Podcasts about Starro

Disenfranchised by the modern comics industry, Paul Spataro and Bill Robinson now ply the timestream in a never-ending quest to re-discover and re-connect with that unique brand of fun and excitement that can only truly be found in good ol' fashioned r

Disenfranchised by the modern comics industry, Paul Spataro and Bill Robinson now ply the timestream in a never-ending quest to re-discover and re-connect with that unique brand of fun and excitement that can only truly be found in good ol' fashioned r

James Gunn is mostly known nowadays for his work with Marvel Studios for the Guardians of the Galaxy duology (and his famous firing and re-hiring from said company), and his most recent DC release The Suicide Squad which he made during his Marvel hiatus (similarities between this movie and the character of Starro not withstanding!) Before Marvel took a chance on him, he was a reasonably well known writer, having worked on the two Scooby-Doo live action movies, as well as writing Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. After his work on Dawn of the Dead he started writing Slither, a tribute and homage to the horror B-movies he loved. With obvious homages to Shivers, The Blob, The Thing and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (but not Night of the Creeps, despite popular opinion that it is!), Slither is a gruesome, grotesque, imaginative take on an alien creature's plans to dominate the Earth, featuring excellent practical creature effects and imagery that you won't forget for a long time. And what does the sex toy industry have to do with the production of Slither? Find out in this episode! I would love to hear your thoughts on Slither! GET IN TOUCH.... Twitter https://twitter.com/verbaldiorama (@verbaldiorama) Instagram https://www.instagram.com/verbaldiorama (@verbaldiorama) Facebook https://www.facebook.com/verbaldiorama (@verbaldiorama) Letterboxd https://www.facebook.com/verbaldiorama (@verbaldiorama) Email verbaldiorama [at] gmail [dot] com Website https://my.captivate.fm/verbaldiorama.com (verbaldiorama.com) SUPPORT VERBAL DIORAMA.... Leave a 5-star rating/review: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/verbal-diorama/id1453296967 (Apple Podcasts) or https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/verbal-diorama-803268 (Podchaser) Join the Patreon: https://verbaldiorama.com/patreon (https://verbaldiorama.com/patreon) Thank you to all the patrons Simon E, Sade, Jardiel, Claudia, Simon B, Laurel, Derek, Jason, Kristin, Cat, Andy, Mike, Griff, Luke, Emily, Michael, Scott, Mark, Brendan, Ian, Lisa, Dan, Sam and brand-new patrons Will and Jack! Buy Merch! https://verbaldiorama.com/merch (https://verbaldiorama.com/merch) Tees, mugs, hoodies and totes are available! EPISODE THANKS TO.... Most excellent patrons: Sam from Movie Reviews in 20 Q's for his Patron thoughts. You can find him @MovieReviewsIn on Twitter Subscribe, follow and listen to Movie Reviews in 20 Q's in your podcast app of choice! And also to Patron Dan for his thoughts! Twitter peeps @WeWatchedAThing Instagram folk @thecinemaguys @stuntgoatanimation Facebook chums None this time Theme Music: Verbal Diorama Theme Song Music by Chloe Enticott - https://www.facebook.com/watch/Compositionsbychloe/ (Compositions by Chloe ) Lyrics by Chloe Enticott (and me!) Production by Ellis Powell-Bevan of Ewenique Studios. Support this podcast

Episode Notes Margaret talks to Casandra about canning, drying, and other means by which to preserve food. The host Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. You can support her and this show on Patreon at patreon.com/margaretkilljoy. Transcript Margaret Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the End Times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy. And this episode we're going to be talking about food preservation and specifically canning and dried food storage and some other things. This podcast is a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts and here's a jingle from another show on the network. Duh daaaaa. Jingle One two, one two. Tune in for another episode of MaroonCast. MaroonCast is a down to earth Black radical podcast for the people. Our hosts, hip hop anarchist Sima Lee, the RBG and sex educator and crochet artists KLC, share their reflections on Maroons, rebellion, womanism, life, culture, community, trapped liberation, and everyday ratchet. They deliver fresh commentary with the queer, transgender, non-conforming, fierce, funny, Southern guls, anti-imperialist, anti-oppression approach. Poly ad and bullshit. Check out episodes of MaroonCast on Channel Zero National, Buzzsprout, SoundCloud, Google, Apple, and Spotify. All power to the people, all pleasure. Margaret Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns, and then maybe a little bit about your experience with prepping, like, I don't know, if you like work for any prepping podcasts that people might like, if you want to shout them out, but also your experience a little bit about what we're going to be talking about today. Casandra Yeah, my name is Casandra and I use they or she pronouns. Um, I don't know, I've always been interested in foraging and gardening and preserving food and I happen to work for this really cool prepping podcast called Live Like the World is Dying. Margaret Casandra is our transcriptionist and we've been talking—I've been bugging them more and more about food preservation. And finally I was like, can I just have you on the podcast? And then you have to listen to the sound of your own voice as you transcribe it. And they said yes, which was nice of them. So okay, so most of your experience in terms of food preservation is canning, is that right? Salem Speaker 2 Yeah, that's—I think the two things that I do most are drying and canning, but I also do some fermenting and, like, salt preserving. Margaret Cool. Okay, well, let's talk about all of it. Do you want to talk about the different methods of food preservation and which ones are appropriate for which foods and what you like the most? Casandra Yes, I think there, there are two things that I think about when I'm deciding how to preserve something and one is, drying, for instance, is good for like really long-term storage. But—and it's also good because the food is lightweight, right? So it's very portable. But in my day to day life, I'm much more likely to use like canned food. So ease of use is another consideration when I'm deciding how to preserve something. And different food is best preserved in different ways. And that's something we can talk about when we get into canning especially a little bit later. Like acidity, how juicy something is, those things all come into play. Margaret Okay. Why preserve food? I mean, like, obviously, you could just go to the supermarket and buy the food instead of canning it or preserving in other ways. Like, I mean, that sort of—that part's sort of a joke. But what is it that appeals to you about DIY preservation of food, like what got you into it? Casandra Um, I live in the Pacific Northwest, and there are certain times of year where food is really abundant and accessible. And it just at a certain point seems silly to me to not take advantage of that if I could. You know, so if I have access to, you know, dozens of pounds of green beans once a year, why not can it instead of going out and buying it in the winter? Margaret Okay, so what are the methods of preserving food? You've mentioned some of them, but is it possible that we could get a list of just, like, what—there's canning, salting, pickling, drying, what am I missing? Smoking? Curing? Is that what you would call that? Casandra Yeah, I guess smoking and curing could—smoking is like a form of curing I think. Freezing. What else? Did we say fermenting already? Margaret No, we haven't put that one yet. Casandra Fermenting. Margaret Okay, should we just go through them and talk about why each one's great? Casandra Yes, yeah, we can definitely do that. It's hard to like, it's hard to talk about them all at once because they're all so different so... Margaret Yeah. Casandra Yeah. Margaret Well, so if possible, I mean, like—one of the things I'm really curious about is that, like, when you look at green beans, you're like, okay, green beans belong in a can. And then when you look at something else, you're like, oh, that belongs fermented. You know, hops, obviously. But what, um—is it just the different methods just work for different foods, if you like are working with meats you're mostly interested in curing them or freezing them or something? Like, how does all this work? How do you how do you decide? Casandra I decide based on what I like to eat most. So like, which preservation method I'm most likely to use because I'm not interested in wasting food. And then also just like, which is the most accessible to me. So for something like green beans, I don't know, I guess you could dry them, but I don't think that would taste particularly. good. So I want to preserve them in a way that tastes really good that I'm actually likely to use throughout the year. And then also space, I think space is a huge issue. So my pantry is only so large so there are certain things that it makes more sense for me to dry like nuts, right? I'm not going to can walnuts, though I suppose you could. I'm just going to dry them and store them in a bin. Margaret Does it just take up less space because there's like fewer individual jars taking up space. Casandra Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. Margaret Okay. What, um, what's like the easiest to get into and/or what's cheapest? Casandra Probably drying? Drying probably or salt curing because, you know, all you need to salt preserve something is salt. Margaret Okay. Casandra Um, but the drying as well. You know, you can sun dry or you can, like, create some trays for yourself and some airflow, you don't need a particular tool to dry something effectively. Margaret Okay, what, uh—you said that drying tends to make things last longest. Like, what's the kind of like, scale there? Okay, so like, because you were saying how, okay, so you're saying how it's hard to talk about all of them at once because each one has like all these different pros and cons. So I'm trying to, like get you to talk about the pros and cons of different ones. But so like, what's the, like, you know, hierarchy of how long food can last. Like I know, for example, in my own limited research into this, I'm like, oh, I can store dried beans, dried rice, etc., for like, 30 years, right? But I'm under the impression that canning has a shorter shelf life than that. And in my head, of course, like it would be, like, freezing, there's a long shelf life as long as you have electricity, and then like cured food, it's like maybe not as lonh. But this might be my, like, my my weird, like, obviously, like, storing meat isn't as good or something. You know, my own non-meat-eating bias which I will attempt to not bring into this particular episode of the show because everyone's gonna make up their own minds about what they want to eat. But so what, um, so if drying last longest, what last least long and what—where is everything else in the middle? Casandra Um, yes. I don't even know if drying last longest, honestly, because you hear about like, fermented or cured eggs that are found that are, you know, hundreds of years old and stuff—or like kimchi, like jars of kimchi that are still good after hundreds of years. So. Margaret Oh lord, okay. Casandra Yeah, yeah, so, you know, fermenting can be very long lived as well. But, but yeah, drying, as long as the thing stays dry and like bugs and mice don't get to it, as long as it's properly sealed, that's probably the longest—longest-term. And then the shortest—what would be the shortest? I think it's probably either canned or frozen. Like, food can be frozen for a long time—sorry—food can't be frozen for a long time but, like, it starts to taste like freezer at a certain point. So that's like my least favorite method, personally. Margaret What does that mean? Is that, like, I've heard that like if you store things in the freezer for a long time it starts to like take on the taste of everything around it. Or is there like a specific, like, just as the cell walls burst of frozenness and whatever—I don't know anything about the science of any of this. Casandra I don't know about the science of freezing. I'm not sure. I just know that, like, you know, if I lose a bag of green beans in the back of the freezer, a year and a half later the green beans don't really taste like green beans anymore. They kind of tastes like freezer. Margaret Okay. Casandra Which is gross. I don't want freezer beans. I'm also very anti-freezer just because we had—we had a, I guess a climate event here in February that knocked out power at my house for about 10 days. And so everything in the fridge in the freezer was compromised. And it sucked, and I lost a lot of food, and it was very stressful. But all of my canned goods and all of my dry goods were perfectly fine. Margaret That's a really important point. Casandra Yeah. Margaret I know that's, like, classic prepper style is to have the deep freeze in your garage full of, like, you know, ideally some deer or something like that. But it always seems like it just requires so much electricity to maintain. Casandra Yeah, and if, yeah. It's also—I mean, I think when we're talking about preparing for disasters, there's the preparing in place versus preparing to move. Um, and so something like freezing makes sense for preparing in place, but—and canning as well. But if you're preparing to move, then something like dried or cured makes more sense. Margaret Yeah. Casandra But even with freezing, like, when our power was out, I didn't thaw out frozen food and try to cook it over my wood stove, you know. It was much easier for me to just like open a can of soup that I had canned from the year before and warm it up. So even if I'm thinking about preparing in place, things like canning make more sense to me. Margaret Yeah. No, such a—being in place versus going—I don't really have anything deep to say about that, I just, I think about that a lot. And there's a reason that all the, like, food you put in your, like, go bag is usually, you know, dried backpacker meals where you add water or whatever, you know. Casandra Yeah. Which is good, in an emergency, but it's not super sustainable. So yeah. Margaret Yeah. At the beginning of the COVID crisis when I was, like, alone all the time and I didn't know what's happening so I just didn't go into town and I just, like, ate through my—ate through my own food stores. You know, I definitely was very reliant on canned goods, canned soups in particular. And then also, like, when I lived out of a backpack and traveled I did rely on cans then but I relied on cans, like, you know, I don't like carry two or three or something like cans of chili or something. This wasn't a DIY canning. This was, you know, Amy's chili. Casandra Right. And that's the other thing too is, like, Amy's chili in a tin can is—it's heavier than dried food, but it's sturdy. But I'm not gonna, like, put glass jars of food in a go bag, right? Margaret Yeah. Casandra That would be catastrophe waiting to happen. Margaret Yeah, I learned the hard way that, like, several times I tried, when I lived out of a backpack I always like want it to travel with, like, this jar of almond butter, but it was glass. Or for a while I decided I was gonna be that asshole who lived out of a backpack and had a brandy snifter. And when I say for a while I mean, like, 24 hours? Casandra 'Til it broke? Margaret Yeah. The jar of almond butter didn't last as long as that, and that was a little bit more of a desperate thing, because when I dropped it I was like, that's all the calories that I have on me. Casandra Oh, God. Yeah. Margaret And I genuinely don't remember—I remember looking at it and staring at it and being like, do I pull out shards of glass? Or do I just not eat? Oh, yeah, I'm just I don't remember which one I picked. Casandra Oh no. Margaret I'm alive so I probably picked not eating the almond butter. Okay, so that's a good point. So is it possible to can and non-glass jars? Like okay, my head like canning requires mason jars. Which people buy in bulk. And they're, like, not crazy cheap, but I haven't looked in a long time. Casandra I know that historically people have used tin cans, but maybe this is a conversation we could get into right now. But, like, modern food safety guidelines, everything I've read is glass jars. But the good news is, once you purchase the jar, this isn't—this isn't prepping like, you know, storing something away for 30 years and like stocking in bulk. This is, like, something that you do yearly and you're rotating through your food so you're reusing your supplies. Margaret Okay. Casandra Yeah. Margaret Which actually, probably—and now I'm just purely conjecturing—is like a better way to do any kind of prepping anyways, like, it's like reminding yourself that it's very rarely for the long haul. It's usually for situations like what you had happen where, you know, you lost power for 10 days. Casandra I mean even just part of your daily life. Like I'm—the main purpose of me doing things like canning and saving dry food is to eat throughout the year, not to prepare for disaster. But, you know, when there is a disaster I'm already prepared so, because it's just part of my daily life. Margaret Well and I guess that's like the yearly cycle that I mean, I grew up completely alienated from, you know, I ate the same things every season of the year. But that's not really the way that humanity evolved. Casandra Yeah. I mean, the nice thing about preserving food is that you don't have to eat the same things because you've preserved them for a different season. But it is cyclical, because, like, right now it's green bean season. So my weekends are canning green beans or tomatoes. And in a few months, it'll be nut season, so that's what I'm focusing on. But it gives me what I need for the rest of the year. Margaret Okay, so I'm going to try and make this a pun but it's not going to work very well. Let's get into the nuts and bolts—but there's no bolts and food—of this. And let's talk about canning. Let's talk about, like, how do you get started canning? What is canning? Like, you know, I mean, if—clearly it's not just the can of Amy's chili, it's something else. Casandra Yeah, so canning is preserving food in a glass jar, in liquid. And you're doing that by using heat and pressure to cook the food inside of it. Like, you're raising it to a particular temperature to destroy microbes and bacteria and things like that. And then it's also creating a vacuum seal. And that's what makes it shelf-stable. Margaret Okay. How do you do it? Casandra Hooray for shelf-stable food. There are different ways. So um, let's see. I think maybe I want to give my food safety spiel first before— Margaret Yeah. Okay, cool. Casandra So, yeah, so I worked in the food industry for a long time and I feel really comfortable with food safety. But I think that it's wise, if someone doesn't feel comfortable with food safety to, you know, do some research or learn from someone or take a class or something because botulism is fatal. However, canning is really safe if it's done properly. And so as long as you understand what properly mean, you're gonna be fine. And then the anecdote I like to give is that—Let's see—my my grandpa's mom—when I was learning to cat I was really nervous about food safety. And my grandpa was, like, don't worry about it because his mom used to can everything they ate in a two-tiered steam canter, which is just, like, outlandish. And she would do it on a wood stove, like, manually regulating the heat. And she would can everything from like meat to vegetables to fruit, which we'll learn in a second why that's absolutely insane. And, you know, she had 18 kids and none of them died of botulism. So— Margaret That's—I mean, by that number, one of them would have died of botulism. Even if someone—anyway, yeah. Casandra So I'm not saying like not to be safe, but just to know that, like, statistically you'll be okay, especially if you do what you're supposed to do. So. Margaret Okay, so take the warning seriously, is what your— Casandra Yeah, I think it was important for me to hear that like, no, really, you're gonna be okay. Because if you look at like the USDA website, or the like national—what's it called?—National Center for Home Food Preservation website. I swear, it's like every other paragraph, they're trying to scare you about botulism. Anyway, it feels like every other paragraph they're trying to warn you about botulism. And it feels really, like, anxiety-inducing. So it's something to be aware of but not to be afraid of, if that makes sense. Margaret What is botulism actually, do you know? Casandra Um, let's see. I think it's it's a bacteria that produces a toxin that is fatal. And the reason it's so scary is because most food spoilage you can see or smell, but botulism, you can't. Margaret Okay. Casandra Um, and it can even be fatal just with, like, skin contact. Margaret Oh, wow. Casandra Yeah, so it's it's very scary, but it—I don't know. I don't want to terrify people. Margaret Well, how do you not make it? Casandra Right. Margaret I was reading something that's like has something to do with, like, whether or not there's oxygen or something? Casandra Yep, yep. So it—botulism grows in an anaerobic environment, which means no oxygen. I think that's correct. I—so I learned from my grandma. That's the other part of the disclaimer. So the science is not something that I know a ton of out, which is fine. But the point is that if you follow proper, like, sterilization and follow recipes that are approved, you'll be fine. So you asked like three times what canning is and how to do it. So maybe— Margaret Yeah yeah yeah. Casandra Okay, so there are two different—there are three different types of canners. And they're used are different acidities. So the acidity of a food is important because the microorganisms in acidic food are killed at a lower temperature than non-acidic food. So for acidic food—and that means, like, fruits, pickled things that have like a vinegar brine—those are canned in a water bath canner or a steam canner. And then non-acidic foods like vegetables, meats, things like that are canned in a pressure canner because it helps them get to higher heat. Margaret Where do tomatoes fall in, are they acidic are they— Casandra So tomatoes are tricky because you—they're right on the edge of acidic and non-acidic. So if you add an acid to them, like lemon juice or citric acid, you can can them as if they're acidic, but if you don't, you have to put them in a pressure canner. And for a long time, whoever regulates canning shit, said that steam canning was not safe. Margaret Okay. Casandra But recently—I think it was Wisconsin University—some school in Wisconsin did a study and found that it is safe, which is great because I prefer it to waterbath canning, and it's how I learned to can. Margaret And it also, I mean was this, was the test subjects just all 18 of your great grandmother's children, or? Because I think that's a large enough sample size. Casandra I think so too. They also used the wood stove. No, so the difference between water bath canning and steam canning is water bath canning, you're just taking a big ass pot, and you're submerging your jars and water, and that's what creates the heat and the pressure and the vacuum seal. But it's really unwieldly because you're having to, like, deal with a big ass pot of boiling water. So steam canning is creating the same effect, but just with steam, so the amount of water you need is much smaller. So that's how I learned and that's what I prefer. It's very quick. And then pressure canning takes a special tool called a pressure canner. Margaret You can't just put it in a pressure cooker. Casandra No, but you can use your pressure canner for pressure cooking, if that makes sense. Margaret Okay. Casandra But pressure canners have—there are two different types, and don't ask me to explain the difference in detail because I won't be able to—but there's a weighted gauge canner and a dial gauge canner. And I believe what I use is a dial gauge. So it has this special gauge on top that tells you how much pressure you're creating within the canner. Margaret So is the basic idea that all this food goes into a jar, the lid goes on the jar, and then you're trying to create enough pressure and heat to both cook the food and seal it? How does it seal it? Like is it, like, creating like a pressure difference inside and outside? That's like sucking the lid down onto it, or? Casandra Yeah, yeah, that's my understanding. And it gets sciency especially with pressure canning because altitude impacts— Margaret Of course it does. Casandra Impacts the pressure in canning time. But that's why it's—so that's one of the benefits of following—let's talk about this actually, this will be useful. So, what makes a good canning recipe? Because it's important to follow good canning recipes. And they'll include things like how to make sure your food is acidic enough. They'll included chart based on altitude telling you what pressure you need, and also how long to can things. They'll tell you how and whether that changes depending on your jar size. So they'll outline everything like that in the recipe. So it's not, like, an equation you have to figure out every time you can a thing—unless you're changing altitude constantly, which would be, I don't know, adventurous. Margaret Would you say it would be jarring? Casandra Yes. Yes, it would be jarring. Yeah, once you know your altitude, it's very easy. And they're, like, companies like Bell jars put out entire books full of charts and recipes and things like that. Margaret Okay, is there something special about like—like, I've never canned anything, but at various points I've looked at how to do basically everything. And I remember when I was looking at canning and a long time ago, I think I got shy—I think I got scared away by the botulism thing, honestly. And it was like something about, like, if you use the spatula—you use like a rubber spatula when you put the food in the jar, and if you don't do it right then you like murder everyone you know. Casandra Yeah, so there are some basic safety considerations. So maybe let's, like, pretend we're canning something. Margaret Okay. Is it green beans? Casandra Yeah, let's can some green beans and we'll walk through the steps. So. So we're just canning plain green beans, which means that they're not acidic. So we're doing them in a pressure canner. So first you prep your food. So if we're prepping green beans, that means I'm snapping all the ends off. And I'm washing them and I'm, you know, I'm making sure none of them are, like, moldy or anything like that. And then I'm getting a pot going to prep my jars and my lids. The thing about jars is that they're glass. And the thing about glass is that if you put a hot thing into a cold glass thing, the glass thing will shatter, right? Margaret Yeah. Which is why you don't drink coffee out of mason jars. Well, people do, but why? Casandra But then they make the ones with the handles as if you're supposed to, you know? Margaret Yeah, that's a good point. Casandra Yeah, that's sketchy. Anyway, so sterilizing your jars and heating them up is sort of all done in the same step, you just toss everything in a big pot and put water in it, and you boil it for 10 minutes. Margaret Okay, and that's not the pressure canner, that's just a pot of water on the stove. Casandra Yep. And, you know, if you were to read like a canning website or something, they—people have all different methods for heating up and sterilizing their jars. I just think that that's like the quickest and the thing that I do because then they're both warm and sterile. So we're doing green beans. So, let's see, what I'm going to do next is take the jars out of the sterilized water. And I'm going to pack them full of these green beans. So we're putting all of our green beans in a jar, and we're doing something called raw packing, which means that the green beans are raw when I put them in the jar as opposed to cooked. And differrent recipes will tell you, you know what you should be doing. And then I pour warm liquid over them—in this case, it's just water—because if there are air gaps in the jar, that means that there's a chance air will get trapped, which you know, botulism and spoilage and things like that. But it also means there's a chance that the jars won't seal properly. Margaret Okay. Casandra Recipes, use something called headspace. So your recipe will specify how much headspace to leave in a jar. And that means the space between the top of your food and liquid and the top of the jar. And so they've timed their recipe based on the headspace. So if the recipe says 1/2in headspace but I leave, you know, an inch and a half, it probably won't seal because it's not in the canner long enough to like vacuum all have that air out. Does that make sense? Margaret Yeah. And then you murder everyone, you know? Casandra Hopefully they just won't seal and you try again. Botulism comes after the jar has sealed, and that's when things go poorly. Yeah, so anyway, so we've got our beans and our liquid in a jar. We wipe the rims of the jar because that's where the seal happens. So we want to make sure there's nothing like impeding that. Margaret Okay. Oh, like a little piece of dirt or something that would keep it from—or like a green bean stem. Casandra Yes, exactly. For things that are, like, chunkier, that's when your spatula technique comes in because you want to make sure there's there aren't any air pockets. Then you put your lids and your rings on. And then everything's really hot, so you make sure you use gloves and appropriate tools and load everything into your pressure canner with, I don't know, I think it's an inch of water. It depends on your canner. And then you seal it up and you start your canning. Margaret Are those, like, electric systems or they like stovetop, Casandra Stovetop, I've never seen an electric one, but I wouldn't be shocked if that existed. Margaret No I just didn't—I've never seen one of these things, so I struggle to visualize it. Okay, so it's in the pressure canner and we start, and then you leave it for some length of time that is specified in the recipe? Casandra Yep, yep. And, you know, different canners come with specific instructions to make sure that your weight is correct and your pressure is correct and things like that. So I won't, like, try to detail that out because it depends on the tool you're using. But assuming your weight and your pressure are correct, then you just set your timer once it's up to pressure and leave it in. Margaret Okay. Is this, like, are they usually like around an hour, or is this like three days? Or what's— Casandra It depends on the food and how acidic it is. So something like meat takes, let's see, like the the bone broth recipe I use—the canning recipe—takes like an hour and a half in the pressure. But something like tomato sauce takes 15 minutes. Margaret Oh, because it's so acidic? Casandra Yep. Margaret Okay. Cool. Casandra You know, that means that, like, on tomato day, I can get through a bunch of batches but on broth canning day I can't, so. Margaret Yeah. What about tomato bone broth canning? Nevermind. Okay. Casandra The lesson is not to—not to combine recipes. Margaret See, I think that this is, like—you know, I've never been like a baker. I've technically baked things, but I'm not very good at following directions specifically. My mom isn't any good at this either. I hope my mom isn't—I have no idea if my mom's listening to the podcast. You know, it's like, I'll start a recipe and then somewhere along the way, maybe halfway, three quarters of the way through, I'm just going to do something different. I don't know why. And so I've always been a terrible baker. So maybe canning isn't the food preservation method that I'm specifically going to get into. Casandra I'm in the same way though. Margaret Okay. Okay. Casandra And here's the thing. So like, with—there are so many fancy canning recipes. Like bourbon peach preserves, and—you know, like, people get ridiculously fancy. And those are never the recipes I use because I would be tempted to experiment. So when I—personally when I'm canning, I'm just canning, like, the most basic ingredients so that—like plain, just in water, I don't even use salt. So when it's time for me to cook later in the year, I can experiment because I haven't, you know, I haven't, like, made all of my beans into different like fancy bean recipes already. They're just plain beans. I don't know if that makes sense, but... Margaret No, no, no, that makes sense. Okay, I think you've sold me on canning—this is—I mean, clearly our job is to sell me on each of these things, one after the other. Okay, so canning is good for something that you're going to cycle through at home. And so that's something that you grow or get access to at one time of year, so you can have access to it at another time of year. And you said you can also, like, can soups—is like the next level up of like the classic bachelor thing where you make a whole bunch of soup on Sunday and put it in the freezer and then just, like, eat that soup all week. Casandra I mean, I do that. So I—soup is why I can, because my kid loves soup and that's just like what we eat during the winter. So I'll get off work and forget to have planned anything. So I'll just open a jar of broth and a jar of stew meat and a jar of potato—you know, I just throw it all into a pot. But that's like seven quarts of food into a single pot, so I think I'm doing both. Margaret Okay. Casandra So we have soup for a week, but it's from pre-canned food. Margaret There's—I really wish I was on my puns and jokes better today. But somewhere there's a soup for our family joke. Casandra I'm sure there is. Margaret Hopefully someone will just tell it to me later on Twitter in a way that is either very charming or very annoying. Casandra You'll have to send it to me. Margaret Okay, so that kind of covers canning. Now everyone who's listened is capable of making up their own recipes and so let's move on from there to—what's next? What do you like the most after canning? Casandra Drying. Margaret Drying. Okay. Casandra What do you want to know about drying, Margaret? Margaret Well, I mean, okay, so like, I feel like there's two parts to it. And maybe I'm totally wrong about this, but there's both the, like, drying of the food and then the storing of the dried food. Does that seem like? Casandra And then the preparing of the dried food. Margaret Oh, yeah, no cooking is totally beyond anything. Casandra It's not like a can where you can just open it and heat it up. Margaret Yeah, you're right. Yeah, I mean, it's like—oh, so that means I should probably just make canned beans. I've always felt like a terrible prepper because I'm, like, I have all these like dried beans. Then I'm like, I hate soaking beans. I definitely just eat canned beans. Casandra See, that's why I do both. So I get my, like, 50 pound bags of black beans, right? And I keep them in five gallon buckets. But then I rotate through them. So I will can large batches of them. So I'm only having to think about soaking them once, right? And then the cans and then I buy more dry beans to replace the ones I used, and then I have cans. Does that make sense? Margaret Yeah. So you can soaked beans, not dried beans, right? Casandra Yeah, well, they're dried and then you soak them so—and it's actually, going through the soaking process and then pressure cooking, essentially, makes them more digestible. So, I don't know. It's my favorite. Margaret Okay. Yeah. Cuz like, it's like, one of the reasons I've given—it's really, I mean, people have probably noticed that I haven't done a lot of episodes about food. And it's not because I, like, think that like this other stuff is cooler. It's because, like, food growing, preservation, and preparation, like, intimidate the hell out of me. And, you know, I'm convinced that I can't grow anything because—I said this in like one of the last episodes—because I tried to plant a pine tree when I was a kid and I failed or whatever, you know. And I'm really excited to get to talk about this, basically, even though it's very embarrassing that I'm, like, in my mind I'm like, oh, yeah, when you soak beans overnight they always—you soak them forever and they always end up still just a little bit, a little bit crunchy. Casandra Because you still have to cook them. Margaret Well, yeah. But—ah, and then the pressure cooker being the way to—okay. Casandra But we were talking about drying food. Margaret Yes. Right. Okay, so yeah, so okay. So there's three different parts to it, there's the drying of the food, the storing of the dried food, and the the preparation of the dried food. Let's not too much get into the preparation of the dried food today. But let's talk about the, like, the drying and the storing. And I'm really sad about this storing because it's the only thing that I've, like, done any of at all and done some research about. So. Casandra You probably know much more than me about the storage, but— Margaret Only in that I took a lot of notes like last week. Casandra Oh Good! Margaret But okay, how do you dry food? Casandra Um, so I use just a really cheap food dehydrator, like the cheapest one I could find on Amazon. There are really fancy dehydrators you can get. You don't have to buy a dehydrator at all, you can just, you know, set things out on trays and rotate them and, like, put a fan near them so there's airflow. Margaret When you say set things out, you mean like in the sun? Casandra Um, I guess if you want it sun dried, but I—in general, if I'm preserving food, I try to keep it out of sunlight. Margaret Okay, that makes sense. Casandra That's maybe—we didn't talk about canning and how long things are shelf stable, but generally, if food is exposed to sunlight, it affects its shelf stability. So. Margaret Okay. Casandra Um, but yeah, airflow is the—temperature and airflow are the major factors for drying food. So, especially if something's very juicy, you want it to be lower temperature with lots of airflow because if the outside of it dries before the inside, it's bad news. I guess it can cause mold for whatever's on the inside if it doesn't fully dry, but if it does fully dry, it means that like, say you're drying cranberries or something, they're rockhard instead of that, like, nice, tender, dryness. I can speak. So yeah, most of hydrators will come with like settings for different types of food. And you can look those up online as well. Like which foods need more heat, which foods want less heat. Margaret How much does humidity affect this? Like I—where I live it's basically I live inside a cloud. All of the South is just a cloud for all of the summer and so, like, I can't even dry clothes on the line unless they're in the direct sunlight. So I assume I would have to use—I would have to use one of these, like, what are they, electric? The ones that you're talking about? Casandra Yeah, I imagine so. I live in a not humid place. So I haven't had to think about that. Also storage, I imagine that you probably have more trouble with food storage. Margaret I do. Casandra Yeah. But, you know, then there are things that apparently great if you have a higher humidity, like—what I'm sure you're super interested in—salt curing meat is, apparently a higher humidity is better so— Margaret Oh, really? Casandra There's that. Margaret I wonder what I can salt cure. Casandra Right? Margaret Just slabs of seitan. It sounds terrible. Okay. Casandra The things that that I mostly dry are nuts and seeds because I grow a lot of sunflowers and also I live in the Pacific Northwest. So it's, like, filbert and walnut territory, acorn territory. Margaret Do you have to prepare—the only one of these things I know anything about is acorns. And I know that you have to do a lot of work to get the tannins out of acorns. You do that before you drive them in this case? Casandra You know, I've actually heard—and I'm planning to try this this year—but I've heard that it's actually quicker to get the tannins out if you dry them first because then, when you introduce water to flush the tannins out, it can, like, fully saturate the nut meat. Margaret Okay. Casandra Does that make sense? So you're getting rid of all the moisture first, and then when you introduce fresh water to the nuts, it can penetrate into the like flesh. Margaret Okay. Because yeah, it takes forever to flush acorns. Casandra It does. If you—I mean, you have a stream, so that would be much, much less time intensive. For folks who don't know, acorns are delicious, but only if they're not full of tannins. Margaret Which is like, what, a natural preservative or something that's in them that, in order to human edible, you have to get rid of. Casandra Yeah, I mean, there are tannins and lots of food. It's the thing that makes sour food sour or like astringent food astringent, but, you know, the amount that's in the average acorn can give you a tummy ache. Margaret Okay, so is this, like, is this one of the ways that you would—because I assume basically all the nuts I eat in my life are, like, dried nuts, right? Because I'm not going around eating fresh nuts. So this is like one of the main ways, if you wanted to make the nuts that you grow taste like the nuts people are used to eating, you would dry them first in this way, right? Casandra Like acorns or just? Margaret Oh sorry. I was going back to like, you know, the other nuts? Casandra Yeah, yeah. Margaret Cashews. I don't know. You didn't say cashews, I was just thinking about cashews. Because I like cashews. Casandra I think cashews are actually way different. Have you seen a cashew plant? Margaret All of the nuts look really weird in the wild. I struggle to understand them. This is the most embarrassing episode I'll ever put out. It's just like, I'm this crazy person who lives in the woods. And I don't know anything about plants. Casandra Because cashew is part of a fruit, right? It's not, like, in a hard shell like a walnut. Anyway. Let's not talk about cashews. Margaret Let's not talk about cashews. I'll pretend like I know what filberts are and talk about them. Casandra A filter is just—I think it's actually a different species than a hazelnut, but it's what we call hazelnuts here. Margaret Okay, cool. Casandra So like filberts and walnuts, things that have a hard shell that you crack the shell open, and then—you can eat it fresh. It's delicious, fresh. But if you want to store it, you just dry it. Margaret Okay. Casandra And some nuts you dry in the shell like walnuts, but some you don't have to. Margaret Okay. And so drying is like a little bit simpler. It's like— Casandra Yeah. Margaret If you're drying walnuts, you look at the article that says "this is how you dry walnuts," and you put them in your dryer and you dry them. Casandra I mean, I don't even put nuts in a dryer, because they're already so dry. Margaret You just leave them out. Casandra Yeah, I just—like, I put a blanket on the floor in front of my fireplace in the winter and just have a, like, mound of nuts that I— Margaret Cool. Casandra Like, rotate. So, but if you're doing something that's, like, quicker to spoil, I guess, like fruit or vegetables, than a dehydrator might be the solution for you. Margaret Okay, how long—like, what are some of the advantages of drying food? I mean, obviously, like, certain foods, like nuts and things, like that's like almost, like, the way that you you store them, right? But it's like, I don't know a ton about, like, dried fruits—I suppose I know fruits a bit—but like dried vegetables, and, you know, is this, uh, like, how long do they last? Like, what is good about this method? Casandra I think it's good because it's smaller so it's easier to store, right? It's also lighter. So that goes back to our conversation about, you know, preparing to be on the move as opposed to being stationary. For things that are snackable it's nice to have snacks, so like dried fruits, dried seeds, things like that. Um, I—there are a few vegetables that I routinely dry because I routinely use them. Garlic is one. I guess alliums. Can we call the allium family of vegetable? Garlic and onions are two of them because I don't really can them. You could ferment them, especially fermented garlic is really popular, I just don't do it. Um, but, like, the number of times I've gone to make soup in the winter and not had garlic or onions is embarrassing. But if I have them dried, I can just toss in a handful and it's delicious. Margaret Okay, but like, so if you dry—how long does dried fruit last? How long do dried vegetables last? Like, is it, like, good enough to last you—kike most of these food preservation methods are sort of, like, meant to kind of get you until—set you up so that the next time—until the next harvest of the same thing. Is that kind of the general idea, like, so that you have this thing that lasts, like, hopefully almost a year, or? Casandra Oh, they can last—I mean, I have like dried onions, dried plums in my pantry that have been there for two years and are perfectly good. The thing about, like, everything other than canning, is that if something goes bad, you can see it or smell it. So it's good until it, you know, it's good until you can see or smell that it isn't good anymore. And that depends on, you know, how you've stored it. Do you put—is it in direct sunlight? Is it totally dry? Is it in a hot place? A cool place? Things like that. But it lasts a long time. That's a really vague answer. I think you were looking for something more specific. Margaret I mean, it's fine. We don't have to have, like, a chart—an audio chart of, like, you know, column A, the fruit, column B, how long it lasts with each different method. Okay, that's how you would organize the data anyway. Casandra It seems like there should be more to it, right? Like, there should be more to talk about with dried food. But it's so simple. You just— Margaret Yeah. Casandra But storage you wanted to talk about and I feel like you probably know more about storage can I do. Margaret Well, only because, like, I came into this with this "I don't know how to make food" thing, right? And, you know, I just remember a couple years ago a food scientist friend of mine was like—this was maybe like four or five years ago—was like, hey, I'm not saying it's gonna happen, but the supply chain on food is looking a little bit precarious this year, or whatever. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna just start having some, like, five gallon buckets of like beans and rice around. And that was probably what started me on the journey that you're all along for with me today. And so I just would go and buy, you know, basically prepper food, right? Ideally, the ones with like the least markup or whatever, but just, you know, five gallon buckets or huge cans of stuff that's like freeze dried or whatever and it's like meant to last 30 to 50 years on a shelf. And so I was doing that. And—but then I realized as I started to kind of, like, scale this, and more people are asking me for my recommendation. And I don't want to just be like, oh, go to Amazon, because that's the main place to buy Augason Farm stuff, you know—ans go for this company I don't know anything about. And instead realized, was like, well, there has to be a way to just, like, put rice in a five gallon bucket. It's like not quite as easy as that. You can do that and that'll last for a fairly long time, again, depending on your conditions, especially humidity and sunlight, as you mentioned, and oxygen is actually one of the biggest ways that, like, long shelf life foods go bad. And so the thing I've been researching, and I'll probably make a YouTube video about in the next week or so, is how to store dried goods for like long term storage, which is less the like—I feel like, in my head, there's like two tiers of food storage. And there's the more important one, which is what you're talking about and the, like, the things that you can cycle through and to get you through any given interruption. And then there's the sort of deep storage stuff where, I don't know, I don't see a reason for most people not to have, like, a month or two of food sitting in five gallon buckets in their basement, you know, that just sit there and you can pass them on to your kids. And—who will be like, really? Why are you giving this to me? But—actually, that's very optimistic to think that they won't immediately understand the need for such things. Casandra Right. Margaret And I like to imagine that will be around for 30 to 50 years from now. That seems optimistic, but I like it. So long term food storage, you can make beans and rice and many other things last 30-50 years. And the main way going at the moment—there's a lot of different ways to do it—but basically it's like the main way that people are doing right now and in prepper world, and it's mostly, I think pioneered by the Mormons. A lot of the information you can get about this—and if you live in Utah, apparently there're these stores will they'll just sell you really cheap beans and rice, and some of them are open to people who aren't in the church. But you basically, you put them into mylar bags, which are plastic bags with like an aluminum layer—which isn't technically the definition of mylar but, like, when you say mylar bag, it's what you mean—and you heat seal the bags. You put in the dried food, and then you put in oxygen absorbers. I always thought you put in desiccant because I think that humidity all of the time. The instruments that I built last year, some of them aren't even playable right now because the warping because the stupid humidity. I don't understand how a mountain dulcimer was invented in Appalachia and has such a thin soundboard. Anyway. So, but you don't put in desiccants necessarily—actually, in general, you don't. It actually seems to be contraindicated. But instead you put in oxygen absorbers that are sized to the size of bag, and you got to do it kind of quick, because obviously when you open up the oxygen absorber starts absorbing oxygen. And what it is is like little iron fillings that are absorbing that are oxidizing and making rust, I think, and they're in little sealed packets that air can go in, but rust pellets can't come out. You drop it in, you heat seal the bag, you can either get like a little flash sealer for like 25 bucks, or you can use a household iron, or you can use a hair—you know, it's like, I have a feeling that people making these things don't actually do this because I've seen people say straightening iron or curling iron. But um, you can seal it with heat. And then it is sealed. And then that doesn't keep like animals and stuff out, so then you put it in a bucket. So really, long story short, you take a mylar bag, at least five mil thick—mil is not millimeter, it's, I don't know, .001 or something, I don't remember. Millionth of an inch or 1,000th of an inch or something. You put in the oxygen absorber, you heat seal it, you put it in the bucket, and you're good. And it seems kind of simple. And it's a lot cheaper per five gallon bucket of beans and rice then going and getting the pre made stuff. Casandra Yeah. Margaret But being able to do it with stuff that you dry yourself—again, like, different things are gonna last different lengths of time. And oh, and you can only do this with stuff that's, like, less than 10% water content. You know, it has to be like way more dried. So you can't just like put in your, like, dried fruit and stuff. It's like almost all like rice and beans and oats and other things. And then there's like weird stuff where like brown rice is actually harder to preserve than white rice because brown rice has, like—which is much better, of course, in general—has more stuff, like more oils in it that can go bad. That's what I've learned, but you should correct me if that's what you're about to do. Casandra No, no, I was just gonna say I've heard of people—or I've seen something called dry canning. I haven't actually tried it. But it's something similar, except you're using jars and you're using an oven to, yeah, create a seal—a hot seal on the jars. And it's supposed to make dried food last longer. I've never personally understood the purpose of things like that just because I rotate. So it's just like a part of my life and routine. But yeah. Margaret Just having some deep storage, you know, like—but okay, this actually makes me—why are mason jars clear? Because isn't sunlight the enemy of, like, all food preservation? Casandra Yeah, I guess so I honestly—I have no idea. They make fancy, like, tinted jars, but they're much more expensive. I imagine it's just because it's more expensive to make tinted glass. But like traditionally you're not keeping your jars on a shelf in direct sunlight. You're keeping them, like, in your basement or your root cellar or something like that. Margaret Okay, so we've been talking almost an hour, and obviously there's still several methods of food preservation left, but maybe we won't go into the details about any of the other ones—unless, is, like, is there like one more that you want to like quick like shout out? Like hey, look how great salting is, or pickling, or, I don't know. Casandra Yeah. I mean, fermenting and pickling is amazing. And that's, like, an episode in and of itself. And I think that it's really like trendy right now, so probably accessible for people to find information on. And then salt preserving and sugar—I can't eat sugar, so I don't do sugar preserving. But those two methods are surprisingly simple. And I'm just beginning to experiment with salt preserving, but I love it. So, I dunno. Check it out. Margaret Is it just like you take the thing and you pack it in salt and then you're like, it's good. Casandra Kinda, yeah. Kinda, yeah. Margaret That's cool. Casandra I mean, there's more to it than that, but basically. Margaret Okay, well, I don't know. You've sold me on far more food preservation instead of just looking at it from this, like—you know, as much as I want to like try and sell you on deep storage, I think that that's like the far and away least useful aspect and like the one that ties most into, like, the bunker mentality that I supposedly shit talk all the time. You know, and so this, like, this—these methods of cycling through appeal quite a bit to me. Is there any—are there any like last thoughts on food preservation or anything else about any of this that you want to you want to bring up? Casandra Just that once you start digging into it, you'll probably be shocked by how many things you can can from, you know, butter to water. So. Margaret Wait, really? Casandra To whole chickens. So it's pretty flexible and pretty fun once you get the basic down. Canned water. Margaret I'm laughing about the canned chicken because I'm imagining, like, the chicken like coming out and running away when you opening up the can 15 years later. Alright, well, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. And also, you know, thanks for helping make the show accessible. And, I don't know, I really appreciate that, and I appreciate all the work that you've done with that. Casandra You're welcome. I'm dreading transcribing this, but I will do it. So. Margaret I appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you got out of this as much as I did. I didn't know anything. I mean, well I didn't know anything compared to what I now know. And I'm excited to eat green beans, I mean, prepare green beans. No, I'm mostly just excited to eat green beans. I really like green beans. I'm really glad that was the example food we used. If you liked this episode or this podcast, you should tell people about it and tell people about it on the internet. Well, tell about it in real life. But if you tell people about it on the internet, all the like weird algorithms will like make other people know about it if you like, and comment, and subscribe, and do all the stuff. And you can also support me directly on Patreon. My Patreon is patreon.com/margaretkilljoy. And there's a bunch of like zines and other things up there. And they're behind a paywall, but if you live off of less money than we make off of the Patreon, then you should just message us and—or me, I guess, on any social media platform, and I will give you access to all the content for free because the main point is to put out content and I really just appreciate everyone's support helps me do that. And in particular, I want to thank Sean and Hugh and Dana, Chelsea, Eleanor, Mike, Starro, Cat J, the Compound, Shane, Christopher, Sam, Natalie, Willow, Kirk, Hoss the dog, and Nora. And also I would be remiss not to tell you that I have a book available for pre-order. AK Press is republishing a new edition of my book, A Country of Ghosts, which is an anarchist utopian book. And if you're listening to this podcast, you probably have like a vague idea of what I'm talking about when I talk about anarchy like that. But if you don't, or if you do, you might like this book, A Country of Ghosts. And if you hate the government and capitalism, you might like it. And if you hate the government but like capitalism, or if you like capitalism but hate the government, then I would challenge you to read this book anyway, because you might learn that both of those are very interrelated things and you're kind of only doing it halfway and you have to destroy the Ring of Power and it must be—don't be a Boromir. You should throw the Ring of Power into the—into the fires of Mount Doom. Anyway, you should tell me about the fun foods that you all prepare, because I will be jealous. Or I'll start canning my own foods and I'll talk to you all soon. Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

Hello subWufers! On today's episode, the gang sits down to chat about the 2021 DC film "The Suicide Squad". Join them as the chat about the film, characters, Starro, "Pirates of the Caribbean", Taika Waititi, DC comics, and more. What did we think about the film? How does it compare to the first one? Do we like Jai Courtney? Tune in to find out!   Special Thanks to this week's sponsor Wild Bill's Soda! Enjoy crisp unique olde fashioned soda flavors anytime with Wild Bill's. Head over to drinkwildbills.com and use code FANDOM10 to get 10% off your purchase!    Thanks to One Outta Ten for supplying the music for this episode.  Check them out on: Instagram @one_outta_ten Spotify at One Outta Ten   Do you have suggestions for the show? Do have specific voice actor or creator that you would like us to interview? We would love to hear from you! Feel free to shoot us an email HERE. Be sure to head over to our website AnimationStationPodcast.com to check out both What's Up, Fandom & Animation Station Podcast episodes.  If you enjoy the show, please rate and review!   Follow the show on: Instagram @WhatsUpFandom Twitter @WhatsUpFandomPC YouTube What's Up, Fandom Podcast   Follow Josh @JoshLCain Follow Connor @talllankyguy96 Follow Angel @aoazany   Tags: podcast, podcasts, movies, tv, comics, popculture, fandom, dc, dccomics, thesuicidesquad, suicidesquad, polkadotman, warnerbrothers, ratcatcher, kingshark, harleyquinn

Neste podcast: Demorou, mas tá entregue! Um papo de loucos sobre o filme Esquadrão Suicida 2, Arlequina, o grupo de vilões presentes no filme e a injustiça que fizeram com o Starro. ARTE DA VITRINE: Randall Random Versão Wallpaper da Vitrine AMAZON MUSIC Acesse: www.amazon.com.br/nerdcast WISE UP ONLINE! A plataforma pra você estudar inglês quando e onde quiser. Link: https://bit.ly/3zX9hyy WISE UP Aprenda inglês mais rápido. Acesse: http://www.wiseup.com/ OUÇA TAMBÉM NerdCast extra toda terceira sexta do mês! Speak English 43 - Estados Unidos: estereótipos VS vida real Playlist completa Speak English: https://bit.ly/2xrWxBW CITADO NO PROGRAMA Monolito Produções - DON ✞ JAVIER l Baseado no Nerdcast RPG Call of Cthulhu:https://youtu.be/hZPDCY8bmoU E-MAILS Mande suas críticas, elogios, sugestões e caneladas para nerdcast@jovemnerd.com.br EDIÇÃO COMPLETA POR RADIOFOBIA PODCAST E MULTIMÍDIA http://radiofobia.com.br PEDIDO DE DOAÇÃO DE SANGUE Pedido de doação de sangue para o Hospital Mário Covas em Santo André-SP.

This week @adafruit we're making a Starro inspired mask with HalloWing. Prototyping a prop from Star Trek and a mini LED matrix. A zombie Captain America for Timelapse Tuesday, creppy! Learn Guide https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-starro-face-mask Starro YouTube Video https://youtu.be/zswfzS_jnA8 HallowWing M0 & M4 https://www.adafruit.com/product/3900 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4300 500mah Battery https://www.adafruit.com/product/1578 NinjaFlex 1.75mm White https://www.adafruit.com/product/1691 IS31FL3741 LED Matrix https://www.adafruit.com/product/5201 Timelapse Tuesday Zombie Cap - Ian Robinson https://cults3d.com/en/3d-model/art/zombie-cap-bust-statue https://youtu.be/9ock0kb89c8 Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

The Ricks review "The Suicide Squad"—complete with the backstory on Starro the Conqueror, King Shark's surprising love life, the box office buzz, and more. From August 8. Brought to you by Taskin, the first name in ultra-stylish, premium-quality travel gear for

Face Mask inspired by Starro from The Suicide Squad. This mask is flexible and features the #adafruit HalloWing, the perfect board for this type of project! Guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/3d-printed-starro-face-mask Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting 3D Printing Projects Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOWD2dJNRIN46uhMCWvNOlbG 3D Hangout Show Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVgpmWevin2slopw_A3-A8Y Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVsMp6nKnpjsXSQ45nxfORb Timelapse Tuesday Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVagy3CktXsAAs4b153xpp_ Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media: Noe's Twitter / Instagram: @ecken Pedro's Twitter / Instagram: @videopixil ----------------------------------------- Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Adafruit Monthly Deals & FREE Specials https://www.adafruit.com/free?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting 3DThursday Posts: https://blog.adafruit.com/category/3d-printing?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Music by Bartlebeats https://soundcloud.com/adafruit -----------------------------------------

James Gunn tries to bring some Troma energy to superhero hijinks, and the guys are sort of here for it, but a little lukewarm?  We try to figure out if that is because vulgar violent superhero excess has become ground too well-trodden to be shocked by, or because Gunn himself has done better versions of similar material, or he is operating within the fundamentally compromised DCEU, or it's just part of Getting Old. 

If Corto Maltese is Cuba is Starro is the Embargo? Or is it Nicaragua and Project Starfish is the CIA drug smuggling? Join journalists / DC comics nerds Spencer Ackerman (Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump) and Arturo Garcia (TruthOrFiction) as we talk about James Gunn's new uber violent political satire movie based on some of my favorite comics. Buy Spencer's book Reign of Terror  and follow him at https://twitter.com/attackerman Keep up with Arturo's reporting and upcoming radio network via https://twitter.com/aboynamedart  and me at https://twitter.com/Elana_Brooklyn

It's time for The Suicide Squad to do what they do best! Go on missions where most of the team dies, and they get replaced with another B list character!! BUT, with James Gunn behind the wheel, is this The Suicide Squad, better than the original Suicide Squad we got a few years ago?  "The government sends the most dangerous supervillains in the world -- Bloodsport, Peacemaker, King Shark, Harley Quinn and others -- to the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. Armed with high-tech weapons, they trek through the dangerous jungle on a search-and-destroy mission, with only Col. Rick Flag on the ground to make them behave." What did you guys think of this soft reboot, of The Suicide Squad? We got a few characters that stayed on for this movie, that came from the original movie, but for the most part, a whole new crew. This Suicide Squad is sent on a mission to destroy a building, not knowing that Starro is being kept inside of the building. Of course, you know he escapes and wreaks havoc! SUBSCRIBE: Apple Podcasts | Android |  Spotify | Pandora | RSS Tell us what you think!Leave us a voicemail at 970-573-6148Send us feedback and/or MP3's to outsidethelongbox@gmail.comFollow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube!Support the podcast on Patreon!Credit - Doyle Daniels, Juan Muro, Gabe Llanas, Tim Huskey

Happy Wine Wednesday! Y'all know we love a motley crew, so of course we could not resist the lure of The Suicide Squad.  What a journey!We kick off our discussion by sharing our prior exposure to the Suicide Squad in other DC projects.  We then share what we loved about the film, as well as the sh*t we didn't like.  The film tries to make a statement about American imperialism, but does it go far enough with its message?  We also talk about how this iteration of the Suicide Squad stacks up against other versions throughout the DC film and television universe.Were you shocked at the fate of Team 1 at the start of the Corto Maltese mission?  We sure were!  We talk about the "big reveal" of Team 2 and about the non-linear storytelling approach of the film.  Kristine also shares her thoughts on James Gunn's influence on the film and how it stacks up against his prior work in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise.Although the team ultimately joins together to defeat Starro the Conqueror, was he really the villain of the film?  After sharing our thoughts on the film's real villain, we explore the Harley Quinn of it all.  Did our beloved breakfast sandwich lover build on the character development we saw in Birds of Prey?Next, we talk about the film's MVPs.  Everyone needs a Milton on their team.  We also talk about the performances that came up short and share our reaction to the post-credit scene.  Are you yearning for more Peacemaker?  No podcast episode would be complete if we didn't get a little thirsty.  Find out who from the cast quenched our respective thirst. Craving more comic book-related content?  Check out our past episodes on Loki, the Thor-verse, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Ant-Man, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. Also, be sure to check out Kristine and the gang over at the Marvelous TV Club podcast for even more Marvel content.  Until next time!Support the show (https://ko-fi.com/morewinepod)

Oh Shit Professor, it's been awhile. AGAIN. In this episode, join our intrepid hosts as they have watched The Suicide Squad (2021) and absolutely Gush over the entire film. Watch as they also talk about Cobra Kai Season 4, Blue Beetle's Movie, the Peacemaker TV Show, TUROK again, The Mist, and more. Socials/Twitch Below: Instagram: James (@james_no_last_name) • Instagram photos and videosTwitter: No Last Name (@james_redensek) / TwitterTwitch: no_last_name_ - TwitchYouTube for the Video version: James No Last Name - YouTube

On this episode of Meanwhile, it's our first episode back from our short hiatus. And Kristina, Taco, and I waste no time giving you our spoiler hot review of The Suicide Squad, not Suicide Squad. The Suicide Squad. James Gunn's DC debut. Was this another smash hit for this beloved director? Did he do the the source material justice? Was this the comic book movie with the highest body count? And who do we think really saved the world from Starro the Conqueror? We got our answers to these questions and so much more. So stream or download this episode right now.....or I'll set off that explosive we put at the base of your skull. 

If you were surprised to see a giant starfish creature in the new Suicide Squad movie, you might be even more surprised to know that monster has been in the comics since 1960. Join us for a discussion on Starro the Conqueror.

Ben and Pogues watch The Suicide Squad. They talk Harley Quinn's accent, character deaths, and the Starro of it all.

We take another break from TV Movie Month to take a look at a film that retcons another film with an almost identical title: The Suicide Squad. Starring Idris Elba, John Cena, Margot Robbie, and a whole host of others, it follows the titular group as they attempt to thwart The Thinker and Starro. It's essentially Guardians of the Galaxy 3, but with blood and gore! The Projection Booth Podcast's Mike White joins Chris again to talk about the film, Gunn's resurgence, and where DC goes from here.You can follow Chris Stachiw at @Casualty_Chris and the Kulturecast @kulturecast. You can also subscribe to the Kulturecast on iTunes here. Also, don't forget to check out our official Facebook page for news, upcoming reviews, contests, and new content, along with our Patreon page.

🎙️🎙️🎙️Esta semana en el Langoy🎙️🎙️🎙️ Hablamos sobre el reciente estreno de The suicide Squad, película dirigida por James Gunn, pero antes ... en noticias hablamos sobre como va la vacunación y la preventa de Rapidos y Furiosos 9, también sobre el fallecimiento de Sonny Chiba, el traile de Spider.man No Way Home, la sprimeras imagenes del live action de Cowboy Bebop, Nautilus en Disney+ y la muerte de Charlie Watts. Además tuvimos una charla con Ciudadano Pop para resolver a la duda ¿Quién chuca es Starro? Aquí te dejamos el menú para que no te pierdas tu sección favorita. 00:00:00 Intro 00:07:10 Noticias 01:06:40 ¿Quién chucha es Starro? con Ciudadano Pop 01:30:40 The Suicide Squad 03:21:20 Recomendaciones Música Usada en este episodio: XTaKeRuX - Free will possession Nublado - Desse Lado Gringo Star - Holding Onto Hate Pheasant - Gravel Beach Model Aeroplanes - Innocent Love Este programa está dedicado a la memoría de Roberto Bustamante Vento, "El Morsa", - Starro tenía razón -

For our 60th episode, Screamin' E, Oobliette Sparks, and Dominic get down and dirty with James Gunn's latest, The Suicide Squad! Get deep into some horror news, and lots more! This is a great one Candy Killers! 

The Nerds talk about James Gunn's triumphant The Suicide Squad.

The Suicide Squad is a 2021 American superhero film based on DC Comics featuring the team Suicide Squad. Produced by DC Films, Atlas Entertainment, and The Safran Company, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, it is a standalone sequel to Suicide Squad (2016) and the tenth film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). It was written and directed by James Gunn and stars an ensemble cast including Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior, Michael Rooker, Jai Courtney, Peter Capaldi, Alice Braga, and Pete Davidson. In the film, a task force of convicts known as the Suicide Squad are sent to the island nation of Corto Maltese to destroy evidence of the giant alien starfish Starro the Conqueror. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Join your part-time friends at the Thicccum Farmz Compound in the Beaded Curtain District for thought-provoking conversation, sing-alongs, odd news commentary, and What I Had For Lunch, The World's First Quantimino Powered™ Guessing Game. Double X Quantimino. Two-digit rule. T.I. Plug In and Hate - Annoying Insects: Mosquito Hawks, Cockroaches, Houseflies, Mosquitoes. Eating bugs. The Earth is a Big Turtle. Double X QuantimEMO. If you met someone that never heard music from the genre "emo" and you could only show them with one song by one artist, which song would that be? Thursday's Full Collapse album discussion. Taking Back Sunday - “Cute Without The ‘E' (Cut From the Team)”, Dashboard Confessional - “Vindicated”, Brand New - “Play Crack the Sky”, Jimmy Eat World - “Just Watch The Fireworks”, Jimmy Eat World's Clarity album discussion. Emo search engine. Honorable mention: The Used - “Taste of Ink”. Double X Quantimino (continued). Thighs at Wing Bars. General life advice from Gemini. Wes Burrito drops off before the Saweetie Meal discussion. Cutting Crew - “I Just Died In Your Arms”. Minecraft. McDonald's limited time celebrity meals discussion: The Saweetie Meal. Wes Burrito reviews The Suicide Squad movie. Starro. Willem Dafoe. Hypothetical Meta-Analysis: Your friend's dog swallows one of your AirPods Pro earbuds (retail $249/pair with charging case) because you left it in reach of the curious canine. Recover the ear bud or replace it ($89). D!ck pizza and ice cream. This Is The Newz. PepsiCo and Boston Beer to create alcoholic Mountain Dew drink. Los Angeles Air Traffic Control Warns ‘Jetpack Guy Is Back'. An Ankeny man accused of bomb threat over McDonald's dipping sauce faces a lesser charge. Woman's terrible date goes viral after he starts flirting with a waitress. Man has a nail removed from scrotum after shooting himself with a nail gun. Burrito's Nippon Newz. Starbucks releases 47 new Frappuccinos in Japan, one for every prefecture. “Raw Pepsi,” the most refreshing flavor ever, is out in Japan, but how does it taste? Burger King unleashes the Tokyo Teriyaki Tower in Japan. Mario isn't number one? Nintendo plumber doesn't win Super Mario series character popularity poll. "Conbini warp" is an increasing traffic problem for businesses and authorities across Japan. More Newz. Best man was ordered to leave the wedding by the bride after a risky joke in speech backfires. Pompeii's fast food joint unearthed in 2019 opens to the public. Aerosol cans cleaned up after a semi explosion in Big Cabin. New Penelope Cruz film poster showing leaking nipple censored online. What I Had For Lunch. Deepfake Sponsors: Julio Tejas, Booba Gettz The Crazy One, Thicccum Farmz.

Coy watched two shows on Apple + and is now convinced they're the most consistently good streaming company when it comes to original content. Jake thinks he's jumping the gun a bit. So the boys chat about the best and worst of today's streaming titans and the streaming vs cable tv cost debate, before tackling some of your hotline calls that lead to talks about Superhero Team Leadership, Doctor Who, a comic book kaiju superbattle between Suicide Squad's Starro the Conquerer and Shang Chi's Fin Fang Foom, as well as the future of the Movie Biz. Join the conversation on the Coycast discord https://discord.gg/5QZW8uuFAe  Follow Coy on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/coyjandreau and Producer Jake at http://www.twitter.com/jakelloydbacon Use #Coycast when discussing the show on social media! Coycast is a part of the Dragon Wagon Radio independent podcast network. Visit http://www.DragonWagonRadio.com for more great podcasts!

This week @adafruit we're all about keycaps! Emojis, resin and wooden keycaps! Halloween season is upon us so we have a flexible Starro prop with a HalloWing M4. Back from our break we're catching up on Timelapse Tuesday and Community Makes! Learn Guide - Emoji Keypad https://learn.adafruit.com/neokey-emoji-keyboard/ Learn Guide - Resin Keycaps https://learn.adafruit.com/diy-decorative-resin-keycaps Kailh Switches - https://www.adafruit.com/product/4955 QT Py RP2040 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4900 HalloWing M4 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4300 NeoKey 1x4 QT I2C https://www.adafruit.com/product/4980 Relegendable Keycaps https://www.adafruit.com/product/5039 Colorful DSA Keycaps https://www.adafruit.com/product/4997 Silicone Keycap Molds https://www.adafruit.com/product/5076 3D Printed UV Lamp Box https://learn.adafruit.com/uv-manicure-lamp Timelapse Tuesday Starro Hallowing Eyes – David Gallagher https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2167717 https://youtu.be/_CcZuCxuZ4k Tiki Mask – Mads St https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4636877 https://youtu.be/jzX9fsgzbH4 Skyward Sword + Shield – PabloPirata https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4902406 https://youtu.be/DrLNJ7l4SWg Community Makes https://www.thingiverse.com/make:958293 Jeffs macropad bumper https://www.thingiverse.com/make:959065 JPs macropad case https://www.thingiverse.com/make:960339 cpx star trek com badge https://www.thingiverse.com/make:960633 lemon keypad https://www.thingiverse.com/make:960631 kitty paw keypad Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ -----------------------------------------

Not to be confused with David Ayer's 2014 Suicide Squad, this film--to quote David S. Pumpkins--is its own thing! In the 25th episode of Champion Casters, Michael and Joe talk about how each of the main characters (Bloodsport, Ratcatcher 2, Harley Quinn, Peacekeeper, King Shark, Polkadot Man, Rick Flag, and Starro--boy that's a lot of characters) successfully and not-so-successfully embody the film's themes around US Militarism, Empathy, and Animal Rights. Don't lose your head during this one! Referenced Frequently This Episode: Emily Gaudette's The Suicide Squad Sneaks In A Radical Message About Animals And Empathy --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/championcasters/message

Episode 57!!!! which is really Episode 70? The Suicide Squad! The movie we have talked about for months is finally here! We Review it and talk about what we liked and didn't like. Starro the Conquerer the difference between the first one at its successor. We also talk Games as a Service! No more buying new versions year after year.... now we can look at IP's being dropped updated for years to come. Some games have been doing this.. Battlefield seems to be just catching on.. We discuss our experience with it and whether we think its good or bad for the gaming industry. Michael Keaton putting BACK on the Batsuit and what that means for him. Venom news... Him possibly showing up in Morbius and the delay moving the movie back. Crunchy Roll's new owners. Sonic 2 casting everyones favorite echidna. Both Avatars, Airbend and the Na'vi... We hope you join us for all that and more on the Alter Ego Podcast!

This Week on Earth Station DCU! Drew Leiter and Cletus Jacobs are joined by Chicken Town's own Kevin Eldridge and the Award Winning Bobby Nash to discuss The Suicide Squad Movie. Superman is teleported to a fascist planet in Justice League Infinity #2. Red Hood leads Task Force-X in Suicide Squad: Get Joker #1. The Suicide Squad comes for Levi in Swamp Thing #6. Atomica gets revenge in Crime Syndicate #6. The Scarecrow makes him move in Batman #111. Teen Lantern goes after Sinestro in Green Lantern #5. Synmar Utopica powers up in Justice League #66. All this plus, DC News, DC TV, Shout Outs, and much, much more! ------------------------ Table of Contents 0:00:00 Show Open 0:01:45 DC News 0:09:40 Justice League Infinity #2 0:14:19 Suicide Squad: Get Joker #1 0:17:07 Swamp Thing #6 0:19:02 Crime Syndicate #6 0:22:22 Batman #111 0:28:19 Green Lantern #5 0:34:22 Justice League #66 0:40:08 Sweet Tooth S1 Ep5 – What's in the Freezer? 0:47:20 The Suicide Squad 1:24:33 Show Close   Links Justice League Infinity #2 Suicide Squad: Get Joker #1 Swamp Thing #6 Crime Syndicate #6 Batman #111 Green Lantern #5 Justice League #66   Cletus's Read More Comics Picks Harley Quinn: Batman the Animated Series: Joker's Favor (1992) + Batman: Harley Quinn (1999) Bloodsport: Superman vol 2 #4 (1987) King Shark: Superboy vol 4 #0 (1994) Polka Dot Man: Detective Comics #300 (1962) Ratcatcher: Detective Comics #585 (1988) Otis Flannegan Peacemaker: The Fightin' 5 #40 (1966) Rick Flag: Brave and the Bold #25 (1959) / Legends #1 (1986) Amanda Waller: Legends #1 (1986) Starro the Conqueror: Brave and the Bold #28 (1960) The Thinker: All-Flash #12 (1943) / Suicide Squad vol 4 #25 (2014) Javelin: Green Lantern vol 2 #173 (1984) Captain Boomerang: The Flash #117 (1960) Mongal: Showcase '95 #8 (1995) Savant: Birds of Prey #56 (2003) T.D.K: technically new, Secret Origins vol 2 #46 (1989) Blackguard: Booster Gold #1 (1986) Weasel: Firestorm vol 2 #36 (1985)   Kevin Eldridge www.flopcast.net   Bobby Nash www.bobbynash.com Want to Donate to the Show or Sponsor our Comics Talk for this week? No problem! Just click on the donate button below! If you would like to leave feedback, comment on the show, or would like us to give you a shout out, please call the ESDCU feedback line at (317) 564-9133 (remember long distance charges may apply) or feel free to email us @ earthstationdcu@gmail.com

Every week we'll 3D print designs from the community and showcase slicer settings, use cases and of course, Time-lapses! Starro Hallowing Eyes David Gallagher https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2167717 CR10S Pro PLA 14hr 26mins X:284 Y:281 Z:26mm .2mm layer / .4mm nozzle 10% Infill / 6mm retract 230C / 60C 71g 60mm/s ----------------------------------------- LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting 3D Printing Projects Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOWD2dJNRIN46uhMCWvNOlbG 3D Hangout Show Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVgpmWevin2slopw_A3-A8Y Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVsMp6nKnpjsXSQ45nxfORb Timelapse Tuesday Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVagy3CktXsAAs4b153xpp_ Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media: Noe's Twitter / Instagram: @ecken Pedro's Twitter / Instagram: @videopixil ----------------------------------------- Visit the Adafruit shop online - http://www.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Adafruit Monthly Deals & FREE Specials https://www.adafruit.com/free?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting 3DThursday Posts: https://blog.adafruit.com/category/3d-printing?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=videodescrip&utm_campaign=3dprinting Music by Bartlebeats https://soundcloud.com/adafruit -----------------------------------------

After narrowly surviving a run in with Starro the Conqueror, Ally and Brendan return to the studio deliver their spoiler-free thoughts on #TheSuicideSquad. On top of that juicy discussion there are plenty of tasty bites on the following: #GunpowerMilkshake review #FoodWars review #TheAscent ongoing impressions #BoyfriendDungeon ongoing impressions #Frostpunk2 officially announced #DrDisrespect is starting a studio Rockstar is re-releasing #GTA 3, San Andreas and Vice City More drama surrounding #Abandoned plus lots more gaming and culture related banter! Let us fill your ears and warm your heart. Be sure to follow The Gamers on Twitter: http://twitter.com/missallyheart (Ally) http://twitter.com/brendanatebit (Brendan) http://twitter.com/weareATEBIT (ATEBIT) Intro/outro by Michael M From Reset: A Gaming Podcast Find more tasty ATEBIT goodness via: http://atebit.net/ (OFFICIAL WEBSITE) http://ko-fi.com/weareATEBIT (KO-FI) https://discord.gg/qNRumhgUMM (DISCORD) #StayHumble #StayHungry

We take a look at DC's newest blockbuster, The Suicide Squad, and discuss everything from whether or not it's charting a new (better?) course for the DCEU to the possibility of a return for Will Smith's Deadshot. It was a silly and fun and nonsensical 2 hour thrill ride. But does that mean we liked it or hated it? And if you want to hear of a new food we invented, make sure you listen for Wesley's food analogy starting around 7:10 in the episode. Twitter: @confidently_podInstagram: @confidently_podWebsite: https://confidentlywrong.simplecast.comCredits:Hosted by: Wesley Nakamura, Brian Redondo, Savon JonesEdited by: Wesley NakamuraIntro Music: Energetic Upbeat by WinnieTheMoogLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/6033-energetic-upbeatLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseOutro Music: Classical Metal Workout by MusicLFilesLink: https://filmmusic.io/song/7525-classical-metal-workoutLicense: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

Episode Notes Margaret continues talking to Simon, a restoration ecologist who works in the Pacific Northwest, about confronting climate crisis with reforestation. Simon can be found on twitter @plant_warlock. The host Margaret Killjoy can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. You can support her and this show on Patreon at patreon.com/margaretkilljoy. Transcript 1:00:55 Margaret   Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the End Times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and I use she or they pronouns. And this episode I'm actually recording immediately after the previous episode with Simon because, as soon as we got off the call, we talked about all of these other things that are worth talking about. And there's just so much to all of this that we thought it might be worth doing a second episode about. You might be hearing this—I don't know when you're gonna hear this as compared to the other part. But anyway, Live Like the World is Dying as a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. Duh daaaaa do. Jingle   What's up y'all, I'm Pearson, host of Coffee with Comrades. Coffee with Comrades is rooted in militant joy. Our hope is to cultivate a warm and inviting atmosphere, like walking into your favorite coffee shop to sit down with some of your close friends and share a heart-to-heart conversation. New episodes premiere your every Tuesday, so be sure to smash that subscribe button wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. We are proud to be a part of the Channel Zero Network. Margaret   Okay, if you could introduce yourself with your name, your pronouns. And then just a real brief overview for people who didn't listen to the first interview we just did with you about the kind of work you do and what your specialization is. Simon   Yeah, thanks for having me on again. My name is Simon Apostle. I'm a restoration ecologist. And I've been working in Oregon and Washington, kind of across the Pacific Northwest, for the last 10 or so years. And most of my work has focused on reforestation, but also just general natural resource management and ecological restoration. Margaret   So we were talking about—you have ideas about what people who have access to some, you know, maybe homestead-style, size of land or land project or even, like, maybe even smaller scale than that—about what people can do besides just reforestation, what is involved in restoration, and using that to mitigate whether climate change or other problems ecologically? Simon   Yeah, so one of the things that, in our field, we've been looking at quite a bit is how do certain keystone organisms really affect the landscapes. And one of the biggest ones—not just in size, they get pretty large though—is the North American Beaver. Which and this is true across North America. And beaver are a critical component of ecosystems. And they do that by doing what we know they do, by building dams, and altering hydrology in a way that creates habitat, it creates diversity, it retains water in a landscape by damming streams up and creating new channels and all of these things. And so reintroduction of beavers, or by mimicking the processes that beavers create, you can do a lot for the land and also potentially make it work better for you. Because you know, as we face climate change, water retention is kind of one of our biggest issues. Margaret   So you're telling people that they should build dams and cut trees?  Simon   That's exactly right. Yeah. If you want to think like a beaver, you should build a dam. If you want to use it for hydroelectric purposes, you can do that. And then, yeah, of course, cut down trees. No, it's a really interesting parallel, right? Because beavers kind of act like us, you know, and they do all these things that we know are—especially in the Pacific Northwest—know are bad. We know that the dams, the hydroelectric dams, are a massive problem for salmon and for other organisms, and disrupting natural water flows and creating barriers and, of course, cutting down trees is the thing we all know is we don't do well. But beaver do things in a way that that they, you know, ecosystem around them has adapted to do and interact with. So a beaver dam—first of all, the scale is different, right, it's not going to be across the Columbia River, it's across a stream, a low gradient side channel, something like that. And a beaver dam is porous, it has water cascading over it, a fish can jump over it. It is complex, you know, there's a pond behind it and there's wetlands on the margins and there's channels flowing around it that they may not have gotten to damming yet. And that complexity is critical, right? Like, it's the taking of a simple stream channel and making it into something really complicated and with little niches for all these different organisms. And it can work for humans too, you know, by recharging groundwater, by retaining water on a landscape for longer you get aquifer recharge, you get, you know, trees surrounding that area, maybe growing a little bit better, all of these things that are directly valuable to us. Margaret   So that's the kind of, like, microclimate stuff of making your area—you're, like, so wells will go dry, slower and things like that. Simon   Absolutely. I mean, water retention in landscapes is so important. You know, as we, like, face climate change, right, it's—and some of that is affected by by climate change directly just through evaporation, but also as you get precipitation changing from snow to rainfall, you know, through a larger portion of the year in a lot of systems, that means that the water's not coming down as a trickle of snowmelt throughout the year, it's coming down, you know, in a single rain of that. And there's none left in the summer. And beaver are one of the organisms that can help counteract that by retaining that water in the smaller streams and then letting it out as a slower trickle. Margaret   It's so wild that that—that something at that small of a scale has an impact. I feel like that's like something that I often forget about because, as much as I'm like, oh, I like bottom-up organizations and blah, blah, blah. I'm like always sometimes forget that something as simple as like blocking a creek can have an impact. Simon   Yeah, and it's the aggregate effect, right, too. It's all of—its every little side channel. And especially if we talk about in a temperate region, like the the Northeast in the US or the Northwest, where you have lots and lots of little creeks. And historically there were probably beaver populations on every single one of those that, of course, were all trapped out, you know, as European trappers moved into those landscapes. Margaret   What—This is it is a question I feel like I should have learned in middle school or something. But why do beavers build dams? Like what's in it for them? Simon   Yeah, so I mean, it's a really good question, right? For them, I think—and actually, this is like, a really interesting evolutionary question because old world beavers, a European, like super similar species. I don't even know how different they are genetically, and I'm sure a little bit, but they don't build dams, they just burrow into into dens on the bank as far as I'm aware.  Margaret   Huh.  Simon   But beavers build dams largely to create more habitat for themselves. They're safe from predators underwater. The entrances to their lodges are underwater. So they'll build their big lodge and then they'll swim underwater to an entrance and then inside the lodge it'll be back up in the air so that they're safe. They also like to eat willows and willows like to grow in wetlands. And so you flat out an area that was a canyon, you create more sediment deposits, you flood into the flat areas, you're going to grow more of these kind of fast growing hardwoods that they like to eat. So it's about creating more habitat for themselves, you know, in a way you can think about them as, like, they're creating their shelter and they're also, like, farming, the things that they like to eat by flooding. Margaret   No, no, only humans do that. That's cool. That's—yeah, I'm like, now I'm like, I wonder if we should have beaver where I—you know, I live on this this creek and, you know, there's willows around and things like that. Yeah, no, okay. And so you're saying—so what is the water retention do in terms of mitigating the effects of climate change and things like that? Simon   Yeah. Yeah. So, like we talked about, just holding that water in the landscape, letting it permeate into the soil, but also slowing that release through the creek just as it is beneficial to so many organisms, right? Because it allows water flow through a longer period of the year. You know, a big flush of water, a big flood, can be a lot less useful than a steady trickle in a lot of cases. Margaret   Can I selfishly ask you about reforesting willows and, like, is that a useful—you know, I guess as I was saying, I live on a creek that floods. And we've talked about, you know, people talk about willows being very good plants for, you know, sucking up water or whatever, but we don't believe it changes the way that water flows across the land or anything like that. But it might help, like, reinforce banks or—because most of your work is riparian specifically, right? What is—what are you doing when you reforest in a riparian area? And how can I selfishly do that myself? Simon   That's gonna depend on the situation, right, but a lot of what we're doing when we focus on riparian areas is because they're important to so many species, right. And so they're rare and critical. And so the benefits that you have by reforesting of riparian area, you have shade over the stream, you know, you're cooling the water temperature which reduces evaporation, it helps the organisms within the stream. In terms of planting willows, I mean, the one of the best things about willows is that they're one of the easiest things to plant and grow, right. They're adapted to break off in flooding. So you have twigs and stems and branches will just break off, and any single one of those can land on a bank of mud and sprout and turn into a new tree. So they have this vegetative adaptation that's a hormone that allows them to root from any given node, you know, and a node being a part of the plant that can turn into a leaf or a branch, or in the case of a willow or root, even if it was, you know, a branch from the top of the tree. And anyone who's you know, propagated cuttings and stuff knows that some plants have that hormone, and particularly willows do. And you can stick a willow branch in your cuttings of some other tree or shrub and they'll root more easily. So a lot of times what we'll do in riparian areas just harvest willow cuttings, either locally if there's a good source, or bring them in from somewhere nearby, or, you know, from a nursery, and just plant those basically stick straight in the ground. It looks super weird because it just looks like we planted a bunch of two or three foot sticks on the ground. Super dense, in most areas in North America you would have—might be planting 2000 stems an acre of willows and kind of related riparian shrubs. And, you know, if conditions are right, you will get a pretty dense willow stand within a few years. Margaret   Do you then go—let's say for some, you had a homestead and there was a dense stand of willows. Do you then go and, like, thin it out so that there's, you know, so each tree—like I know that when dealing with, like, you know, a monoculture of young pines, sometimes you have to thin it out in order to make them grow healthier? Simon   Yeah, that's gonna depend, you know where you are, but but probably not. They you know, their life cycle is such that they are going to live a much shorter period of time, and they grow in these big, thick, dense stands that all grow up at once because there was some big flood that brought in a bunch of new, clean sediment and wiped out all the old ones. And then the new branches and seeds landed and you grow a thick forest. And they'll kind of self thin. And actually that's—those standing dead trees and fallen dead trees or habitat features in themselves. You know, woodpeckers like them, salamanders like the logs on the ground, so do turtles, you know, things like that. So, generally speaking, no, I mean, we'll do things like we control to reduce competition when they're young. But their growth cycle is such that they're a big disturbance, and then they grow, and then everything gets wiped out in a stand, and then they grow again in most systems. Margaret   I guess to go back to what you were talking about earlier, you said you wanted to talk about bringing back beaver. How to—what does that look like? How do people do that? Simon   Yeah, I mean, and sometimes it's as simple as, you know, you have county highway departments and things that you know, beaver like to build dams, and they like to build dams in a roadside ditch next to a highway. So these county highway departments will trap and kill the beaver. And so if you can work with them to say, no, trap and release it. And in some cases, some counties will actually say—you can say, hey, we'd be okay with you releasing them on our property instead of killing them. And they may be, they may do that for you. The other way to do it is kind of—and it depends on, if they're there, to build it and they will come. So you plant willows on a stream, you know, eventually they might find it if they're nearby. They roam pretty far. The other thing that you can do is, even if you don't have beavers, is to start to kind of connect those processes that beavers create by basically building your own dams that are functionally similar to a beaver dam. And beavers will often find those too and start to build and add to them.  Margaret   That's cool.  Simon   We actually, we have a whole technical term. They're called BDAs, which just means Beaver Dam Analogue. But it's a really cool sort of growing niche in my field because it's—they're low tech, right. It's, you're putting a bunch of posts in the river and piling a bunch of brush behind them so water kind of dams up but also flows through. Snd anyone can do it. You know, you don't need an engineering degree, you don't need a forestry degree, you can just kind of do it. Margaret   Aren't like riparian areas, creeks and things like that, like, fairly heavily controlled, like, can't you get in some trouble for messing with a creeks flow. Simon   Yeah, I mean, if you're doing something that's, you know—yes, in the United States, and there's stronger rules depending on the state that you're in. There's wetlands and waters rules that have to do with the Clean Water Act. A lot of these were just kind of greatly diminished by the Trump administration. So you're safer there on a lot of the ephemeral streams, and it's going to depend on your state. But generally speaking, I mean, I'm not a lawyer. But, you know, if you're doing a restoration activity on—we're talking a small stream, a small ephemeral stream on a piece of ground that you own, these kinds of activities are fine. You're really talking about, okay, am I bringing in fill, am I bringing in equipment, am I, you know, dumping dirt, am I building a permanent dam that really is, like, easily identifiable as like an irrigation dam or something like that? That's where you need to get into the permitting world. Margaret   And now I'm just trying to figure out whether I can do micro hydro on a beaver dam. Like without actually blocking it. Simon   That you would probably technically need a permit for in the world we live in, but I won't... Margaret   Appreciate it. Neither should any of you. I've not actually—I looked into a fair amount of micro hydro, and it's just not—even though I have running water on our property, it's not the right move for us. Which is a shame because micro hydro where you don't actually block the creek—I'm sure it has ecological impacts. But it doesn't block the creek. I don't know. Simon   Now there's been studies about, you know, replacing the Columbia River dams with things like that. It's, like, they're less micro, I'm sure, because of the scale, but you know, things that just basically sit on the side of the river instead of blocking the whole thing.  Margaret   Seems so—now I wonder why we didn't do that in the first place. Simon   How was—I think you'd probably get more power if you dam the whole river. And yeah, different time, I guess. Yeah. I thought, you know, it'd be interesting to kind of like, think about, just because your initial question kind of got me thinking about, like, how do we make for us work for us. And, you know, that can touch on, like, you know, how Indigenous groups interacted with the forest in places that I know, things like that, but like, what are, you know, kind of what are some of like the other human benefits to forests. Margaret   So we're still kind of having this conversation about reforestation, and the advantages of it, and besides just water retention, and besides, you know, the cooling effect and things like that, what are—why reforestation? Like, tell me tell me more about what's cool about reforestation. Simon   Yeah, well I think one of the things that we're kind of slowly realizing is, like, all of the side benefits that the forests provide us. And not—we've already talked about, you know, cooling effects and shading and things like that. But, you know, there can also be like a fair amount of food production from a diverse forest. There's been a really interesting set of research that was done in coastal British Columbia, where they found these pockets of forests where you didn't have a closed canopy, you had this kind of diverse patchwork, and near historic coast Salish village sites we had these—or still have these essentially what have been called food forests. So this kind of diverse array of fruiting species like crab apples and cranberries and huckleberries and things like that, that now we know were managed by people. So it's something that we would kind of recognize as something somewhere between like a European conception of agriculture, and then just a natural, quote/unquote natural forest with no human impacts, which of course, there were. But regardless, you know, there's ways to kind of create something that's diverse and works for plants and animals, while also working for you. And I think food production is one of those. And creating diversity in a stand is one of the ways to do that. So instead of thinking about, we have this stand of trees, and we want it all to be as old as possible. Well, what if there's a little clearing over here, you know, which would—could mimic a natural process. You'd have windfall, you know, knocking a few trees over. And then one of the things that come up in that clearing, might be some of those early seral plants, some of them are fruiting, some of them are useful for other purposes, or, you know, and so you can manage that stand, that clearing, in ways that that work for people. You know, it's like, reframing how we think about agriculture, and also how we think about forestry. We think about forestry as producing lumber, and we think about agriculture is producing things that we, you know, and they don't mix. They're just different things. But of course, you know, they're all just plants. Margaret   Yeah, maybe—we would probably need to have an entirely different economic system in order to take advantage of, you know, decentralized food production like that—which, obviously, I'm in favor of a completely different economic system. So that sounds good to me. So this is the kind of stuff that's mostly useful for people who are working—who have access to, like, a land project and things like that. Is this information that people can use to, you know, influence county decisions about how to do things? Like how much control are people able to exert either within the existing system or outside of it on reforestation? Simon   Yeah. One of the biggest issues is the lack of control that people who don't have a sort of like legal and economic stake in these things, you know, indirectly have, in some cases, you know, you talk about a federal agency planning a project, and they're going to say, oh, we're doing community involvement, we're going to talk to our neighbors. Well, their neighbors might be, you know, a farmer, who may even be a local farmer, but owns, you know, a significant amount of land and is not really representative of maybe your rural communities actual income and wealth distribution. Or their neighbor may even be an industrial timber company.  Margaret   Right.  Simon   But a lot of these projects have, you know, if they're federally funded, they have public comment periods. They have all these things that are written into law that are supposed to allow for community engagement, and sometimes are not so easily accessible. But you can get together with some people and watch out for things like, there's going to be a forest thinning project and we want input on this, we want to say, hey, you need to consider, you know, our use, like, our group wants to do mushroom foraging in this area, and we're concerned that you're going to disturb this. Or, we want you to think about how your project design affects that, you know, things of that nature. Yeah, and a lot of times nobody really comments on these projects. So a little bit of public comment, a little bit of input, can actually really sway land managers decisions. I know when I'm in that situation, you know, hearing from five people that are all saying the same thing, is a big group of people, because usually no one says anything. So I think you can have a difference—make a difference. And that's going to depend on the sort of willingness and adaptability of people in positions of power, like with all things. But usually these things just kind of get ignored. So. Margaret   Yeah, one of the things—one of the talking points when I did more forest defense out west—one of the main talking points would be—and, you know, most of us weren't, we didn't really care about what what was good for the economy. We cared about what was good for, you know, the values that we held about biodiversity and things like that. But one of the things we would talk about is that you actually literally make more—like it does more for the local economy by and large to leave the National Forest alone and not run the National Forest timber sale program. And, again, is at least as far as I understood it at the time, and that like most of the timber sale program was like run at a loss because they're basically subsidizing all of the costs of these timber companies to come in and clear cut, you know, quote/unquote, our forests within a colonial system, whatever that means. But these public lands—you know, I didn't realize when I was a kid that the national forests were—huge chunks of them are regular clear cut, and they're on some ways like managed just like another timber farm. And there is a little bit more say that people are able to have. And one of the things that I liked about, you know, working with groups like Earth First was that we were very every tool in the toolbox and that absolutely included public comment periods and showing up to, you know, city council meetings in these small towns and things like that. And working with people who are from the small towns, usually. You know, basically, we would come into support local organizing. And then also, you know, direct action and blocking people from logging. It doesn't always work, right? But it works more times than I expected, to basically come in and say, you know, the tree sit doesn't sit on every tree that they're going to cut. The tree sit sits on where they want to build a road, right? And you block access long enough either to make it just so expensive that it stops being worth it for them, or, more likely, it's part of a larger strategy where you're also, like, suing them in the courts. Like often they do this thing where they can—they're allowed to clear cut—you're suing them to say you can't clear cut, and then they're allowed to if there's no injunction. They can do so while the, you know, while court is happening. So they can be like, well, doesn't matter now, we already did it. And so sometimes you're just literally stopping them while you make a larger change, which now that I think about it feels like a larger metaphor for how so much of this is about preserving what we can while we try to make these larger changes, while we try to change the economic systems that we live under and things like that. Simon   Yeah, no, that's definitely true. And I think just being a stick in the mud sometimes just being loud in as many ways as you can think, can be really beneficial. One issue, kind of jumping on, like, federal logging thing that that is a problem is that you can have kind of greenwashing of timber sales sometimes. You know, you look at, like, post-fire salvage logging that is really not ecologically justified, right? You know, well we need to clear out the trees because then we'll have room for the nutrients to grow. It's like, well, no, you know, fire's natural and actually standing dead trees are an entirely separate and unique habitat type. And they're an important thing to protect, you know. And, similarly, we need to thin forests because we've repressed fire for so long, and we need to make them—we need to reintroduce fire to the landscape. But sometimes, you know, these projects kind of—there will be people who insert themselves in them with ulterior motives, right. So it'd be—no longer becomes about—it's ecologically justified, we're thinning out the young trees to save. For the other ones it's like, well, actually, maybe we should take some of the big ones too, you know. There's probably too many of them, you know. It's like—so just being active, and paying attention to when those things are happening, you can make a pretty big difference over a pretty large chunk of ground. You know, one of the issues that we have here is that I think I mentioned last time is how much of our forests are privately owned though, right? And more and more that ownership is not only private, you know, quote/unquote, but owned by investment firms and entities that not only want to extract profit, but they want to extract profit quickly. So they've reduced the length of time between harvest from something like 80 years,—and you know, 80 year old forest has a lot of habitat value, or a 50 year old forest does—to now being maybe 50, or sometimes even 30. You know, 30 year old trees, which basically just looks like a plantation, you know. And they'll harvest and then they sell the land again. And it's just this ongoing cycle of making sure that the quarterly returns are up so the stock prices are up. And, you know, that's something that really needs to be actively fought in my region. Margaret   Yeah. And then I'm under the impression that you can only have these cycles where you remove all the biomass every 30 or 80 years—you can only do that so many times before you end up with no biomass left and get desertification. Is that the case? Simon   Yeah, I mean, there's certainly—we've undergone massive changes to soil structure in ways that we don't understand in forests in the Pacific Northwest. And, definitely, it's that loss of biomass. And there's certain types of biomass that only big trees can really provide. There's like that something called like brown cubicle rot, which isn't a very romantic name, but—there's other terms for it—but basically it's like, if you've ever been in the Pacific Northwest and you'd seem like a big nurse log on the ground, which is we call like a tree that's fallen on the ground and it has other trees and plants growing out of it. It's providing an entirely unique set of soil conditions. And you crumble that apart and it's got these, like, cavities and square pieces, and it's often very brown or bright orange. And that type of biomass in the soil is just, it's just a completely different entity than the bare mineral soil. And certainly you start to reduce the health of the trees that grow when you keep removing that biomass. And, of course, it provides carbon storage too. So, you know, last year in Oregon in 2020—this year, we had record-breaking heat waves, and last year, we had record-breaking wildfires on the west side of the Cascades, which, you know, you're familiar with Oregon, of course. But for people that aren't, that's, like, the wet side, right? That's when people think about Oregon and big trees and things like that, that's kind of what they're envisioning. But we had these fires raging through the west side. And they ended up burning like 2% of the land area of the state in one month. And a lot of those burns were on these these private tree farms with these young trees that are just matchsticks, they're stressed by drought because they don't have the organic matter in the soil to retain moisture. And they just, they burned completely, a lot of these areas, you know, 100%, true mortality. So there's—you can't do it forever. But but they, you know, they don't care that you can't do it forever. Margaret   Which I guess is like—is yet another example of, like, the whole climate preparedness and mitigating the effects of climate change involves stopping all of this treating the earth just like a sit a set of resources to extract, you know? Simon   Yeah, yeah. And it's not, you know, it's not like, I mean, we use wood products, right? But it's just how do we change our relationship to do that in a way that works for us in the present, and will also work for future generations. I'm working on a forest management plan right now for a property—for a reserve—but that will allow timber harvest, and it's, you know, it was purchased from Weyerhaeuser, it's 1300 acres. And a lot of it was logged fairly recently before they sold it because they kind of extracted the value that they could, But it's thinking about, okay, but the trees are too dense, we're gonna need to thin them. At what stage do we send them, you know, that we can actually extract some value and that value goes into the local economy, and we're creating timber products, but we're not—but we're sort of mimicking the natural cycles in order to get to a place where in a couple 100 years, it's a mature, old growth forest, right? And at that point, like, I don't need to consider what the economy is like in 100 or 200 years, I don't need to consider what we need out of forest products. But like we can make it work for us in the present by clearing little clearings and creating, you know, have like diversity areas that're similar those clearings that I talked about before, or selectively thinning, you know, the weaker trees and creating a more open canopy that mimics those natural systems, but also allows for economic activity or for just wood products that we use in our lives. And I really like that, because it's that dichotomy of, like, what do we need now, but how can we plan for a future that's unknowable to us? But we do know that we want all grow for us again someday for future generations.  Margaret   Yeah, and I like it because it's acknowledging that it's, like, well, we do want to use wood to build our houses or whatever, you know. There's, in many climates, that's the best way to do it. And most of us prefer to live in shelter and things like that, you know. And it's just—and people have this like, okay, well, since clear cutting, you know, on massive scale is bad, and looking at the earth as a series of resources bad, therefore, we have to feel guilty about using, like, you know, interacting with the earth, and that also doesn't do us any good. One, because guilt-based organizing this garbage. But it's also just, like, it's not—it's a babies and bathwater problem, you know. It's a—we do, we are animals, and animals use, well, other animals and nature to do the things we want to do. I remember trying to, you know, we were trying to protect this forest in Southern Oregon, and it was, it had actually been burned. And it was a salvage—it was old growth forests that have been burned on public land. And none of the locals would log it because everyone knew it was bad. So there was like all of these out of state loggers, which is funny because then, you know, of course we get accused of being outside agitators or whatever. And, you know, I remember one of the times some loggers got past one of our blockades and, you know, and people are like yelling at them. And the logger are like, well, what do you do for a living? You know, and I was like, I'm a landscaper. And the person next to me is like, well, I'm a logger. You know, it's like, like, you can be a logger. Like, if you're—you can be a person who turns trees into lumber and have that be a positive thing in the world, you know, you can do forestry in ways that aren't monstrous. Simon   Yeah, and we often don't give people the opportunity to engage with these practices that we all need, you know, to function, at least in the society that we build. We don't give them the opportunity to engage in that way. You know, you can't just like, well, I'm not going to work—if I'm a logger, I'm not going to work on any standard commercial timber operations, I'm only going to do selective logging and I'm only going to do, you know, sustainable logging. I mean, that sounds great. But you know, people who, again, quote/unquote, own the land, I mean, they need to allow that, they need to give people that opportunity, or they need to organize and demand it. And it's sort of the, you know, it's kind of the, like, Plato's cave of forest management. You know, we all need to, like, envision a different world, you know, that can work for us in order to get there. There's a leap of faith that needs to happen, I think, and there's not a lot of faith in what feels like a declining industry and a, you know, climate change, and all of these things. Margaret   Something that we were talking about, you know, when we were talking about doing this episode—about, you know, there's all this information about how to do reforestation, or, you know, sustainable forestry and all of these different things. But I'm guessing most of you listening don't have even as much access to land as, say, I do. Right? And, you know, and so it can be kind of hopeless thinking like, well, what do I do about this? And, because yeah, most land—most privately owned land—is owned by these, well I don't know this is as a statistic, but there's certainly a lot of land that is in private hands in this country that is just, you know, resources to extract, like, things people who would not be interested in doing this. And the reason I was thinking about this is so useful to talk about—pardon the motorcycle revving its engine outside my office—the reason I feel so useful to talk about is because the current situation, to me, doesn't seem like it's going to stay. Because we probably, as a society, are nearing the end of our ability to stick our fingers in our ears about climate change. I'm sure we'll always have, you know, people will always have, like, disaster fatigue, where we—it's not like we're suddenly gonna wake up one day and everyone's gonna realize climate change is real and, you know, have a glorious happy revolution or whatever. But things will shift as more and more people, like, essentially have to come to terms with this. It'll probably shift in bad ways also. But the thing that I—it occurs to me is that it's like, these people who own, you know, giant tracts of land and stuff, like some of them are people, and some of them are people who would see themselves as decent people. And I think that a lot of people who see themselves as decent people are going to start having a different relationship to economic production in the very near future. And maybe some of the other ones who don't want to change, have a change of heart, might cease being able to have the physical security necessary to control what happens on their property. You know, it's, things are gonna change, probably. Well, they'll definitely change, just I can't tell you how they're going to change. So it feels like it's useful to understand all this stuff and to understand the importance of reforestation and all of this, because we might be able to start convincing some of these people that this is what should happen, you know, that they should not manage their property the way that they currently do at the very least. I dunno. Is there any hope in that? Simon   I think the shift that needs to happen is that we need to think about these things long-term. And, ideally, it would be in multi generational cycles. But even thinking about things in terms of people's own lifetimes, and one of the issues with commercial timber management is that it's not even in people's lifetimes, or it's not even in the lifetimes of the company, its quarterly profit returns, its stock prices, it's all these sort of abstract but very quick return things that just—they don't—there's no way for that to really intersect in a healthy way, no matter what you think about capitalism and the stock market and stuff. And I would guess that most people listening to this don't have like super favorable views on that. But there's just no way for that quick cycle of profit returns to mesh with managing an ecosystem, and particularly managing an ecosystem like a forest where, even in a short-lived forests in some regions, you're talking about trees living 100 years. You know, and then in other areas 300 years, 500 sometimes, you know. So it just can't—it can't operate that way. And a lot of the people that work for these companies are people that have lived in these areas for a long time now, right? And do feel like they care about the land, but also they feel like they care about their communities and they need to provide jobs and they're just sort of wrapped up in the system. And I guess I'll make the forest for the trees puns, right, you know you can't see your way out, the trees are too dense in a tree farm. You need to thin it out a little bit. And, sorry, for that terrible joke. But I think that a lot more people are reachable than we know, and we need to just talk to each other. And I think we all need to sort of meet—I don't want to say meet in the middle—but meet in kind of a new place where we're not sort of old school environmentalist in that we say, okay people do bad things to nature, and then we need to just stop people from doing the bad things to nature. It's like, what new—and then we're not just extractivist, you know, logging everything, mining everything, well the economy, you know, jobs, the economy, blah, blah, blah. We need to come to a new place where it's like, how do we develop this relationship that works for us, you know, with each other and with with nature. And that sounds very Kumbaya, but I do think you're right, that climate change starts to—it starts to force a shift. And even the management of these companies know that, you know, Weyerhaeuser, they're not climate denialist, you know. They do experiments to see how far north they need to move their tree seedlings, you know, their stock, you know, do we bring seedlings from Southern Oregon to halfway up Washington because they're adapted to the hotter climate? They're studying all of that stuff, they know it's real. And the people working for them, I think, largely know that it's real too. It's certainly in the past few years around here, I think, gotten to the point where it's unavoidable. I work with loggers and farmers and people that don't always have the same views as me, but that—I hear a lot less climate denial now than I did even five years ago. We've just had too many extreme events. People know it's here. And, you know, and yeah, disaster can create an opportunity, we realize we need to change and we need to come to a better system with each other. And that may, you know, whether you believe in the power of government to change these things or not, that can lead to either community solutions, people just demanding better from the organizations with whom they work. And also, a lot of this stuff could be easily changed in state legislatures. You know, there's the power in Oregon and Washington to say, no, we are going to disincentivize these outside investment groups from owning these forests. We're gonna, you know, lay down a heavy hand. And if you can get local communities of loggers to say that that's good and that's fine instead of kind of these, like astroturfed, you know, Timber Unity-type groups that are really just right wing, you know, corporate funded, hollow entities. You know, if you have actual communities making their voices heard, change feel possible. Margaret   That idea of, like, we have to meet at a third place is really fascinating to me. You know, I remember—well I don't remember. It was before my time in Earth First. But, you know, one of the, like, one of the main stories we talk about, right, is the story of—are ou familiar with Judi Bari, the Earth First organizer who organized loggers? And she got bombed for it, right. And, you know, basically like, she was organizing as an Earth First-er, but very also explicitly as a labor organizer with the IWW. And being like, you know, loggers have one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, and, you know, and are by and large people who like the fact that they spend all their time outdoors, you know. And I'm not trying to come Kumbaya either and be like, oh, well, you know, we'll never have to be opposed to the people who are working on resource extraction or whatever, right. But the less we can be, the better, both strategically and ethically. And also, I mean, I think that's why Judi Bari got bombed. I personally believe that that was by the federal government. I know there was a lawsuit that, one, proving that at the very least, they were certainly ready to go to show that, you know, like, ready to blame her own assassination on herself, you know. And—assassination attempt, she survived the bombing, died of cancer a couple years later. But, you know, like, I think that that actually is what threatens power is when—not to sound Marxist, but like when the working—well, whatever, anarchist, everyone knows that—you know when the working class gets together and is like, oh, we can actually see passed our immediate differences and work together towards a goal, we accomplished an awful lot. And I don't personally have the first clue about how to do that. And maybe you do have more of a first clue because you work, I presume your work puts you in touch with both environmentalists and loggers and timber companies and things that are these very traditionally at odds organizations? Simon   Yeah, so my current role is with a land trust. And for those that don't know, basically a land trust, in some cases, buys property directly or has it donated, and then it's put in a trust forever to protect it from development or for restoration, or whatever the threat is. Or it'll be a legal entity, like a conservation easement, that it's still owned by someone else but we have some restrictions on, okay, you can't mine it, you can't put housing developments on it. Maybe you can still log it though, or maybe there's some restrictions on how that logging happens. And so that allows me to kind of straddle that world a little bit. And I've worked in many different organizations with many different entities, but it kind of gives us a, you know, an avenue to interacting with local communities. Like, we're not just flying in, you know, by night—and some people are still pissed at us and that's fine. That's always going to be the case. But we're there more or less permanently. And so, like it or not, we can work together. But also, I mean, you know, yeah, we do, I work with people, I hire farmers for work, I hire loggers for work. We, like as I mentioned, we do, you know, timber production activities. And so, being local and kind of leading by example, if you have the opportunity, it has been really valuable. You know, I will say that a lot of times the groups that get cut out of that conversation of, oh, we need to work with local communities, are Indigenous groups. You know, and when Indigenous groups are brought in, it's usually tribal governments. And, of course, not all tribes are recognized federally. And if they're not federally recognized, they're out of luck. You know, locally we have the Chinook tribe fighting for recognition and wanting to be a part of managing lands in our region on the lower Columbia River, and being cut out without funding, without recognition. But other tribes are, and so they are able to kind of assert themselves. And so I think this is all true. You know, I don't want to go down the road of romanticizing rural communities, because I think that there's a lot that also needs to change, but there are a lot of people in those communities who, yeah, absolutely want it a different way. And like you said, just like being outside, they like being in the woods, and they just really care about things. And, you know, one of the funniest things to me is that, you know, a lot of, like, a lot of these these people in a way that I don't—it doesn't have any packing in theory or in politics, really—but like really push back against private ownership. You know, when you think about like private property being not just like an absolute thing, but a bundle of rights, you know, I have the right to log this, I have the right to access. You know, all these private timber lands used to be, like, widely accessible to people in local communities. And that, especially when they're a smaller companies, and so people grew up, you know, going to places in the coast range and hunting and fishing and just hanging out and camping and, like, that was their backyards. And they have the larger companies coming in and being like, well wait a second, we can we can charge for permit access, you know, and we can hire our security to control it, and we can put up gates on all the roads. And that really pisses people off, you know, and I think there's a real organizing opportunity there, you know, for someone to bridge that gap and be, like, yeah, you know, you're right. These big private companies really are, you know, taking away something that is not theirs to take away. You know, you own it too, and then can we extend this to, okay, but also you own it, but also, you know, there were people here first that also owned it and stuff do and have an ownership stake. And we can kind of build a new vision of who owns the land. Margaret   Yeah, no, it's like—it's like, people coming back just instinctively, on some level, to the the idea of the commons. You know, the idea that there's this land where it's okay to like—I'm not encouraging this, I'm just talking about the original commons in England or whatever—but like, it's okay to take some trees every now and then. It's okay to forage. It's okay to hunt. It's okay to see this as a common pool of resources that we all, you know, maintain and draw from. And in the enclosure of the commons, of course, you know, is the now everyone needs permits, you know, and you get all the Robin Hood stuff about, you know, don't go hunt on the king's land or whatever. It's just kind of interesting to watch that—not the same. But, you know, history doesn't repeat, it echoes, or whatever the—rhymes? I think it rhymes. I don't remember what the cliche is. I'll make a new cliche by not knowing the original cliche. Simon   Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. And that entity that people are mad at for these access issues. I mean, it's, we have—there's just a vision of, like, here's the tax lots on the map, and that's who owns it. And it just is always much more complicated than that. And I think we just need to, like, recognize and put that complexity forward. Maybe in our society, in a way, that we all kind of know instinctively, you know, that it's wrong to just like, gate it all off and say it's a private property and, you know, screw you. And—but by reinforcing that sense of ownership, too, it makes all this stuff easier, it makes my work easier. And I want to expand that sense of ownership, because sometimes the people that are invited into having a say are people with with power in our society. Margaret   Yeah. The large landowners and... Simon   We can—I think we can build it—yeah, we can build a different ethic of, you know, how we interact with lands, with natural lands. Margaret   Do people—I mean, I don't know whether you would specifically know—but I wonder if people do guerrilla reforestation, you know, just like, going to— Simon   You know, it's a really good question. And like, I remember—so, in Oregon—well and a little bit in Washington—I think it was maybe four years ago, we had the first big wildfire near Portland in a lot of people's lives here. And that was in the Columbia River Gorge, which is like a really beloved place. You know, it's—the Columbia River is, I'm sure, you know, of course, but like, for your listeners who haven't been there, the Columbia River is like carving through the Cascade Mountains. And so it's this massive river, and it's easily accessible from the city. And so there's lots of hiking. And a wildfire started there. And a lot of people, unlike in other areas of the West, hadn't really experienced wildfire close to the city before. And so there was a lot of, like, real emotional scarring for people about, like, we lost this place. Like, it's gone. Like not knowing what was there yet. It was closed for a couple years for safety. You know, like, a lot of the hiking trails and things are still closed. And a long-winded way to say there were groups popping up, I remember on Facebook, you know, being like, I'm starting this group, and I'm gonna go in and start planting trees, who's with me? Like, we need to go plant trees. And, of course, people like me were jumping in and saying, well, actually, fire is a natural process and blah, blah, blah, and like, maybe don't. Let's give it a second. Like this is actually like, the gorge probably burned pretty frequently because there were a lot of, like, village sites and people were there and fires—anyways, whatever. But that sentiment was certainly there. So, like, clearly when people, like, know and love a place I think that, like, they can be organized to like do that, you know. Because this was a place that held a lot of, like a really special place in a lot of people's hearts. And so the question is, like, a lot of the places that really need reforestation are the super degraded places that no one goes to, you know, that aren't like the beautiful mountains. It's like the agricultural pasture that's like a little bit degraded and, like, maybe it's kind of a problem now. Or like just this little strip of land next to the creek, you know. So, I would love to see, like, that sort of like community response to doing that kind of thing. I think it would be like incredibly cool. And in terms of guerrilla efforts, I think probably the best examples you would find outside of the United States. Like I am not going to know the name of the village, but I have a family friend who is a doctor who spent a lot of time working in Rwanda for Doctors Without Borders. And she met these people that, like, in this little village they've started just reforesting, like, the hillsides next to their town. There were like these landslides happening and they just—now they started to get like NGO funding and stuff. But they started themselves. And I really wish I remember the name of this group and what they're doing but—and the name of the village—but I don't know. But I think in places without resources and without, like, everything is very codified, you know, here's who owns this land and here's who's responsible for it. There've been really like beautiful examples of people just taking it into their own hands. And this whole village just goes out and plants trees and I—the pictures are looking at—and it's like they're just, they grow them themselves. And they're like terracing the hills a little bit to, like, retain some moisture. And it was, like, to save their land and their lives. Like there were these landslides that were threatening them and they just started doing it, you know? And so I think there's—the best examples, you need to look outside of people like me who work for governments and nonprofits and things like that and look at other parts of the world. Margaret   That's uh... Okay, so the takeaways are: planting trees is good. Bringing beavers is good. Plant trees whether or not you have permission, but possibly, ideally, get actual local expertise about where to plant the trees and what kind of trees to plant. Change property relations. Yeah, no, no big deal. Damn it. Simon   No big deal.  Margaret   Yeah.  Simon   Also, you know, I mean, build your own expertise, right? Like, just, if you are interested in a piece of ground and in restoring it, just start going there. Like if there's a creek in your town that's kind of abandoned and, you know, whatever. Like, just seeing how it behaves for a couple of seasons, you can start to build that expertise.  Margaret   Cool.  Simon   So it's not that complicated, really. Margaret   Okay, well, that's probably a good note to end on. Do you have—for people who didn't listen to the last episode necessarily—do you have any organizations you're excited about shouting out or how people can follow you and bug you on the internet? Simon   Yeah, just the same things, I think. For people that are in the Portland, Oregon region, a great group—if you're interested in planting trees—to volunteer with or donate to is Friends of Trees. I don't work for them, but they're excellent. They plant trees in natural areas and in neighborhoods. And so you can just google Friends of Trees Portland and find them. For me, nothing to plug. But if you want to find me on Twitter, it's @plant_warlock. And if you have general questions about forestry or restoration, I'd be happy to to get in touch with you. Margaret   All right. Well, thanks so much for letting us steal even more of your time than originally we planned. Simon   Yeah, thank you. Margaret   Thanks, everyone, for listening. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I was just basically, as soon as we finished the call last time, I was like, no, wait, there's more we want to talk about. Because, while it's such a big issue, reforesting the planet to not all die seems like an important thing to talk about. And I hope you enjoyed listening to the conversation again—well, it's not the same conversation. So different conversation. I bet everyone really just sticks around to the end in order to hear me ramble. That's like the main thing. But if you want to be able to keep hearing me ramble, then the best way to do it is to tell people about the show. Yeah, sure. That works. Help feed the algorithms that run the world and things by liking and sharing and subscribing and retweeting and original tweeting and Instagram story sharing and we're on Facebook and Instagram and, you know, I'm on Twitter @magpiekilljoy. And I'm also on Patreon. And if you want to support the show, you can do so by supporting me on Patreon which goes to support all the people who work on this show and all the other stuff that we're really excited to start putting out soon. And I particularly would like to thank Nora and Hoss the dog, Kirk, Willow, Natalie, Sam, Christopher, Shane, The Compound, Cat J, Starro, Mike, Eleanor, Chelsea, Dana, Hugh, and Shawn. Thank you so much. And also, if you want access to the patron only—Patreon only content—but you don't make as much money as like we make—if you—whatever, if you're like not doing super well financially, just message me on whatever platform and I'll give you access to all of it for free. We do like a monthly zine that at the moment has been like zine by me, but soon is going to be zine—original zine by someone else. I'm restarting an old publisher called Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. I'm very excited about it. And we also have YouTube show now called, get this, it's called Live Like the World is Dying because it's the same show, it's just on YouTube. There's some stuff that, like, visually makes more sense—that makes more sense visually. I need to eat, so I'm going to be done recording now. Thank you so much for listening and I hope you're doing great Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

A double delight for John Cena fans this week, purely by happenchance, as Orbital dives into two of his latest movies: the DC supervillain get-together The Suicide Squad, and the heist family saga Fast & Furious 9. Gadgets 360 chief sub-editor and comic book fan Shayak Majumder joins host Akhil Arora to talk about The Suicide Squad. We discuss James Gunn's shock-and-awe tactics and how he makes use of the giant ensemble, led by Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, Joel Kinnaman, and Cena. We touch upon Gunn's mannerisms that contribute to a bonkers over-the-top movie, the multiple Guardians of the Galaxy cameos he stuffs here, and why we enjoyed everything about King Shark. Lastly, we look at where The Suicide Squad lands in the DC Extended Universe canon. Read: The Suicide Squad Review Later, Gadgets 360 senior reviewer Ali Pardiwala and sub-editor Jasmin Jose — both Fast & Furious fans — join Akhil to discuss F9. We delve into the sheer craziness of the film, with returning director Justin Lin putting a meta spin on how these street racers have become invincible superheroes along the way. They seemingly cannot die, and even when they do, they can always be brought back. But Fast & Furious 9 wastes some of its cast (Charlize Theron and Sung Kang) or doesn't know how to use them (Cena). Lin also loves action gimmicks — he was behind the bank vault chase in Fast Five — and on Fast & Furious 9, he turns to electromagnets. He also sends the Fast crew to space! Ali, Jasmin, and Akhil wrap up by picking their favourite Fast & Furious chapter — there's no common ground, surprisingly. Read: From F9 to The Suicide Squad, what to watch in August Follow Gadgets 360 on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Write to us at podcast@gadgets360.com Chapters The Suicide Squad (00:00) Unlike all of DCEU (04:55) Peacemaker vs Bloodsport (08:23) Gunn-isms, ft. King Shark (15:02) Starro the Conqueror (19:09) More Squad, and where it falls (23:40) Fast & Furious 9 (28:03) Racers to superheroes (36:26) Back from the dead (39:42) Electromagnets! (43:28) Young Torettos (45:27) Our favourite F&F (47:30) Cover credit: Universal Pictures. Photo credits: Jessica Miglio/DC Comics, DC Comics/Warner Bros., Giles Keyte/Universal Pictures

Spoiler Warning! Chris and Taylor review the new DC superhero film "The Suicide Squad" written and directed by James Gunn. A task force of convicts are sent to destroy the evidence of Project Starfish and the giant alien Starro. The film stars Idris Elba, Margot Robbie, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, David Dastmalchian, Daniela Melchior and Viola Davis.

Ares is the new resident angry old man of the show, whose previous angry old man disappeared under mysterious circumstances and is now haunting and terrorizing the hosts. Ares works to uncover the reason behind the former angry old man's disappearance. On Episode 472 of Trick or Treat Radio we discuss the Thai horror film, The Maid from director Lee Thongkham! We also talk about lots of new media from The Suicide Squad to Masters of the Universe: Revelation, have some 80s toy talk and find out what actually constitutes a sequel! So grab a supernatural onion, take a whiff of your new air freshener, and don't cry for me, Eternia because we're about to strap on for the world's most dangerous podcast!Stuff we talk about: Friday the 13th, Jason Vorhees, SickBad, Aldo Montoya, MZ returns, Vinegar Syndrome care package, Raw Force, EF Contentment's roast, air fresheners, Suicide Squad, James Gunn, what constitutes a sequel, Sylvester Stallone, John Cena, Godzilla vs. Kong, Kaiju, Starro the Conqueror, too much glowing, Bram Stoking the fire, “I like geists”, what's in Ravenshadow's brain?, convoluted emojis, The Crazies, George A. Romero, Takashi Miike, Quentin Tarantino, Dario Argento, Oscar Winning film Parasite, name that film, Christopher Reeve, duality of acting, ghost stories, twist endings, the three act film structure, Bone Tomahawk, From Dusk Till Dawn, Wellington Paranormal, Physical, Ted Lasso, Masters of the Universe, He-Man-Man, Voltron, Mark Hamill, Skeletor, Foundation, Schmigadoon!, Key and Peele, Henry Rollins, Ram-Man, Bi-Klops, Kenner gives no f*cks, Tunisian cinema, Dachra, kryptonite bullets, I love lamp and Linus, Demonic, Neill Blomkamp, Uncrustables, and the Voyage of Sickbad.Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/trickortreatradioJoin our Discord Community: https://discord.gg/ETE79ZkSend Email/Voicemail: mailto:podcast@trickortreatradio.comVisit our website: http://trickortreatradio.comStart your own podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=386Use our Amazon link: http://amzn.to/2CTdZzKFB Group: http://www.facebook.com/groups/trickortreatradioTwitter: http://twitter.com/TrickTreatRadioFacebook: http://facebook.com/TrickOrTreatRadioYouTube: http://youtube.com/TrickOrTreatRadioInstagram: http://instagram.com/TrickorTreatRadioSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/trickortreatradio)

It's Nom Nom Week on Cinematica Animalia as we take a look at some quirky anti-heros and one giant villainous butthole aka Starro the Destroyer with James Gunn's The Suicide Squad (2021). Do interdimensional virulent dots actually kill people? Do sharks really have kind eyes? How exactly does a giant starfish communicate with it's clone army? TIME POINTS 00:00:42 – Introduction and News 00:04:40 – Movie Introduction 00:10:48 – Trivia 00:13:04 – Science Discussion 00:43:49- Story Discussion 00:52:45 – Final Thoughts and Sign-Off

This week we're getting the gang back together, putting some exploding chips inside their heads and sending them on a gratuitously violent mission, all while discussing the latest entrant in the DCEU ‘The Suicide Squad'. The Suicide Squad is a 2021 American superhero film based on DC Comics featuring the team Suicide Squad. Produced by DC Films, Atlas Entertainment, and The Safran Company, and distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, it is a standalone sequel to Suicide Squad (2016) and the tenth film in the DC Extended Universe (DCEU). It was written and directed by James Gunn and stars an ensemble cast including Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Joel Kinnaman, Sylvester Stallone, Viola Davis, Jai Courtney, and Peter Capaldi. In the film, a task force of convicts are sent to destroy evidence of the giant alien Starro. We Watched A Thing is supported by Dendy Cinemas Canberra. The best Australian cinema chain showing everything from blockbusters to arthouse and indie films. Find them at https://www.dendy.com.au/ If you like this podcast, or hate it and us and want to tell us so - You can reach us at wewatchedathing@gmail.com Or, Twitter - @WeWatchedAThing Facebook - @WeWatchedAThing Instagram - @WeWatchedAThing and on iTunes and Youtube If you really like us and think we're worth at least a dollar, why not check out our patreon at http://patreon.com/wewatchedathing. Every little bit helps, and you can get access to bonus episodes, early releases, and even tell us what movies to watch.

Those Nerds actually went to the movies for once! And of course, it was for the new DC movie Suicide Squad because what else would prompt us to go outside? So let's talk about how great, or not great it actually was. !SPOILERS! We'd love to hear what you got excited about, or any of your thoughts and questions. You can do so by contacting us on any of our social/messaging platforms which all can be found on our website: https://thosenerdscast.wixsite.com/home Music: www.purple-planet.com

Welcome to the Comic Shenanigans Podcast! For the 898th episode, Adam Chapman welcomes Tibor Mate back to the show to discuss the newest DCEU film, THE SUICIDE SQUAD. We banter about the deaths, the cast, Starro and much more! This episode was originally recorded on August 10 2021. SPOILER WARNING!!! Download it now!

The Suicide Squad is the follow-up movie to the 2016 Suicide Squad. It's not exactly a sequel but it is. It's not exactly a reboot but it is. What is The Suicide Squad? Or in the case of Drax, I do you one better why is The Suicide Squad? Mr. Gene and I got an early preview of this movie. However, we waited to release our thoughts and feeling after watching The Suicide Squad a second time on HBOMax. Be prepared as there will be spoilers ahead! Enjoy!!!

Wacky. Ridiculous. Over-the-Top. Wonderful. That's the way to sum of James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. Honestly, it's nice to have some competency back for a DC film. From top to bottom this film is great and it really shouldn't have been. Just from the announcement, it felt like a weird “Is it a reboot or a sequel” type deal since some of the characters from the first panned movie were popping up in this one. This film makes it clear that it's a soft reboot and that they're trying to start off fresh.  The Suicide Squad is exactly what you would expect from the director that gave us two Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Take a bunch of relatively unknown characters, throw them together in an ensemble film and make you care about them (the ones that live along with the ones that die) throughout the whole movie. This feels like Gunn came in and said “Let's take some of the story beats that were tried in the first film but do them right”. There are plenty of times where you can just see this film as taking one of Harley's baseball bats to the dead corpse of the Ayers' film and it's glorious.  What stands out about this film versus its predecessor is that you actually care about a lot of the characters because there's something to care about. Idris Elba is great a Bloodsport and the cast really rallies around him and plays off of him. You may think that DC is leaning too heavily into Harley Quinn but Margot Robbie is one of those actors that fully embodies and invests into the character, it's hard not to want to put her into everything. Quinn is handled 1000 times better in this film than in the first. This feels like the natural progression for this character after her appearance in Birds of Prey. Also, it's time to admit that John Cena is a very good actor. He's in a film with Elba and Robbie and not only doesn't get blown off the screen but holds his own extremely well.  Action-wise, this film is bloody and great. Building on something that was noticed with Birds of Prey, when you can make Harley Quinn's fight better than Wonder Woman, you have to wonder what the hell DC was thinking with Wonder Woman 1984. Also the effects are damn good. King Shark looks fantastic and when Starro shows up, there's no drop in quality. With this film only coming in at $175 million for a budget which is far less than the $200+ million WB has spent on worse looking films, you have to hope that maybe this is the start of a change at WB when it comes to their superhero films. But don't bet on it. The biggest problem with The Suicide Squad has nothing to do with the movie at all but rather with the current state/future of the DC film universe. Is this the start of a new direction for WB with DC films where they finally cut the cord from the Snyderverse? Or is this just a one-off great film and we'll be back to the disappointing business-as-usual with the next film? Only time will tell. But for now, The Suicide Squad takes the lead as the best DC film. Like what you hear? Subscribe so you don't miss an episode! Follow us on Twitter: @Phenomblak @InsanityReport @TheMTRNetwork   Our shirts are now on TeePublic.  https://teepublic.com/stores/mtr-network   Want more podcast greatness? Sign up for a MTR Premium Account!  

Wacky. Ridiculous. Over-the-Top. Wonderful. That's the way to sum of James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. Honestly, it's nice to have some competency back for a DC film. From top to bottom this film is great and it really shouldn't have been. Just from the announcement, it felt like a weird “Is it a reboot or a sequel” type deal since some of the characters from the first panned movie were popping up in this one. This film makes it clear that it's a soft reboot and that they're trying to start off fresh.  The Suicide Squad is exactly what you would expect from the director that gave us two Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Take a bunch of relatively unknown characters, throw them together in an ensemble film and make you care about them (the ones that live along with the ones that die) throughout the whole movie. This feels like Gunn came in and said “Let's take some of the story beats that were tried in the first film but do them right”. There are plenty of times where you can just see this film as taking one of Harley's baseball bats to the dead corpse of the Ayers' film and it's glorious.  What stands out about this film versus its predecessor is that you actually care about a lot of the characters because there's something to care about. Idris Elba is great a Bloodsport and the cast really rallies around him and plays off of him. You may think that DC is leaning too heavily into Harley Quinn but Margot Robbie is one of those actors that fully embodies and invests into the character, it's hard not to want to put her into everything. Quinn is handled 1000 times better in this film than in the first. This feels like the natural progression for this character after her appearance in Birds of Prey. Also, it's time to admit that John Cena is a very good actor. He's in a film with Elba and Robbie and not only doesn't get blown off the screen but holds his own extremely well.  Action-wise, this film is bloody and great. Building on something that was noticed with Birds of Prey, when you can make Harley Quinn's fight better than Wonder Woman, you have to wonder what the hell DC was thinking with Wonder Woman 1984. Also the effects are damn good. King Shark looks fantastic and when Starro shows up, there's no drop in quality. With this film only coming in at $175 million for a budget which is far less than the $200+ million WB has spent on worse looking films, you have to hope that maybe this is the start of a change at WB when it comes to their superhero films. But don't bet on it. The biggest problem with The Suicide Squad has nothing to do with the movie at all but rather with the current state/future of the DC film universe. Is this the start of a new direction for WB with DC films where they finally cut the cord from the Snyderverse? Or is this just a one-off great film and we'll be back to the disappointing business-as-usual with the next film? Only time will tell. But for now, The Suicide Squad takes the lead as the best DC film. Like what you hear? Subscribe so you don't miss an episode! Follow us on Twitter: @Phenomblak @InsanityReport @TheMTRNetwork   Our shirts are now on TeePublic.  https://teepublic.com/stores/mtr-network   Want more podcast greatness? Sign up for a MTR Premium Account!  

On this edition of Scene Invaders Billy Blinks is joined by Brian from Pop Culture Leftovers and our very own Brad from Canada. After the Guys catch up on some housekeeping it's right to the Main Event of the week, James Gunn's The Suicide Squad. The guys give their full thoughts including who their favorite characters were, the most surprising deaths, who we were surpised made it to the end, Starro vs. Amanda Waller, John Cena's performance, and so much more! In What's New the Guys discuss what they've watched this week. Included is the Amazon Prime Original Documentary "Val" which portrays the life and career of Val Kilmer through his own words and never before seen behind the scene home video footage. It's really powerful stuff. Bill and Brian give their thoughts on the first 5 episodes of The White Lotus ahead of the Series Finale. Who do we think is in the box? The guys then move on to discuss their love of Season 1 of Physical on Apple TV+, FBoy Island on HBO Max, and Mr. Corman's debut 2 episodes on Apple TV+. The Following Is Discussed In the News: -The Suicide Squad Has A Very Disappointing Box Office Return? What do we attest this to? News -Star Wars World Will Cost You a Second Mortgage. Hope You're Rich AF or work at Disney! -Lord of The Rings Season 1, from Amazon, completes filming in New Zealand. $465 Million Dollar Budget for Season 1. Season 1 premieres in September 2022, with a TWENTY Episode 1st Season. Our thoughts and Hype Level. - South Park $900 Million Dollar Deal with Paramount Plus. 6 more seasons which will bring them through Season 30 and will coincide with the shows 30 year anniversary. 14 films also part of the deal. New game in development at South Park Studios. -Cobra Kai Season 4 Announced for this December! -Jeopardy Producer Mike Richards in talks to become permanent replacement for the late Alex Trebek. Now there is some controversy over this as there always is for anything announced in 2021. Apparently he was a pretty crappy guy to the models on Price as Right when he served as Executive Producer. -Arthur ending at PBS after 25 Years. Not a Wonderful Kind of Day….. -The Bad Batch getting a Season 2 next year on Disney Plus. Season Finale airs this Friday

In this week's episode, Todd and Bryant get together to discuss The Ascent, Activision, gaming news, and The Suicide Squad! Check it! If you want to reach out you can find us on Twitter @stt_pod, email us at skipthetutorialpodcast@gmail.com, or like us on Facebook at facebook.com/skipthetutorialpod.Remember, leave us a review on iTunes and we'll read the best and worst review every week! You can also join us on discord.gg/meWvcmA. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/skip-the-tutorial2/support

The Foul Bunch talk recent nerd news, try four beers and do a review on James Gunn's The Suicide Squad.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/MunchBros)

You Get a Starro… You Get a Starro… YOU Get a Starro! This week on the podcast, Brian and Darryl are talking about the crazy new Venom 2 trailer, the drama around Sarjo vs. Disney, and FINALLY, they review the newest James Gunn superhero fare… The Suicide Squad. Episode Index Intro: 0:11 Let There Be Carnage: Black Widow Drama: THE Suicide Squad: News Bites VENOM: LET THERE BE CARNAGE – Official Trailer 2 Disney vs. Scarlett Johansson: Why “a Ton of Lawsuits” May Be Next The Suicide Squad (2021) Summary The government sends the most dangerous supervillains in the world — Bloodsport, Peacemaker, King Shark, Harley Quinn, and others — to the remote, enemy-infused island of Corto Maltese. Armed with high-tech weapons, they trek through the dangerous jungle on a search-and-destroy mission, with only Col. Rick Flag on the ground to make them behave. Cast Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn Idris Elba as Robert DuBois / Bloodsport John Cena as Christopher Smith / Peacemaker Joel Kinnaman as Col. Rick Flag Sylvester Stallone as the voice of Nanaue / King Shark Viola Davis as Amanda Waller Jai Courtney as George “Digger” Harkness / Captain Boomerang Peter Capaldi as Dr. Gaius Grieves...

Just in case you wanted to directly hear our SPOILER thoughts on The Suicide Squad, we released our entire review as a standalone episode so that you can hear our thoughts on the film! Plus where does The Suicide Squad rank in the show's overall DCEU rankings? All that and more in this review episode with the Crisis Crew!***SPOILERS FOR THE SUICIDE SQUAD AT 7:20**New Episodes of Crisis on Infinite Podcasts come out every Monday and Thursday! Make sure to rate us and subscribe to us on your platform of choice and send us a secret message and we'll read it out loud on next week's show!!

Episode Notes Margaret talks to Simon, a restoration ecologist who works in the Pacific Northwest, about confronting climate crisis with reforestation, and about hope and resilience in the face of environmental devastation. Simon can be found on twitter @plant_warlock. The host, Margaret Killjoy, can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. You can support her and this show on Patreon at patreon.com/margaretkilljoy. Transcript 1:00:24 Margaret Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the End Times. I'm your host, Margaret Killjoy, and I use she or they pronouns. And this episode I'm excited—I put a call out basically being like, who should I talk to about reforestation and how we can confront climate change through reforestation and, you know, how microclimates affect things, etc. And I am very excited to talk to my guest for this week, Simon, about reforestation. But first, Live Like the World is Dying as a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of Anarchist Podcasts. I tried to go into, pretty neat, y'all heard it, but I tried to go into the radio producer voice but I gave up. We're proud member of the Channel Zero Network of Anarchist Podcasts, and here is a jingle from another show on the network. Da duh daaaa! Jingle Speaker 1 (Scully) Where did you get this? Jingle Speaker 2 (Mulder) Your friendly neighborhood anarchist? Jingle Speaker 3 More of an anarchist militant... Jingle Speaker 4 People involved in social struggles, everybody else. Jingle Speaker 5 People have been waiting for some content. Jingle Speaker 6 Radio. Jingle Speaker 7 The show. Jingle Speaker 8 The Final Straw and I'm William. Jingle Speaker 9 And I'm Bursts of Goodness. Jingle Speaker 8 Thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org. Margaret Okay, if you could introduce yourself with, I guess, your name, your pronouns, and some of what you do for work professionally that has led you to end up on this podcast talking about this issue. Simon Hi Margaret, thanks for having me. My name is Simon Apostle. And I've been a restoration ecologist working primarily in Oregon and Washington for the past decade or so. And a lot of my work has focused on reforestation projects, I guess would be an easy way to describe them to lay people, but really I'm a general practice restoration ecologist. And that means applying science to the field of restoring ecosystems. Margaret Okay, so that brings up the broad and probably easy to answer question of how do we fix the ecosystem? It seems kind of broken right now. Simon Yeah, I mean, it's obviously the biggest question that is, you know, people are never able to answer in my field. I think the first thing you need to know is what's wrong. Which is a question that is answerable through a combination of research and also just feeling out your values, you know, how do—what do we want from our ecosystems globally and locally? And in the early, kind of the early times of ecological restoration as a field, and it's a fairly new field, you know, the idea was, okay, we're going to find historical reference conditions. We're going to figure out, you know, this is what ecosystems used to be—and used to be usually meant, what were they like before white settlers—I'm speaking at a North American context here which, of course, you know, plays into a lot of racist notions about noble savage, you know, how native peoples here really didn't affect the ecosystem that was in a natural state. And as the field has developed, especially in recent years, people have become much more cognizant of what people have been living in and interacting with and manipulating the ecosystems around us for millennia. But then that question becomes much more complicated, you know, our relationship with the natural world is different than it used to be and different than people in cultures historically have related to the ecosystem. So it becomes a very difficult question to answer. So you need to start to fall back on some priorities, you know, or—and those priorities can be something like, well, we value biodiversity, you know. We can look and see that this ecosystem here is degraded, it's full of introduced weeds, there's only three species really dominant. And we know a minimum, whatever things were like in the past, that there was a lot more going on here. So that's a really good starting point. So you have a value of biodiversity. Margaret The the moving away from, like, reference systems is really interesting to me. So the idea is that, like, basically, people are moving away from the idea of, well we're going to make it exactly like it used to be in thism like, quote/unquote, untouched natural state, which of course doesn't really exist because humans have been interacting with nature for a long time. But instead picking what values matter to us and then applying them? Is that— Simon Yeah, I think that's true. And one of those values is historical conditions. And that's kind of the core value of the field. But it's the introduction of these other values that have made things much more complicated and I think much more interesting, but also much more true to how we interact with the natural world. So certainly a value is, we know—we basically know that we've messed up. We know that we've come in and through agriculture, and through building cities and roads, and all of the things that modern society does, we've impacted the natural world in negative ways. We see declines of species, we see loss of biodiversity, we see introduction of invasive species from other areas. And so we know that these things are problems, but what I think my field is starting to wrestle with a little bit more is, okay, well, what is what is really the solution? We can't, we can't, you know, find a time capsule and go backwards. Margaret Right. Simon And even if we did, you know, we don't know how people were managing those systems before we—an when I say we, I'm talking about white people which, again, you know, there's lots of native people that are involved in ecological restoration and that's becoming more of a focus as well. But it's introducing those more complex values. And then, of course, you introduce global warming which is—kind of makes it clear that you can't just go backwards, you know, we don't know what the effects of climate change are going to be in every system or in any system. And so that throws a wrench into the whole idea of, okay, we can just, we can just return. Margaret I like that I like—I mean, I don't like that everything's going horribly. But I like this idea of acknowledging that we can't go backwards and, you know, one of the things that always—when I was a younger environmentalist and I was more involved with green anarchism, one of the things that wasn't always the problem but could sometimes kind of come up as a problem is this idea of, like, pretending like we're all going to go back to the quote/unquote natural way of living and like living off of the land in very specific ways. And it never made any sense to me because it always seemed to me that people,—even people who are like foraging and things like that, I always thought of, you know, I mean, if you live in a city, dumpster diving is foraging, you know, like, not just picking berries, or whatever, and—not to be dismissive of foraging in wild environments—but it always seemed like this romanticization of the past. Of, like, trying to recreate the past rather than taking the ideas—well it's like people, the thing that we're excited about is like people working with what's around them. And what's around us is different than what was around people before industrialization and things like that. So it's just, it's kind of interesting to me to see a parallel with that in something like ecological restoration. And, I mean, it's even in the name "restoration," right? To restore things kind of implies the taking things back to what they used to be, but I don't know. Simon Yeah, you have to respond to the world as it exists in front of you. And you need to maintain a level of idealism, you know, in order to be in this field, I think, you know, because you're faced with the kind of enormity of the world being fairly messed up, you know. There's a lot of tragedy in environmental fields, you know, it's you feel like you're just fingers in the dam and trying to stem the bleeding. And so, in a way, kind of letting go of that vision of, we're just going to completely return and we're going to have these little time capsules of true native ecosystems that are how things were, and then everything else is changing around it—letting go of that maybe can start to allow for some hope and for a broader vision of the future. But there's room for lots of different methods and lots of different results, and that's going to vary a lot locally as well. I'm speaking again kind of in the context of having worked, you know, in the Pacific Northwest. But things may be different somewhere else. So, and the impacts that you're dealing with may be different. So, there's a lot to consider there. But certainly, you know, some of my work is in coastal estuaries in forested wetlands and it's important work, it's important to restore these areas that have been degraded by agriculture. The land has subsided through lack of sediment inputs and diking. We can restore them and we can, we can rebuild these wetland forests and the estuary. But we also have the knowledge that many of these systems that we're, right, quote/unquote restoring, are going to be gone in 100 years. That's just, that's a certainty. And so is there still value in doing that? And maybe the answer is yes. Because maybe, really, it's not restoration, it's just a form of stewardship of the land. You know, we're taking care of it, we're improving the condition for generations of plants and animals. And we can't know what will happen after that. We know that this thing will be gone, but there will be something else after it. And we're maintaining some biodiversity just for the time being. Margaret Well and it seems like if we, if we restore certain areas, even though we know we're going to lose them, you know, we might lose them in like different ways than we would otherwise lose them. I don't know if this is totally naive. But I'm like, well, you know, we know that desertification, and we know that, you know, well at least climate is going to change and overall be much harder. We know that's true. Right? But maybe the way things die off can be different, you know, if we make things a little better ahead of time. Simon Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think that there's functional reasons that would be true, just basic population ecology reasons that that would be true. You know, if you're working somewhere and you know, like, for example, okay, we're trying to, you know, we're working on a dry site and we're trying to restore, let's say, ponderosa pine woodlands in the American Southwest. But we know maybe this is a marginal site for Ponderosa pines, and eventually they're not going to persist in this area. Well, one of the potential mechanisms of climate change is that things move both north and they move uphill, they move up slope, especially in mountainous areas as the temperature warms. And those upslope areas become become relatively warmer, but they maybe are closer to the temperature that was previously in the valleys. It's oversimplification, there's many other factors. But if there aren't trees there, then there's no seed source for that population to move up upslope, right. So, you know, and we deal with a similar thing in these estuarine systems in coastal areas where we know sea level rise is going to flood these places out, it's like, well, at least we have the spruce swamps. We have spruce, and if the spruce exists, the spruce can move into the upper areas. Or if they're there, maybe, you know, you have more trees, they capture more sediment, it slows that process and allows things to adapt. And sometimes the slowing of those start processes can be really beneficial. Margaret Is this the like—when I was in Arizona I went to this place, I think it was called Mount Lemon—and it was like a sky island. It was basically the Pacific Northwest, but in Arizona. I think it even had Douglas firs. I feel like wrong when I say that. But there was some— Simon No. I mean, it probably does. Margaret And that's cool. That's like a—do you know this concept, have you heard of green nihilism or like eco nihilism or climate nihilism or whatever, like nihilism as applies to the climate but in a positive way? Have you heard this? Simon Yeah, totally. And I mean, I think it's kind of self explanatory, right? Like, it's just, it's too much and it's like, well, there's just there's a fatalism about climate change. Margaret Yeah. And this idea—and I think when people use it positively—like green nihilism is like, you know, people sometimes talk about, like, giving up hope in order to be able to, like, you know, stopping—like, giving up stopping climate change and moving towards adapting to climate change. I actually think that that style shouldn't—to me that doesn't feel like nihilism at all, it actually feels very hopeful. Because most of the time, when I think about climate change, I kind of think over everyone forced to live underground and grow foods and hydroponics and, you know, the earth—surface of the earth is unrecognizable. And so when people talk about, like, well, maybe everything will just be a little bit different. I'm like, oh, that sounds so optimistic. And I get really excited about that optimism. But I like, I don't know, the thing that you're talking about now seems like this, like, in between space where it's—you know, it's like, knowing you're going to lose, but seeing what you can gain by trying to win in the process. Simon Yeah, I mean, you have to be realistic about that things are going to change, but we also know that changes are just a part of ecology. It's a part of the natural world. And I—these—it's funny to say that out loud, right, because that's the sort of phrasing that gets used by climate denialist—deniers and such, to say, oh, you know, climate change is natural these things happen. And of course it's not. And the rate of change is extreme and it's bad. But we also can—we can have an active hand in that adaptation, I think is what you're kind of getting at. We can, we know that change is coming. And there's people who are working on trying to slow that rate of change and that's what, you know, we're trying to do if we're talking about reducing emissions and things like that. But when we also talk about—a lot of what we talked about in ecology is resiliency, which, of course, is a really important concept in human communities as well, right? It's how do you build community resiliency in the face of disasters, in the face of climate change, or other threats. And that's a lot of what we talked about in restoration as well now. We kind of, when we talk about moving on from that historical model, one of the things that—one of the buzzwords now is—and I say that not negatively, because I think it's important—is resiliency. And a lot of things can make an ecosystem resilient. One of those things is biodiversity. You know, if we don't know how the world is going to change, the more organisms occupy a space, the more they occupy a piece of ground, the more likely it will be that some kind of balance or equilibrium is going to be found later, or that one of those organisms is going to survive and thrive in some form that may not be the current form, it's not going to be the community composition that it is today, but you probably also won't have a monoculture. It won't disappear completely. You won't get desertification or whatever the specific threat is in the area that you're living and working in. Margaret So it's just like similar to how farmers, you know, one of the reasons that people push back against Monsanto and these other sort of attempts to sort of monoculture our food sources is because if you have only one strain of rice or whatever then whatever blight comes through iw will take out all of your rice. Versus, the more different strains you have, the better your chances of actually getting a good yield. Simon That's exactly right. And that's talking about even just genetic diversity, right. And it's really just, it's threat mitigation. The more—if we have a diversity of species, the same way we think about diversity of genes, you know, and we think about climate change as a disease to an ecosystem, if you think about as a singular living body, the more diversity you have among plant species, the more likely it is that the ecosystem is going to be able to respond. You know, so you don't—if you have a single overstory tree species, which in some cases you have, in some marginal ecosystems that's all that's there and that's all that's available. But if that single overstory species becomes impacted in a way, specific to climate change, to the point where maybe it's wiped out, which is a real possibility in some parts of the arid West where you have native bark beetles, often increasing in damage to forests stands, largely due to climate change, you know, you have warmer winters and so they're able to be active for longer, you have less kills from freezes, so you have whole stands disappearing. And if you have a single tree species in those stands, then it's not a forest anymore It'll be something else. But if you have a multi-layered canopy with with many different tree species, then you know, perhaps one of those other species is going to be resilient, it's going to resist that, threat and it can occupy the space. So it's really just, it's just kind of building in more options for the ecosystem to adapt. Margaret I like this a lot. Like, I don't know, I really am enjoying learning this stuff because it—because it dovetails so well into, like, what I believe about the world and things like that. But like, you know, I mean, one of the main things that I'm interested in is that I believe diversity is a better form of strength than, like, unity. Rather than trying to make everyone agree to something or making everyone the same along almost any axis, instead, getting people to work together despite differences, you know, and, like actual multiculturalism versus like the melting pot, for example. Or, you know, even like in political movements, having diverse opinions, diverse strategies, diverse methods, and then just working together to try not to step on each other's toes and to try to figure out how all of our different strengths can tie together. And so I'm excited to hear that that's, like, the main way that people are thinking about creating resilient ecosystems is, you know, because I think people have this concept of, like, the way to stop climate change is, you know, essentially this eco fascist idea—or I heard someone call it, I think, climate Leviathan or something like that—you know, this idea of, like, a top down, here's what we all must do approach. And yet, I think that replicates, well, the problems that got us here in the first place, but also, you know, that would be like saying, like, oh, well, this is the tree, this particular tree will resist climate change the best. So we're just gonna, like, clear cut everything and plant that tree, you know? Simon Yeah, I think, oh, yeah, I just—I think there's a lot of social lessons probably to be drawn from ecology. And I think it's tempting for people and it's been done a lot. And it interplays, right, we—ecology is the study of relationships between organisms functionally, and if you're talking about restoration ecology, it's just how do you restore those relationships. And if you have a monoculture, there's no relationships to be had, or there's fewer. You know, your web becomes just some kind of simple grid with a few connections instead of this kind of unknowable complexity of interactions. And it's that sort of unknowable complexity that I think is, like, most beautiful in ecology to me, and is maybe why I was drawn to being a practitioner instead of a researcher. Maybe I'm also just not smart enough, that's part of it, maybe I'm not good enough at the math. You know, it's, you know that you have to let go. You get to act and you get to see how the ecosystem responds, and you're never really going to know what all those response mechanisms actually were. I mean, I think that's really nice. But yeah, I mean, it's, an ecosystem is not top down, it's not anything down, it's just the interaction of many organisms. And as a top-down actor, in a sense, you know, choosing our inputs into the ecosystem, I think that's something that does need to be decided as a society in a way, but also that society can be in, you know, there's layers to that, right. It's like, how, what is our ethic? How do we treat natural systems? You know, I think there needs to be like a moral framework. But then a lot of this stuff, it really is only, it only functions on a local scale. I mean, I think it's, in my field, it's so important to just continue to work in one place as much as possible. I mean, it just, I'm still learning plant species, you know, in sites that I've worked on for years and it's, like, I didn't even know this thing existed. And so some level of local control, even if we're operating in the space where government and funding and all of these things are major factors, you need local experts. And some of that is just that, like, we don't orient our society towards local expertise because people have to have jobs and they need to move on from those jobs. And sometimes a career opportunity is going to be in a different part of the country. And, on and on. But without that local knowledge there's just—you miss too many things. And you miss many things regardless. But—and that's why when people, you know, people do lip service to Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices and stuff, and sometimes it's not genuine, but the most genuinely important thing about it is that local knowledge, right, and when you think about, like—in my field, I think about just like the massive tragedy of losing, you know, 1000s of years of knowledge. And then what of it that we have—because these these, you know, cultures and Indigenous people are still with us and they're like—I see, like, yeah, tribal governments and just individual native people trying to insert themselves into these spaces and natural area management and being kind of like, oh, well yeah, you can have this over here. You can do this over in this other space. And it's like, you know, what little we have left that we didn't, you know, wreck of this built up knowledge over 1000s of years, we're kind of just, like, shunting to the side. Margaret Yeah, kind of marginalizing it. Simon And putting it into it's own little box when really that's the model we need to be replicating, you know, and building as a culture, right. We need to build those generations of knowledge. Margaret I like, I get really excited about organizational structures that are bottom-up, right? Like, where the main most important thing is that local expertise, is the fact that the people who live in an area are more likely to have the skills they need to deal with problems in that certain area, but they might need resources. And in some ways, you might want to centralize the acquisition of these resources or whatever, you know, or talk with each other and like network and coordinate with each other, you know, because there's some—there are decisions that need to be sort of made at a larger and wider level. But I think that just, like, we can essentially invert the kind of hierarchies within our society. But I suppose that is tangential to reforestation. And I've been spending the whole time trying to come up with a way to phrase the pun, like, see the forest for the trees, but I'm just going to leave that there, and you all can come up with your own version of that. What, um, to try and be, like, more specific and more practical about it: How does reforestation affect, like a local area? Besides—I guess, like, okay, it's two separate questions. One is the large scale question: How does reforestation impact climate change, besides, again, like protecting biodiversity like you were just saying, and giving, like more tickets in the lottery of survival or something? But also, like, is it true—okay, I'll just go—like, is it true that if we plant a whole bunch of trees then we'll be able to slow down or mitigate the effects of carbon in the atmosphere because of trees capturing carbon? That would be a first question. Simon Yeah. So the simple answer to that first question is yes, of course we know trees capture carbon. And through photosynthetic processes trees and all plants, not just trees, which is an important point that people miss, capture carbon. And that carbon is stored unless it's burned or, you know, otherwise disturbed, sometimes through decomposition processes, you can have methane and carbon released back into the atmosphere. But yes, on a global scale, reforestation, generally, if you're starting at zero state—you know, you take a bare piece of ground and plant trees—reforestation is an effective way to mitigate or counter the effects of climate change. Now, I don't want to go on too much of a tangent, but I will say that one of the scariest sets of words in my field is "global tree planting initiative." Margaret Oh, interesting, okay, because that's where my brain goes. Simon Yeah, that's less a function—well, I think it's a function of going back to talking about needing local solutions—or at least needing local expertise, even if you have a global initiative. And a lot of it is that, frankly, there's organizations out there that are, they're just big grify, you know, that are saying, you buy this product, we're going to plant a tree. You don't know really where that tree is, or they're going to maybe—sometimes that money goes towards replanting timber plantations in Canada or something, you know, and it's like, well, the carbon accounting of something like that is pretty sketchy, because they were probably going to replant it anyways because it's functionally a farm. Right? They're just replanting the trees that they're going to harvest again in 50 years. And in other cases, you have organizations kind of swooping into areas and planting non-native species, you know, in areas that were already vegetated, and maybe that vegetation has similar, you know, carbon storage capacity as that monoculture of trees that you went in and planted. So, you know, I don't want to get too far down that road. But I—the answer is that trees, yes, of course, store carbon. So does other plant life. And the most effective way to use forests to—at least in the Pacific Northwest where I have some knowledge—to combat climate change, it can be tree planting, but it's protecting existing forests from logging and destruction. Because it's really the old trees, at least in this system that I'm familiar with, that have the most carbon storage capacity. But big, old, you know, 100 plus year old trees. Margaret I mean, that's—I guess it's not surprising to me that the organizations are the problem with tree planting initiatives, you know, because I'm so used to not even thinking organizationally at this point that I'm like, oh, no, you just plant trees everywhere, right? But I'm like, oh yeah, but if there was like, either, of course—yeah, of course, these companies where they're like, oh, we want to get the most carbon capture per dollar or whatever. And so yeah, I guess they'll go plant the wrong trees in some area and mess up that ecosystem and mess up the ways of life of all the people who live around there and things. Yeah, I mean, I guess it seems to me that, yeah, defending the trees that we have as well as, I guess, replanting and reforestation but from local, like, in ways that are applicable to the local context as best understood by people who are Indigenous to that context, or at least are experts in that local context, is that...? Simon Yeah, I think that's right. And the other thing I would add to that is carbon accounting is extremely difficult. And in any scientist who studies this—I'm not a scientist who studies carbon accounting, but from everything that I've seen and read, and everyone who I know and I've talked to, there's so much hedging as to be the point, well, we know that this probably has impacts, but maybe those impacts are two centuries down the line. One example is I just saw a presentation about, you know, is looking at what was the carbon storage capacity in coastal wetland systems. Again, this is just, these are places I work. So this really smart researcher whose name I'm forgetting—but that's probably okay—was looking at carbon capture, and then also carbon and methane emissions from these wetland systems. And one of the conclusions was that these wetland systems are long term if left alone, you know, net carbon and methane positive, right, like they will capture more than they take in. But a lot of them are actually emit more methane and carbon through decompositional processes. You know, you think about walking around in a swamp, you stick your boots in, and you get that smell of sulfur and methane. Those decompositional processes, which are super important and do a lot for the ecosystem, emit more methane, which is a much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon than they do capture carbon. And eventually it becomes carbon positive, I guess would be the term, right, that it's capturing more than it's emitting, because methane doesn't last as long as the atmosphere, you're continuing to capture carbon, you know, over time, that could be 400 years in the future, you know. So that doesn't make it not worth doing, but if the idea is we're going to solve climate change by planting trees, you know, or by manipulating ecosystems in order to prioritize carbon capture without considering all these other things, I think it's probably too difficult. It's a nice bonus. But I—my feeling tends to be that there's so much that restoring ecosystems, including forests, reforestation does for societies and for people beyond that—things that you can see and feel and effect—and feel the effects of locally, that we should be valuing those things as well. Margaret Can you give me examples of some of those things? Simon Yeah, well, initially, you know, I know you wanted to talk about micro climates. Margaret That is my next question, so this is great. Simon Yeah. I mean, well, we can jump right into it I guess. There's like, there's been some really interesting research lately on the local climate effects of forests. I was reading a paper earlier about, you know, of course you have you have effects on ground temperature, just through direct shading, right. Just the creation of shade can make a massive difference. In the Northwest, we just experienced what has been described as 1000 year heat event. In Portland, where I live, we had temperatures pushing 120 degrees, which is, like, not fathomable. Margaret Yeah. Simon You know, I still can't fathom that, even though it just happened and I'm seeing the effects. Margaret Yeah. Simon Seeing dying plants. You know, it's apocalyptic feeling. But because we have a good network of temperature sensors and weather stations, you can see that in neighborhoods that had tree cover, you could easily be 10 degrees cooler than neighborhoods without that. And that's going to be largely because of just the direct shading effects. And then there's also cooling effects from respiration and trees, you know, water is one of the best temperature moderators that exists, right. And so just the process of trees respirating and giving off water vapor through that process cools the air. And so— Margaret Oh it's like evaporative cooling that's happening on the Trees? Cool. Simon Essentially yeah. Yeah, it's just, you know, it's thermodynamics. And that respiration slows, you know, when you have a super hot temperatures, a lot of species will undergo, you know, like, sort of heat dormancy, summer dormancy. But it still happens and depends on the planets but, and then of course just the direct shading. I mean, obviously, shade is cooler than being in the direct sunlight. And open concrete and asphalt is the opposite, it reflects a lot of heat. So in an urban context—and there's been actually some really incredible research done by—again, trying to recall his name. A researcher, same person. Yeah, I will, maybe I'll come up with a later. But a researcher at Portland State University who's done thermal mapping of the City of Portland and now has moved on to other cities, basically showing where there's these urban heat islands, right. And these heat islands are—I mean, it's incredibly stark. And of course, there's all these social implications because the heat islands are in poor neighborhoods, and the rich neighborhoods have big old trees. But again, yeah, that the cooling effects just directly from being your trees is well known and it's becoming more and more well documented. Margaret Yeah, I live—I mean, part of the reason I got excited about like reading about microclimate stuff is that, you know, I live on a land project where slightly more than half of it is open field. And then the other half is up in the woods. And I'm the only one who built her house up in the woods. And there's, you know, when it comes to running my solar panels and things, there's a lot of disadvantages here. And the humidity is a little bit worse up there, which is a problem in the mid-Atlantic, although I feel terrible complained about any climate problem that I'm facing in one of the most temperate and so far least affected areas. But it's a 15 degree difference between—you know, and I'm not that far into the woods or something, but my house stays fine in hot Southern summer without AC from, as long as I haven't maintained some airflow and have vents and things. And if I walked out into the field, I'm like—like, I'll walk down in the morning and I'll have a hoodie on, and I'll get to the field and everyone else who lives there will be, like, you know, not wearing a shirt or whatever. It's stark in a way that I never—you know, it's like, I know it on some level, like, oh, if you walk on the middle of the road and it's black and, you know, it's asphalt, it's hot or whatever, right. But I never quite, you know, felt it daily that that difference. And so that's why I got excited about it, just because I was like, oh, this works here. It clearly is applicable on a global scale and I should enforce a global tree planting initiative. Simon Yeah. You can make pretty good money at it. Margaret Yeah. How long does it take to create a microclimate? Is this something that, like, listeners who if they have, like, if they have enough power to influence the, you know, flora of their neighborhood and things like that could be pursuing as a way to at least keep their environment, like, a substantial amount of cooler, or? Simon Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean it's, of course, gonna depend on the growth rate of trees. And that's going to depend regionally. I mean, I live in a pretty productive climate, a mild climate so far in our history and lifetimes. But there's tree species here that, you know, in their established can grow 5-10 feet a year. So that's very much within our lifetimes. Those shade effects, you know, you start to feel that as soon as it's putting out shade, and the more shade that's put out, the stronger those effects will be. So absolutely. If this is a primary, you know, if you're talking about an urban context of interest in your neighborhood, you do want to consider, right, like, what is the growth rate of the species that I'm planting? You know, maybe that's an important consideration for a reforestation project or picking something near your house. You know, if you look in the West, you know, all the old homesteads, they would plant poplars in a row, either as a windbreaker or as shade or both next to the houses, because poplars and things in Populous, in that group of plants, grow incredibly fast. They're also very brittle. Something to consider if you're planting near your house, you know. Limbs can fall off and such. But yeah, I mean, it's something that you can be involved in and do and, you know, especially on sites that I work on, I have sites where I I planted the trees or planted trees with a group of people and eight years later, they're, they're 25 feet tall. And so you're really seeing a forest develop. Margaret That's cool. Simon But of course, that's going to depend on on where you live. Margaret Okay, here's an oddly specific question. How do you plant a tree? Like when I was a kid and it was like Arbor Day or something, they were like, go home and plant this pine tree. And they gave us like this like pine tree sapling, and I like dug a hole and I put it in the hole and then it died. Simon Yeah. Margaret You know? And so I've convinced myself ever since that I can't—I have like a, you know, an anti-green thumb or whatever. And if anytime I plant anything, it's gonna die because I like tried to plant a pine tree in elementary school. But, what's involved in just the literal act of reforestation or even just tree planting. Simon Yeah, well in reforestation, you know, what you're talking about, mostly is scale, right? And so the most important thing is covering acreage and making sure that we can cover as much ground as possible and in the field of ecological restoration locally, we're, you know, we're actually borrowing a lot of practices from agriculture and from commercial forestry where these things are—there's lots of money behind them and techniques have been established, right. So a tree planting crew in the Pacific Northwest, even in steep terrain, and the less steep it is, the easier. You know, each crew member can plant 1000 to 1200 trees per day, would be about standard. Margaret Oh wow. Simon And, you know, if you're reforesting it at an area, say it's canopy species only and you're—you maybe planting 300 stems per acre on a restoration project. So each crew member might reforest four acres a day, on a on a good day. You know, if we're doing a restoration project, we're also planting understory species and other things as well, then maybe that drops to an acre. You know, scale is the most critical thing. So it's professionals, people who know what they're doing, right. And it's not that anyone can't learn, there's some simple things that all plants want when they're being planted. You know, not—letting the roots hang naturally is maybe one of the most important things that people kind of get wrong when they're planting a tree. It's like oh, my god, this, these roots are too big, I'm just going to kind of stuff in the hole and then they turn upwards and we'd call that J rooting. Right? So the root basically forms a J and the tree can recover from that, but when you think about a young sapling developing, one of its biggest limitations in a lot of climates, not all, is going to be water availability. And the deeper those roots are—so the deeper the hole is, the deeper the roots are, and the more natural they are in their arrangement—the later it's going to be able to access water into the dry season. Every inch of depth might gain at a week as the, as things dry out. Trees get planted too high, you know, roots get exposed. That's another component. Margaret Okay. So you just, like—you're going out there with like a, like a one person gas auger or something and drilling a bunch of holes and then going back through and putting saplings that were grown in a nursery somewhere into it? Simon Yeah, most of what most of what we would use in reforestation projects locally, it's almost all going to be hand planting. Again, you're talking about pretty steep terrain. In some cases we may use augers mounted on the back of a tractor. But anywhere that's flat in Oregon and Washington in the winter is usually pretty wet, when we're planting things. So it can be hard to get equipment around. But usually it's snow, we plant smaller trees, things that people can carry. We use what we would call bare root stock, primarily, that's grown in a commercial nursery. And instead of coming in a container, you know, a plastic pot that creates a lot of trash and also is just heavy and hard to carry around, we—the plants when they're dormant get pulled out of the ground with the roots exposed to the air and then they get put in a, basically a planting bag and sealed up. And then you pull them out when it's time to plant them and the roots are just exposed to the air and you plant them in the ground directly. And when you have that, each tree planter can carry maybe 200 trees at a time in planting bags just on their shoulders because the weight is significantly lighter when you don't have the soil attached. So almost all hand planting. So that 1200 trees a day will be—they're digging every one of those holes and just sliding the tree in. You just dig as small hole as possible. You open it up a little bit and—it's a cool process to watch. Margaret Yeah. What do you what are you digging it with that if it's not like a gas auger or something? Like I guess I'm yeah, building foundations. Simon Yeah, we have planting shovels. They're just a long shovel with a long narrow spade usually. In some cases, there's a tool called a hoedad in steep areas. And actually—I'm going to get the history wrong—I think the tool is named after a group of basically hippies that moved out to Oregon in the 60s to be on tree planting crews and they developed this tool, you know, or they named the group after the tool. But I think it was the other way around. Anyways, one or the other. But the hoedads were a cool group of kids back in the day. And so on steep terrain you might have basically looks like kind of a long pickaxe with a blade at the end. But usually, yeah, it's just like a 16 inch long, narrow shovel. Margaret Okay, and then what if someone's trying to plant trees a little bit more DIY, whether getting them from a nursery? Or even, like, is it feasible for people to try and plant from seed with trees? Like, I really don't know much about gardening. I feel almost bad, this podcast is like not focused on food. But I would like to. Simon Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And again, this is where connecting with people locally and understanding what things need to grow locally is so important, right? We don't use a lot of seating for trees and shrubs just because we have a well-developed network of nurseries that grow these seedlings. And it makes maintenance a little bit easier to be able to know exactly where the seedlings are. So you're not mowing something that's, you know, an inch tall. But trees grow from seed, you know. And definitely, you know, one of the things that I've done is on a project where we've had to remove alders, they were going to see it at the time, and we just ground that up into mulch and the seeds that were developing on the tree were part of that mulch, and then that just got spread around on the site. And then we had like, thick stand of alders just pop up. And they were mulch, basically, from the bodies of the parents. Margaret Oh wow. Simon In some cases you can also use natural processes to get those seeds to establish on their own. Like another example would be the cottonwoods locally, which a lot of my restoration is of kind of cottonwood galleries along rivers. They time their sea drop to happen after the river is just dropped, you know, the spring floods have receded. And you have all these, this exposed mud and exposed ground so the seeds can take advantage of that exposed ground. And so, of course, because we have hydroelectric dams on a lot of the rivers here, you don't have that flooding anymore and you have weedy grasses and things. But if you clear that ground at the right time of year underneath the trees, you can get a response of seedlings dropping all around and among those trees. So the remaining mature trees will kind of sprout a forest if you just, you know when those seeds drop, you know when the natural time is for them to emerge, you can use that to your advantage. Margaret How do—you know it's, like, okay, so you work on restoration and reforestation and things like that. But then, of course, as you pointed out, we're also losing a lot all the time. Right? And it's kind of two questions. And one is—sometimes I worry about, you know, my work as an environmentalist or even as, like, with encouraging preparedness, like how much am I just, like, in some ways, like, allowing the system to continue. Because if I'm mitigating—as an activist, if I'm mitigating the worst effects of a system, then in some ways I'm allowing it to continue, right? And like, you know, charity is particularly famous for this of, like, basically just, like, well, industrialized capitalism wouldn't work without charity because it doesn't—you know, like, people need that or there wouldn't be a workforce anymore. And yet, at the same time, this act of redistributing resources is very good, right? And so in the act of physical resources we'll talk about, you know, mutual aid instead of charity. And I wonder about, like, something like reforestation. Where do we cross the threshold? Is it just a matter of scale of crossing the threshold from, like, being a release valve for the worst parts of industrialization versus, like, gaining ground ecoligically. Simon Yeah, right. I don't know. I don't know how to assess that, like, on a global scale. But what I can know is that—you know, circling back to talking about resiliency—if you're doing something to the best of your knowledge to improve your local natural environment, you are—you're counteracting some of those negative effects. Whether it's enough, I don't know. I mean, there's lots that we need to do aside from climate change, I think, to like, start gaining ground instead of just halting it. And the history of the environmental field, or of conservation of natural resource management, is starting with that, oh, we just need to halt things, right, we need to preserve land. And that's super important and still needs to happen. And restoration was kind of people thinking, well, we need a next step, right? We've preserved a lot of land but, like, a lot of its degraded. But of course, we're still building new subdivisions. You know, we're still converting small farms to industrial agriculture. These processes are still happening. And so the answer is, I don't know. I mean, it's hard to know what action is going to have like the best total positive difference. I think maybe organizing to stop a new subdivision is going to be a more effective use of your time, or just more impactful, than reforesting an area that's already natural, that is just degraded. I really don't know, and part of that's going to depend on what you're valuing. You know, what are you most concerned about? Is it habitat—is a total, you know, is it climate change? Is it total loss of green areas? Is it shade as we're talking about, you know, local climate mitigation? These are all things to consider, I guess. And, yeah, I don't know when we reach the tipping point in the other direction, but I know that, for me, if it's directionally—if it feels directionally good, then maybe I've just chosen not to think about it beyond that, because otherwise it's too hopeless. Margaret No, no, I totally understand that. I mean, it's like a thing that I wrestle with when I'm doing activism, but it doesn't make me stop doing activism. You know, I'm like, okay, like, we're still gonna—we still need to do these things even if it isn't yet at a critical mass at which it, like, is winning or whatever on this larger scale. I guess I've always been a big fan of, like, sort of why not both approach [inaudible] girl asking why not both. Because, like, I've always been of the, like, stop/demolish the institutions of destructive—or, you know, like, stop oppression while also building liberation as like, you know, both things are so necessary and I guess I can accidentally sometimes get caught up in that false dichotomy of, like, building up the things we want versus tearing down the things that are destroying the world. I guess, coming towards the end of this, but I wanted to ask—because you were talking about how the work you do, you know, kind of relies on idealism and hope. And I think that that's something that's in short supply right now. And despite my last name, and despite the fact that I run a podcast about the end of the world, I believe very strongly in hope, at least as a strategic thing. You know, it's like, you can't—you can't win unless you fight to win, and you can't fight to win unless you envision the fact that you could win or at least, you know, have a better time along the way to losing or whatever. And so I guess I want to ask you, like, what gives you hope? What—because most of us don't know that much intimately about the ecological impacts of climate change. It's just scary, right? And I know that what you're talking about, about biodiversity giving us a better shot, that feels really hopeful. But I'm wondering if you have other ideas. Simon I would say, one of the most beautiful things I think about being in the field that I am, building forests, a lot of the time is that you are hopefully creating something that's going to outlast you. There's sort of an awe that I try to maintain. And it's not always easy, but some of these organisms that we interact with that might be a couple years old, and they plant it, it could have a lifespan of, in my region, 500 years. We can talk about a coast Douglas fir. And we can't know what the world is going to be like. And it's not really about making your impact, because no one's going to know, oh, I designed, I built this cathedral. You know, it's not like that. But it's, like, you're humbled by the experience of working with something that's so big and so vast in size and in time. And I think that's a really—I think it's a really beautiful thing. And it's a cliche to say, oh, go plant a tree as like an environmental action. But participating in restoration locally—which there are ways to do, hopefully, and people should try to if they have the ability—it can give you that sense of awe. And then if you're able to go back to that place that you helped, you know, 10 years, in 20 years, it's really humbling and it's really amazing. So it gives me hope that things outlast us, you know, that the world kind of goes on, and that also that we can be a positive part of the natural world. It's not just oh, humans are are bad and we're screwing everything up. It's—we can be intentional and how we interact with nature. And I think introducing that intentionality into how we impact the natural world is just so important, and feels good when you do it. Margaret Yeah, I wonder if one of the single most important things we can do is fight this idea of, like, humanity as a cancer or whatever, right? Like, you know, humanity itself, like humans are not inherently flawed in this way. Like, we're not inherently going to destroy everything. You know, it's—there's certain organizational systems, both economic and also larger structural systems, that do this thing, you know, and we end up participating in it. But there's other ways that we can live, have lived, do live, will live, you know? Simon Yeah. And a lot of times we think about nature as something that we affect incidentally. You know, we do a thing that we want to do for some reason, and then we accidentally have an effect on the natural world. And I would like people to maybe think about it as, we can choose how we affect the natural world, and we can be a positive force, and we can be, you know, get very hippy, but we can be one with it. You know, we're not separate, as you said. And it just, it's I think just a much healthier way to view ourselves and nature. Just go do something positive. You know, be specific in how you want to impact the natural world, in the same way that you would be intentional about how you want to impact your community and your relationships with your family and your friends. Margaret Yeah, I like that. I like that comparison and it feels very—it's almost, it's like not even a metaphor. It's just literal. You know, there's like the human and the nonhuman communities that were part of, you know? Simon Yeah. And it's not just having less impact, it's having good impact. Margaret Yeah. Instead of the—you know, it always struck me as, like, trying to just reduce your impact upon the world was always, like, what's the point of that just so that you can feel better about yourself, you know? Like, actually doing something positive feels way better and way less, in some ways, like, obsessive, right? Because if you're just trying to make sure you have no impact on the natural world, you're essentially just trying to negate yourself. Yeah. Was there—is there a question I should have asked you or something that you really want to bring up that you think I or the listener should hear? I wanted to ask you all this stuff about riparian zones and flooding, but that was entirely selfishly because I live on quote/unquote 100 year floodplain that thanks to climate change is a 4-5 times a year. But I'll ask that another time. Simon Yeah. I mean, I think we covered some interesting ground. I would say, connecting with people locally and building that local knowledge is the main thing that I can leave people with. Because that's—I can't tell you what to do if you live somewhere else, or even if you live near me. You know the problems that you face better than anyone, and people in your community probably do as well. So that's, yeah, I can't think of anything else. Margaret Okay. Well, thank you so much for coming on. And do you have any—you know, I don't know whether you're trying to have strangers ask you questions on Twitter or if you'd like to shout out anything about how people can either follow your work or learn more about what you do, or if there's any other organizations or anything like that that you're excited about that you'd like to shout out to people? Simon Yeah. I would say, if people want to follow me on Twitter, it's plant_warlock. And as much as I talk about, you know, environmental issues and projects that I'm working on that may be interesting to folks. Again, reforestation and dam removals and things like that. I have to admit, I also just talk a lot about how terrible our mayor is and things like that. But I would also say for people local to Portland, if they're interested in tree planting, we have a great organization called Friends of Trees that does tree planting projects in neighborhoods and also a natural areas. And it's a great way to kind of get your foot in the door and see if you enjoy doing this kind of work. And if anyone just has questions or, you know, wants advice on things in the natural world, I may at least be able to point them in the right direction. So feel free to contact me. Margaret Okay, thanks so much. And does that organization in Portland—do you all, like, take donations? Can I try and direct people to give you all money? Simon Yeah, they do. I'm not affiliated. I just know it's an easy way for people to get involved. But they certainly take donations, and they are always looking for volunteers. That's not, I know that's slowed down and been different during COVID times, but I think they're taking volunteers again, and people can certainly donate to them. Margaret Cool. Okay, well, thanks so much. Simon Thank you. Margaret Thank you all so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell people about it. This is the kind of the only way that people find out about this podcast is through word of mouth. And I'm incredibly grateful for everyone who, like, you know, shares and retweets and posts to their story on Instagram and blah, blah, blah, like feeds the algorithm and tells their friends about it. And of course, anyone who tells people about it in person. Well if you don't like the episode then don't tell people about it—unless, actually, if you—if you don't like the episode, you should tell people about how much you don't like it because that will still also drive engagement. That's my favorite thing when people do. And you can also support the show by supporting me on Patreon. Eventually, it'll be supporting a whole organization on Patreon, which is basically what you're doing if you support me on Patreon because other people are very involved in this podcast at the moment and we're going to expand out to other podcasts and shows and things like that. Oh, speaking of which, I now have a YouTube show. The channel is called Live Like the World is Dying. You'll be shocked to know that. And you can find it on YouTube. I only have one episode up as of this recording, but who knows how many I have up by the time it's released. In particular, I'd like to thank some of my patreon backers. I'd like to thank Sean and Hugh and Dana, Chelsea, Eleanor, Mike, Starro, Cat J, The Compound, Shane, Christopher, Sam, Natalie, Willow, Kirk, Hoss the dog, and Nora. I really can't thank you all enough. I mean, I don't know, I guess if I did too much no one would listen anymore. If I just said just names over and over again in a weird pleading tone. So I won't do that. But I will say that I hope everyone is handling all this as best as they can and I will talk to y'all soon Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

In anticipation of The Suicide Squad movie, the guys discuss the comic book history of Starro the Conqueror.  Thanks for listening.

Today's the day Firesiders! Or Yesterday was the day if you have HBOMax and didn't feel like going to the theaters… either way The Suicide Squad is out and we couldn't be more excited. Before you watch James Gunn's DC Bloodbath with Task Force X, Join Mendte Mashko and Baby Huey as they break down some of the key players! At least who we think the main players are… for all we know they die in the opening credits. We go over a brief breakdown of the origins of Peacemaker, Bloodsport, King Shark, Polka-dot Man, Javelin, and Starro! So before you, the movie starts, or on the way to the theater, join us for a quick who's who! Welcome to Fireside. Here's hoping your favorite survives.