Been Experimenting With Animation For A Class Project- It’s A Video About Giving Drones Sonar Based

@teagantheamazing Hope you don't mind, but I wanted to pull this reply out to talk about a little more in depth, because I think it is important that people understand this as we move forward.

Also, I am speaking as a private citizen here, not as an employee of the Forest Service.

In the United States, wildland fire response is handled at three basic levels: Federal, State, and Local.

Federally, it is further broken down into the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service. (Some parks have their own fire crews as well, but that varies from park to park, and they're usually still technically Forest Service.) There's really not a ton of difference between the two aside from whose name is on your paycheck. Pay is the same across each, structure is the same across each, training is the same across each. Federal crews and resources are, generally, the main and biggest responders to wildfires because wildfires tend to happen primarily on federal lands.

At the state and local level things vary a lot from state to state. You can have things like the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control in Colorado and Cal Fire in California, and you can have local structure departments that also have wildland divisions and/or training. Some of the local departments will be volunteer. State and local responders also work closely with federal responders, but how much and for how long varies from fire to fire.

Then, on top of all of that, you have private/contract crews. They are what it says on the tin: private crews of firefighters. Some of these crews are great! Very professional, very skilled. Others are...ah...not.

Now, what I am concerned about specifically as we head into this new administration is what is going to happen at the federal level. As I mentioned in the original post, the Forest Service is already struggling. It has ALWAYS been struggling. Without giving you a whole huge history lesson, the Forest Service was founded in the early 1900s by Teddy Roosevelt to protect public lands and preserve them for future use. People threw a FIT about it, specifically people who wanted to basically strip mine the forests for every single available resource. Taft was elected after Roosevelt and basically started undoing everything his predecessor had done. The budget for the Forest Service was destroyed, protections were rolled back. The only reason the Forest Service survived was because in 1910 there was a MASSIVE fire. It was, at the time, unprecedented and the Forest Service was able to use it to lobby for better funding going forward. But the same cycle has repeated ever since. An administration that doesn't value conservation will come in, shred the budget, there will be deadly consequences that make the next administration pad the budget some, and then it will start again.

It's a lot like people who stop taking their medicine because they think they're cured since they feel better, but they only feel better because they were taking their medicine.

So what happens now? Well, it's already happening and it happened under Biden, and will only get worse under Trump. To keep it simple, there are two kinds of federal employment: seasonal, and year-round. Most of the federal Forest Service jobs are seasonal, because the work is seasonal. This includes firefighters, but it also includes things like park rangers and trail maintenance crews. From late spring to early fall there are tooooons of people working. Then, the rest of the year, its a skeleton crew of year-rounders doing mostly maintenance work, controlled burns, paperwork, stuff like that.

Now, with all of that said, here is where we stand at this specific moment: the decision has already been made that the Forest Service will not be hiring seasonal workers outside of firefighting next year. This means no seasonal park rangers, no seasonal maintenance people, none of that. This means next year parks are going to be a MESS. Bathrooms will not be cleaned regularly, campgrounds will not be maintained, trails will not be maintained, and a ton of other stuff. The year-rounder skeleton crew will be all we've got. And, crucially, there will be less professionals monitoring the woods looking for new fires. Rangers, even ones not working directly on fire stuff, are a crucial level of protection for spotting and reporting fires.

Secondary to that is the pay issue. Even if you're a year-rounder, the pay is abysmal. Your average out the gate, newbie wildland firefighter is going to make around $17/hr base pay if they work for a federal agency. Now, there's a ton of random stuff that can bump that pay up even without the retention bonus we're currently getting. You get a night differential and a Sunday differential for starters, and hazard pay when you are actively working a fire, plus there's ALWAYS overtime, sometimes an insane amount of it. Then there's per diem if you are traveling for a fire, and that can be a nice little bump too. But the point/problem is that the pay is VERY unpredictable. You can have a massively busy season and be swimming in money, or you can have a slow as fuck season and end up scrapping by because the base pay isn't enough. The Wildland Firefighter Paycheck Protection Act is supposed to fix this by bumping up the base pay, but that can has been kicked back and forth in the government for yeeeears now.

Now, as you mentioned, people CAN transfer their federal qualifications for fire to state and private crews. It generally pays better if you do. But we do not want to privatize fire response. Given the size of this country, given the spread of the population within it, we have to have a federal firefighting force. Leaving it to the states and private companies will not be enough.

That is where we are starting the new administration: abysmal pay, failing departments, and slimmed back hiring. Given Trump's repeated insistence on slimming down the government, on withholding aid in blue states, on getting rid of things like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is also crucial for firefighting), and other things in that vein, I think we are staring down the barrel of a very, very dangerous time.

So, some action items if you want to help:

Call your local representatives and insist they pass the Wildland Firefighter Protection Act NOW, before the new administration comes in. The new administration could still screw it up, but we've gotta at least try.

Be patient and understanding with Park Rangers in the coming years. They are doing their best with what they've got.

Take responsibility for your use of public lands. Clean up after yourself, pick up litter when you see it, and donate if there is a way for you to do so.

Educate yourself and your community on wildland fire even if you don't think you are in a wildland fire prone area. Learn about and implement defensible space around your homes and communities. I'll be doing a lot of education around this going forward, so if you have questions or want help please ask me!

IMO spectral bats sit either in the middle of weaver-z's Bat Appearance Graph, or have a significant rightward lean because of their dog-like face.

The moment they open their jaws and reveal those fangs, though, they zip into solid 'Those Feratu' territory. Or, that just solidifies their position of being in the middle of the graph.

Spectral bat collection pics. because they're fucking sublime.

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

What's better than one eastern red bat? Three eastern red bats! Female Lasiurus borealis give birth to litters of 2 or 3 pups, with some outgoing mothers giving birth to as many as 5! This is highly unusual amongst bats, as most other species typically only give birth to one pup per season.

(Image: An eastern red bat (Lasiurus borealis) by Merlin Tuttle)

The problem appears to be that Trump's cult showed up, but nobody else did.

I think, it's not so much his cult as.... Trump has a lock on low (really NO) information voters,

so take 2022 Democrats did really well for a midterm, expanded their senate majority and lost the house very narrowly, but only 46% of voters showed up, in 2024 67% of voters turned out, that 20% of the American public that didn't vote in 2022 but did in 2024 likely don't know what a midterm is.

and for people like that, Trump speaks in HYPER, MEGA! simple terms, terms so simple they're wrong even when he's not trying to lie (which he often is) like "build a wall" well thats not actually physically possible, but no amount of pushing back that there was no way to do that got him to stop saying it or his supporters to stop cheering for a thing that couldn't be done, and it was not done, because it wasn't physically possible.

we live in a country PACKED with people who don't understand how anything works, and Trump won because he speaks at a 2nd grade level and there's where 50-ish% of voting Americans are at rn.

Another new bat!

lets get fruit with mama

I can’t stop thinking about how long Golbat is when he closes his mouth

I will continue out of spite. If anyone wants to take me out that badly, they will have to get their hands dirty and do it themselves! If they wish me miserable, they will have to wipe off my Joker smile with their own two hands!