Shichibukai's Playground

But anime and video game boob jiggling is like. The most uncanny valley shit I've ever seen nine times out of ten. You would think people this horny about tits would have actually looked at some but I guess not.

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Folks who grew up watching a heavy browed, eyebrow-less, broad shouldered, tall, strong, gothic, romantic dude with long flowing dark hair who broods and reads books but can also tear people to shreds and bench press houses and have ladies fling themselves into their arms while half the world wants them dead for just being themselves are

wait

shit

In the Eastern USA, only tiny remnants of old-growth forest remain; all the rest, over 99%, was clear-cut within the last 100-150 years.

Most tree species here have a lifespan of 300-500 years—likely longer, since extant examples of truly old trees are so rare, there is limited ability to study them. In a suburban environment, almost all of the trees you see around you are mere saplings. A 50 year old oak tree is a youth only beginning its life.

The forest where I work is 100 years old; it was clear cut around 1920. It is still so young.

When I dig into the ground there, there is a layer about an inch thick of rich, plush, moist, fragrant topsoil, packed with mycelium and light and soft as a foam mattress. Underneath that the ground becomes hard and chalky in color, with a mineral odor.

It takes 100 years to build an inch of topsoil.

That topsoil, that marvelous, rich, living substance, took 100 years to build.

I am sorry your textbooks lied to you. Do you remember pictures in diagrams of soil layers, with a six-inch topsoil layer and a few feet of subsoil above bedrock?

That's not true anymore. If you are not an "outdoorsy" person that hikes off trail in forests regularly, it is likely that you have never touched true topsoil. The soil underlying lawns is depleted, compacted garbage with hardly any life in it. It seems more similar to rocks than soil to me now.

You see, tilling the soil and repeatedly disturbing it for agriculture destroys the topsoil layer, and there is no healthy plant community to regenerate it.

The North American prairies used to hold layers of topsoil more than eight or nine feet deep. That was a huge carbon sink, taking carbon out of the atmosphere and storing it underground.

Then European colonists settled the prairie and tried to drive the bison to extinction as part of the plan to drive Native Americans to extinction, and plowed up that topsoil...and the results were devastating. You might recall being taught about the Dust Bowl. Disrupting that incredible topsoil layer held in place by 12-foot-tall prairie grasses and over 100 different wildflower species caused the nation to be engulfed in horrific dirt storms that turned the sky black and had people hundreds of miles away coughing up clods of mud and sweeping thick drifts of dirt out of their homes.

But plowing is fundamental to agricultural civilizations at their very origins! you might say.

Where did those early civilizations live? River valleys.

Why river valleys? They're fertile because of seasonal flooding that deposits rich silt that can then be planted in.

And where does that silt come from?

Well, a huge river is created by smaller rivers coming together, which is created by smaller creeks coming together, which have their origins in the mountains and uplands, which are no good for farming but often covered in rich, dense forests.

The forests create the rich soil that makes agriculture possible. An ancient forest is so powerful, it brings life to civilizations and communities hundreds of miles away.

You may have heard that cattle farming is a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. A huge chunk of that is just the conversion of an existing forest or grassland to pasture land. Robust plant communities like forests, wetlands, and grasslands are carbon sinks, storing carbon and removing it from the atmosphere. The destruction of these environments is a direct source of carbon emissions.

All is not lost. Nature knows how to regenerate herself after devastating events; she's done so countless times before, and forests are not static places anyway. They are in a constant state of regrowth and change. Human caretakers have been able to manage ancient forests for thousands of years. It is colonialism and the ideology of profit and greed that is so destructive, not human presence.

I have been in a sod house. They only last 5 years or so, because the grasses holding the soil together are obviously dead at that point so they don't hold the soil together indefinitely. But a local historical village used to have one that was rebuilt every time it started collapsing. It was incredible, the density of the chunks of sod and the insulation capabilities were incredibly impressive. It was almost cold inside in the summer (when it was 104 deg F and like 95% humidity outside) and even without any regular running of a stove was warmer inside than out.

But it doesn't exist any more and hasn't for at least 20 years, because there is absolutely nowhere to get sod any more. The last couple times it was rebuilt was with "farmed" sod, stuff grown specifically for projects that needed large bricks of tight packed sod or from former farm fields that had been left fallow for years, and that started out less solid than old growth sod. Then even that wasn't available any more because all of the land is being constantly farmed (with a few small pockets of reconstructed prairie that thankfully isn't available for cutting up).

All of that was made possible because of native plants like those above and the deep, complex root systems they had been growing for hundreds (thousands?) of years. Imagine how much carbon that could hold, and how much *water* it could absorb.

The area I live in is along a sizable river which floods every spring. It is just a normal part of spring, and has been for my entire life, to fill up sandbags, close the low-lying roads, lose access to the parks, and speculate on how high the river will get. The only hills in town are man-made dikes that have been built to be permanent flood protection.

As a teenager and adult I started wondering how the early European farmers in this area survived floods, because along the river was understandably the favored farmland.

...Trans men are literally dying in the closet, just to prove to you how good they are, how not-toxic and not-sexist and not-selfish they are, how committed they are to "changing womanhood from the inside," how much they care about you and about women and about feminism – they're dying, and they're still trying to keep you comfortable, and you can't be bothered to care about them for one brief second. Take that thought home, sit with it, eat with it, let it sing you to sleep. What does that tell you about who you are?"

The reason I used this instead of a simple yes or no answer is because it opened up conversation. Instead of blindly looking for permission, the conversation became more about cause and effect. Usually it navigated the "well you can't tell me what to do I'm going to do it anyway" instinct in kids when I'd say no, because all they were looking for is something to challenge them.

For example: "Can I jump off the slide?"

"Technically you can, but should you?"

If they answer no, I'd ask why. Usually they'd say because it's against the rules or I don't know.

If they say it's against the rules, I'd ask them why they think it's a rule. And if they'd say I don't know, I'd explain that the slide is five feet off of the ground, and jumping that high is a good way to hurt your knees or worse.

And then the most important part: if you did do it, how can you make it safer?

That's when the creativity juices started to flow. I'd get anything from pillows to beds to bouncy shoes to wings to someone catching them (which became a whole different conversation). And I told them since we didn't have those things here, it wasn't safe. And safety is everyone's number one job at school.

It stopped them from doing it behind my back. It got them to engage in critical thinking. And it helped them figure out how to do things without help.

His name is Kris Zhaokai (kris_zhaokai on Xiaohongshu/Red Note) and his creations are incredible

I actually ended up having a surreal and jarring one-on-one conversation with Luis von Ahn, the founder and CEO, who reached out to me after a scathing critique I posted on Reddit started to get significant traction.

Talking to him was like talking to someone who had been brainwashed by a cult. I told him how I and others in my life had found Duolingo so useful and efficient for language learning, and that its usefulness was evidenced by me noticing a real-world improvement in ability to listen to, understand, and speak the languages I had been practicing, but that recent changes had made it dramatically less useful to where I needed to put much more time in to get the same amount out.

His response was like "But all our metrics are up, our data shows that our changes are working." It was so frustrating. The metrics were all about engagement. He was showing people were spending more time practicing languages, not that they were getting more real-world ability to converse in those languages. Practice time was going up but actual language ability was going down. I tried explaining that to him but he seemed completely unable and/or unwilling to understand my point.

It was like talking to a wall.

I left the conversation with any remaining faith in the Duolingo leadership completely shattered, and I completely withdrew from using the site.

Busuu - Busuu is what I used while studying Chinese and Japanese, and the app is comparable to Duolingo.

MangoLanguages - Many library systems are offering access to this to free! Make sure to check to see if your library card gives you access to this resource.

Great Courses Plus - They also have a ton of language material, and are often offered through libraries!

Linkedin Learning - Multiple language (and other!) options, also available through many public libraries.

Anki - Gives you access to thousands of flashcards and the ability to make your own.

Pimsleur - Pimsleur is one of the most highly recommended language programs, especially if you're working for a conversational level.

Other alternatives to consider are Youtube, often a great place for smaller schools and creators to post content. I supplement my classes with Easy German, and I used to be pretty reliant on EveryDay Chinese to practice my tones. If you're looking to learn it, there's bound to be a channel out there that is tailored toward your language learning.