Lurker

like. genuinely. you shouldn't be seeing ads. philosophically speaking. aesthetically speaking. psychologically speaking. you MUST remove them from the spaces that you consider *yours*. imagine some dropshipping company came up to you and went "hey can we put these ads all over your home so everywhere you turn you'll be seeing an ad for us?" would you let them?? FUCK no you wouldn't.

You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.

You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.

You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.

You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.

You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.

You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.

*

*

i saw somebody say “what if you’re gone and i haven’t become anything yet” and basically that broke me on a random thursday evening

Me? I just got Dark Mage. Honestly, it's pretty rare, but the job opportunities are also limited. You either get into covert assassination or dungeon raiding.

God, just because we're the only two kids in The Village, Emmerich Holyblade automatically assumes this makes us friends. He doesn't even realize I hate him and his stupid smug swordsman ass.

The tank Ferron Shieldson gives me bro fists hard enough to bruise. Sister Savantha Healier has tripped over her habit ten times in the past hour.

Outside of combat, I've done a lot of very invisible low-tier work nobody really needs, such as managing all of our finances and inventory, yet they keep fucking including me and praising my efforts when they're having a drink at the tavern.

Our reputation really soared when we stopped one of the Four Demonic Kings of the East North South and West from destroying Capital City of the Holy Church Kingdom Nation.

Emmerich Holyblade insists my 70% Paralysis Debuff clutched the entire encounter despite dealing the Super Cool Omega Finisher, so everyone's asking me for autographs.

Shouldn't he know I hate social interaction if he claims to be my "childhood friend"?? LEAVE ME ALONE.

He said I'm invaluable to this party both as part of our battle plans, our day-to-day tasks, and as his "dearest companion". GROSS!!!

Doesn't he realize this was the PERFECT chance for me to disappear to another country???

Except Elfsdame Woodsworth might be the Holy Nature Origin Princess, or something. I wasn't really paying attention to her dramatic backstory.

After we killed the Holy Nature Origin King (who was really one of the Four Demonic Kings of the East North South and West in disguise), Elfsdame Woodsworth the beautiful elf archer huntress just kinda gave us the sword.

It's sunset right now, and I climbed a tree to just overlook the forest in peace, ALONE, except Emmerich Holyblade "knew I'd do something like this", so now he's HERE. HE ALWAYS DOES THIS!!!!

Blergh. Now we're watching the sun set over the whole Holy Kingdom Church Nation. It's pretty, but that dumbass Emmerich Holyblade isn't even looking at it. Idiot.

We've reached the Demon Lord of Darkness's Dark Demonic Castle Keep now, and we're striking tomorrow.

It's my last chance to quit if I don't want to beef it tomorrow (I do not trust Ferron Shieldson to shield me), but Emmerich Holyblade said he can't do it without me. HE, singular?? So everybody else can do it without me??

And to make matters worse, he said he'd tell me something after we beat the Demon Lord of Darkness. Why the hell tell me you're gonna tell me something??? Just tell me in the first place so I can ditch.

And besides, as if anyone could actually kill the goddamn Chosen Hero Sword Saint. At the very least, he's gonna survive tomorrow. Doesn't he realize how stupidly contrived his powerset is?? Dude, as IF.

I told him that, and he ran off. I'm never going to understand him.

But mainly I was just standing in the back. Debuffing is a crazy magic drain, so I did get super tired, but the most exciting thing I was involved with was when Sister Savantha Healier's Evil Twin threw her weapon at me in a last ditch attempt to take at least one of us down, but Emmerich Holyblade intercepted it. With his body.

Sister Savantha Healier just healed him after, though, so it's fine. I might've been mincemeat had that hit my squishy self. I'm a proud backliner, okay. But it was still pretty stupid and unnecessary, considering we have Phoenix Blessing Revival Potion Stones.

Everybody weakened the Demon Lord of Darkness with their own strikes, so Emmerich Holyblade could finish him off properly with the holy sword Swordexcaliburn.

Before he did, he looked at me with these fucking... star-filled eyes and bright smile, which made everybody else also look at me, which made the Demon Lord of Darkness laugh, so I just nodded at Emmerich Holyblade to go kill the fucking Demon Lord of Darkness already.

God, that took so long. I'm taking a vacation. I'm disappearing into a forest without any elves in it and never talking to another person ever again.

E-Emmerich Holyblade, well, he.

there are multiple ways for a tree to die, each with their own impacts on the ecosystem. Many trees die standing, becoming starkly bare pillars of standing deadwood with increasingly fewer branches and more sharply whitened surfaces as the bark falls off and the branches break, the smaller branches first and then the larger ones. Standing deadwood is vital for housing lots and lots of bird species and it also has an undeniable sexiness and charisma

Trees broken by wind, snapping off at some point up the trunk, are often hollow in the middle from heart rot fungi. I don't think the fungi actually kill the tree, since the center of the tree (the heartwood) is dead anyways, but they do structurally weaken it.

One of the most dramatic tree deaths is windthrow. This happens to large trees that are solid all the way through and not easily broken by the forces of wind; instead, the roots are wrenched violently out of the ground, creating a bowl-shaped hole in the ground with a huge mound of twisted tree roots standing 5 or 6 feet tall next to it.

The death of a tree by windthrow feels very sad, because the tree seemed to be thriving up until that point, but the effect on the ecosystem is very fascinating. The hole in the ground where the root ball was torn up creates a shaded, sheltered area, sometimes filling with water to become a small pool. The root ball itself, right next to it, becomes a tall pile of soil and decomposing wood.

When walking in the forest, I often notice strange mounds rising from the layer of leaf litter, covered in lush carpets of moss, like bustling moss metropolises rising out of lowlands that only have scattered moss towns. Elevated from the forest floor, the moss-hills do not become covered with leaf litter. In some cases, these distinctive moss-hills are still visibly connected to the fallen trunk of a windthrown tree; in other cases, the tree trunk has almost completely decayed, and only the mound created by the root ball remains.

I read once in an article that the creation of humps and valleys by the windthrown tree roots is characteristic of old growth forests. That is, the forest has existed so long, with trees living majestically and dying violently in it, that the ground is no longer a smooth plane, but humpy and bumpy and pitted and pooled from centuries of trees dying by windthrow.

My observations seem to agree that these windthrown-tree-humps have unique ecology, particularly in terms of their thriving moss colonies that remain even after the tree that originally died has rotted away. They would create a million little variations on light and moisture level, gathering leaf litter in some places and keeping it away from others. Variations create multiplying amounts of biodiversity due to the increased amount of niches to fill.

In my area, one of the first tall trees to shoot up after land is disturbed is the water oak (Quercus nigra. They get 50-70ft tall and 3 feet in diameter in about 50 years. They often have very, very shallow root systems. Because of this, they fall over faster than other trees. They are also more prone to disease, and hollow out from the center faster and more often, and are likely to have dead sections on loving trees, providing even more unique habitat.

So some of our forests that are only 50 years old have old-growth-characteristics because of these trees. And then they fall, or otherwise die, leaving room for our true old growth species to rise up. But the pits and mounds of these fallen early-risers are also shaped differently than those of more deeprooted species. They are shallower pools or valleys, and sometimes form a wall that is perpendicular to the forest floor - completely vertical to the ground.

This is just one example, but understanding it, we can see that the predominance of different species in a forest can drastically change its microclimates and topography! Different species rot in different ways, hollow in different ways, and form different shapes on the landscape. If there are lots of different tree species in your area, then the different proportions they grow in, die in, fall in, and the different timings at which they do so, offer an endless aboundment of variety.

This is why no two forests are the same, and no single wild area is ever truly replaceable, or interchangeable. Because each has developed entirely differently, with so many little factors playing in.

it's a historical. it's a western. set in meiji restoration era japan. there's samurai (real historical guy who died in his 20's irl but here he's a grandpa kicking ass with a flintlock and a katana). it's a comedy. it's a shonen. one of the two main protagonists is a 12-year-old girl on equal footing with everyone else who are all grown-ass men. it's a political thriller with detective story elements. it's military fiction, a war story set after the war (Russo-Japanese War). did I mention it's a western and there's gold rush buried treasure and horseback shootouts and bank robberies and train fights. it's extremely perverted, but exclusively for fucked up older men doing insane enemyslash toxic yaoi shit with each other. oh and murder. it has horror elements also. there's multiple fairly compelling het romances in it that have interesting things to say about the intersection of women's roles in society with everything else. female characters are allowed to be ugly and interesting outside their relationships to men. it's a wilderness survival show where the characters hike in the woods and hunt and cook stuff using traditional indigenous Ainu practices and the 12-year-old Ainu girl protagonist whose central conflict about how to protect her people's legacy and way of life against colonial forces and a modernizing world is the thing that drives the plot. dungeon meshi referenced ruipe, an Ainu dish involving frozen and thawed meat, as an homage to golden kamuy doing it first

i didn't even mean to write all that out, it's just when i sat down and tried to articulate all the wild standout elements of this show it came gushing out. The first season was all introducing Ainu culture and ways of life and the like 20 or so highly distinct characters that make up 3 or so different factions chasing after lost Ainu gold, and then they had a whole season arc about other indigenous minorities in the surrounding areas and how their cultural practices differ but their political interests are aligned in resisting assimilation and protecting their land, delving into history and politics not only within Japanese borders but Russian internal and international affairs as well. multiple times the show points out how turn-of-the-century fishing and farming and lumber practices are decimating the local ecology of Hokkaido. i haven't even gotten into the military history yet. it's SO deeply grounded in the place and time it's set in. it's a HIGHLY detailed and meticulously researched show that takes these premises seriously. including the deranged comedy parts where serial killers have fap-offs at each other with sperm instead of bullets. it has serious things to say about protecting the environment and indigenous ways of life as well as PTSD and the weight of taking a life let alone going to war.

another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html

In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.

“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”

Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment

These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).

And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.

Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call.  It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder.  The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.