"It's Giving Me The Death Giggles"

Washington Post is paywalling the article but it looks like Taylor Farms — a consumer bagged salad brand that also supplies produce to grocers and fast food chains like Taco Bell, Walmart, McDonald's, Chipotle, Burger King, KFC, and Meijer —may be at least one of the sources of the current cyclosporiasis outbreak.

Different article that I think is unpaywalled! Important except imo:

On Thursday, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) confirmed that contaminated lettuce imported from Mexico was served at Taco Bell locations in five states: Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and West Virginia.

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and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals:

someone on reddit explained 😭

When it comes to writing, I still have to work through some kind of outline to know where I'm going. The longer I write, the looser the outline has to be, because I'm familiar with where the bones of the story are supposed to be. A lot of the writers who made their entire career out of piles of books set in the same worlds (such as Ann Rice) stopped outlining all together once they were established. They didn't even want to know where the story would go, because they could feel it and know whether it worked or not using the instinct and skill that they already had.

When I'm teaching someone else how to train a dog scent articles, we start with imprinting handler scent and teaching retrieves separately. And there are dogs that I absolutely will still do that for. Valkyrie had both separate for months before I ever put them together into the same picture. But I can look at Fiver in his training journey, and know that the bones are already there for him to figure out how to scent what I'm looking for on a retrieve. So without ever doing the imprinting stage, we went straight from retrieves on flat to hidden or out of sight retrieves, which will then become scent articles. It isn't that imprinting is unnecessary. On the contrary, if you handed me puppy Valkyrie again, I would teach her articles exactly the same. Not to mention that most cases of article training gone wrong I've seen were a case of skipping imprinting. But I've done handler discrimination enough to recognize when imprinting is a necessary step, or just a useful game to strengthen what the dog already naturally understands the game to be.

whats killing us:

drugs (especially opiods), deindustrialization (we cant find fucking jobs), we have piss poor healthcare and no social safety net, overly permissive gun laws, and higher rates of chronic disease. also suicide because of the previous shit and our mental health is a shithole.

this is the bleakest fucking shit i have ever seen.

i knew my friends and i had buried too many people. one of my friends died YESTERDAY of a heart attack and he's younger than me! i have to take blood pressure medication! im 33!!!

jesus fucking christ i want to *scream*

we're fucking *dying* as they slash the system and make it even harder to survive.

fellow millenials and gen z, hold eachother close because tomorrow isnt guranteed. reach for as much joy as you can.

Reach WITHIN a bush or tree and you may find a friend and boy

Gonipterus platensis! This cute little weevil really liked hugging tightly on the leaf they were at, it's adorable. Don't worry it wasn't Cordyceps or anything like that, they reacted to stimuli like a healthy bug, they just really like hugging leaves!

I quite enjoyed how round and red this guy was, the biggest weevil I've ever found!

Taken in Bogotá, Colombia

PBS and NPR were never beholden to the US government.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was created so that the US government could fund public media without public media being influenced by the government. It was a private non-profit funded by the government, not a part of the government itself. This is by design. This was a good thing. It meant that even small local TV and radio stations, could afford to create media for the public good, without government influence.

This meant TV and radio stations for poor communities. For non-english speaking communities. For rural communities. For minorities. It meant that free and accessible media could be created for everyone, even if the government didn't like it.

That's why conservatives defunded it.

Because if they couldn't control it, and if it helped the people they hated, then they would have to destroy it. Do you really think that a fascist government would defund their own propaganda machine?

Not only is the idea that PBS before being defunded was propaganda wrong, but ignores the fact that defunding it is going to have long-term negative effects on vulnerable communities.

Puerto Rican semi-slug, Gaeotis flavolineata, Amphibulimidae

Semi-slugs are land gastropods whose shells are too small to retract into, but are not quite vestigial (as with true slugs). The opaque green area seen in the middle of the body in the photos above is the shell.