Look Closer

I looked closer and I do, in fact, live in an ugly place.

Fix it, less ugly.
- It’s not broken, just unscrewed. But look at all that dust and debris in there. It’s just gonna chill back there for the next 30 years.
- Yeah, definitely time to switch it up

I was telling my mother about this the other day. I study botany and often some of the most interesting plants are the tiny, seemingly boring ones. This is some spotted spurge, Euphorbia maculata, growing out of a crack in some stones.

I have a "neglect bowl" for things like this I've literally scraped off a sidewalk.
Also I get a lot of speedwell as a weed and I kind of like it so I usually let it do it's thing.
- Those asters are lovely, too. I'm not sure those grow here
- Oh I get it, yesterday I scraped up a random rush I saw in a Martin's parking lot. I'm now pressing it with some Sorghastrum and Panicum.
That's so pretty. What did you use to take the super zoomed in photo?
I live near a city and it makes me want to study enough botany to identify the various plants that spring forth in unexpected places. Some of them are quite beautiful and I find myself moved by their improbability.
- Thanks a lot! I have an Olympus Tough TG-6. They're on the TG-7 now and my buddy has one, but they're almost the same camera so if you find a 6 available get that.
  I've probably put 20,000 photos on this thing. It's an amazing digital camera. I have dropped it onto concrete, it's waterproof, just all around great. I recommend getting the ring light if you want to do macro photography. I've gotten some awesome pics with it.
  https://imgur.com/a/0RzgUfk
  You wouldn't think it but the vast majority of my photography is of plants. I just got some great mileage out of photographing insects.

The smaller you get, the more bizarre things become.

The world as you know it ceases to exist.

Here there be monsters.

There's a scene in The Thin Red Line where a squad of American soldiers are lying in grass with Japanese machine-gun bullets flying all around them, and Adrian Brody's character notices an interesting flower next to him and starts poking at it with a real look of appreciation on his face.

there was one war movie where the main character starts chasing a butterfly in the middle of war then fucking dies.
- War movies all lost luster if they ever had any after watching a lot of real footage due to Ukraine. It’s just all romanticised crap. Can’t stand anymore a minute of that weepy music and slowmos like there’s some kind of point or art to the bloody, shit stinking, bloated corpses, meat grinder

Common Grackle?

Do people actually see grackles like this? I find the black/blue difference very subtle
- I see them like that when they're in the sun (Like a rich blue and a metallic, kind of desaturated dRk purple) . If they're in shade/overcast they look like metallic crows to me.
Probably not unless it's stylistically like that. Grackles has black beaks anyway
- Oops, you're right.