Emily's Notepad.

THIS IS MY MOBILE BACKGROUND:

But living walls? Mighty sexy

They provide natural insulation, which not only keeps the heat in during cold days, but keeps the heat out during hot ones. It's better planned and maintained than vines (depending on the plant ofc).

Flooding in urban areas can be reduced since the roots and the growing medium will hold in moisture. Air can be purified, and heat can be reduced because of evaporation.

There used to be trees around where I live but in the last 10 years the city officials were gradually cutting them down either as dead/sick (they were not) or growing too close to tha walkway/buildings (somehow this was not a problem earlier).

This elephant is Chendra, the Bornean Pygmy elephant who was placed at the Oregon Zoo by the Malaysian government after she was shot by poachers as a calf and blinded in one eye. (Sometimes you’ll hear that she’s the only pygmy elephant in a zoo, but there’s a couple other orphans who have been placed in zoos in Europe). 

I’ve been reading a lot on Twitter about the huge ICE raid on the poultry processing plant in Mississippi– here’s a link to a news story about it if you haven’t read anything about it, just for background. There are many layers of horror to it– one being that the plant was in the process of unionizing and had just won a big sexual harassment settlement, another being that ICE spent months setting up the raid and quite deliberately neglected to involve any social services to prevent the arrested workers’ children from coming home to empty houses on the first day of school, because the cruelty is the point– and of course the overarching realization that the plant owners basically invited ICE in to take care of their pesky workers-rights problems, and so on.

The major takeaway is, this company, Koch Foods, is terrible in every single way, and is everything any person of decency regardless of their political alignment should deplore. (Another takeaway is that this raid was absolutely scheduled, on behalf of a major donor to Trump’s campaign, to be a campaign event for Trump 2020, because of how much publicity it would attract and how clear a message it sends about this administration’s priorities.) I’ve seen a lot of good analysis of this on Twitter; here’s a good thread, and others are linked to from there. Here’s the thread I read that really got me going. 

I keep thinking about it, though, from the perspective of someone who is a poultry processing worker. That’s what I do, among other things, on my sister’s farm; mostly I’m an eviscerator but I work other places on the line when necessary, mostly plucking, sometimes removing necks, things like that. I wrote a Twitter thread about what this is all making me think about, here, but I don’t have many followers, and so not many people have responded. So I’m going to restate my point here.

Customers ask us all about the chicken. How humanely is it raised. What are the accommodations like for the birds. Sometimes people ask us about how this affects the flavor; do happy chickens taste better? Lots of people want to know what kind of feed the chickens get, if the corn’s GMO. I occasionally have someone angrily demanding to know why the chicken’s not grass-fed. (If you’re curious, chickens aren’t ruminants, so they can’t survive on just grass, and only eat it because they like it; the point of raising them on pasture is not so much to let them eat grass so much as to avoid the really terrible shit you get from the more efficient and yet disgusting confinement operations that are the commercial standard. Now you know.)

Nobody’s ever asked me about the slaughterhouse workers. 

I sometimes volunteer that the birds are processed on-premises, meaning they don’t have to be transported in inhumane conditions to a strange and possibly unsanitary place. People like that, but mostly don’t want to know.

So think about that, as you’re considering cutting meat from your diet, and such. Because all agricultural workers are subject to similar pressures, whether they handle livestock or vegetables. I certainly encourage you to seek out local foodways, and consider sustainability and such. But I urge you to think alongside all that about who processes your food. Who collects the eggs you pay sixty-nine cents for a dozen of. (Hint: human traffickers supply a lot of the workers who staff commercial production chicken egg facilities.) Who harvests your strawberries, who picks your grapes, who picks your tomatoes. You can stop eating meat, but you can’t just entirely stop eating. 

The reason the farm’s eggs cost six bucks a dozen, the reason our chicken is $5.50/lb., isn’t just the organic-certified feed. It’s the fact that the workers want to be there. And the farm doesn’t even pay that well. I would go so far as to say you literally could not pay me enough to process poultry; I do it for love, I do it because I believe in it, I do it because it has to be done and I am rewarded by the sense of community I get. But that’s a choice I’ve made (and one that’s a choice in the first place because of a lot of privileges and advantages I have). 

The decision to source your food locally isn’t just about the environment in terms of carbon footprint, in terms of sustainability– it’s about confronting the hidden human costs of cheap food. 

Maybe it’s time we stopped looking away from those human costs. 

What a lot of fans, especially more casual ones, don’t seem to realize is that the currency in the Pokemon games it based on the Japanese yen. The symbol for the currency in the games even resembles the yen symbol:

In fact, according to Bulbapedia, the ‘Poke dollar’ symbol was specifically created for the English translations of the games, and the original Japanese versions use the yen symbol.

Now, for perspective, although the exact exchange rate naturally varies, a US dollar is equivalent to about 120 Japanese yen. So, 200 yen is about $1.67. 

A Pokeball in the Pokemon games actually cost less then two bucks. 

There’s a REASON we see so many young kids training Pokemon, especially early in the games. The cost of investing into a Pokeball to try catching their own Pokemon easily falls into the range of a typical kid’s allowance. A Potion for healing after battles is 300 (or about $2.50), but since Pokemon Centers offer their healing services for free, that’s a moot point.

Youngsters in the early game only give within a range from 50-150 of the currency, which is about equivalent to $0.40-$1.25. The first Gym Leader in Hoenn Region, Roxanne, give 1,680 in Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire, equivalent to about $14. Which is about right for the equivalent of a middle or high school honors student. A later Gym Leader, Winona, gives 4,200, or about $35. The Champion, Steven, gives 11600, or $96.67.

The winnings from enemy Trainers varies, but Ace Trainers seem to give out about 1500 or $14 on average, give or take. Swimmers (especially common later in ORAS), award a range from 400-800, or $3.33-$6.67.

Vitamins (such as Calcium, Iron, and HP UP), cost 9,800 or $81.67 each. An Ultra Ball cost 1,200, or $10. A Paralyze Heal costs the same as a Pokeball, while an Awakening is half that. A Revive is 1,500, or $12.50.

What’s the point of doing this? Well, for one, to get a better sense of the in-game economics, which can be hard to grasp if one doesn’t realize the in-game ‘Poke dollars’ are based on the Japanese yen. And a look at said economics reveals some interesting details.

First, it shows basic Pokemon training and raising is well within the affordability of a ten-year old, or older. Which makes sense as Pokemon is aimed at younger kids, and the develops would want them to have the sense that going on a Pokemon journey is something they could do if they somehow ended up in the Pokemon world.

On the other hand, it also shows there’s really not that much money to be made in Pokemon raising and traning, unless you battle frequently and regularly against higher-level opponents regularly and and win. Which is…very much in line with how professional sports work in real-life. Pokemon battling gets compared to a sporting event a lot for a reason. The initial 3-D games were even called Pokemon *Stadium.* Parallels are frequently drawn between the Pokemon League tournaments and the Olympics in the anime. The low money output is probably also why we often see Gym Leaders and the like working other jobs.

Just something interesting I decided to look into. I’m a Pokemon fan first, before any other fandom, and always will be. It’s shocking that I haven’t written any meta on it yet.

Hope you enjoyed!

EDIT:  As pointed out by invenblocker:

The 1000000 price for the bicycle translates to $8259.51, which is the price of a top quality bike for proffesionals.

Excellent catch! Helps explain why the bikes can ride through stuff like snow and sand. They are of excellent make.

And it also helps explain why the bike shop owners are happy to give out their bikes to a prospective Pokemon Trainer for free (whether through a voucher or otherwise). Your average Trainer taking the Gym challenge puts those bikes through the *wringer.* Riding them along mountains, through marshes, and even through snow. But a bike being able to endure that is the kind of thing a professional rider would look for, and desire.

Most Pokemon Trainers will never be able to afford the bikes, but are in one of the best positions to push them to their limits. So giving them out for free is actually a clever marketing move. Imagine a potential buyer seeing a Trainer riding one of those bikes in Lillycove, and said Trainer reveals they rode it from Rustboro (which means they rose it around a mountain, several caves, a few marshes, and possibly other environments I’m not thinking of right now). That’s a hell of an impression to make, and a fast, easy way to sell the buyer on getting the bike themselves, especially if they ride competitively.

AO3 won the 2019 Hugo Award for Best Related Work!

Here’s the speech given by Naomi Novik when the award was accepted:

All fanwork, from fanfic to vids to fanart to podfic, centers the idea that art happens not in isolation but in community. And that is true of the AO3 itself. We’re up here accepting, but only on behalf of literally thousands of volunteers and millions of users, all of whom have come together and built this thriving home for fandom, a nonprofit and non-commercial community space built entirely by volunteer labor and user donations, on the principle that we needed a place of our own that was not out to exploit its users but to serve them.

Even if I listed every founder, every builder, every tireless support staff member and translator and tag wrangler, if I named every last donor, all our hard work and contributions would mean nothing without the work of the fan creators who share their work freely with other fans, and the fans who read their stories and view their art and comment and share bookmarks and give kudos to encourage them and nourish the community in their turn.