#landscaping choices

[cselandscapearchitect]

Natural Turf vs. Artificial Grass: Battling the Urban Heat Island Effect in the Low Desert

The low desert region faces the challenges of the urban heat island effect, where urban areas experience significantly higher temperatures than surrounding rural areas due to human activities and the built environment. As we strive to mitigate this heat island effect, one key consideration is the choice between natural turf and artificial grass. Both options have their own advantages and…

[deoidesign]

Thinking about vampires, death, life, and the space they occupy in between

[noseysilverfox]

✨️By the way, I don't have the opportunity to see who voted for what✨️

[letsmcfreackingloseit]

Hey-ho! I'm back again with some Apex Polarity art, but this time it's some designs for the humans' snow gear!

It started out with me just trying to figure out a design for y/n in my little comic, but then I thought it would be fun to also try and visualize the other humans, so here's my take of y/n, Vanessa and Michael! I really like how they turned out, although I don't think I got Vanessa's "patchwork" look quite right, but I still like where I landed. I added a blue scarf and I was really tempted to give her those red goggles, since it would've made her resemble Vanny even more, but in the end I desided against it.

So yeah- nothing too big this time, just something fun and easy!

But to round this off, I will of course credit the wonderful author @naffeclipse who is writing Apex Polarity, which you can go read if you click right here (can 100% recommend, especially if you like stories with a bunch of fluff, mystery and drama~!) and today I give credit to myself for the designs of the humans! ;P

[utilitycaster]

I do agree with the post going around about how you cannot, actually, run everything in 5e and hacking 5e is a recipe for GM burnout. What frustrates me is that it's true that there's a dropoff in viewer/listenership for Actual Play using non-D&D 5e systems...but in my admittedly limited experience it's often the most dedicated D&D players who are willing to check out an Actual Play in something different. When I look in the CR fandom at who watches Candela Obscura or the Daggerheart episodes or various one-shots? When I look at who praises TAZ Amnesty and Steeplechase? When I look at who recommends Mentopolis and Misfits & Magic? Mostly, they're people who also are huge 5e fans. I've said it before but, nine times out of ten, if you find someone who complains at how 5e-centric actual play is you will not find a single post about a popular actual play channel's non-5e work (while finding plenty about their 5e series) and usually you won't find many posts about actual plays that never do 5e either.

[patchworkgargoyle]

JUST BINGE-WATCHED SCAVENGERS REIGN

HOLY SHIT WHAT A SHOW

HOLY SHIT???

if you can stand body horror and live in the US PLEASE WATCH THIS SHOW ON NETFLIX IT IS AMAZING

[glamaphonic]

i see a lot of fic where ed's like "oh sure whats-your-face" at various members of stede's crew and i simply don't buy it!

in 1x06 he asks after the swede's singing by name.*

*well, you know.

in 1x08 he apologizes to buttons by name for interrupting his moonbathing.

in 1x10 he calls both jim and lucius by name!

he never calls frenchie by name, but there's no way he doesn't know it. he also knows that frenchie sews.

ed spends weeks on the revenge hanging out with them all constantly. telling stories and having on-deck picnics and, in 1x08, frat boy partying for days straight. performing music and planning talent shows!

fang and ivan have never seen him so open and available! ed joins stede in proud-dadding them about the fuckery. he knows that they're feeling a bit too rowdy to have a sedate nature walk to look at insane foliage at dead man's cove. up until the kraken, ed is never anything but kind and friendly to the crew in every single interaction, demonstrates nothing but pleasant camaraderie that we see in 1x10 he genuinely enjoys and appreciates.

there's this tendency because of "goodbye bonnet's playthings" to assume that ed truly thinks of the crew as this amorphous disposable blob of stede's accessories, like his books and his trinkets and his fancy furniture. but when ed declares them bonnet's playthings, he's including himself and the life he thought he and stede were going to build together. not things of no value, but things he has to let go of. because the kraken turn is a tragedy in which ed, cornered, defensively strips away most everything that he thinks could make him vulnerable by a rubric wherein experiencing any kind of emotion or self-actualization is unsafe.

i submit that ed knows the crew. he knows them by name and by talent and by preference.

i submit that he likes them.

and he leaves them behind anyway. because he's not allowed to have nice things anymore.

[quailxcrossing]

oc posting :3 a background i did the other day of my characters Georgiana (they/them, riding the horse), Ilieu (she/her, the little thing snuggled into their chest) and Foliose (she/her, the horse).

these 3 are minor characters in my story TUESDAY, but major characters in my heart. i wanted to try a different, more cell-colored style of background here, and I quite like the result!

the location is inspired by the southwest desert highlands in this fantasy western story. Malachite Pass is dense mountain terrain, and while this image is set in the early winter, let's pretend the blue flax flowers bloom here year-round, yes?

[sitting-on-me-bum]

Aurora Jellies

Beneath the northern lights, moon jellyfish appear to glow in a fjord outside Tromsø, Norway.

by Audun Rikardsen

Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award

[carnelianwings]

Something I find really funny is how for all the rumors that Seed’s staff/writers don’t like Cagalli, Orb under her leadership just keeps ending up in a better (political) position with each addition - Seed Destiny ends with Logos wiped out, Blue Cosmos severely hampered, and the entire Seiran family wiped out, including Yuna. This leaves Cagalli with almost no political opposition in Orb (since the second Battle of Orb would’ve flushed out a majority of the Blue Cosmos/Logos sympathizers within the government/military), along with giving her a boost in popular and military support thanks to her actions and field leadership during the battle.

(Cutting for me just rambling on a bit about the in-universe politics after Seed Freedom)

You can tell with how much she’s managed to get done in the years between Seed Destiny and Seed Freedom - in that short year and a half to two years, she was able to propose and found COMPASS, secret away and upgrade the Impulse, Destiny, Strike Freedom, and Infinite Justice, arrange for ties between Orb and Terminal to investigate/exchange intel (Athrun and Meyrin), and put into place all the evacuation/defensive protocols in case of another attack on Orb (as seen vs Foundation and Requiem, even if she needed Kira to pull an “I lived, bitch” to Aura 😅).

And it doesn’t end there - thanks to Foundation, Cagalli arguably has an easier time internationally now, because the Eurasian Federation leadership also got hit and the Eurasian Federation, while not necessarily Blue Cosmos sympathizers like the Atlantic Federation, was very staunchly anti-PLANT, which I think would’ve caused some problems for Cagalli, especially post Seed Destiny with Lacus joining her for that broadcast.

I actually think Orb probably has fairly decent diplomatic relations with PLANT (I think Chairman Lament mostly cut off that call after everything went south in Eldore because of the whole nuke situation), especially since Lacus is COMPASS’s inaugural president, plus the time both Dearka and Waltfeld (I’m not sure if he’s in Orb or PLANT as of Seed Freedom since his silent cameo has him helping to stop the coup in PLANT in Seed Freedom) spent there. And we have a very prominent all-Coordinator team with the Yamato Team - truth be told I actually wonder how much the Earth Alliance invested into COMPASS because everything we see on screen is either contributed by Orb (Archangel, Murrue and crew, Kira, Mu, and the Murasame Kais), PLANT/ZAFT (Millenium, Konoe and crew, Heinlein, Shinn, Lunamaria, Agnes, Gelgoog, and Gyan), or arguably both (namely, Rising Freedom and Immortal Justice). Unless I missed a minor crew member along the way. Which is possible.

Also pure speculation on my part on this - but the fact Seed Freedom has Athrun going into intelligence with Terminal (which we first see as having a presence in the PLANTS) from the Orb side and Yzak and Dearka going into intelligence from the PLANT side can’t be a coincidence. I want to think the three of them decided on it together because being in intelligence/covert ops gives them the chance to work together without having to force anyone to change their current loyalties - I don’t think Athrun can be truly loyal to anyone except Cagalli after Seed Destiny, and Yzak was always loyal to PLANT, and if Dearka hadn’t been captured and made to realize how extreme PLANT had become under Patrick Zala he wouldn’t have switched sides to Orb/Three Ships Alliance during Seed either. Which also indirectly feeds into Orb and PLANT having better political relations than Orb and Earth Alliance.

Which brings me to my final point - I would be very surprised if Orb isn’t the primary target for the antagonists in a Seed Freedom sequel. At this point Orb’s capable of doing too much with the limited resources it has as a small nation with too much military strength at its command. And there is room for a sequel (setting-wise) because while Earth Alliance took another major hit with during the Foundation Conflict, the ideologies that led to the First and Second Earth Alliance-PLANT wars still exist - even if Blue Cosmos lost another leader, even if the believers of Coordinator Supremacy lost another leader (in Jagannath) those ideologies still fundamentally exist. All the Foundation Conflict did was serve to take down the military leadership of those ideologies - even if the public on both sides see those views negatively it doesn’t make them go away.

[originalaccountname]

if a game that is a poem, a philosophical question, a love letter to life and humanity, and is both a walking sim and a scrapbook sim sounds interesting to you, please play Season: A Letter to the Future

[icewindandboringhorror]

I have a big google doc thing where I keep track of media and stuff (putting everything in loosely ranked categories), which is mostly just for my own reference so I know what tv shows I've already seen before, etc. and I never really look back through it, typically just a quick "okay, watched two movie in the past 8 months, need to quickly slap them somewhere in the lists. okay. done. save document. exit". But today I was actually reading through some of the old notes and there are like... MULTIPLE places where my comment is basically "It would have been good if it were about elves" or "I wish there was a fantasy show made in this same style" or "It's well made, but I just keep thinking about how I would like it more if everyone was an elf or was in old 1700s costumes" or etc like...... lol.... Most biased media ranking system on earth blatantly made by someone with an extremely hyperspecific range of narrow interests. It'd be like if a food reviewer only had 5 foods they actually liked, so they'd just go to a pizza place and be like "eh, the pizza was okay, but I just think it would be better if it was cereal instead. :/ ...2 out of 10"

[starredforlife]

what if trump started campaigning on an anti genocide stance. would that finally convince the dems to fucking say something or would they continue to double down and sink themselves further

[pwurrz]

people are using the “learn to separate fiction and reality” to justify genshin’s and more specifically hoyoverse’s racism and whitewashing of african cultures and. well. i can’t say i’m even a little bit surprised.

[cascadianights]

I don't blame people for not ALL being into native planting and landscaping, but if I had one piece of advice I wish everyone would learn its that if you see it EVERYWHERE in your city and suburban lawns in the USA there's a good chance it's MAJORLY INVASIVE and you should think "wow maybe I shouldn't spread that," over "oh what a great all purpose solution for my lack of a green thumb!" Many of our worst noxious weeds are toxic to people and animals, and serve almost no positive use in the environments they've been dropped in. Just smothers all life.

Common examples are English Ivy, Spanish bluebells, Butterfly Bushes, tree of heaven, bLACKBERRIES, bamboo

[revvethasmythh]

I do think there's something really interesting about Nott specifically choosing to not tell the group she used to be a halfling before she was forced into confessing it. She had ample opportunity to tell someone what had happened to her, hell the group specifically presses her on her dislike of goblins. And they're all listening and sympathetic and supportive. But she stutters through a half-lie and says, "As long as I've been alive--as long as I can remember, I haven't felt comfortable in my own skin. I know that I'm a goblin but I'm not--I'm not like them." It would have been easier to just tell them the truth here, but she doesn't.

I have to assume there are competing forces driving this reaction. An inherent part of her relationship with Caleb at this stage is the hope that one day he will be powerful enough to make her a halfling again. But she never tells him that's what she's hoping for, again, until she's forced to. She walks past every opportunity to say something and hides in her own lies instead. Because that's safer? Because the knowledge of who she used to be is private and sacred and not something she wants to share? Because she's already given up hope that her plan for Caleb to help her would ever be successful, before she's even given him enough information to try? Maybe just because if she speaks the truth out loud she has to revisit a painful past, and speaking in half-truths feels more approachable.

Anyway, it's a very interesting illustration of the way Veth doesn't really ever share her deepest problems unless she is very much pressed to. I know it's often commented on how Sam dropped so much of her backstory without anyone having the information to know what those drops meant, but it's equally interesting the fact that she intentionally chooses not to share the information, even when there was more trust in the party, even though she knew her plan would never work without eventually telling the story of what happened to her.