#i think about this mostly in terms of ecology

[perfectlyripeclementine]

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

[nobodyfamousposts]

Do you think people cling on too much to Adrien's high road advice as a reason to salt on him?

Yes, especially when there are plenty of other reasons to salt him that have previously been ignored. But to that end, it DOES serve as the final straw for people after a SERIES of problems that had previously gone unaddressed.

Much like many aspects of the show, Adrien has displayed problematic behaviors that have been overlooked and waved off in the earlier seasons. This is likely or especially due to the way how in each and every incident, Adrien was narratively shown to be correct. In his stance. In his choices. In his behaviors. He was always right. It doesn't matter if he shouldn't be, because he is.

Now unless you're a hater or anti or salter or whatever negative name people tend to get for not liking a story as it's presented, readers and watchers tend to follow along with the narrative as it presents things and how it presents things. It's a common setup in any story. Protagonist Centered Morality, I feel framed best by Susan in the Discord series:

Susan: ...and then Jack chopped down the beanstalk, adding murder and ecological vandalism to the theft, enticement and trespass charges already mentioned, but he got away with it and lived happily ever after without so much as a guilty twinge about what he had done. Which proves that you can be excused anything if you're a hero, because no one asks inconvenient questions.

Pretty much this. Most people will follow what the narrative says because it's the narrative. If the narrative wants you to focus on Marinette being embarrassed, you're going to focus on how much she's cringe. And if the narrative wants you to view Adrien as a perfect sunshine boy who never does anything wrong, anything he does is going to be framed through that lens and it's difficult to break from that view and call out the times when he is wrong. Not unless he does something particularly severe.

It should be noted that outside of Chameleon, Adrien had, among other things: lied to his partner, caused someone to get akumatized and had his partner take the blame, was messing around during life-threatening and city-threatening situations, did nothing as Chloe tormented people right in front of him, DEFENDED Chloe after she tormented people right in front of him, bailed on an event with friends to set up a date with someone who said she had other plans and then got mad at HER for it, tried to flirt or confess in the middle of an active crisis which took necessary attention away from said crisis, caused himself AND his partner to get hit by akuma powers and needlessly be taken out of commission.

And yet people could mostly overlook these instances. They weren't his fault. Chloe is his friend. Marinette is worse. He's just a kid. He has a tragic backstory. So on and so forth. Easy to overlook. Easy to ignore in favor of the Sunshine Boy setup people were given and want to believe in.

But there were three major instances that really grabbed people's attention and stayed:

His attitude in Frozer. It probably wouldn't have been so bad except this rejection already happened in Glaciator, where he was supposed to have learned a lesson and accepted just being Ladybug's friend and now apparently didn't, despite it happening earlier that very season. Then in response, he decides to date Kagami as a rebound, drags Marinette with him on his date (without realizing how he's asking his friend to be a third wheel on a DATE) and focuses on her when he's supposed to be with Kagami, throws another tantrum in the middle of an akuma fight and refuses to work with his partner when the city is literally frozen, and requires Ladybug to apologize to him for hurting his feelings before he finally working with her. Again. But okay, he's a teenage boy in love. Not used to rejection and got his feelings hurt. Lovesquare is endgame so of course it'll work out anyway, so it's not like this bump in the road is really going to matter long term so we shouldn't hold it against him. Fine. Dumb, but fine. We've forgiven it in other shows and other poorly done teen romances, we can forgive it here.

His behavior in Syren in which he demanded to know secrets from people when the secrets were not theirs to tell him, and went so far as to attempt to blackmail his kwami (which was funny) and threaten to quit and abandon the Ring that the big bad is after while the city is flooded and people were trying to not drown (which was decidedly less humorous). But it was played for wholesome when Plagg reassured him and he got what he wanted by Fu revealed himself even if Adrien did nothing to actually show he earned it, so all's well that ends well, I guess? And people could justify it because "they're partners" and "part of a team" and "she should trust him" and "it's not fair he's the only one left out of the loop" and "he has a right to know" and just general "Fu is an idiot" (which is admittedly hard to argue). So people were disgruntled, but most were willing to overlook it.

His holier than thou lecture to Marinette in Maledictator over everyone being happy Chloe was leaving. When all Marinette was doing at the time was watching everyone else have fun. When Adrien specifically guilted Marinette and not any of the other actual partiers involved who were literally throwing a party over his friend leaving and probably should have warranted a lecture more than the girl just standing there. When the girl in question was also Chloe's main target and out of everyone had valid reasons to be happy that her bully won't be around to bully her anymore. When Adrien himself has historically been present to witness Marinette being targeted including twice he witnessed Chloe attempt to steal from Marinette, once he witnessed her try to blackmail Marinette, and numerous other times when she actively caused harm to Marinette and others. When Adrien then proceeded to sit in a corner and pout rather than do anything else or just leave if the party really bothered him. When Adrien, if he really cared so damn much, could have gone after Chloe himself! Or y'know...have stood up for Chloe earlier when she got upset in the first place. But fine, okay, Chloe is his childhood friend. So maybe he's just being biased and oblivious to the fact that his "friend" is a horrible person. But people can excuse and justify it in that they are friends and friends support each other, and the longer someone is friends with someone else, the harder it is to break from them. And that Marinette was probably just the target of his lecture because she was the one there in the moment (and the only one who would listen without arguing). And her calling Chloe useless was "mean" despite it being quite frankly the least of what she could have said about her in the moment (coughcough theft cough blackmail cough punished the entire school cough TRIED TO CRASH A TRAIN AND NEARLY KILLED HER AND HER PARENTS COUGH-FREAKINGCOUGH). Fine. Childhood friend means Adrien supports her in all her horrible and even deadly actions. Frustrating, but again, able to be explained and you can see where he's coming from.

These are all things that definitely got Adrien some side eye at best and some detractors at worst.

BUT if you really think about it, all of these examples are objectively worse than his lecture to Marinette in Chameleon. Not accepting being told "no" and continuing to chase a girl who isn't that in to him (while leading on another). Putting lives at risk over personal wants that could quite honestly wait until AFTER the crisis is over. Defending someone who is harmful and guilt tripping the victims. Compared to those, telling someone to leave a liar to their lying seems relatively minor.

So why this? Why here? Why is it Chameleon that has people saying enough is enough? Why is it this episode that is causing the sunshine boy to be so tarnished and the subject of salt in fan fiction?

Because this is the time when it couldn't be rationalized. There wasn't even a valid sensible canon-based reason for his stance. The arguments that Adrien "knew confronting her wouldn't work" or that he "handled her like paparazzi" or that he "knew Marinette previously failed when she tried" (even though he wasn't there and didn't know) or that he "didn't think anyone would believe him" don't come from canon. Those were fan arguments made after the fact to justify him after the base was broken and the outcry became too much to ignore.

This case didn't have any of the ties or rationales of the previous incidents. Adrien wasn't defending himself or his place in a partnership. He wasn't fighting for his love or his dream or an outcome he wanted and that we all knew was coming—if anything, he was fighting against her. He wasn't defending a friend like he did with Chloe—I mean, it's pretty evident he doesn't even really know or like Lila at this point, and for all intents and purposes, this is apparently only the second day he actually had any interaction with her. There was no notable reason Adrien really had for why he essentially chose to protect Lila over literally anyone else as she wasn't a friend and it wasn't in his interests to protect her from a consequence that wouldn't hurt her short term as much as it would likely harm everyone else long term.

And yet, he still defended her and her freedom to lie. Over Marinette. Over Ladybug. Over his friends. Over any sense of right and wrong he seems to have no problem throwing around when it comes to Marinette/Ladybug. Which seems like he targets her 9 times out of 10 compared to pretty much anyone else by this point. So it's little wonder then that people who didn't already hate the lovesquare because of the cringe factor from Marinette started to hate it for being incredibly unhealthy given that their relatively limited interactions tend to involve him lecturing her for failing to live up to his double standards that only seem to apply to her in any given situation.

This incident by itself doesn't seem like much, but when looked at as part of the series as a whole, it's when people couldn't keep overlooking this trend. Where he seems to admonish the wrong person. Where he acts like a mouthpiece rather than a person. Talks like he’s wise in a situation he seems to have a childish and one-sided view of. Acts like a brat but is treated as though he has no accountability in the situation he causes. Where he is wrong but no one and certainly not the narrative acknowledges it (not until season five and two seasons too late when it doesn't matter and he's still not the one facing consequences for it).

And it's not like he actually follows the stances he himself promotes. In Chameleon, canon presents him with this idealistic stance that Lila could change if given a chance, except he doesn't give her a chance. He doesn't push her to be a better person. He doesn't support or in any way help her to be the better person he insisted to Marinette she could be. He also doesn't do anything or warn anyone when she keeps lying and actively harms the people he says he cares about. He doesn't do anything one way or the other other than some lackluster encouragement to stop lying and a warning that goes nowhere. It just further gives credit to the argument that Adrien either simply doesn't care about other people, or that he doesn't care for Marinette specifically. Neither is conducive to the lovesquare or the increasingly tarnished view of the "sunshine boy".

And it could have worked. Canonically and intrinsically to his character. His idealism and trust in the wrong person comes back to bite him. He learns and grows from it. Except that, much like with nearly everything he does in canon, Chameleon set it up that Adrien was the writers' mouthpiece and thus was not "wrong". I'll grant that they did have him admit it and apologize to Marinette for it two seasons later, but it is pretty evident that during Chameleon, they intended his lecture to be right, with no foreshadowing and no implication otherwise. And I'm fairly certain they only backtracked and had him do that much because of the amount of fan outrage over the episode.

So yes, I think his lecture in Chameleon was really a final straw since unlike Chloe, Adrien has NO relationship with Lila to justify his defense of her. Especially when the argument is in favor of letting her lie to the people he's supposed to care about. That combined with how jarring it was how most of the class just sided with Lila over the seat issue in the first place, and I think people were less inclined to just ignore the problems in the episode specifically and with the series as a whole as they were compared to the first and second seasons. Not just with Adrien, as we see that Alya also started getting more callout and salt since then as well as more retrospective scrutiny over her behavior in earlier seasons.

But yeah...Chameleon was where things seemed to take a 180, so it's bound to be the deciding episode and deciding incident that sticks out in people's minds with these characters. That's probably why it ends up the go-to for salt and complaints on the characters involved instead of any of the other incidents that would arguably warrant it more.

[canmom]

a big mercy in the world is that it's actually much harder to hijack someone's behaviour with some kinda visual stimulus than capital would like.

so despite the constant semiotic fusillades of advertisers trying to 'shit in your brain' as the ad hacking slogan goes, you still get better at shutting it out. the advertisers have to resort to more and more desperate means to try to get you to buy product. of course they sell this to their clients as subtle behavioral modifications that manifest without the target even realising. but despite the occasional breakout viral success, it's mostly just a zero sum desperate battle to remind you that they exist at all. most ad exposures are wasted on people who either were never going to buy the thing or were already going to buy the thing. advertisers mostly just copy other advertisers and follow fads but present themselves as the key to success like a court alchemist to a king. overall it's a cancer swallowing up more and more of its host.

this does not make it any less annoying.

anyway, ads are only one part of marketing, and since they kind of suck, the modern method to promote your shit is to try to get 'organic' promotion through word of mouth, positive user reviews on a storefront, etc. so of course many companies cultivate 'influencers', post shill reviews, buy fake metrics, and all that. since all these mechanisms then become immediately less trustworthy, an arms race develops of trying to camouflage the fake marketing speech as 'genuine', 'honest', 'unbiased' etc. the result of this on communication is bad, there's chaff everywhere, but once again the effort of the marketer trying to control you bounces off the wall that people hate it and will not go along with it if they can help it.

a more subtle approach is to just try and cultivate people assigning themselves the role of reviewer. this can create something a bit more symbiotic. the reviewer gets to build an identity out of consuming product and being a discerning connoisseur, and the stuff they like gets free marketing written about it. hence sites like goodreads and letterboxd. not only that but when the thing they like does well, the reviewer gets to feel proud that they acted as a kingmaker.

one weird upshot of all this is that a small company will get really worked up about a negative review on a platform from some rando and go out of their way to placate them. i feel like we're going to see more people exploiting this - ig the gacha mra shit in korea is in part a ripple of that, though those cunts went a lot further than just review bombing.

anyway I've participated in this machine. arguably all the writing about fiction i do on this blog is feeding into it. when i think about it, i think it stinks, but I'm not sure what else to do. there are authors i admire, and who are my friends, i want them to be read by people and have bread on the table.

obviously just because there are powerful actors whose primary concern is moving product doesn't reduce all the discussion of art to elaborate games around moving product. in some sense the 'product review' form is an invading force, best disregarded. but i feel like it would be unwise to ignore the ecological mechanisms underlying what gets made and how and what makes its way to my eyeballs... and how my own behaviours belong to that ecosystem. even if it's depressing to think in those terms.

[blueper-saiyan]

I’m overanalyzing something that’s canonically not meant to be thought about, for fun, so here’s a speculative Saiyan biology question: how often do they actually need to eat? I’ve sort of joked about the possibility that it’s like large predators irl where they gorge themselves occasionally and then wait until the next big kill. This would balance out the amount they’re eating to closer to a normal human, just a surprising amount in one sitting, and dodge the thing I’m about to go off the deep end about. But I think they’re probably supposed to need that amount frequently? Which is like, rodent levels of frequency and portions, but unlike a small mammal, a huge amount of actual food consumed. It’s fine if there’s only a handful of Saiyans on a whole planet but how did that work when there was a lot of them? That’s a massive amount of food, where is it coming from? Are they mostly feeding their army by taking food from conquered planets? They’d still need to be producing enough for their homeworld. Is it being farmed automatically and that’s how they can have the majority of their whole species be soldiers? But like, Gine has a job processing meat, so it’s clearly not entirely automated. Stuck thinking about Saiyan agricultural production and supply logistics help.

Unfortunately, I can also say that almost immediately after finding out the amount that Saiyans eat, the back of my mind did jump to “how fast do they starve?” Like, is that a much bigger threat for them than a human or do they have about the same amount of reserves, even if they’re eating more? If it is way faster, how does that affect how they view food/hunger? As a fun irl example, hummingbirds have such an insane metabolism that they would potentially starve to death if they slept at night. So they don’t sleep like normal, they enter a state that’s more like hibernation to slow their metabolism down enough to survive. Many hummingbird species are fiercely territorial because they need access to their food source or they starve. I imagine a theoretical hummingbird society would be thinking about food differently. And because this is my indulgent post where I get to talk about animals, I’m also going to bring up vampire bats, which could also potentially starve if they can’t feed within two days or so (I did not go deep into scientific literature to find original numbers and sources for this estimate I’m sorry true bat fans. Actually same goes for the hummingbird estimate but I know more about birds.). Unlike the more territorial hummingbirds though, vampire bats roost together during the day in colonies, with the same other bats repeatedly. And their food source can’t be guarded like a flower patch can, so there’s less purpose to territoriality. So they can form long term friendships with each other by interacting in ways like grooming each other. Within these friendships, when one bat gets a meal during their few-hour-a-night feeding window, but the other one doesn’t, the one who got enough food will often share with their friend to keep them from going hungry. Then their friend returns the favor when their roles are reversed, keeping them both alive, along with the rest of their friend network.

So those are some very different responses to needing food nearly constantly. If I were deeper in ecology mode I could probably try and come up with explanations based on the types of food source and territory and other factors for why, but I’m here to apply this to Saiyans lol. Honestly, a cooperative strategy would make more sense given that they’re pretty human-like, but that’s certainly not the sense we get given of their society. Were they always super individualistic or is that a recent development? Are they even actually individualistic or is that fully a societal role thing (elites are different from lower class warriors)? Or is the idea that they don’t cooperate partly a lie made up after their deaths anyway? Speculative biology for intelligent species get the extra layer of culture just to make things more messy and fun. We also know pretty much nothing about their original home planet and the actual context that shaped them, so I don’t get to apply other factors, like how easy it is to defend food sources or how important it is to stick together. We probably won’t ever get to know anything more about their original homeworld/Sadala, which is disappointing given that we got hints about it, but it does leave more room for speculation.

[random-thought-depository]

A TV channel in my area plays Star Trek TOS episodes on Saturday night, last week's episode was the one about how the writers were scared of hippies lol.

Anyway, in the episode they go the anvilicious route of making all the plants on that planet incredibly poisonous (and the hippies I guess too technophobic to wave a tricorder over a bush before deciding they want to settle there), but before they found out about that there was a line about the planet having no animals and, wait, even if the biochemistries were compatible, wouldn't a planet with no animals logically be pretty difficult for humans to survive on, especially if the humans are going to go full anprim and live as gatherers?

Obviously getting enough protein might be a problem. And I think there's some vitamin you can only get from animals? You only need tiny amounts of it IIRC, small enough that preindustrial vegetarian Jains were able to get enough from insect contamination in their food, but on a planet with no animals at all that would be a huge problem!

But also, no animals would logically mean no fruit, right? Fruit exist to entice animals to move a plant's seeds around for it. If there's no animals, there's no reason for plants to expend energy on growing them. Plants on a planet with no animals would probably mostly propagate by wind-blown seeds, and have seeds similar to dandelion fluff, small and very light to easily disperse in the wind.

That basically leaves tubers. Which probably would exist; they might be even more useful on a planet where there are no animals to plunder such rich stores of energy (though I guess there'd probably be parasitic fungi and stuff evolved to exploit them). On the other hand, on a planet with no browsers or grazers the main selection pressures driving the evolution of tubers would be winter, drought, and fire, so if "Eden" has a nice climate it might not have a lot of tubers either.

I don't think it'd look nice and pretty and park-like like the planet in the episode either. For one thing, I think, just like it has no fruit, it'd have no flowers except things similar to dandelion puffs; there'd be nothing to pollinate them. With no animals with eyes, there'd be no reason for plants to evolve parts with dramatic color contrast. Its vegetation would be rather visually monotonous, mostly greens and browns. But also, and more importantly in terms of its potential (or lack of thereof) for human habitation, that kind of lush but open park-like landscape is what you get when vegetation is being regularly pruned back by people or animals or fire or some combination of those things. I think a planet with no animals would have very different vegetation growth patterns, more like...

In areas dry enough for burning seasons, I think you might get a fire-adapted ecology where fire does some of what grazers and browsers do on Earth. With no grazers and browsers and the main selection pressure being competition between plants, you'd get a dense tangled profusion of growth and lots of slowly decomposing dead plant material (cause there's no animals to help break it down or prune the leaves before they get a chance to die and fall off, just bacteria and fungi). It'd probably be rather difficult for a human to walk through, a forest choked with a dense profusion of undergrowth and dead stuff; at least there are no thorns, and nothing like poison oak; with no animals there's no selection pressure for thorns or poison. In dry parts of the year, this accumulation of living and dead plant material becomes a tinderbox for wildfires. If a planet like this looks idyllic from orbit, it's cause you arrived in mid-spring/mid-autumn; come in summer/winter, when dry seasons are in full swing, and you would see huge wildfires and skies stained with smoke. The oldest and biggest trees are tough enough to usually survive the burning, but the undergrowth is cleared. After the burn, seeds sprout and saplings grow quickly, competing to take advantage of the cleared ground, quickly filling the forest back up with a tangled profusion of growth and an increasing accumulation of slowly rotting dead material, completing the cycle.

On the other hand, on the same planet, in the places with lots of rain and conditions favorable to evergreen plants, there might be forests of enormous trees with forest floors that are pretty open but rather dark, barren, and muddy, with most light being blocked by a dense cathedral-like canopy far above. They'd smell of mud and rot, as the forest floor has accumulated large amounts of slowly decomposing leaf litter fallen from the canopy far above and has a mostly decomposer-based ecology of fungi and bacteria that slowly feeds on that. This is an ecosystem of trees and rot, and the trees make no fruit, they reproduce by seeds like dandelion fluff, small and very light to float on the wind, and they don't even produce much of that; they live a very long time and reproduce very slowly, partially because they're Cronuses; their dense canopy starves their own offspring of light along with everything else. For all the green lushness of their canopies these forests are low-energy ecosystems, conservative ecosystems, defined by the almost total victory of ancient, mighty incumbents; these are the Cronus forests, the lands of the Cronus trees.

There's very little energy available to humans in these Cronus woods. Some edible mushrooms, maybe; that'd be about it. Very possibly humans simply could not survive here, except perhaps in tiny numbers and by living in almost hermit-like isolation and dispersal. The Cronus forests might be almost as hostile as the Sahara or Antarctica, a place where the likely fate of some unfortunate stranded human explorer would be to die of hunger lying on the roots of some sequoia-size Cronus tree that was ancient when Julius Caesar marched into Gaul, staring up into cathedral-like dense green canopy through which only a dim twilight illumination filters even at mid-day, their nose filled with the reek of mud and rot.

Humans might try to terraform the Cronus forests by opening them, but I think that might be quite difficult for low-tech humans. The obvious efficient strategy for attacking the Cronus trees would be to set fire to them, but fire would be one of the primary natural threats to the Cronus trees, and a strong selection pressure on them, so I expect them to be well-adapted to resist it, with fire-retardant chemicals in their bark, wood, sap, and leaves so they resist ignition, and with their sheer size protecting them. The floors of the Cronus woods would receive almost no direct sunlight and therefore be cool and probably damp, and they would have very little undergrowth; fire would probably not spread easily through such an environment. It might be more effective to set torch to the canopies, but they would be dozens or maybe even hundreds of meters above the ground; quite a climb, on a tree that's probably more-or-less a branchless trunk much of the way up, and you've got to climb back down after setting the tree on fire.

That leaves tediously timbering them one by one. With, say, Medieval technology, this might work! The Cronus trees look mighty and their rule assured, but they are actually quite vulnerable. They are slow. Their defenses are purely passive. They literally could not make a single motion to defend themselves as an enemy attacked them with steel saws and axes. And they reproduce very slowly; if they could be timbered efficiently, it would be easy to destroy them faster than they reproduce. An enemy that can think and move is an outside context problem for them, something that never existed in their environment and therefore something they are totally unprepared for. Humans with steel saws and axes might be very efficient killers of these ancient titans.

But steel axes are pretty high-tech if you think agriculture was a mistake. Without metal tools? Imagine trying to bring down a giant sequoia without metal tools, so the axe is something delicate like obsidian or bone, or it has to be very tediously ground to a blade, or you're basically trying to bring the (big and structurally strong!) tree down by bashing it to a pulp, and big saws are probably impossible. Now imagine having to do that over and over again. Imagine trying to clear a forest that stretches from horizon to horizon that way.

If very low-tech humans can inhabit the Cronus forests at all, I think it might be as, like, highly dispersed small families who move around constantly and rarely meet each other, living on the occasional patch of edible mushrooms or other tid-bit, cause there just isn't enough energy to support anything denser. And even then, they might have to stick to the edge, where other ecozones are accessible, cause, like, would mushrooms even have all the nutrients you need?

I mean, I guess there would be some kind of open woodland areas? I think a planet with no animals would have more forest than a more Earth-like planet with the same climate, cause you've removed a major inhibition on plant growth. Think of how places like highland Scotland used to be forested, but when humans with livestock were added to the mix it became more-or-less an open grassland landscape. I think you'd see a similar effect comparing Plantworld to a version of the same planet that had animals; places that would be marginally viable forest without browsers would be grassland or open woodland with them. But a planet with no animals is probably going to have areas wet enough for plants but too dry for forests, so it'll probably have some grassland equivalents. But...

... Grass in natural prairies often gets pretty tall, doesn't it? And that's with grazers. A grass-equivalent that evolved on a world without grazers would be more selected by competition against other plants. I think no selection by grazing but more selection by competition against other plants might favor more investment in individual stalks. And instead of looking like our grass, these plants would have a cluster of little branches and leaves at the top, for better light interception - and to shade and thus inhibit the growth of any rivals growing near their base!

So, maybe... The experience of walking in a grassland in no animals world is very different from walking through a lawn or even the kind of knee-high or less wild grass I see around the Bay Area. The grass is tall. It's taller than you. The stalks are thick too; finger-thick and hollow; it's more like a forest of young bamboo. It feels more like walking in a cornfield. And it's surprisingly dark. Each stalk has a little crown of small branches and leaves, and together they make a surprisingly dense canopy not far above your head. The effect is claustrophobic and eerie. It has a vibe a little like the Cronus woods. And that's not an accident; these plants are essentially much smaller versions of the Cronus trees; tighter constraints, similar strategy. This place replicates the Cronus woods in miniature. This is the Cronus prairie, the land of the Cronus grass.

This probably doesn't sound like a place you'd like. If it's any consolation, if the Cronus grasses had minds they probably wouldn't like you either. Unlike the Cronus trees, the Cronus grass is small and vulnerable enough to experience you, fast-moving muscles-having thing, as the outside context problem you are on its world. You move through the Cronus grass and break a stalk. What a calamity to that plant! All the energy and resources it poured into building that stalk, all that work, the work of its life, undone in an instant! Now it has no crown to drink the sun, and its luckier neighboring competitors will close over it, and it will die without ever having a chance to scatter its gossamer seeds on the wind. Or maybe it's a different, longer-lived sort of Cronus grass (Cronus grass and Cronus tree aren't species, they're strategies and niches), and in the soil below the base of the stalk, where the long-lived part of the plant lives, there is a tuber, from which it can pull stored energy to regenerate the stalk, but this only prolongs the failure cycle; that energy was supposed to be used to regenerate the stalk after the Cronus prairie burns in the dry season and is reduced to a horizon-to-horizon smoldering plain of bare earth and ash; now its energy stores will be depleted when the fire comes, and afterward it will not be able to keep pace with the growth and regeneration of its neighbors and rivals, and they will close over it and it will die.

Those tubers make the Cronus prairie the best place on this planet for humans to live. Some of the Cronus grasses are annuals and live only one year, dying in the fires of the dry season and leaving only seeds to continue their lineage, but many are long-lived, with root systems that survive the fires, and these all have tubers that store energy to regenerate their stalk after the burn. In the competitive scramble after the burn the advantage offered by such a pre-existing storehouse of caloric wealth is huge, and these plants evolved in the absence of any animals that might raid them. Think of the Cronus prairie as a vast field of turnips and potatoes, with multiple edible plants in every square foot of soil, stretching from horizon to horizon. Here, at last, is something like the promise of Eden; food provided abundantly by nature with no need to work the soil, simply waiting to be dug up, available in such quantity that there would be little motivation for hard toil or war. That is, if you don't mind a monotonous diet of bland and nutrient-poor tubers, every day, every year, almost every meal, from the day you are weaned to the day you die. Low-tech human inhabitants of the Cronus prairie would have plenty of calories, but getting enough protein and other nutrients to stay alive and healthy might be a very hard struggle for them, and they might often suffer from malnutrition.

The abundance of the Cronus prairie would also be fragile. The tuber-growing Cronus grasses are long-lived and reproduce slowly, and digging up the tuber would probably destroy one. All the defenses they use to protect their precious hordes of carbohydrates are against enemies as slow as themselves, bacteria and fungi and specialized "vampire plants" without chlorophyll; they are not evolved to deal with raiders with muscles and eyes who can simply physically dig up the tubers. It would be quite easy for humans to slip into harvesting them faster than they reproduce.

Imagine what life might be like for a low-tech inhabitant of the Cronus prairie, a few hundred or a few thousand years after establishment.

Your staple food is something like turnip soup (the stalks of the Cronus grass furnish the fuel for cooking). No animals in your world have yet developed the ability to breathe on land, but there are things a little like insects you can find in creeks and rivers; they are enough to supply your people with the nutrients you absolutely must get from animals. Your people wean your babies late, because mother's milk is one of the precious few foods available to you that is not Cronus grass tubers and is much more nourishing. You've learned to feed your children small amounts of human feces to establish the gut microbiomes they need to process food. Finding enough food that isn't Cronus grass tubers to get all the nutrients you need is a struggle, but you know if you eat only Cronus grass tubers you will get sick and die slowly. In fact, your people are chronically malnourished and chronically ill, but you live long and most of your children grow up anyway, because your world has few bacteria and viruses capable of infecting humans, so your immune systems don't have to be very strong. In a desperate measure to increase protein consumption, your people have incorporated cannibalism of the deceased into your funeral rituals (your people view the practice as loving and reverential and normal, not desperate; it is done only to people who have already died of natural causes and allows their flesh to still be part of the tribe while their bones are shallowly buried to nourish the Cronus grass). Water bugs and human flesh are the only meats you've ever tasted. It is the beginning of the dry season, and the sky is stained with high-altitude smoke from the vast wildfires already burning hundreds of kilometers to the north. Soon your people must move northwest to the island of barren rock that rises from the Cronus prairie or southwest to the Cronus woods; there is little food in those places, but the fire stops at their boundaries, and to be caught out in the Cronus prairie when the fire walks across it is death.

You know, if you're going with "hippies have an overly romanticized view of nature and therefore don't deal with it well," I think I'd kind of prefer this. Just making the plants on "Eden" super-poisonous is just kind of an arbitrary fuck you, but... "Planet with no animals and sufficient abundance that you can survive as a gatherer without much effort" is totally something I could see as a hippie fantasy; no need for hard toil or alienating technology, little temptation toward war, no dangerous animals that might hurt you, and no temptation toward carnivory. But it's an ecologically incoherent fantasy! You are also an animal! A world with no place for animals has no place for you! It will probably not be an easy world for you to survive on! Of course, it'd be difficult to portray this in a one hour TV episode; would probably work a lot better with a novel.

Also, you could flip this around: if you think about it, it's actually really weird that a planet with no animals has fruit (even super-poisonous fruit). Maybe it's not a natural wilderness. Maybe it's somebody's food forest.

Suggestion: "Eden" is actually a heavily gardened world maintained by one of those state-repelling cultures James C. Scott talks about. Its inhabitants are not humanoid and have totally different biochemistry from us, so the local food's perfectly edible, palatable, and nourishing to them. They mostly live as gatherers at a low level technology, doing the sort of proto-agricultural ecosystem engineering lots of hunter-gatherers do on Earth. They maintain just enough technology to tell them when a starship is dropping by. When that happens, they crawl into little hidey-holes and go into a deep hibernation, which makes starship sensors not register them as alive. They come out of hibernation a few days later or something, which is usually enough time for visitors with more galactic-normal biochemistry to realize the plants on the planet are poisonous to them, lose interest in it, and leave.

Something something people who reject the value system of settler colonial society but don't reject the terra nullius myth.

Also, I might use these ideas for a planet in my own sci fi, cause it has a premise that easily lends itself to such a scenario happening somewhere in it.

[bonefall]

do your cats recognize invasive-ness? i was reading your custom moth/butterfly taxomomy and it reminded me of spotted lanternflies (which are not in the UK i think?) so i got curious

Yes, AND I am willing to use StarClan to let them know about certain long-term damages that some species do that they may not know about on a short timescale,

BUT

That's all within reason! Ecologically speaking, not every non-native species is invasive, and there are some species which the Clan cats can't get rid of. In addition; the environment of Sanctuary Lake is different, in some aspects, from the environment of White Hart.

Here's a couple of the examples that are particularly interesting off the top of my head;

Sycamores and Spottedleaf's tar-spot blight are exclusive to the White Hart. They are an American species, and were deliberately planted.

Cedars are exclusive to Carrionplace, they were planted to help with the smell.

The pine plantation that ShadowClan's Bog Project decimates was mostly sitka spruce with an occasional douglas fir, they had never seen a douglas fir until Sanctuary Lake

They are not aware that Signal Crayfish are invasive. Signals spread a disease that is almost 100% fatal towards the native Whiteclaws. The species cannot coexist in the same ecosystem.

Clan cats fucking hate Gray Squirrels, every time canon has a 'pointless argument' about squirrels crossing the ThunderClan border, in BB that is a very real point of anger about other Clans doing unauthorized hunting of Red Squirrels.

Part of why ThunderClan is seen as so 'pushy and bossy' is because they are self-proclaimed Red Squirrel Defenders

Without getting into the cultural significance of this, it has to do with Thunderstar (righteous, defender of the weak, Our Glorious Leader) and Skystar (treacherous, hater of the weak, Their Barbarous Dictator)

Minks. Clan cats fight Minks constantly. River otters leave them alone, but minks are notorious prey-stealers (and RiverClan is probably looking for an excuse to get at those pelts)

Muntjacs are what humans consider an invasive species, but Clan cats actively manage their populations. They're the perfect size of deer to hunt and they produce very valuable pelts.

Rhododendron is uprooted ASAP because it gets out of control fast. This is StarClan knowledge.

Giant Hogweed is an IMMEDIATE danger and killed as soon as it's spotted. It's noxious, it spreads like wildfire, it gets so big it's impossible to handle. If I wasn't working with canon and had Thistleclaw to make a name pun out of, I would have used Giant Hogweed as the authoritarian parable. Ecologically speaking Thistles are actually very valuable for pollinators and are a pioneer species-- Giant Hogweed should die by my hand

[bleachbleachbleach]

The post was getting very long, so I started a new thread, but this comes from this meme post here. Thank you for the tag, @dreaming-about-seireitei!

I'll no-pressure tag @withoutteamalice, @inkyperson, @crysuzumushi, and @mikansei, using the very scientific metric, "the last 4 people who left narrative tags on one of our posts/reblogs." Also anyone else who wants to!!!! (Please feel free to tag us so I can read your lists!)

list 5 things you can talk about for hours without preparing any material:

I’m bad at these kinds of memes because I know they’re hypothetical, but then my brain is like, “Well, I would not do that.” XP I wouldn’t talk for hours about something unless I were completely convinced my conversation partner was 1) equally interested in the thing, and, specifically, 2) open to being engaged for that duration. I don’t want to be too much and burn them out on me and then not get to be friends with them anymore. 😖

But five things I would really love to be in dialogue with people about for hours, Bleach edition:

The maps and calendars of Soul Society — Especially the potential for maps that engage with space-time in interesting ways, and don’t fit the form of what most people on Earth envision as a ‘typical’ map.

Any kind of municipal/regional service in Soul Society (mail, foodways, billing, professional services) — Stuff that would show up in the Encyclopedia Soulttanica, essentially.

Ecology/evolution in Soul Society — Both in terms of biome/weather/flora/fauna and also in terms of how shinigami came to be. I’ve been back to thinking recently about shinigami having had a very different form prior to modern human development. But have also been wondering about the possibility that Soul Society (not just the Yamamoto-created society, but the place in general) potentially being a much younger universe than ours, and despite the “longevity” of shinigami as individual units, their world actually being much younger than life on Earth. And also like, if it is a true reflection/shadow of the Living World, is their ecology complex enough to weather sharp changes? Or is it more prone to ecological collapse because it lacks the ecological complexity to support different epochs of life? (Re: the existential threat of Yhwach.)

Regional foods/holidays/accents in Soul Society — Possibly in contrast to the musings above, but (mostly) Rukongai culture as NOT just a reflection of what exists in the living world, and life not just being a waiting game, but the possibility of rich life/culture/time worth having in Rukongai.

My fanfic, your fanfic. — I miss having writerly community. It’s rare and difficult to come by in any fandom, in any era, but I feel like the parallel play aspect of fandom has only increased, and that’s a huge bummer to me!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

hi, I'm a student looking to maybe go into paleontology! I love your blog, and I've just got a few questions if that's alright!

How did you get into paleontology?

How did you end up becoming a paleontologist (as in, what subjects and such helped)

and what do you do on the job?

Sorry for all the questions, I'd just like to know more about being a paleontologist!

Hi! So

There are a LOT of ways to get into paleontology

The field has multiple parts:

Geologists who focus on the rock content and depositional environment and the context each fossil is found in

Biologists who focus on what the fossils were like when they were alive

Artists who do their best damn job to take all of the evidence and reconstruct the organisms as they were in life

Paleoartists are just as much part of paleontology as the rest of us! In fact, paleoart is an important part of the science.

I personally got into paleontology via option B, Biology. I majored in biology in college and then got a master's degree in evolutionary biology. I also kept up with paleontological papers, read a lot, and constantly challenged my own assumptions.

In undergrad, I did research on paleo, too - that's a big help. I got to organize a Burgess Shale collection and identify all the organisms. Getting a research position in undergrad is a major help to getting your foot in the door.

The way I got into my paleontology PhD program was via networking, unfortunately. There are a lot of conferences year round about paleontology, and lots of people - enthusiasts, wanna be scientists, but also fully fledged scientists and researchers - attend them. I met my advisor, Dr. Peter Houde, at one such conference (Society of Vertebrate Paleontology Annual Meeting). We chatted, he realized I had a lot of research interests in common with him, and I applied to work with him.

Evolutionary Biology, Anatomy, Physiology, and Ecology are the big biology subjects that every paleontologist needs to know. We need to know how things evolve, how their bodies work, and how they interacted with each other and their abiotic environment.

In terms of geology, the big things there would be Sedimentology, Stratigraphy, Geochronology, and Geochemistry. Understanding how sedimentary rocks form, how things fossilize within them, how we measure deep time, and what the different chemicals in fossils and rocks mean for that organism's history are all necessary components.

I would also take drawing classes, specifically so you can draw what you observe in the field. I never did and I regret it.

In terms of how I fell in love with paleo originally, well, my parents showed me Land Before Time when I was like, one, and I fell in love instantaneously. I spent most of my childhood reading dinosaur books, through high school. I just kind of never stopped being obsessed.

On the job, I mostly look at fossils at a lab bench, prep them with very basic chemicals (so nothing too dangerous most of the time), and look at their traits. I also scour databases and gather lots of information about what I need to know. There's some programming, some excel work, graphing, lots of basic stuff. I also have to write a loooot. I don't do fieldwork, because I'm disabled and fieldwork is hella unaccessable, but there's lots for me to do at the bench!

I can go into it more, but I think that's a good start.

[battle-of-alberta]

Can you tell me more about the wildlife in alberta? there seems to be lots of it! I heard there used to be bison? Have the bison come back or are they extinct now?

Parks Pass: What are Bison?

I've been working on this for well over a month, although I've been thinking about it since I received this ask last fall. Bison are so central and important in prairie history, ecology, spirituality, etc. and I feel that they exemplify this more than perhaps any other living thing here... I don't think I will go this in depth into other wildlife for this series.

I am not a naturalist nor do I represent Parks Canada or related organizations, all of this information has been sourced through reports from Parks Canada, organizations like CPAWS, etc. There are a lot of questions surrounding ecology, legalities, and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples that I just am not equipped to answer by myself... but I wanted to give as clear an overview as I could of the challenges and successes around bison in Alberta.

More notes, close ups, etc. below. I will try to link to some sources in the notes as a reblog.

I tried my best to make each panel stand mostly on its own so that you could read them in any order, but I hope there is a bit of a flow to the information... The pieces were slightly bigger than my scanner, so I apologize for some blurry writing and cropped edges!

(yak left, bison centre, buffalo right) (You will find all three domestic in Alberta, at least at agricultural fairs if not commercially)

[ badum tishhhhhhh]

I tried to get the moose and our guides to scale physically, but it was tricky! Also: the summer ochre cape tends to appear on male plains bison.

There is debate as to whether wood and plains bison should be classified as separate species at all. The fact is, there remains a legal distinction in Alberta that will become relevant in a few panels.

This safety tip is if you're on foot- in a car, obviously stay in your vehicle! Don't attempt to drive through bison either, just let them pass!

The "Ecology" title got cut here, my apologies.

Some other ways bison improve the ecosystem is by literally rolling around and trampling on the landscape, the churning of the land and the fertilization from buffalo dung helps plants and insects thrive, which in turn benefits all creatures along the food chain. Cows do not nearly replace the magnitude to which bison benefit the prairie.

Often in school, the sole fact one might learn about the First Nations of the plains involves a diagram of all the uses of each part of a bison. These descriptions have almost always been in the past tense, in order to place Indigenous peoples and their ways of life purely in the past. This is not a reflection of reality- many Indigenous folks in Alberta are still maintaining their traditions and their relationships with bison today. The tee pee here is based off of a Blackfoot design featured at the Royal Alberta Museum. Also pictured is a drying rack of meat, and a bison stomach suspended as a cooking pot. Pemmican is often described these days as a "superfood" or the ultimate protein bar; it is a mixture of dried meat and berries that both preserves well and is extremely nourishing.

It is difficult to summarize the impacts of colonization in a short space, especially where bison are concerned. The creation of Treaty 7 in Alberta, particularly, was a result of an intentional and devastating eradication of the bison by settlers. This forced First Nations such as the Blackfoot Confederacy into impossible positions: follow the buffalo into the United States and risk attack from the Americans or the Sioux as the herds became smaller and smaller, or to agree to the Canadian government's terms to stay on a fraction of their traditional territories in order to keep from starving to death.

At the same time, anthropologists, collectors, and tourists tried to buy or take anything they could get their hands on from what they perceived as the end of an era: salvage anthropology of First Nations in the West painted an image of "pure" native culture that was about to be lost forever, while First Nations peoples were being forcibly assimilated, excluded, or eradicated by settlers.

There is still a lack of understanding in mainstream settler Canadian culture of the human labour that went into the creation of the "natural" "wilderness" of this land. This is something that the settlement, the industrialization, and the creation of national parks in Alberta and elsewhere ignores or erases, but there is a growing awareness and acknowledgement of the relationship between First Peoples and the land.

The prairie ecosystem remains extremely endangered and little understood, especially as environmental activism tends to focus on deforestation or pollution of the ocean rather than the destruction of native grasses and shrubs.

Cameo ft. Mac representing Wood Buffalo National Park, which spans the border of the Northwest Territories and Alberta. Obviously, the main cause of environmental destruction surrounding the park involves human industrial activity: logging, mining, and development of the oil patch. Disease can be easily transmitted between bison and cattle and can easily wipe out already struggling populations.

I was shocked to discover that all bison were considered livestock as recently as two years ago and could thus be harvested by anyone, anytime, and anywhere outside a protected area. Plains bison still do not have status as "wildlife".

The province did recently expand the "buffer zone" outside of Banff National Park, giving the Park a chance to recover bison that have wandered outside of the barriers before they become 'fair game', as it were.

Also worth noting: B.C. and Saskatchewan both protect bison under their provincial wildlife acts, but plains bison leaving those provinces and entering Alberta or Manitoba would be considered livestock as they are unprotected.

Elk Island stocks bison across the continent and around the world, which is incredible! Not all of those original 700 were sent to Elk Island, unfortunately those sent to what was once Buffalo National Park did not make it.

Likewise, a project to reintroduce bison to Jasper didn't bear fruit. An article via Jasper Local I had found earlier (that no longer seems to work) describes the discovery of a bison skull at Talbot Lake that most likely represents a bison from this recent reintroduction attempt.

The Banff bison reintroduction pilot (2017-2022) is the most recent attempt to reintroduce bison to areas of Alberta, and so far from the initial Spring 2023 report one of the more successful projects. Public sentiment both locally and internationally is very positive, with a lot of attention on social media, articles, and other outreach methods. The project is also partnering closely with all the First Nations in Treaty 7, as well as other community stakeholders such as visitors to the park, local residents, nearby ranchers, etc.

Phew, I just threw a ton of info at you! I hope this answers the question :)

[ceescedasticity]

'Unforsaken' cutting room floor

From where they're first talking about the possible warden. I guess I decided this got more detailed than it needed to be? I kind of like it…

------

Anyone know where Radagast is these days?

Celeborn says he was present when they were disassembling Dol Guldur and trying to restore things, but left even before the Ringbearers sailed.

Elrohir says Estel was mostly sure Radagast was helping with ecological restoration in Mordor for a while, but never actually caught sight of him and hasn't heard anything for a while. Maybe he went farther into Sauron's old territory?

So, no one knows where Radagast is in any useful way.

They might actually have some idea where one of the Blue Wizards is, or at least was: the Magus Caerulus who is or was very influential on the Men living in the lands just west of Pelndoru. Khitwê and Risyind don't know much more than that, but they assume the Men who live there would.

So they could, if they choose, go most of the way to Pelndoru and see if they can pick up the trail of a wizard.

A wizard who's apparently involved in human politics, Celeborn points out. That's not an obvious good sign.

(Okay look, it is not easy coordinating resistance to Sauron when you have no Eldar or Edain in your arsenal — Avari and other humans have the heart and the will to fight the Shadow, but they mostly don't have lingering bits of Valar-favor. If the Magi Caeruli didn't stay personally involved the people of the East and South just wouldn't have any tools to protect themselves. It's gotten a lot better! Almost no one thinks they're gods now and they're definitely not kings!)

(In a different incarnation of this fic, with additional digressions about the Blue Wizards and even more outrageous OCs— Well, never mind.)

Still: Going most of the way to Pelndoru and talking their way into meeting the Magus Caerulus is an option.

…Assuming they're still there.

Getting a wizard would be a long-term and chancy endeavor, and no one is very enthusiastic about it.

"Besides," Celegorm says, "it's not like you need to be a maia to fight a maia."

"Strictly speaking no, but…"

(Celegorm is thinking: Finrod actually didn't do too badly against Sauron until he lost his nerve, and Maglor is a much better bard than Finrod, and the Warden is — he assumes — weaker than Sauron, so this should be workable if Maglor gets in the right frame of mind.)

(Maglor and Turgon are thinking: True, but all balrog-killers died doing it and this thing may be stronger, so let's not get cocky.)

(Glorfindel, Celeborn, Elladan, and Elrohir are thinking: How much of Glorfindel's Second Age pre-return-to-Middle-earth power-up is still lingering? Is this hypothetical Warden bigger or smaller than a balrog, figuratively speaking? Also there's the Saruman comparison, Mithrandir did a lot to break his power but he was definitely vulnerable to other attacks, what kind of shape is this thing in—)

(Khitwê and Risyind are thinking: Wait, what's a maia again? Is it the same as a wizard or not?)

(Whiterot is thinking: About something else entirely because she doesn't want to think about maiar.)

(Sharlinnu is thinking: Is it too late to start taking notes?)

It's still not like anyone is planning to let this stop them either, so Elrohir asks if there's any procedure of arming for umaiar.

"Fire-resistant armor and the best weapons you have," says Turgon.

"That's balrogs specifically," Celeborn says. "More generally, you need to be aware of the mental and spiritual influence — like the Black Breath of the Ringwraiths, but possibly much worse — and be prepared to resist it."

"Just about anything dies if you cut its head off," Celegorm offers.

Maglor gives Celegorm a 'I know you are not actually this book-dumb, will you stop embarrassing me' look, which Celegorm ignores. "There are seventeen known repeating types of umaiar, and any individual might be unique. What Lord Celeborn said is the only consistent rule."

"Mithrandir left Glamdring here, though," Elladan says, half-joking. "He killed a balrog with Glamdring, so it could be considered a weapon for use on umaiar?"

"Hmmmm."

"I forgot to mention that," Glorfindel says to Turgon. "Glamdring is here — we don't know how it got to Eriador, but after it surfaced Mithrandir wielded it until he sailed — do you want it back?"

"…No thank you," says Turgon. "I don't think it would like being wielded by an orc."

Is there anything in the armory that would? They'll have to check.

Anyway, what about Maglor's anti-maia capacity? Clearly he's been keeping in practice driving orcs into the Sea…

Maglor wants to avoid admitting to weakness in front of Turgon, Celeborn, and the children more than he wants to yell at Celegorm for having unreasonable expectations. He says he can play a harp if necessary, but it's been a while since he did anything big.

Turgon says he thought they were already counting on Maglor to break the Crucible open. Asking him to fight the Warden at the same time seems a bit much.

Sharlinnu asks how the Dark Lord was defeated, anyway.

…They don't know?

Well, they know it happened fast and unexpectedly and Mount Doom erupted—

The One Ring was destroyed in Mount Doom, that's how.

…Wait, do they know what the One Ring is?

Yes, they know what the One Ring is.

…Actually Whiterot and Sharlinnu are a little vague on that.

Okay, if anyone wants details, there's a book. Suffice to say: No one actually fought Sauron.

All right, so there's no one — other than Glorfindel and Maglor, hopefully — particularly equipped to fight the hypothetical warden. Are there other people they could call on for more strength in general?

Well, there's Thranduil. He's pretty busy right now, though.

And while he's been easy-going about old Sindarin grudges in general asking him to work directly with Maglor Fëanorion might be a bit much to ask for.

Not to mention the orcs. Thranduil still struggles with dwarves.

Whiterot asks if knowing he has a… personal stake… would make it easier for him to handle it.

Nimloth? Maybe…

No, Oropher.

…

(Turgon, Celegorm, and Sharlinnu actually do all recognize the name — highest-priority Greenwood target in the Second Age. —Also Reckless and Sly really wanted to kill him. None of them had any idea he's an orc, though.)

(Celeborn is horrified, but not as shocked as he would be if Celebrían hadn't identified Ningloreth of Lórinand, who died in the same battle as Oropher and had less of a reputation for obstinacy.)

(Maglor never heard the King of Greenwood's name while he was king of the Greenwood, but recognizes the name from old intelligence on Iathrin nobility. He does not mention this.)

(Khitwê remembers the name from various history lessons in Imladris and has to remind Risyind.)

Personal stakes notwithstanding, Thranduil is still very busy and not guaranteed to keep his temper even when he's trying very hard. Celeborn would rather not involve him in this and would really rather not tell him about Oropher.

Círdan? Probably not.

…Although they should probably keep him in the loop.

Maglor sighs dramatically and asks if anyone knows where Daeron is.

Sailed under a false name, Celeborn says. So much for that idea.

What about dwarves? Or Men?

Dwarves might be able to help if not with a warden specifically, but… this isn't really their problem, is it? It's an elven problem. (It could be the dwarves' problem if it turns out there's a warden and it can trigger orcs multiplying, but that's never happened that they know of.)

It's an old, terrible, horrific, even shameful elven problem. Elves should take care of it.

[deviousraptor]

Please tell me about your theories for the ecological niches of the upside down. I could not be invested quicker.

You have now unlocked my special interest.

So! There's only 4 known creatures within the Upside-down: the Mind Flayer, the Demogorgon (with bonus pupa stage), the Demobats, and the vines. Of those 4, 3 have actively attacked people, though it's unclear whether the vines began as omnivores or developed into it over time, and it's unclear exactly how the Mind Flayer sustains itself. However, there is an inherent and glaring flaw to their ecological system: with mostly predators, the world of the Upside-down is completely fucked and will consume itself until everything dies.

Which is, in terms of habitats, not ideal. The brief glimpses of the world we get before 1 began shaping it to his will are a completely barren wasteland, and even with his powers to copy the other side (not touching how that was possible with a 10 foot pole), even with these new additions to the environment it's completely unsustainable, which is why 1 began to propagate the Demogorgons in our world, with far more resources. Even with full grown Demogorgons being able to pass onto our world via portals and hunt, such activity in high enough numbers to sustain the population of the dying world.

Dying? Yes, I think that before Henry stumbled into it, the Upside-down had been decaying for many years. On top of the predatory nature of the only creatures there, they also act much like scavengers, especially with the vines that create almost a net like a spider to grab prey (Though that's subjective, as you could say that the vines are being controlled in all the moments we see, we don't really know how they work. So I'll say that with the lack of water and generally any type of nutrients to grow, this particular plant adapted to also scavenge for water and nutrients within living/dead things).

We also have no idea how the Mind Flayer sustains itself. It absorbs flesh to create constructs, but that could again be Henry manipulating it through whatever dumb construction powers he got. What we do know is that it's an incredibly powerful lifeform, can communicate telepathically or at least mess with the minds of others, and can shift through worlds easily once a portal has been opened. Perhaps it's like a flock of micro-organisms that function like a fusion of starlings and nanobots. I digress.

In short, I think a catastrophic apocalyptic event happened within the Upside-down. Perhaps it was a natural disaster, like the asteroid that started a mass-extinction. Perhaps it was a bloody and terrible war of elevated creatures similar to or even beyond the Mind Flayer that doomed their world. Either way, I think the glimpses we see are Henry pulling together the last stragglers of another world.

[kurooscopy]

omg tell me about your selfship lore please!! hehe

🪱, 🐼 , 🪩 ,📱,🍀??!

oh god is that too many im so sorryyyy

EM HI !! (๑>ᴗ<๑) this has been sitting in my inbox while i was out all day and answeing it was literally the only thing i was thinking about

it is never too many he is my favourite thing to talk about <333

🪱- who asks ridiculous questions? (eg "would you still love me if i was a worm?")

i ask ironically for shits n giggles but he asks unironically to be a shit stirrer HAHAHA he'll come up to me with something cupped in his hands and it's some bug he caught and he's like "this is me if u even care"

i roll my eyes at him but in reality i'm a zoology major i can appreciate the ecological importance of worms don't worry tetsu i would still love u

🐼- what's the silliest nickname(s) you have for each other?

unsilly but i have to make a conscious effort to rmb his name is tetsurou like wym,, he's just tetsu to me ^3^ i call him srce (slv for like sweetheart) and he calls me angel <3

unfortunately or otherwise i am a product of my environment and "dickhead" is a much more affectionate term over here, so he gets that when he's being one LMAO

and i wear glasses so i'm sure megane-chan/four-eyes is not off the table from him (this is why he's dickhead x)

🪩- who's the life of the party, and who seeks out the host's pet to hang out with?

he is much better at socialising than i am LOL like i'll do it and i don't mind parties if i already know ppl, but meeting new ppl is so tiring i would much rather find the furrier household residents :3 it's ok, he comes looking for me sooner or later hehe

📱- who uses nine million emojis and who uses none?

it's me hi i'm the one with nine million e/kaomojis 💀💀 my texting style is mostly the same as how i type on here so lol

he will use emojis ironically to emphasise smth but he'd rather use punctuation to greater effect

🍀- who insists they're luckier to have found the other person?

again he is better at this than i am HAHAHAHA

that is not to say i don't feel like the luckiest girl in the world!! but i'm more of a physical touch/quality time person than words of affirmation >﹏< so he verbally insists more while i show him in other ways 🫶🫶

[leafdebrief]

Hi friends 👋

This is mostly a message for people on/from Twitter, and for me to repost as a link over there. Tumblr does long-form better and I can't think of any other way to communicate this effectively without a lot of writing, so here's the deal.

I'm getting close to finished compiling the various things I need to send for my pre-2023 mail people (yes, I am still doing this because I collect first and send when everything is perfect) and tying up a lot of loose projects. There's still a lot of work to do but with the time I've been not tweeting, I've been painting, soldering, building, videoing and editing my busy little hands away in preparation for surprises to come. BUT—

I need to get even more serious now. Or at least as serious as someone like myself can muster.

Right now, for me that means laying out my Grand Plan for this year on this post and then getting right to it. I'm addressing the Twitter fam directly because for you, dear friends, that will kinda mean I won't be on Twitter that much anymore. Really this time.

Yeah yeah, I know. We all threw up our arms and threatened to leave umpteen times, and then we all settled to stick around to watch it all burn, and for a while I was satisfied with that pace. It was fun watching the fire.

But the fire has already been reduced to embers.

Now it just feels like standing in front of a smouldering pile of garbage and gleefully inhaling its toxic fumes.

For the last few months, Twitter has slowly but very steadily been silencing the people I want to talk to—in a number of different ways—or outright making them disappear from me. Or worse still, replacing them. With what?

Antivaxxer

Antivaxxer

Transphobe

Elon Musk

Climate change denier

Literal nazi

Elon Musk

Antivaxxer

Everything I see everywhere in this place and now in my life is telling me in no uncertain terms: "mobilize now".

Bad actors are already mobile. The pandemic created an opportunity for our collective horseshit to fester, and now it is very commonplace to see people who publicly—and often violently—act out their racist, phobic, misogynist agendas in the real world. Stuff that nobody would dream of saying out loud 10 years ago for fear of getting punched are now everywhere I look. Nazis used be a Not Cool thing.

But people are literally dying.

I've been trying my level best to stick around and keep up morale on behalf of those who are being actively targeted, but then the shooting at start of the Lunar New Year gave me a shake. Once again, the target is people who look like the person I love most in the world. Her whole family. All of the people in my life that I hold dear, in fact, are targets in one way or another.

The funny thing is, violent extremism isn't even the worst threat we're facing. The walls are closing in from every direction: unfettered spread of deadly viruses is past the point of fixing, and ecological collapse the likes of which our civilization has not ever seen will happen in the next 10 years.

Does that mean I'm giving up the fight to go take care of myself and mine?

Don't be absurd. I'm just angrier.

Lucky for me and nobody else, the coping mechanism I developed for my anger in my 20s is doing everything faster. Like, way faster. More aggressively too.

But I need to focus and organize my efforts a bit better so I can start doing things out in the Real World™. The good news is that I already started preparing for this months ago and have a headstart now.

Basically, I think what I need to do is integrate all my various battles into one ongoing project/series/lifestyle, so I can just always be working towards those various goals while still creating content that can use any platform available to spread reach and find new ways to fix things.

Here's the plan:

Tour de'Brief is happening for real. I will be touching more grass this year, in different cities, to visit the various dispensaries I've become close with and talk with locals about local issues (keeping myself and others as safe from disease as possible naturally). Why?

Well for starters, it's the disposable thing again! I will be personally trying to make storeowners commit to getting rid of theirs, in exchange for an LD-exclusive battery recycling bin (to be sent to me for collection) and a bunch of assorted creations for all their employees. Yeah, I made stuff. Lots of it.

Twitter presence will ramp down to a mostly communicative one: announce things posted on other platforms, coordinate things with people, answer questions, and probably Spaces. Maybe the odd shitpost here and there, but I'll be draining my drafts folder for the foreseeable future. Does that mean... no more content??

Actually, no, it means NEW content—I'm going back into the YouTubes! Going full production mode, even more content hopefully. Big ambitious videos with all our friends, collaborations with musicians.. and Twitter hanging around in my back pocket to connect with those collaborators. I am turning into a television set.

Tumblr will still work for long-form writing, but also with more focus on showcasing finished works (paintings, trays, electronics, etc). There's lots of stuff to show now since I've been saving it up.

The podcast! (Wait, what??) That's right, I'm booting it back up! The format will be more guest-based since I have all you great pals to talk to now.

That mailing list! Once I'm done with friendmail, I'm going to just start randomly sending you shit, as was my original plan. #FreeDrugs is forever!!!

What I need most right now is a way to cover more ground. The way I've decided to achieve that is by being a pest, so.. the usual really, but much more personal this time around. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar though, so I'll be needing lots of time to make bad creations that will hopefully entice a store of people to temporarily tolerate my presence.

If this sounds like a bad plan, it might very well be. But stick with me here—

My thought is that I can use the opportunity presented by fighting my climate battle to shoehorn in whatever other missions need attention depending on the geographical area. Different places have different problems; I need to learn about how each community tackles them, if at all, and gather context.. read the vibes... then break shit!

Figuratively that is.

Of course there will be plenty of literal breakages, and that's part of the fun!

I am preparing for the world to look very different, and very Not Good, in the coming 5-10 years—the extent to which is not clear to me yet. I would be narcissistic and delusional to think I am going to save the world by collecting batteries from pot shops and arguing with the locals, but I need to do everything.. anything.. that I can, all at once preferably, while trying to expand my reach organically by essentially docu-series-ing the next year as it happens.

It's gonna be wild itellyouwhat.

This Friday we'll have a good bash before I quiet down the Twitter presence indefinitely, but I want to still be reachable and connect with the people I met there. It's a hard line to draw. There will be lots of mail goes back and forth though, so I'll still be retweeting and replying whenever possible.

If Spaces disappears, I have an entire mailing list of friends—digitally now!—and the means to operate outside of Twitter in a variety of different ways. We will continue to connect digitally until I make it to your hometown, and until then I will continue to mail things to anyone on that list... you're helping to make my video content, see?

We always make the greatest team.

[script-a-world]

Submitted via Google Form:

How can I create species with varied diets (taking into account both required nutrition and chosen habits, i.e. vegetarian or high protein for a bodybuilder) With food on earth, we know what kind of nutrition is in what food, but what species actually need seem to be all over the place. I can never tell whether other species don't need a certain nutrition or if they get it from non foods. Sure, I can make it all up give them whatever diet/food strikes my fancy including odd stuff, but it would be difficult to include storylines of malnourishment or anything regarding a deep dive into nutrition.

Tex: Before all of our fancy scientific equipment used to measure things like calories and mineral content, we mostly just made educated guesses on what people were craving in various situations - the more people document what, say, a heavily fevered person want to eat (when they do have an appetite), the larger the pool of available data is for physicians and regular people to discuss on what the best course of action is. To follow the example, this is where “feed a fever, starve a cold” comes from; a fevered person is heavily dehydrated so broth with salt in it alleviates that.

To address another point of your concerns, not all nutrition comes from the consumption of organic matter - or at least, humans haven’t optimized everything as such. A lot of minerals are best suited in water rather than some bitter vegetables or even blood (but even that has exceptions based on local adaptation to one’s environment). Vitamin D, which is not necessarily considered a vitamin at all (Wikipedia), is synthesized for use by exposure to sunlight. 

I think a nutritional profile is going to require a baseline regardless of what an individual chooses to do with their body, be it medical recommendation, personal desire, or vocational expression, given the assumption that they’re all the same species and thus generally of the same biological requirements (i.e. carbon-based).

How much protein does an adult member of your species need per day based upon a given age range in order to get minimum nutrition? What about carbohydrates? Vitamins, minerals? Fats? How do they metabolize, in general and under desired constraints such as high physical activity versus low physical activity? How much of this is impacted by what’s actually available in terms of flora and fauna in their environment? Do they perform agriculture and sedentarism in their society? Do they trade with others from different ecological niches? What are typical cravings in standardized situations?

Wootzel: Perhaps this is a question you’ve already answered for yourself, but since you didn’t strongly mention it in the ask, I’m going to question your intentions a bit! Friendly-like, of course. 

Why is it that you want detailed nutritional needs for your species to show up in your world? Are your plots heavily focused on cuisine? Is it an important plot point for a character to become ill due to a nutritional deficiency, and/or for characters to struggle to share food because they are vastly different species? 

I ask because I honestly can’t think of a reason that having all of this information plotted out would improve your story, and I want to offer at least a brief caution against overloading your story with scientific worldbuilding to the point that you lose readers who don’t want to wade through it. Unless you’re writing for a very niche audience who are just fascinated by nutrition in speculative biology (which is fine, if you are!), you’ll probably use, at most, 2% of your nutritional information in your final project without making it feel shoehorned in. You could certainly include a plot about malnourishment and a character falling sick because they’re missing important nutrients, mention what those nutrients are, and have literally zero other nutritional details; most audiences wouldn’t bat an eye about the lack of detailed context.

That aside, here are a few things that might help you get your nutritional variances off the ground.

You mentioned that life on Earth has huge variation in diet but that species’ needs “seem all over the place”, so here’s some information that might help demystify that stuff. This is a tumblr post talking about why pigeons have the dietary needs that they do, and it gets into some general information on why different species need specific diets in order to be able to digest them correctly. It isn’t in depth, but this information might give you a jumping-off point to researching what structures an animal will have if it has a particular diet. 

Another major factor is toxins. Earth plants have evolved a huge variety of toxins, and the species that eat them have evolved to avoid those toxins in a variety of ways. On earth, Humans are very good at being able to ignore lots of different toxins, and it’s not unrealistic to expect that sapient species from other planets would evolve to be good at using all kinds of different food sources as well, since food abundance is a huge factor in the evolution of high intelligence. We can eat things like avocados, garlic, and chocolate, which could kill a lot of our pets! 

If you have a specific dietary situation in mind and/or more details about your world, feel free to ask again with more details (use the submit feature or the google form linked on our blog if you need extra space for information). We can work best with a narrow idea of what your end goal is. 

Wootzel’s wholesale note: Just to note, because you mentioned vegetarians and bodybuilders, that you should avoid insinuating that a character's diet is predictable because of their lifestyle. While those aren't bad examples of lifestyle factors that influence diet choices, remember that there could be dozens of factors in a person's life that could result in different dietary  choices. Also, that there are vegetarian bodybuilders.

[random-thought-depository]

Tangential vagueblogging (about somebody I generally respect, and I don't want to add to the pile-on they're getting), but I'm going to note that I really don't like when people present "predators control the population of prey species and kill off their sickest and weakest individuals" as if this is some kind of favor to the prey species, a merciful euthanasia of beings that are literally better off dead.

It's impossible to know how deer feel about the merits of slowly starving to death vs. being ripped up by wolves, but we can look at human emotions and behavior in comparable situations.

"Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it." - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein.

I think humans show a strong revealed preference along those lines. Suicide seems to be a minority choice even in the most miserable conditions in the historical record. Take, for instance, slavery in North America circa 1500-1850 or so; pretty awful. Some slaves did commit suicide. But most of them did not. This is just one many examples in the historical record of humans enduring appalling conditions and apparently mostly not choosing suicide (Irish potato famine, Nazi death camps, gulags, classical era Greco-Roman slavery, etc.). This is actually kind of remarkable if you stop taking it for granted. Of course, it makes perfect sense if you think about it in terms of evolutionary theory; for a species intelligent enough to imagine suicide, choosing to live is a selection pressure, potentially a quite powerful one. We're all descended from the people who chose survival, because those who chose death left no descendants. For a species intelligent enough for long-term planning and suicide, an attitude of "my life, though it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it" is an adaptive trait, and it is no surprise that it seems to have approached fixation before the beginning of recorded history.

The predators alive now mostly do not attack humans because they follow mother's wisdom. The conservatism inherent in the mother's wisdom strategy may keep humans safe for a while, but big predators in most of the world have had tens of thousands to millions of years to eat a human (or proto-human), discover we are quite edible, and add us to the mother's wisdom food list that they transmit to their offspring. Why hasn't this happened? Well, what happens to a predator that kills and eats a human? Other humans follow the people-eater back to its den and kill it! The only predators that survived were the ones that did not habitually eat humans, either as a matter of blind luck or because they were smart enough to learn that we're more dangerous than we look. I suspect the saber-tooth cat, the marsupial lion, etc. are not around anymore because they were unable to make this adjustment. Point is, it sure looks like when humans got smart one of the first things they did was give themselves the same circumstances as deer that have no predators to control their numbers!

You'll often find references to early agriculture actually being a step down from hunting and gathering; primitive farmers are not well-nourished, have a lot of diseases, etc.. To me, preindustrial agricultural humans look a lot like those overpopulated deer; there aren't any predators left to control their numbers (a circumstance they arranged for themselves!), so now what caps their population is malnutrition and infectious disease (and the synergy between the two; malnourished animals and humans get sick and die more easily), so they mostly live on the edge of starvation, so they're hungry and sickly and riddled with diseases (and they are a great burden upon the wider ecology). Being an ancient or Medieval peasant sounds miserable in a similar way to how being a deer in an overpopulated park or a city pigeon sounds miserable. And yet, I think most people would agree that ancient Mesopotamia or Medieval Europe would not be improved by adding Blindsight vampires with the crucifix glitch fixed, even if the survivors the vampires don't eat might have better diets and fewer parasites as a result (because the vampires would kill a lot of the people they'd otherwise have to share their food and other resources with).

It's also pretty suggestive that an often repeated theme of human stories is "what if there was something that related to you in the way a wolf relates to a deer?" and the intended and default reaction to that idea is horror. From dragons, vampires, and Grendel to the "xenomorph" from Alien, the human imagination is persistently haunted by the fear that something may target us for predation; even the ostensibly human killers of e.g. slasher horror are in a sense just another kind of predator. Predation is also a favorite metaphor for human exploitation and abuse of other humans; we speak of rapacious rich people and manipulative abusers as "predatory" even though, of course, they (usually) don't literally eat us.

Humans were a prey species once and, gee, it sure looks like we hated it, like it was a trauma that still haunts us hundreds of thousands years later (probably burned into our genes; predator avoidance would have been a selection pressure), and like as soon as we got smart enough one of the first things we did was to give ourselves the circumstances of those overpopulated deer, choosing chronic food insecurity and high disease load as the lesser evil.

How would you feel about your grandma and your disabled son being dragged away and devoured by wolves? How would you feel about somebody who suggested that such predation was a sort of favor to your species?

How would you feel if you were hungry and sick and in pain and had a broken and infected leg and the wolves came for you? I think I would say, "my life, though it may be only an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it!"

Like, my first articulated objection to "predators are actually good for prey species" thinking is "imagine how ghoulish it would be if somebody applied the same logic to humans!"

I'm not an expert on animal behavior, but it seems to me that the behavior of most animals suggests a similar revealed preference. When the wolves come for an injured deer, I would guess the deer will likely try to hobble away. The city pigeons that occasionally walk by my window are likely malnourished and riddled with parasites and some of them have pretty gruesome foot injuries (I remember reading a post about this once), but they continue to go about the business of survival and even reproduction (I occasionally see them doing what I think are courtship behaviors).

And sure, that's dubious reasoning from analogy. Notably, humans are probably pretty unusual in being intelligent enough to imagine suicide (and also having hands and being smart enough to make weapons, which makes suicide much easier), and therefore present humans are probably the product of a very unusually strong selection pressure for wanting to live. Probably most animals lack the cognitive capacity for suicide, even the passive suicide of suicide by starvation or suicide by predator. I wonder if the point where humans became intelligent enough to imagine suicide is marked by a genetic bottleneck... Deer likely don't have the cognitive capacity to imagine their own death, and if they did they might be more at peace with the idea than we are, because they've experienced no selection pressure for conscious avoidance of death qua death; the injured deer likely tries to hobble away from the wolves because of some combination of pre-programmed reflexive instinct and fear of the pain of the bite, or something like that. If you magically gave a deer human intelligence, it might be much more at peace with the reality of its eventual death than we are.

I guess my truest objection to "the wolves are really good for the deer" thinking is that it feels like another manifestation of Just World thinking and therefore deeply conservative - not in the sense of conventional political conservatism, but I think it's a manifestation of a sort of thinking that's one of the wellsprings of political conservatism; I talked about it here. @aksemmi, I'm wondering if maybe you meant something like that.

[brigittttoo]

Hello, my dear!!! I would love to hear about 👹 and 🌻(birds) for the ask meme. <3<3<3

hi elwen!! thank you for the asks, these made me Think <3

👹: if all your fics were in a horror movie which one would die first?

Strangely enough, this is not something I've ever thought about before! Now that I've scrolled through my entire ao3 works page, and one by one imagined the Essence of each fic in one of those horror movies I've never seen (like Scream, or Halloween), I think I actually have a surprising amount of faith in my fics' abilities to hold out until the final, bloody scene. But, after much deliberation, I'm certain the answer is either: my codywan order 63 fill for Snowstorm, OR, my codywan historical french artist au As before the loved one. The REASONS are such that I think the codywan girls in Snowstorm are so young and innocent and naive that if this fic died first it would be the perfect impetus for the rest of the horror movie cast to say "hey wasn't she supposed to be back by now?" or "huh? what was that noise?" but ALSO I think the codywan in ABTLO are the lovers that would get so distracted by each other in their car parked at lover's crevasse that the killer could pick them off impossibly easy in the first 30 seconds and literally no one else would notice

🌻: if your fics were all (birds) what would they be?

I won't pretend I'm not confused by this one elwen, but I'll try my best and also thank you for giving me an excuse to use my birds of the world online subscription more than I already do :^)

I dunno, my first thought was the family Rallidae, because rails represent a decent range and variety of bird in terms of morphology, geography, and ecology. They're also pretty prone to flightlessness though, and several branches within the family have evolved flightlessness independently several times. This means that sometimes rails will fly enough to spread to an island and then just evolve to never leave. To complete the metaphor then, my fics are mostly AU's, straying in all directions from canon, but then digging in deep into the AU they've landed in, and compelling me to do an enormous amount of research for information I will likely never use haha

the fic writer ask meme!!