AnIndefiniteArticle

Very cool read! I learned a lot. Let me quote a few interesting passages.

Fish do congregate around wrecks and make them their new homes, but (emphasis mine):

Paxton, Taylor and their colleagues are working to further understand how fish use artificial reefs, and if new human-made reefs prompt fish populations to grow or just pull them from elsewhere. “Are these fish being taken away from nearby natural habitats, or over time are new fish actually being produced?”

Not to mention pollution potential, even from basic building materials like iron that persist after intentional scrubbing and decontamination:

Almost anything can become a reef under the right environmental conditions. But many objects can be sources of underwater pollution in their original states. Toxic paints, asbestos, iron and rusting metal particles can seep out of the structure and into the surrounding waters. Because of this, official reef-creation projects include extensive cleaning and decontamination before the structure or object is sunk into place. That’s not possible, of course, in the case of shipwrecks, which often sink and are abandoned in times of duress or bad weather and only are rediscovered as artificial reefs years later.

For example, scientists have noted instances of iron leaching from sunken ships and having adverse knock-on effects on surrounding reef life. In 2008 at Palmyra Atoll, a reef formation and U.S. National Wildlife Refuge south of Hawaii, researchers observed an invasion of a type of sea anemone called a corallimorph around a shipwreck. The vessel, which ran aground in 1991, was moored to the ocean floor by iron chains. Algae need iron to grow, but the element isn’t plentifully available in many parts of the central and south Pacific Ocean, so its sudden abundance prompted an explosion of algae and an unbalanced invasion of the corallimorphs. The overgrowth, dubbed a “black reef” by scientists due to the anemones’ dark coloration, stretched for over half a mile around the shipwreck and smothered the existing coral in the area.

Invasive corallimorphs, a type of sea anemone, crowd out coral around a shipwreck site at the Palmyra Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the central Pacific Ocean. (Thierry Work, USGS)

The shipwreck was removed in a multimillion-dollar restoration project spearheaded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2013. In the years since, scientists have had some success with attempts to rid the reef of lingering corallimorphs with pulverized bleach, a treatment that could be used at other similar sites. The Palmyra Atoll is renowned for its biodiversity (it’s home to three times as many coral species as the Hawaiian Islands), and scientists hope the restoration and removal efforts will help retain the area’s abundant marine life.

So, it sounds like these wrecks can become habitats, but they aren’t as biodiverse as natural coral reefs and can have other negative consequences. If we’ve destroyed the natural habitat, then these can be band-aid replacements so the fish at least have somewhere to go. If the natural habitat still exists in an area, then that natural habitat is much healthier without contamination.

It seems ridiculously irresponsible to just sink our old ships when we’re done with them.

I don’t disagree.

I’ve already been thrown out of society, and since then society has been lit on fire by our new government, so that’s not really an option.

You’ve gotta play the hand you’re dealt, and I’m out of cards other than bitch on the internet until I run out of food, but maybe if I can actually get a deer I can extend that runway a little.

Ok, but our bodies and brains are pretty well adapted to the hunting part.

The other day I was out in the woods because I was depressed and suicidal and I found a trail with some hoofprints and started following it on a whim kinda hoping I’d get lost. It’s surprisingly easy to just follow a trail, very instinctual. I just kinda kept autopiloting along even past sunset and after a few hours… there were three deer just lying there! I got excited and tried to slowly/quietly approach and pet them, but touching one just woke them all up and they bolted. If I had brought a club or other weapon with me (hell, even just grabbed a stick…) and used that instead of going for love, I could have brought home a deer with basically zero effort, just autopilot and letting my body do what it wanted to do when it didn’t want to deal with the human world anymore. I’ve never hunted anything before but it’s apparently just a super easy and human thing to do if you just go out in the woods and let instinct take over.

So, yeah, I’m now convinced that ordering a pizza on the phone (and the societal labor required to procure the money for that) is absolutely harder than persistence hunting a deer. Although maybe I should try reproducing that experiment before I rely on it for survival.

But yeah, just go out in the woods and there are deer. Way easier than picking up a phone. Assuming the humans that came before you didn’t kill the forest before you got there.

Size matters!

Also: a few extra vertebrae to share the load and reduce the local curvature. Don’t slip a disk!

Ribs aren’t what get in the way.

That’s when it’s time to write a cover.

He never did, he just bought them.

Ok, but I need manual control over how the tiles get arranged and shaped.

And I need to be able to stack windows.

Hyprland is pretty and declarative and has so many cool extensions that work really well and help to tie the experience together, but sway is more functional.

If hyprland offered the same ability to manually control the tile tree that sway offers, I’d use it.

For now I’m shoehorning the hyprland extensions like hyprwall and hyprlock onto sway.

Stool forme s

They cried wolf to clear the way for the real deal.