Hello, world. I’m MacDara Conroy, and this is my blog.

Tag: nature

Oh, this? Just a video of a herd of guinea pigs living wild in a Dutch garden. [c/o TKSST] #video

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Weaknotes for m/e 5 October 2019

So I let a month go by. That’s why I went with ‘weaknotes’, after all. Bullet points required here, I think — just the highlights, the most remarkable that I didn’t already tweet or blog. Here we go. More…

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Sometimes all you need in your life is some baby capybaras. [c/o TKSST] #video

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Why Pop Culture Links Women and Killer Plants

“The use of poisonous mushrooms isn’t about women playing some zero-sum game with controlling men. What the trope really does is prompt viewers to consider what female agency can look like in situations that are overwhelmingly shaped by sexism—and it’s not a pretty sight. The women mimic the language of violence articulated by the men in their lives, in one of the only ways available to them. Unable to emancipate themselves fully from the trappings of their gender roles, their only recourse is to do harm before they suffer further. In one of the last scenes of Lady Macbeth, when Katherine implicates her lover and maid in the murder of a child, her face is eerily impassive, mirroring the expression of her husband early in the film when he regards her with cruel indifference. In that moment, they are one and the same.” I did not like Lady Macbeth, but that quote gets at what the story really is. #link

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The Atlantic: Welcome to Pleistocene Park

Ross Andersen on a fascinating project in Siberia, already decades old, that’s attempting to resurrect the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem. It’s not just the scale of the biome itself in terms of both the space and time required (it’s a ‘Long Now’ kind of deal, for sure, when we’re talking about “a global land war” between grasses and forests over tens of millions of years) but the mind-boggling accelerated futurism involved in creating the approximation of an extinct species that might be the key to such a biome thriving beyond human hands. That’s not to mention the intersections of and implications for climate science and geopolitics and biotechnology and ethical philosophy. Wow, just wow. #link

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