It’s a period piece romance. That’s cool, that’s all well and good, except that on the sidelines there’s an undead warlock who’s trying so hard to kill the protagonist, but all in ways that the protagonist either doesn’t notice or doesn’t accept as supernatural

And it isn’t a twist! The audience knows about the warlock! The warlock has a villain song! The warlock is one of the principal characters! But the protagonist spends 95% of the movie completely unaware of the warlock, and just spends the entirety of the movie doing period piece romance things while being repeatedly inconvenienced by the warlock until the climax, when the protagonist has to very suddenly

Acknowledge the existence of the warlock

Acknowledge the existence of the supernatural

See some real-ass goddamn magic

Kill the warlock

I have never seen a movie with a plot structure like this before, and I don’t think I’ll see one like it ever again. It’s like an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that turns Lady Catherine into a vampire who’s just repeatedly trying to drink Lizzy’s blood, but Lizzy doesn’t even notice until the climax whereupon she stuffs Lady Catherine’s mouth with garlic and cuts off her head (an adaptation I would kill to see, by the way). There are two completely different genres playing out at the same time, and one of them is trying to kill the other

….

…

is that true??

But in a broader sense, other animals do craft specialized foods :)

Bees dehydrate a mixture of spit and nectar to make honey.

Damselfish farm specific species of algae - defending their plots vigorously, since they can only digest a few kinds.

A species of Yeti crab farms bacteria, raising colonies on its long claws and helpfully holding them near nutrient-rich undersea vents.

Leaf cutter ants chew up food, fertilize it with their own excrement, and then innoculate the mixture with a special fungus! The fungus then grows fruiting bodies, which the ants eat. Little farmers :)

Fungus farming emerged only once in ants. In wood-boring beetles, it evolved independently eleven times. Today there are roughly 3,200 species of ambrosia beetles, none larger than a grain of rice, that raise fungi in chambers tunnelled out of dead trees. The beetles have evolved specialised pockets on their bodies to carry the big sticky spores of fungi when they move on after exhausting their host tree. (Pockets!) Each group of ambrosia beetles has one or several species of fungi it prefers to raise, but all of them produce nourishing globules not found in fungi that are not associated with beetles.

The black garden ant raises aphids as a form of animal husbandry- feeding and protecting them, herding them from one branch to another like little green sheep, and harvesting the tasty sap they produce when well-fed. When the herd grows too large, the ants will eat the aphids!

There’s a species of (I think it was a vole or shrew?) that harvests tough grass and leaves it in its den for days to decompose a bit so it’s easier to digest - habitual fermentation :D

(Unfortunately, rumors of elephants leaving fruit to ferment and get drunk is only rumors. There’s no evidence that they actually do that - they prefer fresh fruit right off the branches)

So yeah!

While many other animals have sex, farm, ferment food and even raise livestock for meat and drink…. (some even keep pets!) humans are the only one to cook with heat.

Humans are so, so much more than just sex and love. This is specifically to all of my ace/aro followers: you are a part of us and your intrinsic value is in no way negated by the fact that you do not experience love or attraction. The next time you scramble some eggs or zip up a winter coat or write your name or take transportation or play a sport do a craft please remember that those things are infinitely more important to your innate humanness than your romantic or sexual orientation.

me:

See, I LOVE the National Parks. I always have a pass. I got to multiple parks a year. I LOVE them, and always viewed them as this unambiguously GOOD thing. Like, the best thing America has done. 

BUT, I just finished reading this book called “I am the Grand Canyon” all about the native Havasupai people and their fight to gain back their rights to the lands above the canyon rim. Historically, they spent the summer months farming in the canyon, and then the winter months hunter-gathering up above the rim. When their reservation was made though, they lost basically all rights to the rim land (They had limited grazing rights to some of it, but it was renewed year to year and always threatened, and it was a whole thing), leading to a century long fight to get it back. 

And in that book there are a couple of really poignant anecdotes- one man talks about how park rangers would come harass them if they tried to collect pinon nuts too close to park land- worried that they would take too many pinon nuts that the squirrels wanted. Despite the fact that the Havasupai had harvested pinon nuts for thousands and thousands of years without ever…like…starving the squirrels. 

There’s another anecdote of them seeing the park rangers hauling away the bodies of dozens of deer- killed in the park because of overpopulation- while the Havasupai had been banned from hunting. (Making them more and more reliant on government aid just to survive the winter months.) 

They talk about how they would traditionally carve out these natural cisterns above the rim to catch rainwater, and how all the animals benefitted from this, but it was difficult to maintain those cisterns when their “ownership” of the land was so disputed. 

So here you have examples of when people are forcibly separated from their ecosystem and how it hurts both those people and the ecosystem. 

And then when the Havasupai finally got legislation before Congress to give them ownership of the rim land back- their biggest opponent was the Parks system and the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club (a big conservation group here in the US) ran a huge smear campaign against these people on the belief that any humans owning this land other than the park system (which aims at conservation, even while developing for recreation) was unacceptable. 

And it all got me thinking about how, as much as I love the National Parks, there are times when its insistence that nature be left “untouched” (except, ya know, for recreation) can actually harm both the native people who have traditionally been part of those ecosystems AND potentially the ecosystems themselves. And I just think there’s a lot of nuance there about recognizing that there are ways for us to be in balance with nature, and that our environmentalism should respect that and push for sustainability over preserving “pristine” human-less landscapes. Removing ourselves from nature isn’t the answer. 

Me: minding my own damn business in the grocery store

One of my students and a few of his teammates enter the dairy aisle. 

My student is holding hands with one of his teammates. 

My student: Oh hey, Professor X!

Me, who has both my student and his girlfriend in my class: …Hello

My student, looking at his hand-holding partner: Oh! Don’t worry. My girlfriend knows. Not that I’m cheating! I’m not cheating. I’m not gay.

Hand Holding boy: Not that being gay is a bad thing! It’s a good thing!

My student: Right! But no, listen. We aren’t together, we just hold hands in public sometimes.

Hand Holding Boy: Especially on Friday nights. And weekends. And at away games.

My student: Because sometimes people will say shit and then we can punch them! And if the fight started because someone was being homophobic, coach won’t get mad at us.

but i was naïve. it's apparently about every positive experience. enjoying a meal? you're so lucky, children are starving. spending your day off cosy in bed? wow, so selfish, homeless people are freezing to death.