Jules @afewbugs@librem.one

My grandmother began sewing ribbon skirts as part of her healing from the trauma of residential schools.
She and my mother have always been fantastic seamstresses, frequently making my Halloween costumes.

She's now moved on to making regalia, and this is her first Plains-style regalia dress.

#NativeAmerican #Regalia #Indigenous

Jumping off what @blaine is saying here:

https://mastodon.social/@blaine/109400462722746600

I work in professional fact-checking and content moderation for my day job at https://meedan.com and I have begun conversations about ways to do content moderation as a federated service that admins can pay to subscribe to (where moderators are paid a living wage, maybe in worker owned coops even, as opposed to big social media companies using basically sweatshop moderation labor)

My wife saves every sea creature she finds stranded on the beach, knowing that most won’t survive

Had me thinking about horseshoe crabs, bled for research then released. How many survive that?

Something like 4-30% of bled crabs die in the process. How many make it alive into the ocean and stay alive?

This long-term survival study is surprisingly encouraging— bled crabs survive better than unbled crabs, perhaps because that acute mortality culls less-healthy ones!

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.607668/full

#ThrowbackThursday
Kipper-the-cat in a tree in Portugal, probably winter 2007. She travelled across France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Czech Republic, England, Scotland and Wales with us. She was buried in Yorkshire in 2016 at a grand old age.
Probably needs a #CatsOfMastodon hashtag too.

Switching flights to night trains could cut 3% of total EU climate heating emissions, according to @BackOnTrackEU@twitter.com.
👀▶️ https://back-on-track.eu/the-global-warming-reduction-potential-of-night-trains/
#3percentOverNight

One question is: how to detoxify spaces without putting the load on people affected to make it right? We all have a shared responsibility for that -- but it involves letting go of privilege.

I *think* the first steps are listening well, amplifying critiques, looking for practical routes to change. But also, if you're coming at this from an engineering mindset - then chill out with that and defer those with lived and learnt experience of building inclusive social spaces

I've seen a few folks join Mastodon and complain that it's too difficult to follow people on other servers, with the cutting and pasting and whatnot. But @bramus has now created a neat Chrome extension (or bookmarklet, if you prefer to go that route) that let's you avoid all that hassle.

I just tested it out... by following @bramus with it!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastodon-view-profile-on/limifnkopacddgpihodacjeckfkpbfoe

Unlike worker bumblebees, the males don't return to the nest once they've left and often gather together to spend the night on flowers.

This is group of male Buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris) on a passion flower 💚

One to watch out for in 2023 bumblebee season!

📷 Gaynor Griffiths

#BeeTheChange #Bumblebee #Wildlife #Nature

The view over the Somerset Levels this morning just before sunrise. Taken from Glastonbury Tor.

Elon's take over of Twitter has set a lot of things into motion in the digital world

Tumblr and now also Flickr are thinking about intergrating ActivityPub so it will be able to connect to the Fediverse!

A lot of lay offs in the mainstream social media but the Fediverse is only growing!

The world is waking up Social media can be fun but also privacy friendly at the same time, you got the proof now!❤️

No billioaires needed ✅

If you're like me, then you were really happy to learn about Mastodon's enthusiastic support for image descriptions, and you were really eager to join in.

Then you went to actually write something and realized you have no idea how to present visual information in a way that is helpful/enjoyable to those who are #VisuallyImpaired or #Blind.

I found this guide really informative: https://uxdesign.cc/how-to-write-an-image-description-2f30d3bf5546

Of course, I'd also love to hear any additional tips y'all might have!

#Accessibility

Imagine if those in a position of power today were to wake up 30 years into the future and find themselves having to answer an international tribunal judging their contribution to climate breakdown that has since developed. Would they claim they had no choice? #COP27 #climate

See in the image how thin the atmosphere is we're polluting. Take a globe, find two cities just 100 km apart on that globe - tilt that distance vertically and that's all there is to space. And that's already generous.

The other thing the "adaptation is more realistic than mitigation" deniers get wrong is ecology. Organisms live in habitats, their ecological niches. Climate is a major determinant. It's a complex web that would be broken. There is no adaptation without huge ecological upheaval.

Solidarity with all the UK #academics on #strike today ✊🏾

There's no high quality public-service education without fair pay, healthy working conditions, dignity and labour rights for all staff. We're with you #UCUrising @ucu!

I'm so old I remember that both the US and the UK used to tax very high incomes at 90%. AFTER you made a bunch of money THE REST was taxed a lot. If you make $1 billion you "only" take home $100 million.

How MANY problems do we have now with billionaires screwing up both countries, and the rest of the people struggling?

So don't tell me about solutions until you raise top tax rates back where they should be in a democracy.

The POINT of top tax rates is redistribution.

#tax #taxtherich

#GreenParty MP Caroline Lucas' #RightToRoam bill calls for access to rivers, woods and green-belt land:
“There is overwhelming evidence that time spent in nature makes a huge contribution to our physical health and mental wellbeing, yet access to nature remains vastly unequal across different parts of the country, and people from ethnic minorities or with low incomes are even less likely to live near accessible green space.”."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/nov/22/national-parks-england-and-wales-off-limits-to-public #UKPolitics