maramahan

[maramahan]

the big three questions of media analysis: what the author wanted to say, what they actually said, and what they didn’t know they were saying

[maramahan]

A Ship tossed in High Seas, by Eugène R. Garin (1922-)

[maramahan]

The best advice i can give any creator is do it before you're good at it, do it BEFORE you're happy, do it while you suck, do it while you're doubting yourself and get stuck the fuck in, because waiting around to be "good enough" is a motherfucking trap of the highest degree. You'll get good along the way and better after ever project is complete. Remember, this is the greatest thing you've ever created, and then you'll do something else. You're only ever gonna get better, but not if you stand still.

[maramahan]

Eyes of the forest. Aspen trees

[maramahan]

Velociraptors are scary but really they aren't that scary because they can't change speed. They always move at exactly the same rate, so they're predictable and you can avoid them. The real one to look out for is the acceleraptor

[maramahan]

I love Granny Weatherwax so very much, and one of my favorite about her is just that she’s kind of really unpleasant all the time; she’s nosy and critical and stubborn as a mule and a filthy hypocrite and she’s prideful and far too serious and extremely bossy and refuses to admit when she’s wrong, she’s deeply conservative and judgmental and demanding and rude to everyone, no matter who they are. But that never stops her from helping, or wanting to help, she’s going to help and she’s going to insist on helping and she’s going to complain about it every second it takes. Esme Weatherwax is not nice, or polite, but she is good, and I love her so dearly for that

[maramahan]

[maramahan]

Excerpt from this story from Northern Public Radio:

Next year, “rewilding” will officially be a part of the conservation approach in Illinois.

A new state law explicitly includes the concept as part of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources’ strategy. It’s the first time a U.S. state has included rewilding in its legislation, people working in conservation said.

The goal of rewilding is to reintroduce native species and restore whole ecosystems. Advocates often describe it as helping nature help itself, or putting nature back in the driver’s seat.

Cynthia Kenner is the executive director of Prairie State Conservation Coalition in Illinois. She said the new law formalizes the work happening in the state already.

“It's allowing the continuation of practices that are already in place, but it brings more meaning to really letting nature come back,” she said.

An example of rewilding is occurring in the northern part of the state in Rockford, where the Severson Dells Nature Center is working to transform a former golf course into 170 acres of prairie, forest and wetland habitats. The area will serve as a wildlife corridor as well, allowing species to pass through to other nature preserves in the area.

Rewilding often focuses on repairing habitat suited for apex predators like mountain lions and keystone species like beavers and bison. The idea is when these species can succeed, other species will start to recover around them, said Jason Kahn, board president of the Rewilding Institute, which supports large-scale conservation projects across North America.

Perhaps the most well-known example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s. In South Dakota, black-footed ferrets have been reintroduced to Badlands National Park, and bison are roaming prairies in Illinois and Iowa. These keystone species have helped to recover native habitats in the area.

“It doesn't cost a lot of money,” Kahn said. “Nature knows how to take care of itself. If we stop insulting and abusing it, all you would need to do for something is to let it grow, let it mature and let it be. And the wildlife will find a way in.”

Rewilding isn’t just about restoring large swaths of the landscape away from humans, said Cathy McMullen, a faculty member in the Department of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. She said one of the most meaningful approaches to rewilding can take place on your block.

“There's a buy-in for everybody, say, in a neighborhood,” she said. “You plant a pollinator patch, and you maintain that pollinator patch, and if you scale that up to a whole neighborhood, no one person gets overwhelmed by all the work. Everybody's doing their piece. In the process, they’re going to learn some bugs and birds and make a connection to nature.”

“This bill adds rewilding as a strategy that the agency can implement,” she said. “They are also already doing many of these practices, and they already have the ability to consult with their ecologists, the biologists and the folks that make these decisions for the state to add species to the landscape.... This doesn't give them any new authority.”

The law goes into effect at the start of next year.

[maramahan]

Hey, man, c'mere. Listen. Get in real close, this is important.

You're gonna make stuff again. You're gonna make stuff you're proud of. You're gonna make stuff you're excited to share. You're going to feel that overwhelming drive to create, not just the frantic I want to want to you're stuck in now. You're going to have awesome ideas, and you're going to make them into reality. You're going to create again. You're still an artist. You're still a writer. You're still home to the same passion you had before. You'll find it again. It's not gone. It's just resting. Let it rest. You're going to make stuff again. I promise.

[maramahan]

“Take year 3 student Emma Glenfield, who started with a simple question about magpies and wound up conducting some cutting-edge research almost by accident."

[maramahan]

[maramahan]

We saw a firefly on our way home from national night out tonight.

I've lived in this neighborhood for 20 years, and never seen one here, before.

In less than a decade, I've watched the proliferation of native planting, habitat planting, signs saying an area is for pollinators and no pesticides allowed, fewer and fewer monoculture grass lawns. Better raking and soil health practices. Businesses and schools are installing rain gardens and native plants all over my neighborhood, and it's slowly spilling out into more and more types of neighborhoods.

if you haven't been paying attention to gardens for the past decade you'd never notice it.

But it started slow and now it's speeding up rapidly.

Expectations here are shifting.

And tonight, we got a firefly.

[maramahan]

You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit

[maramahan]

an interesting linguistics find! so I'm reading this text from 1908 and it keeps referencing "hp" in the context of "not being at full hp" "applying your full hp to a task" etc

and I'm like....... okay that is a perfectly normal way to describe energy and reads totally clear to me, but I KNOW you don't mean hit points/health points which is the first place my brain goes, so what are YOU using hp to mean

and it's not explained in-text, which means it was common enough to not warrant explanation to the 1908 audience, so gotta look elsewhere

horsepower. turns out it's horsepower.

and I'm absolutely FASCINATED that a commonly used initialism from 1908 now stands for something different AND YET the contextual meaning is still the same to a 21st-century reader

I could hand this guy my nintendo switch and he'd be like, ah yes I understand, this ''''pokemon'''' loses horsepower throughout the fight

language is amazing

[maramahan]

Amaury "Chocolate Guy" Guichon is undoubtedly an extremely skilled sculptor in chocolate but I think my favorite thing about a lot of his videos is the effort he puts into putting actual dessert food under the sculpture work

So many of his desserts & pastries have at least 5 layers of different textures & flavors. Fruit jams, caramel, cake, creams, mousse, cookies, meringue, crumb layers etc

That's what makes his work truly impressive to me, especially as someone who quickly got tired of the "knife that turns everything into cake" thing, where it was all basic chocolate cake buried under 13 layers of fondant

It takes amaury's work from an impressive stunt to "if I ate that, it would probably be the best thing I'd eat in my whole life"

[maramahan]