Cade | they/them/theirs

The stories you hear of people dying from rationing, this is what happens to their body.

Affordable insulin isn’t just a right, it’s a necessity.

No one can send me DMs or posts, and I can't send them either. My blog no longer is searchable. The wrongly flagged posts have no option to appeal.

Messages I send to tumblr support using the email on my account won't go through either. Ones I send using my other email will go through... only to recieve a response that I have to use the email on my account to send support, due to account security. That'd be fine and well... if it would go through.

It is increasingly popular to find it inherently unethical and exploitative to kill animals for food or to farm them for animal products, and instead eat and wear "plant-based" things. This is an impulse toward ethical treatment of non-human living things.

But this way of seeing animals as "lives" and behaving accordingly, depends on seeing plants as non-lives. Asking whether we have ethical obligations toward plants is so absurd, it's dismissed as trolling.

I've known many people who farmed or hunted animals who had a great reverence for their lives. Some people would think that this is not genuine and that it is never morally acceptable to take a life for your own use.

Kimmerer discusses Indigenous use of animals. But when a tree needs to be cut down or a plant uprooted, there is the same vivid awareness that a life is being taken, that the plant's life is A Life.

Now I'm troubled by the dismissal of plants as providing total freedom from guilt and moral responsibility among many people and organizations who see animal life as deeply sacred. Plant based products are cruelty-free alternatives to animal products and plant-based diets mean nothing had to die for your meal.

I understand not wanting to support cruel industries or being uncomfortable with eating animals, but the more I learn about plants, the less I believe that all animals have something all plants lack, that means we have moral obligations toward animals and not toward plants.

We know that plants share nutrients with each other and make decisions based on their environments that give them the strongest chances to either survive or produce successful offspring. We know that the distinct smells that many plants release when trimmed or cut are often panic responses to ward away predators and warn other plants of dangers. We know that plants decide to either compete or cooperate with neighbors based on many factors.

Are those things not an indication that plants have some level of consciousness? That they also have a drive to live? Why can we attribute those traits to animals whose forms of communication are obvious to us and then deny them in life forms who communicate in different ways?

I'm terribly arachnophobic. horribly. I get it, the irrational fear you can't fully erase. Yes I'm an entomologist and yes everyone at work thinks it's very funny.

But the more you pick away bit by bit at that general massive ball of fear, the more you can understand it and turn fear to wonder. I started small, just learning some facts about spiders but still unable to stomache looking at pictures.

And then I realized I could look at jumping spiders fine and made an effort to try to appreciate what I could about them. From there I could realized I could look at and Touch harvestmen and that there was a whole world to them to learn and love too. And by turning that Ambiguous Ball of Fear into curiosity and respect I've gotten to a place I can live side by side with my arachnophobia and approach spiders with appreciation, even if I will cry if forced to touch one.

the short version is, it's a book about a book about a book about a book about a movie that never existed about a house that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. it is probably the single most famous/notorious existing work of "ergodic fiction", meaning basically fiction which exists in such a complex relationship with its medium that it takes nontrivial effort just to consume, meaning uhhhh a lot of it looks like this,

or worse!

it's like, fifty percent an extremely high-effort mockery of modern academia, it's often doing its active best to be completely incomprehensible to you, its and i cannot emphasize this enough A Space With A Beast In It. its awfully dear to my heart also. or as mark z danielewsky who wrote it puts it: