happybadger [he/him]

Only two Republicans voted against the measure while 142 Democrats crossed the aisle in approving it.

If chess made you smarter, every Paradox grand strategy game player would be a genius. Victoria 3 is much more intricate.

My t-shirt saying “I’m no fucking predator or paedophile” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

Now sue the school out of existence.

Zoe Schlanger - The Light Eaters. Buy this yesterday. It’s so fucking good. All the current science on plant communication and neurology. The Factually podcast did a good interview with the author recently- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBToVPeuHX0

Michael Pollan - The Botany of Desire. Pollan is better known for his How to Change Your Mind book about psychedelics, but this a particularly good book on four materialist histories of plants.

Matt Candeias - In Defense of Plants. It’s kind of like a broader version of The Light Eaters with a focus on plant behaviour.

Richard Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist. This and Biology as Ideology did more for me as a scientific horticulturist than any particular book about plants. To understand a plant, you need to understand the dialectic of organism and environment because a plant is intrinsically tied to one setting it mediates its whole existence around. The biggest thing that will hinder you in plant science is the way it isolates the subject into an object of study, trying to remove as many of the variables as possible. But plants exist as a product of endless variables and The Light Eaters shows that we’ve barely scratched the surface of their world or how it works. The more nuance you can build into how you approach plants- the ecology, the chemistry, the soil-atmospheric interfaces, the ethnobotany and anthropology, the environmentalist theory- the better you’ll understand them. Botany on its own is pretty narrow.

I can only imagine how many useful genes that saves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryukyu_flying_fox

They’re a fruit bat in the Southeast Asian tropics. Absolutely massive bats. You walk under a palm tree and there are a dozen large puppies looking down at you. The fruit farmers of the region are ecocidal toward them, despite deforestation being the reason why they’re congregating in the only reliable food source left. They’re a great generalist pollinator with a similar ecological niche as squirrels, shitting out edible plant seeds over an almost 2km range.

The only difference between the Washington Post and the British tabloids he came from is that the tabloids occasionally have softcore porn. They’re ideologically in the same realm as the Daily Mail.

I can’t imagine something braver than posting this photo. Thank you kind sir. You are truely a scholar and le gentleman.

https://teachmecommunism.podbean.com/

https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/

I really like these two podcasts for breaking down concepts, history, and significant figures. The second one has two spinoffs, Red Menace for individual works of theory and Guerilla History for historical events, which are both also great.

England should be disqualified for filling every waterway with shit. It’s like a performance-enhancing drug if you only have to swim in a little bit of it.

Genocide Joe 2024- “Bring the Boomerang Back”

Student programmers are the only group I’ve seen that seem to consider it useful. It’s useless in plant science without the rigid sourcing that academic/STEM work requires. Everything it says is a surface-level formulaic response which is clearly mixed together from a dozen unreliable blogs/reddit posts/random articles. It’s just having a clueless coworker that googles things for me, but I still have to type in the same prompt I’d google and read an untrustworthy answer of similar length to a good one.

https://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/articles/snowflake-method/

I like the Snowflake Method. You start with the core idea and branch out in a fractal-ish pattern to develop different elements and plot points. Mindmapping software helps keep it organised: https://xmind.app/

My magic rocks do something. Trust me. Crystals and turquoise are for rubes but this magic rock is named after a planetoid so it has special energy. Buy these very expensive magic rocks instead of the cheaper ones at the woo store.

The Magic School Bus was from a time before woke pollution. I fondly remember every episode ending with the class yelling at the Latino student.

Can’t do this anymore. Not since teaching became “woke”.

Fast food has been so ratfucked over the past few years that it wouldn’t be worth it if they hadn’t increased prices by 30%+ to match a sit-down restaurant’s. When you get a fraction of the food and it’s worse, a fast food restaurant adds nothing. Even the convenience is meaningless now that I can order online from most places and it’s ready by the time I get there.

Pretty much. What got me is that he was an aviation officer with a pretty high rank. They have extremely strict entry requirements, regular psychological screenings, constant checks by flight surgeons. He was around 20 years beyond when a lot of psychiatric illnesses start presenting and as far as I know we never established an etiology for it. The only trigger I could ever think of was the needle piercing him but until that moment he showed absolutely no anxiety about the blood draw and I thoroughly explained why we were drawing two separate chest panels over the next few hours. One moment he fully understood what was happening and was discussing it, the next it was chaos. After really fine-tuning my sense of shit about to kick off from that line of work, I had zero indication anything was off about the situation.