You can't catch me, I'm already a butterfly

get that camera out of my face mom.

she thinks I’m the purrparazzi. lmao

Sorry, I cant.

I don't want to.

No.

everything is the same.

all of it. 

old sam dies.

and then just

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

I'm afraid they'll become engineers and sign off on bridge designs that collapse - and people will die.

I'm afraid they'll become medical professionals who don't know what they're doing - and people will die.

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

Do you know what happened? The deer population tripled in size and they all starved because they ran out of food. But not to death, oh, no.

Because seeing the deer starving to death made the humans sad, so they would FEED THE DEER.

But the humans never had enough to feed ALL the deer ALL the time, so all they did was stop the deer from dying, and THAT'S IT.

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.

As time went on, he started teaching interested students some basics signs, and after a year, I had students who started signing to each other during class so they wouldn't disrupt the lesson, sign across the room so they wouldn't have to shout, sign when they were overcome with emotions to the point they couldn't talk.