Memento Mori

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

Here's a before shot of an area I pulled in early spring, pretty much the entire forest looked like this when we moved here. Almost everything green you see is honeysuckle!! It leafs out so early which makes it easy to spot and target. I pull it all by hand and it's slow going but so worth it!

Scissor-tailed Flycatcher (Tyrannus forficatus), male, family Tyrannidae, order Passeriformes, East TX, USA

I'm talkin white people selling rattles and dream catchers, white people banging First Nations style drums, white people teaching talking stick workshops, that kinda shit

So what do you do when you see this crap? How do you show your disapproval in a way that makes them give a shit?

I'll tell you what I do. The point is to show them that appropriating Indigenous cultures will lose them customers.

When I see fakey Native art I say something like "Oh wow, you make dreamcatchers! What nation are you from?" (Use tribe in the states)

I used to ask point blank if they were Native, but I'd nearly always get some Cherokee great grandmother bullshit, or even "I'm not sure, I could have some Native in me!"

Most of the time they don't know what I'm talking about, because they're not Native and don't know that this is a very normal thing to ask when meeting another Native.

When they ask me what I mean I say "I mean your tribe, which First Nation are you from?"

This is the point where they sheepishly mumble that they are not First Nations.

I let my face fall and say something like "Oh. That's disappointing" or "Wow. Unfortunate."

I let it get awkward. And then I leave, shaking my head in disapproval.

You may feel like you need to educate them on cultural appropriation but here's the thing: it's 2025. They know. Brenda the middle class reiki shaman is FULLY aware that her smudge fans are stolen culture. She doesn't care. The only way to make them care is to hit them where it hurts: the wallet.

Make them think that you would have purchased what they are selling if it was AUTHENTIC.

If you wanna go the extra mile send an email to the organizers, in your best white people voice, and tell them that you are disappointed that they are facilitating culture theft.

my shop is open again! there are still some pelts in the shop that are in the finishing stages that will be added soon, but i am pretty happy with what i have up so far, so i'm gonna pull the trigger!

here's a little preview:

and they turned out pretty nice if i do say so myself

This dinosaur skeleton is incomplete. But, it doesn't look that way to us, because the parts it's missing are parts we don't have.

See how there are ribs on the bottom? Those are called gastralia. That's right, dinosaurs had ribs on their stomachs as well, and modern crocodiles and alligators still have them! (Also, notice that the ribs keep going to the hips instead of stopping above the waist. This is also true of modern birds, and why a bird can't have a concave stomach!)

Next, notice that ring floating in the center of the eye socket? That's called a sclerotic ring! Fish, reptiles, birds--with the exception of mammals (and, oddly enough, crocodilians), pretty much all modern vertebrates still have them! It's literally an eyeball bone. Afaik we haven't found a T-rex specimen with any intact, but since we've found them in other dinosaurs, it's very likely they had them too.

On the contrary, T. rex had such big eyes that a significant portion of its brain was devoted to visual processing!

See, these aren't eye socket bones.

No, wanting to see the night sky isn't a twee retvrn to ghibli-ass take. It's not a matter of some anprim impulse to dismantle industrial society for ~nature aesthetics~, it's an extremely visible symptom of environmental degradation that gets downplayed because the externality seems trivial to most people: "Oh no, the night sky, what ever will we do without it."

But it actively disrupts light-sensitive circadian rhythms in plants and wildlife, which disrupts foraging patterns, reproductive and hibernation cycles, and contributes to wildlife population declines. It's not the major contributor to those declines, but it's an additional point of stress in an ecosystem already stressed by climate change and other forms of industrial pollution. And so much of it is wholly unnecessary.

I don't think people realize how far-reaching the problem is, either. That light isn't just confined to the places people use. You don't escape it by just taking the bus to the edge of town. That light carries, in some cases for hundreds of kilometers. Death Valley has some of the darkest skies in the US, and yet, the dome of light above Las Vegas is visible on the horizon over 250 km away! Anywhere within 50 km of a major urban center, just about anywhere in the world, never gets darker than a night under a full moon.

And this is very much a recent problem too. Before the switchover to LEDs, it was relatively expensive to light places. That meant actually accounting for the energy use and making sure it was being used where it was needed. That light was also warm-colored, so it didn't travel as far. With the decreased cost of lighting, it became standard to light places like daytime whenever they might be needed. Lighting didn't get safer, it just got more thoughtless.

The reason you see astronomy-types sounding the alarm most loudly is because they're the ones who have been seeing the full effects of light pollution and its encroachment on dark skies. It's a hobby for me too, but it's partly because I'm a night owl who grew up in a small town with nothing else to do. I used to be able to clearly see the Milky Way horizon to horizon when I grew up in the mid-00s. The last time I visited about five years ago, I could only see it overhead. The population has fallen by like 10%, but the skies are brighter. I can tell when the college decided to leave the football stadium lights overnight. I can tell where the car dealerships that added overnight display lights are. I can even see when trucks with the fuckass LED light bars are coming over a hill from 5 km away.