Poor Unfortunate Souls In A Major Key Is Cursed

Christopher Gray, 21, a Drexel University junior and CEO/Founder of Scholly, has found a way to make finding those scholarships easier.

Gray himself has been very successful in finding scholarship funds.  He is known as the “Million-Dollar Scholar” after being awarded $1.3 million in scholarships.

Over the past three years, Gray has also helped other families manually scour through databases, and figured, “Hey, I need something that can help.  There has to be a faster way.”

Gray developed the answer in the form of Scholly, an app that uses eight specific parameters, like state, GPA, or race, to instantly filter through a deep directory of scholarships available for the prospective student.

“It’s extremely simple,” says Gray and that ultimately was the goal.

“The fact that it’s on the mobile (phone) really hits the audience,” says Soham Bhonsle, 21, a Scholly user and Drexel University senior. “It serves the need of its time. We want it on the go.”

Nicholas Pirollo, chief technological officer for Scholly, also offers that apps optimize searches compared to standard websites because they are more tailored to specific needs.

A recent study, conducted by Sallie Mae, shows that 39% of families used scholarship funds to pay for college during the 2012-2013 academic year and Scholly connects users with relevant scholarships in about five minutes.  Scholly’s database is updated monthly to remove scholarships that are no longer available, add scholarships, and refresh deadlines.

There is money out there to go to school.  Scholly has more than 10,000 downloads of the $0.99 app found in the Apple App Store and Google Play.

Scholly’s costs are intentionally positioned at an affordable price to serve more people that need it and boast a potential big payoff.

“Pay 99 cents and you may get $5,000 or $6,000 in scholarships.”

Scholly helps put the power of funding your education in your hands.

Better Future Program’s 3,000 free resources have all been officially moved to Notion and not only are much easier to read on BOTH desktop and mobile, but have fully functional search and sorting options! Go check out our Liberation Library to support a Black-, queer-, and woman-owned nonprofit!

I am travelling for a long time and I want to download some ffs on my Kindle, can you rec me something good and longer? Just please, I need happy endings. I of course have already put all yours on, to re-re-re-read. Because you are brilliant. Obviously. ALSO PARKS AND REC.

Hahahaha! Yay for all the Parks & Rec love!

Okay, guys, the call is for good, longer fic. I assume you’ve got “Performance” already, right? Here are some other recs: 

Jupiter_Ash’s Tennisverse: http://archiveofourown.org/series/16847

Mise en Place by azriona: http://archiveofourown.org/works/896418

1electricpirate’s Applications and Practices of Basic Arithmetic series: http://archiveofourown.org/works/896418

The Heart in the Whole by verityburns: http://archiveofourown.org/works/301718

Left by lifeonmars: http://archiveofourown.org/works/639976

prettyvk’s Ink Your Name ‘verse: http://archiveofourown.org/series/100784

History, Repeating Itself by gyzym: http://archiveofourown.org/works/179622

flawedamythyst’s Skeletonsverse: http://archiveofourown.org/series/35165

You said longer fics, so I left out some of my absolute favorites because I figured you wanted the really meaty stuff!

If you’re willing to go outside Sherlock and Sherlock-related fandoms, here are my Inception recs: 

toomuchplor’s Steinway!verse: http://archiveofourown.org/series/6054

Patience, a Steady Hand by Helenish: http://archiveofourown.org/works/170021

gyzym’s DomesticVerse: http://archiveofourown.org/series/5589

Okay, guys, what would you add?? 

Homesteading survival knowledge

Growing Food:

The basics of Growing Food

Crops to grow for Maximum Production

Seed Starting Plan

Grow transplants for free

How to get Seeds for Free

How to find good soil for Free

Amending the Soil

How to Collect Seeds

Re-potting and care for tomato transplants

Growing dry beans

Growing Garlic

How to grow a lot of Leek

Plants going to Seed Explained

Food you can grow and eat in the Winter

Climate change and Food Security

Plant Lemon Trees from Seed

Why is rain much more effective than watering?

Stashing Food

Storing the Food from your Garden

Living in nature and food conservation

Making a Meal from foraged and Garden Food in Winter

Sun-drying Strawberries

Sun-drying Cherry Tomatoes

Citrus Tips

Canning

Blackberry Jam

Strawberry Jam

Salsa (tomatoes, peppers, onion, garlic)

Đuveđ (mixed vegetables preserve)

Ajvar (preserved peppers)

Preserved sugar Cherries

Foraging: 

Edible Mushrooms that grow on trees

Edible Wild Plants to Forage for in Spring

Make Honey out of Dandelions

How to cook with Nettle

Incredible value of Pine Needles

Herbalism

Rose Water

On herbal infusions and poison tea

Herbs to Collect for Tea

How to safely make Elderberry Syrup

Yarrow and Lemon Balm

Basic Medicinal Herbal Tea Uses

Tree Care:

How to grow trees

Where are the Tree Roots?

What is Root Flare

Tree Pruning Mistakes

Types of Pruning cuts

How to Prune Correctly

Other:

Building a Cob House

How to make Earthen Floors

Cooking with minimal use of heat

Processing Forest Clay

How to hand-work clay

How to make laundry detergent out of conkers

Creating baskets out of Newspapers

How to keep your space cool during heat waves

How trees create a living atmosphere

How to get rid of ants

Survival Recipes

What garden plants can be used as poison

Tribes Revive Traditional Hemp Economies

A post-petroleum transition plan.

“With 10,000 uses, hemp is one of the most versatile plants to grow—and in many ways can be a catalyst for change for Native peoples. We see a New Green Revolution in Indian Country, tied to justice, economics, restoration ecology, and a return-to-the-land movement, and it’s growing.

Just last year, the Fort Berthold Reservation, Colorado River tribes, Iowa Tribe (Kansas and Nebraska), Yurok, Sisseton and Santee Dakotas, to name a few, all got their hemp plans approved by the USDA, but more than that, tribal growers and thinkers are considering hemp as part of the future for Indian Country. And young leaders such as Muriel Young Bear, a Meskwaki woman from Iowa, and Marcus Grignon—a Menominee and project director at Hempstead Project HEART, a John Trudell initiative—represent a new wave of commitment.”

Despite their enormous ecological values, new research reveals we don’t understand how most arachnid species are faring right now – or do much to protect them.

Spiders need our help, and we may need to overcome our biases and fears to make that happen.“The feeling that people have towards spiders is not unique,” says Marco Isaia, an arachnologist and associate professor at the University of Turin in Italy. […] A new paper by Isaia and 18 other experts digs into the conservation status of Europe’s 4,154 known spider species and finds that only a few have any protection at the national level. Most have never even been adequately assessed or studied in detail, so we don’t know much about their extinction risk or their ecological needs.

Italy, for example, is home to more than 1,700 spider species, but fewer than 450 have had their conservation status assessed and only two have any legal protection in that country. Greece, meanwhile, has nearly 1,300 spider species within its borders, but scientists have only assessed the conservation needs of 32 of them. None are legally protected. […] “What surprised us most while assembling the data was the extremely poor level of knowledge about the conservation status, extinction risk and factors threatening the survival of European spider species, despite Europe being one of the most studied regions of the world in terms of biodiversity,” says Filippo Milano, the study’s lead author […].

And of course, this is not unique to Europe; other countries and continents fail to protect arachnids, and for similar reasons.

“Spiders are understudied, underappreciated and under attack by both the climate crisis and humans affecting our environment,” says spider expert and science communicator Sebastian Alejandro Echeverri, who was not affiliated with the study. “These are one of the most diverse groups of animals that we don’t really think about on a day-to-day basis. There’s like 48,000-plus species, but my experience is that most people don’t really have a sense of how many are in their area. In the United States, for example, we have just 12 spiders on the endangered species list out of the thousands of species recorded here.” This lack of information or protection at the national level affects international efforts. At the time the research was conducted the IUCN Red List, which includes conservation status assessments for 134,400 species around the world, covered just 301 spider species, eight of which are from Europe. That number has since increased — to all of 318 species from the order Araneae.

As we see with so many other wide-ranging species, a transnational border is often not a spider’s friend. The paper identifies several examples of species protected in one country but not its neighbor, despite being found in both places. According to the paper only 17 spider species are protected by conservation legislation in two or more European countries.

“Animals aren’t limited by our political lines on a map,” notes Echeverri. […]

And maybe, along the way, their work can help inspire people who fear spiders to look at them in a different light — or even to help look for them, like the Map the Spider project that asks citizen scientists to upload locations of the complex webs woven by elusive purse-web spiders. […]

“Focusing on spiders has been a very important choice […],” Isaia says. “You may study their web, their venom, their bizarre behaviors, the interactions between different species, their role as predators, their amazing taxonomical and functional diversity, their key role in the maintaining ecosystem equilibrium. You may also use them as sources of inspiration in architecture and visual arts. Aren’t these good reasons to find them attractive?”

——-

Headline and text published by: John R. Platt. “We Need to Talk About Spider Conservation.” As republished by Salon, 23 May 2021. Originally published by Platt at The Revelator, 10 May 2021.

By the numbers: Why this ancient rainforest is an important climate solution

Key facts and figures show why Tongass National Forest in Alaska is an important ally in confronting climate change. The Tongass’ large old-growth trees are great at trapping carbon, underscoring the importance of protecting the wildest areas from logging and development.

Excerpt from this story from The Wilderness Society:

Trees absorb carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. This makes them some of our greatest allies in the fight against the climate crisis.  

Big, dense, old-growth forests are especially good at absorbing and trapping (or “sequestering”) carbon, the leading greenhouse gas causing climate change. The Tongass National Forest in Alaska is often referred to as “America’s Climate Forest,” the nation’s “climate insurance policy” and “a national champion” of carbon sequestration.

But that only works if they’re left standing. Once cut down, these trees release their stored carbon and can exacerbate the climate crisis. That’s why we need to protect old-growth trees in places like the Tongass.  

The Trump administration got rid of protections for the wildest parts of the Tongass. The White House said it plans to review that decision. We encourage President Biden to follow through on that promise and ultimately restore protections to this ancient rainforest.

Tongass National Forest has been called a “key weapon“ for fighting climate change. The reason: big, old-growth trees are highly effective at trapping climate-warming greenhouse gas like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing (or “sequestering”) it. Scientists have estimated that the Tongass accounts for about 8% of the carbon sequestered by all national forests.

Bottom line: if left standing, these trees are crucial to combating the climate crisis. But when old-growth trees are logged, they release carbon back into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis rather than helping it. Research has found that carbon density in unmanaged forests is 60% higher than in managed forests. In other words, forests like the Tongass are most effective in helping the climate crisis when left alone.

Scientists have known for quite some time that plants—especially trees—are big-time absorbers of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. A 2011 study tried to quantify the worldwide effect and reported a net global forest sink of as much as 1.1 petagrams—1.1 billion metric tons—of carbon per year. According to the EPA’s calculator, that means the world’s forests annually remove carbon from the atmosphere equivalent to that contained in nearly 54 million tanker trucks’ worth of gasoline.  

I just have this mental image of like. All the Studio Ghibli characters in one room. Japanese schoolgirls, skinny pretty wizard boys, magical princesses, children, dragons, spirits, etc.

And then - off in one corner of the room - is Porco “I’d rather be a pig than a fascist” Rosso, swirling red wine in a stemless glass, visibly uncomfortable, and looking like a dad at an anime convention.

And that’s why he’s my favourite.

KU JOURNALISM MAJOR SHREDS “CASE” AGAINST MIKE BROWN

Shelby Lawson is a student at the University of Kansas, majoring in Journalism and Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Lawson posted the following to her Facebook page: 

“Alright y’all. I’d like to clear a few things up. This is a general address to the long list of misconceptions and inconsistencies and abuses of power that exist surrounding the killing of Mike Brown. I have researched these points and provided sources in case you wish to do some reading of your own.

-The most common misconception I’m hearing is that Mike Brown was significantly larger than Officer Wilson. This is incorrect. On page 198 of the official grand jury transcript, you can see that Officer Wilson testifies he is 6 ft 4 and weighs 210 lbs,the same size as Mike Brown.

(source)

-Mike Brown was NOT stopped because he was a suspect in crime. He and his friend Dorian Johnson were stopped for jaywalking, as Darren Wilson testifies to on page 208 of his grand jury testimony.

-Mike Brown WAS fleeing from Officer Wilson when he was fatally shot. Wilson confirms this on page 281 of his grand jury testimony.

-Officer Wilson broke police self-defense protocol, which teaches to disarm and incapacitate rather than kill and teaches officers to go for body shots. Officer Wilson shot Mike Brown twice in the head, after he shot him four times in his arm and torso.

(source)

-Ferguson Police ignored protocol and refused to interview or take a statement from the eyewitness present from Officer Wilson’s initial contact with Mike Brown until his death.

(source)

-The forensic examiner broke protocol by failing to take crime scene photos. On page 95 of the grand jury transcript, she claims that this was because her camera had died, however, she goes on to describe how she immediately followed Wilson to the hospital in order to photograph his “injuries.”

-Forensic investigators broke protocol by failing to test Officer Wilson’s gun for fingerprints, since Wilson claims that Brown grabbed his gun and caused it to misfire. Page 39, grand jury transcript.

-Darren Wilson was then allowed to break protocol by washing the blood off of himself before it could be photographed, making it impossible to analyze blood spatter patterns and determine what position Mike Brown was in when Wilson first shot him. Wilson recounts this on page 10 of his official police interview.

(source)

-While Officer Wilson’s story of what happened that day has changed at least three times, six separate eyewitnesses, four of whom have never met each other, all have identical accounts of what happened. They were never interviewed by police.

(source)

-These eyewitnesses all agree that Darren Wilson was the aggressor and that Mike Brown was shot while surrendering, with his hands in the air and that his last words were “I don’t have a gun. Stop shooting.”

-This is backed up by Mike Brown’s autopsy, which suggests that Mike Brown would have had to be in the hands-up position for the bullets to enter his hand and arm the way they did.

(source)

-Furthermore, in a press conference, the coroner who performed Mike Brown’s autopsy relays that there was no trace of gun shot residue anywhere on his body, proving that Wilson’s claim that Mike Brown grabbed his gun, causing it to misfire, is impossible and untrue.

(source)

-Ferguson Police lied about the distance Mike Brown was from Officer Wilson when he was killed. They reported it was 35 ft. but it was in fact 148 ft.

(source)

-Owner of Ferguson Market states that he did not call police to report a theft of cigars, that the theft had nothing to do with Mike Brown, and that the man on the security footage is not Mike Brown.

(source)

-The prosecuting attorney for the case against Darren Wilson has helped raise $600,000 in donations for Darren Wilson, creating a clear conflict of interest.

(source)

-The police department that Officer Wilson worked for prior to coming to Ferguson was disbanded after multiple instances of racial profiling.”

(source)

Source

not enough fireworks and champagne on the whole fuckin continent to celebrate this the way you're supposed to celebrate it