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We have enough to share

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Hate Hate Hate stories that reward characters for refusing to do triage. 'I refuse to choose only one to survive even if it means both die' [plot contrives for this to be the only way both survive] is so weak. Making difficult decisions with no good outcome is not a moral failing

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love that game changer just keeps bringing in more people at every opportunity. hi yes these people are here to yell at you and then breakdance if you succeed. we just like paying people

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No smoking

English added by me :)

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dino saurs were not scary monsters they were mamas with eggs and when they drank water they were like fuckk yessss waterrrr

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I am small and I can't do very much. That is the despair of an individual in a big and violent world. But the plants teach me it is okay to be small. Everything is either small, or made of things that are small. We are all connected. Symbiosis.

So, on the subject of bugs.

It is the fourth summer of the Meadow. My plants grow strong and wild and cover more space than ever before. I have worked to eradicate the invasive lawn grass and carefully curate large clumps of only native species (with a few esteemed naturalized weeds allowed---I have no quarrel with Chicory, it has a positive effect on the ecosystem).

I have tall, huge native Field Thistles, multitudes of tough and aggressive evening primrose, wild strawberry spreading everywhere, a dozen vigorous gray-headed coneflowers, giant clumps of cup-plant, and so many asters and goldenrods that I've had to start targeting them in my weeding.

Yes, yes, I have the showy ones like purple coneflowers and black-eyed susans, but I also encourage and cultivate weird little weeds that are too inconspicuous or ugly to be often planted on purpose. White avens, lanceleaf frogfruit, nettle-leaf vervain.

There are too many plants. I'll spend forever listing them all. What is really interesting, is what's happened with the bugs.

Every year, there has been a much bigger variety and population of insects. I am both seeing many more species, and seeing the same species in much, much larger numbers. Even on the same plants that were already there 4 years ago, I can see way more bugs.

Flower flies, for instance. There are tiny yellow and black flies known as flower flies that are very beneficial for gardeners, because their larvae are predators that attack aphids. It used to be that I could often see a dozen, but now I see hundreds of them every time I go outside!

Or wasps. There are more species of wasps than I possibly could have imagined. It used to be that I would only see the reddish paper wasps, the ones that make big paper nests in the eaves of your house, but now, there are dozens of different wasps. Some are black, others black and white, others black and yellow, others black and brown, and they come in all different sizes. A bunch of blue-black wasps with white stripes live in the log next to my pond.

I identified them and looked up the species, and they had not been studied at all since the 1960's. Supposedly they are solitary species, but several different wasps have made nests inside the log right next to each other. That's the first interesting thing. The second interesting thing is that the nests were first inhabited last summer, and the same species of wasp still lives in them, so their town has been inhabited for multiple years instead of being abandoned when the larvae emerge. Has the next generation taken over the old nests? I am observing something about the species that is not known to science.

Wasps are hated and feared, but my wasps have never been anything but peaceful and polite, and they have so much beauty and importance in the ecosystem.

And the bees! I am observing bees this year that I had never even heard of before. Many of them are so tiny, I doubt they could even reach the nectar in large flowers like purple coneflower. What if the small, inconspicuous flowers are essential for smaller pollinators like the tiny bees? That would make sense. Different flowers evolved to attract different bees.

Beetles, ants, leafhoppers, flies, moths, butterflies, all kinds of bugs. Specific plants attract specific bugs, but it is not the plants individually that restore insect biodiversity, it is the way the plants interact and form a bigger ecosystem.

What I mean is, as my garden grew, the increase in bugs was not linear in relationship to the plants, it was exponential. The combination of the many different plants into an ecosystem attracted many more bugs than would be expected from the sum of each plant individually.

I remember the emptiness and barrenness before. I see it around me when I visit other places. The disappearance of bugs. The insect apocalypse. It's so clear to me now. The cause is biotic homogenization. I call it plant sameness.

Everywhere around me, landscapes have been made into expanses of the same few plants. But when plant sameness is replaced by variety and diversity, many plants interacting in many different ways, everything changes.

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wait other post cancelled. mutuals. when r ur birthdays.

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I cannot stop thinking about this article. It has enchanted me.

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damn they weren’t lying that mental health medication CAN make the heat even more unbearable

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Unusual but sympathetic paper:

Language Matters: What Not to Say to Patients with Long COVID, Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Other Complex Chronic Disorders

https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/22/2/275

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calling out for my mom in a moment of extreme pain and terror, but taking an aside to explain to the audience that i mean i want the concept of a mother as caregiver and protector to defend and rescue me rather than my literal mom, whose presence would neither bring me comfort nor improve the situation

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love books. because it’s like what if something happened

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pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

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tbh i dislike the "small dog owners never train their dogs. unlike big dog owners who ALWAYS train their dogs" thing because well. that's not true.