yes, doctors suck, but also "the medical ethics and patient interaction training doctors receive reinforces ableism" and "the hyper competitive medical school application process roots out the poor, the disabled, and those who would diversify the field" and "anti-establishment sentiment gets applications rejected and promotions requests denied, weeding out the doctors on our side" and "the gruesome nature of the job and the complete lack of mental health support for medical practitioners breeds apathy towards patients" and "insurance companies often define treatment solely on a cost-analysis basis" and "doctors take on such overwhelming student loan debt they have no choice but to pursue high paying jobs at the expense of their morals" are all also true

none of this absolves doctors of the truly horrendous things they say and do to patients, but it's important to acknowledge that rather than every doctor being coincidentally a bad person, there is something specific about this field and career path that gives rise to such high prevalence of ableist attitudes

and I WILL elaborate happily

🚨🚨REMINDER: Campaign Rewards Survey Closing this Sunday 🚨🚨

For those who backed our BackerKit campaign, a heads up that you have until this coming Sunday, July 7, to make your final choices on the rewards you will receive!

We want all our backers to get exactly the rewards they want most, so please make sure to fill out the rewards survey sent to your emails.

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why is this the hottest thing i've ever seen

HE SHOWED UP WITH A DUEL DISK TODAY?????

AND ALL FIVE EXODIA PIECES

I need everyone to know that I looked it up, and Noah Lyles is doing this as part of an ongoing bet he has with shotput competitor Chase Jackson. She's wearing Naruto accessories every day, and if Lyles whips out Yugioh cards at every race, then for the shotput finals Jackson will re-enact the scene of Rock Lee dropping his weights.

This is now the only part of the Olympics that I care about.

this is your random reminder to CHECK IF YOU'RE STILL HAVING FUN

are you enjoying scrolling tumblr? watching youtube? reading that book? playing that game? drawing that art? doing that activity? if not,

YOU CAN STOP AND DO SOMETHING ELSE

you don't have to stick to something that you are doing for fun if it isn't fun for you anymore. You can come back! If you've loved it before you are likely to love it again! but you can stop!

Don't get stuck in a loop of doing something that you think should be fun when it isn't! You can put it down for a bit! Maybe that's the very thing that will make it fun again later!

It always gets me that the name "Gandalf" literally just means "Wand-Elf" or "Stick-Elf". I'm imagining old Gondorians just being like:

Librarian: I saw that weird guy at the library again today.

Guard 1: What weird guy?

Librarian: The old guy with the beard? Kinda elfy-looking, apart from the beard?

Guard 1: Oh, with the big-ass stick?

Librarian: Yeah, looked like he was carrying an entire tree branch.

Guard 2: Yeah, that's the Stick Elf.

Guard 1: Hell yeah, I fuckin' love the Stick Elf.

Librarian: The "Stick Elf"?

Guard 2: He comes by every few years, usually after some weird book or other.

Librarian: Oh. Yeah, he wanted a treatise on goblin breeding habits.

Guard 2: Like, how they have sex? We have books on that?

Librarian: Yeah, turns out we do. I was as surprised as you are.

Guard 1: What'd the Stick Elf need a fuckin' goblin-fuckin' book for?

Librarian: I didn't ask. So you just call him "Stick Elf"?

Guard 2: I mean, he looks kinda elfy and he always has that stick, so, like, yeah.

Guard 1: Dude also has some fuckin' dope pipeweed.

Guard 2: Oh yeah, his pipeweed is awesome.

Librarian: How long has he been coming here?

Guard 2: Oh, for decades. He's, like, super old.

Guard 1: More like fuckin' centuries. Dude's old as balls.

Guard 2: Wait, really?

Guard 1: Yeah, my gran-gran used to talk about him. She loved his pipeweed too.

Librarian: So he's… an immortal pipeweed dealer?

Guard 2: I think he's just, like, a connoisseur. He doesn't sell it or anything. He just always has some really top-notch pipeweed on him.

Archivist: Oh, are we talking about Stick Elf?

Guard 1: Hell yeah we are!

Librarian: You know about the Stick Elf, too?

Archivist: Oh, totally. Stick-Elf's a super chill dude. Gave me some awesome pipeweed when I was maybe 12, and tee-bee-aitch I think I'm still a little buzzed from it.

Guard 1: What'd I tell ya, fuckin' dope pipeweed!

Archivist: Also he's really old.

Guard 1: Old as balls.

Librarian: Yeah, so Éodan and Jenniforomir were telling me.

Archivist: My grandpa used to tell me stories - he said one time he saw Stick Elf enter a smoke-ring contest.

Guard 1: Ooh, I'll bet he kicked fuckin' ass.

Archivist: Apparently the guy made an entire warship out of smoke and it flew around shooting down the other rings.

Librarian: And how much of this "fuckin' dope" pipeweed had your grandfather had by this point?

Guard 1: No no, that's totally plausible. Dude's got weird elf powers and shit for sure.

Archivist: He brought fireworks for the king's birthday one year, too.

Guard 1: Oh fuck, I forgot about those! Fuckin' incredible fireworks! Dragons and knights and glowy trees and shit! I was fuckin' 6 years old or something, they totally blew my mind. Hey Éodan, did you see that shit?

Guard 2: No, I think that's before I lived in Gondor.

Guard 1: Wait, you're not from here?

Guard 2: Oh, no, I grew up in Rohan. We moved here when I was, like, thirteen because my uncle Éojeff said he could get my dad a sweet job. And also that there were houses that didn't smell like horseshit.

Guard 1: Oh shit, are you related to Éojeff and Éosteve who run that æbleskiver stand on Norndîl St?

Guard 2: Yeah, they're my uncles!

Guard 1: Shit, they cook a fuckin' great æbleskiver!

Librarian: Ok, hold up a sec, "Stick Elf" can't possibly be his real name.

Guard 1: Why not?

Librarian: What? You think his parents named him in the hopes that he would carry around a fucking tree when he got older?

Guard 2: Maybe they gave him the tree when he was born!

Archivist: I don't think a baby could carry that stick.

Guard 1: You ever seen a baby hanging onto something? They're hella strong.

Archivist: It's not a strength thing, their hands are tiny. That staff is enormous!

Guard 1: My halberd's bigger 'n I am, I can hold it just fine.

Archivist: You're not a baby.

Librarian: Also why would elf parents name their kid "stick ELF"?! Presumably they know that their kid's going to be an elf!

Archivist: Is he actually an elf? I didn't think they grew beards.

Guard 1: How'd he get old as balls if he's not an elf?

Guard 2: His ears aren't that pointy. Maybe he's just a really old guy? Like, a Numémoriam or something?

Guard 1: Did you just say "Numémoriam"?

Guard 2: Nûnenorman? Munimõrbitan? Y'know, those guys like the king that can get super old.

Guard 1: You mean the fuckin' Númenóreans?

Guard 2: Yeah, the Númenóreums.

Archivist: Even the Númenóreans don't live THAT long.

Guard 1: Plus he carries that fuckin' stick around.

Guard 2: Wait, what does the stick have to do with it?

Guard 1: That's an elf thing. Y'know, trees and shit? Very elfy.

Librarian: Ok, look, but his parents naming him "Stick Elf" would be weird whether or not he's an elf. In fact, it's even weirder if he's not - what human names their kid "elf"?

Archivist: Huh. Yeah, you're right, he probably does have another name.

Guard 2: Yeah, I guess so.

Librarian: He's been coming here for decades and nobody's ever asked his real name?

Archivist: I dunno what to tell you, he's Stick Elf. Even his library card just says 'Stick Elf'.

Guard 1: Fuck yeah, the Stick Elf!

Guard 2: Maybe we could, like, ask him his name sometime?

Guard 1: Hey, look, Elrond's over there. He's old as balls too, maybe he knows?

Guard 2: Oh, we shouldn't interru-

Guard 1: HEY ELROND, YOU'RE OLD AS BALLS, RIGHT? WHAT'S THAT OLD ELF WITH THE STICK'S NAME?

Elrond (coming over): Do you mean an old man cloaked all in grey and blue, leaning on a rough-cut staff, who came to the great library this day?

Guard 1: Yeah, the Stick-Elf!

Guard 2: (Sorry to bother you, sir...)

Librarian: He's got to have a real name besides 'the Stick Elf', right?

Elrond: Indeed, for no elf is he. You speak of the wizard Olórin, wisest of the Maiar, older even than Eä itself. Many are his names in many countries: Tharkûn among the Dwarves; Incánus to the south; Mithrandir he is called among my people, the Grey Pilgrim.

Librarian: Oh.

Elrond: And here in the North he is called Stick-Elf.

Librarian: Oh.

Guard 1: Fuck yeah!

Stop posting workplace conversations on main

this is about david tennant telling a transphobic politician to “shut up” btw:

Nah, shutting up transphobes and homophobes it's always the right thing to do.

For the millionth time the freedom of speech protects you from the GOVERNMENT not the DAVID TENNANT

He’s a citizen criticising a politician also. That’s the direction that freedom of speech is supposed to protect.

Granted him being a celebrity means that many people think he’s no longer a citizen, but the fact remains that celebrities aren’t government.

Like I know this is a bit of a circus because people get to defend their pet celebrity on social media and it’s all very distracting and sparkly, and it feels like a chance to be witty and look at David Tennant. It’s presented in a very online storm-in-a-teacup way. Everyone knows the Tories are faithless and everyone’s used to social media being nasty and there are pictures of David Tennant to spice it up. It’s something to distract nerds with, and it doesn’t take much.

But don’t get distracted from the fact that the prime minister of a nation, leader of the nation’s government, is publicly claiming that a private citizen of the nation criticising a member of that government is a violation of freedom of speech. Even if Tennant wasn’t someone whose face you like, it would still be absolutely shocking for the leader of a nation to call for his shame on public like that. It should be shocking. And the inversion of the idea that “people have the right to criticise the government” into “the government has the right, and indeed the duty, to retaliate against citizens for criticising it” should be something you can instantly spot and point out. Don’t look at the magic trick - look at the person’s hands. Don’t look at the celebrity - look at the behavior.

That’s the political sleight-of-hand that’s worth engaging with here. Especially since if anyone “wins” in the resulting court of popular opinion, it will likely be Tennant, and it will likely be attributed to his nerd-popularity. Notice and name the behavior instead. That will be perennial, sometimes associated with less beloved figures, and a good piece of critical thinking to practice.

y'all can make fun of feng xin for being scared of women all you want but I think he developed a flight response to them after hearing the horniest, filthiest, inner most depraved prayers all due to a spelling error

everyone dunking on that automated fleshlight sex toy needs to remember that disabled people get horny too ok 💜

having a masturbator that moves itself, holds your phone, and gives the user exact and immediate control of speed and intensity is fucking revolutionary for disabled people who cannot jack off without assistive devices. for some reason nobody wants to talk about disabled people masturbating but since all of you #sexpositive #feminists agree that jacking off is normal and good and everyone should be able to do it, you have to extend that sentiment to disabled people too. people who cannot move their hands/arms get horny. people who have no core strength get horny. if you physically cannot hump a fleshlight or use a manual sex toy or give yourself a handjob then it is very difficult to experience sexual pleasure without another person involved.

disabled people deserve sex toys that work with their bodies. disabled people deserve to be able to sexually pleasure themselves. disabled people deserve adapted sex toys that the entire fucking internet does not decide to make "lazy basement dweller creep" jokes about.

Reminder that in the 1970s, disabled man Gosnell Duncan, who was paralyzed from the waist down, created body-safe silicone and silicone dildos as a response to the needs of the disabled community. Duncan’s work was important in bringing sex toys — particularly dildos — into the public eye, meaning they became much more accessible for all Americans.

You can’t disconnect sex toys from disability and disability history. If you use any body-safe silicone today, sex toy or not, you have Duncan to thank.

More on Duncan here:

Also, this website has really really great accessible sex toys and other sex accessories (chairs, cushions) Their stuff is priced pretty well too, considering that it’s high quality stuff.

I would like to personally plug Intimate Rose dilators and pelvic wand. Their dilators are made of silicone which is more comfortable flexible than a lot of other dilators that are made of either hard plastic or metal. They also have an ergonomic handle that can be swapped between different sizes of dilator. They have a vibrating pelvic wand as well, but I haven't tried it.

There's also the Ohnut which is a silicone ring that is worn over a penis (though I'm sure it can be worn over a strap as well, but the reason it exists- you could just wear a different strap) to prevent deep penetration that is painful for the person being penetrated. It comes in a few different sizes depending on how deep you like or can handle being penetrated. (Also discovering from re-checking their site just now that they now have a vibrating one!)

I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

It's that time of year again and I think we should all enjoy this, as well as familiarize yourself with your local fireworks laws, the non-emergency line or see if there's a fireworks reporting hotline. I would very much like to not be in the path of a wildfire.

hear them out

[ID: Three-panel Pills That Make You Green comic.

Panel 1: A tall purple person and the green person are sitting on stools by a table. In the background is some kind of bar desk with a plain person, a crimson person with a triangular torso and a sky-blue person with cat ears standing around it.

Purple: "Yeah so I don't really identify as transchromatic OR cischromatic actually"

Green: "Oh! uh-"

Panel 2: Zoom in on a perspective shot of purple on the left and green on the right. Green has a box above their head saying:

"Dialogue choices: -Semantic argument -Deny their lived experience >Hear them out" with "head them out" being selected.

Panel 3: Zoom back out to the same scene as the first panel. In the background another green person with a slight gradient on them has met up with the sky blue person.

Purple: "Yeah so when I was a kid they put me on pills that make you green, 'cause they'd diagnosed me with Unwanted Purple Syndrome. Thing is I actually did want to be purple once I thought about it, so I had to take purple pills."

Green: "Oh I get it now"

Purple: "So I think binary categorisation is a bit reductive about how I got to where I am now"

End ID]

Start - Previous - Next

"You made the ptmyg lore too complicated by adding more colours" look at the hype in the notes and tell me this wasn't worth it

#i don't know if it was the intent but this feels like intersex rep

100% it's deliberate intersex rep

100%

it’s deliberate intersex

rep

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

struggling with how to word this, but putting it out there anyway:

i can fully understand the posts on here from a lot of americans being tired of “vote blue no matter who” posts when the #1 thing that people are constantly (and sometimes only?) addressing is how the republican party is going treat trans/queer people if elected.

it’s part of an unfortunate pattern of prioritizing the effects on a demographic that includes white + upper class people, when people of color and those in the global south are actively and currently being killed or relegated to circumstances in which their survival is very unlikely

it is genuinely exhausting to witness this, and i was also on the fence about even participating in voting because i a) felt like it didn’t matter and b) every time i voiced being frustrated with the current state of the country, white queer people would immediately step in with “but what about trans people!” -> (i am mixed race trans man)

and i say this with unending patience toward people who do this, because i know that it’s not something they actively think about. but everyone already knows how the republican party is going to treat queer people. you are probably talking to another queer person when you bring up project 2025. the issue is that, for those of us who aren’t white, or for those of us who are but who are conscious of ongoing struggles for people of color worldwide, the safety of people around the world feels more urgent than our own. that is the calculation that’s being made.

you’re not going to win votes for the democratic party by dismissing or minimizing these realities and by continually centering (white) queer people.

very few people on here and twitter are actually talking about issues beyond queer rights that concern people of color, or how the two administrations differ on these issues instead of constantly circling back to single-issue politics. this isn’t an exhaustive list. but these are the issues that have actually altered my perspective and motivated me to the point of committing to casting a vote

i may circle back to this and add more as it comes up, but i’m hoping that those who are skeptical / discouraged / tired of the white queer-centric discourse on tumblr and twitter can at least process some of this. please feel free to add more articles + points but i’m asking for the sake of this post to please focus on issues that affect people of color.

As someone who works in immigration, The whole system is fucked. However, Biden has done a lot to make it easier. Here are some highlights:

- Work permits for asylum seekers. Trump did not allow asylum seekers to work above board, forcing them into cash paying, near slavery jobs. Biden has made work permits relatively quick and easy to get. Also, even though they aren’t cheap, ($520 each) his admin has waived fees for many categories including initial asylum seekers and Violence Against Women Act seekers. Also, anyone with a work permit that was renewed this year will have it for 5 years, enough that if trump fucks the process for everyone people can at least still make a living.

- Prosecutorial discretion. Under Trump, if you didn’t have a path to citizenship and you had immigration court, you were finished. Biden has essentially paused proceedings for hundreds of thousands of people who don’t have a case now, but might in the future, giving them time to work, marry, have children, and potentially open new doors for themselves.

- The one that made the news: Parole in place. To immigrate legally, you have to enter the country legally except under very narrow circumstances. If you crossed the border and don’t win in court, you currently have to apply for a hard to get waiver with a 4 year waiting list to leave and come back legally. Biden is trying to waive this by expanding the options for people who crossed the border and married citizens to eliminate the waiver process.

These changes could be gone as soon as january 25th 2025 if Biden loses, as the new administration will replace the whole administration with political appointees frothing at the mouth to send people back regardless of their personal circumstances.

Sure, immigrating to the US isn’t what everyone wants. I dream of a future with truly open borders where nobody would have to do any of the things I do for them. Right now though, Biden will make things better, even if only to a point. Trump will make them much worse.

Also poor disabled people.

Recipients of SSI are - by definition - not “upper class” because you can’t have more than $2000 at any give time. Half of SSI recipients aren’t white. (People of Color are also more likely to have jobs where they’re injured or working in dangerous conditions, and have also been disproportionately impacted by COVID.)

i wish i was famous in the 70s so i coulda gone on the muppet show and flirted with the muppets

Yeah, yeah. It’s all fun and games until Miss Piggy tries to fight you in the studio parking lot for “stealing her man.”

Where's my Jewish phrase for when you people are being irrevocably horny?

“This, too, is Torah, and I must learn!”

Citation

Behold, a Meme:

I love that they're in differing amounts of allowance, too.

"None of these words are in the Bible": fully opposed, there is no written acceptance.

"This, too, is Torah and I must learn": entirely on board, wants more to happen.

"By Allah you people are dogs. I will reblog as always": "ew guys. really? ... lemme in."

After nine months in closed beta, we’re ready to lift the waitlist and invite anyone to try Ellipsus! 🪩

Are you tired of:

... Large docs that lag?

... Bouncing between tools to collect feedback from editors and betas?

... Large corporates and looming LLMs?

Then Ellipsus might be just what you’re looking for. :)

Give us a try and let’s shape the future of collaborative creative writing, together. ✨

Hello, tumblr user. Before you is a tumblr post asking you to name a female fictional character. You have unlimited time to tag a female character, NOT a male one.

Begin.

Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.

You would go online and find questions like "Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!" and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it's baking so it doesn't rise.

Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn't treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.

An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn't charred.

Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.

Disclaimer: I am about to drag the entire field of landscaping like Hector's corpse through the mud at Troy. If this is not the kind of thing you're into, read no further.

So, the entire United States (where I live) is covered in these:

Landscaping shrubs give me major uncanny valley ick. They grow so indifferently to hostile surroundings and caretaking alike, totally ignored by insects, that it seems they must never have been quite alive in the first place.

If it's possible to be cruel to a plant, what we've done to landscaping shrubs is cruelty; they're bred to be planted in packed clay and gravel beside barren concrete and poison-soaked lawn and cling to life for a few years at best before being replaced— all the while forming no relationships with other plants or animals and showing no outward signs of distress.

So the trouble is. Everyone Knows that the way you make a flower bed is

till up a section of ground,

put the plants you want in it, spaced apart according to how big they're expected to grow,

spread mulch over the empty space between them,

and pull up all the weeds that pop up for eternity.

This doesn't work. It's amazing just how much it doesn't work and just how devoted the entire fucking world is to believing that it does.

Fact is, ecosystems are a ceaseless and absolutely unstoppable flow of change. New plants emerge. Present plants grow and interact with other organisms. Old plants die. Organic material decays and is changed. Erosion and weathering remove and introduce new soil material. CHANGE. This is what it is to be alive, to have life, to live. CHANGE.

Life wants to proliferate, to grow, to take in and use energy, and we live on an alive planet of alive things. Life has adapted to every possible niche, from the deepest mine shafts to the drains of hospital sinks; the harshness of extreme environments is nothing but "I double dog dare you."

Extreme environments have life forms that specialize in them. They're sometimes called extremophiles. A heavily disturbed and denuded environment, like a bare, tilled-up flower bed, is extreme for most plants; plants are a community-oriented lot that essentially collectively terraform their own environments.

Direct, unfiltered exposure to sunlight, rain, and wind is absolutely brutal for many organisms that don't live in a desert or other similar biome. Plants take damage from the very radiation they feed upon. Raindrops striking the bare soil, without leaves or decaying plant matter to cushion them, pack the surface soil layer into a hard crust. Wind blowing against plant leaves makes them lose water faster (succulents have a workaround though). Soil without a thick mat of roots and fungi penetrating it washes or blows away at the slightest disturbance. Water in direct sunlight evaporates quickly. And bare rock, asphalt, or concrete in sun quickly becomes unsurvivably hot.

These conditions are features, not bugs, of desert biomes, but they are also temporarily created by disturbance in any biome. So there's a special category of short-lived plants adapted specifically for disturbance. They're called pioneer species or disaster species, but their other name is more familiar: weeds.

The typical landscaping bed, with big spaces in between the intentionally planted plants waiting for them to grow bigger, is exactly the habitat weeds are adapted for.

Weeds produce a bajillion tiny seeds that make their way into every crumb of soil everywhere, and weed seeds don't sprout immediately when they are buried in soil—they wait. Weed seeds go dormant, like sleeper agents waiting for activation, sometimes for decades, until they detect a disruption in their surroundings that tells them their environment has been disturbed. Then they sprout.

Keeping weeds out of a flower bed that looks like this is so much labor that no one can do it. And pulling up or killing the weeds is disturbing the soil and activating more weeds. It's like a task you would be assigned in Hell.

And everyone KNOWS no one can do it, so landscapers lay down landscape fabric or just straight plastic under the mulch so everything in the soil is trapped when it tries to emerge. The trouble with this is that soil eventually forms or is brought in on top of it, and new weeds grow in THAT, or the weeds just sprout right through not giving a singular shit, as weeds are wont to do.

And landscape fabric, like plastic, NEVER DECOMPOSES. Either way you're just putting plastic in your soil.

Even worse, these ill conceived weed barriers might eventually kill your plants. Roots need water, they also need to exchange oxygen with the air. Enough mulch and plastic to stop weeds, will also likely suffocate your plants to death, on top of stopping water and nutrients from reaching down into the soil where roots can absorb them.

Once your plants are dead, you have to dig through plastic to plant new ones, and probably put down new plastic. With most suburban homes this cycle has repeated god knows how many times and you can't break ground without digging up more scraps of non-biodegradable trash.

Another alternative is to use straight-up rocks instead of mulch, just pile rocks around your plants. This doesn't actually stop weeds, but it does mean every time you try to plant something, you get to spend hours picking rocks out of the soil one by one.

Or you can use poison. Yay!

I get so angry about this, because the average American thinks gardening is this kind of torture labyrinth where you just pull crabgrass out of a pile of splinters forever, and any advice they receive will consist of instructions on how to kill their plants slowly.

It's at the point where the mulch with a few small plants in it IS the aesthetic ideal, where the black mulch is a visual backdrop to set off the plants, because NO ONE EVER SEES THESE GARDENS REACH MATURITY because THEY NEVER LAST THAT LONG. At some point the idea was that the flower bed would eventually "fill out," but now "dyed mulch with plants scattered in it" is just what a garden bed is expected to look like.

Landscaping websites typically list the lifespan of small trees or shrubs as around 10 years, which is...incredibly sad. Not every plant will live to its maximum lifespan, but many common species can live to 50-70 years.

And what this leads to, is landscapers expecting plants to only last a few years, so they plant trees 2 FEET FROM A BUILDING where they CANNOT SURVIVE LONG TERM. They plant lil baby ornamental shrubs where they cannot grow AT ALL without obstructing a path or a window. But it's what people expect to see, they expect to see tiny baby shrubs no more than knee high.

No one knows what a bush is anymore. "What are some bushes that are about a foot tall" I don't know, go to the Arctic fucking tundra and tell me!!! But the actual answer is: any of them, if you kill them often enough.

Many places with "nice landscaping" are literally just digging up their plants and replacing them every few months. That's what my college campus did.

And here's the thing that REALLY grinds my gears, okay? Not everybody wants or values Soulless Corporate Boxwood Hedge type gardens, but there is NO INFORMATION on any other way to do things.

The assumption that gardening is a planting your desired plants a certain distance apart in a single event and after that, no change except the plants getting bigger, is so fundamental, you can't even find a method of gardening that incorporates basic ecological succession. Which is going to happen whether you like it or not.

Weeds are specially adapted for heavily disturbed and destroyed environments, but that doesn't mean that every disaster species is a "bad" plant that is ugly or harmful.

So here's what we'd want to do: Group species roughly by their lifecycle (longer lived vs. shorter lived, annual vs. perennial) and the plasticity of their growth form (relatively fixed growth forms vs. colony forming, creeping, stoloniferous or rhizomatous plants, vines). Plant seeds in the wild don't fall to the ground perfectly spaced apart. The amount of room there is in total is what's important. Plants adapt their shape relative to the plants around them.

Plants are three-dimensional, meaning they take up the space they need by a mix of vertical AND horizontal growth, and they're not solid, impermeable masses that exclude other objects, they have spaces between their stems and leaves.

Plants grow overlapping and mixed together with each other. This is actually good for all of them because it cushions them against getting knocked flat by storms. Some wild species can't even hold themselves up planted alone without other plants surrounding them.

You'd plan out fixed locations for the relatively long-lived plants with relatively non-adaptable shapes. Then you'd put in the plants that can shift their growth forms a little more, plants that form colonies or that grow in the direction they favor etc. Then you'd overload the rest of the space with annual plants, low creeping plants, vines, etc—plants that can essentially move around wherever they like.

Gardeners keep assuming that plants don't move but they do. Any colony-forming plant or plant with rhizomes, vines, runners, etc. can move to where it wants to be by growing that direction and making new stems and roots there. Annuals likewise will produce a bajillion seeds that end up everywhere and the seeds in the best place will grow up and be successful.

You need a mix of plants that grow tall, plants with a more creeping habit, plants that are more ethereal and delicate and mix in with more robust plants, etc.

The dense, compact, extremely fixed and predictable form of selectively bred garden plants is actually way worse for excluding unwanted weeds. A mix of three or four plants planted in the same space, growing opportunistically to take advantage of gaps between their companions' leaves, will do a way better job of filling space.

Also, everyone thinks a vine is only good for climbing a trellis or something. Bullshit. A vine is just a plant that does whatever the hell it wants. An herbaceous vine will be perfectly happy climbing your other plants or creeping along the ground, filling in spaces the other plants missed.

You should expect your garden to change over time! That's the biggest thing I wish people knew. You're not going to get the "end result" within a year. There is no end result. Shorter-lived plants take over the role of dominating the place while the longer lived ones are still growing up. Every plant eventually dies and another plant grows. Change is eternal, so embrace it!

Think of it like this, either you pick out the adaptable short-lived disaster species, or Nature picks them for you. There's gonna be weeds. Weeds are as unstoppable as time. So, might as well pick native, ecologically beneficial weeds you like.

A healthy selection of ferocious native weeds will critically weaken the invasive little shits. The long-lived perennials will take longer to grow to maximum size and flourishing with heavy competition, but later-successional species are used to that; they spend the time networking, biding their time and building a super deep root system that will prepare them for explosive and vigorous growth when they're ready.

Eventually, the "weedier" plants will get outcompeted and begin diminishing...which is when it starts looking like a great time for a new garden!!!!

This all applies doubly to any sort of environmental remediation or habitat restoration context, btw. Like, to use the context I have actual experience with, people pay lots of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars annually just in the US, to perform beach dune remediation.

Which, in practice, usually means "put a few hundred feet of scree fencing in, and then pay someone to put in a monoculture of sea oats plugs at 2 foot intervals, then be surprised when 95+% of them die off in 3 years." Like, you HAVE to start taking the natural ecology into play here. Maybe throw some beach ipomeas or asters and other dune grasses into the mix, or even some of the woody-ish shrubs you get back on secondary and tertiary dunes. Fuck it, if you're far enough south, why not try some mangroves even?!? Or shit, I don't know, maybe at least propagate relatively local ecotypes rather than plugs of sea oats from some random greenhouse 2500 miles north in a completely different climate. That's not even getting into any considerations re: trying to maintain the extant soil microbiome when you just dump a few hundred tons of soil you dredged up on the beach. This shit has been common knowledge (albeit not always commonly utilized knowledge) in other grassland restoration projects in praries and the like for decades, let's get with the goddamn times already on this.