pineapple smells

Hey What's Up. I (enjoythat) write Stranger of Paradise fic. ★Keeper – read this one it has stuff in it ★Asking for More – click if gay sex ★Gravity – thesis on Jack subbing ★Coherence – gay sex (post-dlc2 edition) ★Mortification – quick 1600 words of intellectualism ★APTITUDE – evil gang 😈 ★Fed Animal – evil gang...? 🐺 ☆ ...& when I tag a thing sopffic, it means I'm Going On About this pastime, OR self-posting about SoP & want to categorize it but not put it in the main public tag. thank you.

★Comment on SoP fic + receive a comment on anything! Read more here.

★See fic from the Stranger of Paradise fanbook in this AO3 collection!

I go insane & write posts sometimes, too. ★About Sarah – I got mad at wikis & hosted a philosophical forum on my blog about it. read the reblogs + replies + stuff; they're cool ★The Jackstos Meal – self-explanatory (comes with cocktail recipe!)

Join the Stranger of Paradise community @@SOPFFO here ! I made it! You can be in it. You can ask questions and discuss scholarly topics and click on polls. React to stuff. Reblog art. All this and more... ☆ (You can also look at my intro post about it here if you want.)

Header text & inexplicable rat sentence are from Crowds by WHITE ASH. "lyrics" here (highly recommended) ☆ and, this post is TAGGED with SOME TAGS that I use, so that if you are on the APP, you can GO TO those tags, on my BLOG. WITHOUT FUCKIN AROUND A BUNCH. ...!!!!!

I can hear your objections mounting. That until this point, at least I'd been in the Fayetons' direct proximity. How could I have, even retroactively, achieved such intimate access to someone like Arun Patil? Simple divination strains credulity, and journalistic effort brands a fraud. Better chalk it up to delusions of grandeur—as if the difference between confidence and delusion hasn't generally been a little extra skin and muscle hanging between the legs. Women are always, on some level, unreliable narrators. Victims. But do not mistake my victimhood for weakness—this isn't like old times. There are advantages to victimhood, narratively, and I know how to take advantage of them. My unreliability frees me from any burden of proof. Consider that before Veblen there was George Eliot; before Girard, Flaubert. Remember every great novel is an unbelievable truth.

...so maybe this just reflects that i don't read much Literature Published Within The Past Ten Years, but this reminds me so distinctly of a style of post that was really popular in the play-by-post horse RPG scene of the 2000s

in which you'd open your post with some dramatic epigraph—like, "Having children makes you no more a parent than having a piano makes you a pianist," or whatever—and then you'd sort of riff in a free-association-y way thereafter, like—start with a description of the night sky, and then shift from the night sky to a vague meditation on the nature of sanity, and then link the sanity-meditation back to the character, and FINALLY get back to a backhanded callback to that epigraph, in a way dense with Reference and Vibe but otherwise kind of shallow, and like... this prose reads to me as the somewhat-more-sophisticated version of the horse RPG thing? but it's still the horse RPG thing? so i can't help but cringe?

(i actually dug through my files to see if i could find an example from an actual old horse RPG, but... those files are mysteriously missing, and i do not presently have access to The Dusty Attic In Kentucky Where A Bunch Of Those Posts Are Printed Out, woe. but hopefully someone here's familiar with the style?)

anyway idk. do readers get something out of this. it just seems so. airy and rootless

oh i am SO excited to make you into one of today's lucky 10,000 (brief primer on the 00s horse RPG scene under the cut)

In 2021, Swarovski (the company that makes the very sparkly crystals you see in certain jewelry, on figure-skaters' twinkliest outfits, on red carpet dresses), decided they didn't want the grubby fingers of small-time jewelers, clothing designers and costumers and crafters on their shiny beads and rhinestones anymore. They decided to limit their sales to "luxury" and couture creators, not girls who sell stuff on Etsy. The tenor of their press release on the subject was snide and insulting. Resellers (like your favorite bead shop) would no longer be allowed to carry their product; the average Jane on the street would not be able to purchase them. You could only get them if you had an authorized business agreement that bound you to very strict brand behavior. And those of us who still had good stock of the crystals would no longer be "permitted" to use the brand's name in our listings for sale.

Every bead shop and craft supply place and many, many small clothing makers--wedding shops, prom and dancing dress suppliers, the sort of salt of the Earth mom and pop time machines of shops that are the backbone of the field--scrambled to find something that could replace them. The last of the stock dwindled quickly, all of us grabbing what we could get while there was any chance of it, and then it was gone and we no longer had any access.

I was Big Pissed about it at the time. It was just so goddamn stuck-up, when wholesalers and indie jewelers had made them so much money, when some people I knew--when *I!*--had been brand-loyal for decades. But with no recourse, everyone pivoted fairly quickly, most of us to Preciosa Crystals. Those are Czech, quite sparkly, and considerably less expensive than Swarovski. The faceting method they use is different, but not worse; any differences are hardly noticeable when you're seeing them as a hundred pinpoints of light.

Well, out of nowhere, Swarovski just dropped this: https://www.harmanbeads.com/swarovski-brand-policy-update

"Effective June 1, 2026, Swarovski updated the distribution and brand usage policies introduced in 2021. Businesses may now purchase Swarovski Crystals without signing a Brand Control Agreement, and Authorized Distribution Partners may once again sell Swarovski Crystals to resellers, including bead stores and online retailers. Businesses may also use the Swarovski brand name when following Swarovski’s Proper Use Guidelines. Designers, manufacturers, artists, brands, retailers, and resellers are now eligible to purchase Swarovski Crystals through authorized distribution channels."

They want us back. A lot of the companies who could have kept a brand relationship with them also have swapped to Preciosa, over the last half-decade, in solidarity with indie creators and out of a sour awareness that it could be them, next. And it doesn't hurt that Preciosa was able to expand their line quite a bit now that everyone who wanted sparkle had no choice but to go to them.

And I'm not seeing nearly anyone who intends to return. The feeling is, "Y'all told us to fuck off! Off we fucked! And now, that's what you can do, too!" I'm seeing a lot of "How many of us did you stab in the back?" comments from the people whose money they're hoping to attract.

"For decades, wolf researchers believed ravens followed wolf packs to find food. Every biologist who flew aerial surveys over Yellowstone saw the same thing.

Wolves moving across the snow with ravens overhead, black shapes trailing the pack like a shadow with wings. The assumption was simple. The ravens were following the wolves. The wolves would kill. The ravens would eat. A study published in March 2026 using GPS transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens in Yellowstone proved the assumption wrong.

The ravens were not following the wolves. They were remembering where kills had happened before and flying over those locations looking for new carcasses. The relationship between the two species is real. The mechanism is not what anyone thought it was.

Bernd Heinrich, a University of Vermont biologist who spent years studying ravens in Maine and Yellowstone, first documented the scale of the association. His data showed ravens present near wolf packs 99.7 percent of the time during winter in Yellowstone. Not occasionally. Not frequently. Essentially always. On Isle Royale, researcher John Vucetich observed the same pattern from the air.

Every wolf pack had ravens with it. The birds were just always there.

The numbers at kill sites are staggering. The average number of ravens documented at a Yellowstone wolf kill is thirty. The maximum recorded at a single carcass is 135.

A wolf pack brings down an elk in the Lamar Valley, and within hours over a hundred ravens have materialized from across the drainage to feed. They do not wait politely. They land on the carcass while the wolves are still eating. They grab chunks of meat and cache them in the snow and in tree crotches for later retrieval. Research estimates that ravens can consume up to forty percent of a carcass, which means a wolf pack that kills a seven-hundred-pound elk may lose nearly three hundred pounds of it to birds.

That loss is so significant that one study proposed a theory that reshapes how we think about wolf pack size entirely. If a pair of wolves can take down an elk, why do wolves hunt in packs of four, six, eight, or more? The per-capita meat return decreases with every additional mouth. A pair gets the most meat per wolf. The answer may be ravens. Two wolves cannot eat fast enough to outpace a hundred ravens stripping the carcass simultaneously. A larger pack can post guards, feed in shifts, and physically dominate the carcass long enough to retain a greater share of the kill. Wolves may hunt in packs not because they need more teeth to bring down prey, but because they need more bodies to defend the kill from birds.

The ravens pay for their meals. Heinrich documented in his book Mind of the Raven that ravens serve as an early warning system at kill sites. Ravens are more vigilant than wolves. They perch in trees overlooking the carcass and scan the horizon in every direction. When a grizzly bear approaches, or a rival wolf pack, or a mountain lion, the ravens see it first. Their alarm calls alert the feeding wolves to the incoming threat before the wolves' own senses detect it. The wolves get airborne sentries. The ravens get an animal with the jaw strength to open a frozen elk carcass that no raven beak can penetrate.

That is the core of the mutualism. The raven cannot open the hide. The wolf can. The wolf cannot see a threat approaching from a mile away while its head is buried in a rib cage. The raven can. Each species fills a gap in the other's capability, and the result is a partnership so consistent that L. David Mech, the most published wolf researcher in the world, wrote that each creature is rewarded in some way by the presence of the other and that each is fully aware of the other's capabilities.

The play behavior is the part that makes biologists uncomfortable because it implies something beyond transactional mutualism. Wolves and ravens play together. Not at kill sites. Not during feeding. During downtime. Yellowstone observers have documented ravens diving at resting wolves, pulling their tails, and flying away. Wolf pups chase ravens across meadows. Ravens steal sticks from pups and hold them just out of reach. The interactions look like the cross-species equivalent of two bored kids messing with each other because there is nothing else to do.

Doug Smith, the retired lead biologist of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, had watched this relationship from the air for decades. Wolf researchers have believed forever that ravens follow wolves, he wrote after the 2026 study was published. Every wolf researcher has seen it. I have seen it routinely from the plane while wolves are chasing an elk in Yellowstone Park, numerous times. Ravens are just always there. This is an age-old observation. But it has never been rigorously tested until now.

The 2026 study, which used 2.5 years of GPS data from transmitters on wolves, cougars, and ravens simultaneously, revealed that ravens were not tracking wolf movements in real time. They were patrolling known kill sites. A raven that fed at a wolf kill in a specific drainage in November would return to that drainage repeatedly over the following weeks and months, flying over the exact location where the carcass had been, checking whether a new kill had appeared. The ravens were not following the wolves. They were following the memory of where wolves had killed before.

That distinction matters because it changes the raven from a passive follower into an active strategist. A bird that follows a wolf pack is reacting. A bird that memorizes kill locations across an entire landscape and patrols them systematically is planning. The raven is not tagging along. It is running a surveillance network across hundreds of square miles of Yellowstone, checking sites where food has appeared before, and showing up fast enough when it appears again that every observer since the 1995 reintroduction assumed it had been following the wolves the whole time.

The wolf and the raven share almost identical geographic range across the Northern Hemisphere. Everywhere wolves live, ravens live. The association is not a Yellowstone novelty. It is a continental relationship between two of the most intelligent species in North American wildlife, running continuously across boreal forest, tundra, mountain, and prairie, built on meat, memory, and a mutual awareness that neither species has ever needed to be taught."