#the farm might need more crop variety tbh

[ward-leon]

wip modded minecraft town bc i think its turning out nice so far

(+some buildings below the cut ft. the farm golems)

[aro-aizawa]

stardew valley mods i'd make if my brain didn't melt when i try to understand basic game modding:

krobus dialog overhaul - mostly just his roommate dialog, smth abt it gives me the ick. vaguely feeling aphobic, but likely unintenional.

villager interactions - a lot of the villagers have routines/interactions with other villagers like the sebastian, sam and abigail friend group or penny and maru's bookclub. but we don't really get to see them interact outside of player focused cutscenes, or just vibing together. like if the player gets 4 hearts w penny and maru, they join their bookclub. or a group cutscene on the tuesday yoga classes. also a great opportunity to do smth w the wizard/caroline/abigail thing. abigail being taught magic would be cool as fuck but also make her the most interesting marriage candidate tbh.

related to the top two options: the ability to integrate krobus and the dwarf to the rest of pelican town - the fact that though krobus and the dwarf appear in the relationships tab, they're so static, literally staying in the exact same place unless invited to a movie or become a roommate. fleshing them both out as villagers would be nice, even if its just on the small scale. i feel like abigail would be great friends w krobus or the dwarf.

plausible housing for the unnamed npcs that are employed by joja/movie theatre. what, they just.... live in the building? not even an unenterable house near where the bookseller is stationed? i feel like there should be more npcs that need housing but idk

linus moving his tent regularly - this is just,,,, a minor thing that bugs me but i always make linus my bff in every run, but since he's so attuned to nature i always like the idea of linus moving his tent occasionally to a new area. around the woods in places, near the tide pools, if the player has opened up the secret woods, then in there too, tucked away from slimes.

more sandy content!!!!!! - where does my girl sleep? right behind her counter??? because i see absolutely no door leading to a bedroom. also friendship cutscenes would be cute as fuck, or emily visiting the desert more often than just on her birthday. also trans sandy i will die on this hill.

the ability to order things from robin when she's not at her counter - like if she's off on her tuesday gym get together or w/e you could leave a note at her place w the materials. maybe it might take an extra day or two but i am so tired of remembering on mondays or tuesdays i need to order a building, then having to spend ten minutes in the house waiting for the exact moment she passes her counter. rip.

more remixed community bundles - like the generic mod config menu has been doing amazing work, the ability to use that to set up a custom configuration of bundles would be great. or even an option to have only the remixed bundles, like the seasonal foraging ones are boring, give me more like the medicinal bundle or the sticky bundle. make me have more variety in how i set up my farm and what crops i grow.

more platonic cutscenes!!!! - i wanna be like unofficially adopted by evelyn and george as their grandkid, them tell the player things about their grandpa, and alex is just like :/ guess my grandparents have another grandkid. helping out w gus or smth and together him and the player make a new recipe, fishing w willy and one of you reels in a massive fish. getting lewis to stop needlessly hiding his relationship w marnie bc literally no one would care if they were dating why is this scandalous, you're both unmarried and its not like he exempts her from business tax.

[aho-dapa]

okay *brings out notes* 

I actually have similar hcs of the courts but are a little different

I was thinking is high fae conquering the lesser fae (like very greco roman stuff since it’s literally everywhere you look in Prythian) very much a millennia in the making with that

Since there is a lot of greek parallels with the names, I kind of saw Summer as a mash of Italian and African

(this is also coming from the place of merging fashions and cultures, kind of like how at of people live with merged identities, and also just making some stuff along the way)

Since, well, Helion, looks a lot like Helios to me, I thought about Greece and Eygpt here. There’s a lot that could be touched on with the sun god Ra or even the collision of greco-egyptian traditions, like with Serapis, another god of the sun

Yeah, I also didn’t think that deep from a sustainability standpoint on that hc, but more from the military feel of it. I had also thought a little bit on the farming aspect of this. Maybe even change the Illyrian landscape to be kind of inhospitable for crops and farming, I’m thinking sharp high mountains that would also add to the stoniness and otherness the canon tried to build. They could also have other sources of food from either hunting (there could even be a group of woman only hunters because of necessity of all the men’s constant focus on training) or seafood since most of the NC is surrounded by the ocean.

Also thought about adding mobility to the Illyrians, like maybe the migrate around Illyria or even to neighboring islands. Could even tie into cultural traditions and stuff. And also with the Spartans I think a lot of their military prowess came from the idea they were near unbeatable in battle, even if they were constantly training. That’s why I thought it be cool to have all of the Illyrians be a parallel of greek city states and their conflicts. Like having sub groups of tribes within a larger tribe that’s overseen by Velaris and Hewn City.

There could also be so much variety between Illyrian tribes. One that’s matriarchal or one that has customs that are completely different to anywhere else in Prythian. Maybe even use this as an avenue to introduce nations outside of Prythian.

Also, maybe the low birthrate could be tweaked into that it’s very difficult for women to have successful births rather than difficulty getting pregnant. This might put more pressure on women in this case. Could even expand into harems (which now that I think about how monogamous sjm’s world is when that’s one of the key way’s women have been oppressed). Also, would be cool to contrast that with polyamorous relationships. Not to mention how many subsects of religions Illyria could have because of this and the potential religious conflicts. Could make it more nuanced than just having it focus solely on the oppression of women. Ohhh, there can even be tribes where the roles are switched between men and women, that would be cool to explore.

I constantly wonder about how the Illyrians sleep.

I’ve also hc’ed Dawn as India inspired. From a quick search (and from help with replies), Thesan is an Etruscan name (of a goddess) but it has roots in Hindi?? Still need to look more into this tho.

Tbh it gets difficult to monolith a place as one culture especially since they're all so unique, I think that’s why a one to one comparison (in fantasy) might not be needed all the time

Worldbuilding Illyria + a sort of rant on sjm’s writing, again

I’m sorry but quick idea, yknow what would have been cool, (while the Illyrians were an actual collection of people in history from what I gather–groups of people that likely didn’t call themselves Illyrians at all), is some Sparta parallels with Illyria. Would have been cool is all I’m saying. Not only very warrior oriented but also treated women differently. Very matrilineal and all that and women were likely still expected to be athletic. 

But also would have been cool to highlight how even though women had some more freedoms than their other ‘greek’ counterparts, they still had their own disadvantages like not being able to be involved in politics and stuff. Would have been great actually to show how women with power can still be oppressed, would have been stellar and an actual conversation starter but eh. 

BUT YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD HAVE BEEN BETTER???

Keep reading

[botanyshitposts]

im still working on that paper on government regulations of GMO crops and its just.....really fascinating. i feel like i just....wasn’t very well informed about exactly how these plants interact with environment and with people before, although ive heard vague arguments about legality and possible dangers one way or the other tossed back and forth a lot. the regulation in a legal sense is done by USDA APHIS under title 7, chapter 104 (the Plant Protection Act), and it’s very messy and very interesting. for example, i’ve heard a lot about the ‘intellectual property’ legal case with Monstanto, but i just learned about the supreme court case Monsanto Co. v. Geertson Seed Farms, which concerns the actual regulation of some of these products. 

background: the issue in this case is if GMO crops could cross pollinate with non-GMO crops and introduce those genes inadvertently into nearby wild/organic populations. this is a big factor of what people mean when they say ‘GMO crops could hurt the environment’ (wether or not it could actually cause harm is another thing that kind of is on a more case-by-case basis with the gene involved and stuff). 

from there: 

1. if you are a company wanting to mass-produce ur GMO crop, then u put that crop through years of development and then contact USDA APHIS, who sends people out to put it through it’s paces and make sure that it’s not going to fuck anything up/hurt people. usually by this point the company is 600% sure that it’s safe, because the entire regulatory process costs a lot of money and you don’t want to put just any old crop through that just to have it fail. 

2. again, USDA APHIS runs under title 7 chapter 104, which classifies GMOs as ‘plant pests’ (this wording gives APHIS the legal jurisdiction to screen them like they do). BUT because of the technical meaning of ‘plant pest’ in another law, a GMO is only a GMO if it contains DNA from another organism. so if you take DNA from the same plant and move it around/modify it, you can petition USDA APHIS to declassify it as a plant pest, meaning that the particular crop becomes completely deregulated and can just kinda....do whatever, get planted whatever, etc and is completely out of the jurisdiction of the department. (it should be noted that this is kind of viewed as a loophole, because one of the concerns about genetic engineering is that by moving genes around the genome, you could accidentally insert it into another gene and break it’s function, causing unintentional adverse affects.)

3. this wording also means that USDA APHIS also has to abide by NEPTA, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which states that if APHIS gets petitioned to deregulate a crop, before they do anything they first have to do an environmental assessment of the crop that is wrapped up in a report saying ‘yea u good, because all our tests came back negative, ur plant is now Free’, ‘you are not allowed to grow this, because of x reasons, your plant must remain under our regulations’, or ‘you are allowed to grow this Wherever and do Whatever, but only in certain places where you can be sure x things won’t happen, if you grow it outside those zones then its back under our jurisdiction’. if USDA APHIS decides that it’s safe enough, they can allow the crop to enter deregulation before the environmental assessment is finished. 

so it’s 2004, and Monstanto has an alfalfa crop variety that’s Roundup Ready (meaning that it’s resistant to their patented herbicide Roundup, and if you have it planted you can spray the field with that herbicide and kill everything but the crop. they have a few different kinds of crop like this but this case concerns their alfalfa variety). they decide ‘hey, lets go petition the USDA for our crop to be deregulated so we can do Whatever We Want with it’. the problem here is that alfalfa is open pollinated, meaning that it’s naturally pollinated insects.....that also pollinate other alfalfa nearby. alfalfa that may not be GMO. alfalfa that may, in fact, be organic.....which, by federal regulation, cannot be GMO. APHIS looked over the case and did an assessment and was like ‘yea sure sounds good’ and started the process of deregulating the crop.

organic farmers in california noticed this, and they were like ‘that’s not very cash money of u’. so in 2006, Geertson Seed Farm and a few other organic farms rallied together and went to the california district court and were like ‘we dont think APHIS’s environmental assessment was enough, and we think that they should conduct a more thorough investigation, and during that investigation they should stop the process of deregulating the crop’. the court was like ‘yea that sounds reasonable’, ordered APHIS to conduct a new investigation, and ordered that Monstanto would not be able to plant any more of that alfalfa until APHIS had finished said investigation. monstanto was like ‘can you just like, partially deregulate it so we can like, plant it in some places at least?’ and the court was like ‘No(tm)’. 

monsanto Did Not Like This. they appealed to the california appeal courts, who in 2013 also said No(tm), and they still Did Not Like This, so they appealed to the u.s. supreme court, who was like ‘yea ok you can plant it in some places until APHIS finishes the assessment, because Geertson Seed Farm didn’t actually like....have any harm done to them, and we’ve decided that they need to show harm before they can demand that it not be deregulated’. they also decided that cross-contamination between organic and GMO crops does not qualify as harm done to those crops, because ‘harm’ in the context of a ‘plant pest’ is widespread physical damage and destruction of other plants, and changing the genome of a plant like that is not physical damage, which is....a really interesting conclusion that brings up a lot of questions, tbh. i’ve been thinking about it a lot lately, like....this is pretty strictly adhering to just the damage imposed on plants, and doesn’t branch out to consider how cross contamination could impact organic farmers economically through potentially having their crops deemed non-organic do to no fault of their own. i also feel like this is one of those cases where it could have some Wild Ass implications if it ever comes up in a human or animal context, although i can’t say exactly what that might be.