happybadger

joined 4 years ago
[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 8 points 1 hour ago

thinking Hitler/Stalin is awesome

Guy who did the holocaust versus guy who stopped the holocaust. These are not the same-picture unless you're pretty stupid.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 1 points 1 day ago

I'm not saying I've never covered myself in feathers and sat naked in a tree waiting for birds to feed me. I'm not perfect, no one is, we're all on a journey of learning and improving. Growing a termite on your back just seems like it'd take so long before it would trick the termites.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 13 points 1 day ago (2 children)

That must have been such a wild evolutionary arms race. I wonder how it even began.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 4 points 4 days ago

With every snake I've handled, maybe a dozen species of domestic pets and wild ones, they've always been more afraid of me than I am of them. Even the rattlesnakes on hiking trails. One small part of their body is a defensive weapon while I have four limbs and tools. They can't see well, they're pretty dumb, and their mouth might not even be large enough to bite me.

They don't really have mammalian affection but snakes do seek warmth. My chainlink kingsnake was almost 2m long and he wanted nothing more than to hold onto me while I did things. He could have constricted but I wasn't posing a threat and he was fed regularly on a predictable schedule. On feeding and shedding days I didn't handle him to minimise that conflict. The reward of having that pet was peaceful coexistence with something I have a mild phobia of and being able to see the behaviours that humanise it. They're all the fun of an aquarium but you can hold the fish.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 3 points 6 days ago

Meanwhile my dog: :ecoterrorist:

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

Ontologically silly-ass

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

I take pride in poisonin' myself and my family as much as I poison my land and biosphere.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 27 points 1 month ago (3 children)

Andor is probably the last Stars War that I'll watch unless they come out with another one that learns from it. DS9 took Star Treks seriously and the result was a show that has relevant ideas 30 years later. Until Andor, none of the Stars Wars I've seen have taken the universe seriously. They've expanded on it in unnecessary detail and obsessed over that detail, but intellectually they've all felt flat and liberal. Andor spends three episodes showing the Death Star through Foucault and you get one brief shot of it after a full film-length of watching how a gear is made using slave labour. That dialectical materialist analysis of the empire is so much more interesting than any battle or Jedi scene across the whole canon.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 2 points 1 month ago

“And I don’t mean R-rated to be vulgar. R-rated as a Trojan horse for emotion. I always wonder why studios don’t want to just gamble on something like that.”

An Andor-type film would be great but Reynolds seems like such a generic lib that I don't think he'd make it compelling.

[–] happybadger@hexbear.net 11 points 1 month ago (1 children)

surprised-pika-messed-up people want mature stories that reflect their lived experience under fascism?

 

Goddamn swamps are beautiful. The only place I've been to which felt more alive is deep jungle in Panama. Driving to Miami, I stopped in Big Cypress before the Shark Valley area of the Everglades. Whereas the latter is mostly sawgrass marshes with islands of trees that are a few inches higher in elevation, Big Cypress has extensive cypress swamps that took me an hour and a half to drive through. The life there grows in layers and everything has a rich network of epiphytes growing on it. I couldn't ID the specific air plants but they're so large that I think they're the endangered giant ones. Similar species grew over almost every other tree, some of them as massive as witches brooms.

Surprisingly not as many vines as I thought there would be, but the climbing asters that dominated the area were probably 10m long and coming off a bush as large as a car.

I'm definitely going back to Florida to explore its ecosystems more and kayak around the tip. Both carnivorous plants and live fungi were totally absent that far south.

 

Called the Pa-Hay-Okee or River of Grass by the local Seminole tribe. It's 97km/60mi wide and flows so slowly that I couldn't see the water moving, draining Florida's main lake into the state's southern coast. Ecologically it's fascinating, with like 4m/12ft of elevation gain across it representing multiple ecosystems linked to how much water persists throughout the year. In the Rockies the ecosystems change every 300m/1000ft, here it's whether the water is at your ankle or your knee.

Highly recommended. It's remarkable.

 

Parrots are known for being adaptable, but you might not expect to see them in the trees of snowy Stuttgart. Yet it’s true: Around 50 yellow-headed Amazon parrots live in this German city. And they don’t just survive here – they thrive.

From making the most of the daily commute to major success in breeding, the Stuttgart parrots are of great interest to conservationists. With wild parrot numbers in sharp decline and more cities across the globe reporting urban parrot populations, could they offer hope for their species’ future?

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