California has the second largest number of Native American tribes in the US, and yet their presence is largely made invisible by the settler majority in the state. People here know precious little about this area’s original inhabitants which is both a shame, and a clear example of how far the US has gone in order to silence Native voices and continue the colonial genocide that was started when America was first colonised some 500 years ago or so.
For us indigenous peoples, our languages form an integral, central part of all discussions concerning our identities. Taking this into consideration, the act of speaking or using an endangered language becomes not only an important tool to facilitate one’s participation in what could be referred to as an indigenous reality, it is also a natural vehicle for the transmission of cultural values within our own communities.
We are our languages, they shape us, and connect us with our ancestors while simultaneously bringing us into the future.
This photo was taken on the section of Huntington State Beach closest to where the Tongva village Lukupangna once was.
As visitors to these places it is our duty to learn their native names as well.
today at goodwill i found a kirk/spock au where kirk is a lowly redshirt
Okay no but this book.
Do you know how fucking long I hunted for a copy of the first edition of this book? I can’t remember the specifics, it’s been ages since I read it, but in the first edition it had some line that was basically confirming Kirk/Spock that was removed after the first printing.
oh my god are you telling me i found a piece of fandom history and i had no idea
I AM BACK AT GOODWILL AND IT’S STILL HERE AND IT’S A FIRST EDITION WITH GAY STUFF???? IT’S A DOLLAR?????? I’M
it starts out with wholesome hand-holding and boyfriends worrying about each other
they’re in an au now and kirk is an angry ensign with a drug problem
“being the top felt weird and wrong”
SOMETHING STIRRED INSIDE HIM
no matter the universe kirk can’t keep his shirt intact
THIS IS WHERE SHIT GETS REAL Y’ALL I CAN’T
THE MIND MELD IS BARELY EVEN A METAPHOR
KIRK WAS ASKING FOR IT
aaaaaaaaaaah
this is the best dollar i have ever spent and yes that includes bearllionaire
I’d heard about this as some sort of fandom urban legend – everyone heard about it, no one seemed to have hard copy. Nobody was sure if it was some unpublished fanfic, a first draft, vanity press, whatever.
And it’s real.
No one had a copy because Gene Roddenberry found out about the romantic undertones and forced Pocket Books to recall the first edition so that it could be drastically revised.
It was a winding, wonkish and occasionally obscure conversation about foreign coal exploration, natural-gas pipelines and pig manure as a power source. But only one of the men on the line — Energy Secretary Rick Perry — held sway over his nation’s energy policy. On the other end of the conversation were Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov, who had just added Perry to their list of high-profile hoax victims….
During the conversation, which was posted in its entirety on Vesti, a Russian news site, Perry was convinced he was talking to Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman, who appears to speak through an interpreter. Perry talked about a potential pipeline across the Baltic Sea for Russian gas, cyberattacks on the U.S. power grid, natural-gas exploration in Ukraine and the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris climate accord. “I hope that stepping away from the Paris accord will not have any negative impact with our relationship with the Ukraine,” Perry said. “We tried to divorce the politics from this and really just let our record stand, one that I’m very proud of.” He also talked about a meeting scheduled for August where they would let American business executives talk about extracting oil and natural gas in Ukraine. “What we have seen in Texas is the great increase of productivity, particularly in shale gas because of hydraulic fracturing and the directional drilling,” Perry said.
Perhaps the only giveaway about the true nature of the call was a statement the “Ukrainian prime minister” made about a new biofuel invented by Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, according to the Pravda Report newspaper. The fuel was made from a mix of home-brewed alcohol and pig manure. Perry said he’d like to get more information about the “scientific development.”
I found this Youtube channel run by a Japanese chef and it’s actually better than porn? First all all his cinematography is off the charts. Youtube videos have no business looking that good. Second of all, everything he makes looks SO TASTY, and he explains the recipes in such a simple, soothing, manner. Third off all, he does this all while his two adorable kitties watch??? Like… they are so intent on what hes doing but they never run around or hop on the counter???? He has a stool for them to sit on as he makes his recipes Im gunna die
Look at this and tell me it isnt the best thing on youtube
he and his (American) wife have a youtube vlogging channel all about being an international couple and they have thREE CATS THAT HE COOKS WITH
Jun’s Kitchen
this video was literally fire.i bet the cats have a fave dish to watch
this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014.
the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):
this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up.
but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop.
they remembered that no harm was coming from this actionand decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop.
she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.
they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered.
it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!
how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this???
well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen.
so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????
plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)
national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!
…this is exactly why “I can do anything I want to it as long as it doesn’t feel pain” has always felt… incomplete, to me, as a moral theory
both in terms of deciding what’s permissible and in terms of deciding what isn’t
right, like – people are all too willing to decide entire categories of HUMANS don’t feel pain (autistic people, for instance). i don’t trust that judgment applied to organisms who are so fundamentally different from us we wouldn’t understand them even if they were doing their version of crying out in pain. and even humans can suffer without making it obvious, so why shouldn’t other species.
It’s like the intelligence thing. we start from the assumption that all other species completely lack any form of intelligence, emotion or even sensation in this case, and are shocked at any evidence otherwise. we’re just starting from an absurd set of assumptions.
This is precisely why “The search for alien intelligence on other planets” raises my hackles.
We can’t even recognize “alien” (i.e. “other”) intelligence on this planet! We refuse to recognize “alien intelligence” (i.e.neurodivergence) in our own species!
here’s some Pangur Trivia: if I don’t carry her sleeping body upstairs with me at bedtime she’ll begun an Unceasing Scream upon waking in the dark alone
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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