Pioneer Valley Witch

Oh my boys. Oh my heart.

This comic is coming for me man. His dad’s ashes!! 😭😭😭😭😭💔💔

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

It's still far from our reach.

In addition to all that was mentioned above:

The likelihood of dying in infancy or childhood--or losing a child--has plummeted just in my lifetime. The likelihood of dying in a natural disaster is the lowest in recorded human history. Yes, even with the uptick in natural disaster intensity from climate change!

Humans alive right now are more likely to have access to healthcare, electricity, education, birth control, clean water, and nutritious food than at any other point in human history. There are so many diseases we can treat now that were a death sentence for 90% of human history.

This is not by accident. This is because generations of humans put in work to make life better for their communities.

Some of our solutions had the side effect of creating other problems--better access to electricity that ultimately made people's lives easier and safer led to pollution and climate change, for example--but we are tackling those knock on problems too. Our generation's solutions to our current problems will probably create their own less-bad side effects for the humans after us to deal with.

This is my seventh post in a series I’ll be making on how to increase biodiversity on a budget! I’m not an expert--just an enthusiast--but I hope something you find here helps! 

So you’ve gotten started on making a garden to boost biodiversity! 10/10, excellent work! So, now what?

First, you’ll need to keep watering the plants--especially if you’re going through a dry season. Native plants will be more acclimated to your area’s seasonal weather, but they’ll need a helping hand while they’re getting established--especially if you’re starting with young, tender seedlings. With that in mind, if you accidentally skip out on crucial watering days, don't panic! There's been tons of times where I haven't watered for an entire summer and had perennials come back the next spring! Even this year, during a heatwave, I completely did not water my swamp milkweeds, but they're already popping back up! You may also need to go in and weed, especially if you’re seeing invasive species popping up in the garden. Invasives are no good--if you do anything, do your best to get those out as effectively and safely as possible!

If you’re needing to maintain your shrubs in spring and summer, double check to make sure there are no active bird or insect nests within them. If it’s possible to wait until later to cut your shrubs, it could be extremely beneficial.

When fall and winter come around and your plants begin to die back, don’t cut them away if you can! Many insects overwinter in the plant stems left behind as perennials die back to the roots. In addition, birds will use seed heads as a source of food over the winter. Try not to clean things up until late winter/early spring, when other food sources are beginning to come back and things are growing again. By then, the insects should be waking up and leaving the plant stems as well.

However, don’t let this discourage you from collecting seeds! Collecting seed from your plants is a great way to continue gardening at low cost, as well as making friends and encouraging others to garden by trading seeds or offering them as gifts. If you're in an area where you do need to cut back, this is a great opportunity to collect the seeds and save them for the future. You could also cut back what’s dying in the front yard and keep things to overwinter in the backyard. Some overwintering habitat is better than no overwintering habitat.

Want to know how to collect seeds from specific plants? I've found YouTube to be a great source of info for this! Knowing what you're doing and when is key to getting a viable harvest.

As your mulch begins to break down, you’ll need to keep adding more to top it off, if you can. It can get a bit repetitive, but no worries--the mulch breaking down means your soil is improving! 

If possible, add to your garden! Expand, add in new things, and keep encouraging the growth of native plants. If you couldn’t add that water feature in year one, see if you can in year two! New interest in birds? Add a birdhouse, or more bird feeders. Loving the butterflies? Add plenty more nectar-rich plants, or do more research into what they lay their eggs on! Want more color? See what else you can add in! Came into some new pots to expand your flowerpot garden with? Find cool native plants to put in them! I always encourage people to start small and then expand over time, as opposed to starting big and getting overwhelmed.

Keep learning and observing native species of birds, insects, mammals, etc. See what’s coming to your yard now, and look into how you can improve things more for them on your budget. If you aren’t seeing what you were hoping, see if there’s other actions you can take that’ll attract what you’re hoping to see in your backyard habitat. Knowing more about the world around you makes it easier to know how to help the world around you. Talk to others about what you’re doing, the changes you’ve made, and the results you’ve seen! Curious neighbors? Work friends? Your closest homies? Your family? All fair game! You just might be the one who gets someone else interested in making their space a habitat for local wildlife!

Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.

We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.

it happens every. single. time and not just in the us, it's happening right now in the uk: a right wing government runs a country into the ground so bad that their own voters can't support them anymore, so next time a leftist / centrist government is elected. they barely have the time to build the key institutions back up and stabilize the economy before voters who refuse to acknowledge subtle improvements or value strong foundations that can be built upon go "sure, you stopped the roof from leaking and fixed the plumbing and we have reliable electricity now, but those are not flashy enough! why didn't you bring us utopia from a rubble in 4 years?" and vote back the right wingers who of course wreck everything again as they promised they would while the same voters make the surprised pikachu face

Get lost in the facts?

Don't use facts, use MAGA disinformation and Republican racist propaganda.

And what does Republican racism look like?

I'm not a proshipper or whatever, but people need to learn to use their blacklists better.

I'm old. I remember an internet that had no filters. There were no blocklists. You just visited people's personal GeoCities or Angelfire or Tripod websites that they built themselves and hoped that they'd give you a clue before you clicked the links on their site. You just kind of accepted the risk that by being online you were kinda... in public... and anything could happen. Even on ff net, with its teensy summary sentences, you could get jumpscared. It wasn't great! But we didn't have anything better. I also remember an internet where people who wrote "yaoi" fiction, slash fiction, m/m fiction were treated like freaks. The "THAT'S NOT CANON" Brigade had so many pitchforks. Lots of people, even those speaking in defense of the right to cast characters as gay in their stories, would start with caveats like, "I'm not into this, but..." or, "Let me tell you my thoughts on yaoi..." That was ALSO not great! But human beings were just getting used to the idea of unlimited online communication and all kinds of prejudices and personal limits were clashing.

@lisxdumbr excuse me as I borrow your tag for a moment, cause we're onto something.

Rent-lowering gunshots aside, I think this highlights a pretty fundamental quality to tumblr memes, which is they're meant to be fun, not funny.

Most Goncharov content aren't funny. They don't make you laugh as an audience. In fact, there's some serious and awe inspiring quality fanarts, music, fanfics, and analysis on a non-existing flim. It's not about making the funniest joke, it's about having fun making the joke.

Tumblr memes aren't meant to entertain a passive audience. The entertainment value is in the participation. And this quality is present in a lot of long-form tumblr memes. Colour theory, urban gothic (short lived but glorious), hawkeye initiative (short lived but glorious), making shitpost arguments into shakespeare, @theshitpostcalligrapher (excuse the tag) and other shitpost calligraphy. A lot of these memes are about taking silly things seriously. And even passively reblogging these memes are about participation. "I can take this seriously too." Or, in Goncharov's case, "yeah I'll help collectively gaslight the internet".

Another big part about sharing it isn't about how funny the joke is, but how impress you are with the effort. As an audience you can feel the love artists/musicians/writers put into their Goncharov fanwork, and can't help but have respect.

This same logic goes for how coffeeshop fics are fun to write, but they aren't funny. The charm for the reader is that someone loved these characters as much as you did.

In contrast, when you look at viral tweets, they're often one-shots. They're very funny and witty but you don't tend to get the same degree of repetition and variations. Because twitter is built for consumption and snappier participation, and the increasingly algorithm-driven navigation makes content more competitive, which means quality lies in individual tweets, and not in the whole phenomenon.