we should elucidate the benefits of reading in a youtube video that gets more surreal and horrifying and inaccurate and darkly humorous as the video progresses while still intermingling this progression in with true and relatable facts, so as to hold their attention and provide a memorable experience and increase the likelihood of people sharing it.
oh, here, an image i meant to upload here a month or two ago for demonstration purposes.
This is a gum tree preparing for the summer bushfire season. Observe! Not only is this thing full of extremely flammable oil that will make it explode when it is, eventually, on fire, it has shed its outer layer of dry, thin, flaky bark so as to form a ring of kindling around its base.
It is more of a loud CRACK! as the wood splits asunder and embers spread everywhere and helpfully light other things on fire and make bushfire season the just barely containable frightening inferno it is. But the fire either side of that is a sort of susurrance!
I recall last xmas driving down the highway and there were legitimately fires in the shrubs either side of it. I genuinely hope those were careful and controlled, and deliberate backburning.
But fact of the matter is a lot of people are still happy to throw a cigarette out of the car window which, y'know. Bushfire season. So many of the plants are trying to make fire start, they don't even need an actual fire source to eventually light on fire. But they will if it's so gracefully given to them.
@Aaron WATCH OUT FOR BUSHFIRES. It's bushfire season! Stay safe! Don't let them mug you! If they make threatening gestures, ignore them and keep walking.
The dynamic is just different. A lot of the fauna relies on bushfires to revitalise it and act as, more or less, garbage clean-up. There are species of grass that will grow very long, then dry out and just incubate their roots until a bushfire sweeps through to remove the stems. Gum trees can likewise just grow very tall and unwieldy unless they've got a bushfire sweeping through taming them regularly.
The flora evolved without a strong "alpha predator" and "helpless, weak, delicious prey that defends itself by fleeing" dynamic. Most animals are well-equipped to defend themselves with claws, teeth, spines, poison, or sheer muscle. (Wombats are good at charging and headbutting people and animals they don't like!)
@Ahriman Yes. That's a good analogy. Everything grows out of control relying on something to sweep through and burn up everything that needs burning.
Over time I guess the plants got so used to this, the healthiest ones were in fact the ones that planned for it to happen, and helped it happen.
So evolution ran its course and our flora all plans for regular bushfires destroying it and the fauna plans for running the hell away or finding other ways to survive.
@Ahriman If Australia was the JRE of Earth, half of Earth would rely on Australia and most people would be dead or dying. Also, it would be a socialist utopia with every mobile specie only having X resources to spend unless they are pretending to be subspecies. There would be an extensive way to do just about anything, but from time to time physics would stop working. Finally, Sun God would be worshipped, but nowadays all would have to listen to Oracles.
Actually, no one would bother doing anything properly. Australians would simply wait until the current approach fails and then do the actual work in the exception.
The holy artifact of the JRE-Australia would be the boomerang, the real world symbol of a dynamic object - it's just impossible to throw it out for good intentionally, you can only forget about it and hope it gets lost on its own.
@doppelgreener My favourite bit about wombat lethality is that they can and will crush the skulls of predators between their butts and the walls of their burrows.
(He's exploiting a loophole in the Laws of Magic; although the Fifth Law forbids necromancy, the Laws are designed specifically with humans in mind.)
(It's not the sort of trick that you should pull on the council regularly, but it gives the council enough wiggle room to avoid crucifying you for violating the Laws when the violation probably saved the world.)
That one won't actually kill you, as far as I know. It'll poison the hell out of you and that's just about the singular worst, most excrutiating experiences possible to human beings, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone. (Then again there's records of, say, a soldier who was bedridden in agony for a few days who turned his gun on himself for it, so I guess that's as good as killing you to some people.)
quick etiquette question: I seem to notice that comments on questions get deleted somewhat judiciously, is it the norm to delete your comment once it's been sufficiently addressed in answer/other comments, or should I tend to leaving it up for archive-diggers?
@lithas Comments on the main site are intended to be temporary. They should be used to ask for clarification or to help shape questions and answers. On meta, they're usually kept and using them for discussion is tolerated. Once you get the privilege to flag comments, you will see that one of the possible reasons for asking the deletion of a comment is "obsolete"
@lithas We're not obligated to delete our obsolete comments, but it's good form. The Stack doesn't really have the idea of "archive digging" per se; the point of the Stack is to become a well-sorted pile of actionable answers to real challenges people face. Too many comments create "noise" that folks have to scroll through while looking for answers.
@Shalvenay Some of the cloth made of it is rather delicate, also. Crepe, for example, I know to be at risk of tearing. But it seems likely that with all the varieties of cloth, some or most of them may be sturdier.
@trogdor I didn't like Chrome at all. I used Firefox for a long time, then went to Opera and stuck with it until they went to Chromium. Now I hop back and forth between Chromium Opera and Pale Moon (a variant of Firefox), though when Vivaldi is less buggy, it'll be my browser of choice.
