Okay! I get it! I’ve worked on Gulf of Mexico ecosystem health issues for a decade, including the GoM dead zone, so you’ll have to take my word that I’m pretty passionate about it! I also work in scicomm so I just try to have a little levity sometimes, I find it helps engage people, but that’s just my style and I know…

Well the “boring science” thing was a joke because obviously I work in environmental science and I like it but okay.

I mean like, small fish kills do happen reasonably often just because of fluctuating water conditions, sometimes they’re weather related and sometimes they’re caused by manmade stuff like nutrient pollution. Like in Texas we’ve been having weird hypoxic events all along the coast since the summer because of the huge…

Unfortunately, like many environmental issues, it doesn’t get much attention outside of us boring scientists and maybe the people directly affected by it, like Gulf of Mexico coastal communities and fishermen. There’s a lot of planning and strategizing and studying but not a lot of actual policy implementation.

Oh shit! I used to work over near Grand Isle, Louisiana and I’d heard of jubilees on the island before but I’ve never seen one myself.

And ocean acidification! I mean, you can make up biblical stuff about Donald Trump but honestly we’re fuckin ourselves over pretty good already in the environmental department and he’s just gonna give us a good assist on not changing the course.

High-five!

Well the linked story says they think the fish were chased into this lock system and accidentally shut in and the sheer number of fish consumed the available oxygen in the water and since they were trapped, they died. Kinda weird but it makes sense.

Hello: Environmental sciences person here. Fish kills like this seem to disturb people but its not that uncommon and happens in usually more boring ways, like a bunch of tree debris or something falls into a stream after storm and uses up all the oxygen in the decay process, turning the water body hypoxic until it…

I moved to back to Texas last year (my home state) after living for years in the New Orleans area. I was a little nervous about voting because of the voter ID laws (I have not updated my driver’s license yet due to nothing but my laziness) which I had heard were being badly applied all over the state. I brought the…

Yeah usually you gotta keep your campaigning materials 100 feet from a polling place, which is why in a lot of states you see signs crowding the medians and lawns within a radius of the polling place but not exactly all up in it. Although when I voted here in Texas there was an older black lady wearing her “I’m With…

My boyfriend works supervising low-functioning autistic children in a childcare center that does intensive special needs work and he makes like $12 an hour. He’s getting a graduate degree. American childcare is fucked.

There are a lot of regulations (rightly) governing how childcare centers have to be run for health, safety and supervision reasons so I imagine overhead is pretty expensive.

It sucks. I was a young female journalist in the south covering the 2008 and 2012 elections for a subsidiary of the NYTimes when a lot of this “mainstream media” distrust was beginning to foment at the behest of Fox News. You’re taught to let a lot of it roll off your back. People feel completely comfortable…

Oh snap shoulda checked the comments. The same thing stuck out at me.

I’m always down with a throwback jam, but the line “let’s just kiss till we’re naked” sounds like something an 6th grader would put into a sexy song.

“If anyone else had done that they would be charged with treason and thrown under the jail at a minimum, and a firing squad likely.”

The intersection between hip hop and line dancing is a lot closer than you’d think. Ever seen the Cupid Shuffle?

Yeah me too. I went from Ooo! to Meh. pretty fast.

I mean, I understand the virtriol here, but they’re kids. I hope they feel the death of this girl deeply and realize that what they did was shitty and never do it again, and don’t let their kids be little assholes, and generally try to affect some postive change fueled by that guilt.