Happy new year from the Netherlands! 2021’s pretty nice so far. Already getting used to the hellspiders and the ambient purple glow is very pretty
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theyer old enough that they used to connect
They're older than Florida. The Floridian peninsula is the solidified runoff of the Appalachians that got caught on some coral. It's why we're like this, I think. You don't stand a chance of being normal when you were created by the shed skin of an elder god draping itself over a hollow skeleton. You're always going to be a little Off.
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ALTYou love to see it. (Not the destruction of trees, obvs, but shitheads meeting their oncoming comeuppance at the hands of trees.)
Okay, as someone with their doctorate in plant health (specifically trees and landscape plants), I'm frothing at the mouth livid.
Pollarding is a type of pruning done where you remove the upper branches of a tree with the intent of forcing it to grow more branches. Historically, it was used to produce fodder for livestock and wood for fencing, crafting, etc. but now is more of an aesthetic choice - it creates dense shade and reduces the risk of heavy branches becoming safety concerns later.
However, that pruning is something that occurs in January - March, when the tree is dormant. Not in the peak of summer, when there's a heat wave expected. By doing it during dormancy, the tree has already stored all of the nutrients and sugars the leaves held in the roots and trunk, ready for use in spring.
By pruning these trees now, they've severely damaged them, if not outright sentenced them to death. Leaves provide a tremendous amount of shade to the trunk, actively cool the area through respiration (pulling water through the tree and into the air around it), and provide sugars and nutrients necessary for growth through photosynthesis. These trees now have to work overtime to compensate and re-grow and entire canopy of leaves with reduced resources.
These trees are in what are sometimes affectionately known as "hell strips" - there's a concrete sidewalk on one side, asphalt on the other, and they get hot. Not just upwardly hot, but they heat the soil underneath them as well. The root zone of these trees don't get a lot of water to begin with (concrete and asphalt don't let water in well) and it doesn't seem like there's a lot of soil around the tree to begin with.
Trees in hell strips already have the heat and restricted root zones working against them - you can't have healthy trees if you don't have room for roots. Now these have to compensate and draw resources to push out new growth.
In addition, all of those pruning cuts are open wounds - places where infections and insects can enter into the tree. Usually mature trees can manage minor infections or infestations with no issue. But these trees are now extra susceptible because their immune response is weakened - all the extra energy available is going to new growth, not fighting off infections.
So there's a bunch of factors here that have put these trees at a disadvantage: the removal of most photosynthetic plant material, an increase in surrounding temperature, a restricted root zone, the potential for increased infection, and a heat wave expected in the next week. These trees are going to struggle the rest of their lives because of the decision to prune these trees like this now - all over a desire to break a strike so the studios don't have to pay their actors and writers and editors fairly.
I hope they get the book thrown at them with tree law. And then some.
If I had to read this then so do you all <3
In case anyone doesn't know, to decant a wine is to take it out of the container it fermented in and pour it into a bottle while sifting out the sediment and detritus that has settled to the bottom over the years that it's been closed.
If this story is true, which is so horribly in character that I have to imagine that it is, then they probably had some needlessly extravagant Rich People wine at this party. I'd ballpark at least a couple hundred per bottle, maybe a couple thousand knowing the kinds of brown-nosing marks that tend to spawn near Elon.
What this means is that he was likely drinking yucky dirty shitty Wine Dregs that were potentially rotting for decades, typically consisting of dead yeast, insoluble rotting grape skins/seeds, and honestly probably a bunch of other shit that you HAVE to filter out before drinking "real" wine.
Fucking idiot.
He's the guy with the most money, by the way.
unironically adore chess set designers whose central design principle seems to have been "how can I make a position as hard to parse as possible"
note that the king becomes an offensive piece in the endgame
use this chess set for the alimony gambit
You don’t have to have a heart to know that Hart Hanson is a visionary.
This is really how most DND encounters get solved, honestly
