This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees’ range has shrunk by 90%.
(my own photos)
Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.
Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would’ve penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you’ve observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.
You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:
when I become an eccentric billionaire I’m going to buy every house in 10 square blocks of unremarkable suburb. I will have them all furnished and decorated except for (and this is key) one house in the dead center. this house I will put up for sale at a ridiculously reasonable price for the area. once it sells, and the new owner/couple/family moves in, the plan will spring into action.
every single house besides the one in the center within my 10 square blocks will remain uninhabited. I will put all the lights inside on timers so that it appears that people are living in there, I will have lawns mowed when I’m sure everyone in my victim house is at work/school, I will have decorations put up during the holidays and cars moved there and parked in driveways when I’m sure that the owner/couple/family in the house at the center is not there to witness it happening. I will produce all the superficial trappings of life without a single person actually being there.
who knows how long it’ll take them to realize that something is wrong? when their kids are playing in the yard, and they notice they’ve never seen another child around here even once, despite the four-bedroom family homes all down the street? after a few weeks, when they realize the lights in the house across the way click off at exactly 9:45, on the second, every single night? when they’ve been living there for a month and a half and they realize they’ve never seen a single car park in front of another house? when they want to greet their neighbors and not a single house in the whole neighborhood opens its door?
when they do realize that they’re completely alone here, what would they do with that fact? what would you do if all at once, as you stood in a crowd, you realized that every single person around you was a mannequin? it’s unnerving, sure, but enough to warrant a move? how long will they live in this idyllic ghost town before it gets to them? can a person survive in a dollhouse? Thank you. *I wave to the crowd as I walk offstage at my ted talk. one person gives a halfhearted round of applause from the back. a talk about sustainable ecosystem management was scheduled for right now and no one knows how I got up here.*
It’s a sad fact that every long running universe based upon themes and tones of isolation, limiality, and cosmic horror gets worn down by overexplanation, overpopulation of the universe with entities, overuse, and eventually irony and financial exploitation. Derlething happened to Lovecraft, it happened to SCPs, it happened in record times to the backrooms.
If you try to build a collective work with vibe of subtle unease and liminality, someone will invariably introduce a guy that looks like this:
Yeah, that sounds like massive tone drift and escalation from “a Delta Green-style organization’s x-files and procedures for weird objects and creatures”
Just admit that you hate monarchy because you think it's 'primitive' and think that white countries should have more 'modern' styles of government.
I’m actually a classical royalist and I think white countries should be balkanized into 1000s of powerless bickering regional territories ruled over by local petty monarchs. They all each get exactly one nuke.
Every so often a note will blow through my notifs telling me “Um actually the water is only radioactive at the bottom so it’s perfectly safe to swim here” yeah bitch swim in the reactor pool see if I fucking care
today this older man came in to get information and then he asked to see the full text on my shirt because he “loved fishing” and when I did he just went silent and said “that’s a new one”
Anonymous
