#and again. we have every capacity of doing so.

[sassydefendorflower]

I feel horrible to butt in, but I do in fact think there are some addendums to this post.

For one, Margaret Thatcher and other horrible powerful women are not examples of the matriarchy. Or what a potential matriarchy would be like.

Every extremely powerful women, who then used that power to abuse it, did so in a patriarchal structure.

I am not saying that to defend these women. Their choices are their own. Everyone has the same capacity for evil, be it man, woman, queer or not.

I just want to clarify that we legit do not know what a matriarchal power structure would look like. Because from an anthropological standpoint there has never been a large scale matriarchy in the history of humanity (as far as we can tell). There have been some smaller groups and cultures, who have structures we would maybe describe as matriarchal, but none of these cultures are comparable on the large scale of the patriarchy. The power structures in those small groups are often genuinely different, because in praxis what we do know of matriarchal societies is completely different from an imagined reversal of the patriarchy as we know it. But, again, we cannot actually make these comparisons, because the few matriarchal societies that exist are also often very rural, and anti-capitalist. They aren't some strange utopia, they are still humans and there are definitely hierarchies at play, but they are simply not comparable to the large scale of the modern patriarchy as it is inherently intertwined with capitalism, colonialism, racism, and classism.

Again, I am not saying this in any shape or form to relieve any women of guilt or the responsibilities for their actions. There is no such thing as a better sex (hell, we really need to reconsider gender as a whole, if you ask me). But.

The patriarchy is sooooo deeply ingrained in our culture - in most human cultures existing right now and throughout history - that we genuinely don't know what a matriarchy would look like.

Hell, in Cultural Anthropology, if you create a genealogy and it is a matri-linear society, do you know what that means? It means that inheritance moves from the BROTHER of the mother to the BROTHER of the daughter (we are talking the inheritance of goods here). We generally assume that there isn't a single group of people where mothers can pass there belongings directly to their daughters as the main line of genealogical inheritance (and if there are deviations from this they are statistically irrelevant). There is bi-linear inheritance, of course, in which the parents equally pass everything down to their children, but that is a relatively recent development, and still always something that happens within a patriarchal society.

An example of a powerful woman (be it the Chinese Empress Dowager Cixi or Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merkel or... you get the idea) will never be an example of what the matriarchy would be like. Because we're thinking of power structures within the confines of what we know: the patriarchy.

And, yes, people who argue for the simple role reversal of Women in Power and Men At The Bottom, are obviously wrong. But they've also obviously never engaged with the theory. Such steep power structures and rigid hierarchical step-ladders would obviously be bad. But any conceivable matriarchy wouldn't be that. Because from the few we have seen throughout history and even right now... we know you always have to answer the question: what do we do with the babies?

And that is a question not easily or logically answered by a simple role reversal.

(and I don't want to equate womanhood with the ability to give birth - truly not. But, statistically speaking, women are the people birthing the most children, and as such, any society in which women are "in charge" the way we observe power structures within the patriarchy, also has to answer the question of what these "women in charge" will do with the possibility of childbirth.)

I am not arguing for the goodness of women. I am arguing for the admittance that we just genuinely don't know what a matriarchy would be like.

(not that is should be our goal to find out)

The power structures of the patriarchy have been historically so all-encompassing for most of us, that we genuinely cannot divorce even the thought experiment of a matriarchy from it.

And this Not Knowing should be part of the conversation.

just so we're clear, replacing patriarchy with a matriarchy would be just as bad because it's the same exact thing. it's a power structure. it lends to systemic abuse.

equality doesn't mean "one gender is better than the other". equality means all genders are on the same playing field. no one gender is better, or worse, than the rest.

women are not inherently kind. women are not inherently charitable. women do not inherently have other peoples' best interests in mind. women are not inherently gentle and nurturing. women are not inherently smarter or dumber than any other gender. women are people, and that means that women are varied. chasing men of that pedestal and placing women there instead will create the exact same problems.

you can run around saying "women are just better than men" but you're doing the exact same thing that's being done to you right now, and that's not how you collapse the structure. you're just taking the same abusive power structure and painting it pink. enough. equality means we are all on the same level. equality does not mean one gender is superior to the rest. got it?

[torchickentacos]

you ever scroll past some sort of discourse that you didn't even know existed, and you have to take a second and realize that, while none of us are superior to others, some of us ARE much better at choosing which dumbass hills to die on? because I think sometimes you deserve to go 'huh. at least I'm not getting involved in all that'.

[licorishh]

Hey as a super introverted but not shy person I'd just like to say the jokes about extroverts "adopting" introverts to "get them out of their shell" are actually completely unfunny and it just goes to show how little respect a lot of y'all have for the fact that we genuinely don't want excessive social interaction and that y'all are forcing us to do something that brings us extreme physical and mental discomfort because you perceive our introversion as a failing rather than as purely a difference in personality.

We don't need your "help" to socialize. We're not children. We're simply not interested in spending every waking second of our lives talking to people and being talked at in return.

[rox-of-iu]

me + mayhem going on a stupid silly hike for my stupid silly mental health

touched grass and i am normal again (lying)

[cementcornfield]

i will say, in the calmness of the morning after lol, i DO still think we are more likely to get tee, ja'marr, and trey done than not, like i said in the tags last night. though, the nature of this FO being the FO it is and the family behind it, they will make it unnecessarily hard and frankly just say dickish things like this in the interest of "negotiations".

if you look at more of what duke said yesterday:

On Tee: It's going to be hard. We feel like we have the resources to do it, but it all depends on how the negotiation goes and whether they're willing to accept wanting to come back at a number that makes sense for everybody. And you know what we do with Tee going forward, I've always been very upfront in my desire to have Tee Higgins on our team. I've never not been upfront about that, and that desire continues, but we have to be able to come together with his representation on what that means and what the right number is for his experience, for his play time, for his production."

Let's find something that works for everybody, because he is a guy that we want to have here, and hopefully that can come together, but we have other guys who are trying to take big bites of the apple in other areas, and we're going to have to balance those as we go forward.

Basically corresponding to the viral tweet of, we can't pay everyone top dollar, which while shitty, is something i think tee realized when he fired David M. it has ALWAYS been the case that in order for this to work, tee will be getting less money than he would from a WR-desperate team in free agency. (i believe right now his projected worth in FA is 28 million a year, i could easily see a team like the patriots going up to 30 tbh). we've taken the agent switch however to mean that he's okay with getting a few less million. how much less is he willing to settle for? and would it be fair in the team's POV regarding his play time and production (because you really can't have a discussion about tee's worth if you aren't factoring in the unfortunate reality of his injury history and consistent lack of availability). and all that is where the uncertainty comes in. and that will be the bengals' argument against him getting paid at the top of his position, despite what he is likely worth on the free market. i believe that's what duke is alluding to here, but you know, said in the most dickish way possible. because we CAN and we SHOULD pay tee what he's worth, but the FO's strategy has always been to low ball and, again, make negotiations so so much harder than necessary.

On Trey: Has he earned a pay raise and a bump in an extension … he has,” Tobin said. “We’re cognizant of that, and we will give that to him. But whether we agree on what that looks like, is what is to be determined.” "We'll do what we can. We'll do what we feel is right, and we will try to get Trey re-signed. It's not giving anybody an extension. It's agreeing with somebody on an extension.”

Again, instead of just outright saying, yeah we want trey, he's our ONLY player on defense basically worth paying and we want to make him happy, duke goes through all this nonsense on how we won't GIVE him an extension (implying in some ways that it has yet to be earned, despite....everything!). again, a negotiation tactic that feels so gross when paired with the viral "we can't pay everyone" quote. but i do still feel like they will try here, going back to the first part of the quote, it just depends on how much of a bump trey wants. i don't think trey necessarily wants to be the HIGHEST paid DE in the league, he just wants to be playing for a more reasonable paycheck than his current shitty contract (which, i will say, no one forced him to sign that extension. i remember it being talked about last year, how he had a particularly green agent who gave him bad advice about both the original extension and the ability to adjust it last year).

On Ja'Marr: “It's a priority for us. It's something we feel like there's a framework to work off of. Should be a pretty easy framework to work off of. Guys in his position have recently re-done contracts. We believe in Ja’Marr, he's very important to us. The other guys that have done contracts are very important to their teams. So, we believe there's a real framework to work off of. I would expect that we could come together on something that makes sense for both sides.”

This is the one that actually does give me the most comfort, and i think even duke realizes that ja'marr HAS to get done this offseason. like god, they came so close last offseason it's so ridiculous. but they've got the "easy framework" based on the recent top WR contracts (aka justin's, which i've talked about already following the same time frame for ja'marr so far). they just have to use that contract structure, something close to what they structured last year, and make some adjustments. they know this is their last chance to get it done without blowing everything up and burning some bridges. they know how important ja'marr is. it's going to get done. let's just pray they don't drag this shit out again and ja'marr misses another training camp!!

Zero excuse not to pay our best players. Btw.

[ghostcrows]

the way people talk about and view mental illness has always been under this veil of sympathy and understanding but really when that energy is most needed it all just vanishes. we have 200 more specific terms for certain symptoms and 2000 more videos on how to stop procrastinating and how to deal with rejection sensitive dysphoria and 50000 new videos on how it's In Your Brain and it's Hereditary and it's Homemade by your Primary Caregivers but people still dont really ...get it. they just dont. the resources available are so hollow. its empty promises. suicide hotline that just gets you insta-detained. therapist you talk in circles with for a third of your income per session. housing program with a wait list that only gets longer. this insistence that you build up a support system with no support. this quietly depleting time frame you have (or feel you have, this very real pressure) in which to get your shit together before you're just another sad statistic. always having to wait until you're at the brink of complete self destruction to get help, and by then. how much damage is already done

it's all just casting shadows on the wall

[zorthania]

A piece about survivors guilt.

This comic isn't perfect. I started it back in October 2023, and every time I picked up my pen, I wept.

I bring this to you today, on 9/11, in hopes that you reflect on this day a little differently than how most Americans would. Let it move you to continue to boycott, protest and challenge your family, friends and colleagues. You have a bigger impact than you would believe.

Thank you for reading this with an open heart.

From the river to the sea...

I'd like to bring to attention the fact that the figures depicted above are a gross undercount of the actual number of deaths. I scoured the internet high and low to source my findings and not a single one could break down the devastation that befell an individual ethnicity. Instead, they lumped a bunch of ethnicities together, provided a general timeline, and called it a day, reinforcing the sheer scale of dehumanization propagated in the west. The only consistency between all the articles I looked up was the 4.5 to 4.7 million figure I've included above, and even then, they were all published by western media news outlets... the very same that have been so unreliable and complicit in the genocide of Palestinians today. So I have to take everything they say with a grain of salt.

We are not just numbers.

All of us have ambitions and desires and lives worth living.

With that said, this is your friendly reminder to:

Donate an e-sim

Donate to PCRF to provide Palestinian children aid

Donate to Pious Projects to provide woman with feminine hygiene kits

Donate to CareForGaza to provide food to displaced families in Gaza either through their Gofundme or their paypal

Donate to any of the vetted gofundme campaigns on GazaFunds to help Palestinians trying to flee Gaza.

And if you or someone you know sees or experiences a hate crime and can afford it, SUE. This is a more effective use of your money than most realise. The reason zionists act with impunity is because of the normalization of white supremacy and oppression of ethnic minorities. Challenging that in any capacity tells them that there are consequences to their actions and makes them think twice before engaging in hate crimes and helps raise all of us up against the systems currently in place that let them get away with it.

If you can't donate or spend any money, you can:

Do your daily clicks.

Boycott targeted companies on the BDS list (if you're like me and you don't want a single dollar to go towards anything supporting Israel right now, you can use Bdnaash to double check what products are okay to buy, but the BDS list is sufficient as it is a strategic attack and proven very effective thus far)

Flood your representatives emails and voicemails with how you won't be voting for them unless their politics align with an immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

Attend a protest, be LOUD.

Challenge your circle of friends, family and colleagues with conversations about Palestine. (THIS IS THE MOST UNDERRATED AND MOST EFFECTIVE THING YOU CAN DO)

and if you're really up to, be disruptive in any capacity that you can think of towards major corporations benefiting from this onslaught. (i.e. halting military manufacturers from production + shipments, sticking boycott stickers on products at your market etc)

And finally, if your country wasn't mentioned in the above excerpt, it was no deliberate omission on my part and I encourage you to come forward and tell your story about the suffering of your people so that this may be a learning opportunity for everyone.

You are seen.

You are not alone.

Thank you again if you've read this far.

From the river to the sea...

[hakugreenfinch]

"you should absolutely go for a scholarship abroad" they dont know i spent 5 months studying abroad and during those 5 months only once did anyone that wasnt a teacher try talking to me and even she went "oh" when i said i was an international student and just. left

[neverendingford]

.

[yoshistory]

oh my god 15 days left at this job and im hearing word that at the last minute they're trying to snake back and barter to keep me after i've already mentally fucked off. fuuuuuck

[tired-teacher-blog]

When your baby started kicking for the first time, you immediately sprinted towards your husband who was still deep in slumber in the comfort of your shared king sized bed, it was only 3:30 in the morning after all, a little too early to rise, and you would have been snuggled up to him if your bladder capacity hadn't prevented it for the third time that night.

_ "Katsuki wake up wake up, you have to feel this! It's moving!" you announced in a loud whisper while shaking him lightly.

_ "Huh what, what's moving? Do I need to blow it up?" he was obviously disoriented as he tried to blink the sleep away, knitting his eyebrows in concentration so he could focus his blurry vision on you.

_ "What? No, are you crazy?" you bursted out laughing at his unexpected response, and waited for him to gain full consciousness as he wobblily sat up to face you.

_ "Is everything okay?" he reached out to gently trace your cheek, and you could tell he was fully awake at last.

_ "Here, feel this," you took his other hand and placed it on your bulging tummy, "our baby is moving."

His eyes widened and his mouth hung open in obvious amazement, and you watched in awe as your husband's face lit up at the new feeling under his palm.

_ "This is real, we're actually having a baby." the wide, almost face-splitting smile appearing on his face was the same one he had when you announced your pregnancy a few months ago, and the warmth it evoked in you was also the same as back then.

_ "We are Katsuki." and you couldn't help the tears of joy welling up in your eyes as you watched the bliss radiating from him, placing your hands on top of his and holding on tightly.

That night -and every following night- he kept his hand on your belly when you climbed back to bed, holding you from behind and rubbing soothing patterns on your tightening skin while kissing your neck and whispering sweet 'I love you's' and promises for eternal happiness together, until you finally drifted off again.

[rafey-baby]

dealer!rafe knows just the right way to apologize after coming home late once again…

18+ mdni!

c/w: kinda free use, p-in-v, angsty undertones?

wc: 820

part two

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

It’s past midnight when she stirs awake in their unlit bedroom to Rafe’s calloused hands roaming along the skin of her waist as he slumps down on top of her, groaning when he can feel her delicate presence underneath him, at last.  

It’s unbearably thermal, which is why she’s merely wearing a flimsy top as she lays on her stomach under the covers; softened bones feeling mellow under the weight of his heavy limbs profoundly pressing her into the mattress.  

She tries to move around some, albeit unsuccessfully as his much bigger body cages her between the rumpled sheets and his strong abdomen and she lets out a displeased huff because he was supposed to be back hours ago. 

“Rafe? Where were you? Waited for you…” she sounds almost upset with her mind hazy; dreamy sleep still lingering. 

“Just had to take care of some shit, m’sorry,” he murmurs, guilt weighing him down at the prospect of making her sad. It’s something he seems to be doing a lot these days. 

“Missed my girl all day,” he burrows his face in her hair, inhaling the dulcet coconut scent of her favorite conditioner still present in the damp strands.  

She sighs.  

“Thought you said you’d come home early tonight and we’d watch a movie…” she complains, voice still coated in the glimmer of the dreamland she’s been forced to wake up from.  

“I know, baby. But listen, you’ll get me all to yourself tomorrow, yeah?” His honeyed words soothe her some but she’s still discontented. He always does this. Promises something and then gets her hopes up thinking he’s finally going to keep his word but every time some shit comes up.  

“Was worried something happened,” she persists, a frown obscuring her face as he presses a sugary kiss on her cheek in apology. That’s the other thing, it’s not exactly the fact that he works too much that concerns her, but the nature of his business. It’s dangerous.  

After all, he doesn’t keep a gun tucked in the waistband of his pants whenever he leaves the house for nothing. And even if she knows he can take care of himself, she can’t help but feel a sense of relief wash over her whenever he opens the front door unscathed. 

“Don’t have to worry about me, you know that,” he scolds, peeling the covers off her frame and tugging her closer by a grip on her hips.  

“But Rafe—” she whines. 

“But nothing," he interrupts her as he tugs down the zipper of his pants. "Look so sweet when you sleep, gets me so hard, you know?” He mumbles before she feels him poking at her entrance.  

“I’m still mad at you,” she complains with a pout. However, she doesn’t exactly do anything to stop him. Craves to feel close to him in any and every capacity he lets her, even if it can be exhausting to love him as much as she does. 

“Shh, let me say hi to my pussy, hm?” Love it when you’re not wearing any panties to bed, make it so easy for me to just…” he trails off, finishing the sentence with a nudge of his hips against her; tucking his cock into the warmth of her with his fingers sinking into the flesh of her ass.  

“Ray…” she whimpers; the odd intimacy they seem to share in the quietest hours of the day always comforting her in some peculiar way.

“Let me make it up to you, okay?” It’s more of a demand than a request and she has no choice but to let him do as he pleases when he pushes in deeper; prodding at the spongy spot inside her and making her cry out.  

“Yeah? That feel nice?” He pants in her ear; shoving her face more into the fluffy pillows with each thrust of his hips against her.  

“Promise, I’ll take the day off tomorrow and we can do whatever you want, can watch all the movies and make some food and could run you a bath, hm?” He rasps in her ear as her breathy moans get louder by every drag of his cock in and out of her gummy walls.  

His rough hands slide between the mattress and her body, groping at the flesh of her tits as he’s letting out guttural groans from the back of his throat; thrusts growing sloppy in their search for a release in the all too forgiving girl who wishes Rafe was always like this.  

The way he’s talking to her right now initiates false hope in her and she thinks that maybe one day she’ll be able to actually trust his empty promises.  

However, she knows that the minute he gets a call regarding a missing shipment or a late payment, he’s going to have to leave to make sure everything’s in order; returning after nightfall the following day because that’s what always happens. 

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Keith Edwards at No Lies Detected:

Donald Trump has been in office for one week, but it feels like a year’s worth of events have been crammed into those seven days. That of course is by design. Trump thrives on overwhelming our capacity to react, flooding the zone with chaos until we are too exhausted to resist. He wants you to feel powerless. He wants you to surrender. But this is not about resistance; it is about reclamation. Resisting implies he is in control, and we are simply pushing back. Reclaiming puts us in the driver’s seat, taking back what was always ours to begin with. Today, I’m going to write about how not to give up, how to take back your voice in your own future, so that when a year actually has passed, you’ll be able to look back not with exhaustion and despair, but with the satisfaction of knowing you fought back. 

Give Yourself a Break – But Do Not Break

You do not have to be a political warrior every waking moment. If following every outrage sends you spiraling, turn it off. If breaking news alerts drain your energy, silence them. Stop following doomer influencers or left-wing media outlets that profit from outrage-mongering.  To borrow an exhausted but accurate phrase: this is a marathon, not a sprint. Take the time to process your anger, to feel the betrayal, to curse the failures that got us here. Be furious at the Democratic Party’s fecklessness. Be enraged at the indifference of Republican enablers. Allow yourself to mourn the election loss. But do not wallow. Do not linger in the abyss. Feel your anger, harness it, and then use it. Because we never truly processed the trauma of the first Trump presidency – like with COVID, we let it taper off without closure. Whatever you need to do to process the fact that Trump is in power again, do it, because...

Accept That This Is All Going to Suck

There will be worse weeks than this one in the next four years. Many will seek refuge in denial, pretending that the worst-case scenario is mere hyperbole. Do not indulge them. Reality, however grim, is better faced than avoided. When I lost my sister, I found that I actually felt better when I accepted that she was not coming back. I found that the alternative – resisting reality and trapping myself in an endless cycle of grief – actually caused more suffering. Once we embrace the truth, however, we can begin the path toward something new. This applies here, too: America will not be the same, nor is it lost. If we accept the darkness ahead, we can begin carving out the light. The only way through this is forward. This is going to be bad. And the sooner you accept that, the better you are prepared to fight.

Get Involved

Fighting doesn’t have to feel big. Start small. Do something that reminds you that you have agency, that you are not a passive observer of history but an active participant. 

​​When Trump was first elected, I refused to wallow in misery. I joined my local Democratic club, handed out ballot proposals, and took an active role in shaping my community. That decision put me on the path to becoming a Democratic strategist and creating a successful YouTube channel. Starting locally is the most satisfying way to get involved, because politics are most responsive when they are local. Federal politics are sluggish and hard to break into without experience, but local activism can be swift and potent. Attend a city council meeting. Get involved in your local Democratic Party. Knock on doors for a local candidate or ballot initiative. Don’t just vent your frustration into the digital void – channel it into tangible change. 

[...] Do not let Donald Trump eat your hope. He is not a king. The courts have already blocked his blatantly unconstitutional rollback of birthright citizenship. State governors are taking advantage of our federal system to prevent the rollback of rights and protections. Federal employees are pushing back against sweeping policy changes. We are only in week one, but this gives me hope.  

Keith Edwards wrote in No Lies Detected on how to survive Tyrant Trump’s 2nd reign: don’t give up.

[duncanor]

That's what I thought when I first read Trimax, but after a year of thinking about it and discussing with others, I don't believe that's true anymore.

Legato was important to Knives, more so than Elendira. Which is something she complains about in canon! Legato isn't a Gun, he doesn't have a number nor was he chosen for this purpose, in Nightow words "Knives took him on a whim". He went as far as giving him a name, and names have weight in Trigun, so it's not a thoughtless move I think.

If anything, Legato is Knives's right hand man.

And, while it's not obvious at first with the whole "breaking his spine like a twig" thing (nothing is with them tbf), Knives did put him in charge and does put up with Legato antics a lot more than ya would think. The whole point of Wolfwood is protecting Vash from Legato's jealous anger after all. Knives literally went behind his back to do so, instead of.. Idk, vaporize him.

The thing with Knives no one should forget is, he's a big liar and quite the hypocrite. He doesn't want to care. So he will act as if he doesn't. He exaggerates his moves, he lashes out but if ya observe his actions. Legato comes out as an exception in how he treats others around him.

And that's just, on a basic level. The story itself parallels a lot Knives&Legato with Vash&Wolfwood. They're on the same spectrum but in opposite directions. There could be a lot of reasons for why Knives ended up taking Legato under his sharp wing, but I tend to agree with folks theory of Knives seein' a lot of himself and Vash in Legato situation and overall way of bein'.

Do you ever think about the fact that everything Knives wanted from humanity as a kid, love and acceptance and 'sharing the same heart',

All this, he got from Legato and yet he still mangled him and left him to die at the hand of his own brother.

Legato wanted so bad for him to see him as an equal, the same way Knives wanted humanity to see him as one AND YET.

[rebeccathenaturalist]

Welcome to my Tuesday morning PSA about plastics!

So--I was walking along the Bolstadt beach approach sidewalk here in Long Beach, WA yesterday afternoon, and I started seeing these little orange pellets on the ground that looked a little bit like salmon roe (but probably weren't). So I picked one up, and it was most definitely rubber. I went around picking up every one I could find, and while I didn't keep exact count I probably amassed 50-60 of them. I took this picture before depositing them in the nearest trash can.

These are airsoft gun pellets, and you can buy them in big jars containing thousands of them. That means that someone who decided that the beach was a great place to shoot their airsoft guns could easily litter the place with countless little bits of plastic rubber in less than an hour. We already have a huge problem here with people leaving trash, including tiny bits of plastic, all over the beach (you should see the gigantic mess after 4th of July fireworks when thousands of people come in from out of town, blow things up, and then leave again without picking up after themselves.)

But these airsoft pellets have a particularly nasty side effect. You know how my first thought was "wow, those look kind of like salmon roe?" Well, we have a number of opportunistic omnivore birds like crows, ravens, and several species of gull that commonly scavenge on the beach, especially along the approaches because people often feed them there. If I can catch the resemblance of an orange airsoft pellet to a fish egg, then chances are there are wildlife that will assume they're edible.

Since birds don't chew their food, they probably won't notice that the taste or texture is wrong--it'll just go down the hatch. And since they can't digest the pellets, there's a good chance they might just build up in the bird's digestive system, especially if the bird eats a large number of them--say, fifty or sixty of them dropped on the ground along the same fifty foot stretch of sidewalk. The bird might die of starvation if there's not enough capacity for food in their stomach--or they might just die painfully of an impacted gut, and no way to get help for it. If the pellets end up washed into the ocean, you get the same issue with fish and other marine wildlife eating them, and then of course the pellets eventually breaking up into microplastic particles.

You can get biodegradable airsoft pellets; they appear to mainly be gray or white in color rather than bright screaming orange and green. But "biodegradable" doesn't mean "instantly dissolves the next time it rains." An Amazon listing for Aim Green biodegradable airsoft pellets advertise them as "Our biodegradable BBs are engineered to degrade only with long-term exposure to water and sun and will degrade 180 days after being used." That's half a year for them to be eaten by wildlife.

I don't know, y'all. That handful of carelessly dropped rubber pellets just encapsulates how much people don't factor in the rest of nature when making decisions, even on something that is purely for entertainment like an airsoft gun. We could have had a lot of the same technological advances we have today, but with much less environmental impact, if we had considered the long-term effects on both other people and other living beings, as well as our habitats. We could have found ways from the beginning to make these things in ways that benefited us but also mitigated any harm as much as possible. Instead we're now having to reverse-engineer things we've been using for decades, and sometimes--like the "biodegradable" airsoft pellets--they still have a significant negative impact.

But--at least there are people trying to do things better, thinking ahead instead of just on immediate profit. We're stuck in a heck of a mess here, figuratively and literally, and changing an entire system can't be done in a day. Maybe we can at least keep pushing for a cultural shift that emphasizes planning far into the future--if not the often-cited "seven generations ahead", then at least throughout the potential lifespan of a given product.

[mysteryshoptls]

SSR Mozus Trein - Strict Suit Voice Lines

My lectures are open to all students. Now, take your seat. Class is starting.

Summon: What do you believe makes a competent mage? Magical abilities? Knowledge? Experience? Dignity? The answer is... All of the above.

Groovification: Strenuous effort has the capacity to eclipse raw talent. Voraciously absorb every bit of knowledge you can reach even greater heights.

Home: Question?

Home Transition 1: I will always discipline unruly students with a firm hand. I cannot allow those who are serious about their studies to suffer because of them.

Home Transition 2: Lucius, how are your little paws doing today, hm? Let me have a look see... ...Ahem! Yes, what is it? Can you not see I am currently busy?

Home Transition 3: Ah, is it that time already? I became so engrossed in my book that I completely forgot to eat... I understand that is not ideal, and yet...

Home Transition - Login: Have you reviewed your previous lessons and prepared for next class? Merely attending class is not conducive to studying. You need to go over what you've learned over and over again in order for it to truly seep into your mind.

Home Transition - Groovy: Oh, was the previous quiz too easy? Well now, it seems you've drastically improved. I must raise the difficulty on the next one.

Home Tap 1: I've had students come to me, elated that taking my course cured their insomnia. An absolutely disrespectful claim, is it not?

Home Tap 2: There is still much we do not know about Ancient Magic. Even textbooks on the subject touch only on surface level information. It is a fascinating subject of study.

Home Tap 3: Lucius is a long-hair cat, and thus, during shedding season, he sheds so much hair that I could practically make another smaller Lucius. I can only wonder if there could be some use for it...

Home Tap 4: What's this about a manga about a mage in historical times? Far too much creative liberties are taken in those silly things. If you wish to properly gain knowledge about history, you should read specialized textbooks on the subject.

Home Tap 5: As it stands, all professors should wear a robe as proper attire. Teaching class while sporting a garish coat is simply unacceptable.

Home Tap - Groovy: I am quite fond of my rocking chair. I find nothing is better than being able to rest in it while stroking Lucius's fur.

Duo: [TREIN]: Crewel-sensei, are you prepared to begin? [CREWEL]: Don't strain your health, Trein-sensei.

Requested by Anonymous.