The parts my editor cut

Today, many scientists acknowledge the troubling attitudes that have long plagued research projects in Indigenous communities [...] But some Indigenous groups feel that despite such well-intentioned initiatives, their inclusion in research is only a token gesture to satisfy a funding agency.

Has everyone just believed this whole time that I bring it up for optics?

Everyone nods, "of course he mentions Indigenous people," because they believe it would simply look bad for me if I didn't.

In fact Indigenous knowledge is a constant topic of conversation and point of reference when I discuss my work as a scientist who uses Western science because my work is useless without it.

I work with endangered species which are endangered solely due to continual colonial violence against people and the land. I can follow the Western scientific method all I want and publish 100 papers on how to fix salmon populations—and get nowhere without Indigenous knowledge and sovereignty.

Indigenous knowledge is not an afterthought to reference as back up to Western science. Believe it or not, we can and should lead any number of scientific projects with Indigenous knowledge.

Meet me in the woods, I have a secret to tell you 🪭⚔️

My illustration for My Liege - A Queer Knights in Love artbook from @dames-zine and @novaandmali !

48 hours left on the KS!

They call themselves the children of the Sunlight Sisters fandom. This tends to pop up whenever the sls get mentioned or Celine gets seen around and about. A common thing is that the Huntrix fandom tries to make the Sunlight Sisters trend on certain dates to ‘support their moms’

So there’s the picture of Mira checking in on Zoey/Rumi’s stream that’s a meme (it means ‘Are you ok? Need anything????) But there’s also Rumi crawling over the green screen (I MUST tell you this right now) gifs of Zoey bouncing up and down (excited!) gifs of Rumi snapping her head up to glare at certain fans at events (used to mean I heard that !!!!) and Rumi when Zoey pulled the green screen down all of the sudden (a replacement for :0

‘New Sunlight Lore dropped’ = Rumi mentioned Celine the tiniest amount in passing

‘New Sunlight Lore dropped!!’ = Rumi mentioned Celine in context of her childhood

‘NEW SUNLIGHT LORE DROPPED!!!!’ = actual new Sunlight lore dropped

‘Call the lore master’, used as a tag for Zoey if someone has questions about either about the Sunlight Sisters or the random memes and trends of the Huntrix fandom

‘She just looms’, a defense against people thinking Mira is the leader/mean. Got made backwards compatible with Celine in the Sunlight fandom then made its way back to modern Celine.

‘Rumi is an international wanted criminal’, an in joke about how Rumi is probably breaking laws when she buys plants from around the world and brings them home

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.