CHANUR’S BREAKOUT (1991) by Michael Whelan, cover for the book by C.J. Cherryh.
One of the great science-fiction novels of my adolescence. :)
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Requisite Yearly We Do Not Buy from Baker Creek post
It's seed catalog time! One of my favorite times of year, honestly. While my garden mostly sleeps, full of dry leaves and fluffed-up birds and cold breezes, I'm indoors contemplating tomato varieties and telling myself that *this* will at last be the year I get the peas in on time.
As it is that appointed time, my usual yearly reminder: don't buy from Baker Creek!
Baker Creek are racist, fascist assholes! They intended to platform Cliven Bundy at their yearly conference, and Native seedkeepers have said that Baker Creek stole from them (and sell the product of that theft). They did a For Ukraine fundraiser that actually went to a far-right Ukrainian organization invested in obliterating LGBT rights.
Baker Creek might have some fun varieties of seed, but I can very nearly guarantee that if you see something there you want, I can find it or an analogue for you somewhere else.
Here's a selection of seed companies I personally have bought from, or people I trust have recommended; there will be a secondary and possibly tertiary reblog, since Tumblr only allows me to do ten links at once. If there's a company you've bought from and liked, please leave a review for them in the comments! What did you get, what did you like, how was the germination?
Native Seed Companies: (please, please feel free to add more in comments to this post)
Companies Specializing in Native Pollinator Plants and Seed:
New to me last year, but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED seed preservation company (they have an incredible selection! My 2023 germination of their seed was like 98%! But they only accept paper order forms):
Cool weird nightshades, I got a bunch of dwarf tomato seeds from them last year and THEY didn't suffer from peppergate because they're a small company that does a lot of their own seed:
A list of ten more companies or so, which I buy from every year, will follow in a reblog in about two minutes; please share that one instead of this one.
Seed Companies From Whom I Buy Seeds Every Year:
Want to try just a few of something? Seedsnow is *really cheap*.
I got my first real year of tomato seeds from Totally Tomatoes, and a full decade on I'm still getting germination from packets I bought that season:
HUGE selection of most every kind of bean you might want to grow:
It's not a bad idea to get in on Autumn and Winter seed sales--things are pretty rough right now, planning a garden can give you the feeling of a bit more stability and control--so I'm reposting this a bit early, this year!
Look through the notes for other people's reblogs with comments for other seed companies, too! Some great stuff in there.
having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups
And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.
It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.
Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.
The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.
Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?
oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly
mad emperor destroying his own palace/seat of power to fulfill a childish whim of grandiosity + priceless imperial jewels being looted old-timey heist novel-style in former royal palace (now the most famous museum in the world) + the pope and the king of britain sharing a prayer for the first time since the 16th century (in the sistine chapel, no less!).................. HUGE week for the hamfisted fall-of-empires symbolism
do not despair, the week hasn't even ended yet!