gay bear
Analysis is thought. Fear of analysis is fear of thinking which is fear of life. To reject analysis is to embrace a sort of opioid sedation that will transition more smoothly into death than actual participation in the waking world
To my fellow white people: this is not about it being an annoying way to "censor" the word and that isn't how it caught on or what it was for. Writing "ahh" instead of "ass" became a meme because it's supposed to sound like a "black guy accent."
me, whispering: portraying nonavian dinosaurs as living/thriving in tropical rainforest environments like those of today is just straight up racism
other people: what
me, still whispering: modern tropical rainforests are one of the most recently evolved ecosystems, only truly appearing in the early Paleogene, after all nonavian dinosaurs went extinct. They did not live in them, and if they were brought back into the modern day, they would not thrive in them. the only reason we associate tropical rainforests with primitiveness is because POC live there, and the associated narratives around jungles and savagery. that's it. that's the whole thing.
Also this makes me wonder if even the association between "tropical" and "rainforest" today might be due to that trope! There are many temperate rainforests (for example in Cascadia), but rainforests are associated with these narratives as a whole and are turned into this stereotype of a tropical primitive land.
Temperate rainforests in Cascadia and the Appalachians, Wikimedia Commons (1 2 3 4)
The plant communities that non-avian dinosaurs inhabited were just. So crazy different than the ones we have now. Like, flowering plants didn't even exist at all at the beginning of "dinosaur times" and even into the cretaceous they were nowhere NEAR as dominant as they were today.
Like, in general a lot of contemporary biomes are really new. Grasslands are extremely new because up until pretty recently geologically speaking, there was no such thing as grass, and it was even more recently that grass-dominated ecosystems became a thing.
posts made by that botanist lady from jurassic park
I'm a nonbinary paleoecologist but I could not be more honored by the comparison
“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett (via peatbogbodyhasmoved)
Googled it and you know what, it is beautiful:
[ID: a photograph of purple asters growing amidst bright yellow goldenrod flowers. End ID]
Some of the 2010s-era Loki stans were annoying but some of them were very justified. They put Tom Hiddleston in handcuffs and a muzzle. Then they put him in chains and a collar. Then they had him look waifishly sad in a prison cell. Then they put him in handcuffs again. Then they chained him up again. Where else were teenage girls going to see that.
slightly worried by how many people seem to have been taking the things they see online at face value before genai was a thing
"it sucks that genAI means i have to verify everything i see online now!" you shoulda been doing that anyway though
remembered im posting this on the infinite chocolate website