a place of bells & trees

1. borrowing misery from future

2. carrying grief of the past

another responsibility for the stressed person

requires time and money they probably don't have

takes a lot of luck and hard work and time to be effective

$5000

これ… あなたのせいですね？

Hm… It’s because of you…

くいますけど！

うれしい！きれい！ありがとさま！

#context for this: he didn't actually walk away #he broke his leg in four places and got knocked out #but his first question when he woke up was "is my grandson okay?" #because before the bison charged (some teenagers had been provoking it earlier) #he and his grandson were taking videos and photos of it from a fair distance #they did not engage with the bison inappropriately #< prev tags are important!! #also saw someone else's reblof mention that he did get the bisons attention as it was charging at them so it wouldn't go for his grandson #mans actually a hero for that I'm glad he survived with minimal harm for the hit he took #also they were hundreds of feet away taking pictures so they were being respectful of the animals #fuck the people who antagonized it and put him and his grandkid in danger like that #yellowstone #bison

As a correction I will add: they were definitely NOT a safe distance away.

Yellowstone's MINIMUM recommended safe distance away from bison is 75 feet for this exact reason, because they can close smaller distances very quickly. Still a genuine case of "wrong place, wrong time," because outside of rutting season (which for bison is summer, which is peak Yellowstone tourist season; for deer, rut is autumn, so if you hunt/live in deer country, don't let that catch you slipping), you would not expect them to be super close to areas like the dining tables the way this bison was. So by the time this family saw this bull, they were already too close (ballpark, probably 75-100 feet away, is my guess), and it was already too late for them to do anything about it. It's a wild animal. It happens.

Secondly, there is no evidence that this bison had been agitated or provoked by teens. It did CHASE some teenagers earlier that day, because rutting season makes bison aggressive and territorial. We know that's the case because if they had been close enough to provoke this bull, he'd have gored them before ever crossing paths with this 65 year old man, because bison are fast when they're pissed off, and all the teenagers got away safely. Just like this man, it was "wrong place, wrong time."

Thirdly, Carl Isom-McDaniel's broken leg was his femur in four places at the hip and femur head. That's a severe injury that required surgical repair. He's up, walking around, and no TBI, wasn't trampled, so still way better than it could have gone, but the photographer who filmed this encounter and other park attendees nearby had to scream and run at the bison to chase it away from killing this man. So, it's not minimal harm, this is a life-changing injury, especially for an older patient, but everyone is very aware that if you're going to be charged by a bison, this is pretty close to a best case scenario for the outcome.

Lastly: the bison is not going to be euthanized! Park attendees did nothing wrong, and neither did the bull. And no one died. Which is a win when it comes to wildlife. :)

extremely indulgent completely nonsensical crossover based on two of my interests.

If anybody is interested in Chinese folklore, here you go!

Have all the old scans I have of stories from my chinese literature, folklore, and popular culture class.

This document that is basically the intro to all of it with a bunch of background info, but also contains the absolute first appearances of Mulan and Butterfly Lovers (which I was talking about in the tags of that other post before) that you can read, as well as some other excerpts on them and some other similar tales:

'Li Marries Virgin Huang with Honor'. A story that just goes through a shitload of examples of similar gender role focused tales with similar people (including Mulan and Yingtai of Butterfly Lovers):

Now. On to the fuckload of other versions of Butterfly Lovers lol

Here is my favourite (Wu Dialect Ballad), and thank fuck I decided to upload it anyway because it was completely illegible lol, but on the share site I can read it just fine. Wonders never cease:

'The Ballad Of Liang Shanbo And Zhu Yingtai's Common Study As Sworn Brothers' (part 1 & 2) and the very beginning of 'The Song Of Liang Shanbo':

More excerpts from 'The Song Of Liang Shanbo' with some commentary:

Two excerpts from the performance ballad 'Yingtai's Grief' (part 1 & 2):

'The Curly Bearded Hero' (a T'ang Dynasty story):

'The Assassin', 'The Highwayman Monk', and 'The Kun-lun Servant' (T'ang Dynasty short stories), as well as a bit of interesting info on the history of knights and bandits in Chinese fiction:

'A Leopard Monk Returns To The Laity Of His Own Accord' (a Ming Dynasty stage drama):

'In A Humble Inn, Mr Li Meets A Knight-Errant' (a Ming dynasty story):

'Wu Sung And The Tiger' (written story and excerpts from Shandong clapper tale [performance poem, regional oral traditions]):

'The Plot Against The Birthday Convoy' (a Yüan Dynasty story, part of 'The Men Of The Marshes'/'Water Margin'):

4 Tales of Illustrious Women, 10 Tales of Women Knights, and some interesting background on each and on women & revenge in Chinese fiction.

In order: 'The Chaste Woman Cui°', 'The Pure Woman Hao Jie E.°', 'The Virtuous Woman Peng°', and 'The Martyred Woman Hu°'; 'The Maiden Of Yue*', 'Lady Jing The Thirteenth*', 'Aroused By A Sense Of Justice*/Cui Shensi's Wife*/The Merchant's Wife*/Zhang Daqing°' (4 versions of the same story), 'The Lady In The Carriage*', 'Hong-Xian/Red Threads*', 'Nie Yin-niang*°', 'Lady Jing Thirteen°', 'Dong Guoqing's Concubine°' (2 versions), 'The Woman With The Incense Pill' (Yüan Dynasty), and 'The Female Knight-Errant' (Qing Dynasty). [*=T'ang Dynasty; °=Song Dynasty]:

The half-circles are called zaï! They're a traditional farming practice in the Sahel desert, and their introduction + reintroduction can be largely credited to Yacouba Sawadogo, the man linked above! He reintroduced and innovated on the zaï on his own farm in the 1980s, and did extensive outreach (along with scientist Mathieu Ouédraogo) to encourage other farmers to adopt them as well.

He also promoted the use of cordons pierreux, which are basically just lines of rocks to reduce erosion, preserve sediments, and increase water absorption.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.