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Stop offering me virgin blood. Nobody wants your virgin blood. The ritual explicitly calls for slut cum.

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read that post blacked out and woke up with this on my computer. crazy. stay safe out there everyone

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Just a thought, but I think that something that often gets overlooked in the romance vs friendship/QPR debate is how those things are just as socially constructed as gender, and do not, in fact, fall into a strict binary, or even trinary system. Relationships between people are fluid, negotiated things, and terms like partner, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, friend, etc, mean different things to different people, cultures and eras.

Whether two or more people decide to make their specific type of relationship exclusive, or committed or intimate; whether they’re attracted to each other, or decide to have sex, or live together, or cuddle; whether they do all, or none, or some of those things, they should be allowed to label it how they please. QPR, bromance, FWB, open relationship, polycule, etc. Sure, those terms carry connotations and assumptions, but hailing them as absolutes without any gray areas shows a lack of understanding for human behaviour, and creates unnecessary stigma and difficulties for people who are poly, ace, or aro, as well as anyone whose hierarchy of relationships is just different from the expected norm.

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You see I too often sat in school classes and thought “when am I ever going to need this, I’m never going to be an engineer, I’m never gonna be a scientist, I’m never gonna be a linguist” and then I grew up and it turns out a lot of bigots and cults and scams and grifts hinge their entire business model on you just. Not knowing what a protein is or some shit

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(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts

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Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

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you must solve my riddles three

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Comet passing over village , spaghetti glyph

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This Weekend: Readercon in Burlington MA!

This weekend, starting today and running through the 20th, is Readercon at the Boston Marriott in Burlington, Massachusetts! Duck Prints Press is delighted to be returning to this con for a second year as a vendor in the Bookstore, and I’m also honored to share that I’ve been selected to contribute to programming! I’ll be in five panels (and arriving Friday morning).

I hope to see some of you there! Don’t be a stranger – come say hi!

Bookstore Hours:

Friday, July 18th: 3 p.m. – 7 p.m. Saturday, July 19th: 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. & 2 p.m. – 7 p.m. Sunday, July 20th: 10 a.m. – 12 p.m. & 1 p.m. – 3 p.m.

My Programming Schedule:

(read more)

Friday, July 18th, 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.: Sustaining the Small Press Ecosystem

Panelists: Catherine Lundoff; Claire Houck/Nina Waters (I’m moderator for this one!); Julie C. Day; Leon Perniciaro; Neil Clarke

Description: Small presses are often held up as the life blood of the genre, providing creative outlets for work that isn’t a great fit for the Big Five, space for new voices, a jumping off pad for some careers, a gentler landing for others. And many of these things are true to different extents. But the attrition rate is enormous and the obstacles to success are daunting. So what do small presses bring to the table, what are some of the obstacles that they face, and Is there a way to support a healthier publishing ecosystem in the field?

Saturday, July 19th, 1 p.m. – 2 p.m.: The Author as Public Persona

Panelists: Charlie Jane Anders; Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Lyndsay Ely; Marianna Martin PhD (moderator); Max Gladstone

Description: In a recent Publishing Rodeo episode, the famously anonymous author Chuck Tingle argued that being an author is at least somewhat a public engagement, and that writers should not shirk that duty or shrink from that relationship. How can authors, from frontlisters to backlisters to self-publishers, navigate their careers as public figures? What responsibility do authors have to their audience, their society, and themselves?

Saturday, July 19th, 3 p.m. – 4 p.m.: Neurodivergent Approaches to Story

Panelists: Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Ekaterina Sedia; LJ Cohen (moderator); Sophia Babai

Description: People have a tendency to understand and process our world through story, whether it’s the stories we tell ourselves or how we relate our lives to stories we read and heard as children. People don’t always approach fiction the same way as each other, however, and those of differing neurotypes can have very different approaches to both reading and writing fiction. How do these approaches differ, what common pieces of writing advice are best seen as meant for neurotypical ears only, and what less commonly-discussed methods have worked better for neurodiverse writers?

Saturday, July 19th, 8 p.m. – 9 p.m.: The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction

Panelists: Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Kate Nepveu (moderator); Laura Antoniou; Victoria Janssen

Description: In an article of the same name (https://www.fansplaining.com/articles/endless-appetite-fanfiction), Elizabeth Minkel discussed how “2024 was the year [fanfic] truly broke containment—everyone seemed to want a piece of the fanfiction pie, leaving fic authors themselves besieged on all sides.” Attempts to steal and monetize fanfic proliferated, as did reviews treating living authors as distant and unreachable. What do these trends say about larger changes in attitudes toward stories and creators? How can fans of all kinds nurture supportive connections to authors?

Sunday, July 20th, 12 p.m. – 1 p.m.: Content Warnings: Pros, Cons, and Purposes

Panelists: Claire Houck/Nina Waters; Gillian Daniels (moderator); Melissa Bobe; Romie Stott

Description: Many romance novels have started including content notes or warnings, which advise readers of potentially sensitive plot elements or themes, such as grief, murder, and self-harm. Content notes appear far less frequently in SFF novels, whereas some venues for speculative short fiction have been including them for years. Panelists will share examples of particularly effective—or ineffective—content notes, while surveying the reasons for their rise in romance and the potential applicability of those reasons to long-form speculative fiction.

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Via FB

I’ve posted about a bearded dragon that had to be rescued by fire fighters—here’s one that just fights fires 👍

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hahaha omg y'allllll I'm getting encased in tree sap rn what kinda pose should I fossilize in 🤣

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i’m sorry kink fans but i just can’t see the suffix ‘con’ without thinking it means convention

‘dubcon’ will skrillex be there??

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what i've been up to the past 20 minutes

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Technology transparent PNGs

free 2 use

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It wimdy

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HELP. chat i found another funny sea creature sex image

WHY IS HE WATCHING THEM LIKE THAT !!!!