I like plants, fungus, animals, goth, punk, gay, queer, humor, and fandom stuff. I mostly reblog, though I might make some original posts on growing things, life with tiny demon parrots, etc. if I ever get motivated.
IndexCommBroadcast SignalShip's Log
i think a lot of heated rivalry criticism boils down to the fact that people don’t understand that romance can in fact be a genre on its own with its own conventions rather than a sideplot to a bigger storyline. “heated rivalry had no plot” the romance IS the plot. it is a romance storyline. like this cannot be that difficult to understand. what do you want them to do? go on a mystical quest?
Season 2 and they Knight’s Tale those sexy hockey boys
if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars.
i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants ‘to bring in the bees and butterflies’ and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf
you will not get butterflies if you kill all the things that turn into butterflies! what are you doing!
“A wordy update! News of ICE hitting us with a retaliatory audit went kinda viral and we’ve received a HUGE amount of support. Not only were we extremely busy all weekend, but we also received over $1000 in unsolicited donations.
We’re paying this forward and have made the following donations:
$1000 each to four immgrant rights orgs: The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, MONARCA, COPAL MN, and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee.
And $500 each to two orgs providing mutual aid in MSP: the Flourish Placemaking Collective and the Twin Cities Vegan Chef Collective.
We’re not experienced philanthropists, but this made sense to us. Hopefully, ICE will learn that the more they try to hurt our community, the more we help each other.
Hexachloroethane is the green gas. It is banned by the Geneva Convention as an asphyxiation CNS depressant, but the Trump regime argued that “foreign fake laws” don’t apply to US citizens and approved it for use on civilians in the US.
So get a good gas mask and some trench fighting tools because we’re going back to WWI but this time with drones apparently. It’s going to get worse unless we make it get better. And that’s going to take a lot of work.
Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.
The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;
“Smallpox was.”
For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.
Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.
The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.
The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.
Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.
In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.
If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.
After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.
Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.
We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.
With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;
“Tuberculosis was.”
“Smallpox was.”
Fuck. That hit me hard.
death and the stars
I’m quite fond of the heroes of my field have slain one of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse
Great Curassow (Crax rubra), female, family Cracidae, found in forests in southern Mexico, Central America, and northern South America photograph by @piusnotter
