TeaandCharcoal Fanfiction Archives

Red flags: Unbelievable nature you've never seen before!, no external source cited, low image quality could be hiding AI artifacts, lacks scientific name for plant, OP is an aesthetic blog (no offense, I see you credit most of the artists you post, OP <3).

Green flags: Common name of the tree provided (although the leaves don't look like any olive tree I've ever seen).

Reverse image searches and citation trails all seem to lead back to now-deleted Reddit posts. Google Images says it's this one in r/NatureIsFuckingLit, and TinEye says it's this one in r/interestingasfuck. Both were posted back in 2020. This is important because the rise of AI images was in 2022.

People in the comments of places this image is posted throw around botanical terms like "dichotomous branching" [branches split into two at the nodes] and "divaricated" [branches grow far apart from each other], which are cool, but don't tell me what the tree is.

Searching up "Black Olive" on iNaturalist finally got me some answers, and it turns out that YES. This is a real tree! This tree is a Dwarf Black Olive (Terminalia molinetii, Formerly Bucida spinosa). The above photos are some particularly nicely framed shots of a tree with particularly small leaves, which really highlights the branching structure. I really wish we knew the photographer's name. Here are some more photos of the same species:

Terminalia molinetii by jriveracruz50 on iNaturalist, posted under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.

This tree is native to Southern Mexico, Belize, the southern tip of Florida, and Cuba. Dwarf Black Olives are completely unrelated to Olive trees in the Olea genus that I'm more familiar with (the former is in Order Myrtales [Myrtles, Evening Primroses, and Allies], and the latter is in Order Lamiales [Mints, Plantains, Olives, and Allies]).

Tarantino’s “favorite editor” was Sally JoAnne Menke who edited all of Tarantino’s films until she died.

Because naming and credit is important, especially when you’re talking about women not getting credit and recognition of their work as named individuals.

If you want to know more about women in early filmmaking (emphasis American) and the sociology of how different roles were divided, gendered, and re-gendered in the first decades, I highly recommend Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar.  

But it takes an agent of chaos (the artist) to do something so utterly random as to strip the branch and line up the needles in little rows. That’s bizarre, that’s outside all natural behavior, that destroys the organized systems of life and creates something without purpose or connection.

We think of life, of living organisms and ecosystems, as chaotic and messy because they’re complicated and never wholly predictable. But every piece of them, from the smallest cell to the greatest forest to the deepest ocean trench, are governed by coherent rules where everything happens for a reason. A fox eats a rabbit because it is hungry. A seedling strains its leaves toward the sun. A bird dances to attract a mate. All living things move with purpose, and the changes they wreak upon the world are born of natural impulses.

Except when living things do things just cause. A bird sings to itself under its breath, all alone on a wire. A seal rides the waves that batter the beach for the fun of rolling in the surf. A human strips the needles off a pine branch and lines them up in tidy rows. There’s no natural harmony in any of these things. There’s no order. We do them because we are more than cogs in the great machine of the world. We do them because they bring joy.

We will outlive them.

This isn’t just a statement of hope. It’s also a curse: when the tyrants who want us dead are gone, when Titus and Hitler and Czar Nicholas and Stalin are dead, when the names of the shahs and sultans are forgotten, the Jewish people will endure. We will still stand proud beneath the Arch of Titus and bellow “where are you? Because I am here!”

Today if you are a woman, a trans person, a person of color, a disabled person, any person who needed this not to happen, I want you to look Trump dead in the face and say “we will outlive you.” When he’s dust in the wind and his name blotted out, we will be here. When his regime falls and its enablers rightly damned by historians, we will be here. WE WILL OUTLIVE HIM.

And if you’re currently thinking “not me, though,” let me introduce you to what we call the 614th mitzvah, the only one that’s not in the Torah: NEVER GIVE HITLER A POSTHUMOUS VICTORY. If he would have wanted you dead, you fight like hell to stay alive. Do not go gentle into that good night. Spit and claw and tear and punch your way into the light.

THIS IS HUGE!!!! Right outside of New York City, wow!!

Look, I made a collection of Fandom cakes that I found!

The way Halsin treats your relationship vs how Astarion speaks about the arrangement doesn't really match up

I like the Hinge and how it works but Astarion refers to it as a sex thing, won't hold your "hunger" against you

And within 2 seconds Halsin is like, I'm in love with you you are my heart you are my everything I'll never take you away from anyone and I'll always respect your decisions but the day I tire of you is the day I tire of life

We never get to see Astarion having to get used to what he assumed was you just climbing mount Halsin for a quickie, and I think it would make some interesting dialogue for the epilogue party where Astarion and Halsin both love and honor the PC and want to be with them and they both respect each other but this got really deep really fast all the same and was very much not the little fling that was expected.