mille ambulat oculis

This makes me a bit sad. On the one hand there's a touch of kind of old school communist asceticism you got before the catgirls took over, where people would very seriously tell you that there won't be any faggots in the revolution because wanting to fuck is some kind of bourgeoise degeneracy. There's this sense that investing in relationships that are oriented to pleasure is somehow counter political, frivolous, a waste of energy.

And obviously there's a level of "stop making me hear about polycule and start doing something I actually respect" about it, which, go fuck yourself. It's important to them that it's nonsexual and nonromantic because they find that part gross.

But it also makes me a bit nostalgic for when the far right was cranking out memes showing us as Tom of Finland style muscle boys, bulges a-bulging, lifting our ski masks to make out, and we sent them to each other like this could be us <333

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Equisetum xylochaetum

It looks like it hangs out in some canyon stream beds, which makes sense as that's where I would expect to find the most water in such an arid environment. Thinking about how things are in Arizona, groundwater fed springs can often crop up in canyons, and rivers can be fed by them in addition to snow runoff or other precipitation from farther afield. Even if it's dry most of the time, that's where the water is all going to flow to.

They must get plenty of water where they are, because these guys also get Really big. 4 meters high is insane. Really calling back to their ancestors in the Carboniferous there that were some of the first trees.

According to the paper I found, they also have some interesting interactions with fungi and bacteria in transferring nutrients into and out of the soil.