For years now I’ve done what I can to encourage use of other sites, but the fact remains that my specific community of friends and peers (many of whom have known one-another for over two decades now) have used twitter as a stomping ground since 2008 or so. It’s extremely difficult to establish that sort of intersection elsewhere, and it gets particularly ugly when folks’ livelihood and income are tied into the matter.

Having the main hub for communities torn apart because of one fool’s antics really, really sucks, and then I’m/we’re called garbage on the sites we try to establish on, for clinging to that lifeline. It’s all a frustrating feedback loop.

Great find- Cerement’s ID is on the dot. They’re delightfully bizarre to stumble upon for the first time, aren’t they?

Loads of oddball relatives out there as well. I haven’t seen this one due to the range being restricted to the west coast (US), but it’s completely absurd (Allotropa virgata).

God, they’re too cute to be real (great shot!)

I ran the photo through iNaturalist and it suggested a group of flies I’ve never seen before- broadly Tachinidae, and more narrowly it zeroed in on the genus Adejeania. Seems like a safe guess in terms of location, too!

Yep, seconding what others have said, this looks exactly like my ground cherry plants (aka husk cherry, aka Physalus genus). 😄

I LOVE their coloration at this stage. What a good find. 😄

For me it’s mostly the ease of it. I’m the type to get very bogged down by (perceived) steps, hurdles, and visual overstimulation. An illustration:

Notebook

• Find pen or pencil
• Find the page you need
• Go

Tablet/Etc

• Is it charged
• Specific pen only
• Keyboard needs pairing
• Is keyboard charged
• It wants to update now, awesome
• Turn it on, see ten unrelated apps --> forget what I’m doing
• App randomly decides it needs internet access
• Probably have to deal with syncing now
• etc etc
• (another ‘me’ problem: I get really hung up on trying to format things digitally, which takes time way from what I’m supposed to be doing)

Now, there are certainly benefits to writing things out digitally, especially when searchability is key. Any important info in any of my booklets that I might need to find later on gets typed up or entered into a spreadsheet where applicable. Not the most efficient way to do things, I suppose. 😅

In general though: I just like being able to look down and see a thing I’ve written, rather than needing to wake up a device, open a program, or otherwise fiddle with a screen, especially while multitasking.

Replying quite a long time after the fact, but I just had to thin some radishes and dangit I was thinking of this post. I find it difficult in particular because of wildlife predation- I never know which of the remaining sprouts will even survive!

Animals camouflaged as moss, lichen, and leaves are so magical to me; hundreds of thousands of years alongside plants, eventually mimicking them to perfection. Just the most wonderful thing there is. 🥺