Owlie's Domain

-you need to wear sunscreen if youre going out in the sun. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. You don't need the expensive designer stuff but please just wear sun protection.

-you still need sunscreen if you are black or dark-skinned. Not only can you still sunburn, but direct UV light exposure also increases your risk of skin cancer, no matter how much melanin you have. There's tons of brands out there that are made for darker skin tones that don't leave that ashy finish behind, you just need to know the terms to look for. Look for the words "tinted, matte, mattifying," and shea butter-based sunscreens. There's also lots of brands that are formulated with your skin tone in mind. I don't have any to recommend unfortunately because I don't have experience needing that, but I know they are out there.

-if youre very hairy and cream sunscreens get caught in your body hair and glob up, get a spray sunscreen instead. It'll get in all the nooks and crannies instead of getting caught in your hair. Spray sunscreens are also good for those who have troubles with the effort and time it takes to put on sunscreen. Just make sure you spray it in a well ventilated area or, better yet, under cover outside, like on a porch or balcony.

-dont believe the fearmongering about chemical sunscreens. They're much more reliably protective than mineral sunscreens are. Thats because theyre chemically formulated in lab settings to be consistently protective and keep on shelves for long periods of time, while mineral sunscreens have a bad habit of ingredient separation and uneven formula mixes. Really, unless youre swimming directly in the great barrier reef or you have a specific skin condition or allergy to the ingredients in chemical sunscreens (the only customer i actually recommended our mineral sunscreen to over our chemical one was a regular who had skin cancer), you don't need a mineral sunscreen. Your wallet will also suffer less.

-you might have to double cleanse in the shower to get all sunscreen residue off your skin. Thats a good thing actually, it means your sunscreen is really good at barrier protection, but its also annoying. The way to do this without drying out your skin too much is by doing one quick cleanse of your skin with about half the soap you's typically use just to loosen up that residue and dirt, and then another deep, proper clean like you usually would that will get it all off. While leftover residue isn't really a health risk at all, it can clog your pores over time and cause uncomfortable acne breakouts, as well as trap dust and dirt under all the gunk. It can also get on your bedsheets.

-if you double cleanse, I recommend moisturizing after because it does dry you out a bit. You don't need a big fancy designer moisturizer either, just go to the drug store and get their basic pump bottle of body lotion, and separate facial moisturizer (the separation matters, the skin on your face is a lot more thin and delicate than the skin on your body). The main thing you want to look for with any product is that you arent allergic or sensitive to the active ingredients and avoid anything that uses alcohol as a binding ingredient.

-hats, hats, hats!! They keep the sun out of your eyes and your face!! You cant put sunscreen on your eyeballs!! Wear hats!!

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

Canebrakes built up incredibly rich, fertile soil and are amazing at preventing erosion. They form incredibly strong mats of rhizomes. And their roots are known to go 10 feet deep into the soil.

Captain Amelia, voiced by Emma Thompson

Wildwood – Official Teaser Trailer

The year is 1519, and you are Hernán Cortés. You and all of your compatriots are stuck in the most effective way to make someone a bad person: put them in a situation where they must become incredibly wealthy and powerful incredibly fast or else they will die horribly. Transatlantic voyages are absurdly expensive. Anyone in the ‘New World’ who isn’t rich enough to afford their own army is deeply in debt, with no collateral but their own sword-arm. It is an environment that does not reward half-measures. It does not even reward full measures. It only rewards putting a brick on the gas pedal and crossing your fingers - if you kill one person then you’re a murderer, but if you kill hundreds of thousands of people then you're a paragon of glory and the Spanish crown will make statues of you.

The year is still 1519 and you are Moctezuma II, Huēyi Tlahtoāni (great ruler) of the ‘Aztec Empire,’ also known as the Triple Alliance, or the Mexica. You know a thing or two about half-measures not being rewarded, because you are in a process of rapidly expanding and consolidating a nascent Mesoamerican empire. You are quite good at your job - even before you ascended to the throne, you cultivated a reputation as a skilled warrior, a dedicated student, and a devout worshiper. Your name means something like ‘lord who frowns in anger.’ It’s a fitting name, because the process of ‘imperial expansion and consolidation’ generally involves killing lots of people. To make matters worse, some weird hairy white guys showed up out of nowhere and they keep demanding an audience with you. You try every trick in the diplomatic handbook - deferment, threats, flattery, bribes - but everything you do just seems to make them more single-mindedly focused on your destruction. Later, after you are dead, they will claim that you thought they were gods.

The year is 1545, and this whole ‘colonialism’ thing is starting to peter out. Trans-Atlantic voyages are still ruinously expensive, and the pickings are getting slimmer every day - it’s not like you can go loot Tenochtitlan a second time. You’re starting to wonder if it’s time for everyone to pack up, go home, and forget about… holy shit is that a mountain of silver? Is that an honest-to-god mountain with more silver in it than every other existing silver mine on the face of the earth combined? Yes. Some call it Potosí. Many will call it “the mountain that eats men.” In a single moment, colonialism goes from a plundering campaign for recently-unemployed soldiers to a permanent institution. The alchemists back in Prague and Vienna never learned how to turn lead into gold, but the mercenaries and taskmasters in Potosí found a much simpler equation to turn blood into silver.

The year is 1571, and the economy of the Ming dynasty doesn’t feel so good. Their experiment with paper money was a failure, to put it gently. It turns out when you try to have paper currency but you don’t have sophisticated counterfeit protections and there’s also a booming cottage industry of people making paper in their actual cottages, well, you can guess how that ends. So you’re trying to shift to a silver economy. But then you run into an even bigger problem: you don’t have enough silver. So if you start demanding taxes in silver, the price of silver will skyrocket, which means taxes will skyrocket when the economy is already ailing from the whole ‘paper money’ thing. Some hapless scholar-official in Guangdong is nervously watching a peasant sharpen his pitchfork when he gets word from a messenger: some gweilo just showed up at the port with literal shipfuls of silver and they want to buy silk, tea, spices, and porcelain at outrageous markups.

Within living memory, the world was still ‘medieval’ in many ways - slow, parochial, zero-sum, carefully arbitrated by tradition and precedent. Legible. And now Spanish sailors take Bolivian silver on ships guarded by West African mercenaries and Japanese ronin, sailing to their colony in the Philippines to rub shoulders with Chinese officials, Indian sultans, and Malay merchants. All because some dipshit from Genoa got his math wrong and wouldn’t shut up about it.