Just Some Stretches You Can Add To Your Daily Routine!

My sort of maybe embarrassing “late to the game” thing I’m learning now is how to tell if oil has gone bad.

I feel like most other foods have obvious visual tells like mold or they end up smelling foul and obviously bad. But I was googling about oil and the internet says “if it smells like crayons, it’s bad” which would not have been my first guess. And I tested it out on my somewhat old sesame oil and was like “by god, I would describe this as smelling like crayons”

Anyway protip if your old oil smells kinda like crayons it’s probably no good 🖍️

tumblr user, drinking a bottle of uncontaminated water in post apocalyptic america: i love this?? this is so pure omg

Fun fact: in the 80′s the Dutch Unemployed Union held ‘fridge raids’ to protest against poverty. 

They’d find out when a politician of big boss who upheld poverty and starvation wages was speaking at some public even, then they’d carefully break into his house with a LOT of people and they would eat EVERY piece of food in his house and leave the empty dished behind without taking anything else. 

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

A redraw of Castle in the sky

hey can we talk at some point about how having adhd makes you way more likely to be depressed because literally nothing you need to do to be a functioning adult gives you any happiness at all

like this is an actual statistical problem

Note to self: Let the system complicate itself. Increasing complexity is healthy. Initial complexity is a collapse risk.

This applies to everything – gardening, gaming groups, even religion. If you try to do everything you want to do at once, you will fail – the harvest will be lackluster; the game will fall apart; your connections to the gods and spirits will fill with static.

Take it slow. Start with something simple. When you have that down, add something else. Add things slowly and deliberately, in response to what you learn as you move along.

The breadth and depth you want will come with time, if you let it. Doing it all at once will only lead to burnout and failure.

In some parts of the range, basket makers began to observe a decline in the numbers of black ash. They worried that overharvesting might be to blame, a decline caused by too much attention for the baskets in the marketplace and too little for their sources in the woods. My graduate student Tom Touchet and I decided to investigate. We began by analyzing the population structure of black ashes around us in New York State, to understand where in the trees’ life cycle the difficulty might lie. In every swamp we visited, we counted all the black ash we could find and wrapped a tape around them to get their size. Tom cored a few in every site to check their ages. In stand after stand, Tom found that there were old trees and seedlings, but hardly any trees in between. There was a big hole in the demographic census. He found plenty of seeds, plenty of young seedlings, but most of the next age class—the saplings, the future of the forest—were dead or missing.

There were only two places where he found an abundance of adolescent trees. One was in gaps in the forest canopy, where disease or a windstorm had brought down a few old trees, letting light through. Curiously enough, he found that where Dutch elm disease had killed off elms, black ash was replacing them in a balance between loss of one species and gain of another. To make the transition from seedling to tree, the young black ash needed an opening. If they remained in full shade they would die.

The other place where saplings were thriving was near communities of basket makers. Where the tradition of black ash basketry was alive and well, so were the trees. We hypothesized that the apparent decline in ash trees might be due not to overharvesting but to underharvesting. When communities echoed with Doonk, doonk, doonk, there were plenty of basket makers in the woods, creating gaps where the light would reach the seedlings and the young trees could shoot to the canopy and become adults.

In places where the basket makers disappeared, or were few, the forest didn’t get opened up enough for black ash to flourish. Black ash and basket makers are partners in a symbiosis between harvesters and harvested: ash relies on people as the people rely on ash. Their fates are linked.

"Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer

A reminder that humans are, in fact, an important part of the ecosystems we inhabit. We *can* be a benefit to the ecosystems that support us, and that our absence *can* be detrimental to the other organisms that we evolved with and lived alongside for thousands of years.

One thing that has made me a much more well-adjusted person is a clip I once saw of Hank Green saying that anyone can be in amazing shape as long as being in amazing shape is one of their top three priorities.

(This is obviously a generalization that isn't true for everyone. But it is true for most people and I'm proceeding from there.)

This "top three priorities" framing has genuinely reduced my tendency toward jealousy and self-comparison a lot. Now when I feel envious of someone’s spotless, aesthetic home, I think to myself, “Having a spotless, aesthetic home is probably one of their top three priorities. It’s definitely not one of mine, so I shouldn’t expect my home to look like that.”

Or when I see an influencer with a body that takes a ton of work to maintain: “Maintaining that body is obviously one of her top three priorities, because it’s her livelihood. My livelihood is my brain, so I’m never going to prioritize my body like that.”

It also helps me to identify areas that I actually DO want to prioritize more. I realized in recent years that my envy for my friends who prioritized writing more than I did was NOT going away, so I started to prioritize writing more. (Not top three, but higher priority than it has been in the past.)