🔮Sapphic Ace🔮

So naturally the writing style is very clear and simple, and I don't mind it, every once in a while it's nice and relaxing to read something that doesn't specifically intend to drown a reader in confusing nuance and a constant barrage of overwhelming detail. It's a simple, straightforward story, set in the year 1615, about a 14-year-old basque boy who gets hired onto a whaling ship, and the whole story is told from his perspective.

I'm halfway through it now, and at this point of the story the whaling ship of the story has reached Iceland, and the sailors are weirded out by the local turf houses. Someone voices disbelief that these people would really live underground, like some kind of gnomes, and asks whether these folk are even christian. Someone else, who has actually been this far north before, affirms that they are - of a sort, at least. They are some sort of lutherans. And underground-dwelling heretics or not, they're pretty reliable people to work with.

Considering that the book is written in finnish, for finnish children, who are also lutheran by vast majority, the deeply catholic basque sailors' views of Icelanders are obviously not intended or illustrated as the objective truth. People who are otherwise good, intelligent and well-meaning can be completely ignorant about people whose like they have never met or even heard of before.

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.

The scientific versions of this make me feel very glad that I’m no longer a lab rat, as the life-defining version of this for me was when I was a young lab rat tasked with tracking down an extremely defrosted armadillo from Texas.

When the consignment of armadillo parts - decorously placed upon dry ice, in accordance with the finest scientific principles - was shipped to a young British scientist and summarily lost in transit, it was one of those academic problems. You know what I mean by that. That means: Problems that only happen to academics.

The late armadillo was too late. Despite earnest emails promising that it had arrived a few days before, this was meant in a sort of spiritual sense, and what you might refer to as the “material” aspect of the dead armadillo manifested many days later. This was the subject of some fraught discussions between the ivory tower and the US Navy, who said rather stiffly that they had shipped a dead armadillo in perfectly sensible dead condition to us, and had no idea why the American postal service had interpreted their instructions as “send the dead armadillo on a quirky little road trip and lie about it.”

Intense discussions about the dead armadillo revealed the US Navy had no sense of humour about Schrödinger’s Armadillo (“we sent you a dead armadillo, and have washed our hands of any downstream issues”) as well as their rather uptight announcement that they would not be sending us any more free dead armadillos unless we could prove that WE were not in the habit of carelessly losing them. The implication being that this important military armadillo corpse had been lost entirely because the postal service had received it in a spirit of unbecoming whimsy, and this was the fault of Elodie, lab rat and designated representative of the United States Postal Service. As the military arm of the imperial core are naturally the primary suppliers of high-quality scientifically reliable dead armadillos, this censorious and frankly ungenerous cooling-off was a topic of some consternation.

Elodie, a very young person at the time, who rather fancied the British postdoc who looked so enthralling in riding breeches, was thus tasked with tremulously arguing with the Navy about how grateful we were for everything, but how fresh armadillos were far more academically interesting, while we were on the topic, if they didn’t mind, and if they could spare another one, if we promised not to allow the mail to become whimsical.!

The academically interesting part of the metaphysical armadillo was eventually run to ground significantly after the point at which the dry ice had become academic. The state of the armadillo inside the box at that point was an extremely academic problem. The late armadillo had become so late that it had surpassed biological interest, yet had not quite entered the realm of palaeontological significance. It was, however, a stage of lateness that was officially Too Late. It smelled of an unusual kind of death, simultaneously pork and mouse.

As the most junior of junior lab rats, it fell on me at the time to sneak the box into the medical waste in someone else’s laboratory (as is only honourable.)

and people are SO eager to blame hamlet for everything in the play (which is a tragedy, thinks are kind of required to go wrong) meanwhile Claudius, the guy who murdered his brother and basically tells his grieving nephewson that its gay and stupid for him to be mourning his dead father a month after he died because its now his unclefather and motheraunt's wedding, somehow gets off scott free despite being the actual reason for the entire play's plot. you see what i'm getting at here?????

was the lengthy but still social media friendly column of words you're about to reblog written by the op? can you find them? is this the kind of thing they usually post? if not, is a source or author's name credited?

or is the text extracted from a screenshot of social media posts? did that op write it? can you find them? is this the kind of thing they usually post? if not, is a source or author's name credited?

or is the source implied but not actually given? is the text accompanied by an editorial-style image with a generic logo for some publication or organisation you've never heard of? can you find that publication or organisation? is this the kind of thing they usually post?

@elodieunderglass or other horse people:

A horse’s gallop is much like a beat of a song, and you CAN hear discrepancies, just as people can hear changes in music. If you want to demonstrate a phenomenally observant or horseful character, they could certainly detect two horses galloping by sound, including irregularities in the gait. Killie could do it!

A horse, as an animal, even forced, is quite unlikely to put up with a hard gallop at a limp with a rider; they are generally considered incompatible. An intermittent irregularity can be masked at a gallop, and a horse that stumbles detectably at a gallop (bearing in mind it’s a four-beat rhythm, so you’d have to hear a few full cycles to pick up on the irregularity) probably wouldn’t also be “limping.” A little lame, perhaps, but a horse failing to fire on all four cylinders under load would be stumbling on their last leg, their rider pushing them on under desperation. They’re not motorbikes. But that’s generally okay in fiction.

You’re meant to say, “ah! An observant, possibly supernaturally so, and possibly horseful character!” Not to grade the author on their knowledge of an animal they don’t necessarily care much about.

Anyways they were already a blight upon the land when I was in high school about ten years ago and a group of people at my school got obsessed with this drink they’ve sold there for a long time called the 911.

Why is it called the 911? Well my friends, it consists of Irish cream flavor, half and half, and six shots of espresso. In the medium. They add more if you get a large. People were getting larges.

Anyways being an unmedicated adhd teenager, coffee had absolutely no effect on me so I ended up getting a lot of free Dutch Bros 911 drinks because it was known that for some reason Roman is immune to these things so when people couldn’t handle finishing their 911 drinks because it was too much caffeine for them they’d give it to me.

Did u know. That they call their employees broistas? It’s sickening.