Update: the city of Plantation has just added an event!

Project: City of Plantation note: only covers Plantation Preserve Linear Trail and Golf Course special event: September 9, 9am ~ 11am

Again, note that the project covers the whole month, even though the special event is on a particular day.

Oh, you might already know this but I just wanted to mention that there’s City Nature Challenge in May, which is also a BioBlitz run in a bunch of different places (similar to the Parks for Pollinators event in that regard).

Yeah, there’s a variety of BioBlitz events; this one just happens to be one of the bigger sets of events.

And thanks for the extra info!

I’ve generally found that avoiding the biggest crowds seems to also avoid some (though not all) of the worst behavior. More specialized subreddits, communities, and magazines tend to be more chill, and also more focused on their topics.

It’s arguably so easy to “farm karma” that I accidentally did it for a while. Just kept posting silly puns to reply to stuff people post on the Florida Man subreddit.

Reddit karma ain’t worth much at all.

On one hand downvotes are an expression of negativity, but on the other hand downvotes are an outlet for negativity.

Meanwhile, I’m scratching my head trying to figure out why a bunch of the top comments here got like one downvote each, lol.

Honestly I don’t think an algorithm needs to work very hard to “be mean” like that. Sure, you can purposely put people with clashing views in each other sight on a place where people go to hang out and have fun. But you don’t even need to go do that on purpose. To some extent, people naturally produce more “engagement” with stuff that’s controversial/argumentative.

Imagine if I were to walk past you and say some completely innocent comment. Now imagine I were to walk past you and insult your favorite movie/show/song/game/whatever. You’d be far more likely to respond in the latter case.

So, as people respond, more activity is generated, and that makes the post “hotter”. Simply boost what’s hot, and you have a veritable litany of controversy.

(or his mother)

lol, suspiciously specific denial

Yeah, I wasn’t really using Reddit much before Reddit had its meltdown and the threadiverse exploded onto the scene. I’ve had a lot of fun here. Frankly I think I understand how the threadiverse works more than I understand how Reddit works.

I’ve had a similar experience with Mastodon. Wasn’t a big Twitter user, but now I’m more active on Mastodon than I ever was on Twitter. On each of multiple Mastodon accounts.

JRPGs definitely did get dunked on sometime within the past couple decades. There was definitely commentary going around about how JRPGs were somehow bad because they’re too linear and tended to have too many similar story tropes/character archetypes and random battles were bad, yadda yadda. Some people even speculated that the genre was dying out. (That prediction obviously turned out to be wildly inaccurate.)

I guess it could be argued that some people did dunk on it for culture-specific reasons, especially for the anime art.

I’ve met such people before.

I disagree with them though, as the tropes and presentation of a game are more pertinent to genre labels, than is the nationality of its creators. There are many western-made JRPGs, and there might even be Japanese-made WRPGs as well.

Amusingly, Dark Souls seems to have spawned its own mini-genre, with people now calling games “Souls-likes”.

I’ve heard some people try to use “eastern RPG” instead, but I’m not sure it’s caught on.

For what it’s worth, “western RPG” (or “WRPG”) seems to have caught on; some people call this style “computer RPG” or “CRPG”, but I’d say that even more inaccurate of a label. So yeah, WRPGs and JRPGs.

And meanwhile, we also have action RPGs, which can be subdivided into games that are more similar to something like Diablo (action WRPGs) vs. games that are more similar to something like Ys (action JRPGs).

And then we have strategy RPGs. And then we have MMORPGs. And then we have dungeon crawlers. And then we have roguelikes, which are distinct from dungeon crawlers despite also involving going around a dungeon.

Okay let’s be frank here, “role-playing game” itself was never a great name to begin with in the first place. There’s the famous comment that if you’re playing any Mario game you’re playing the role of Mario. But rather, “RPG” is just the broad umbrella for games that are descended, however distantly it may be, from D&D. Kinda. (I’ve heard that at one point Zelda 1 was called an “RPG”, though obviously the meaning of the term has become a little more specific since then.)

You’re welcome!

You might already know this, but I just wanted to mention (for anyone curious) that one neat thing about what NYC did is that it’s actually one of the more famous textbook examples of ecosystem services.

Basically, at some point they actually calculated how much it’d cost to build a water filtration plant vs. how much it’d cost to maintain the Catskills watershed, and found that the latter was significantly cheaper, proving the notion that well-functioning natural systems can do things that are worth huge amounts of money, seemingly for “free”, so they’re well worth the effort to understand and safeguard such resources.

Here’s an article about it: https://blogs.edf.org/markets/2017/11/07/how-and-why-farmers-in-the-catskills-protect-new-york-citys-drinking-water/

And here’s an article about how policy approaches have changed over time. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2015/11/30/the-catskill-watershed-a-story-of-sacrifice-and-cooperation/