learning how to be a better writer is really all about having the confidence to be shit at it!!! let yourself suck and have fun with it!!!! give yourself the permission to write the worst story in existence and then write it slightly better!!! a snail may be slow but he’s still crossing that sidewalk and he’s doing great and i love him
Research has shown repeatedly that when native host plants dwindle or disappear from an area, the populations of insect herbivores shrink and become less diverse. An analysis of 76 studies of caterpillar health on native and introduced plants found that with few exceptions caterpillars were larger and more likely to survive when reared on their native host plants. And in plant communities invaded by non-native species, the study found, the abundance and diversity of butterflies and moths were significantly reduced.
There have, however, been exceptions. In a small percentage of cases, insect herbivores have adopted introduced plants as food sources, especially if they belong to the same genus or family as their native hosts. In the most celebrated example, 34 percent of California butterfly species were found to feed or lay their eggs on non-native plants.
Because not every study has demonstrated negative effects, the long-running controversy over whether introduced plants are harmful to native insects continues. Ecologist Richard Hobbs, a senior research fellow at the University of Western Australia’s School of Biological Sciences, says that “the assumption that species cannot adapt to new resources is being increasingly questioned.” He notes that “studies indicate that non-native species can have positive, neutral, or negative impacts, and it is not as simple as just assuming that non-native species are just plain bad.”
According to Tallamy, however, the positive cases are uncommon, and “you have to look at the negative as well as the positive effects.” He points to kudzu, a rampant invader of the eastern U.S. that has been found to support the silver-spotted skipper, a native butterfly. This has led some people to conclude that invasive non-native plants are not all bad. “With a kudzu invasion you may gain the silver-spotted skipper,” Tallamy responds, “but you lose literally thousands of species” that depend on the native plants the kudzu replaced.
I kinda hate it when people romanticise the past. People did not somehow have better morals in the 50s. They lost their shit if a black person drank out of the same water fountain as them. Be fucking fr
People were fired for being gay. Women couldn’t open their own bank accounts until the 1970s. Black people couldn’t even sit on a bus in peace. When people today say the past was better, I have to wonder… who was it better for? Because I can assure you that most minorities were NOT having a good time
Someone brought a specific example to my attention earlier; by the time I looked at it, there was no flag (I believe the reporter that it had been flagged). Then it was flagged again later! The image in particular should not have been flagged - it was a completely innocuous image (and pretty cute). We are now doing a deep dive to figure out exactly what is going wrong so we can fix it. Ideally, if we can figure out the problem for this one particular post, it’ll have a knock-on effect and other posts that are similarly benign don’t get flagged. I’m pretty upset that this is happening, so I’m really grateful that we have a case we can deeply investigate. I really regret the harm that’s been caused to our trans community by this kind of flagging. Being trans should never be penalized. This is an extremely high priority internally right now.
I am begging, begging y’all to understand the difference between gore and body horror please.
Body horror is transformation/monstrous sort of things like a mouth where you shouldn’t have one or like, the shifting bones and whatnot in werewolf transformations. It is where something horrific is happening within the body itself.
It is not a bloody nose, cuts, wounds, injuries ect. That is gore. It is not scars, limb differences, or visual disabilities either.
For fuck’s sake please learn this stuff because the next time I see someone tagging a scarred or disabled character as “body horror” I am gonna lose it.
I’ve been confused for my own mother before (buying something with a credit card with my deadname on it, having a doctor’s office receptionist double-check that I am the patient and not calling on his behalf because I “sounded more mature” on the phone and parents can’t make appointments for adults), but I think the funniest wrong conclusion I’ve had strangers make about trans things I’ve had around was this time I was putting my old shit up at a flea market. I was selling stuff at a “this shit’s gotta go before I’m about to move and I’m not hauling these back to another city”-price, and this old man who apparently frequented there to find stuff that’s actually valuable being sold at such prices came to have a look at the goods while I was setting them up.
He was interested in some of my dishware, and asked politely if he could have a look at them while I was unpacking, and chatting with me while he waited for me to be done since he couldn’t buy them before I was done (I let him have dibs, but the cash register wouldn’t ring them up before I was all set). He apparently noticed that some of my silverware that I’d gotten as graduation gifts and literally never used had my old name engraved on them, but he didn’t say anything about that.
But when I put up my old graduation dress - which wasn’t worth much, cheap fake silk but it was a nice cut - he remarked “she must’ve left in a hurry to leave that behind.” Since the finnish language doesn’t have gendered pronouns, I didn’t immediately make the connection that he was referring to someone female before he gestured at the dress. Once it clicked, I figured the best course of action was to just nod that yeah, she’s not coming back for those and I’m not keeping them.
Dude had concluded that my deadname must be an ex that dumped my ass so fucking fast she didn’t even pack her silverware or nice clothes.
