Just Screaming Now

It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.

they start talking to a human and the human is like "haha yeah that's a crow!" and the alien researcher is like "you called it a 'bird' earlier, is that a different name?" and the human is like "oh a crow is just one species of bird, there's like, 10 others out there"

"On this planet?"

On Earth, the inhabitants are just. Playing and walking LITERALLY STEPPING ON CARPETS OF ORGANISMS the whole time. the aliens are like "it doesn't hurt them??? Can't you just...move them to a place where you don't have to step on them?" and the humans are like "no of course not, grasses evolved to tolerate being stepped on, and besides, more plants would grow there if we tried to move the existing ones"

Alien: I don't understand...why would you not place the solar farms in an area of the planet with no existing ecosystem?

Human: ...what?

Alien: You have rather sophisticated protective gear and have done some space exploration, surely you could establish them in an area of the planet to which life is not yet adapted?

Human: ...there isn't one.

"I don't think you understand what I'm saying. Only 25% of Earth's species have been formally described, at most."

"that's...that's most of them."

"Yes?"

"Well...I suppose the ocean trenches and abyssal plains must be difficult for you to reach...where did you have to travel for your discoveries?"

"Wait. I believe this is something your language refers to as needing 'unpacking.' The current biodiversity represents a historical low point?"

"Well, a local minimum, as the math people say. But yeah, I think there was some recovery after the Younger Dryas about ten thousand years ago, but for every new species humanity creates intentionally or unintentionally, tens or hundreds have been wiped out. We're not proud of this."

"We will need time to digest this, to the point I'm afraid to ask the next question: NEXT great extinction?"

"Yeah, I forget how many there've been total, and there's some arguing over how bad it has to get before it really counts. A comet or meteor strike 65 million years ago wiped out the majority of life...the majority of species or even genera...there's entire classes of life we didn't know ever existed until we found their fossils a few hundred years ago. And then there's the Permian, when a good chunk of a continent erupted and I think we lost...ninety percent of all species? Maybe more? I'd have to look it up. There was also a mass extinction that just happened because all the continents got pushed together and apparently that was bad for life on land and in the sea. You're looking a little faint...do you need to sit down?"

"But...even a single great extinction has always meant the end of life above the unicellular level, on every world we've visited. This planet has evolved complex incredibly ramified life repeatedly despite three mass extinction events?"

I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.

Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!

But let me tell you a story:

I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.

One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.

At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.

I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.

Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.

The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.

And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.

So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.

So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.