old and depressed vampire man stan

Elrond, Moon - Reader Painted for Magic: The Gathering - Universes Beyond - The Hobbit

AD: Cassie Murphy

AUGHHH

The Indigenous people who farmed and hunted here (and still farm and hunt in what land they have been able to keep and reclaim) were able to grow miles of upon miles of crops with multiple harvests a year, encouraging this biodiversity by creating forest gardens with incredible amounts of food from staples like corn and squash to local fruits like pawpaws to European imports like apples alongside controlled burns which allowed fields and buffalo ranges to expand.

Nowadays my state is known almost exclusively for its fields of nothing but corn and soy beans. Driving through in between the comparatively small cities you'll see nothing but fields where the plethora of different trees and plants were chopped down mile by mile, the remaining wetlands drained and flattened, and the rich black soils robbed of their nutrients through decades upon decades of monocrop agriculture now preserved through the life blood of petrochemical fertilizers which destroy the surrounding environment.

This process was done mile by mile as the tens of thousands of Indigenous people were killed and displaced by settlers and the US army, the land measured and sold acre by acre to white settlers who raped the land as described, filling the pockets of wealthy land speculators (like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) who bought the land directly from the government in schemes so corrupt historians have dedicated entire careers to mapping out their dramas.

The way he sits with his little feet:

Like, when my agents are pitching me for something, they'll be like, "Look at his facebook! Look at his tiktok!" They're never gonna say, "100,000 people follow him on tumblr. Remember tumblr?"

But the thing is, I don't actually use facebook or tiktok (except for promo). This is the only place I use, the only place where I'm interested in the community and shared creation and all that shit.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

The solution to the problem wasn’t some new dangled printing technology, but rather using a tool that Magic has had access to for decades.

Magic boosters can have slots, that is a card that shows up in every booster usually with some theme, most often rarity. We can assign slots in a booster as long as every card in that slot comes from the same printed sheet. It’s how boosters can get a land card or a specific theme (such as every booster of Dominaria getting a legendary creature).

Printed card sheets are made up of many cards. The printer then cuts the sheet so each card is separate. When doing so, the cards in the sheet will always end up in the same order.

So, here was the clever idea I had. What if we made a sheet where the mirrored cards sat next to each other in the sheet? The first card is Card 1, version A (1A), and next card was Card 1, version B (1B), then Card 2, version A (2A), card 2, version B (2B) and so on.

The problem is while we control the order, we don’t control what two cards you get. You could get Card 1 version A (1A) and card 1 version B (1B) or you could get Card 1, version B (1B) and card 2, version A (2A). How could we guarantee you get a matching pair?

The answer was we give you three cards from the sheet. Since they are in order, two of the three have to match. So, if you get 1A, 1B, and 2A, you get a mirrored pair of Card 1. If you get 1B, 2A, and 2B, you get a mirrored pair of Card 2.