spider pronouns it/ze/bit/xe

Bad Buddy (8/??) + Tumblr Text Posts

Bonus:

has anyone done this yet <\3 (I feel like the answer is yes…)

Black Palm Cockatoo chick at San Diego Zoo (sound warning: hungry baby)

i have never related so much to a tiktok

Hey here is your friendly reminder to not tell your nice boss stuff.

I’m at the executive management level for my very small company and I have 4 people who report directly to me. I am a nice boss. I’m friendly with my employees, I treat them like professional adults, I actively try to create a positive work environment, and I mentor them and make sure they’re advancing in their careers. I do my best to shield them from the rest of management doing stupid shit. My employees like working for me.

The other day one of my employees came to ask if she could change her hours on Mondays. I said yes immediately because it’s helpful for me to know when she’s here and when she’s not, but as long as she gets her work done I don’t care when and where she does it. She then proceeded to tell me that it was so she could attend therapy and like … I will never use this information but … as a general rule don’t fucking do that.

Do not tell your employer shit about your mental or physical health except for the bare minimum needed to request a reasonable accommodation. Even your nice boss can fire you, even your nice boss can unfairly change your working conditions, and even your nice boss at some point is probably going to face pressure from their superiors.

I’m not saying don’t trust your boss with anything ever. I’m just saying that anytime you are in the workplace you need to keep your private information private. You can still have a good relationship with your boss. Your workplace can still be pleasant. But if it ever feels like disclosing private information is required in order to have a good relationship with your boss, please see that as a red flag.

This post got a like out of nowhere and I only vaguely remember writing it and I’m not entirely sure which of my employees inspired it, but it still holds.

It was gut-wrenching when I realized that many people alive today have never seen a truly mature tree up close.

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

Preserve the old growth forests of the present, yes, but it is even more vital to protect the old growth forests of the future.

I live right next to a state park that has some of the oldest forest stands in the Eastern part of the country, with the tallest trees in the state. I grew up with stuff like this basically in my backyard:

It was shocking to me to grow up and realize how few old-growth forests are left. It was very easy for me to feel like there are no truly natural places anymore outside these few protected parks, and that was depressing to my forest-loving self.

But like the previous person said, we can have this again! In a couple hundred years, all the forests that were clear-cut 200 years ago will be mature as long as we protect them. People in the future will get to experience huge trees and spongy fertile soil and carpets of moss softer than blankets, because nature will always regenerate. The world is not a desolate echo of what once was. The world is still full of beauty and magic and it will continue to be in the future.

OK, I've seen this post like a dozen times this week and feel the need to add something. I absolutely agree, conservation is a huge issue and we need to stop destroying ecosystems, but. BUT. This isn't what the issue with repairing Notre Dame is. (And also, screenshots aren't sources and neither are twitter rants, which I'll get to in a sec.)

The main issue with the wood for rebuilding Notre Dame is that it needs to be green oak and the beams need to grow straight. This significantly narrows down the choice of trees that can be cut. When the cathedral was first built, it took a whole century (97 years, from 1163-1260). Building methods were much slower than today, so the current reconstructors are processing wood for it much faster than when it was originally built, which means less time for other trees to grow in their place and a more significant impact on the environment.

The carpenters helping with this process have been participating in the experimental archaeology project of Gueleon Castle, and are approaching Notre Dame repairs the same way as the original builders, with 13th century techniques. Why is this significant? Here, from the article linked:

The issue with Notre Dame was not that there was no wood, but that there was no wood in France that met modern repair designs. The original builders used wood that was locally available, which there is still plenty of. So this isn't necessarily a conservation issue, but an issue of modern architects not considering how to use what's local and sustainable instead of demanding that nature provide for their invented needs.

This doesn't mean that there is no environmental issue, because like I said, the current reconstruction is going through trees at a faster rate than the original due to the speed of their work. But they're using the same kinds of trees as they did in the 12th and 13th centuries.

This means it's more likely that the main problem at the root of the tweet in OP's post is that what they learned in archaeology class seems to be outdated and from before the experts at Guedelon got involved in the process. It's unclear if "Trey the Explainer" is a current archaeology student or if they're referring to something they learned several years ago that is no longer accurate or fully informed. Their bio states they're "A W-Grade Internet Celebrity whose main goal is sharing information about paleontology, biology, anthropology, history, and science. I make Youtube videos" which, frankly, doesn't mean any of their posts researched or verified. I'm also enthusiastic about history and post about it online sometimes, but as you can see I link articles and references because 1. I'm not an expert 2. if I was, then I'd be linking even more sources.

The photo that the tweet was retweeting, meanwhile, is of a felled giant Sequoia tree from c. 1910 cited as being in the collection of the Library of Congress on Wikimedia Commons. Sequoias grow in California, which is where that photo was taken. This image has nothing to do with the trees originally used to build the Notre Dame cathedral in France in the 12th and 13th centuries, it's just meant to illustrate the OP tweet's point (inaccurately) and evoke a reaction.

(Also anyone who knows about wood knows that the screenshot of the tweet from Ains Proclaims above that claims to show wood from 1918 and wood from 2018 is absolute bullshit, those are two beams from literally different trees and if you thought about it for even just a few seconds you would realize that both are brand new cuts of wood and it makes no sense that one of them would be from 1918 yet look so freshly cut. Different woods have different grain densities. It's honestly unclear if the photo is implying that this is what wood cut in these years looked like or this is what wood from trees planted in these years looks like and doesn't say what year the cuts were taken.)

Me & the other drivers were really impressed when you swerved around all of us at high speeds & got to the red light before anyone else

In a monumental discovery for paleontology and the first of its kind "Mummy of a juvenile sabre-toothed cat Homotherium latidens from the Upper Pleistocene of Siberia"

Abstract The frozen mummy of the large felid cub was found in the Upper Pleistocene permafrost on the Badyarikha River (Indigirka River basin) in the northeast of Yakutia, Russia. The study of the specimen appearance showed its significant differences from a modern lion cub of similar age (three weeks) in the unusual shape of the muzzle with a large mouth opening and small ears, the very massive neck region, the elongated forelimbs, and the dark coat color. Tomographic analysis of the mummy skull revealed the features characteristic of Machairodontinae and of the genus Homotherium. For the first time in the history of paleontology, the appearance of an extinct mammal that has no analogues in the modern fauna has been studied. For more read here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-79546-1

I always knew it was possible, but I never dared to hope.

She got so mad she wrote song lyrics and edited a video and everything omg

Living.

WHAT IS THIS AND WHY DO I LOVE IT SO MUCH

this is the video description on youtube: “ I’ve been a server for 5 years. I made a song about the way white girls ask me for boxes. “

CAN I GET A BOX?

Always reblog Can I Get A Box

Finally a fucking good post

God a classic

Tectonic plates shifted buildings collapsed meteors struck the earth. People died.

First Teaser for Percy Jackson and the Olympians Season 2

2010. A Japanese woman sits down to take photos of her shiba inu dog for her blog. Suddenly, a man leaps out of a time portal. "Sorry, I can't let you do this. I cannot tell you why." She asks: "Is it forbidden knowledge from the future?" He sighs: "No, it's just too fucking stupid to explain."

they sacked my fucking fiefdom. it's so over. i'll never be able to afford the king's taxes. i don't have a single fucking asset to my name except *winks shyly* my special sex ability🫣

unlock powerful new heroes to ATTACK my pussy!!!