication efforts and monitoring to confirm the rats were gone, both of which involved the local community. Removing the rats has helped to improve food security and safety for residents, as well as increasing the prevalence and numbers of native wildlife.

Arthur Neale, the atoll’s Executive Officer, says Palmerston’s rat-free status means the world to him and everyone else who lives on the atoll. “Rats infested the atoll for over a century. They ate our crops, invaded our homes and harmed local wildlife. We saw the rat problem becoming worse, with the potential to seriously undermine our resilience in the face of climate change impacts. “Benefits from the rat eradication are already evident. Our food security has improved massively. Fruits like guava, mango and star fruit are now abundant and free from rat damage. Our nu mangaro (a coconut tree variety) are thriving. Vegetables, especially cucumbers, have seen an astonishing increase in yield. “We’re very excited to see more native species now rats are no longer eating them. Seedlings of tamanu and puka are increasing and we’re seeing and hearing more birds. Wood pigeons and red-tailed tropic birds have returned to Home Islet. Crabs and lizards appear to be more abundant.”

Here's a cool video from a few years ago covering the work to remove rats and inclusion with the local community (Just a heads up the video does show dead rats a couple of times).

[cheerfulomelette]

I feel like tumblr should be bigger fans of The Blues Brothers. It's a movie that has everything we value as a community. Attention and respect to pioneering black musicians, open hostility to nazis, open defiance to police, Carrie Fisher with a rocket launcher and flamethrower, a soundtrack that goes hard as hell, John Belushi so blasted on cocaine that he continues to do somersaults despite having a broken ankle. It's got it all!

[cheerfulomelette]

*Full Question: Are you more likely to find a fucked up fantasy disturbing/concerning if the person is imagining being the perpetrator rather than the victim? Not a question of if this is fair or logical treatment, just about your kneejerk feeling. By “fucked up” think bigotry, hard SA, murder, worse, stuff that can be controversial even among weirdos.

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There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

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i hope luigi mangione is proven innocent & gets to sue a ton of companies for slander and win & i hope he gets enough money to rebuild his life and get any help for his chronic pain that he needs & i hope he’s able to disappear from the public eye entirely if that’s what he wants

[cheerfulomelette]

Hey don't cry, okay? We just found Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a species thought to be extinct for the past 60 years.

[cheerfulomelette]

Starting to think a cooler headcanon for Clark’s upbringing might just be that the entire town of Smallville collectively decided to just go with it and accept that Martha and John's kid has superpowers, but we don't talk about it.

Someone's tractor gets stuck and nothing can get it out? "Be a dear and run down to the Kents, would you? Ask for Clark?"

"Why Clark, we need a machine--"

"Run along now."

Or if he kicks too hard and the football vanishes into the upper stratosphere, no it didn't, we all collectively saw it land over there *vague hand movements*

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there's this well-meaning but I think quite misguided Thing where someone transmasuline whose transition has left them looking, for lack a better term, very conventionally masc - bearded, muscular, liable to be assumed cisgender - will be held up in an argument that essentially goes "lmao you dumbass terfs really want THIS GUY to use the women's bathroom???" as if it's inherently absurd that someone who looks that way would use the women's bathroom. and these tend to get passed around quite a lot to cackle at the stupid terfs who want huge hairy men in women's bathrooms.

and like, let's get one thing straight: no, of course they don't want that guy to use the women's bathroom. they want him to die or detransition; that's their actual goal. they want him to not exist as a trans person. let's just be clear on that.

but the thing that actually bothers me is that this rather steamrolls over the fact that for every transmasuline person who looks like that, there are also transfeminine, nonbinary, and intersex people who look like that and want access to women's bathrooms, and setting up their presence as some kind of absurdity really isn't doing them any favors. nor is it helping the less "passing" trans people who want to use men's bathrooms! this is in fact reinforcing the idea that public bathrooms are a space to be policed based on appearance, that you only gain access to if you can look a certain way.

which is absurd for many reasons, including that it's a fucking bathroom. people are there to piss. ideally anybody should be able to piss next to anybody and we could stop bothering with gender separated bathrooms at all, but in the meantime let's at least not take part in actively encouraging people to decide at a glance who's allowed to piss where.

[cheerfulomelette]

Notpla, the company which makes seaweed-based packaging to replace single-use plastics, started with its two French and Spanish founders, Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, experimenting in their student kitchen while at Imperial College London.

Now, Notpla has replaced more than 21 million items of single-use plastic across Europe, and is aiming to displace 1 billion units by 2030. In partnership with Just Eat, Notpla’s packaging was used at the UEFA Women’s Final at Wembley Stadium, London in 2022. From seven types of folded carton board boxes that year, it has grown into a catalogue of over 50 different designs. 

And the company is launching a new deli range, featuring plastic-free windows so people can see their sandwiches before buying. Honsinger hopes this will help Notpla branch out into office catering and museums, where that sneak peek is important.