Today’s daily create #tdc5280 #ds106 #dailycreate #ShowYourStripes point toward the #ShowYourStripes webpage that very neatly shows

visual representations of the change in temperature as measured in each country, region or city over the past 100+ years

The site also links to #BiodiversityStripes

The ‘biodiversity stripes’ provide a visual representation of the change in biodiversity over time, often since 1970. The highest level of biodiversity is coloured bright green. Lower levels move through yellow to grey, depending upon the level of decline. Darker greys appear with greater declines.

This one shows the decline of UK moths from 1970 to 2018

An image showing the decline, 86%,  in British moths from 1970 to 2018  The highest level of biodiversity is coloured bright green. Lower levels move through yellow to grey, depending upon the level of decline. Darker greys appear with greater declines.

86% decline in only part of my lifetime. Horrific. I was 12 in 1970, I remember when cleaning insects from a windshield was a thing.

In 2025, the now-annual survey conducted by Buglife in Kent found a decline of 66% in flying insects since 2021.

Kent bug splat survey shows ‘troubling’ fall in flying insects – BBC News

I am currently reading Aurochs and Auks by John Burnside, a wonderful book, which in part deals with the feelings around this terrible state of affairs.

@creating

Three happy moments in the last week:

  1. My fairly new granddaughter (no images for obvious reasons)

  2. Yesterday in the park, I saw two shadows spinning round each other on the path. Two Speckled Wood Butterflies spiral up through the sunlight. There were too fast & fascinating for a photo.

  3. I made a rolled omelet where you separate the eggs and the yellow layer wraps round the white layer. Looked & tasted good (I didn’t even think to take a photo)

Read: Solace House by Will Maclean ★★★★ 📚

After sudden scalding exposure to the late twentieth century, and the garish monomania of the supermarket, it was joyous to return to the hospital, to the house. I found that I wanted to immerse myself in Solace House and its environs, gather it around me, cloak myself in it. I didn’t doubt, in that moment, that this was what Flayne had felt, sequestered here in his self-imposed exile.

Fun Gothic horror with magic mushrooms. A narrator who becomes more & more unreliable as the book gets weirder. I am not sure I really know what went on. Plenty of nineties details.

Like:

“Wait. You knew it was damaging mental health, sleep, attention and social development, and your response was… to give younger children even more access?”

And we will say:

“Well, yes. But everyone else was doing it.”

A clear succinct run over social media & the young. Personally I think there might be something in making the vendors made efforts to fix social media but at least there seems to be some movement.