i-just-wanna-vote-on-fruit - Tumblr blog

i-just-wanna-vote-on-fruit · 2 years ago

Text

“Cringe culture is dead” isn’t just about letting 15 year olds cosplay MHA (but is also an issue). It’s about letting 50 year olds dance at clubs even if they’re “bad at it”, it’s about letting 10 year old’s wear random bits of clothes to make an outfit that’s “weird”, it’s about letting adult men experiment with artsy makeup looks even when they’re “messy”, it’s about letting teens scream music even if they “sound bad”.

“Cringe culture is dead” means letting people learn new hobbies at any age, experiment with their identity at any time, expressing themselves in ways outside the norm just as much as it means let 20 year olds play roblox.

Cringe culture is just social norms being forced on people rebelling against societies value consensus, it’s keeping people in brackets that are easier to market to.

Let cringe culture be dead in every aspect of life outside online spaces.

66K notes · View notes

i-just-wanna-vote-on-fruit · 2 years ago

Text

@dawnforger-fr

Saw your tags on the fruit poll, and figured I’d help you figure out what kind of blackberry you have.

There are lots of rubus that can be found in California, including lots of native ones and some invasive ones.

The one I most commonly see, especially in inland areas dry and hot enough enough that the grassy landscape turns gold all summer, is an invasive species named Rubus armeniacus, Himalayan blackberry. That one usually has leaves-of-five instead of leaves-of-three, and the stems are thick, often as thick than a pinky at the base or if it’s older thicker than a thumb (1 inch). They have ridges along the stems (because of these ridges, if you clip off a section of stem and look at the cross section, it would be hexagonal). These stems are smooth with relatively few thorns, which are as big as the thorns on garden roses. They’re sharp and long enough to stab me even through jeans. The thorns are sparse enough that you should be able to carefully grab the bare spots on the stems to move them without touching any thorns. They don’t tend to creep along the ground as often as the others, and are usually strong enough to grow up or diagonally unsupported for a few feet in length before they get long/heavy enough for the tip to weigh back to the ground to form bramble thickets— although they will also climb fences and trees and cover and smother smaller shrubs. The seeds in the blackberries are large. They get stuck in my molars sometimes. When I see these I tend to try to eat as many as possible so that they don’t spread as bad.

I also see California blackberry (mentioned in the post) a lot, but usually in wetter areas such as on the coast, or near creeks and other riparian zones. These ones always have leaves-of-three. The stems are much thinner, more akin to the width of a vein or tendon on the back of your hand (~1 cm), and have no ridges (if you cut the stem and looked at it you would see a round cross section). They are coated in tiny needle like thorns, so dense that it’s impossible to grab a stem by your fingertips without touching a few thorns. These thorns are soft enough that they can’t prick you through a sturdy layer of fabric, although they might cause a stem to cling to a flannel shirt like Velcro. California blackberry stems are thin and weak, and usually crawl on the ground or trailing on top of fences or plant matter. Often I will see it in the same thicket as Himalayan blackberry, using the much stiffer Himalayan stems as support to reach the same height. If it can support its own weight it’s definitely not California blackberry. The berries have much smaller seeds (that don’t tend to get caught in my teeth), and a lot of people prefer the berry flavor (although the growing conditions and ripeness may affect flavor a lot more than the species of blackberry does.)

Occasionally thickets that contain both of the above will also contain hybrids. The hybrids are really wonky from their genetic diversity— for example, sometimes they have as dense of a pattern of thorns as California blackberry does, but they’re HUGE thorns that grow as long as the ones Himalayan blackberries have. Don’t worry about this one, they’re pretty rare. Rare enough that I can’t find any links or pictures.

Whitebark raspberry seems to be the only other native rubus that seems likely to be called a blackberry, and it’s comparatively a lot more rare, at least in my area (I’m in Northern California). Whitebark raspberry, also called blackcap raspberry, black raspberry, or blue raspberry, looks somewhat similar to California blackberry, but it can stand up unsupported, has leaves-of-five as well as leaves-of-three, and the backs of the leaves and often stems are coated in a silvery substance. These plants produce dark raspberries that look like blackberries, but are less glossy/shiny. These berries are what “blue raspberry” artificial flavor is trying to imitate.

Thimbleberry is also a rubus, and so are salmonberry, snow raspberry, San Diego raspberry, and red raspberry, but we can rule all of them out because their berries don’t look like blackberries. Rough fruit berry, Rubus lasiococcus, is a blackberry, but it’s supposed to stay red and hairy instead of turning black, so it isn’t easy to mistake for a California blackberry.

Other than that, I don’t know of any blackberry or blackberry-adjacent plants that grow wild in California.

Hope that this was interesting! If you ever happen to find out which one your blackberries are, I’d be super interested in hearing.

Also, once you have finished reading this post, if you were to press like, it would be mildly helpful. That way I know to stop editing and adding more information because you would not be seeing any further edits anymore, lol

#sorry about the alt account #I didn’t want to bother my followers so I decided to post on an account that doesn’t have any

1 note · View note