So when I was in school, they'd be all 'oh wow if you think this is bad, wait until college/grad school.' But then I got to grad school, and it was honestly less stressful than high school?

I was in class maybe 10-15 hours a week, would study on campus for 1-3+ hours each day before going home, and then studied at home a bit more if I needed it, but I was 1) taking classes I knew would benefit me (and most definitely did), and 2) I'd chosen to be there and was excited for everything going on. It was hard work sure, but with the exception of my Masters project and a few rather gnarly classes, it was mainly just challenging and interesting. And I could bring tasty snacks to class and go on nice walks between classes and study sessions to chill out.

Yes you're expected to hold a job in grad school, and you have life and chores, but the program never made me cry or stress out half as much as my senior year of high school did and that to me speaks volumes.

adults are always talking about how “kids will do anything to get out of school” and okay, first of all that’s not true, but I think we really need to ask why that idea holds so much sway.

children’s brains are hard-wired to take in new information and acquire new skills. consider, for a moment, just how thoroughly our society had to fuck up the concept of education for it to be a normal thing to assume kids are universally desperate to avoid learning.

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

pixel art chocolate delicacies to wish you a happy valentine's

apparently people are now purchasing thick water to make slimes with because of a trend on tiktok

thick water is for disabled people who can’t swallow properly. stores usually have extremely limited supplies of it.

please don’t buy thick water for fun or to make slime with. it’s literally the only way some disabled people can drink anything. It’s not a fucking toy

For Roger!

why yes I AM making boop gifs from screen recording

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

i drew this because i. wanted to, i guess

Golf Courses ARE Being Converted

The Solarpunk "fantasy" that so many of us tout as a dream vision, converting golf courses into ecological wonderlands, is being implemented across the USA according to this NYT article!

The article covers courses in Michigan, Pennsylvania, California, Colorado, and New York that are being bought and turned into habitat and hiking trails.

The article goes more into detail about how sand traps are being turned into sand boxes for kids, endangered local species are being planted, rocks for owl habitat are being installed, and that as these courses become wilder, they are creating more areas for biodiversity to thrive.

Most of the courses in transition are being bought by Local Land Trusts. Apparently the supply of golf courses in the USA is way over the demand, and many have been shut down since the early 2000s. While many are bought up and paved over, land Trusts have been able to buy several and turn them into what the communities want: public areas for people and wildlife. It does make a point to say that not every hold course location lends itself well to habitat for animals (but that doesn't mean it wouldn't make great housing!)

So lets be excited by the fact that people we don't even know about are working on the solutions we love to see! Turning a private space that needs thousands of gallons of water and fertilizer into an ecologically oriented public space is the future I want to see! I can say when I used to work in water conservation, we were getting a lot of clients that were golf courses that were interested in cutting their resource input, and they ended up planting a lot of natives! So even the golf courses that still operate could be making an effort.

So what I'd encourage you to do is see if there's any land or community trusts in your area, and see if you can get involved! Maybe even look into how to start one in your community! Through land trusts it's not always golf course conversions, but community gardens, solar fields, disaster adaptation, or low cost housing! (Here's a link to the first locator I found, but that doesn't mean if something isn't on here it doesn't exist in your area, do some digging!)

The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

Three simple things I want you to do to help improve your community:

Join a union. If you're not sure what union you can join, may I recommend the IWW? If you can't join a union for whatever reason, talk to your friends who can!

Mask up against respiratory infections, including COVID-19, the flu, and other pathogens. Encourage your loved ones to mask up if you're able. We live in a society where our most vulnerable can't access healthcare, and masking up is a way to do your part to help! For more information on actions you can take for public health and safety, check out The People's CDC.

Invest in independent art. Whether that means financially supporting artists or just helping spread the word on social media, indie artists need YOU! If you're tired of corporate tomfoolery erasing the hard work of artists everywhere, help support the artists trying to make it outside the mainstream. Censorship and capitalism are hitting artists hard, and we need support wherever we can get it!

in 1978, sanrio made a crocodile called big challenges. he was never used for anything. 

he believes that you can overcome your own big challenges !

So if you watch chocolate news at all the last bit, you'll know that recently the cocoa commodities prices skyrocketed. This is from a huge pile of reasons, from the fact that the vast majority of cacao grown for chocolate comes from only two countries, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana, who are being hit hard by drought and the impacts of climate change, but also by the fact that mainstream chocolate has always been subsidized by paying cacao farmers far, far less than they should be, pushing folks into extreme poverty and child and forced labor.

Let me say that again: chocolate has always been subsidized by underpaying cacao farmers.

And if you're not sure how bad this really is, I always point to this chart from Uncommon Cacao's 2022 transparency report, which has the weighted average they paid per kilo of cacao to the farmer at $2.51/kilo, while the total price per kilo at farmgate, or commercial standard pricing, that year was $1.32. Imagine how little went to the farmers who were paid farmgate. (And yes Fair Trade is better, but the total Fair Trade price is still less than the amount Uncommon paid directly to farmers.)

This has been going on for years, decades, centuries. And while the Harkin-Engel protocol has pushed some action, and the bean to bar chocolate movement has been getting more pay to farmers, that's only a small slice of the cacao situation, and only for the last 20-ish years. (And also the Harkin-Engel Protocol's goal deadlines have been pushed out so many times that it's the majority of the wiki page's content. Oof.)

Okay, so what do we even do here? The easy answer would be 'support your local bean to bar chocolate maker,' but that's not truly easy when $10 for a bar of chocolate is no joke when you're making minimum wage.

So here are the steps I recommend:

Learn about the state of cacao and how chocolate is made. Learn about child labor in cacao and why it's happening, and how cacao is a native plant to Central and South America, not Africa, and how that impacts cacao harvests.

Look up bean to bar chocolate makers, also known as craft chocolate makers, and see if there's one in your area. (There likely is!) Bean to bar makers buy cacao either from groups like Uncommon and Meridian Cacao or direct from farmers/cooperatives, and it's the best option we have right now for supporting ethical chocolate. The big source to try a bunch of makers at once in the US is Bar & Cocoa, but there are smaller shops like The Meadow and Yahara Chocolate, and other shops around the world like Cocoa Runners. If you can go local, they'll likely have samples, so you can try things and see what you think. (Also get on their mailing lists for sales.)

If you want to continue to buy Hershey or Nestle bars, be on those brands' cases. They only act when they get enough pushback from consumers, and they definitely won't act whenever they can get away with it. So keep telling them, publicly, to post transparency reports, to post updates.

There's no one right answer here, but being silent is definitely not the answer. And we need to discuss the fact that folks shouldn't go into poverty so that we can have cheap chocolate.

if you dont want print media to die, buy physical copies of things. if you don’t want independent journalism to die, subscribe to a local newspaper. if you want more libraries and skate-parks and arcades, get a bunch of friends and call in the individual charge of your village or town or whatever and ask for one to be built and use the existing ones. if you want more native flora and fauna, start looking at the ones that already exist and how to preserve them. this is your world too. fight for it. get rid of the rot of passivity.