Steamed Rutabaga

*looks around Iowa*

Corn smut is easy to ID! I suppose I could use that one (for either purpose).

Conservationists and conservation researchers often do not even consider fungi in their research, papers, statistics, and proposals.

It's like they are invisible even to the scientists who study the natural world.

A few weeks ago I attended the Olympic Peninsula Fungi Festival. I went as someone who is interested in most everything in the world, lives in a wet, fungi filled temperate rainforest, and is mostly ignorant about fungi. Here are some things I learned:

AI-Generated Videos of ICE Raids Are Wildly Viral on Facebook An account is spamming horrific, dehumanizing videos of immigration enforcement because the Facebook algorithm is rewarding them for it.

The most horrifying AI slop of ICE raids you can possibly imagine is wildly viral on Facebook, collectively totaling tens of millions of views from a single account. First spotted by @chadloder.bsky.social

www.404media.co/ai-generated...

If they're a British org & have been around long enough, they've likely got exactly that in their back issues...

OTOH folks have been cheating at pub trivia since internet-connected phones & probably since the invention of pocket reference books. It's the same disease: hypercompetitiveness.
[And the fact that we no longer seem to teach being a good sport; but even when we did those little finks abounded]

Recently, everything is ChatGPT here, OpenAI there, and we are urged to fully engage with it.

So in the pursuit of not having to think for ourselves, have we given up on Earth, and are quite content to fry the planet with data centres?

Chortle!

*twitch twitch*

How many decades did that take?!

..."directly under" as in they made a basement, or as in that cutbank is even more undercut...?

Have you heard Gordon Bok's "Brandy Tree (Otter's Song)"? It's one I go to when I'm wanting to be in The Wind in the Willows instead of...whatever other nonsense this is.

Memphis is experiencing gestapo-style raids 24/7 now. Our local media is failing us and the national media is ignoring this black/blue/incredibly poor city in a red state. I guess we just aren’t as sexy as LA or Portland.

Here it went, in mid-October, from 80°F to 30°F in the space of five days.
The trees held their leaves quite late--some are still laden--& we got snow on Sunday [which is actually normal, but much earlier than the last few years.]
Saturday it will be 70°F again. The seesaw/whiplash makes it worse.

YouTube video by Pasalaqcua James Keelaghan - Cold Missouri Waters

Day 12: Fire

James Keelaghan: “Cold Missouri Waters”

It’s a tragic tale about smokejumpers fighting a fire in the 1940s.

#LyricsPrompt2025

m.youtube.com/watch?v=Dztj...

Roger is a legend. Respect.

The manoomin fact sheet I made a few years back for @anishinaabekdem.bsky.social, why not. Roger is quoted at the very end. Can't quick find the larger version where I more prominently featured his words.

Super cool that recognition was fought for and won. ♥️🌾💧

For #NativeAmerican Heritage Month, let's honor Elder Roger LaBine, who pushed for over 2 decades to get #manoomin #mnomin designated #Michigan's state native grain #Chippewa #LacVieuxDesert #Ojibwe

It was absurdly bright! I started off with a 4sec shutter & went down to 1sec during the brightest red flare.

Huh! I should try to see the aurora somewhere quiet, then! There's a bird chaser at work that drives me NUTS.

Cocoa and vanilla beans aren't "beans" in the sense of legume, either!

Hippopotabus! That's great!

Oof, yes. That was the first non-Earthsea LeGuin I read, as a college student, hanging out in the stairwell of the building I had history classes in.
I was a freshman in the College of Natural Resources. I'm not sure I ever quite shook it.

"A book everybody wants to HAVE read & nobody wants to read."

Heck, I enjoyed Ivanhoe, too, but if that's a "classic" it's for being old & full of purple prose more that any actual impact.

Encyclopedia Brown! I'd nearly forgotten those.

The line between "classic" and "popular" is often silly, frankly. I liked Huck Finn, which was certainly "popular" when published & is now a "classic"--which "genre" Twain had a humorous definition of.

That book was such an eye-opener for me, a Midwestern white kid, at about that same age.

It is here in Iowa, & I can see it in town! (Granted the north side of a smaller city)

The first and last lines of Joni Ernst’s legacy as a human on earth will be that she was instrumental in the confirmation of the Sec of Defense most hostile to women serving in military, and she knew that when she voted for him.

It's the same way rich people look down on the poor & whine that they just need to be "more disciplined with money." In the end it amounts to "it's your fault for not having [rich/Canadian/etc] parents" & oddly, I don't recall getting to pick?

That would make a neat pattern for glaze!

I did get the impression the mixed-gender boarding schools were mildly less awful, but I would have no idea, only having lived on campus for my bachelor's degree years.