Join A Cleam, Head a Tub

cr 苦瓜

in the game, mutt and pebbles are always nearby when henry wakes up after sleepwalking. therefore, this is the sight he sees when he wakes up in some random shrub.

believe it or not, it's actually the much more common (but still majestic) ponderosa pine. More obvious in my photos where you can make out the needles;

they're growing on a slickrock formation and have very little soil to work with, what they do have is pretty much loose sand. It's incredible that they can grow there at all! They end up stunted, like bonsai trees. For reference, ponderosa growing in standard conditions are one of the tallest trees you'll see in the southwest:

Zion Canyon is the only place I've seen large numbers of ponderosas get freaky. I see smaller trees like piñon pines and juniper chill out on cliffsides more often, but they're pretty small and gnarly to begin with. I don't think it's an elevation thing, Zion Canyon isn't too high compared to neighboring landmarks, so who knows why? Juniper & eastern white pine below (including a white pine bc I have no good piñon pics, they basically look the same to me)

And for the uninitiated, bristlecones look like this:

However, we are also very invested in making sure that we have a nation worth celebrating, and one that our children and grandchildren will still have decades from now: one where women will still be allowed to vote, where illegal detention centers with incredibly inhumane practices will not be increasing their size and capacity every year, where citizens are not gunned down in the streets merely for standing up for the legal human rights and safety of their neighbors and even strangers, where government databases of historical information do not mysteriously go missing every other day, where black and indigenous history is not being erased and rewritten, where our natural resources and treasures like water reserves and old growth forests and national parks are not sold off to the highest bidder who only care to monetize and destroy them, where "gold standard science" actually means peer reviewed publicly available data which takes into account the basic logic of things like the differences between correlation and causation, where we aren't starting wars with other nations and profiting off of their pain and destruction, where we protect all people's freedom of religion and don't enforce our favorite one in our seats of government or workplaces or places of education, where we don't randomly blame immigrants for the price of beef we barely even import from their country, where people who are arrested are given the required access to their legal counsel, where we don't dogpile visiting world leaders and throw tantrums like five year olds because they aren't wearing the right clothes and we got butt-hurt about it and refuse to help them save their own people from war, where we don't take part in human trafficking by detaining and deporting individuals with the legal right to live in this country and sending them to places they have never lived and often aren't even from or moving them from state to state and then releasing them hundreds of miles from their home with nothing more than the clothes on their back and illegally requiring someone else to come pick them up, where children don't run from their school bus stops bc the federal government has been illegally kidnapping and deporting their friends and parents and neighbors, where children don't have a higher likelihood of being shot to death in their classroom than in any other "developed" country, where we don't refuse research grants to scientists bc they used words like "female" in their studies, where we don't accuse pocs of "stealing white jobs," where the people running our health initiatives actually know the names of vitamins and understand how fortified food works, where we are able to protect our families from known deadly diseases like measles and polio bc we understand vaccine technology enough to trust it, where the general populace is aware that "due process" is a right which must be granted to absolutely everyone absolutely every time or else anyone at any time is subject to having all of their rights abused and discarded, where we prosecute to the furthest extent of the law pedophiles and felons and violent insurrectionists rather than excuse and reward them for their actions, where we care for the good of our neighbors at least as much as we care for our own good bc we live in a hecking society and not an every-man-for-himself and may-the-richest-group-win wasteland.

That is a country worth celebrating 250 years, much more so than the decrepit and quickly collapsing empire we have been becoming for decades and have now quickly snowballed into authoritarian insanity. That list is only scraping the very tip of the iceberg of outrages perpetrated by this president and his administration and his supporters in the last several months.

Some 250 years ago, the people of this nation had some very specific, very strong things to say about the type of world they wanted to live in and the type of authority they refused to subject themselves to. I highly recommend reading up on it and comparing their grievances against a corrupt government and their ideals with what is happening all around us today. You can find them in such documents as The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and The Bill of Rights.

If you're a Christian, you can also find a lot of the basis for this other thing called "loving your neighbor as yourself" and with it, "loving your enemy," in the Holy Bible. But, very importantly, you don't need to be a Christian to be a good American - I'm just adding that one bc I myself am a Christian and I am heartbroken and livid every time someone uses their corrupted delusional version of my faith to support their hatred of anyone who doesn't look like, sound like, think like, and smell like they do and exactly how they would order the world to. They have either forgotten or never truly learned what it means to be created in the image of God, to care for his world, and to love and serve as Christ to everyone.

I will absolutely, emphatically, be celebrating that this nation has lasted 250 years, while also making space to acknowledge the vast depths of harm it has committed against its own people and many others during that time - what we don't remember, we can't learn from. That's historically pretty close to the average lifespan of most empires, but provided we can manage some heavy course correction, I have the dear hope this nation will indeed continue. I will be celebrating the people and laws and actions that empower and protect my neighbor regardless of their religion, race, gender, nationality, legal status, or any other qualifier. And I will be celebrating the people who today continue to stand up for human flourishing and doing the best we can to give a wiser, kinder, stronger world to all of its citizens.

the city of los angeles

the city of new york

sex

how drinking alcohol works

how getting high works

how a child of any age speaks

how nuclear physics work

how [my job] works

how debilitating being shot in the shoulder is

how hypothermia works

things I have never before seen someone fake their way through writing about, until today:

SHRIMP COCKTAIL:

banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol

generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is

#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro

And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!

POMEGRANATES:

zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple

thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute

sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.

FRUIT TREES:

zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''

salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE

baander: #cranberry trees

DOUGH/BATTER:

maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre

livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles

lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY

Some other topics:

And the kicker:

I like to think of what Project Hail Mary was like from Rocky’s point of view.

thinking about...

murder-"careful don't let any emotion bleed through to the feed"-bot patting itself on the back for a good job sounding professional as it makes contact and establishes rapport with the stupid pet bot

meanwhile, miki, very familiar with emotions and effortlessly plucking them out of the feed: what the fuck this is the single most traumatized wet cat i have ever met; gods alive, gotta be extra nice and friendly to this one; who DID this to it it's LITERALLY crying in a closet rn i am NOT equipped to handle this; ill just be EVEN MORE nice for now and make a note to download an emotional support and trauma recovery module once we're off milu

murderbot: ugh it's so dumb and nice and annoying and infantilized

But Carthage was much more than a foil for the Romans. It was a fascinating civilization, but, thanks to the Roman destruction, we can only get glimpses of their gods:

Their writing:

And their culture:

Much more about what we know (and don't know) about Carthage here:

Be real Adrian who do you think you’re fooling