The Fiction Treehouse

sometimes i talk about how awful it was to feel trapped by my daily makeup routine and how i couldn’t leave the house without putting on a full face and it played a major role in the misery of my high school experience because i had to spend so much extra time getting ready in the mornings and that followed me into my early 20s as well and it was hell and it was so incredibly liberating to go through the slow and uncomfortable but ultimately essential process of getting my bare face back and having makeup be an optional accessory instead of a mandatory uniform. and the response always tends to be ah yes of course, because of your trans and your masculine. and it’s like aha so close! actually! I think if I ended up being a feminine cis woman I also still would not deserve even a second of that shit! I think trans women and nonbinary people and every human alive should have the option to leave the house without a single cosmetic product ever touching their face! but thanks for playing!

Geological horror. You find a geode and crack it open and the crystal lining its walls is human blood that can't be genetically matched to anyone. You find a human skeleton but every one of the bones is made from rock, a rock that you know can't be whittled into those shapes. You find layers of clay and loam that sport ancient fossils at the top and the still-rotting corpses of modern animals at the bottom.

This reminds me of the blood river in Antarctica. For like a century scientists had no clue why this river looked like, acted like, and felt exactly like blood. Turns out it’s just really high in iron.

Blood Falls isn't just high in iron, it's the byproducts of extremophile bacteria that have been isolated under a glacier in a iron- and sulfur-rich anoxic brine for the past 5 million years.

AO3 does not, will not, has NEVER had an app. If you think that you found “the ao3 app,” that’s not the ao3 app

I'm so endeared by the French term for a stray cat being "chat errant." This implies the existence of a stray knight. Or that a chat errant is searching for noble purpose.

why do americans think everyone on the internet lives in the same place as them. just saw someone say honeybees are "not native". not native to where????? the entire planet?????

saw a photo of garlic mustard somewhere on the internet once and americans in the comments were like "fun fact this plant is invasive so you should definitely tear out any you see, WITH THE ROOTS so it won't spread!" whole fucking time i'm living in garlic mustard native range. i don't think i will be doing that.

This drives me absolutely up the wall in r/birdfeeding. Every time there's a picture of a house sparrow, the entire comments are filled with americans talking about them being invasive and how they should be basically killed on sight. But often OP has not provided a location, and house sparrows have a HUGE native range. Here in the UK they're not only native birds, they're on the decline, they need our help and protection.

Me every time I see a post saying that you should destroy your lawn and cram a bunch of native plants as closely together as you can instead. Look, I'm not saying lawns are native to Australia because they're not, but our native plants evolved to burn; they are dry, their leaves are dry, and they're full of oils. If you plant native plants the way Americans tell you to that's a fucking fire hazard and you are endangering yourself and your neighbours next time we have a Black Summer.

My friend @ryttu3k linked me a great PDF on planting a native Australian garden in such a way as to reduce its status as a fire hazard!

tapping onto this, Ry's guide is for a specific part of NSW. Australia is a very very big place and there is a lot of biodiversity. So don't take one guide as The One True Guide because I used to be a ranger and lemme tell you, trying to stuff native plants in terrains they are unsuited for just creates a mess for everyone. Honestly, just google "native planting <your council> " and they will have a guide that is specific to your area.

so cool how advanced the algorithm has become, it literally only takes like a decade or more of spying on all my internet activity and then it can expertly curate a selection of 15-20 youtube videos that i don't really want to watch, and then keep showing me those videos over and over again for a week so i can scroll past them again. the future is now