Rynling R&D

Collards Only
https://collardsonly.com/

These North Carolina Collard Farmers & Farmettes think they've got the grit — and the greens — to claim the title of North Carolina's Sexiest Collard Farmer, but the truth is, it’s all up to you! Do they have what it takes to charm your vote with their collard-growing prowess, mud-caked boots, & undeniable farm-fresh appeal? Cast your vote and let’s find out who’s got the true grit to be crowned the absolute hottest in Collard Farmer in all of North Carolina!

They're all very special, but I'm partial to the gentleman in the bathtub filled with collard leaves.

Fam, be careful with your time online.
https://greenjudy.tumblr.com/post/771760180357742592/weird-cultural-shift-detected

If reading longform, offline, makes you feel bored or anxious, be gentle and patient with yourself. Start with stories you remember well, reliable sources of well-being. But please know you will need to put some backbone into it in the long run.

I think we are going to need to rebuild our ability to think, to process experience. This will be an unsupported activity. In fact, most of the really powerful cultural forces are making it very hard for us to notice, feel, perceive, or think clearly.

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My post-pandemic experiences in higher education have led me to believe that a lot of us are, in a very real way, at the point of Long Covid where being able to read a book from cover to cover has become a distinct and useful cognitive skill that can almost visibly put you a head above your peers in terms of performance. Literally: reading makes you smarter.

Anyway, I want to shout out to all the writers who are still using their own human minds to create books worth reading. I love you.

25% of the people have a 4th cone and see colors as they are
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/25-people-have-4th-cone-see-colors-p-prof-diana-derval

You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green and red area). You enjoy different colors as you can appreciate them. 50% of the population is trichromat.

You see between 33 and 39 colors: you are a tetrachromat, like bees, and have 4 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green, red plus yellow area). You are irritated by yellow, so this color will be nowhere to be found in your wardrobe. 25% of the population is tetrachromat.

I counted three times on three different screens, and there are exactly 40 colors. Idk where they're getting that there are only 39. I also don't understand the idea of being irritated by yellow. I love yellow! And "there is no yellow in your wardrobe" feels like a very silly thing to say. Yellow and its handsome cousin saffron are often on the palette of floral prints, which more people would wear if they weren't cowards. Also let me introduce you to one of my favorite t-shirts (here), which is 100% OSHA certified.

City of Glass
https://www.biographic.com/city-of-glass/

This article is about how Chicago is slowly adapting its architecture to be less lethal for migrating birds. Glass-fronted buildings are ubiquitous in the city, which lies on an established migratory path. Every spring, tens of thousands of migrating birds collide with glass and die. Buildings can be made safer by turning off the lights at night and removing trees from lobbies, and architectural firms have begun to create bird-friendly designs by incorporating visual "noise."

Why Maui Burned
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/06/maui-wildfire-response-recovery

This article is about how local citizen's groups in Maui have begun to remedy outdated agricultural practices that cause wildfires. The August 2023 wildfire in Hawai'i was the deadliest American wildfire in more than a century. Water is plentiful on the island, but that fire was caused by a drought, which was itself a result of twenty-century agricultural land division. People in Maui have therefore been campaigning to buy unused farmland and restore it to its natural state.

What Plants Are Saying About Us
https://nautil.us/what-plants-are-saying-about-us-264593/

This article introduces "Ecological Psychology," which studies how plants intelligently respond to their environment. Plants appear stationary to human perception because they move slowly, but they're able to respond to stimuli, anticipate change, and grow to avoid obstacles. The vascular system in plants plays a similar role to the nervous system in animals, and the emerging discipline of Ecological Psychology studies their adaptive intelligence.

Hayao Miyazaki teaches Hideaki Anno how to say "Arigato"
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5wha4e

No comment, just: I love them both so much.

Vermis: Lost Dungeons and Forbidden Woods RPG artbook review
https://bdsmrpg.blogspot.com/2023/06/vermis-lost-dungeons-and-forbidden.html?m=1

In those days, a guide book would sometimes contain a world unto itself, with the world lore, character options, and select item and enemy types to accompany the experience. [...] Implication was the name of the game, making you want to fill in those gaps and see the sprites in motion, to experience the endings to the quests introduced in the little tome.

The Guide to a Game That Doesn’t Exist: On Plastiboo’s “Vermis”
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-guide-to-a-game-that-doesnt-exist-on-plastiboos-vermis/

As a strategy guide — precisely insofar as it is a strategy guide — Vermis makes good on the promise that such volumes once made to their readers: that there is a world beyond these pages waiting to be explored. [...] Vermis also builds the speculative world of its own existence: a world where this bygone form of secondary literature, the strategy guide, never disappeared, never dissolved into the slush of the content economy, but instead flourished as an aesthetic form unto itself.

The Soul of Place: Six of my favorite Dark Souls sites
https://doshmanziari.substack.com/p/the-soul-of-place

How oddly human that we can learn to have affection for such antagonistic and cheerless places. Here, in some miniature and finite way, is a positive model of eternal recurrence: through the passage of time, a vicarious avatar coming to admiringly know the shape and pattern of every fine and mundane and brutal thing, and through this achieving mastery over endless cyclicality. Who could love a place like Sen’s Fortress except the very person it was designed to crush?

This is another essay by the same author. It resembles a listicle, but only in form. I aspire to achieve this level of writing. It might be fun to create a piece like this for Twilight Princess, which has amazing architecture.

In Dark Souls, the video game convention of "treasure chests" is replaced by corpses that your character can loot. Some of these corpses clearly died while attempting to overcome a challenge, while others are just chilling in scenic locations. My favorite places in Dark Souls tend to be of the latter variety. In other words, I enjoy finding quiet spaces where my character might comfortably sit down and leave the cycle. My absolute favorite location is the lovely little courtyard garden in the Lower Undead Burg where you fight the Capra Demon, which is mossy and beautiful and gets nice indirect sunlight.

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Final Fantasy Button Up Shirt
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1380607278/final-fantasy-button-up-shirt

I was looking for references for an aloha shirt that my Jenova monster might wear, but now I'm tempted to get one for myself. (They have a Korok shirt too, but it's not as cool as this one.)

A Beginner's Guide to Street Art
https://lu.ma/53ks8h33

Come learn the basics of how to do two street art methods: stickering and wheatpasting. We'll cover practical how-tos for creating and install stickers and wheatpastes and considerations for messaging within your work.

This hour-long class is free to watch on Zoom tonight (March 3) at 8pm Eastern. At 8pm I'm either outside writing (if it's warm) or sitting in the bath playing video games (if it's not), but I'll do my best to tune in. I'm too much of a coward to actually do street art,* but I'm curious about how it's done. The presenter, a professional science educator, is more of a writer than an artist, but I'm interested in her thoughts about how to combine words and images into an effective message.

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ETA: Yeah, I didn't make it. Idk man, I wake up early to write before I go to work, and by 8pm I'm in no mood for a Zoom call. During the daylight-savings months I can party until dawn, but I should probably stop kidding myself about how mentally and emotionally available I am after dark during the no-sunlight months.