bemusedlybespectacled:

ardatli:

hearthburn:

ardatli:

I can’t. Every single sentence in this could not be more wrong if the author deliberately set out to be the wrongest person in wrongville. I just.

I don’t care what else might be useful in this book, if your introduction is as fundamentally incorrect as this, the reliability of everything else you’ve ever said and that your editor has ever touched is immediately thrown into question.

Monochromatic MY ASS.

I… that is… such bullshit. Wool and silk are arguably the easiest fibers to dye. Cotton’s a stone bitch to color. (Let’s not even get into ‘change clothes irregularly’, that’s bullshit too.)

I know, right?? Protein fibres suck up dye like no-one’s business; it’s cellulose that hates it.

And as for the others… linen bedsheets, bitch. And linen and silk woven so finely as to be practically transparent. And I’d like to take my records of inventories with 100+ linen shifts for one person, because of multiple-changes-per-day, and shove them up his grant.

It’s like he assumes that without cotton we also wouldn’t have, like, modern inventions and techniques? “Wool is hard to clean” I mean yeah you have to use Woolite on the gentle cycle and air dry but that’s not that much harder than using normal detergent

Aside from how fucking wrong this dude is about textiles…you guys do realize that Mister DIckbag here is actually attempting to justify how we *needed* the slave trade so that we would have the Cotton-Driven Modernized World, right?

Where is this dude, who published him, and how many parts can you separate a body into with a gardening hoe before the hoe’s edge is too big for the pieces.

*eyes the photo and highlighted text in the original post, and twitches a moment before screeching angrily*

Linen is a fucking awesome damned fiber, and the only godsdamned thing I can wear when my skin has decided that EVERYTHING is evil and itchy. And I still have TWENTY YEAR OLD LINEN TUNICS THAT ARE WEARABLE. Not tunics that rarely get worn, but my damned working tunics that get worn about a third of the days out of the year. Granted, I have only four left that are that old, and two are going to become one tunic because there are worn spots in the one I prefer to wear, and one of them hasn’t been worn in several years because it’s had to have a fair sized patch put on it, and is currently being decorated so it’s a spiffy fancy linen tunic. But still.

And pretty much all the ancient scraps of fabric that have been found after thousands of years? LINEN AND WOOL AND SILK. Linen-wrapped mummies. Wool pieces in salt caves and bogs. Silk and wool and linen fragments in burials. And yeah, several of them look pretty drab because THEY GOT OVERDYED BY THE GROUND THEY WERE BURIED IN.

(I do not have the spoons to go finding links, but. Mummies of Urumchi. There’s a book about the Hallstadt bands. Women’s Work. Woven Into the Earth. Linen. And those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head and have access to. My spelling may be off on the couple of non-English words, because the books are downstairs, but still.)

And as for the colors – HAVE YOU SEEN THE COLORS YOU CAN GET WOOL AND LINEN AND SILK IN? Check out Red Fish Dyeworks if you want to see the sort of colors that can be achieved for hand-dyed silk and silk blends while still not getting into more modernly-popular colors. Bokkens (I think that’s how it’s spelled?) for linen. Jaegerspun for wool. (Hello, yes, these are people I get thread from, and my mom’s shop doesn’t have the room for all the colors.)

Washing… Linen needs to be rinsed and hung to dry mostly, unless you get it muddy or very gross. Also, it was underthings for centuries because it’s actually pretty damned easy to wash.

Wool takes forever to dry, so you generally don’t want to get it wet as much. HOWEVER. If your wool thing does get wet and/or muddy, hang it up where it gets good air circulation to dry. When dry, brush off the dirt. (Hey, the things you pick up from doing reenactment when a majority of your clothing is linen and wool and the only reason cotton is used is because when making clothes for growing kids, cotton is cheaper.)

Silk I’m honestly not as familiar with for pre-modern cleaning methods, but you know what? Dry cleaning is not a modern invention, so even if people didn’t wet-wash it, they could still readily clean it. Though they’d probably have paid someone else to do dry-cleaning, because people have been paying other people to do their laundry for fucking millennia. (That I picked up from someone else’s research for fanfic. Pre-internet fanfiction, at that, so book-research.)

If you hang up your tunics/dresses/gowns, they smell less. Sweet-smelling herbs in among clothes and in the chests/closets where they were kept were a thing. Clothes aren’t inherently smelly unless you’re a complete ass who doesn’t bother to take care of your clothes.

AND COTTON IS A NATURAL FIBER, YOU COMPLETE AND UTTER NUMBSKULL!

*takes a deep breath*

I am going to go get dinner and maybe walk in circles for a bit to calm down, because stupid fucking pieces of less-useful-than-shit are not good for my health.

megabeeprime:

thecholma:

grison-in-labs:

solacekames:

systlin:

gotinterest:

bigmammallama5:

beepost-generator:

peteseeger:

curlicuecal:

telesilla:

lavvyan:

lankyguy:

sarkos:

lyricwritesprose:

prince-atom:

miyajimosachi:

kiwianaroha:

smitethepatriarchy:

iron-sunrise:

brett-caton:

alaija:

thefloatingstone:

sapper-in-the-wire:

people today with access to more raw information than any other period: the earth is flat

german artilleryman in 1916, who barely washes his own ass: I need to account for the curvature and rotation of the earth when plotting my firing plans

Eratosthenes, an Egyptian, in 3750 BC when fucking mammoths hadn’t even gone extinct yet: Oh hey I can use these two obelisks to calculate the earth’s entire circumference based on
the length of their shadows

and the Earth’s curvature. Neat.

Erastothenes was born in 276 BCE.

The last mammoth died on in island off the northeast coast of Siberia in ~1650BCE.

And as I’ve pointed out previously, the Coriolis effect was known even earlier than that, although it may not have become important to gunnery.

I find it utterly bizarre that humans saw these megafauna.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/02/science/woolly-mammoth-extinct-genetics.html

“
In fact, the Wrangel mammoth’s genome carried so many detrimental
mutations that the population had suffered a “genomic meltdown,”
according to Rebekah Rogers and Montgomery Slatkin of the University of
California, Berkeley.

Analyzing the Swedish team’s mammoth data at the
gene level, they found that many genes had accumulated mutations that
would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete,
making the proteins useless, they report Thursday in PLOS Genetics.

“

That
“genomic meltdown”

is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

Sex exists for a reason, and no, “because it’s fun” is not the answer,
sorry. It works better than reproduction otherwise. Which is why every
complex species uses it.

Intelligence requires a lot of things to be working correctly, and if you have an all female species that is over the tipping point of idiocy, then there won’t be enough people to maintain the technology to continue to reproduce. And humans will go the way of the
Wrangel

beasties.

Fortunately, feminists are horribly lazy bastards, so i doubt they’ll continue to get their way, but it does made for a decent plot for a dystopian fiction…

What …the fuck?

That went off the rails so suddenly like I thought I was just gonna learn something cool about mammoths and then WHOA.

I scrolled past this thinking “the earth is round, yes, something, something, mammoths…’

But the second time it came past I saw

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal

And I think I got whiplash from that pivot. I also laughed so hard that I couldn’t breathe.

I’m????

Point and laugh at the MRA, kids.

How … does he think … mammoths reproduced …

Never mind, not sure I want to know.

reblog to support Mammoth Feminism,

ignore for G E N O M I C M E L T D O W N

I here af for my Feminist Mammoth ladies, bring the species back!

DOWN WITH GENOMIC MELTDOWN

I… what exactly is combining ovaries supposed to achieve? 400 lazy feminist babies at the same time?

Shhhh…you weren’t supposed to tell anyone.

FEMINISM KILLED THE MAMMOTHS

I feel like we’re getting away from the main point here, which is that the world is flat

the world is only flat because it was trampled by feminist mammoths

reblog if you support your army of genetically-melted feminist mammoths that trampled the earth flat

Don’t anybody tell this guy about that species of lizard where there are only females it might break him

My head hurts after reading that.

I’m sending this post to @wehuntedthemammoth

Why would you hurt me like this?

That “genomic meltdown” is one of the reasons feminism is so potentially lethal, because they keep pushing for asexual reproduction, or trying to combine ovaries, when the most likely outcome is a population running about – unable to reproduce sexually since the whole “male genocide” bit – with incredibly damaged chromosomes.

I teach genetics, I don’t deserve to have to explain why this is so wrong and yet. Oh my god.

Mueller’s Ratchet–which is what this chucklefuck is talking about, the reason that purely asexual lineages don’t last well in evolutionary time–does not apply to feminism. The hypothetical scenario of merging two eggs to create a baby? Yeah, uh, that’s fucking sex in this context, whether or not it involves a male.

There are zero feminists pushing for parthenogenesis for humans, mostly because the whole thing is basically impossible for mammals as a result of mammalian investment in genomic imprinting. Among other things. It’s the sort of thing that only works okay in species that don’t control their embryonic development anywhere near as closely as your basic placental mammal does, because it relies on a certain amount of flexibility about sex determination and placental mammals are kind of weird about that.

Even if there were, Mueller’s Ratchet only applies if you never ever sexually reproduce and reshuffle alleles, like the parthenogenetic whiptail lizards mentioned upthread. If we have the technology to induce parthenogenesis in a human woman, we have the technology to reshuffle some alleles now and again. Mueller’s Ratchet kind of presupposes that going in and manually editing a genome isn’t a fucking option, shitwad!

Furthermore, Mueller’s Ratchet is specifically a population genetics phenomenon that refers to the accumulation of deleterious mutations within an asexually/clonally reproducing lineage. It has dick fuck all to do with chromosomes.

Mueller’s Ratchet exists in order to explain why asexually reproducing lineages haven’t overrun the world, because frankly in the short term these lineages usually do way better than their conspecific, obligate sexually reproducing partners do. Furthermore, it’s really fucking common to see species that reproduce sexually at some times and asexually at other times, depending on context and who’s available, and that’s in and of itself a complex fucking phenotype you species-centric cortically starved ignorant dillweed

all of this is completely fucking irrelevant to the mammoth example that @brett-caton there chose to bring up, by the way, because mammoths don’t fucking reproduce asexually either

as you would know if you’d bothered to read the paper, you self-satisfied jellyfish fellator

or even the pop science article you cited yourself

which clearly and cogently explains that the fucking mammoths died of being inbred as all shit, much like yourself

the laziness inherent in jumbling all this pig-ignorant, overconfident and understudied bullshit together and claiming it’s a solidly built house rather than a crumbling, confused pile of enraged starfish is the final straw

you can’t even be arsed to read an article that you dug up and cited yourself, you shithugger

how are feminists supposed to be the lazy ones?

you obviate your own thesis with your own intellectual failure, you pathetic snailsucking weed in the garden of knowledge

To hell with mammoths or Flat Earters, I’m here for the PURE OWNAGE of fools trying to start somethin’.

I love when people with relevant degrees roll up into threads and drop science like Rock Lee dropping his leg weights.

I weigh

officialjameelajamil:

Today is my 32nd birthday.

This is the best birthday I’ve ever had because I’ve woken up to thousands of women sending me pictures and messages about the things they love about their lives, and the things they have done that they are most proud of. This has been going on for days now.

I was scrolling through “explore” on Instagram (always a certified mine field for one’s self esteem) and came across this disastrously damaging picture.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. A group shot of grown women with their respective weights posted across each of their bodies, and the post asking what we think of their weights and then asking its followers, “What do you weigh?”

WHO CARES? What kind of crazed toxic nonsense is this? What is this post trying to achieve other than to induce anxiety into young women about something so entirely irrelevant? What are we teaching women about our value? Can it be measured using a metric system? Why do so many posts like this exist on social media? How is anyone supposed to get through the fucking day happy with themselves when we are given such unreasonable and shallow goals to achieve, falling short of which, no matter who we are, what we do, how many lives we save, how many children we raise, how many people’s lives we touch, we are not worth anything.

I snapped. I am just done. I’m so done with seeing this and letting it pass me by. It’s so dangerous and disgusting. It’s so belittling and abusive. We are subliminally bullied all day by the magazines, the side bar of shame, social media, and by each other. The onslaught is so aggressive that we are going to have to retaliate with 10 times the strength to undo all of the damage to the global psyche of women. So I posted this:

A small ode to the brilliant life that I am so lucky to live, that I built by myself from scratch, to the friends I am so lucky to have and to my self worth. This is how I measure myself. What I did, how I made people feel and how much I have enjoyed myself. It has taken me 10 years to get to the realisation that I am worth more than the digits on a measuring tape. And more importantly, the push back against body shaming shouldn’t just be about how much we love our flaws, it should be about something that isn’t really about the body at all. Self acceptance is important. But we deserve more than acceptance. Let’s step as far away from the conversation about our bodies as possible and make acclaim, integrity, achievement, contribution to society and kindness: Values worth shouting about again.

I posted it on twitter, and within an hour women started sending me their own ones. There were too many to keep track of. It happened so fast. The pictures were amazing. None of them were posed and filtered, nobody was contoured to within an inch of their life, or sucking anything in. It was women living their lives, writing down all of the things they were grateful for and proud of. All of the degrees they have, the babies they made, the cancer they beat or are fighting, their families they love, the disabilities they live with or help with, the relationships they have built, the companies they started. Just women waking up and remembering that they are valuable, and they do important, difficult, incredible things. Things that are more than just achieving the perfect lip liner, losing baby weight quickly or being able to EAT PIZZA WHILST AT A LINGERIE PHOTOSHOOT!!! (WOWWEE!)

Here are some of my favourites:

Women of every size and shape and age and background sent me their declarations of self love and clapped back at the shame they have been drenched in their whole lives. We are attacked by this beast our WHOLE DAMN LIVES. Bemused parents are writing to me that social media has their 8 year olds talking about diets and what they dislike about their tiny growing bodies. We are facing an epidemic of self hatred. Instagram while sometimes an amazing way for us to share, is in many ways, hurtling us at light speed towards the demise of what the suffragettes were building.

We lack focus because we are concentrating on the wrong things. Most of the women I know wake up much earlier than men to get ready, and spend much of their time and money on complete nonsense like manicures and pedicures, hair treatments, and waxing. Women bleach their bumholes. THEY BLEACH THEIR BUMHOLES. This is how far we have gone with our pursuit of perfection, that we are no longer satisfied with the natural colour of an area almost nobody in the world will ever see. We have to be thin, but with big breasts and bottoms, gravity free, spotless, hairless, ageless, light skinned but always with a year round sun kissed glow; we must be fun and eat pizza and drink beer but also completely cellulite free and we must all have tiny noses and enormous eyes and lips but with skinny faces, but our skinny faces must never look gaunt and old.

And after all this, and after all the work we do, that we do as much of as men, ON SUBSTANTIALLY fewer calories than we probably need, we get judged more and paid less anyway.

NO. I’m sorry but at some point something has to give. We have to object. We have to do it together. Rather than just complaining about it, lets fill the void of sense with some perspective and some regard for the lives we are so lucky to live. An education is a luxury and a beautiful thing, not afforded to millions of women in the world. Bringing children into the world and raising them to be happy and healthy and kind is a great achievement, that literally builds the world. Surviving illness and war and trials of mental health makes a warrior out of you. Fighting for the rights of those who have no voice is heroic and important. Reading and writing and filling yourself with knowledge makes you so much more fun to spend the day with. Travelling and being independent and supporting yourself is the sign of a woman in control of her life.

We spend our lives in pursuit of the approval of others when we don’t yet even really approve of ourselves. My opinion of me is now (and only very recently) the one that matters.

I remember being 15, miserable and so relentlessly disappointed in myself, thinking it didn’t matter that I had a full academic scholarship and that I had a job and good grades, a Grade 8 in piano and I was a good kid, because my hip bones didn’t jut out, I had a round face and my thighs were forever touching. I was taught nothing else mattered. And that my fat covered up my achievements. I am so, so aware of the damage the media does to a vulnerable mind, it ruined the first 20 years of my life.

I found this really sad old drawing I did of myself when I 16, with what I felt I had to look like in order to be accepted by girls at school, and society in general.

I can’t sit by and read the messages of self hatred that teenage girls send me, about how they hate themselves for not looking like Victoria’s Secret models. I can’t watch what happened to me, happen to them.

I hereby call out every newspaper run by a man that shames women about their appearance.

I hereby call out journalists who write passive-aggressive shaming articles about weight gain and congratulatory ones about women who lose weight.

I hereby MASSIVELY call out celebrities who don’t document what it takes for them to look the way they do. If you have had surgery, say something. If you have a strict diet and workout regime, say something. It is UNFEMINIST to push an image that was created in the fantasy lab of the patriarchy, essentially that of a sex doll, to other women, and pretend that it comes naturally to you, and that junk food and lying down in expensive hotel suites is what keeps you beautiful. You have a platform and have to use it responsibly.

I hereby call out the fashion industry for STILL after 10 years of being called out, perpetuating the idea that expensive clothing only looks good on stick thin, barely pubescent girls. (None of whom can afford your bloody clothes)

I hereby call out the women who troll other women online about their appearances.

I hereby call out the trolls that live in our own heads and eradicate all of our achievements and shower us in self-doubt and loathing.

In this uprising of female power we must realise we are being set absurd extra goals, thick and fast. The further we come as a gender, the more ridiculous the ideals we have to fulfil become. We are being distracted and exhausted and our eyes are being taken off the ball. Every minute you spend thinking about how thin or gorgeous you aren’t, is a minute you aren’t spending on growing your business or your life.

I’m not saying it’s not important to watch out for your health. I’m not saying your BMI isn’t something to pay attention to. I do think it’s important to try to be active and put good food into your engine. But I also think the shame and feeling of failure is what drives us to the unhealthy eating habits we acquire to “comfort” us when we feel inferior and depressed. It’s a catch 22.

And by all means take pride in your appearance. Enjoy your looks, and your clothes and your sex appeal, but don’t make it your number one concern and selling point. It can be in your top ten, but it should never, ever define you. It isn’t important. We aren’t supposed to all look the same. And nothing good ever comes of self hatred. It will never further you. It will always hold you back.

Please think of the things in your life that you are proud of, that fulfil you, that make you happy and write them down somewhere, and look at that list every time you feel that you are failing, or that your jeans are tight, or you have a chubby arm in a group photo of a night out, or when you watch a video of a Hadid eating pasta.

Please remember you have every right to be here, and your life is important and it is precious, and on your death bed you aren’t going to be thinking about your love handles.

I love women and we deserve so much more than this. We can do better. We have to.

We can win the revolution against shame.

Plot bunny for adoption

Because while the world building with @jabberwockypie was fun and awesome, I have entirely too many projects to work on to add this to them. (And now I am going to go nap because tired and ow.)

JabberwockyPie

Also everyone in Marvel seems to have crappy parents, too. *considers* Except for T’Challa, whose parents are apparently awesome, but I haven’t seen BP yet.

Morgyn Leri

*nods*

I suppose the parents of some of the side characters are probably good too, but most of the main characters, yeah.

Certainly almost all the parents we have actual information on.

JabberwockyPie

*nod* The ones we see on-screen or – yes, that

Morgyn Leri

Well, ok. Steve’s mom was a good person, and Bucky’s mom.

JabberwockyPie

I have admittedly not seen the more recent MCU stuff, at least in terms of Age of Ultron or Civil War, just because I don’t really have any motivation to do so

Yes

Morgyn Leri

But they’re also dead, and have been for a while.

JabberwockyPie

*nod nod*

Morgyn Leri

And as for AoU and CW – yeah. Nope.

JabberwockyPie

Frigga was a good mom, I think? Or at least we didn’t have any reason to think she wasn’t, beyond possibly putting up with Odin’s shit a bit too much

Someone – I think scifigrl47? It seems like it would have been her – has a few good rants about how all of the MCU people (and Marvel in general, really) follow this one specific pattern for Terrible Dads (while we are ignoring or fridging the moms)

Morgyn Leri

She’s the kind of mother who tried to be a good parent, but her co-parent undermined that by being an absolute bag of dicks.

JabberwockyPie

Yes,t hat

Like, if Frigga and Heimdell had been co-parenting, I think things would have come out WAY BETTER and WAY MORE EMOTIONALLY STABLE

Morgyn Leri

🙂

There’s an AU to play with. What if more of the Avengers had a better childhood? And in particular, what if Frigga did not put up with Odin’s shit at all, and put her foot down where her boys were concerned?

Steve’s childhood I’ll leave alone, ‘cause it seems decent for the time period (not great, but not horrible because parents).

JabberwockyPie

*nod*

Morgyn Leri

Frigga not putting up with Odin’s crap parenting. Clint Barton’s mom getting out with her boys. Bruce Banner’s mom getting herself and Bruce out of their home situation.

Clint and Bruce could still become superheroes, though their motivations and the how might be different.

JabberwockyPie

Natasha’s backstory is kind of a clusterfuck.

Morgyn Leri

Yeah.

JabberwockyPie

*nod nod*

Tony… maybe if Howard hadn’t been allowed to be such a DICK, and then Obadiah Stane perpetuating shit

Morgyn Leri

Jarvis and Peggy calling out Howard on his shit more.

JabberwockyPie

I mean he’d probably be a LITTLE nuts anyway, because Doing Science and Doing Engineering

Morgyn Leri

*nods* Yup.

But there are things about how Howard treated Tony that other people being a little more “Howard, no, stop” would have helped.

And someone noticing that Obidiah was a bad influence, that would be useful.

JabberwockyPie

Maybe if someone noticed that Obadiah was fucking creepy and it was someone Howard would actually listen to

Morgyn Leri

*nods* Yeah.

JabberwockyPie

*considers* Or Peggy could kill him. IJS

Morgyn Leri

😀

JabberwockyPie

Peggy not liking the way dude acts around Tony

Nope you die now

Too bad

Morgyn Leri

Peggy and Jarvis conspire to get rid of Obidiah and make sure it looks like an accident.

Or that he just up and left on his own, and the body is never found.

JabberwockyPie

He tripped and fell. Onto a knife. Twenty-five times.

That too! D

😀

Morgyn Leri

Airplace accident in a small plane.

*airplane

Or a car crash.

Or a boating accident.

Or he took a trip to Europe and never came home, and who knows what happened to him?

JabberwockyPie

*nod nod* It was Mysterious Circumstances. Conveniently

Morgyn Leri

Or evidence comes to light he’s a spy for an enemy country.

JabberwockyPie

But without him around, Howard isn’t being nudged in certain directions

Morgyn Leri

Because then they don’t have to kill him to get rid of him.

JabberwockyPie

Yes, that would be bad. So unfortunate. Can’t trust anyone.

True

Morgyn Leri

Just. Obidiah gotten rid of, and Howard doesn’t have his malign influence, and improvement of the Stark father-son relationship. o/

And actually, having Obidiah be found to be a spy works better.

JabberwockyPie

*nod nod*

Then Howard has to investigate anything Obidiah told him to do ever

Morgyn Leri

Yup.

JabberwockyPie

And question those decisions

Morgyn Leri

And also, it means that later, Obidiah can still be behind Tony’s kidnapping and his transformation into Iron Man.

JabberwockyPie

Also easier on Tony if his parents weren’t suddenly killed off when he was a kid. Like, I think it’s a little easier to tell a parent (or a parent’s memory) to go fuck themself if they didn’t die suddenly and tragically when you were a teenager?

Morgyn Leri

*nods* That too.

… and my brain just went “so, they make sure the evidence that points to Anton Vanko spying for the Soviet Union points instead to Obidiah Stane, and voila, Obidiah gets to go away, and one Ivan Vanko maybe gets to not grow up in fucking Siberia to hate the Stark family for sending his father back to the USSR to end up rotting in a gulag.”

And then I think about Ivan and Tony growing up together and tossing ideas back and forth together about everything, and just making the world tremble, because two geniuses in one place that could do anything up to and including taking over the world if they were interested in doing so.

JabberwockyPie

FOR SCIENCE

Because they get bored a lot

And egg each other on

Morgyn Leri

Yup!

Gah. And have them get a chance to meet a saner and more stable Loki.

Also, add a Bruce who’s less likely to try to fold himself into as small a space as possible.

Two engineers, a scientist, and a mage who is also the god of mischief.

The universe is going to start worrying about what comes out of that lab.

JabberwockyPie

Saner, more stable Loki, who – while very much a fan of mischief and the specific subset of mischief that is “screwing with his brother” – is not nuts

😀

Morgyn Leri

😀

The universe will never be the same.

It will probably be better.

JabberwockyPie

Watching Thor 3 I was just waiting for them to do like an “I’m not touching you! I’m not touching you!” bit because siblings

Morgyn Leri

*snerks*

JabberwockyPie

Also trying to get Loki to do magic so that they can Do Science To It, until he gets bored and takes a break to poke Thor or something

Morgyn Leri

*nods*

And also maybe, with somewhat less terrible childhoods, the Avengers would be better able to communicate, and there aren’t misunderstandings that lead to things like AoU and CW.

I mean, still there’s probably miscommunications, because those happen even when people are trying, but they aren’t going to get to world-ending levels of horrible.

JabberwockyPie

Maybe they can like, talk about it

Or someone will suggest talking about it

Because they’ve all had less crappy childhoods

Morgyn Leri

*nods* Yup.

JabberwockyPie

And at some point someone might suggest Talking About It

(Even though Talking About Feelings Is Terrible.)

(But Necessary!)

Morgyn Leri

🙂

JabberwockyPie

Whereas when you have the team full of people with terrible childhoods, everyone is kind of like “… I dunno. How do interpersonal relationships work?” and then you get AoU and CW

Morgyn Leri

*nods* Yup.

DS9 Meta

So, just finished watching the episode where Odo and Lwaxana get married, and I’m thinking about it, and comparing my reaction with my reaction to the episode I refused to finish last night. Which was the one where Kira and Shakaar get together, and at the point I stopped before I started the lots of internal screaming, Odo was about to fuck up at his job because he’s distracted by them, their closeness, and possibly his jealousy over some aspect of it.

I get far more cranky over that episode than the one where he passionately defends his love for Lwaxana and desire to marry her, and not just because it’s the cliche of the love triangle. To the point of, as I said, internal screaming. (Only not external screaming because I tend to prefer to be a physically quiet person. People tend to underestimate me that way.)

So, the question becomes why?

My usual interpretation of Odo is an aro-ace character who is randomly forced into this unnatural romance plot with Kira, and there’s at least one episode he apparently is interested in sex, and I made faces at that. Because all of those bits tend to read as “everyone must be interested in romance and/or sex, it’s unnatural and wrong not to want it”.

If I try to read it as something in universe? Odo is a neurodivergent aro-ace who is trying to mimic the social cues of romance that he sees around him in an attempt to better fit in. And sometimes that’s enough to be able to watch the episode I did not finish last night, because I can read it as “Odo is distracted by attempting to observe how romance works between (Bajoran) humanoids”, if only just. It keeps the screaming to a dull roar and I can make it through the episode, and the next one I watch can be the calming down episode.

It still doesn’t really make sense, because Odo doesn’t let his need to observe humanoid behavior interfere in doing his job, and yet, suddenly, because Kira is involved, he fails to do his job to his usual standard, and they’re put in danger because of it.

So. Yeah. Lots of screaming.

And yet, Odo getting married to Lwaxana doesn’t make me scream, and it’s not because Odo and Lwaxana have any more chemistry than Odo and Kira.

I think, honestly, it’s because his entire speech reads as someone who has found a soulmate. A platonic soul mate who made an effort to understand him. Who has a lot of her own defenses to hide who she is, and understands the need to apppear different from who a person actually is. And he does love her for it, dearly. But it’s not romantic love.

And their marriage is for her sake. He’s doing this to protect her reproductive rights as her culture understands them. Treating her as a person whose opinions and desires matter, rather than an object to be owned (as the person she’s married to at the beginning of the episode has been treating her).

That she then makes the decision to go back home at the end, to give Odo the room to be himself, and not have her unrequited romantic love for him potentially ruin their friendship, just. It makes me so happy. She is someone who is very much interested in romance and sex who doesn’t have any interest in changing her aro-ace partner. Who doesn’t treat Odo as broken or unnatural for having no desire for either romance or sex.

Yes, it takes her a while to understand it, but she makes the effort where, as far as I can tell, no one else actually does. Quark seems to be the only person who goes out of his way to imply that Odo’s lack of sexual or romantic interest is unnatural, but no one makes any effort to say “yeah, it’s normal, there are humanoids like that too”, either.

Just. I really appreciate the acting in the episode that took what could have been something written as romantic and turned it into a platonic awesomeness without taking away the love of it.

theknightlyrealist:

historical-hatred:

argonauticae:

beautifuloutlier:

prokopetz:

sarahtypeswords:

wetorturedsomefolks:

memejacker:

several-talking-corpses:

memejacker:

caligula had anime eyes

wait romans painted their marble sculptures

it looks like a cheap theme park ride mascot

yep

here’s a statue of Augustus

and here’s a reproduction of the statue with the colors restored

i honestly think that what we consider the height of sculpture in all of Western civilization being essentially the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit to be evidence of the potential merit of found art

“I tried coloring it and then I ruined it”

And you know what the funniest part is? The paint didn’t just wear off over time. A bunch of asshole British historians back in the Victorian era actually went around scrubbing the remaining paint off of Greek and Roman statues – often destroying the fine details of the carving in the process – because the bright colours didn’t fit the dignified image they wished to present of the the cultures they claimed to be heirs to. This process also removed visible evidence of the fact that at least some of the statues thus stripped of paint had originally depicted non-white individuals.

Whenever you look at a Roman statue with a bare marble face, you’re looking at the face of imperialist historical revisionism.

(The missing noses on a lot of Egyptian statues are a similar deal. It’s not that the ancient Egyptians made statues with strangely fragile noses. Many Victorian archaeologists had a habit of chipping the noses off of the statues they brought back, then claiming that they’d found them that way – because with the noses intact, it was too obvious that the statues were meant to depict individuals of black African descent.)

There’s a lot of good academic discussion about chromophobia in modern Western aesthetics and how it links to colonialism.

a couple of general points:

1) the reason the reconstructions here look like “the leftover templates of gaudy pieces of theme park shit” is because they’re reconstructions. this is not actually what these statues looked like, and in my opinion they do roman art a massive disservice. the reason they look so “gaudy” (which is actually the exact same colonial attitude that led directly to the literal whitewashing of graeco-roman art, nice, very nice) is because the colours have been applied flat, with no shading or blending to give the impression of shadow. looking at contemporary roman portraiture, it’s clear that they did actually have quite a sophisticated grasp of shading and colouring, and to imagine that they would just suddenly forget how to do the dark bits when they were painting on stone is ludicrous. for context, this is a portrait of paquius proculo, a fresco from pompeii, dating from around 20-30AD, ten years earlier than that bust of caligula:

(also of interest in this regard are the fayum mummy portraits, dating from the second century AD; again, although they are of varying quality, the best of them demonstrate a clear understanding of shading. for example:

and, to be honest: do you really think a civilisation that produced this

just, what, didn’t get paint? these reconstructions are laughable, not because they’re colourful but because they’re presenting an incredibly sophisticated culture as unable to understand simple artistic concepts; something that i think itself contributes to the idea of colourfully painted statues being ‘silly’ and ‘gaudy’, which again is an incredibly colonially-influenced idea.

2) the reason graeco-roman statues are often missing the noses is because most excavated statues are generally missing the noses. they are fragile. the head of a statue is basically a football with details; the nose is the only protruding part and is comparatively narrow and thin (as opposed to, say, an arm or leg, which takes more force to break off but is still very much detachable, c.f the venus di milo) and is very, very easy to break off. although i am absolutely the last person to deny the racism that has been present in classics, the noses thing is really not a great example.

Many sculptures from antiquity were defaced during the early Christian period. During riots, Christian mobs would smash the noses off of ‘pagan’ sculptures, as they usually depicted pagan gods, or emperors, and depending on the sect, any depiction of a person could be considered ‘graven’.

The hotbed of Christian zealotry was Egypt. Throughout its time as a Roman, and then ‘Byzantine’ province during its early Christian history, the province proved practically unmanageable due to its Christian theological riots, with the majority of the population not following Constantinople’s doctrine and theological orders.

This Roman bust of Germanicus at the British Museum was defaced – nose smashed off – during a riot that would have taken place in late antiquity in Egypt, so, 400-500AD [also, note the cross etched into forehead]

Probably the most known example of this is the destruction of the Alexandrian Serapeum, a vast temple complex in Alexandria, Christian mobs tore the temple apart, destroying and looting, tearing it down brick by brick.

Another example, outside of Egypt, is the Nika Revolts in Constantinople. On its creation as a co-capital of the Roman Empire, an unfathomable amount of art and sculpture was brought to adorn the New Rome, and during the revolt, for the most part this cream of the classical crop was destroyed, again, by theological mobs.

After Egypt’s conquest during the Arab-Islamic conquests, this practice would have continued. In fact, theologically, many of Egypt’s Christian sects were more in line with Islamic theology than what became mainstream Christianity in both ‘Orthodox’ and ‘Catholic’ doctrine.

Basically, if you want to know what happened to sculptures from antiquity, Abrahamic faiths happened to them. We divorce classical and ancient sculptures from their meaning – we see them as history or art, but to the new faiths, they were graven images, they were pagan, and they were destroyed or defaced.

I like this version of the thread. It has actual history in it not just “Victorian assholes” did it (which this thread also seems to be the only thing I ever see about Victorians removing paint from statues).

thecuckoohaslanded:

sentimental-shipwreck
replied to your post “I can’t stop thinking about crocodiles for some reason so here’s some…”

Why are crocodiles captured though?? Forgive my ignorance, it just makes me sad to see them caged in, is it for their own safety and that of others? Shouldn’t they be free?

Most of the time if they’re taken from the wild it’s because they’re “problem crocodiles,” i.e. they have gotten someplace that puts them in dangerous proximity to humans and they’re at risk of killing livestock and/or people. In the old days they most likely would have been killed, but since they became protected species (I think in the 80s?) they instead need to be captured alive and relocated. Sometimes the most suitable place for them is in captivity. If it’s any reputable zoo they will be healthier and better off that way anyway, crocodiles are very vulnerable to stress and the stability and routine of captivity is actually healthier for them than being in the wild.

Lolong was a problem crocodile. He was suspected of killing at least 2 people and some domestic water buffalo (evidence of this was NOT found when they pumped his stomach, and eyewitnesses reported seeing two crocodiles, of whom Lolong was the smaller one). He did NOT have good treatment in captivity and died within two years as a result of it, but honestly there was really nothing else they could have done with a 20 foot crocodile without some significant international aid.

Most of the crocodiles at the Australia Zoo, formerly run by Steve Irwin, were problem crocodiles. They definitely had good treatment under his direction, and all the animals there are probably in excellent health. The oldest crocodile ever recorded lived there until dying in 2010 somewhere between the estimated ages of 120 and 140 years old. His name was Mr. Freshie. Bob and Steve Irwin themselves caught him around 1970.

Utan was bred in captivity by accident, but he seems to be in good health and his enclosure is nice. He should have a long life ahead of him. Cassius has made it to 114 in a much lower quality enclosure.

Brutus, Dominator, and Gustave are all wild. The Adelaide River tours go into their natural habitat (former two). Gustave I can’t say for sure because he was very elusive, and Nile crocodiles in general aren’t the easiest to track individually. He was primarily tracked by one French herpetologist, Patrice Faye, who named him and observed him for something like 20 years. I’m not aware of any sightings of Gustave over the last few years. It’s possible he’s still alive, but he’d be in his 70s at least, which would make him very old for a wild crocodile, especially in the harsh and territorial environment that Nile crocodiles live in. He was an EXCEPTIONAL crocodile, but has probably died by now.

There will be more Gustaves though. Thanks to poaching laws crocodiles are recovering greatly in the wild and reaching sizes (and numbers) they haven’t seen for quite some time. There are four species that are known to be capable of exceeding 20 feet in length: American, Orinoco, Nile, and Saltwater (possibly a fifth if the Saltwater crocodile is reclassified as two separate species). Of these only the Saltwater crocodile has a verified modern record of a live individual over 20 feet, but there are remains (mostly skulls) from the others that would have come from individuals up to 22 feet or more. One skull from India is claimed to have come from a 23 foot crocodile:

That’s more than a full 10% longer than Lolong.

This, however, is the largest Saltwater crocodile skull in the world:

It’s 38.7 inches/98.3 cm long.

Crocodiles grow slowly and the laws have only been in place for a few decades. The giants will make a comeback.

The Crocodylus genus is designed to produce bigger crocodiles. Now that conservation laws have taken away their only natural predator, they are destined to thrive. Evolution has produced almost nothing else that held the same perfect design for so long. Climate change does present a significant threat to their reproduction, since their sex is determined by the temperature of the eggs.

Unfortunately as their numbers grow and their territory increasingly overlaps with ours, there are going to be more “problem crocodiles” that need relocating. I’m against hunting them and hope they remain protected as much as possible, so when necessary I don’t at all see captivity as a bad thing for them. Especially since their activity level is so low. They do very well in healthy captivity because their only real needs are a stress free environment, consistent access to food, and safety from humans and larger crocodiles. Captivity provides all of that for them. If you’ve ever seen them in a zoo, they learn their routines and will be most active when they know it’s time for their food to be brought to them, and they’ll gather around the feeding area shortly beforehand. Otherwise they just spend their time deciding whether floating in the water or basking on land is better for their digestion.

They’re perfectly content to just sunbathe for 80 years.

It’s really not a bad life.

Well, here’s the thing that I try to explain to people. As a life-long Star Trek fan, when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out, one of the revelatory things for me – as a twelve-year-old who watched the show for almost a decade, who’d poured all over the blueprints, read all the novels; I lived and breathed in my imagination the Star Trek universe – when Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out and I saw the design of the new Enterprise, which you could tell was bad-ass, it was souped up, but it all made sense. When you looked at it, you were all like, “Oh, okay, that’s an extrapolation of the design, it looks cooler. Faster. More powerful. And very, very sexy…”

But when you saw the interior – this is what blew my mind the most – when you saw the interior of the refit Enterprise, with the blue-and-red impulse dome, and the impulse engines you knew so well, and how they related to the rest of the Engineering section, how the intermix chamber came down from that impulse dome, went into the Engineering deck that was below the impulse engines, and how you saw that same intermix chamber snake back through the length of the secondary hull to where it went into the different warp nacelle struts… when you saw that, you realized that the entire internal makeup, the internal design of the Enterprise had been incredibly well thought out. You looked and that and just thought, “Oh my god!” One could never understand the relationship between the warp drive and the impulse engines in The Original Series, because the Engineering set in The Original Series was located behind the impulse engines. So…how did that work with the warp drive? It never made sense to me; you never really got it. But with Star Trek: The Motion Picture, you finally saw how everything related, and the Star Trek universe was extrapolated upon in such a gorgeous way across the board – from Starfleet Headquarters to the Epsilon IX station to the Klingon battle cruisers; That first glimpse inside of the [Klingon] bridge, with the moving tactical displays, I nearly lost my mind. We’d never seen that before, other than the brief glimpse behind Subcommander Tal in “The Enterprise Incident.” But we finally saw this with The Motion Picture. For me, as a Star Trek fan, the imagination and the thought that was on display in that movie – of the Star Trek universe itself – was wondrous.

One of the things about the Abrams Star Trek that irked me to no end is how they just haphazardly put into that movie whatever they particularly wanted. Like, J.J. Abrams wanted the image of a young James Kirk driving up on the ground, seeing the Starfleet shipyards as the Enterprise was being built, and then seeing his future. He wanted that image, and you know what? As a director myself, I get that. I think that’s great, J.J. – however, the actual design of the Starship Enterprise, from its very inception back into the Sixties, came from the very real scientific idea a ship the size of the Enterprise COULD ONLY BE BUILT IN ORBIT, because of its sheer size. That’s a very scientific, real world concept based on the laws of physics. Components would be built on Earth, then assembled in orbit. You would not build a starship that looked like the Enterprise, with that configuration, with small struts holding up massive warp nacelles, if you had to build it on the ground and figure out a way to put it in orbit. You wouldn’t do it! The energy expenditure it would take to lift up something like a starship from the surface of the Earth and put it in orbit, into space, you couldn’t do it. It wouldn’t make sense, even if you had the technology to do it, because the ship would not be configured that way – so when they put the Enterprise on the Earth simply for that “classic” image, to me, what it said was the filmmakers were throwing out 45 years of all of the imaginative Star Trek design work for one single image. In the theater, I felt I was seeing someone say to me personally, “Fuck all that. I want an image of this starship on Earth so somebody can ride up on a motorcycle and see it and look at his future.”

I’m sorry, but the Starship Enterprise was simply not built on a planet. It just wasn’t. One of the constraints of the Star Trek universe is the Enterprise was built in space. That’s the design of that ship. It just was! Now, you can sit there and go, “Well, I didn’t want it to be that way.” But that’s always been the design of that ship; it’s as much as Spock having pointed ears. By putting it on the planet Earth… I was just like, okay, the thought behind the design work – it was just people saying, “Well, the practicality of all this, we’re going to throw it out the window.” My thinking would be…the screenwriters and Mr. Abrams should’ve figured out a really interesting 23rd CENTURY way to show that same image of Kirk seeing the ship for the first time. Riding up on a motorcycle and looking off into the future is just not very interesting.

To me, that same thinking permeated the rest of the film. They used narrative shortcuts and previously established cinematic imagery to convey information. So, why, exactly, is James Kirk a troubled young man in the J.J. Abrams movie? We never see a scene with the young James Kirk having something that happens to him directly that turns him into a troubled young man – sure, we’re given this shorthand scene where he steals a car, drives off a cliff, and that, inexplicably to me, the audience goes “Oh, he’s a rebel.” Well, is he? We don’t know; why is he a rebel? His father’s not around because he sacrificed his life so Kirk could live. That shouldn’t make you troubled. Then you have an obligatory scene inside a bar where the townies get into a fight with the Starfleet Academy boys. That is a generic scene from a hundred other movies. “But let’s put it in a Star Trek movie where it will be in the 23rd century!” There was nothing in that scene that was clever or had a 23rd Century twist; it was a bar fight scene that we’ve seen in movies back to the dawn of cinema. It is not a great Star Trek scene; it is not an interesting variation on the bar fight scene; it turns Starfleet Academy members, or young cadets, into ogres and oafs… “You’re talkin’ to my girl? Well, let’s get into a fight!” I mean, we’ve seen that scene in a hundred other movies; it is the most uncreative, shorthand bullshit storytelling method ever.

Throughout that entire movie… I will say this, to give them credit; I did enjoy the young Spock stuff on Vulcan, I thought that was great. The rest of the storytelling, to me, was – while the filmmaking was fine, there was some brilliant filmmaking on display; the acting was great, I love the characters and I thought the casting was impeccable – but to me, the storytelling was just generic and subpar. It did not create a believable ‘reality’ to me. The universe of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie is not ‘real’ the way the original Star Trek and The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager – and even Enterprise – were ‘real’. You cannot give a third-year cadet on academic probation the captaincy of a starship. In what universe would you ever do that? He’s had one mission – admittedly, he saved the Earth; of course, Vulcan was destroyed – I mean, what does he know about first contact missions? What does he know about interacting with an entire starship crew – I mean, the original Star Trek, when you met Captain Kirk, you got through various episode back stories he’d served for years and years before he became captain.

I understand what they were doing, and the movie made a lot of money, but to me, it did not create a believable universe – the way Star Wars created a believable universe, the way Alien created a believable universe – that new Star Trek movie was generic pablum that appealed to the masses. But, to be fair, that was exactly what it was designed to do. The greatest thing about it – I will say this – it made a lot of money, it brought the franchise back from the dead, and now new Star Trek is viable and lucrative; people are going back and rediscovering the original show, which is really the most important thing. I just wish it were a lot more intelligent.

Robert Meyer Burnett speaks about J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek (x)

do you need some ice for that burn

(via jacquez45)

reblogging for @medieisme

(via purplesneakerprincess)

HOLY FUCKBALLS that was AWESOME. Seriously, I don’t even smoke and I need a cigarette after reading that. *happy sigh*

(via greenbergsays)

‘even enterprise’

(via timefortigers)

jabberwockypie:

iamshadow21:

ruffboijuliaburnsides:

did-you-kno:

If you’re trying to figure out whether
someone has a fake smile, look at their
eyes. When you have a genuine smile,
the corners of your mouth upturn, your
cheeks raise, and the skin around your
eyes crinkles. Known as the ‘Duchenne
smile’, it happens involuntarily when
you’re truly happy about something- so
a smile without eye crinkles is a good
indicator that someone was forcing it. Source Source 2 Source 3

ahahah oh boy science no.

i learned to fake that part of the smile when i was fuckin 14 and miserable, if i smile you ain’t knowin it’s fake unless i want you to.

Also, the info in the original post is super fucking ableist against people who have different expressions for whatever reasons. Autistic people, blind people, people with muscle or movement disorders or paralysis that affects the muscles of the face, etc., often have different patterns of expression. For example, autistic people often have smiles that look ‘fake’ to neurotypical people. It’s not that we’re not happy or genuine. Right now, my five year old nephew (moderate to severely deaf, probably autistic too) smiles with only one half of his face. The other eye and half of his mouth he screws up tightly like he’s wincing. That’s just how he smiles. Sure, there are times he expresses with his whole face like a quote normal person unquote, but nine times out of ten, it’s his quirky, atypical smile/grimace. And that’s fine. He’s a happy neurodiverse kid.

Also, tangentially, fuck all that noise about ‘eye contact means you’re not lying’. No, eye contact means nothing. There are a hundred different neurobiological, social and cultural reasons why people don’t do it. Body language and facial expressions can only tell you a small part of the story when you don’t know the person and their background. Just stop judging based on science invented by sadists who liked torturing homeless people in the name of ‘research’. (Google Duchenne, I’m not exaggerating.)

Also, if you’re autistic and got CRITICIZED a lot as a child about not smiling “correctly” or were coached into awkward “normal” facial expressions, that can totally lead to being an adult who really doesn’t know what a natural smile looks like FOR YOU.

I practice smiling with the eye crinkles and the lifted cheeks. It’s my customer service smile, usually with bonus teeth. Wide, cheerful, and according to the original post, absolutely genuine.

Whereas my smiles among friends are less likely to be with the eye crinkles and the lifted cheeks, and almost never have teeth (sometimes, but usually I’m still trying to cover them with my lips). Because showing of teeth is at best a “I don’t know you” and at worst is a “back off, I don’t trust you and you’re making me want to commit violence to defend my space/person/friend”.

So. Yeah. Fuck the idea that there’s only one way to do genuine smiles. (Although that being generally accepted as true does make it easy to get people to think I’m genuinely cheerful and happy when I’m working retail.)

jumpingjacktrash:

glumshoe:

i-am-an-adult-i-swear:

rowantheexplorer:

anarchyisfunandfree:

anarchyisfunandfree:

anarchyisfunandfree:

Fun fact, hammering metal spikes into tree trunks is a federal crime in the US because environmental activists used to do it in the 80s to fuck up chainsaws and logging equipment.

So you should never use this effective strategy for disrupting logging operations because it is illegal.

Here’s a link describing exactly how to do it, so you can make sure not to by accident.

Okay, but a laborer working a shit job for a shit logging company doesn’t deserve a chainsaw chain snapping in their face. Like most agriculture jobs in the US, logging labor is dominated by undocumented immigrants, paid far too little cash under the table, and who most certainly don’t have benefits like medical or workplace injury coverage for when a 2000 rpm chainsaw blade snaps and whips them in the face.

How about we instead find another way to disrupt logging operations that don’t put incredibly vulnerable laborers at risk? By all means, tear down the system, but don’t hurt the very people you’re supposed to be helping.

^^^ this and driving spikes through trees can severely harm the tree and even kill it. Copper spikes will kill trees, and putting holes in trees can open them up to fungi and other things that feed on the cambium and destroy the tree.

Logging is literally the #1 most dangerous industry in North America, with the highest rate of professional fatalities per year. Laborers themselves are already calculated as rather expendable and replacing parts is… not difficult.

Trees can easily heal from branches being pruned, but breaking the bark on the trunk, even just to carve your initials, can seriously injure a tree even without leaving potentially toxic metal in the wood.

why would you sabotage logging in 2017 anyway

in the 1980′s lumber companies would clear-cut pristine old-growth forest on land they didn’t even own, and laugh at the resulting hellscape

thanks to environmentalists being politically effective and enacting legislation with the support of responsible civil servants – as well as the development of lighter, more all-terrain logging machinery – that changed, and is no longer the case. (despite overexcited assholes spiking trees so working-class joes would get killed by their own chainsaws, thus giving anti-environmentalists plenty of propaganda fuel)

now logging companies selectively cut only the trees they want, from land they specifically maintain as tree farms, and replant if natural reseeding isn’t doing the trick.

logging in the 80′s:

logging in 2016:

note how they harvest the trees that are a useful size, but still much smaller than old style logging operations took; trees this size are easier to transport, and with modern all-terrain equipment, can be carried out over rough ground fairly easily, so they can leave the younger trees to grow.

this practice is also safer for the workers – getting hit with a telephone pole sized tree is still pretty dangerous, but it’s less guaranteed to kill you than a tree the size of a church steeple, and also less likely to break free of the equipment and go bouncing down the hill at you like a trap from indiana jones.

a recently harvested tree farm looks a little sparse, but it’s still got plenty of roots holding the soil against erosion, plenty of plant life to shelter birds and insects, and it’ll be left undisturbed for a decade or so to regrow.

in conclusion: since trying to murder workers is terrible, isn’t it nice there’s no reason to spike trees anyhow?