Take Two

another commission! a pair of sea otters persisting, despite the horrors

(and a slightly better view of the otter on the right)

Turns out you can roll a 7 on a d6

Remember the sixpencee child slave thing? What happened there, exactly? Was the kid freed? No? They were just run off the website? OK so what good exactly did that do?

Remember the bone stealing witch? What exactly did that witchhunt accomplish? The person got arrested, oh that's great, the american justice system surely rectified the situation

And again, those are instances where the accusations were true and involved real substantive harm to another person. We used to joke on here how callout posts were shit like "receipts below: [several paragraphs of petty fandom drama] [three paragraphs of petty interpersonal drama involving cheating on partners or stealing food out of the fridge or something] [fabricated evidence that the person is responsible for the murder of JonBenét Ramsey]"

And that was back in the 2010s. The meta has changed. Callouts used to be a tool people used to point out actual harm a person had done, rarely, and more commonly were used as a means of bullying somebody over petty drama. Nowadays they're used to manufacture outrage and harassment against marginalized populations. They are a weapon bigots use to turn us against each other. A few manufactured accusations here, some out of context or clipped screenshots there, and people who should be standing in solidarity with each other against white supremacy, patriarchy, cisheteronormativity, are instead devouring each other.

It's sinister as shit, dude, and people will still share these accusations without a second thought. So, why? What is the point? What's the best case scenario here? Raising "awareness?" what the fuck is that supposed to accomplish? Will we get the oh-so-trustworthy authorities involved? Are we hoping for an arrest? A conviction? Throwing a queer or poc person in prison so they can be abused and assaulted and humiliated behind bars? Is that who we are?

Callouts and the like don't serve any real good in the world. At a macro scale they divide us when we should be standing together, and at a micro scale they result in deeply traumatic never-ending harassment and threats and doxxing and worse to a person who almost definitely does not deserve it. And again, for what? A sense of "justice?" this is not justice. This is retribution. It is punishment.

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

ONE YEAR LATER! The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo is available for pre-order worldwide (links below)

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

*and barking. and LIES

me: my dude we just woke up!! It’s time for wakefulness and doing things and Productivity