Seasons, Teaching, and Adventures

"I can teach you to bind hair into a net to catch heat," the wizard said, "using arcane counting and a pair of fine wands."

After a while, the man said "Isn't this knitting?"

I did the “compare” part as well – not sure how 696969696 and -696969696 work - they’re not hexidecimal codes and I didn’t bother to poke around the linked sites.

It's impossible to overstate the necessity Salmon have been to entire cultures for tens of thousands of years.

I get that the humor around this video may not be "that deep," but capitalism and colonialism divide us all from the sacredness and inherent value of all lives. Many of us have become completely disconnected from the cycles of life which support us every day and from the food that nourishes us. If a music edit about salmon moves you, hold onto that. Foster that! Salmon have always moved us. Listen to a story in Tlingit about the Salmon People:

Shanyaak’utlaax̱: Salmon Boy Told in Tlingit (with English Subtitles) - YouTube Find stories about Salmon in the Irish Folklore Collection:

Read about what Salmon are to Peoples of the North Pacific, from the Ainu people to the Ulchi people:

It's impossible to overstate the necessity Salmon have been to entire cultures for tens of thousands of years.

I get that the humor around this video may not be "that deep," but capitalism and colonialism divide us all from the sacredness and inherent value of all lives. Many of us have become completely disconnected from the cycles of life which support us every day and from the food that nourishes us. If a music edit about salmon moves you, hold onto that. Foster that! Salmon have always moved us. Listen to a story in Tlingit about the Salmon People:

Shanyaak’utlaax̱: Salmon Boy Told in Tlingit (with English Subtitles) - YouTube Find stories about Salmon in the Irish Folklore Collection:

Read about what Salmon are to Peoples of the North Pacific, from the Ainu people to the Ulchi people:

My adaptation of the God of Arepo short story, which was originally up at ShortBox Comics Fair for charity. You can get a copy of the DRM-free ebook here for free - and I'd encourage you to donate to Mighty Writers or The Ministry of Stories in exchange.

Instagram poets could never!

There is easy low hanging fruit here, especially about the US and salty tea. And I'm so SO tempted.

But also I'm super in to tea and I'm bored.

The perfect cup of tea is how you want to drink it, and if you do not LIKE tea then drinking it a different way, or a different kind of tea, vastly changes it.

A pinch of salt makes things less bitter, this trick also works with coffee. But other things that affect taste are tempriture, length of time it brews, where the tea was grown, the climate, the soil, and how big the leaves are. Some of the cheapest tea has little more than dust in the tea bag while more expensive teas you will notice have more structure to the leaves.

Tea brewed in colder tempeitures needs longer and creates a different taste. It may require more tea to get the specific flavour you want, and generally it is less bitter for it. Similar thing to spices where if you cook them, use them hot, toast them first, etc, you get a different set of flavours to using them cold.

Like wine, tea can have lots of flavour profiles and colours. Assam for example is very dark, malty, and strong, it can get quite bitter. Ceylon is much lighter. Darjeeling is good with lemon, but Assam is better with milk, in my humble opinion. Lapsang Sushong is very smokey. Earl Grey

Most people will drink a mix. English breakfast is usually a mix of Assam, Ceylon, and Kenyan. Earl Grey is flavoured with bergamot.

White, green, and black tea all come from the same plant, just different parts of it, treated differently. Black tea can take a higher tempriture, but boiling water on green and white tea will scorch the leaves and make it very bitter. Agitating the tea can also have this effect as it releases more tannin.

As a general rule there is a tea for everyone, and a way to drink it that you will enjoy, whether that's hot, cold, mixing it with spices, flavourings, fruit, milk, sugar, lemon, and yes, even a pinch of salt.

My friend just sent me this and I really hope it's real cause it's hilarious.

Edit: OH MY GOD ITS REAL

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Harvesting honey does not murder bees.

The device pictured above does not mash up bees or their hives.

There’s no ethical concern when it comes to eating honey, it’s totally ethical as food is concerned.

Bees manufacture honey using pollen. They store it in the cells of their hive, where it’s used as food for the colony, particularly the larvae growing into the next generation of bees.

When you harvest honey, you remove parts of the hive that are being used to store the honey, without taking any bees along for the ride. Those parts of the hive are then put into a device, like the centrifugal extractor shown above by gemstone-gynoid, where the parts are spun really fast to pull extract the honey. The honey gets collected on the walls of the extractor, drips down, and can then be filtered and bottled for human use.

So.

It turns out that bees love making honey and can make more of it than they’d ever need. It also turns out that beekeepers taking care of hives and harvesting their honey keeps bees healthy and thriving, more so than they’d normally accomplish on their own. And we really need bees healthy and thriving because they help us grow an astonishing amount of food by pollinating plants.

Apparently it's an ongoing mystery why dandelions in North America are so diverse, when all dandelions that have been found so far are apomicts that reproduce only by cloning themselves.

However, any given site will have many distinct dandelion genotypes, with many different traits.

For example, a site might have one dandelion strain that blooms primarily in fall, and another that blooms primarily in spring.

One theory is that there's new genetic information constantly coming in from Eurasia somehow. Apparently dandelion seeds can spread on the wind 150 KILOMETERS! Perhaps some are just blown across the ocean in a storm? But if that's the case, why weren't dandelions found all over North America already when European settlers came?

And YES, weed is a valid "category" of plant, they are plants falling under one or both of the following categories:

Disturbance-adapted "disaster species" whose niche is to rapidly establish themselves in recently disrupted or destroyed environments. When a tornado or flood wipes out the existing plant community, the weeds are the first to return, and they get the restoration process started

Plants that have co-evolved with humans to live in human-created environments (like agricultural fields)

Yes! They are symbiotic with us! It's cool because everyone knows about artificial selection as a means of creating crops and domesticated animals, but humans have also selected the traits of weeds for thousands of years, and they have evolved a lot in response!

Many weeds of crops have changed the times and seasons when they bloom and produce seed so they can live in fields. Their growth shape and rate has changed. They have even evolved to mimic crops in a cool process called Vavilovian mimicry!

And what's even cooler

Is that weeds often get domesticated into crops themselves! Some of our crops probably started out as weeds.

And also, crops can turn back into weeds! In Europe, teosinte, the wild ancestor of maize, has become an agricultural weed...and the CRAZIEST part, is that it has obtained genes from genetically modified corn crops, and become resistant to herbicides as a result!

Weeds kind of follow us around and hang out at the edges of our settlements, perhaps in the same way domesticated dogs and cats must have done. Whenever you see Queen Anne's Lace at the edge of the road, consider that it is also known as Wild Carrot... (but don't try eating it, Poison Hemlock can look pretty similar!)

And they evolve FAST. We think about evolution as occurring slowly, over millions of years, but weeds constantly challenge what we think we know about evolution, demonstrating that organisms can evolve in the blink of an eye—in just a few decades. Some of them have even turned into new species.

And of course many of us have heard about herbicide resistant weeds. Chemicals like Glyphosate (Roundup) were thought to be a miracle for revolutionizing agriculture, but weeds are rapidly evolving resistance to herbicides, and every passing year they get stronger and more effective at resisting these chemicals. Amaranthus palmeri, a species of Amaranth, has been found resistant to SIX different herbicide families AT ONCE.

The most accomplished of all herbicide survivors is a little Poa annua found on a golf course, which resisted seven families of herbicide.

Sometimes they change the chemical mechanisms the herbicides target. Sometimes they release enzymes that neutralize the herbicide. Sometimes they make a hundred duplicates of the gene that codes for the protein targeted by the herbicide. Sometimes they create little storage closets in their cells where they stuff all the herbicide away where it can't hurt them. Sometimes they strengthen the protective coating of their leaves so the herbicide can't absorb. It used to be that these adaptations had a fitness cost, but the plants are getting better at it. There's Amaranth now that is completely unaffected by doses of herbicide 18 times what is recommended on the label.

Did you know Amaranth is edible? Just a fun fact...

Weeds are such an awesome, almost spiritually potent facet of nature. They are liminal creatures, always existing on the margins, defying the boundary between wild and tame. They are the food and medicine that sustains our bodies, essential to our civilizations from the very beginning, but they destroy our ambitions of control.

They are plants of the immigrant and enslaved, the friend of the impoverished and marginalized, essential to the lives of the poor all throughout history, and the scourge and ruiner of hollow aesthetics of wealth. They take care of us. Yarrow which dressed the wounds of Achilles, Kudzu which clothed the people of China for thousands of years and fed them through many famines, Dandelion which is good for food and has myriad medicinal properties, Pokeweed which is poison if prepared incorrectly, but important food for the impoverished, Amaranth which fed the great empires of Mesoamerica...

Wherever we are, weeds are too. They evolve rapidly and continuously, eternally transforming themselves so they can never be destroyed. They sustain and heal us, but we are powerless to control them. Weeds are inevitable, indomitable, and an inherent consequence of Nature's movement and powerful striving to LIVE.

And they are innately tied to our existence. We made weeds. Weeds made us. They remind us that we are part of Nature's movement—however we alter and shape the world around us, something adapts, stitching the gap shut as soon as it is opened. We exist on this earth, therefore a great diversity of life DEPENDS on our existence.

No that isn’t just a birch tree,

That’s the Sisters Rosamund, Lyonesse, and Miranda, They are under a shape shifting curse and trapping themselves inside a tree is the only safe way for them to figure out how to break it.