Another Side... Solar/lunarpunk

Its similar to why you cannot put bad people in a class of their own. The moment you do that you stop being able to see the bad things that the people closest to you do a la "my best friend couldn't have said that racist thing, they're not evil."

The moment you think you are immune from this type of backslide into right wing nonsense is the moment you stop questioning yourself enough to keep yourself from backsliding into right wing nonsense a la "I mean im not antiscience, im vaccinated, I just think that fluoride in our water supply is imparting children's ability to learn as fast as they otherwise could without it."

>mormons tell girls their most important roles throughout their entire life are wife and mother. extremely patriarchal, told in every way except in plain speech that they are expected to erase their personhood in favor of performing a strict role

>american culture says that the wedding day is about The BRIDE. it's HER day.

>mormon girls are not told about the strictures of a temple wedding until endowment because secret secret.

>mormon girls spend their whole lives dreaming about their american weddings with their wedding dresses and decorations and loving vows and a day about me me me me me me. perhaps the ONLY day that they truly expect might be in some way about them. the day they get to be star of the show

>wedding industry puffs these american girls dreams of their wedding up to extremes

>forced out of wedding dress on wedding day by a random bishop they've never met in their life because it's debatably not modest or white enough (even though it was made by a mormon dress shop) who also says your name wrong. you're not allowed to speak, and especially if you're in a larger city or a busy day, your wedding ceremony feels more like being processed at the DMV than a celebration of your love and commitment to each other. factory pace 15 minute wedding

>bishop follows you to the reception and loudly tells everyone that you and your new husband are the least important part of the ceremony because actually the holiness of the mormon temple church is what's really been proven today. better not get distracted by young love when really it's the Mormon Church That Matters

at least these are the throughlines i've noticed. i've never watched a woman's "I left the Mormon Church" video that didn't mention her wedding and how much it sucked absolute shit the whole time.

mormons think they're normal perfectly average christians until endowment because people who aren't endowed aren't allowed in the temple even if they're a mormon child in a mormon family. (to the point that exmormon youtubers and social media personalities regularly get comments from mormon youths saying that they're lying about the temple and endowment and all of it). + endowment takes place after high school graduation and the expectation is to marry YOUNG. so these girls are generally 18-22 (up to 24 if she both went to college and on mission), brand new to a church that runs on social pressure and expectation, and trained for their whole lives to obey and trust authority without question while ignoring their own feelings and misgivings. the consumerist american values and ideas of the wedding are in full play, including ideas that are WAY more powerful for mormon girls. it being the bride's day is supercharged in importance when the bride knows she will never get another day.

i think in the mormon girls' consciousness, she always knows she's going to be second fiddle. or fourth or fifth. she'll never hold the priesthood or be a leader to her family or community and even in the afterlife, she's beholden on her husband to call her forth by a secret name into paradise. and he can choose not to. but this day is supposed to be the day where she gets to be her own person and honored for her necessity to the whole process even if she's in a support role. where she gets to be recognized and honored for the role she's committed to.

and then. she likely can't wear her wedding dress and will be forced to buy another one in the mormon church giftshop that also sells the secret underwear. even if she does get to wear her dress, she has to put the shit quality mass manufactured one-size-fits-all temple garments on over it to feel ugly and undifferentiable during the ceremony. and her wedding ceremony is conducted in a factory style and it's exactly the same as the other girls that have gone ahead of her. to the point the bishops regularly get their names wrong. and then they don't get to exchange vows. and then they literally aren't allowed to have any kind of wedding celebration disconnected from the church so they can't hold a reception without a bishop in attendance to spend the whole time denigrating the importance of her relationship with her husband and telling all the non-mormons that the most special part of the day is over and they weren't allowed in because they're not holy enough and this reception is just a stupid meaningless party. telling everyone that the only part of the day that the bride had any say over and the only part where she's meant to be special means nothing and is nothing. the part that matters is the part where she doesn't.

during what is supposed to be her special day, she probably never feels more reduced to being an interchangeable hole whose purpose is producing flesh children and spirit babies. any other girl could have been standing there with your husband and it wouldn't have made a single difference. and this is the day your whole life has been leading to.

like, it's the young ages and the recent surprise of what the church actually is and the unbelievable sexism to their liturgy and how it's all mutually exclusive to an american wedding culture that mormon girls are primed to invest in. like these girls talk about picking out baby names and starting wedding scrapbooks at like 8. they're all trained by their religion to be the girl in class that is the most obsessed with getting married and having babies and then, right before what they've been dreaming of for their entire life finally happens, all of those dreams are crushed into dust and replaced with something i think every american would call a very bad wedding.

like. when you think about how a non-mormon girl who started her wedding scrapbooks at age 8 would react to the priest at her wedding getting her name wrong, to not being able to wear her dress, to not being able to choose her venue or have her different religion family members and loved ones in attendance, to have the same guy who got your name wrong in the ceremony follow you to the reception and continue to shit on your relationship in order to remind everyone that the Church is Most Important? she'd murder that priest and burn the fucking building down with everyone in it, laughing while people fled. and then she'd have a re-do and no one would be surprised. the mormon girls seem to leave the church about it, which is basically burning their whole lives down with how enmeshed the mormon church demands you be.

(For the audience, an epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant, like plants that grow on tree branches or something like that)

So strange!

Like I would have thought that the grass blades would do great dangling down from branches since they could just keep growing until reaching the ground, and the drought tolerance of grasses and fibrous roots would also help, and they're monocots just like orchids which are commonly epiphytes, and growing in a tree gives a height advantage to wind-distributed pollen...

Plus grasses are really slaying in the terrestrial niche so there probably isn't much pressure to evolve to exploit new niches.

I bet it's herbivory. Orchids and many ferns really get their shit wrecked by deer chomping on them, so any orchid that could get up in a tree where the herbivores can't reach would have a serious advantage over those losers on the ground getting chomped.

Wonder if i can speed up the process a little. Get some Poa annua and breed it for rooting characteristics necessary to anchor in tree bark

(I choose Poa annua because that species is the first vascular plant to colonize all seven continents since becoming an invasive species in a small part of Antarctica, and the first plant to evolve resistance to seven herbicide modes of action at once—observed in a Poa annua in a golf course in Tennessee. It is a great conqueror.)

Flowering plants in general didn't appear until relatively late. (Grass is a flowering plant, even though it doesn't have the brightly colored petals we usually associate with flowers, because it is pollinated by wind and not insects.)

For most of Earth's history, a lot of the places that are full of grasses and wildflowers now, were filled with plants from groups that nowadays only have a few surviving species. For example, horsetails: a class of plants that used to be everywhere and have a lot of different families, but now the only survivors are the genus Equisetum.

Another example is the lycophytes, also known as clubmosses, which is confusing because they are not mosses, they are actually a sister group to all other vascular plants.

Lycophytes that exist today are small, but there used to be huge ones that grew into massive trees, in fact the forests that formed a lot of our coal deposits were made of these plants (This art is by Falconaumanni of Wikipedia!)