Utah transportation: “ Good news we could all use: the Parley's Wildlife Overpass is working.”

Thanks Blake Ledbetter (@blakethy) and @usuaggielife for leading the study.

Father Moose - Let's cross the highway here. There's no cars in sight and we'll save 10 minutes getting to your Mother's home. Mother Moose - Don't you dare! We're going to that new overpass and I don[t want to hear any more about it!

Geothermal magic in the heart of New Zealand - Author: LyraHorizon

Uniforms of Garibaldi's Red Shirts during the War of Italian Unification.

Þrouʒ muċ trial ⁊ heartache, I have finally also figured out how to type like þis on my LAPTOP.

I can finally do ƿ and ġ and ȝ and ᵹ and ę and æ and œ and things like ī and ā wiþout having to copy ⁊ paste þem or do Alt codes.

Richard Anuszkiewicz Iridescence 1965

apple spider vinegar

æppel wiht æced

joke explanation:

the word cider is from french, the original pun doesnt work in old english. the oe word is æppelwin, literally apple wine. there isn’t a word for spider that rhymes with win, so i had to look around for some other options.

oe authors tend to be much more concerned with the alliteration of words rather than rhyming. poetry will sometimes rhyme a bit, but verse structure is much more focused on what alliterates. so, instead of finding a word to rhyme with win, i wanted a word that started with the same sounds and i settled on wiht

wiht means a thing or a creature. it often means stuff in general, but it also has a sense of animals and monsters specifically, which is the meaning i was thinking of here. so this means apple creature vinegar

rejected options:

wine, which means friend. sounds super close to win, but i decided the tone was too different from the original

wyrm, which means worm or bug in general. closest semantically to the original post, but doesn’t match with win quite as well

the thing that's been rotating in my head like a horrible little rotisserie thorn is that yuna says: i think we thought maybe you were gay.

we thought maybe you were gay.

we thought maybe you were gay as you grew up and became a professional athlete. rookie of the year. as you navigated this famously homophobic career path. as you tried to put together a public persona, as we guided you through sponsorships and brand deals. we thought maybe you were gay as we watched you, our shy and anxious and awkward son, as you grew into an isolated adult. few friends, no real romances. your mom still buys your shirts. you have always lived alone.

we thought maybe you were gay, but we didn't say anything.

i think - your mother, i - for a while now, we've thought maybe for a while now - we thought - we thought it, we didn't say it, never out loud - because that would mean we had to address it and that would mean we might be right. we kept our eyes down and our mouths shut and we know you so, so well, but we didn't ask and we didn't say anything, not even when scott hunter did all that right out there in front of god and the cup and everyone, and we let it slide off us and into history, past tense, and didn't look too closely at your reaction because we thought maybe you --

i'm sorry that i made you feel like you couldn't tell me.

because i did that. and i knew i was doing it while i was doing it. and i know that you know, now, that i knew i was doing that. i looked away so things could be easier for you because it's there's nothing to tell there's no need for a statement. no need for a plan.

and all this time, all your adult life, since your rookie season, the summer before, you've been in love - lovers - no, look at the way you look at him, you've been in love - and you've kept it secret while we made him your rival. pitted you against him. played up conflict and animosity against him. we sat together at tables with an empty chair where he should have been, where he is now, and hated him if we thought of him at all, and now you sit here and tell us you want to keep that secret another ten years, another fifteen because we made you think that this - this weight, this pressure, this fear we can see in the line of your shoulders and the way you breathe - that this is somehow easier.

you would have kept that secret another ten years, another fifteen. you aren't telling us now because you're ready, or because you want to. you're telling us because you were caught.

found out what, exactly? as if maybe your father was still going to keep that secret for you. as if he didn't tell me, not the whole of it. not everything he saw. as if you could have pretended you hadn't seen him, and he would have pretended he hadn't seen you. another ten years. another fifteen.

we thought maybe you were gay.

but we hung onto: maybe not.

you can click keep reading but I didn't put anything down there!!!!!

As bigoted media and government reports of the murder of Renee Good emphasize that the ICE officer who shot her was a "committed, conservative Christian," I want to emphasize that Renee Good was also a Christian, whose faith and values informed her actions.

Like many queer Christians, Renee grappled with her faith in the past, even winning a poetry award in 2020 for a poem exploring issues of faith and science. She'd discarded the bad (the poem mentions getting rid of "the parasitic kind" of bibles) while holding onto her faith's foundation of kindness, community, and love.

Her wife Rebecca Good remembers her thus:

Like many queer folk in this day and age (and like so many immigrants), Renee Good, her wife, and their son had migrated for "the chance to make a better life" just last year, when they'd moved from a more conservative place (Kansas City, Missouri) to a more progressive one (Minneapolis). But no place is devoid of bigoted violence; it just takes different forms.

Good was murdered within 1 mile of where George Floyd, also a Christian devoted to helping his neighbors break out of cycles of violence, was murdered six years prior.

She is also only one of countless people, largely im/migrants & BIPOC, of many faiths and values who have died at ICE's hands — including Black US citizen Keith Porter, at least 30 detainees in 2025, and at least 4 detainees in these first few weeks of 2026 already.

Every single life is of infinite worth, and violence against im/migrants is just as heinous and needs to be decried just as loudly as violence against citizens. I focus on Good here because this post's purpose is to refuse to allow conservative Christians to control the narrative of what it means to follow Jesus.

My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), claims Good as one of our own:

In the PC(USA)'s official statement, which opens by connecting Good's death to Jesus's declaration that "No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends" (John 15:13), Renee Good is placed among "a sacred lineage of faithful witnesses who have risked and lost their lives in defense of human dignity." Among these martyrs are the Rev. Elijah Lovejoy, who was murdered for his opposition to slavery, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

As the Rev. David Black, a PC(USA) pastor in Chicago, put it,

This "sacred lineage" challenges us to continue the the fight for liberation that they died for. For Renee in particular, her wife Becca tells us that

Black has experienced ICE's violence firsthand himself:

While protesting at an ICE detention center on September 19, he was shot with pepper balls after quoting Jesus's words to several officers: "Repent and believe the good news, that the Kingdom of God has come near" (Mark 1:15).

Black believes this incident went viral because “people recognize this is actually the consequence of Christian witness in the middle of an empire that calls itself Christian, and yet violently persecutes people who engage in real Bible-based, Jesus-centered Christian witness.”

Rev. Black emphasized that persons of various faiths and no faith have all banded together against ICE in the name of what is right and good. To him, action is more important than creed:

“Jesus never said you all have to be Christians and go to church... He said to do this work in my name, and people are doing that work in real time."

Nor does Jesus tell us we have to have everything figured out, only to show up:

The queer advocacy organization I'm part of, More Light Presbyterians, describes the universal call to show up for im/migrant rights thus:

Together, let us seek to follow the God of the stranger — the God of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, of Ruth and Naomi, of Mary, Joseph, and countless other biblical immigrants and refugees.

Let us seek to follow God the stranger, the One who migrated from the heavens to earth, from Bethlehem to Egypt and Nazareth, the immigrant and refugee who was persecuted by local authorities and found a home in a foreign land.

We each have a part to play in ushering in God’s Kin-dom, which has no walls, no borders, no prisons.

Read our full statement here, which ends with a list of many different ways to show up in this struggle.

Detail from "José y María" by Everett Patterson.

So let us pray, in order to prepare ourselves to act:

Justice-bringer, border-shaker, God of the oppressed in every time and place,

With the prophets we cry out, HOW LONG, o God? HOW LONG will wave after wave of evil consume your people, as hateful people claim to act in Your name?

No words can do our grief and our rage justice. So we release our lamentations to Your own Spirit's wordless, ceaseless groaning. We center ourselves not in speech, but in these inspirited bodies You fashioned in Your image. We connect our bodies to Yours, which shouldered Empire's cross.

As Your body, we will rise. As Your body, we will hold fast. As Your body, we will place our bodies in front of those more vulnerable.

Subversive Spirit of the Living God, be our rage, our will, our voice, the ties that bind us together. Enfold us and embolden us for this holiest work of solidarity that risks all things in the name of love.

Amen.

add yours!

Red Sun  -  Arthur G. Dove. 1935 :: American 1880-1946

* * * * *

“… We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see Ahead, but looking back the very light That blinded us shows us the way we came, Along which blessings now appear, risen As if from sightlessness to sight, and we, By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward That blessed light that yet to us is dark. …”

Wendell Berry

[alive on all channels]

* His mother is a physics teacher, he says to his mother: without touching the ball, throw it in another cup and get 50 dollars, look what his mother does! 😳😂*

SAME

I think this is funny but I also think it's worth asking ourselves the same question about our world because we could say the same, couldn't we? Why should we care so much?

We live in a solar system that most certainly is just one among 400 billion in our galaxy. One galaxy, out of 200 billion or up to a trillion whirlpools of stars scattered as dots across the universe. We live in a vast, still mostly unknown cosmos. And one could also ask about this incredible fact "what now"

Well I don't know, you tell me! You should know about the shape of our planet, our place in the universe, how our world works. The flat earthers delight in having The Truth that nobody else has, this is why such nonsense is appealing, they want to know a hidden truth so they can feel power over a world that is complicated and constantly changing. But you also can open up Wikipedia or watch a documentary and learn the real, ever-evolving scientific understanding of our own universe right now. You can do it right now.

And what are you gonna do about it? Are you also not gonna care, are you gonna ask "what now"? I don't know, you tell me.

I think that of all things you could attack flat earthers for (and honestly, why bother, they're the easiest of easy targets), curiosity is not it.

"oooohhhh they care so much about the shape of the planet" do you though? Do you know how seasons work, do you know how our solar system works, do you know how our universe works? "why should I care about if the earth is flat if i have to pay taxes lmao" I also have to work and pay taxes, but I take my time to learn about the world around me. Ever gone to the planetarium? Ever just picked up a documentary? We live in a time where scientific knowledge is more easy to access than any other age of human history. What are you doing with that?

If you're not curious about the world, you're halfway to being a flat earther, if it's not that, some other nonsense will get you.

one of the things we've gotta start talking about when we talk about the death of media literacy is the concept of the artistic process and how so many people do not understand that a work can be deeply personal to the person writing it without being a diaristic, 1:1 representation of something they have personally gone through; that part of the artistic process involves transmuting some of your emotional experiences into a different setting or narrative, and that "writing what you know" is about emotions, not literal things that happened to you three days ago. sometimes it means combining multiple experiences or people into one, or putting those parts of your life and emotions into a character who doesn't look anything like you or share your identity. sometimes it means those parts of yourself will show up in the villain (on purpose) or the things you've thought and believed will be borne out by the narrative to not be correct. sometimes it means creating situations you've never personally experienced as a means of digesting emotions that you have. sometimes you won't even realize what you're digesting and working through until it comes out on the page and you look at it with the privilege of distance. none of this makes an artist "a liar," none of it means those themes and emotional truths aren't still extremely personal to them, and none of it means that they're inhabiting a role or a voice they're not qualified to write from just because it's not 100% autofiction being presented as such. as a writer myself, i feel like none of this should need to be spelled out, but in just the past couple days i have seen this fundamental misunderstanding of the artistic process applied to artists as diverse as paul thomas anderson, william shakespeare, and taylor swift, and i just want to say: you guys are not as smart as you think you are, and "this can't be about that because THAT never happened to THEM" is not the checkmate you think it is. someday i will find the person who made that "the curtains are blue" comic and they will die a bloody death by my hands.

i also think the fandomification of book publishing over the past decades and the bad faith co-opting of "own voices," which was a concept that originally had good intentions but which quickly turned into "no one is allowed to write from an identity perspective other than their own or about an experience that has not personally happened to them or else they will be canceled on YA twitter for being hitler goebbels mcriefenstahl by other bitter YA writers who don't even really believe this about them, but who are mad that they haven't gotten a book deal yet," has a big part to play in this phenomenon. people by and large don't read anymore, and when they do read, it's first-person narratives from the POV of characters who look, think, and sound exactly like the author, who are relating experiences that the author has to be able to prove they have personally gone through (or have POTENTIAL to go through), lest they have their reputations permanently smeared and ruined for the crime of literally just writing fiction... or else they're reading first-person narratives that are just sexual fantasies projected onto a blank-slate main character. the concept that a work can be personal without being representational is kicking a lot of people's asses because the state of publishing over the last decade has basically done away with books that aren't just the author's personal trauma repackaged, because that's what sells these days. and it fucking sucks. it fucking sucks so bad. it's horrible for the concept of free expression, it's horrible for talented young artists and writers who want the freedom to explore stories and themes that aren't intrinsic to their own personal life circumstances, it's horrible for readers' brains and imaginations and sows a real environment of disrespect for the concept of WRITING. FICTION. it's just miserable altogether. anyway yes this was all brought on by seeing someone on threads smugly assert that hamlet couldn't possibly have had anything to do with shakespeare processing the death of his son because it was written a few years later and besides, it's about the death of a FATHER, not a SON, so CHECKMATE. to which i can only say, quoth remy ma: are you dumb????

From the article:

This massive meta analysis (for those not familiar, a study analyzing the results of many studies on similar topics) found that the vast majority of conservation efforts show much much better results than doing nothing. In many cases, biodiversity loss was not only stopped but reversed.

This shows that conservation efforts really work and money invested is put to very good use. Legally protecting endangered species really works, restoring habitat really works, removing invasive species really works, returning land to Indigenous communities works. All of the blood, sweat, and tears being poured into protecting the natural world has been making a real, big, tangible, difference on a global scale.