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Sunday, July 30, 2023

Citizen Science

I recently signed up for Inaturalist. I'd been wanting to help with some sort of citizen science project, and this seemed like it had a good, broad scope. 

Basically, you take photos of animals and plants (mostly wild ones), post them, and mark where you took the photo. You can identify the animal/plant yourself, and others will help identify them. Then people can use these observations to see the range that an animal or plant lives in, when it's blooming, and who knows what else.

I've started the very slow process of posting a ton of my old photos. I often label where I took the pictures, which has been of immense help. I saw cool animals in Japan, for example, but never knew what they were. And now people are identifying them for me! It's awesome!


And what's even better? I've started using inaturalist to help with my stories! For example, I looked at the observations of wild roses to see when they're in bloom.


(I thought I had photos of wild roses, but I can't find them. So here's a garden rose)

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Word Collectors

I've started collecting words. 

It's not as weird as it sounds. They're words that relate to magic somehow. Different types of magic, for example. But even more interesting, words in different languages that don't have an English equivalent.

Why? Because I have to come up with names for weird magic phenomena, and it helps so much if there's already some word that exists to describe it. 


Lion