rip mythbusters you would've loved destroying cybertrucks

Women want one thing and it's quite obvious, A large affordable interconnected North American Rail Network

"Peekaboo" painted by me in Procreate!

Number 5 in the Close Encounters Collection!

THE WAY SHE POSED AFTERWARDS HFKFBDK

My artistic rendition:

you know it’s the real deal when you have to call up your friends, romans, AND countrymen

AND you need to borrow their ears

If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...

Start helping with citizen science projects

What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!

You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases

Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.

Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.

Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.

Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.

Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.

Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.

--

I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.

Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help

Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.

Yup, these are actually *really* important. And a small bit of work helps, so it’s doable even if you’re snowed under with survival work or in too much pain to concentrate for longer periods.

It’s multiply-checked by more than one person, so don’t worry about fucking it up because your concentration is fucked. Your input is valuable but not the only input.

I find Zooniverse very good, and it does Citizen Historian work too - I spent time digitising concentration camp records because a) families still don’t know what happened to some of their loved ones b) this makes the records available for historians without travelling to archives in person, which I can testify is *invaluable* for disabled historians and helps cut the need for overseas travel to do vital historical work.

It unexpectedly helped me with learning how to decipher premodern handwriting too, which proved really useful in my academic stuff. You *will* pick up valuable skills doing this. Put it on your CV.

Other places you can go to do citizen science, from the notes

(Thanks to everyone who left these in the notes! If you know more, put them in the notes, and I might add them! And ty @enbycrip for the fantastic addition that covered a bunch of details I didn't get to)

Apps/Websites

In person

Also:

Even if you don't have time to spend, but do have some processor cycles to spare, check out the projects available at BOINC's Compute for Science: https://boinc.berkeley.edu/

Hey guys, these projects make a HUGE difference for science. For example, I run bplant.org and iNaturalist is the #1 source of images in ID guides and articles and other educational materials I develop. The plant observations are also helpful for assessing plant ranges and how these ranges are changing with climate change. And it also helps me identify local seed sources for use in restoration plantings. Use of iNaturalist, even casual use like a random person uploading pics of plants they see growing in their yard, or a random parking lot they were in, or a random vacant lot, those observations are MAJORLY helping in (1) education (2) science (3) conservation.

This stuff makes a huge difference.

Also, if you want to make the biggest impact on these sites, release any material with the more permissive licenses, like CC-BY. If you add a NC or ND clause, for instance, your photos cannot be included on Wikipedia or bplant or a number of other educational sites, because those license restrictions are incompatible with combining with copyleft material.

But yeah, go do citizen science, please!!!

I thought I'd go back and repost this because there are probably a lot of people out there who, like me, reallllyyyyyy need something to distract them right now

So, hey. You. Stop doomscrolling. Take a deep breathe. And if you want, try doing some citizen science or citizen history instead

I'm also going to especially promote MapSwipe, for those who want to do something tangible to help people now.

From their website:

Data Everywhere

Hey also wanna add, I LOVE iNaturalist as a science illustrator. Google images can't be trusted, but iNaturalist can! I used it heaps for my upcoming book project to make sure I was putting the right animals in the right places and they were the right size and right colour and not an ai fever dream disaster. What colour is a certain species of sea star? iNaturalist knows! What's the difference between the sea snails that live on the east and west coast of the US? iNaturalist knows! It is genuinely so useful and I appreciate every person who contributes.

May I offer you some Esseks in these trying times

official fish post

forest vibes 🍂

imagine being a totally random dude and all you want to do is catch some fish and then you get stranded in this weird, gigantic foreign kingdom and they make you the utmost authority on your language and literally all you wanted was to catch fish

it used to be so easy to find a job

Gorgeous hardware

Petition to bring back the boop function next year for the ides of March where instead of a paw on the screen it’s a little knife that Caesar gets stabbed with

SIGNED

I’m bixby :)

cookie? 🍪

late fall evenings in Seattle.

I feel like one of the clearest indicators that capitalism doesn’t fucking serve people is LED headlights. Because LED headlights endanger millions of lives every single night, I have never met a single person who doesn’t HATE them and take any opportunity to complain about them, and yet we have made zero progress in banning them in 20 years (literally it’s been 20 years this year) because they’re cheaper for car manufacturers