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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • My amateur-ecologist thoughts:

    I had the same reaction reading this; all my life I’ve been told to remove all standing water no matter what. It’s really unfortunate that we drain swamps, remove pools and puddles, and populate ponds with introduced fish species just to reduce mosquito numbers, because we’re destroying critical habitat and watering holes for so many species in the process. Unlike most wanton environmental destruction it’s at least for a good reason (from a anthropocentric point of view anyway), but it would be better to try and reduce mosquito populations in less invasive ways.

    I posted in another thread for this article that (in my experience) salamander larvae will annihilate any and all mosquito populations before they can get established. They’re voracious little critters, to the point of frequently turning to cannibalism, because they’re racing the clock to grow and metamorphosize before their pool dries up in summer or freezes in autumn (depending on climate). Mosquito larvae are sitting ducks to salamander larvae, and given a healthy salamander population are unlikely to make it to adulthood before getting devoured.

    In many areas salamander populations (as well as other amphibians) are struggling because the fish introduced to their breeding ponds (for recreational fishing, mosquito control, or just aesthetics) will often eat their larval forms. It seems like a potential win-win to use salamander population support as a means of mosquito suppression.






  • I’ve been to Singapore. You would have to pave every square inch of the island just store all the vehicles if everyone owned a car. The problem isn’t that cars are too expensive: it’s that the government pussy-footed around the issue and soft-banned vehicles through high fees rather than the more equitable approach of outright banning them for most private use. It’s like the saying: if the only punishment for breaking a law is a fine, then that law only applies to the poor.

    Being a dense city and tiny island, life would be much improved for everyone if vehicle ownership and use were limited to businesses/workers that can demonstrate a work-related need for a vehicle, taxis, and people with disabilities that prevent them from utilizing public transit and/or taxis.




  • I want to disagree, but the reality is that most TV shows from the 90s and before have aged pretty poorly (certainly way worse than movies of the same age have). There are a few reasons for this, but I think the big three are: TV used to be lower budget and lower prestige (going from being a movie actor to a TV actor was shameful), TV had to be episodic due to the nature of broadcast (this improved once TiVo entered the scene, but it was streaming that really made multi-episode storytelling possible), TV episodes were extremely exact in their length (had to stick to the broadcast schedule, which sometimes caused major pacing problems).

    Sci-fi TV especially seems to have aged terribly. Part of that is it used to be a niche genre that did not get the resources it needed to not come off at least a little campy, but I suspect the biggest issue is that of audience: shows like Star Trek or X-Files tried to have mass appeal in a way that TV nowadays doesn’t need to. I think Firefly’s (eventual) success really helped the genre turn a corner, and subsequent hits like BSG showed that “serious” sci-fi was feasible on the TV model. These two series also really ratcheted up viewer expectations for what “good” sci-fi TV should be.

    I appreciate the classics like TNG for keeping certain franchises alive and the genre as a whole stumbling along until it could really hit its stride in the '00s, and I do think the shows have some watch value even today, but honestly most of it is rooted in nostalgia and historic importance.










  • Japanese theater history is interesting! Kabuki (I assume you’re referring to this) started off as all women, then became all male. This created “onnagata,” actors playing female parts but in a constant state of method acting so they also appeared as women off stage. More recently there’s also the super-popular Takarazuka, an all-women musical troupe (basically Japan’s Broadway). I’m not sure how much those folks in Texas would consider Japanese theater part of their cultural heritage, but it’s another great example of queer theater in human history (that continues to this day!)


  • [It seems I accidentally deleted the original comment when I went to edit it, so here’s the repost]

    There were literally classes at the public library where people would get together and share websites. Also, because the web wasn’t monetized, similar sites would link to each other because they didn’t see other sites as competition for views and ad dollars. The Anime Turnpike, for example, was basically a yellow pages of any and all English-language websites related to anime. There were also “circles”* (even well after search engines entered the picture) of sites sharing a theme (eg a TV show fandom) and you could click through them like flipping through a Rolodex. But yeah, in the very early days (as in, before most folks even had email) word of mouth was quite prevalent; one of my mom’s favorite sites she heard about from a taxi driver.

    *EDIT: Sorry, I think I got my languages mixed up; as others have said they were called webrings in English