#collapse of ecosystems

[serpentface]

Sketch of a typical Wardi house (small), located adjacent to farmland on the Briya river floodplain.

Most houses are made with mudbrick and with a smooth outer coating, sometimes plastered or otherwise decorated (this one has fairly minimal decorative painting). The climate is dry overall and mudbrick is the most economical and resistant building material available (though it does require more maintenance than in outright arid climates due to regular and sometimes very heavy winter rains), with the use of wood generally being reserved for maintaining the structural integrity of the roof and portals. These houses are fairly effective at insulation, and a well-constructed home will not have dramatic temperature gradients between hot days and cool nights.

Some homes lack doors altogether and use fabric or straw drapes; actual doors are hung by pintles and made with wood and/or woven reeds. Domestic chimneys have not been invented anywhere in general, and smoke in a small house like this will be removed (not the most efficiently) through small tubes in the walls and via the door/windows. Cooking hearths in these smaller houses are usually placed in the center of the building, which goes a little ways to allowing smoke to disperse.

Flat mudbrick roofs are in use in some places, though pointed thatched roofs like these are more common in all but the driest areas due to better shedding rainfall/occasional snow accumulation. Thatching is made with straw or papyrus, location depending, and can become very thick as a byproduct of routine maintenance on old houses.

Misc bits:

-bell windchimes on each side of the house (wards off ghosts and makes a pretty sound).

-little clay guardian lion over the doorway (most houses will have one on each side, though those not overseeing entrances may be hidden in the thatching or buried to fully embed their protective qualities).

-dung fuel being dried on one of the walls.

-koli plant right outside (easy low maintenance fruit and vegetables)

[verdantglow]

Apple Staff Alignments & Other Notes from Retail Purgatory AU

Etho

Role: Genius

Alignment: True Neutral

Has been at this Genius Bar the longest (apart from Doc)

He's mostly here because he's good at it, they pay him well, & it's generally pretty tolerable. Plus it'd be like, a whole thing to find another job, & he's got other things he'd rather spend his time on.

At this point, he's gotten pretty good at slipping into work mode, so he's generally pleasant, if kinda unremarkable (in demeanor), if you get him for your appointment.

That said, he's very much doing just enough to stay in the managers' good graces & gets maybe a bit too much enjoyment out of seeing just how close he can get to that line.

Like he knows exactly how late he can be on how many days each quarter without getting official feedback & he will be late all of those days.

"Sorry I'm late for the team meeting, traffic was crazy out there!" [is obviously holding a full cup of steaming hot coffee from Starbucks]

So yeah, he's not the one starting shit, but he's definitely just gonna watch in amusement & not help if Doc's pissing off another customer.

Refuses to work any morning shifts ever. Schedule him every weekend day if you want, but if you tell him to show up for a shift before 1pm, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

Tango

Role: Genius

Alignment: Chaotic Good

Tango is an absolute fucking delight to have as your Genius. He's got this infectiously good energy & is just soooo hype to help you figure out whatever's wrong & show you like ten completely unrelated but very cool things in the process.

He is constantly going out of scope, doing software fixes & in appointment hardware repairs that he's very much not supposed to do. Not to mention showing off the most awesome accessories the store currently carries.

So his productivity numbers are abysmal & he's got the longest average appointment duration in the store (well. probably the local market, actually).

But he's also got hands down the best customer reviews. Plus all those $1.5k drones he keeps selling by flying them around the back of the store while in appointments.

Management has tried asking him to hand those customers off to a sales person so he can do tech stuff, but he always just says he couldn't do that because he was still in an appointment with them & he can't send people off without fixing their problems, can he?

& honestly, they really need his review scores to balance out Doc's.

Doc

Role: Genius

Alignment: Lawful Evil

He's been a Genius at the store since it opened & he transferred from being a Genius at a different location.

He has worked on pretty much every Apple product in the last couple of decades & remembers how to fix all of them.

Not that he's happy about it. He will bitch incessantly while doing repairs on newer iPhones & iMacs, spending the whole time complaining about the degradation of product design at this company. He'll do these more challenging repairs flawlessly, but he will not be happy (or quiet) about it.

He has the shortest appointment times in the store. It's part him being wickedly competent at identifying & fixing issues, part he just doesn't want to waste time in appointments with people with boring problems.

Not that his customers complain about the quick appointments. In fact, that's the only good thing they have to say in his reviews. Most of them are more about how he barely talked to them & when he did, it was to insult them, their problems, &/or their devices.

Doc'll routinely cherry pick customers out of the appointment list even though he's super not supposed to. Because if there's a problem weird enough to interest him, he will be taking that appointment.

He really doesn't actually need this job. He's been really into the stock purchase plan Apple offers for the whole time he's been there. He's got such an absolutely wild number of Apple shares at this point; he could sell some & retire & have plenty left over.

And yet. He's still there.

Impulse

Role: Genius Admin (Genius Bar/Repair Room operations plus miscellaneous other responsibilities)

Alignment: Lawful Good

When Impulse became Admin, management told him how the Repair Room & everything in it was his responsibility. What they meant was, "keep everything on track & the Geniuses in line." What he heard was, "okay you're basically Repair Room Mom, so take care of these idiots."

& he really took that to heart.

Like. Impulse can imagine every way that things can go off the rails & has plans for all of them.

He always keeps back stock of all the tools & consumable goods hidden somewhere in the store. Anything from sim ejector tools that everyone's constantly losing to those weird obscure tools used to fix the nearly unserviceble Mac Pros twice a year, you need it, he's got it somewhere.

While management expects him to enforce all the rules & tell them when they are broken, he is way more concerned with just holding the whole repair operation together. He's got so many irons in the fire as admin, he's not that bothered with rules that don't have an actual impact on getting things done.

However, he does remind them all about safety rules very often. You even try to touch the repair bench without being grounded, he will appear from nowhere to say that he knows you weren't about to do something that could brick a customer's device or start a thermal event. Because both of those involve a lot of paperwork that he's responsible for.

Tbh, he's actually pretty worried about their safety since things can go sideways fast with some repairs & either of those things would involve having to tell management. Okay, and he doesn't want do paperwork, but that's just because he's so busy keeping things going, he doesn't have time to get distracted by extra paperwork!

He works a lot of early morning shifts to do various inventory things & get things organized before the store opens. He's gonna be up anyway, might as well take the shifts no one else really wants.

Mumbo

Role: Genius

Alignment: Chaotic Anxious

Oh Mumbo. My sweet, sweet Mumbo. My anxiety baby. (I say as an anxiety baby.)

He's great with customers & at explaining things in ways that make people feel reassured, even if they have no clue how things work as soon as they leave the store.

However, he does get anxious easily when things are busy & the team is behind on appointments. So he gets sent back to do repairs when that happens before he flips out.

To be fair, he also gets flustered back there, which tends to lead to him trying to go faster & making mistakes that wind up making the repairs take longer.

But Impulse has a strategy worked out with Mumbo for when he's on repairs.

Because when Mumbo isn't flustered? He's the fastest repair person by a long shot, especially on iPhones. No one can perfectly replace as many phone batteries per hour as calm Mumbo can.

So when it's busy & there's a lot of phones to be done, the overhead lights go out with only the bench lighting on, classical music and ambient rain noises go on the speaker, & Mumbo works from a repair to do list that Impulse made just for him.

Seeing everything waiting to be repaired will just make Mumbo nervous & slower, so they decided that he only needed to see the next few at any given time. Impulse takes care of any priority rearranging that's needed on the full list & Mumbo puts on the blinders & only looks at the next three repairs & busts through a super human number of repairs.

(Even Doc is impressed. He just won't actually directly say so.)

[nando161mando]

Now, that is funny.

Days after they all got annoyed because a climate protest tried to hinder them driving into the desert.

#climate #irony #morons

[tilbageidanmark]

100 tons of dead fish collected in a Greek town last week

[drop--pop--candy]

the thing about the for you tab is i really don't believe it has any sort of algorithm at all. because sometimes it serves me actually good posts and sometimes it serves me ???? not just 3 fe.tish posts in a row but all different ones. after i just reblogged like five aroace posts. hello???????????

[gay-artificer]

Some of my thoughts on the nightcat trailer but this is more or less what I think is going on... A mass ecological shift is happening with the increasing failing of iterators, and in particular the local collapse of a huge, rot-infected super-organism has spread the rot to a wider environment where it hasn't quite died off without the support of his living system- a process that takes time. Downpour, while I think won't be directly connected to this DLC in terms of story implied that rot cysts eventually shift into the weaker brother long legs, before dying off completely. With pebbles completely infested at time of collapse, a lot of rot has been suddenly dropped into the surrounding ecosystem underneath him along with heavy atmospheric shifts. The entire area is more or less in disarray as things struggle to adapt to the rapid changes, with the Watcher potentially being forced out of the Moon/Pebbles locale in search of more stable environments. Given the role iterators had in shaping the locale weather, I'm imagining maybe longer rain cycles with overcast/nighttime period. Maybe weather events like thunderstorms? Base game Rain World had a big focus on survival in reclaimed urban environment, so it could be cool to explore the other aspect of rapid development- The fallout when it changes the world faster than creatures in it can evolve.

[10bmnews]

Switzerland's glacier collapse: How a village vanished and what it means for the future - Times of India

On May 28, 2025, the tranquil Swiss village of Blatten in the Lötschental Valley was dramatically transformed when a massive landslide, triggered by the collapse of the Birch Glacier, buried approximately 90% of the community under mud, ice, and rock. Fortunately, due to earlier warnings about visible cracks in the glacier, residents had been evacuated about ten days prior, preventing a greater…

[tzimtzum]

so ive been in my little gym girl era and it's been so sinister to see how quickly watching a couple very dry videos on form transformed my feed into like 1. crazy eating disorder bait content, and 2. Gym Guy Humour which is SO steeped in misogyny without being misogynistic, so if you were a young man just learning to work out you would instantly be exposed to a barrage of content that seems completely apolitical but is conditioning you at every turn never to see women as your peers. & my gym rat friend who uses IG informs me that the next stage of the pipeline is a slope of 'men's mental health' content that's gradually more openly misogynistic until you're in the manosphere. that's probably fine

[weafurry]

summarizing our headcanons for how slivers structure has degraded over the years in three words; modern day chernobyl.

[alex-strike-is-transgender]

Sometimes I really just wish things didn't change so much. Yeah the world changing and improving so fast is great and all but I'm tired and just really want something familiar to go to.

[nando161mando]

111 years ago today Knowledge alone isn't sufficient to ensure good decision-making, because governance isn't about information. It is about power and influence. We need policies to be informed by evidence and to ensure scientists have credibility

[tilbageidanmark]

What happens to the natural world when people disappear?

Across the globe, vast swathes of land are being left to be reclaimed by nature. To see what could be coming, look to Bulgaria.

[fisheito]

How it started:

How it's going:

[intelligentchristianlady]

Scary News

Humanity is in danger of crossing the point of no return for five of Earth’s natural systems because of human-caused climate change, according to a new study from an international team of more than 200 researchers. The collapse of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, widespread coral reef die-offs in warm water, disruption of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre circulation, and the abrupt thawing of permafrost regions are all in danger of being irreversibly crossed at 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. Global temperatures have already risen between 1.1 and 1.3 degrees. “Tipping points in the Earth system pose threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity,” Tim Lenton said, lead author of the Global Tipping Points report. “They can trigger devastating domino effects, including the loss of whole ecosystems and capacity to grow staple crops, with societal impacts including mass displacement, political instability and financial collapse.” Lenton added that the report is a “tale of two future paths for humanity. We’ve basically left it too late for incremental action. Instead, we need to find and trigger what we’re calling some positive tipping points that accelerate action down an alternative pathway.”

(See x, Day 1051, for links.)

[valentineblacker]

Sad to see this D20 season end... not just because people really liked my last fun facts post... anyway, here's more info on Hank's glowy little ocean critters! They're dinoflagellates! A little plankton/algae that's also responsible for red tides. (There are a lot of bioluminescent guys in the ocean so I wouldn't be surprised if there are others who use this strategy.)

[irenespring]

I have shamefully watched Selling Sunset enough times that I am starting to be able to tell Brett and Jason apart.