#thousands of leaves from hundreds of trees over millions of years

[kaijuno]

A 1400 year old Ginkgo Biloba tree shows every November an autumn display, shedding his golden leaves, that attracts thousands of people from all over the country. The ancient tree grows behind a Buddhist Temple next to Gu Guanyin in the Zhongnan Mountain Region of China.

This large Ginkgo tree known as the Maidenhair Tree; is refered to as a living fossil.

The species is believed to have appeared several hundred million years ago (fossilized remains have been found) and thought to be extinct, until a specimen was discovered by a German naturalist in the late 1600s.

[fatehbaz]

On the night of April 30, 1541, the Ming Ancestral Temple in Beijing was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. [...] 

[T]he fires forced the Jiajing Emperor to resurrect one of the dynasty’s most expensive, difficult, and destructive projects: the logging of old-growth timber in the far southwest of China. Disaster struck again in 1556, when fires burned the Three Halls that form the central axis of the Forbidden City. The Three Halls burned yet again in 1584. [...] Yet the lightning strikes in Beijing were also a disaster for the old-growth forests of the southwest, where the logs to build the palaces had first been cut in the early 1400s. As logging supervisors soon learned, ancient trees could not be felled on a regular basis. Officials pressed ever deeper into the gorges of southern Sichuan and northern Guizhou to find them, bringing massive transformations to the environment in the process.

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The foundations of Beijing were laid between 1406 and 1421 by the Yongle emperor, a junior son of the Ming founder, who moved the court to his personal appanage in north China. [...] Grasping the sinews of power that connected his court to far-flung regions of the empire, Yongle pulled one million laborers to Beijing to build his palaces. Because the weight of Chinese buildings is carried by their pillar-and-beam frameworks (liangzhu), monumental buildings required monumental trees (Figure 2). So Yongle also dispatched a similarly large labor force to the old-growth forests of the far southwest to cut the fir (Cunninghamia lanceolata) and nanmu (Phoebe zhennan) that grew straight and tall enough to be used for imperial construction.

We cannot be certain just how many logs were cut to build Beijing, but the figure must have been astounding. In 1441, two decades after the completion of the project, 380,000 large timbers were left over from the earlier construction. By 1500, these too were gone, used for repairs or too damaged by rot to be used for construction purposes.

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In the sixteenth century, logging officials wondered how their predecessors had been able to obtain so many giant timbers. Li Xianqing, who supervised more than 40 logging sites in the 1540s, noted that large trees could still be found, but they could only be transported out with great difficulty and at great expense. The majority had to be discarded as hollow or insect-damaged. Even when a quality log was found, it took five hundred workers to tow a log over mountain passes.

Skilled craftsmen were on hand to build “flying bridges” (fei qiao), stone-lined slip roads, and enormous capstans (tianche) to tow the logs up slopes (Figures 3 and 4). In the remote forests of the southwest, loggers faced attacks by snakes, tigers, and “barbarians” (manyi); “miasmatic vapors” (yanzhang, probably malaria); storms, forest fires, rockslides, and raging rivers (Figure 5). Labor teams had to carry their own food and often starved. At the rivers, logs were tied into massive rafts bound with bamboo for buoyancy, towed by teams of 40 men, and then launched on the three-year, three-thousand-kilometer journey to Beijing (Figure 6). Only a small fraction of the trees reached the capital in a condition where they could be used for palace building.

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Expeditions exceeded their budgets up to fiftyfold.

One official remarked, “the labor force numbers in the thousands; the days number in the hundreds; the supply costs number in the tens of thousands each year.” Another saying held that “one thousand enter the mountains, but only five hundred leave” (rushan yiqian chu shan wubai). To make matters worse, logging mostly occurred within territory that was under only loose Ming control [...].

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The Yongle Palaces were said to replicate the otherworldly atmosphere of the old-growth forests where their pillars originated. The presence of these timbers in Beijing linked the capital, materially and symbolically, to the southwestern landscape of cliffs and gorges where the trees had grown.

But ancient sentinel trees could not be reproduced on demand. The fifteenth-century logging project was a millennial event, removing the growth of hundreds or even thousands of years. Later officials were forced to come to terms with the transformations their predecessors had wrought in the ancient forests. Eventually builders had to switch to smaller, commercially available timber, using ornate artisanship and commercial efficiency to substitute for the austere majesty of the early Ming palaces, and the thousands of years of tree growth on which they rested.

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All text above by: Ian M. Miller. “The Distant Roots of Beijing’s Palaces.” Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Environment & Society Portal, Arcadia no. 39. Autumn 2020. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[liondapearl]

“I'm Israel.

I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Those people who happened to be here, had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 400 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing their history.

Call me Israel. Some of my people committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers to represent me. In 1948, Menachem Begin was in charge of the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, including 100 women and children. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for our allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Call me Israel. Carved in 1948 out of 78% of the land of Palestine, dispossessing its inhabitants and replacing them with Jews from Europe and other parts of the world. While the natives whose families lived on this land for thousands of years are not allowed to return, Jews from all over the world are welcome to instant citizenship.

Call me Israel. In 1967, I swallowed the remaining lands of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - and placed their inhabitants under an oppressive military rule, controlling and humiliating every aspect of their daily lives. Eventually, they should get the message that they are not welcome to stay, and join the millions of Palestinian refugees in the shanty camps of Lebanon and Jordan.

Call me Israel. I have the power to control American policy. My American Israel Public Affairs Committee can make or break any politician of its choosing, and as you see, they all compete to please me. All the forces of the world are powerless against me, including the UN as I have the American veto to block any condemnation of my war crimes. As Sharon so eloquently phrased it, “We control America”.

Call me Israel. I influence American mainstream media too, and you will always find the news tailored to my favor. I have invested millions of dollars into PR representation, and CNN, New York Times, and others have been doing an excellent job of promoting my propaganda. Look at other international news sources and you will see the difference.

Call me Israel. You Palestinians want to negotiate “peace!?” But you are not as smart as me; I will negotiate, but will only let you have your municipalities while I control your borders, your water, your airspace and anything else of importance. While we “negotiate,” I will swallow your hilltops and fill them with settlements, populated by the most extremist of my extremists, armed to the teeth. These settlements will be connected with roads you cannot use, and you will be imprisoned in your little Bantustans between them, surrounded by checkpoints in every direction.

Call me Israel. I have the fourth strongest army in the world, possessing nuclear weapons. How dare your children confront my oppression with stones, don’t you know my soldiers won’t hesitate to blow their heads off? In 17 months, I have killed 900 of you and injured 17,000, mostly civilians, and have the mandate to continue since the international community remains silent. Ignore, as I do, the hundreds of Israeli reserve officers who are now refusing to carry out my control over your lands and people; their voices of conscience will not protect you.

Call me Israel. You want freedom? I have bullets, tanks, missiles, Apaches and F-16s to obliterate you. I have placed your towns under siege, confiscated your lands, uprooted your trees, demolished your homes, and you still demand freedom? Don’t you get the message? You will never have peace or freedom, because I am Israel.'’

- Written by Professor Norman Finkelstein.

Please also read 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine', by Israeli history professor and activist Ilan Pappé .

The world has been lied to for 73 years.

The Palestinian people are being destroyed before our eyes, and many of those who have been shouting loudly, 'Never again', look away.

[puzzled-pegasus]

I love wof but heres some annoying technical things I despise about it

The scaling of Pyrrhia is nuts. You're telling me they flew across the ENTIRE world in a few weeks?? Like bro. And Pantala is basically an island, not even a continent with how much space the damn Hives take up.

Also the populations? There should be MILLIONS of dragons but naw, just a few hundred of each tribe. What? I mean I guess the war and whatnot but like?? They're the dominant species of the world??? Can't tell me that RainWings are the largest tribe when SandWing have all that space too and SeaWings have the entire ocean, but naw RainWings. SandWings I can understand cause so many of them were killed but SeaWings aren't more populated??? SeaWings?????

The scaling of dragon to scavengers is completely inconsistent and drives me nuts. Are they the size of a mouse? A cat? A monkey? How do they compare to other animals??

SeaWings "turning on" their night vision. Girl how do you think eyes work?

SkyWings being red and orange instead of sky colors. I mean I guess if it was like males that were bright and females were more bluish gray, sure, but it seems weird they'd need to stand out so much. Though I suppose if you even see one it's too late cause they're so fast.

Surely dragons must have better senses of smell? It's not talked about much at all.

OH MY GOD THE TWO THOUSAND YEAR GAP WHERE DRAGONS ALL LOOK AND TALK EXACTLY THE SAME AS THEY DID. DO YOU KNOW HOW LONG TWO THOUSAND YEARS IS. TWO *HUNDRED* YEARS AGO THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE WAS WILDLY DIFFERENT. 2000 YEARS AGO, CORRECT ME IF IM WRONG BUT ENGLISH DIDN'T EVEN EXIST

Language evolution is a thing, Tui, especially over Two Thousand Years. Do you know how cool it would have been for Darkstalker to at least have an accent or speak Olde English but nooo. In the actual book Darkstalker, I understand; as making them speak a weird old language for the entire book would be exhausting and meaning is better interpreted if the language makes sense. But like? When he's talking to dragons 2000 years later? Some contrast would have been cool. Like every thirty seconds he says some weird extinct word out of habit and everyone is like ??

How come in 3000 years one species of dragon evolved into 10 tribes but 2000 years didn't even give them any new inventions or language changes. Ain't no way. Also there's no explanation of how or why they evolved that fast and adapted all their wildly different traits. A dragon tribe family tree would be so cool.

Not an unusual opinion but erasing animus magic. I had PLANS! Come on!

Why do IceWings have spikes? Why?

Also why are there IceWings named Penguin and also ones named Polar Bear. Penguins live in the SOUTH POLE. If this planet does not have a SOUTH POLE, there should be no PENGUINS. If it DOES have a SOUTH POLE, we need to MEET the SOUTHERN ICEWINGS.

Various other animal and habitat glitches: animals that live nowhere each other being used for names in the same tribe.

SEASONS???? SUMMER AUTUMN WINTER SPRING?? I'M SEEING THE NAME WINTER BUT I'M NOT SEEING A FKING WINTER?? RAINWING DRY SEASON WET SEASON?? SANDWING SEASON OF STORMS?? AUTUMN LEAVES? LIGHT SEASON AND DARK SEASON WAY UP NORTH WITH THE ICEWINGS?? HOLIDAYS IN THE DARK SEASON TO CHEER THEM UP?

Why do IceWings all have blue eyes if their blood is blue? Are they all albino? Has Tui ever heard of snow shine?? These poor dragons should all have eye damage cause their poor unpigmented eyes don't protect them from the snowshine burning their retinas

Why don't MudWings have fins or webbed talons? They don't need gills but they are semi aquatic so?

Every time it mentions HiveWings flapping their wings instead of buzzing I lose a week off my life expectancy

[iy0v]

I am Israel. I came to a land without a people for a people without a land. Except that those people who happened to be here, had no right to be here, and my people showed them they had to leave or die, razing 400 Palestinian villages to the ground, erasing their history.

I am Israel. Some of my people committed massacres and later became Prime Ministers to represent me. In 1948, Menachem Begin was in charge of the unit that slaughtered the inhabitants of Deir Yassin, including 100 women and children. In 1953, Ariel Sharon led the slaughter of the inhabitants of Qibya, and in 1982 arranged for our allies to butcher around 2,000 in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

I am Israel. Carved in 1948 out of 78% of the land of Palestine, dispossessing its inhabitants and replacing them with Jews from Europe and other parts of the world. While the natives whose families lived on this land for thousands of years are not allowed to return, the sons of Canaan and Egypt ever since the epic of Megido, Jews from all over the world are priorized for their ethnic superiority and entitlment of their claim, welcomed to instant citizenship.

I am Israel. In 1967, I swallowed the remaining lands of Palestine - East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza - and placed their inhabitants under an oppressive military rule, controlling and humiliating every aspect of their daily lives. Eventually, they should get the message that they are not welcome to stay, and join the millions of Palestinian refugees in the shanty camps of Lebanon and Jordan.

I am Israel. I have the power to control American policy. My American Israel Public Affairs Committee can make or break any politician of its choosing, and as you see, they all compete to please me. All the forces of the world are powerless against me, including the UN as I have the American veto to block any condemnation of my war crimes. As Sharon so eloquently phrased it, “We control America”.

I am Israel. I influence American mainstream media too, and you will always find the news tailored to my favor. I have invested millions of dollars into PR representation. for CNN, New York Times, and others have been doing an excellent job of promoting my rightful propaganda. Look at other international news sources and you will see the difference.

I am Israel. You Palestinians want to negotiate “peace!?” But you are not as smart as me; I will negotiate, but will only let you have your municipalities while I control your borders, your water, your airspace and anything else of importance. While we “negotiate,” I will swallow your hilltops and fill them with settlements, populated by the most extremist of my extremists, armed to the teeth. These settlements will be connected with roads you cannot use, and you will be imprisoned in your little Bantustans between them, surrounded by checkpoints in every direction.

I am Israel. I have the fourth strongest army in the world, possessing nuclear weapons. How dare your children confront my oppression with stones, don’t you know my soldiers won’t hesitate to blow their heads off? In 17 months, I have killed 900 of you and injured 17,000, mostly civilians, and have the mandate to continue since the international community remains silent. Ignore, as I do, the hundreds of Israeli reserve officers who are now refusing to carry out my control over your lands and people; their voices of conscience will not protect you.

I am Israel. You want freedom? I have bullets, tanks, missiles, Apaches and F-16s to obliterate you. I have placed your towns under siege, confiscated your lands, uprooted your trees, demolished your homes, and you still demand freedom? Don’t you get the message? You will never have peace or freedom, because I am Israel.

-X

[amorosebeing]

Trees Don't Grow Through A Single, Dull Branch

Feel free to let me know what you think, or what you assume the context I wrote this in was.

Two years ago, just like you, I sought to see what lay ahead at what shall pass as the clock spins fast I gazed down the path ahead, my heart beating like a drum And The World demanded a clear way to run a thousand branches and more laid out, with marks scratched in the bark by every climber before me

a clear way to run, a single path right now, no time to perceive the flowers blooming between nor the shafts of sunlight filtering down through the leaves choose your fate before you have found it it’s bait to think you can wait with youth. I was at the same point as a billion every one of us brilliantly aware of our given order

Straight ahead, straight forward, no room to slip If you only once lose your Grip, debt will be there to catch you.

The thoughts of my Grip had churned with the most terror in a quiet school, a labyrinth of pale stucco walls and deep-blue banners. I didn’t know where I would be after those walls not much at all yet an ordinary clerk gazed through the sterile white sunlight streaming through the window; and through the painted-over concrete wrapping around her sight of the road ahead so unbothered, her fright nowhere seen working day in and day out, but little despair to show little fear of what could come and so I asked how she could see so far, so much

“I don’t” “I cannot see ahead with perfect clarity, but I didn’t get here through perfection” “Don’t try ten choices and get them all perfect. Make a thousand and get nine hundred right” “For when you slip, you’ll have plenty enough to regain your grip”

Even in plentiful times, the thought of slipping down wears at one’s soul a bubbling mix of one’s anxiety for self and loved alike along with the nagging chains set to our world’s Towers, never failing to pull, but merely giving slack all the late nights your mother has worked, and all the news stories of a million students slipping, further into owing We cannot ignore the pains of each shackle, but why not twist within them, as to dance? As to live and breathe? I hope to see these chains crack and fall industrial steel and gold melted down into something new, and messily alive but for now, I will stretch as far as I can within them taut ties tend to snap, after all;

And now that I have made five hundred choices, now that I have reached out now that I have climbed another rung of learning now that I have grown up, spoken out, sought Providence I find nine of ten a high standard not the Chasm it once seemed; would you rather know nothing of the journeys you could take? Or live, and make a few mistakes for your sake? My grip slackened, yet never fell; clicking, falling into a new gear

Yet the worry of challenge persisted, far in my soul Would I really be enough to fight hardship and strife, strength and fright? Surrounded by paperwork and rooms that scant went empty, she had another word “You can’t avoid Doing. But cliché as it might be, you can find something you love to Do” “I hope that answers your question.” it wasn’t much, truly just words of advice sandwiched between stationery and the thrum of the breeze from a woman I knew, in some sort of passing an acquaintance, though a friendly one. perhaps I have even exaggerated it, made a galaxy of a star but is that not what art does? To expand, to create? To let a whisper echo?

They were not the sermon of a preacher, in gold embroidery beneath stained glass nor the shout of a researcher, wrapped in a silver cloak above hadrons colliding just words whispered on the wind

But we cannot forget the value of such things Was there not a man whispering to his daughter of the wolves in the dark and the love in the light a hundred thousand years ago? Weren’t there families, huddling together in the cold and dust of the Great Depression a century ago, whispering of better days? Weren’t you and me once young, new things, finding the most precious love from the murmurs of a parent, friend, or sibling?

It is so easy of think of the ultimate, the absolute, the perfect But to think of that only is a sin The sun is bright, and the darkness terrifying But I find the greatest sanctity in the stars between In a million pinpricks, so much larger, in truth, than the sun could ever be Don’t forget the words of a stranger you’ll never see again, a friend you might only hold again a decade from now, or a teacher whose way you have largely parted For in the years since, I had found her quite right I cannot avoid challenge, for strength and change comes from its embrace I cannot avoid fright, for I have a great height to fall But I can do my best to avoid suffering Smell each rose Love each bug, hiding beneath the bark As we all must

Work the best you can in the branches of a broken world And do as you can to make it better, growing leaf by leaf, flower by flower

Don’t forget that Fate is not inevitability but merely the ripening of the consequences of what has been done, and what has happened What has been loved, and lost For I still do not know my path, but we are not bound to a single, dull branch.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

Saving a Forest of One When viewed from hundreds of kilometers above Earth, this patch of aspen foliage in south-central Utah looks somewhat ordinary. But the leaves belong to a colony that is actually quite extraordinary. More than 40,000 genetically identical trees are connected by a common root system, and are part of a single massive organism, a male quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides), that scientists have named Pando, which means “I spread” in Latin. In this fall image (centre), acquired with the Operational Land Imager-2 (OLI-2) on Landsat 9, Pando’s yellow leaves are visible for about 200 meters on either side of State Route 25 just west of Fish Lake. The darker green forested areas surrounding it are dominated by evergreen trees, including spruce and fir. Many of the other yellow areas in the image are aspen stands that are not part of Pando. Pando’s trees and root system span 106 acres (43 hectares) and weigh 13 million pounds. That is roughly the size of 80 American football fields and the weight of 15 jumbo jets, making Pando among the largest and heaviest land organisms on the planet. (Offshore, sea grass and coral reefs also grow to vast sizes, but likely do not carry the immense weight of Pando.) The precise age of Pando’s root system is difficult to determine. But scientists think the aspen seed that started the plant sprouted several thousand years ago, perhaps even as long as 14,000 years ago as ice retreated from the Fish Lake Valley after the height of the last glacial maximum. Since sprouting, that seed has grown and spread by sending up new shoots every spring from its root system. These shoots—sometimes called suckers or ramets—are recognized as trees as they grow to maturity. They typically persist for about 100 to 150 years before dying back, even as Pando sends up more shoots and lives on. But Pando has not been well in recent decades. “It’s dying,” said ecologist Paul Rogers, the director of the Western Aspen Alliance at Utah State University. “Mule deer—and to a smaller degree cattle—frequent this area in such numbers that they are grazing on the young shoots and stopping them from getting established. If you think of Pando as a village, it’s a village full of old people with very few children growing up to take their place.” Rogers and a colleague from Utah State University first reported in 2018 that Pando was in trouble. Field measurements and a series of historical aerial photographs made clear that the forest has thinned considerably since the 1930s. In that study, and in an update published in 2022, Rogers reported that the only parts of Pando that were showing signs of regrowth were the parts that were fenced off from deer and cattle. The photograph below, taken by Rogers, shows more growth of young stems on the inside (left side) of one section of fencing. However, Rogers wonders about how large a role fences should play in trying to save Pando. “Is fencing Pando off like a zoo animal the right solution?” he asked. “We also need to look at things like predation and what can be done to keep deer populations at more sustainable levels to address the problem in a more comprehensive way.” For Rogers, the challenges and management questions don’t end at Pando’s edges. “Pando, though charismatic and fascinating, is a microcosm for much bigger, more global issues,” he said. “We have to think not just about Pando, but about how we keep aspens—forests more broadly—all over the world healthy and thriving as the climate changes and people put increasing pressure on ecosystems.” That is going to require a change in perspective that expands far beyond Pando or this one part of Utah, he added. “This Landsat image is a reminder of how small even one of the world’s largest organisms is from a planetary perspective. We’re going to need monitoring and conservation of aspen forests on a global scale.” NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Photo by Paul C. Rogers (Western Aspen Alliance). Story by Adam Voiland.

[freehawaii]

DID POLYNESIAN VOYAGERS REACH THE AMERICAS BEFORE COLUMBUS?

History.com - May 25, 2023 According to science, voyagers from Moananuiākea reached America around 800 years ago. “A 2020 study found that Polynesians from multiple islands carry a small amount of DNA from indigenous South Americans, and that the moment of contact likely came some 800 years ago…” Polynesian voyagers sailed without a compass or any other nautical instruments. Yet by reading the stars, waves, currents, clouds, seaweed clumps and seabird flights, they managed to cross vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean and settle hundreds of islands, from Hawaii in the north to Easter Island in the southeast to New Zealand in the southwest. Evidence has mounted that they likewise reached mainland South America—and possibly North America as well—long before Christopher Columbus. “It’s one of the most remarkable colonization events of any time in history,” says Jennifer Kahn, an archeologist at the College of William & Mary, who specializes in Polynesia. “We’re talking about incredibly skilled navigators [discovering] some of the most remote places in the world.” Tracing Polynesian Ancestry Based on linguistic, genetic and archeological data, scientists believe that the ancestors of the Polynesians originated in Taiwan (and perhaps the nearby south China coast). From there, they purportedly traveled south into the Philippines and further on to New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago, where they mixed with the local populace. By around 1300 B.C., a new culture had developed, the Lapita, known in part for their distinct pottery. These direct descendants of the Polynesians rapidly swept eastward, first to the Solomon Islands and then to uninhabited Vanuatu, New Caledonia, Fiji, and elsewhere. “The Lapita were the first ones to get into remote Oceania,” says Patrick V. Kirch, an anthropology professor at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, and author of On the Road of the Winds: An Archeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact. “It was really a blank slate as far as humans were concerned.” By the 9th century B.C., the Lapita had made it as far as Tonga and Samoa. But then a long pause ensued without further expansion. Researchers note that, beyond Tonga and Samoa, island chains are much further apart, separated in some cases by thousands of miles of open ocean, and that the winds and currents generally conspire against sailing east. Perhaps Lapita boats simply weren’t up to the task. Moreover, as Kirch points out, the closest coral atolls had not yet stabilized by that time. “It’s possible that there was some voyaging past Samoa,” he says, “but they would have found just coral reefs and not actual land they could settle.” Double-Hulled Canoes Accelerate Expansion During the long pause, a distinct Polynesian culture evolved on Tonga and Samoa, and voyagers there gradually honed their craft. In time, they invented double-hulled canoes, essentially early catamarans, lashing them together with coconut fiber rope and weaving sails from the leaves of pandanus trees. These vessels, up to roughly 60-feet long, could carry a couple dozen settlers each, along with their livestock—namely pigs, dogs and chickens—and crops for planting. “They now had the technological ability and the navigational ability to really get out there,” Kirch says. Though the exact timeline has long been disputed, it appears the great wave of Polynesian expansion began around A.D. 900 or 950. Voyagers, also called wayfinders, quickly discovered the Cook Islands, Society Islands (including Tahiti), and Marquesas Islands, and not long after arrived in the Hawaiian Islands. By 1250 or so, when they reached New Zealand, they had explored at least 10 million square miles of the Pacific Ocean and located over 1,000 islands. “You can fit all of the continents into the Pacific Ocean,” Kahn explains. “It’s a huge, huge space to traverse.” Even the tiniest and most remote islands, such as Pitcairn, did not escape their notice. As Kirch points out, no one else in the world was remotely capable of such a feat at that time. “Around 1000 A.D., what were Europeans doing?” Kirch says. “Not much in the way of sailing.” He adds that, as late as the 15th century, even the most accomplished European seamen, like Vasco da Gama, were merely hugging the coast. Easter Island Among Many Inhabited by Polynesian Voyagers The Polynesians did not have a system of writing to record their accomplishments. But they did pass down stories orally, which tell, for example, of how Hawaiian settlers came from Tahiti, more than 2,500 miles away. “Where the sun rises, in Hawaiian understanding anyway, is a place where the gods reside and our ancestors,” says Marques Hanalei Marzan, cultural advisor at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. “To get to that place is probably one of the reasons why the migration east continued.” (As an April 2023 study confirms, Polynesian voyagers sometimes sailed west as well into what’s commonly referred to as the Polynesian Outliers.) Each island chain developed its own unique characteristics. On Easter Island, for instance, the inhabitants constructed giant stone statues. Yet all Polynesians spoke related languages, worshipped a similar pantheon of gods, and built ritual sites with shared features, Kahn explains. The various islands also maintained at least some ties with each other, particularly during the heyday of Polynesian expansion. “It’s not just that they came from a place and left and never made their way back,” Marzan says. “They actually continued those relationships.” Evidence that Polynesian Sailors Reached Americas Most experts now believe the Polynesians crossed the entire Pacific to mainland South America, with Marzan saying it happened “without question.” Stanford University biologist Peter Vitousek has similarly told HISTORY that “we’re absolutely sure,” putting the odds of a South American landfall in the 99.9999 [percent] range.” For one thing, experts note that Easter Island (also known as Rapa Nui) lies only about 2,200 miles off the South American coast, and that Polynesian voyagers, capable of locating a speck of rock in the vast Pacific, could hardly have missed a giant continent. “Why would they have stopped?” Kahn says. “They would have kept going until they couldn’t find any more.” Genetic evidence backs up this assertion. A 2020 study found that Polynesians from multiple islands carry a small amount of DNA from indigenous South Americans, and that the moment of contact likely came some 800 years ago (not long after the Vikings, the best European sailors of their era, made landfall on the Atlantic coast of the Americas). Archeologists have likewise found the remains of bottle gourds and sweet potatoes, both South American plants, at pre-Columbian Polynesian sites. Some scientists speculate that the sweet potato could have dispersed naturally across the Pacific, but most agree that the Polynesians must have brought it back with them. “Try to take a sweet potato tuber and float it,” Kirch says. “I guarantee it won’t float very long. It will sink to the bottom of the ocean.” Poultry bones from Chile appear to show that Polynesians introduced chickens to South America prior to the arrival of Columbus, though some scientists have disputed these findings. Meanwhile, other researchers analyzing skulls on a Chilean island found them to be “very Polynesian in shape and form.” Less evidence ties the Polynesians to North America. Even so, some experts believe they landed there as well, pointing out, among other things, that the sewn-plank canoes used by the Chumash tribe of southern California resembled Polynesian vessels. What Happened to Polynesians in Americas? No Polynesian settlement has ever been unearthed in the Americas. It therefore remains unclear what happened upon arrival, particularly since, unlike the Pacific islands, these landmasses were already populated. Perhaps, Kahn says, “they got up and left and went back.” When Captain James Cook explored the Pacific in the late 1760s and 1770s, thus ushering in a wave of Western imperialism, he recognized the Polynesians’ exemplary sailing skills. “It is extraordinary that the same nation should have spread themselves over all the isles in this vast ocean, from New Zealand to [Easter Island], which is almost a fourth part of the circumference of the globe,” he wrote. Eventually, however, as they colonized the islands and suppressed native languages and cultures, Western powers began to downplay Polynesian achievements, according to Marzan, who says they assumed “that the people of the Pacific were less than.” Some falsely claimed, for instance, that Polynesian sailors had merely drifted along with the winds and currents. (It didn’t help that, at the time of European contact, many Pacific Islanders no longer used large, oceangoing canoes. Some, like those on Easter Island, had already chopped down all the tall trees needed to produce them.) Worst of all, European diseases decimated the Polynesian population. “It was this massive, devastating loss,” Kirch says. “And when you have that, your society really falls apart.” Before long, most remaining Polynesians began sailing with Western techniques. More recently, though, the old traditions have been revived, starting around 1976, when the Polynesian Voyaging Society sailed, without instruments, from Hawaii to Tahiti. They have since embarked on numerous other expeditions, including a worldwide voyage from 2013 to 2017. “The Polynesian Voyaging Society has really inspired many cultures across the Pacific to reconnect with their traditional practices,” Marzan says. Once again, double-hulled canoes are plying the ocean.

[newstfionline]

Friday, October 27, 2023

Biden weighs striking Iranian proxies after attacks on U.S. troops (Washington Post) President Biden faces mounting pressure to strike Iranian proxies that have repeatedly attacked—and injured—U.S. troops in Iraq and Syria this month, but he is weighing any decision to retaliate against his broader concern that the war in Gaza could be on the precipice of erupting into a regionwide tempest, according to U.S. officials and others familiar with the administration’s deliberations. Biden said Wednesday that he warned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, that if Tehran continues to “move against” U.S. forces in the Middle East, “we will respond.” The president’s disclosure followed reports that nearly two dozen American troops were hurt within the last eight days after 14 or more aerial assaults on their bases in Iraq and Syria. An additional attack was recorded Wednesday, after three rockets were launched at a U.S. outpost in northeast Syria and one landed inside, a defense official said. No one was reported injured.

With House speaker installed, US Congress returns to spending battles (Reuters) The morning after U.S. House of Representatives Republicans united around new Speaker Mike Johnson, lawmakers on Thursday returned their attention to spending bills urgently needed to avert a government shutdown and respond to crises overseas. Congress has just over three weeks until a stopgap measure to keep federal agencies funded runs out on Nov. 17, and Democratic President Joe Biden is also pushing for $106 billion in new spending to aid Israel and Ukraine, and beef up enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border. Meanwhile, House Republicans are pushing for a full plate of 12 separate funding bills to keep agencies running until Sept. 30, 2024, the end of the fiscal year. This rare feat requires close negotiation between the narrowly Republican-controlled House and the Senate, which has a two-vote Democratic majority.

Millions more Americans were food insecure in 2022 than 2021—USDA (AP) Millions more Americans had difficulty securing enough food in 2022 compared to the year prior, including 1 million more households with children, a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) showed on Wednesday. The increase interrupted a years-long trend of declining hunger in the United States. Previous reports from food banks and the U.S. Census Bureau have indicated that hunger is increasing as low-income Americans struggle to recover from the pandemic and from the end of expanded food assistance. The USDA report, which did not provide an explanation for the rise, found that 12.8% of households—equivalent to 17 million households—struggled to get enough food in 2022, up from 10.2%, or 13.5 million households, in 2021. Nearly 7 million households faced very low food security, meaning members’ normal eating patterns were disrupted or food intake dropped because of limited resources, USDA said.

Acapulco residents are left in flooded and windblown chaos with hurricane’s toll still unknown (AP) A day after Hurricane Otis roared ashore in Acapulco, unleashing massive floods and setting off looting, the resort city of nearly 1 million descended into chaos, leaving residents without electricity or internet service and a toll of at least 27 dead. The early images and accounts were of extensive devastation, toppled trees and power lines lying in brown floodwaters that in some areas extended for miles. Many of the once sleek beachfront hotels in Acapulco looked like toothless, shattered hulks a day after the Category 5 storm blew out hundreds—and possibly thousands—of windows. There seemed to be a widespread frustration with authorities. While some 10,000 military troops were deployed to the area, they lacked the tools to clean tons of mud and fallen trees from the streets. Hundreds of trucks from the government electricity company arrived in Acapulco early Wednesday, but seemed at a loss as to how to restore power, with downed electricity lines lying in feet of mud and water.

Shoplifting Surges in U.K., Putting Workers in Scary Situations (NYT) Stashing six bottles of wine into a bag, a man wearing a dark jacket and beanie heads straight to the store exit without paying, barging by a female shop worker who blocks his way and only stopping when her colleague overpowers him just outside the doorway. For the supermarket’s owner, Richard Inglis, the early morning fracas—captured on CCTV—was the day’s first attempted theft but was unlikely to be the last. “I’ll probably have another three or four today,” Mr. Inglis said, adding that, while trying to stop shoplifters, he and his staff members had been punched, kicked, bitten, spat at, threatened with needles, racially abused and attacked with bottles. “It’s like the Wild West out there at the moment.” Britain is seeing a surge in theft from its stores at the hands, stores say, of opportunistic shoplifters, marauding teenagers, people stealing to finance drug use and organized gangs intent on looting. According to official figures, shoplifting incidents recorded by the police rose by 25 percent in the year ending June 2023, and Co-op, a British supermarket chain with about 2,400 stores, recorded its highest ever levels of theft and aggressive behavior, with almost 1,000 incidents each day in the six months to June 2023, a 35 percent spike from the previous year. One of its stores was “looted” three times in one day, it said in a news release.

Russia prison population plummets as convicts are sent to war (Washington Post) Russia has freed up to 100,000 prison inmates and sent them to fight in Ukraine, according to government statistics and rights advocates—a far greater number than was previously known. The sharp drop in the number of inmates is evidence that the Defense Ministry continued to aggressively recruit convicted criminals even after blocking access to prisoners by the Wagner mercenary group, which pioneered the campaign to trade clemency for military service. The Russian prison population, estimated at roughly 420,000 before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, plummeted to a historic low of about 266,000, according to Deputy Justice Minister Vsevolod Vukolov, who disclosed the figure during a panel discussion earlier this month. Russian forces are now heavily reliant on prisoners plucked from colonies with the promise of pardons, a practice initiated by the late Wagner boss Yevgeniy Prigozhin, who began recruiting convicts to fight in Ukraine a year ago and amassed a 50,000-strong force.

Delhi air turns very poor but ‘worst is yet to come’ (BBC) The air quality in India’s capital Delhi has fallen to poor levels and is expected to deteriorate further in the coming days, officials have said. Delhi is one of the world’s most polluted cities through the year. But its air turns especially toxic in winter due to various factors, including burning of crop remains by farmers, low wind speeds and bursting of firecrackers during festivals. The polluted air causes severe health issues to Delhi residents every year. Some residents said these were the early days in Delhi’s pollution cycle and “the worst was yet to come”.

U.S., Russia veto each other’s U.N. resolutions on Israel-Gaza war (Washington Post) The U.N. Security Council failed again to adopt a unified position on stopping the carnage in the Middle East, with the United States and Russia vetoing each others’ resolutions. The principal difference between the competing resolutions was Washington’s call for “all measures, specifically to include humanitarian pauses,” to allow aid to flow into Gaza—a position it rejected as recently as last week and with no specific mention of ongoing Israeli airstrikes—vs. Moscow’s call for a complete cease-fire. The United States is in an increasingly minority position in rejecting a cease-fire, which is supported by the U.N. Secretary General, Arab states and much of the rest of the world.

Israel’s Strikes on Gaza Are Some of the Most Intense This Century (NYT) Israel’s 19-day bombing campaign in Gaza has become one of the most intense of the 21st century, prompting growing global scrutiny of its scale, purpose and cost to human life. Since terrorists from Gaza raided Israel on Oct. 7, killing roughly 1,400 people according to the Israeli government, the Israeli military says it has struck more than 7,000 targets inside Gaza. That is a higher number than in any previous Israeli military campaign in the territory, a narrow enclave less than half the size of New York City. It also outstrips the most intense month of the United States-led bombing campaign against ISIS, according to Airwars, a British conflict monitor. For Palestinians, the scale of the bombing campaign has appeared vengeful and unfocused, killing Gazans from across a wide spectrum of civilian life and destroying residential areas. The Hamas-run Gazan health ministry says Israeli strikes have killed more than 6,500 people, a number that if verified would make this the deadliest conflict for Palestinians since at least the Lebanon war of 1982. Israelis say the strikes are not about retaliation but defense.

The ‘Devil’s Playground’ of Urban Combat That Israel Is Preparing to Enter (NYT) Heavy fire from rooftops and booby-trapped apartments. Armor-piercing projectiles blowing up troop carriers. Fighters blending in with civilians, launching drone ambushes, or surging from tunnels full of enough ammunition, food and water to sustain a long war. As the Israeli Army gathers tanks at the Gaza border for a threatened invasion aimed at crushing Hamas, experts are warning that the country’s troops could face some of the fiercest street-to-street combat since World War II in Gaza City and other densely packed areas. Urban warfare studies and American officials offer dire comparisons to Iraq: Think of Falluja in 2004, the most intense battles that American troops had faced since Vietnam, or the nine-month fight to defeat the Islamic State in Mosul in 2016, which led to 10,000 civilian deaths. Then multiply the destructive toll, possibly exponentially. Hamas has three to five times as many fighters—perhaps 40,000 in all—as the Islamic State had in Mosul. It can draw reserves from a young, restive population, and has international support from countries like Iran. Even on its own, Hamas’s leadership has had years to prepare for battle across Gaza, including in city streets, where the superiority of tanks and precise munitions can be stymied by guerrilla tactics. “It’s going to be ugly,” said Lt. Col. Thomas Arnold, a U.S. Army strategist who has published studies on urban operations in the Middle East. “Cities are the devil’s playground—they make everything infinitely more difficult.”

Lonely (Gallup) Nearly one in four people worldwide—which translates into more than a billion people—feel very or fairly lonely, according to a recent Meta-Gallup survey of more than 140 countries. Notably, these numbers could be even higher. The survey represents approximately 77% of the world’s adults because it was not asked in the second-most populous country in the world, China. With the World Health Organization and many others—including the U.S. surgeon general—calling attention to the dangers of loneliness, these data, collected in partnership between Gallup and Meta, provide a much-needed global perspective of social wellbeing. Global results indicate that the lowest rates of feeling lonely are reported among older adults (aged 65 and older), with 17% feeling very or fairly lonely, while the highest rates of feeling lonely are reported among young adults (aged 19 to 29), with 27% feeling very or fairly lonely.

[syilcawrites]

among golden hues

s. Link and Zelda reunite (in one form or another) a/n. Wow hi it's been like almost 6 months but I wrote a lil smth smth tonight because watching that teaser made me go crazy again heh. I love the sort of... whimsical feel I'm getting from tokt so I tried to emulate a bit of that here! It was rly refreshing to write since it's been a bit... and I hope you enjoyed reading it as well! Thanks for tuning in :-)

ao3 (or u can read here on tmblr!)

And finally, he finds her, at the break of dawn, just over a mossy cliff that hides the sun. Golden flecks drift with the wind, swirling around him, coming from the shimmering trees that rest upon the floating islands. When they brush against his ear, they whisper to him; their voices are quiet, soft, like a wish. He wonders if they carry the hopes and dreams of the people from down below. Countless of lost wishes and dreams, floating high into the sky for the Goddess to hear—is his also lost amidst the hundreds and thousands still waiting to be heard?

When he climbs to the top, with his bleeding hands and blurry vision, he sees her standing there. Zelda, half tilted to the sun and half tilted to him, as if she is waning, unsure. She's wearing her ceremonial dress, albeit a bit different than what he remembers. Her short hair bristles in the light breeze; she tucks her golden locks behind her ears and turns.

It feels like it's been eons since he's last seen her—years upon years. He lost track of time, he had forgotten the sensation of her touch upon his skin, somewhere along the way. He can no longer recall it, the warmth she once harbored, and it scared him.

He doesn't want to forget her, not again.

But she washes away that feeling of doubt immediately as they lock eyes—her emerald eyes, shining and brilliant—nothing like how he last saw them, fear-stricken and pained, blinking away into the darkness that had swallowed her.

"Oh, there you are," she says gently, as if she didn't want to wake up the slumbering world around them just yet. She responded so nonchalantly, it was almost as if she had simply wandered just a little too far from him and they lost sight of each other for only a few minutes. "I was wondering when you'd get here."

Her back is to the sun and it illuminates her figure in a soft glow. Link stands at the top of the hill, half mesmerized and half afraid, unblinking. If he blinks, will she disappear? If he blinks, will he wake up somewhere in the dark, clutching the battered Master Sword as if his life depended on it?

Countless of times, that's happened. He has envisioned them meeting again and again; every single time he'd run to her, embrace her tight, and let a million words spill from his parched lips within a second, and then the moment he would pull back to finally, finally look at her, he'd wake up.

He'd wake up in darkness, skin coated in cold sweat, infections blooming on his wounds, old and new.

Zelda takes the first step forward, head tilted in concern. "You're alright, Link," she says it so confidently that his breath catches in his throat. She extends her hand out to him and takes another step. Her bare feet leave light imprints upon the dewy grass. He stares hard at the flattened grass, and a flicker of hope crawls into his heart.

With her, it's so easy. She always finds a way to wiggle herself into the crevices of his heart with ease, as if she knows the ins and outs of it.

She's in front of him now, with her hand in between them. They're closed into a fist, hiding something.

"While I was waiting for you, I found this. I thought 'ah, I think Link would like to try this'," she says, her voice chipper, almost excited. She opens it to reveal just a few reddened berries. They're a beautiful, deep shade of crimson. The richness of the color stands out amongst the throngs of golden hues surrounding them.

Link fought against old kings and ancient beings to get here, to find her, to be with her.

"Well?"

He blinks.

His vision clears and he can see the freckles dotting her sunkissed skin, splashed across her cheeks like the night sky. His fingers move without him thinking—the tips are calloused to the point where he can't feel anything with them, but regardless, he lightly brushes them across the freckles adorning her face. Slightly bumpy, like he remembers, and just a few centimeters to the right, near her jaw, the dip in her skin... that little scar on her cheek is still there.

Suddenly, she pops a berry into his mouth, between his parched lips. "I know you haven't eaten anything since last night. You like to skip out on it when something’s bothering you."

He chews—it's refreshing, juicy. Probably the best berry he's ever had in his life. She's absolutely right, he does love it.

"Delicious, isn't it?" she asks, beaming. She pops one into her mouth as well and hums a little happy tune that he can't recognize. "While we're here, we should harvest some. It's not good to journey on an empty stomach, Link. You of all people should know that."

Zelda holds his hands, interlocks their fingers, and guides him. Dumbly, he follows along, speechless still. She's warmer and softer than she's ever been, beaming. Should he really be holding her hand back with his ruined hands? But she doesn't seem to mind. Instead, she tightens her hold, and it's reassuring.

And so, they pick berries.

Some are the color of cherry wine, others of dark magenta, but his favorite one is still the crimson berry she gave to him. Zelda speaks in between their harvest, small talk, and he feels bad for not saying a single thing, but he's afraid to break whatever spell he's under, because if he speaks and asks her a question, she'll disappear.

He knows she will.

"Ah... it seems like it'll get dark soon," she suddenly says, immediately stopping whatever topic she was previously on.

Before he knows it, the sun is setting.

His stomach drops and he looks at her in a hurry, brows furrowed and lips parted, but he's unable to formulate anything. He has too much to say, but no time. He's never had enough time, so instead, the desperate words he wants to tell her spill in the form of silent teardrops.

"Link," she says, tenderly cupping his face. She wipes the heavy tears with her thumb and smiles lovingly at him. "You'll be okay."

He shakes his head, leaning into her hands, trying to soak in the affection she carries with her. Can't he just stay here with her? All he wants is for her to stay, all he wants is for them to stay together.

"Where are you?" he asks quietly, almost pleadingly.

Instead of answering him, she smiles, but it's sad and apologetic and he knows she won't answer. She presses her forehead against his.

"We'll find ea—"

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Link awakens to the sound of water.

A droplet splashing against a rock.

A methodic sound, almost like a deep rumble in the belly of a beast. He can't remember what he was doing or how long he'd been sleeping; he didn't even realize he fell asleep. Lethargically, he sits up, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand—something falls from his hands into his lap.

Berries.

When had he picked them...?

His stomach growls and he realizes that he hasn't eaten since last night. He's running low on food as well... he has to find his way out of this labyrinth of a cave before he starves to death. He picks them up and pops them into his mouth, savoring the burst of flavor that explodes from them.

His heart aches at the taste, but he can't recall why.

[abhorrenttheorizer]

Ok so uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Been a while since I made some TGSquid content

I'm trying to find some sort of a balance between quantity and quality but there's issues. I don't want to post something actually worthwhile once every 5 years, but I also don't want to post a bunch of shitty sketches and unfinished things that don't look good.

Hopefully the image below isn't too bright for people who use 100% brightness settings but just in case I am going to spoiler for photosensitivity reasons

This issue is made worse by the fact that I seem to only be good at rendering now. My cartooning or "flat sketch" quality is in the shitter, but bear with me on this one.

TL;DR: I have turned Rythulians into furries and also there's more of them:

Sooooooo rythulian history and development because why not. In order of most ancient to most recent from left to right.

Also heavy crossover material because you can pry the idea that Journey and Sky are connected and they're all the same species/in the same evolutionary tree out of my cold dead... brain?

And so begins a small sketch of what repeated divine punishment does to a motherfucker. Why? Idk but tbh I like the idea that Megabird is a corrupt, unforgiving, wrathful deity that regularly punishes her devoted children. That idea unironically won't stop pestering me but I'll talk about Megabird and my thoughts on her later.

Rythulian evolution is all kinds of fucked up because of the heavy divine hand (wing?) at play in their development, with new traits suddenly and randomly being added instantly when they should take millions of years to develop. In the beginning, Rythulians were once tall, lumbering, bony creatures that lived in lowland forests and plains areas. This species was extant from several thousand years before the start of their civilization, to a few hundred years before the start of Journey (2012). At this point in time they were more closely related to "dark creatures" in their surrounding areas than "light creatures", hence the lack of glowiness. While not true vertebrates, ancestral Rythulians had an internal shell in the chest region with segments similar to those of ribcages, and a heavy keel at the center to protect the wax gland. They also had long segmented attachments to the internal shell that acted like a spine, fused in the lumbar region which made them relatively inflexible. They also only had one fur and one eye color, dark blue with bluish green eyes, with little to no variation in fur pattern or color. Because they lacked the internal magic that would grant them the ability to stand on itty bitty Barbie feet, the feet of ancestral Rythulians were thick and camel-esque, made to hold their great size and weight against soft forest soil. At this point in time, Rythulians did not need to perform yearly death rituals, only ascending the mountain for rebirth for the sake of cleansing the body and spirit.

Cue massive war over resources forcing their evolution into the 2nd figure in the image.

Nicknamed the "Atonement species" by their far descendants, the next iteration of Rythulians were small(er), soft, jelly things with bright white beads where green eyes once were. Smooth, sloping torso that used to be their arms now void and featureless, like the duney wastelands they were commanded to die in. Despite having very slug-like anatomy, they do not leave a moist trail when they move. However, what separates this slug from the slugs of some other reprimands of a higher power, is that the Atonement Rythulians do have mouths, and boy did they love screaming. Atonement Rythulians existed from a few years before the start of Journey (2012) to several hundred years before the development of the first settlements on the other size of the Mountain of Eden. Unlike their previous ancestors, this species had no bones at all besides the skull and internal shell, a trait that will continue on in the rest of their descendants. Their feet are significantly smaller as well, and all digits posess retractable hooves. On the lower belly is a pouch of loose, stretchy skin that will continue in all future descendants, something that protects them from the impacts of guardians and enabling them to stretch up to 6x their height, As well as the relative bonelessness, they were created in the image of Light, and thus had Light's magic, rather than their naturally evolved Dark ancestors. They lacked arms because of divine punishment, it was arms that aided the ancient Rythulians in their pillage and plundering and war, and it was arms that were taken away, forcing generation after generation of slugbirb to maneuver their environments with only their legs and their song for dexterity. Also unlike the ancestral Rythulian, this species came in a wide variety of facial disc colors, another trait passed down to their descendants.

Cue the start of divine corruption, a goddess rendering thousand of years of armless infrastructural development obsolete for supposed shits and giggles.

The "Sanctioned" or "Spirit" Rythulians differed not much from their previous ancestors, other than for their Good Deeds, they were finally granted their arm privileges back, in the form of massive hulking bear paws. This species originated several thousands of years after the events of Journey (2012), and was extant up until the Eden disaster before the events of Sky: Children of the Light. Under their new powerlifter arms, they have a small flap of skin from the upper arm to the waist, used to aid them in flight, giving them added endurance against their predecessors. Along with the retractable hooves in the feet, the hands have retractable claws as well.

Cue even more war over technology, followed by even more divine punishment, followed by even more divine corruption.

Finally, the latest iteration of Rythulians, with many traits that are far more adapted to flight than the previous forms. Some of these traits are to bring them closer to other flying light creatures, such as their long, tentacle-esque tails used for steering much like the tails of mantas, and others are simply to make flight easier, suck as their longer membranes that start from the elbow and reach down to the hip, which help with endurance flying. Modern Rythulians have been extant since the first of their kind, the descension of Prince Alef/King Resh, to the present day. This iteration practices complete metamorphosis, with a waxy, almost carapaced "larval" stage (the skykid, or moth), and the softbodied, "feathery" secondary form (secondary instead of adult, since they metamorphosize into the softbodied form well before they are mature, around the age of 10). This species also must sacrifice themselves every "birthday" that individuals may have simply to age properly, whereas such rituals weren't necessary for their predecessors.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully my posting will be a little more regular as I balance school, work, and shitposting on this.... site xd

[scarsmood]

If it's not too nosey a question, what is being yukonkin like?

Waggin’ always wanted to talk about this. So for me it’s definitely identifying as the concept from a very biased perspective and privileged perspective. I bring that up cause I think the one thing that gets me about it is land you live on is typically in someones culture and shapes your worldview. To some degree if not defining it. Geography is destiny as they say.

I’ve never been to the yukon. I plan to but even then i’m not living there and I wasnt born there. Which i think both merit something to the deeper understanding of the land. With that out of the way. I identify with a specific time period roughly the gold rush era. Everything about the time period fascinates me about how people stake claims, sought for gold, competed with the indigenous people of the land. It was one of the hardest lives you could pick yourself out to do.

Death was everywhere around the corner all the time. Jack londons stories cemented this for me as he only lasted 4 months in the yukon before getting sick and having to leave. His stories like white fang, to build a fire, and call of the wild are impressions from those 4 months. It does not suprise me men froze to death trying to walk in 50 degrees of frost or wolves picked off sled dogs at night.

In wilderness its taught pretty universally you respect nature or nature will disrespect you. It’s not a matter of you “pitying” nature you are asking for space and wishing for that to be granted. Nature or the natrual world is full of tricks that have been in developement for millions of years as humans we cut outselves away from these lessons in our own curated space. Its awfully bold of us to come back into nature with not even enough knowledge as a squirrel and claim we know better.

So what does this have to do with concept kin? I identify as the unrelenting force that is natrual pressure. The cold, the starving, the growing and dying of resources, shaping and cutting into nature can either work out great or set up the local village for a mudslide.

The yukon is a great example of these interactions with humans. We survive the wilderness at the price of gold all for a chance to bring back a pretty rock for money and our own monetary survival. This relationship between nature and man is amplified in this situation the humans are desperate and the ecosystem is extreme. It takes animals who have evolved for millions of years great effort to survive there. Good luck to joshua, the guy who just got off a boat from england trying to strike gold hundreds of miles from civilization to find knowledge wiser than a wolf or eagle.

I grew up in central texas near cold springs. I never socialized well with other kids cause I felt like I was the forest. Kids were often afraid of the forest but i could weave under the bushes and thorned vines. I knew which ones were poison ivy and which were fine to be scratched by. I learned which plants were edible by foragers or asking more experienced people as a kid. I knew never to eat anything i didn’t understand fully. My forest is haunted i spent every day alone and in the forest. I saw creatures that lurked in the trees that didn’t exist. Central texas has a rich history of indigenous people that was basically erased. When I comb through the river you find metal door handles hand made rusted for decades and arrow hears and oddly shaped rocks. It is unsettling to be the ancestor of conquistadors who erased a society to then have the audacity to set foot over the same river people lived on for thousands of years and pretend you understand.

I don’t understand and i never will understand the landscape to that deep intrinsic level but i can make sense of my experiences and what the forest teaches me.

My experiences have made me feel the same things I’m sure my ancestors felt when they saw creatures never identified before. The euphoria of finding a berry patch or successfully hunting an animal. Somethings being in the forest that long just ignite parts of your brain I feel most haven’t honed.

The force of nature on the human mind is one that shouldn’t be taken lightly. As I grew up this other’d experience became more streamlined. I hung out in the forest less. I did more human things but I still know when a bad storm is a bad storm when the forest goes silent. I know it’s been a hard year when the leaves aren’t so crisp and fell more like leather. Getting by in a hard summer.

Being conceptkin of the yukon is an extension of these experiences. Watching the human experience play out against nature. While I do identify as a threatening wolf I acknowledge im human bodied and with that my experiences persist far closer to a human than an animal. Because of how I grew up I also don’t think there’s anything wrong with being human. I think the actual issue is how humans forget how to have a relationship with nature. We have to consider when we cut a path through the forest if instead we should just use the deer trail like all the other animals do. We are not special. They also have the most optimized path. This isn’t something typically known or followed though.

When I get a shift It’s a mirage of feelings, the cold breeze on mountian tops, the swirling air, the breathing forest, the burning fires in the valley, the elk herd on the side of the mountian like a body working in tandem. I am a casual observer of these things from my perspective. Watching the interactions of man and nature. Letting a story repeat itself as many times as it wants. Watching as the system of interactions change. The wolves get hungry and pick off a dog or people cut down a section of forest for logging.

It’s very serene. Peaceful and quiet. Turning my brain off to listen to the systems at play. I will never claim I “know” everything about the yukon or nature because i never will. I just experience and know what ive learned from my own experiences.

I hope this makes sense!

[mariacallous]

While Ukraine has successfully reclaimed huge swathes of territory in the country’s east in recent months, U.S. officials expect the onset of winter will slow the pace of fighting as both the Russian and Ukrainian armed forces contend with muddy terrain, lack of ground cover, and a morale-sapping bitter cold. 

The region’s icy winters have played to Moscow’s advantage in the past, helping to arrest advances by Napoleon and Adolf Hitler’s under-prepared forces, earning the nickname “General Frost” or “General Winter.” But in Ukraine, Moscow faces an adversary acclimatized to the winter conditions, while analysts expect the cold will help—and hinder—the two militaries in different ways. 

“I think the main difference is that Ukrainian troops are better equipped to deal with the conditions,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military with the Virginia-based think tank CNA. “But Ukraine is likely to have the more difficult task of pursuing offensive operations, whereas the Russian military seems largely set to defend.”

From the outset of the war, Ukraine has received military and humanitarian aid from a phalanx of Western countries that has left its troops significantly better equipped to weather the chilly months ahead. In October, Canada announced that it was to send nearly half a million items of cold-weather gear, while the latest military aid package from Washington included 200 generators for Ukrainian troops.

The Russian military has been beset by logistics challenges since the beginning of the war. Russian officials have acknowledged that they didn’t have adequate gear to equip the hundreds of thousands of troops called up in a partial mobilization announced in September, which is likely to compound the failing morale of Russian troops as the mercury dips. 

While Ukraine has succeeded in driving the Russian military out of approximately 50 percent of the territory it had occupied since the start of the invasion in February, the winter conditions are likely to make further offensive operations challenging. A lack of leaves on the trees leaves troops and tanks exposed, while water-logged terrain may force them to move by roadways. 

“I think you can expect over the winter months that some of the operations will slow, and there may not be too many dramatic moves by either side,” John Kirby, spokesperson for the U.S. National Security Council, told reporters on Wednesday. “That doesn’t mean that we think everything is just going to come to a halt,” he said. 

But winter in the region is not a uniform state. A deep freeze—which usually sets in around February—can turn the ground rock solid and could pave the way for more ambitious maneuvers early next year. “The advantage, then, is to the force that is able to take advantage of that, and Ukrainians are, in general terms, in a much better position to take advantage of that than the Russians,” said Fred Kagan, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute.

For Ukraine, there is every incentive to try to keep up the momentum and keep Russian forces on the back foot. In November, the Russian military was forced to retreat from the southern city of Kherson as Ukrainian strikes on bridges along the nearby Dnipro River left Moscow’s forces increasingly isolated. In a visit to the newly liberated city, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky vowed to continue until all occupied territories were liberated. 

“The Ukrainian strategy, from my point of view, appears to be to maintain pressure on Russian forces to prevent them from reconstituting their force so that the Russian military is still on the defensive in the spring and that Ukraine retains the initiative,” Kofman said.

Moscow, meanwhile, is showing signs of digging in. Commercial satellite imagery has revealed that Russian forces have been constructing miles of trenches and anti-tank fortifications. “Right now, the Russians are creating defensive lines in southern Kherson. They’re doing it in Zaporizhzhia, and they’re starting to do it a little bit more up in Luhansk and some parts of Donetsk,” said Dara Massicot, a senior policy researcher with the Rand Corporation. 

“They have a smaller front line now, with more people, so they’re able to create a more dense defense line, or several echelons of lines, and that is going to make it difficult over time for Ukrainians to engage them head on,” Massicot said. 

With the Russian armed forces battered and bruised after months of fighting, digging into defensive positions and using the winter to buy time to rebuild their forces would seem like an obvious choice for Moscow. But from day one of the invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s political objectives in the war have been consistently divorced from the realities on the battlefield.

“Putin has ordered his military to do a variety of militarily stupid things over the course of this war,” Kagan said. 

Indeed, Russia hasn’t entirely given up on its efforts to seize more territory in the Donbas, as brutal fighting around the small city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region is ongoing. The ferocity of the fight for Bakhmut, which holds little strategic significance, has baffled observers. “The Russians are leaning into a massive offensive in Donetsk Oblast, and certainly they don’t expect it to end with taking Bakhmut, because Bakhmut isn’t much of a prize,” Kagan said. One possible explanation for the continued fighting in the region, he said, could be to help Putin craft a narrative of success for audiences back in Russia. In the early days of the war, Moscow sought to justify the invasion by falsely claiming a need to liberate the Donetsk and Luhansk regions from Ukrainian oppression. While Russian forces have succeeded in seizing almost all of the Luhansk region, much of Donetsk still remains under Ukrainian control. 

“It looked like Putin decided that he would give up Kherson city and western Kherson province if he could get as close to the rest of Donetsk, and then he could at least say he had accomplished that objective,” said Kagan, who added that there had been no official statements by the Kremlin to confirm that this was the Russian leader’s line of thinking. 

Russia has found other ways to use the winter to its advantage, pounding Ukraine’s energy and heating systems with missile strikes in recent weeks, causing power outages across the country as it seeks to undermine public morale and pile pressure on the Zelensky government. On Tuesday, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg accused Putin of trying to use winter as a “weapon of war” as the alliance’s foreign ministers met in Bucharest and pledged their support to help Ukraine repair its energy grids. This week, the Biden administration also announced an emergency aid package to Ukraine of $53 million to help keep the lights on through the winter. 

Moscow has also sought to leverage the winter to undermine Western support for Kyiv, as governments continue to make the case for continued high levels of military and humanitarian aid to Ukraine while publics contend with energy prices set soaring by Russia’s invasion, a tension that Russia will likely seek to exploit. A recent report by a British think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, notes that Moscow will likely unleash an “information campaign … to try to convince Western publics to spend money at home rather than sending it abroad. … Ukraine and Europe are being targeted via the same pressure points.”

[bumblebeeappletree]

How do trees grow and develop?

Trees have been on planet Earth for approximately 370 million years, and over time they've developed some incredible methods to growing, communicating, and being resilient to nature's challenges. How do trees grow?

It all starts with the seed. Trees have many methods for dispersing seeds, which can range from simply dropping them on the ground, using wind, or even getting a helping hand from animals and insects.

Once settled, tree seeds often have a long period of “dormancy," followed by germination, and ultimately transformed into a young tree with a true stem, wood, bark and leaves.

The leaves of a tree also absorb light through a process called photosynthesis. When conditions become too cold or too dry, growth slows down and the tree sprouts protective waterproof buds around these zones. Finally, when a tree is old enough to release its own seeds, the cycle repeats!

Many tree species can live for hundreds or thousands of years. While they are subject to old age, death usually occurs due to external stressors such as floods, fires, strong winds, poor soil, and human intervention.

This fascinating process is just one of the many reasons why we love trees.

[meghansworks]

The Follydeer

8 September 2023

The first submission for a Quick Write exercise of my senior year's creative writing course. The prompt was to color in a coloring sheet page and make a short story that lead up to that image.

My ticket to a million dollars was trapped under a thick net, at the mercy of the barrel of my old L.C. Smith. Her spindly legs bent in an awkward fashion, trembling against the dewy grass. Her velvety pelt contrasted against the green, and her golden antlers caught the beam of sunlight that leaked in through the trees, reflecting off of its iridescent surface as if touched by midas himself. I would like to think that she and I have a mutual understanding, that her life is a prize that is the cure to the incurable illness of my poverty. Within her beady eyes, glossed over from fear, I can see the faint glow that resides behind her cornea. It is what she is known for. 

My key to a comfortable life resides in those eyes. All I had to do was press down on the trigger, take her back to the shed and pluck those two black orbs out– each of them selling about five-hundred thousand a piece. It is said that once you cut into her eyes, the elixir of life would spill out in an endless stream. Whether this is true or not to me, I will not leave my fortune up to chance. Should that be a mere folly, then I have sucked two poor suckers dry of a million dollars. 

My anticipating finger rests on the trigger, causing it to creak slightly against my grasp. The entire commotion she had made once the net landed atop her frail body caused the birds of the forest to cease their chirping, the small critters to scurry up into their burrows, and the bugs to bury themselves back into the ground. This side of the forest had fallen silent, and the only sounds present were her shallow breaths and my own, controlled puffs. With her in such a position, I will be able to take her out with one bullet. 

Although in a fortunate situation, I find myself frozen in thought. I couldn’t quite place why I hadn’t pulled the trigger and taken what was mine minutes ago, but a heavy weight upon my shoulders simply made the action impossible to carry out. This feeling of agonizing and bothersome guilt was something I had felt twenty years ago, perhaps when I had just turned twelve and daddy took me on my first hunt– using this same L.C. Smith. It was that same November morning that I declared to him that I would bring home the grandest kill, so that he and mamma could buy that cottage up the river they had always wanted. Now here she was, all those years later.  Even if it was too late to bring home the magnum-opus of any professional hunter to my folks, they would at least witness it through the clouds. 

I hadn’t felt this kind of guilt since then. In all her nymph-like beauty, the deer of everyone’s dreams had laid her trembling head down to accept her long-awaited fate. The sight itself was enough to pull at a grown countryman’s heartstrings like a taught banjo. 

Maybe it was the memory of my first hunt, my late folks, or just her sheer beauty that caused me to step back and rip the net off in one grand motion, allowing her to scramble to her spindly legs and bound into the thicket. The last glimpse I caught of her beauty was her velvety flank passing over a bush and leapt into the darkness. They say you only see her once, and that’s it. And if you do, it was a chance given by god.

The means to happiness should never cause you to bend your morals.

[tombeane-blog]

Moon Merde Memorial Instead

January, 2024

The Peregrine One Space Craft was launched January 8.

Phase one of it's mission was to put a lunar lander on the Moon - creating a memorial with the DNA of George Washington and John F. Kennedy, among others.

After, it was to continue traveling forever into the blackness of space carrying DNA from a bunch of famous people along with more DNA stuff from some narcissistic A$%&les with too much money.

Shortly after launch it began to fail.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic decided to dispose of the craft by letting it burn up while re-entering Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the South Pacific Ocean.

They made that decision to keep it from wandering aimlessly through space, posing a collision hazard.

Excuse me! Wandering aimlessly through space posing a collision hazard!. Wasn't that part of the goal of the mission to begin with?

As my grandson would S.M.S me, LL&OLO.(1)

"What's your problem Tom? It seems like the common sense thing to do. Why leave that junk to clog up our galaxy - maybe even spoiling our late night view of the Milky Way from the Kitt Peak Observatory?" "Listen up Vern. It is estimated that there may be as many as 170 million pieces of space junk orbiting the Earth. Of the approximate 55,000 pieces that are large enough to track, the Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network is constantly monitoring about 27,000 of them."

Talk about collision hazards - it's a global cloud of junk.

Let's face it, this whole thing was a secret conspiracy at the highest levels of the government/hollywoke cabal. That craft and it's mission was purposefully sabotaged!!!

"I gotta' stop you right there Tom. Take a breath. Enough with the hypervenistrating. What in the Wide World of Suzie Wong makes you think it was sabotage?" "Wake up Vern. Nobody believes that an object slightly larger than Lizzo wandering through a void slightly smaller than infinity is gonna be a collision hazard."

Nope, it has everything to do with the first part of it's mission - depositing a small hair from George Washington and a few tonenail clippings from John F. Kennedy's left foot smack dab on Moon where everybody can see it."

And here is why:

"Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren issued a statement to express his objection to the NASA planned Jan. 8 launch of the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket to the moon."

"The sacredness of the moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own," Nygren said in a statement. “The placement of human remains on the moon is a profound desecration of this celestial body revered by our people.”

"Vern, do you seriously think our current weakwoke government was gonna stand up to an angry minority?"

Nope. Goodby space craft. Hello indigenous votes.

But as for me. No Mas!

From where the sun now stands, I stand athwart history, yelling stop! Chief Joseph / William F. Buckley.

"Stick with me on this Vern. Climb into the WayBack Machine and set the dial to 300,000 B.C. (which was a sunny day as it happens)."

And what do we see? Mankind originated in Africa, not New Mexico.

And in the before-time, our forefathers migrated north until they found themselves in the Middle East.

Most of them had no desire to get involved in that frigging Middle East mess, so they split up. Half went left and half went right, settling in Europe and Asia.

Long after the before time - due mainly to Climate Change 12.4.1 - the Asia guys stumbled onto a land bridge which allowed them to cross over into North America.

You and I and my dog knows that somewhere in that chain of tree dwellers, snake eaters, hut owners and semi-advanced civilizations a few of those people felt that the big glowing celestial thing in the sky was sacred.

Hundreds of thousands of years before anyone in North America was even around.

So I'm not gonna let these johnny-come-lately Indigenous Moon-Worshipers take ownership of our Moon. It belongs to all of us.

But all that aside, I do agree with Buu Nygren that none of wants to have to stare at toenail clippings every night.

So next time, maybe they should save us all a lot of trouble and figure out a better way. Something that is not a profound desecration of anything.

Here's my plan.

Let's use the DNA of the earliest ancestors of everyone on the planet. We can find this DNA in Cretaceous Crocodile Coprolites.

Place a couple of Sacred Coprolites in an urn and create a Mooner Memorial by crashing it on the Dark Side Of The Moon(2) where no one has to look at it.

All Hail Royal And Ancient Moon Merde!

(1) Laugh Long and Out Loud Obnoxiously (2) Discovered by Pink Floyd in 1973