when millennials were first heading into high school and college there was a huge trend in news stories about how stressed out our kids are, how their backs are getting messed up from carrying so many books, how they’re sleeping less and doing more school work, and how we should do more to help our kids have the childhoods we had because our kids are falling apart from stress and being forced to be more productive than kids should be. but then once millennials started hitting the workforce all the news was about how millennials are lazy and narcissistic and entitled lmao you were real concerned about us until you found out a 23 year old is more qualified to do your job than you
That’s because at some point in the middle we stopped being “their children” and became a bloc of terrifying outsiders with foreign values and little regard for what had been their established cultural norms.
I’d forgotten this but you’re right. I think it started earlier though, it started when we started out performing them on exams. Then suddenly all our schoolwork was easy and we were being rewarded for just showing up.
Trying to figure out if you’re ace or aro can be so much harder than other
sexualities because it’s like, trying to find the absence of something. Imagine
you’re at a pond and you want to know if there are any turtles, or fish. Say
you find a turtle and you’re like “great! Now I know there are turtles.” Or a
fish, now you know for sure there are fish. Or you find both, and now you know
for a fact there are both turtles and fish in the pond.
But like, if you don’t find any turtles it might be that there are no
turtles or maybe you’re just really shitty at looking for turtles and maybe you
THINK you saw a turtle over there or maybe it was just a stick. Maybe there are
only a few turtles. Maybe you need to do something special to find the turtles. Maybe a bunch of these rocks are actually turtles but you couldn’t tell them apart.
Maybe there are no turtles. You have no idea. Meanwhile some people are saying “Oh
there have to be turtles! You’ll find them eventually ;)” or “How many turtles
have you found in your pond?” or “Try planting some vegetables at the shore to
attract the turtles.” Or “Oh no! What disaster happened to your pond that there
are no turtles?” And you’re just standing there wet with an empty net and a
tired expression.
But whatever because whether there are turtles or fish or not your pond’s
ecology works just fine without them because that’s what eco-communities do
they form a system around what they have. You aren’t missing anything if you
don’t have turtles you just have a pond system without turtles. If someone
tried to change you by pouring a bunch of turtles into your pond it would
probably fuck something up.
So you don’t have to be entirely sure. You don’t have to search every inch of the damn pond before you can decide there are probably no turtles. If you want to take the aro or ace label because you think it fits go for it. And if you do find your turtles you can rename the pond. That’s fine.
Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.
Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together.
You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits.
Frankentrees.
As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.
On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.
But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:
I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be
I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.
I need to be more like tree
I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.
what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?
Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).
As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “
including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”
It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.
Shit’s tight yo.
Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.
Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.
May's Blog 