May I present the best apple:

Chenango Strawberry, Ginger Gold, Viking, Wolf River... Gosh, I miss the apples in the Midwest. The varieties out here - even in the foothills - are sharply limited by the lack of cooling hours.

Anyway for OP, the answer is at least partially - apples and pears are the only fruit trees you can really grow in most of the US. Pomegranates, figs, citrus, olives, peaches - all of those are right out. It gets too cold in most of the US.

Nut trees are also pretty limited - walnuts will grow lots of places, but they poison the ground under them. Pecans, pistachios, almonds - nope.

So if you're a farmer who wants a nice shade tree that also provides food, you're probably going to grow an apple or pear tree. And when half the little farms have at least one apple tree, you end up with a lot of varieties.

We're here, we're queer, we're really fucking tired so we're just gonna go straight to biting instead of feigning polite confusion if you're gonna be a bigot this time, just so you know.

Happy Pride!

Opalized crab claw fossil, a rare geological occurrence where organic material is replaced by precious opal.

The fossil dates back to the Cretaceous period, roughly 66 million years ago, when the area was covered by an inland sea.

It was found in Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, Australia, a region known for ideal conditions where silica-rich groundwater replaced the original exoskeleton.

Here's a paper about opalization in New South Wales, Australia, which includes lots of cool pictures.

϶—T÷h÷a÷t÷s÷A÷G÷o÷o—d—P o

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀i n

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀t

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀S

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀I⠀⠀⠀⠀H

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀T

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀F

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀U

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀C

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀K

⠀⠀⠀⠀M⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀Y

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀B⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀EA

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀D

⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀S

If you wait until your AC goes out to make sure you have enough fans, there will not be fans available for you to buy. If you wait for a wildfire, no one will have KN-95s for you to buy. They will all be sold out, especially as climate change makes summers more and more severe, and fire season longer and longer.

Other tips for keeping cool in extreme heat:

Do not ever leave a child or a pet in the car while it is off. Ever. Not "just for a few minutes," nothing. Kids have died from being trapped in hot cars in temperatures as low as 70 degrees F (21 C)

Especially if you live somewhere that doesn't typically get hot, make sure you own at least 2 tank tops and 2 pairs of shorts if at all possible. Thrift them or search them on Buy Nothing/something similar if you don't have them already. You will want the option

Cotton fabric evaporates moisture quickly and sheds heat fast. Cotton clothes are great for the heat for that reason, and if you're really desperate for relief, get cotton shirts/towels/cloths wet and either wear them or hang them up in front of a fan. The fan will blow the cooler, moist air throughout the room, cooling things down

Open windows and doors on opposite sides of rooms to create airflow

Hydration tablets and electrolyte drinks are magic for dehydration. You need to replace the salts you're sweating out. Salty trail mix is also great for this (you eat it on hiking trails for a reason)

Make sure your pets stay cool! Cold packs inside fabric can be really good for this (and for you!)

Most efficient place for a cold, wet towel to cool you down is the sides of your neck, your hands, and the soles of your feet (but NEVER put ice against your bare skin!)

Don't really expect anything of yourself between 1pm and 4pm - that is the hottest part of the day, and so it's the time you need to be the most chill (ba-dum tss). Movement creates heat (hence why you shiver, hence why exercising warms you up), so try to do as little as possible, and especially try to save errands and exercise until dusk

Many places now have heat shelters. Look them up in your area. The public library is often a spot for these, and if not, still a really good and FREE place to stay all day with AC

Plants cool things down. Standing on the grass will leave you measurably cooler than standing on the asphalt two feet away. Stay on plants, stay in the shade, and do what you can to add plants and green spaces to your area, to help keep it cool

If you live in a wildfire hotspot, try your best to get an air filter or air purifier now, because there will be none left by the time you need one

If you do end up near a wildfire zone: any smoke you can smell is smoke that can affect your lungs. Leave the house as little as possible. Duct tape the seams around windows and exterior doors to help keep out the smoke. And pack a go bag (change of clothes, toiletries, important documents, medications, spare food and water, essentials for pets or kids)

Know what heat exhaustion and heatstroke look like, and how quickly you are at risk. Particularly if you are chronically ill, have/had long covid, or are taking certain medications, you may get heat exhaustion really fast. (I've gotten it in literally 15 minutes flat. It does not need to take very long - if you're beet red and have a pounding headache, that may be heatstroke, take it fucking seriously.)

If you do have known issues with heat tolerance, consider carrying around a thermometer on hot days. Check your temperature if you start feeling "off", or routinely while in the heat. If you're running a fever, you're either sick or have heat illness, get the fuck out of the heat. (Be aware that for oral temperature, you need to have not eaten/drank anything in the last 15 minutes. Armpit will do in a pinch. I am not sure how well infrared works if you're in the "clammy" stage of heat exhaustion.)

If you already have heat exhaustion or heatstroke, fans and wet towels may not cool you down sufficiently. Cold drinks, icepacks, or a cold shower/bath are faster in an emergency - they cool you directly, rather than using sweat/evaporation to cool your skin. If you have limited resources to cool yourself, focusing on pulse points/big veins can help, like putting an ice pack on your neck or the inside of your wrist. Think like a vampire.

Cotton can be ok, but linen is better if you can get it. Polyester and other synthetics are typically fucking hot, avoid, avoid. Check your clothing labels - even "obviously" cotton things like t-shirts may actually be 50%+ polyester.

An adult human can only absorb about 1L of liquid per hour. Staying hydrated in extreme heat can be very difficult, because you may be losing more than 1L per hour. Using a timer to make sure you remember to drink can help.

If water suddenly tastes disgusting, check your electrolytes. Having emergency Gatorade (or similar) on hand can be helpful, because not only does it have electrolytes, but it tastes gross and sweet and chemical to most people who aren't low on electrolytes. No shade toward people who inexplicably like Gatorade on its own merits - but if it suddenly starts tasting way better than usual, take that as a sign. The rate at which people lose electrolytes through sweat varies wildly by person, even without chronic illness in the mix.

Know what discomfort and heat-related illness look like for your pets. Providing cool water and cool places to lay down is helpful. Panting is bad, but many animals are uncomfortable well before that point. (Mine usually start laying around on the coolest ground available and refusing to play around 80F. They are, however, extremely fluffy cats.)

Know what discomfort and heat-related illness look like for anyone you're responsible for, especially children and elderly people, who are more vulnerable.

Support and patronize your local libraries; they're an invaluable resource for anyone without A/C in this fucking world, in addition to all the other great work they do.

I just wanna see how we crash this plane

# of likes = # of passengers on board

# of reblogs = # of flight hours the pilots have

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

Lumberjacks, like most megafauna species generally require more space than the average hardware store, even a big box store could provide. The misconception is that Lumberjacks are a social species because of how they often work and live together.

This is a matter of necessity, not preference, and a survival technique for thriving under the LogBoss.

A “pack” of Lumberjacks, if not under the environmental pressure of a LogBoss will naturally disperse until they each have a wide territory.

Lumberjacks rarely fight for territory.

One on one, a Lumberjack could drive out a Dad or Lesbian, however the latter tend to travel in social packs.

Lumberjacks will passively retreat on the presence of large numbers of people. Kind of like Sasquatch.

Getting a “pack” of Lumberjacks assembled would be hard enough unless they were forced into a Hardware Store by a LogBoss. In that case, they would already be in a heightened and potentially agitated state far above their natural behavior. This artificial scenario can be likened to a circus animal running amok. If it had been in the wild, the incident would not have occurred.

Free-roaming Lumberjacks are the cryptids of the Hardware ecosystem. They are surprisingly quiet and unobtrusive.

Only experienced silverbacks or the boldest young Dads dare venture into a craft store for long without his mate or offspring to keep roving Craft Ladies at bay and guide him in this strange ecosystem. If a Dad enters with his mate and is separated from her, he will often scuttle for the seeming familiarity of Woodcrafts, Models, or Paints (the latter not to be confused with Fine Arts, unquestioned territory of art students), but he eyes Scrapbooking and Jewelry with trepidation and will usually venture into those exotic areas only in the company of females of his pack.

Lumberjacks are rarely spotted entering craft stores of their own volition, for while they do not fear it as Dads do, they know it is an environment unsuited for megafauna such as themselves.

Hardware store Lesbians generally adapt more easily to craft stores, although they may enlist another Lesbian of a subspecies more adapted to that environment to guide them until they find their niche. Lesbians have even been known to seek the aid of a Craft Lady, a native fauna that share similarities with Lesbians but are usually smaller and nimbler to suit their chosen habitat. Dads who witness this are often awed by the Lesbians’ temerity, for although larger, Dads are generally wary of the cunning and dexterous Craft Ladies and may mistake their enthusiastic pack greetings as predatory swarming.

Craft Ladies, secure in their ecological niche, have no fear of interlopers and take the presence of non-native beings in stride, although they may become territorial about scarcer resources.

I went to right-click a file today and was met with an "Ask Copilot" prompt, despite having diligently removed every trace of the scourge from my computer any time it's ever been installed in the past. When I went and looked in the program list and indeed found "Copilot," it said it was installed today, 4/16/26.

Enraged and confused because I have Windows Updates turned off for this machine, don't install anything unless I can check what's in the patches, and haven't ran any updates since the end of March, I went rooting around in the logs and found that the culprit was... the latest update for Acrobat.

I went to their stupid support website, and their stupid chatbot confirmed it:

Do not leave it unpatched. Get rid of it completely.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

I'm not actually talking about the weirdo-in-chief here.

I'm talking about how "humanitarian intervention" keeps turning into blatant profiteering and war crimes.

I'm talking about the US becoming a laughingstock and pariah on the international stage because of "weapons of mass destruction."

I'm talking about Americans being famously rude, ignorant, and annoying to pretty much every country around, because we're encouraged at home to be ignorant and self-important.

The fact that leadership changes every few years has kind of obscured it, but... I don't think MAGA are the only ones acting like a cult. They're just the sudden change which is obvious to those of us on the outside.

One common usage is to make local anesthetic more effective during surgery, for instance. It's used in a number of injected medications.

Bee stings contain an enzyme very similar to this medication, so sometimes, people with bee allergies have an allergic reaction to hyaluronidase.

This is called cross-reactivity, where your body mistakes something for the thing it's actually allergic to, and has an allergic reaction anyway. For instance, sometimes people with latex allergies also are allergic to bananas and other fruits. They don't actually contain latex, but there are some similar proteins.

Apparently, hyraluronidase used in humans is derived from one of four sources: sheep testicles, cow testicles, cow testicles again, and GMO hamster ovaries.

Short answer: Probably not.

Longer answer:

Hyaluronidase is actually a whole family of enzymes; we have five types within the human body! Most allergic reactions are to analogs of hyaluronidase which are very similar but not quite identical to human versions.

(This is part of the reason that GMO hamster ovaries are becoming a more common source. The CHO cell line - derived from Chinese hamster ovaries - is used to create recombinant human hyaluronidase, which reduces the risk of adverse reactions. Those adverse reactions are most often because of cow or sheep allergies, but bee/wasp allergies also come up sometimes. Mostly in eye surgery. Which sounds very unpleasant.)

However, there's also a lot about the immune system we don't really understand yet.

The scientific community still hasn't figured out, say, long COVID. What makes one person get it when another doesn't? How do we treat it? How do we test for it, and can we tell if someone's 'faking it'? Is it the same as similar autoimmune conditions, or different? We just don't know.

Or take semen allergies! A surprising number of folks are allergic to semen - including some men who appear to be allergic to their own semen. (Fun fact, hyaluronidase is also secreted by semen - or the modified ovipositors wasps and bees have as "stingers". I hate it too. But that's why most of the traditional sources are testicles.)

Having an adverse reaction to your own body is far from unheard of. And with something as under-researched and stigmatized as pregnancy symptoms... Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all if people occasionally get sick from the hyaluronidase their own bodies secrete.

It's probably still quite rare - cross-reactivity isn't super common, this specific cross-reactivity is less common, and being from one's own body should also help reduce the risk.

But has it happened? Jeez, probably.

i call it a car-bird because it makes calls that sound like the little "beep-beep" of a car getting locked by the keyfob. and i know its not a car because it comes from up in the fucking trees, and at midnight, and the middle of the day when i can see EVERY car in the neighborhood and none of them are locking and unlocking on repeat

He got me again the other night when he started making morning bird noises at midnight.