very attractive i know (18+)

i remembered that you can upload gifs to artfight and i took that opportunity ehehe hope thats cool

My front yard is already filled with pretty and native plants. Even if it wasn't, putting seeds in someone's yard is a jerk move when you don't know them or their history.

I can't take care of a yard filled with plants that make me sick. My yard accounts for most of the neighbourhood's butterfly population on account of everyone else poisons anything in their front yard that isn't grass because of this kind of bad behaviour.

Yes, I'm cutting back a lot of the extra growth out front. It's a fire hazard, there's too much underbrush and I don't intend to be responsible for burning down the neighbourhood. Cutting back plants to reduce fire danger and ensure that I can take care of a garden neglected for over a decade is not a bad thing.

We got twice as many flowers this year because the flowering plants could actually reach the sunlight.

General rule of thumb with seedbombing is that blasting your seeds into private property (especially gated/fenced property) is way more risk than its worth. Not only is there a risk of getting tangled up in some dusty ass low level court, but cookie cutter suburbs and manicured golf courses with evergreen lawns and not a dandy in sight are far from prime seedbombing soil, as they'll most likely be herbicide-ed into an early plant grave.

And just to be clear, that's not a bad thing just because your efforts have been wasted or because the seeds were wasted, but rather because it just gives the owner another reason to bust out their Plant-Killer 3001EX and squirt a gallon of chemicals into the earth. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but depending on where it is and how much you shoot, it might not be that far off.

Guerrilla gardening has its place and that place is in empty, neglected areas that receive no attention apart from getting mowed or weed-whacked every month or two.

The idea is this: when your area was developed and buildings and roads were constructed, many plant species were extirpated from that area, and most plant species are becoming more and more isolated with populations in increasingly scattered locations

You are re-introducing plants into areas that either are suitable habitat, or where you could feasibly care for them

But the thing is

Guerrilla gardening appeals to the part of your brain that wants to stick it to The Man and do something exciting and risky and cool and "punk"

And I think that part of your brain can be ultimately self-serving.

Because many of the most effective actions you can do don't FEEL badass and subversive. They don't LOOK badass and subversive. Direct action is often boring as fuck and not illegal and won't be recognized as courageous and cool because it's very mundane and often tedious and sometimes gruelingly hard.

The truth is

Two or three friendly conversations with your neighbors about native plants are worth a thousand seed bombs

This type of popular image of "direct action" glorifies and lionizes this idea of an individual person doing something Cool and Illegal, and for the most part, this is a fantasy and a lie and a product of the terribly anti-human, anti-community, hyper-individualistic type of society we are in

Do you want to make your neighborhood into a lush paradise for native species? Talk to your neighbors. Do you want X institution to stop using pesticides on their grass and start a pollinator garden? Call them. Email them. Now find other people in your area who can support you and try again. See if your library can tell you about local environmental organizations. Reach out to the guy who runs the farmer's market or the lady who is in charge of the gardening club. Build up a list of contacts.

Do you know how you can get people to grow native plants? Do you know the number one super easy way to get people around you into growing native plants?

Grow native plants yourself, and when they spread or produce seeds, offer everyone free plants.

I cannot possibly recommend this method enough.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

I’m a woman. I’m a black woman. I’m a poor woman. I’m a fat woman. I’m a middle-aged woman. And I’m on welfare.

In this country, if you’re any one of those things you count less as a human being. If you’re all those things, you don’t count at all. Except as a statistic.

I am 45 years old. I have raised six children. There are millions of statistics like me. Some on welfare. Some not. And some, really poor, who don’t even know they’re entitled to welfare. Not all of them are black. Not at all. In fact, the majority-about two-thirds-of all the poor families in the country are white.

Welfare’s like a traffic accident. It can happen to anybody, but especially it happens to women.

And that’s why welfare is a women’s issue. For a lot of middle-class women in this country, Women’s Liberation is a matter of concern. For women on welfare it’s a matter of survival.

Survival. That’s why we had to go on welfare. And that’s why we can’t get off welfare now. Not us women. Not until we do something about liberating poor women in this country.

Because up until now we’ve been raised to expect to work, all our lives, for nothing. Because we are the worst educated, the least-skilled, and the lowest-paid people there are. Because we have to be almost totally responsible for our children. Because we are regarded by everybody as dependents. That’s why we are on welfare. And that’s why we stay on it.

Welfare is the most prejudiced institution in this country, even more than marriage, which it tries to imitate. Let me explain that a little.

Ninety-nine percent of welfare families are headed by women. There is no man around. In half the states there can’t be men around because A.F.D.C. (Aid to Families With Dependent Children) says if there is an “able-bodied” man around, then you can’t be on welfare. If the kids are going to eat, and the man can’t get a job, then he’s got to go.

Welfare is like a super-sexist marriage. You trade in a man for the man. But you can’t divorce him if he treats you bad. He can divorce you, of course, cut you off anytime he wants. But in that case, he keeps the kids, not you.The man runs everything. In ordinary marriage, sex is supposed to be for your husband. On A.F.D.C., you’re not supposed to have any sex at all. You give up control of your own body. It’s a condition of aid. You may even have to agree to get your tubes tied so you can never have more children just to avoid being cut off welfare.

The man, the welfare system, controls your money. He tells you what to buy, what not to buy, where to buy it, and how much things cost. If things-rent, for instance-really cost more than he says they do, it’s just too bad for you. He’s always right.

That’s why Governor [Ronald] Reagan can get away with slandering welfare recipients, calling them “lazy parasites,” “pigs at the trough,” and such. We’ve been trained to believe that the only reason people are on welfare is because there’s something wrong with their character. If people have “motivation,” if people only want to work, they can, and they will be able to support themselves and their kids in decency.

The truth is a job doesn’t necessarily mean an adequate income. There are some ten million jobs that now pay less than the minimum wage, and if you’re a woman, you’ve got the best chance of getting one. Why would a 45-year-old woman work all day in a laundry ironing shirts at 90-some cents an hour? Because she knows there’s some place lower she could be. She could be on welfare. Society needs women on welfare as “examples” to let every woman, factory workers and housewife workers alike, know what will happen if she lets up, if she’s laid off, if she tries to go it alone without a man. So these ladies stay on their feet or on their knees all their lives instead of asking why they’re only getting 90-some cents an hour, instead of daring to fight and complain.

Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country. We’ve already started on our own welfare plan. Along with other welfare recipients, we have organized so we can have some voice. Our group is called the National Welfare Rights Organization (N.W.R.O.). We put together our own welfare plan, called Guaranteed Adequate Income (G.A.I.), which would eliminate sexism from welfare. There would be no “categories”-men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids-just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up.

any time someone is in any kind of crisis or upheaval, offer to feed them. tell them they don't have to choose what it is if they can't make decisions, just ask about allergies and preferences and tell them you're just gonna make food happen at their house.

friend having a baby? delivery gift certificate to order food to the hospital after the kid shows up.

someone's relative passes away? offer to make them dinner.

buddy gets laid off? ask if you can order them lunch.

pal stuck in a depressive episode? offer to drive them to fucking mcdonalds, if that's what they want.

people in crisis are tired and sad and angry and the last thing most of them are doing is thinking about feeding themselves. so if you have the ability or time or money, providing that is always, always a good move.

My friend Kate got a bunch of our friends together and bought us a shit-ton of Uber Eats gift cards. The entire week Emet was in the hospital, I ordered salad with salmon on it for dinner. It was about as much as a burger and fries would have been from one of the places that can make gluten-free stuff for me, and I didn't have to do anything but poke a few buttons on an app.

I’m not upset or anything, I can kinda see what you mean! If you’re expecting anything cool on the internet these days to probably be fake, yeah, the colors on the meat do look incongruous.

Let’s take a second here and use this as an educational experience for everyone. Fake animal photos are totally an internet scourge these days. If you don’t trust the OP of a post like this saying it’s not AI, how else could you check and try to find out?

Three things to help you verify not slop:

1. There’s a bunch of other photos in series with this one on my website, which allows you to see context for when and how the photos were taken. There’s also other photos of this animal and this habitat in other lighting and weather conditions. That’s generally more work than people will go to if they just want to create a viral photo, and you can look for internal consistency.

2. AI isn’t good enough yet to replicate specific stripe patterns on individual tigers, they get all wonky. The animal and her location are named in this instance and it’s easy to google to see if everything lines up.

3. You can also check to see if the thing in photos actually happens. The meatball throwing demo is a very, very common occurrence at this facility! It’s a regular activity during talks when tigers are in that habitat (it is a multi-species rotational space). They posted a video on their Facebook fourteen hours ago of their curator getting a direct shot into a different tiger’s mouth.

However I do want to note that I don't think @theswordofdamntheseknees was accusing your work of being AI, and did not mention AI at all - I think it was a joke about how painful it is to step on the sharp plastic corners of a LEGO, made with the understanding that the meatballs are the true version of events.

Someone on Bluesky a couple days ago also assumed the site/my account was either AI or a content scraper so seeing that type of commentary twice in two days was like, ah crap, I have not succeeded at my intended transparency and messaging. I must fix this immediately. And therefore I managed to totally miss the joke.

One of the things about fact-checking as a career is that man, it is waaaay to easy to take things super seriously at all times. I am very deep in a major paid project the last few months and my brain apparently only has one setting right now.

Plus like… okay, those meatballs do really look kinda fake! I could see it being genuinely confusing!