Starry Night

"A Scottish field once home to mono-crop barley has become a pollinator’s paradise after intervention from a local trust saw bumblebee numbers increase 100-fold.

Entitled Rewilding Denmarkfield, and run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the project has also seen a sharp increase in the number of species passing through the rolling meadows after they were reclaimed by dozens of wildflower species.

The area north of Perth is about 90 acres in size, and surveys of bumblebees before the project began rarely recorded more than 50. But by 2023, just two years of letting “nature take the lead” that number has topped 4,000, with the number of different bee species doubling.

“This superb variety of plants attracts thousands of pollinators. Many of these plants, such as spear thistle and smooth hawk’s beard, are sometimes branded as ‘weeds’. But they are all native species that are benefiting native wildlife in different ways,” Ecologist Ellie Corsie, who has been managing the project since it began in 2021, said.

“Due to intensive arable farming, with decades of plowing, herbicide, and pesticide use, biodiversity was incredibly low when we started. Wildlife had largely been sanitized from the fields. Rewilding the site has had a remarkable benefit.”

Similar increases have been recorded in the populations of butterflies, with a tripling in the number of these insects seen on average during a ramble through the field.

The numbers of both insects are now so high that Rewilding Denmarkfield offers bee and butterfly safaris to visitors.

Local residents told the Scotsman that on spring and summer days, the field is awash with color, and hums with the sounds of bees and birds. Even as multiple housing developments expand around the Denmarkfield area, the field is a haven for wildlife."

Like, the overwhelming majority of the mechanics of that genre would lend themselves absolutely perfectly to that. The tank controls early in the genre? character handling and turning their chair. The oft-joked part of you can't climb over knee-high obstacles? Well, yeah, even if the protagonist has enough mobility to stand and climb over, unless they can get their chair through with them they're out of luck. The often semi-cumbersome relationship with melee weaponry and use of firearms? A wheelchair user is someone who would have even more reasons to not want a demon from hell practically on top of them- both their body and their primary means of mobility is at risk.

Heck, Silent Hill even loves scattering wheelchairs around and using them as imagery anyway, just put the playable character in one.

Even the way these sort of games often herd and control the player character's movement through the setting, and how they have to solve puzzles to progress- that would have perfect intertextuality with someone who's not just lost in the middle of nowhere but also has to figure out how to, say, get up to a second floor of a space that doesn't have an elevator and they can't climb the stairs.

I know the game Endoparasitic has a protagonist with only one working limb as its central conceit but as-said it baffles me how few games feature mobility-limited protagonists when so many genres but especially survival horror feel like they'd lend themselves perfectly to that sort of thing.

Almost every survival horror concerns itself at least partially with navigating an environment that seems set against you and often having to specifically solve problems to get place to place in crumbling environs.

The absolutely pervasive mentality that unwanted criticism or critique shouldn't be given and should be ignored is why fans of color don't stay in fan spaces.

And I am not going to mince words here:

A lot of you are racist. A lot of your fan works are racist.

That might have been difficult to hear. And if it was, you should probably reflect on why that was.

"Fandom etiquette" has created a space where fans of color either bite our tongues and eventually leave or say something, get dogged on, and then eventually leave.