I was a woman with stubble and a receding hairline, alternating back and forth between different terrible haircuts before I got laser and bangs and became the woman you see before you today. And when I talk to some of these girls now who get hrt and laser IMMEDIATELY after coming out, it's got me having mixed feelings. On the one hand, I'm happy for them, it's really a testament to how much we've fought to get access to medical transition. on the other hand, they all ask me where I get my confidence from and literally it's because I used to look like a crossdressing faggot before I looked like a woman, and people still gendered me correctly about 50% of the time back then and it made me realize that nobody fucking notices little bumps in your clothes or the spot you missed shaving. An actress who forgets a line can still deliver a memorable performance.

ALSO! WHILE I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION

I'm a 5'10" Brick Shithouse of a woman. I have forearms bigger than some dude's biceps. I got a soft tummy and am often covered in grease and you know what! I get treated like a woman everywhere I go now. anyone telling you that you need to lose weight, or stop working out, or starve yourself to be a woman is fucking lying to you. There are as many ways to be a woman as there are women. As long as its authentic to yourself, the world will respond in kind.

You're gonna be fine kid.

People look at this and go 'yeah that's a woman', all your fear is in your head.

Also, go eat a sandwich.

Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now

So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.

I do it all the time.

However.

The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram

There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.

Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.

Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.

And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.

If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.

So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:

It grows only a few millimeters a year.

This is "preserved" reindeer moss.

It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.

It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.

It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.

There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting

These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.

Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.

Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.

This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.

I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry

The abundance of lichen in Finland is... debatable. According to economic standards, there's enough for commercial harvesting (which is done by harvesting 20-30% in a given location, then harvesting is banned from that specific location for the next 5 years. At least this is how things go in theory...). However, there's a constant issue of reindeer not having enough lichen to feed on, since reindeer are always herded in the wild. This leads to reindeer herders having to give them species-incompatible supplementary feed.

Personally, if the native species don't have enough food to feed on in the wild, to me that would be a better standard to measure the economic viability of harvesting lichen for other purposes with.

Also there's a constant issue of poaching lichen from the wild for which culprits are almost never found. Part of it can be simple issue of ignorance or thoughtlessness. But undoubtedly there are people doing it for commercial purposes, knowing it's not part of the "jokamiehenoikeus" ("everyman's rights", which gives Finns moving in nature the right to pick berries and mushrooms or whatever pinecones they find on the ground in the woods for their own use).

Thats terrible, but I'm not surprised, I suspected it might not truly be sustainable.

Yeah. Harvesting this stuff on industrial scale to be sold for arts and crafts is not acceptable.

Do not buy reindeer moss.

Hang on

One of these shops (with thousands of sales!) is selling BIRD FEATHERS

That is a FEDERAL CRIME

...

If you see people selling poached items you should see if you can contact their government. Many places allow you to make a report. This is only time I'd advocate Narcing

Yeah like...

I'm not a snitch, but this shop I'm talking about is selling ORCHIDS. Uprooted, clearly pulled up from the wild, for people's terrariums. And slow-growing lichens. And mosses.

And they have thousands of sales.

One of their items includes bird feathers in the photos. In the USA even possessing the feathers of any wild bird, let alone selling them, is illegal.

So.

Update.

I'm looking through etsy shops for anything that appears obviously poached/illegal.

There are so, so, so many listings of Usnea (old man's beard lichen) as a medicinal herb. And other lichens. I found someone selling PULMONARIA LOBATA of all things.

I'm thinking about how I can recognize when a plant is probably poached from Appalachia, but I can't recognize a plant that is probably poached from a faraway place.

This is going to sound crazy, but I sort of hate the houseplant business.

I don't hate houseplants as a concept. But a lot of house plants are tropical plants, desert plants, epiphytic plants, and other plants with narrow habitat requirements, and it creates a HUGE market for these plants in areas the plants don't live.

Not all of them are poached, but outside of a few very widely cultivated species, how do I know, especially if I don't know anything about the plant's native ecosystem?

Cacti, succulents, carnivorous plants, and orchids are all threatened by poaching. Even species that are cultivated in nurseries are heavily poached. And someone buying from California doesn't necessarily know that those "wild-collected" Goodyera pubescens from Kentucky are scarce enough that seeing dozens of them being sold on Etsy is a major red flag.

Most people don't even know that Venus flytraps are native to North and South Carolina and nowhere else.

Poaching doesn't look how you think it does.

People think "oh, if it was illegal it would have been shut down/it wouldn't be for sale still". WRONG. There's tons of illegal plant, animal, and fungi remains for sale, often on cutesy websites like Etsy. It's especially rampant in the "gothic" aesthetic, which places great value on bones and real animal remains:

It shouldn't be up to you, the consumer, to do all the research and track down every bit of information to make sure what they're buying is actually respectfully and sustainably sourced, but often, it is, because it's really hard to regulate and track Internet-based businesses.

"It's just a few plants, it doesn't matter" - yes, it does. If it were only one person, I might understand, but the whole thing about businesses and capitalism is that they have a never-ending need, an infinite demand.

As a conservation ecology student I am begging people to think twice when you see this kind of thing. Don't take sellers at their word, and if they act cagey or give you non-answers or vague assurances, STOP and LEAVE. Better yet, report them. Take screenshots in case listings and pages get taken down, and report them to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, or the appropriate equivalent in your country - just google "(your area) report poaching". The US Fish and Wildlife Service has an online form, below:

Thank you for reading. Your actions really do make a difference for every single plant or animal that gets exploited like this, and I appreciate you.

ok time to pirate ubisoft games even harder

This is why everyone must support Stop Killing Games. Look it up, sign the petitions everyone.

European Citizen Initiative -> right here! If you're in the EU and want to sign it.

The deadline is 31/07/2025.

If someone doesn't understand 24 hour time and is chill you can convert it for them because that's helpful and polite.

If someone primarily uses 12 hour time but understands 24 hour time and is chill you can leave it unconverted as a sign of respect for their abilities.

If someone throws a hissy fit whenever someone gives a time in 24 hour time you are obligated by sacred duty to exclusively give them the time in 24 hour time, even if you actually use 12 hour time.

If someone calls it military time you get to laugh at them for being a yankee. even if they're not.

Every time you have GenAI make you an anime waifu with three titties and a dumptruck ass a family doesn't get to have a drink or bathe.

Every time you ask Copilot to write you a PowerShell script to stroke your boss' ego, a city experiences a brownout.

Every time you chat with your AI "girlfriend" a farmer doesn't get to water their animals.

Using these tools actively hurts you and your community, while at the same time enriching some shitheel who would happily step on your neck to make an additional dollar. Don't use them. Actively remove them from devices you own. Disable them whenever possible. Go out of your way to avoid them. It's honestly not hard. You've been using the internet just fine without GenAI hallucinating at you.

the bird is the hat, jinu

Chubby Six-eyed Magpie from K-pop Demon Hunters for obvious reasons.

Give me more deranged expressions for animated female characters please because I am SO FUCKING HERE for this

We love our unblinking giant demon cat.

they may be spying on you (i don't mind tho)

Dont stop talk about palestine 📣📣🇵🇸

A little more info:

everyone stop interacting with this post, @i-wear-the-cheese is the only person I'm listening to from now on

I sometimes call the microwave the "nuke box", as in "nuke it for a few seconds". I see nothing wrong with calling it "popty ping".

And that's fine! Out of context I can see how this is might just seem like I'm being extremely pedantic and slamming down on people's personal lexicons for no reason, but it's less about the individual usage of popty ping and more about the widespread 'teehee Welsh is so silly' attitude that non-Welsh speakers so often display — maliciously or not — when talking about the language.

I genuinely don't care if a mam teaches her child to say popty ping instead of meicrodon or if someone genuinely enjoys using it in everyday speech, but I do care if it's being used by English speakers as a way of treating a minority language as a linguistic punching bag for the millionth time.

It's less about the microwave and more about the microcosm.

it always seems weird to me when certain political historians define fascism very narrowly. it kinda seems lile they're always using nazi germany as the only true example of fascism, and anything that isn't exactly the same as nazi germany is not truly fascist

japan in wwii? not true fascism because they didn't have a single dictator with absolute power. spain under franco? not fascist because they weren't constantly at war with their neighbors. chile under pinochet? not fascist because they had some capitalist economic policy. mussolini, who literally coined the term fascism? not a true fascist because he was pro-catholic

i have heard all these arguments from serious people. but if you accept them, you have to conclude that there has only been one fascist nation and one fascist movement literally ever, and there will never be another one. you have to deny the reality that fascism can take root in any culture. and it always takes on different characteristics because every culture lionizes a different glorious (imagined) past