no. 1 goose barnacle fan

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

(Source) August 2nd, 2026.

Neuse River Waterdog (Necturus lewisi), family Proteidae, found in eastern North Carolina, USA 

Neotenic (retaining aquatic larval traits into adulthood) salamander.

plsn is an abolitionist volunteer org whose primary service is reference, so answering questions and providing resource access to people inside, and you can volunteer to either be a part of processing their incoming/outgoing mail or otherwise to actually help answer the reference questions, which is what i've been doing. you don't have to be a librarian to volunteer; they will teach you how to do reference and there are templates and faqs to help you every step of the way. plsn is based in new york but they answer mail from facilities all over the country, and you can participate remotely + asynchronously even if you live elsewhere or outside the u.s. it's also a low time commitment - they ask you to answer at least 4 letters per year, though of course you can do as many as you want - the only time-sensitive part is that once you claim a letter, they ask you to answer it within 5 days.

it's an opt-in system where you to choose the letters you'd like to answer and you're never required to answer a letter that you don't want to; i would say based on my experience so far that there is a particular need for volunteers who are interested in helping letter writers access erotica; people frequently write in requesting written erotica, photos of celebrities, pornstars, and cartoon characters, etc. and volunteers' job is to provide that while keeping within whatever specific facility guidelines apply so that the resources can actually make it back into prison without being rejected by censors. there are also so many letters about different games and gaming systems, especially magic the gathering; i had no idea how many people inside are playing magic the gathering! plus tons of requests for different books and articles either in part or in whole, so it is also a lot of straight resource acquisition.

Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so I’m snowed under atm ☠️

So there’s a lot of talk about Tolkien being ‘of his time and class’ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. ‘Of his time’ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isn’t applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ‘norms of his time’ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to ‘what Tolkien said’ rather than ‘what was actually happening then’.

Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the “the fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his time” line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.

I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.

since ive been asked a few times i shall make a dedicated post about it regarding putting gills on a human/humanoid there are two types of setups bony fish have 1 gill opening, sharks have multiple gills in blue here

for gills on a humanoid to be realistic they need to be between the neck muscles and the hyoid muscles, like in real fish the red are the beck muscles, green are throat muscles, and blue are areas you could feasibly put gills! using shark here as they take up more space

instead of gill musculature bony fish have a large bony shield called an operculum covering their gills, but the principle remains the same gills are between the back muscles and the throat muscles, though with bony fish you can make the covering just fleshy if you want

here is it all together again as the two main muscles the cucullaris evolve into present in humans are the trapezius and sternocleidomastoid so show how this muscles evolved in sharks its this trapezius-like structure but in bony fish since the shoulder bones are connected to the skull the cucullaris helps move that joint!

this muscle has roots in out placoderm ancestors and can be seen in placoderms like dunkleosteus! here this paper

in placoderms it also helps articulate the head and shoulder bones

“Dick Schwartz [founder of IFS] started calling them ‘critters’ a long time ago,” Falconer tells me. “They had a staff meeting at one point, and changed the name to Unattached Burdens, because it makes it sound a little more academically acceptable. This idea is like the third rail, and Dick’s terrified it’s going to destroy the reputation of IFS. But I thought it was so important that I wouldn’t shut up about it. It led to me being exiled from the IFS community for a while. Finally [Schwartz] came around and wrote the foreword to my book, and now they’re talking about it in Level 1 training.” [...] A core IFS dogma is “there are no bad parts.” But it turns out this is not entirely true. There are some parts that are not part of your Self. On the positive side, there are the “guides,” or angelic beings. And there are Unattached Burdens, UBs, or what are traditionally known as “djinns” or “demons.” As Falconer said, UBs have been a bit of an IFS secret, only taught in Level 3 training until recently. But a year ago, he published his book about UBs, with a foreword by Dick Schwartz and praise from other leading IFS therapists. This book has been pretty influential in IFS, underground psychedelic culture (where Falconer is active), and the wider New Age / spiritual culture. (He was interviewed on the Emerge podcast and the Stoa has launched a talk series dedicated to the topic.) Demonic entities are having a moment. 

article

reportedly, many IFS therapists are now routinely informing patients that they are possessed by demons lol

Here’s another client who emailed me: “I’ve been seeing my psychologist who specializes in trauma therapy for about 10 months now. I made it clear that I was not interested in anything spiritual because I had a lot of that pressed on me, and I wanted to set my boundaries…After our meeting on Tuesday, when I discussed a very frightening embodiment of what I would call the abyss, or death, which I felt had its sights set on me….she told me she thought I had an unattached burden. At first, I was interested, thinking it was some kind of trauma thing, and then my heart sank. And then I got really pissed off. I have suffered from delusions in the past, she knows that. I have experienced psychosis in the past. I have been expressing very suicidal thoughts, and I’m in one of the most vulnerable times of my life, certainly of my adult life. I feel disrespected, but more than anything, I feel, honestly, it’s kind of disgusted with the fact that she could say something so irresponsible to somebody in my situation.” IFS therapists can dismiss all these examples as “bad IFS,” but it seems there is clearly a risk of IFS therapists and coaches suggesting or imposing the idea of a UB, and clients finding it harmful — even more so if they’re working with clients taking psychedelics, which amplify suggestibility. In his book, one observer even tells Falconer it looks like he’s making hypnotic suggestions: “Participant 1: [Falconer], it seems like you implanted a lot of little suggestions, almost like a hypnotist. Falconer: Well, there is a general principle here. These things are often full of pride, and you can use their pride to manipulate them. “ In other words, Falconer thinks he is hypnotically manipulating the UB rather than the client… I emailed the IFS Institute to ask if they wanted to comment on these issues, but didn’t hear back.

[...]“the current expansion of IFS across psychotherapy and social media has moved beyond its evidence base.” The authors note that the existing research on IFS excludes people with psychotic symptoms, even as they warn, based on their own observations in clinical settings, of the “overapplication” of IFS to people with such symptoms: “Our concern is that encouraging splitting of the self into parts for those who struggle with reality testing might be disorganizing.”

Yeah. No shit it might be "disorganizing".

Another cultural influence has been the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score, which attempts to make the case that trauma can fundamentally reshape the body and the brain. Published in 2014, it found a new wave of readers during the pandemic and has been on the New York Times bestseller list in the paperback nonfiction category for more than 334 weeks. Notably, van der Kolk effectively gives IFS his blessing in a chapter on the theory. “We all have parts,” he writes, adding, in words that could have been penned by Schwartz himself, that “a part is considered not just a passing emotional state or customary thought pattern, but a distinct mental system with its own history, abilities, needs, and worldview.” Several years later, van der Kolk went a step farther in a blurb he wrote for No Bad Parts: “IFS is one of the cornerstones of effective and lasting trauma therapy.”

I was wondering when that motherfucker was going to show up. Reminder that Van der Kolk is a satanic panic believing weirdo who harassed his colleagues to the point of losing his job and is wrong about pretty much everything.

I was not originally invited to speak, but heard last minute that someone else had fallen ill and was giving up their slot, and begged white organizers through the grape vine to let me speak as a Salvadoran migrant and union steward who came to the US at age 7.

I have long been soured of going to so many rallies and felt alienated that they were allegedly for or about my people, but that no one had thought people /like/ me exist - we are still here! There are migrants in your work spaces and neighborhoods and organizations, we have stories and labor songs and speeches to share, we are marxists and labor organizers and have reasons to speak out too.

But seldom if ever do you hear our music or faces or voices near the banners. Instead of Tigres Del Norte we heard Bella Ciao, and none of the singers knew the Italian words or bothered to even translate them, so they sang nanananananana, instead of the powerful lyrics that maybe meant something once to someone somewhere. Instead of Somos Más Americanos we heard Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

Instead of a Salvadoran woman who wanted to speak to the American union workers about the Banana workers unions, we heard from a dozen white people about democracy, and justice, and the constitution, and no one was warned about what would happen if they marched down the street from the park to the ICE facility. They fully expected everyone to come back and complete the second half of the rally.

Instead, marchers with their dogs and children were tear-gassed to hell and back the second they dared get close to the facility, maybe at best 1/3rd of the marchers returned while the rest were bottlenecked towards ICE. There was little to no water to treat the untrained protestors. I returned to the rally quickly realizing I could not get caught up at ICE, knowing who I am and what awaits me.

When I got back a chorus of smiling white faces sang a silly song like a Christmas carol with their heads bobbling, reading the lyrics from some handed out papers. White people with upside down flags cheered. Then a black woman in overalls abruptly got on the mic and said “Well thank you everyone but we have to close the program early because people are getting tear-gassed, please get home to safety righty away,” - and I swore I couldn’t believe my ears.

They had brought us all here, marched all these people down to the ICE facility, and expected us all to march back without encountering teargas? And then when some people had made it back they had them sing a little jingle but turned the one migrant away? I begged them to let me speak for the three minutes I had allotted, noting that I had put myself in serious danger to come out here today. That I needed to be heard just this once, and that all the white people had their fair turn to say many unrelated things, and to sing many unrelated songs.

She said, “you don’t understand, there are children down here,” and I had to say “you don’t understand, there are children in the camps.”

And she tried again, “yes but the gas is spreading,” and I said “yes we have been down here being gassed for six months, don’t you understand?”

She blinked twice and told me they just had to break down. I watched from the sidelines as they continued to blare Caribbean Blue and smooth jazz while people filtered out, stood around talking, chatting - finally I said, “please let me speak, you still have speakers going, it’s been 20 minutes,” and the DJ, a white elderly man in a sweater vest who had a strict “only the classics” policy that seems to actually mean “no hip hop and no curse words,” - barked at me that he had to break down and to help him take down his canopy. I am no maid, so I did not listen. He then turned to my comrades and told them to take his canopy down, which they did not. Then turned to his two other labor organizers who were not paying attention, and they took a leg of the canopy and moved it somewhere without breaking it down.

And one looked at me and said quietly, “it’s okay, take that bullhorn no one will notice,” and we took it and ran.

And we ran to a firetruck which I climbed, and I gave the speech, which was in fact more than 3 minutes, sorry not sorry, to a crowd of workers who were slowly pouring out from the ice facility, some stopping, some going, some who heard me, some who didn’t. And I gave it there and it was the only speech most of these people will ever hear from a migrant in all of this, and I think that is tragic. But I firmly believe that had I not given it, had I not climbed the truck, had I not taken the mic, some people would have never heard this story at all. And I think very much you should hear it. And I hope you will share it, if you have the chance. And I hope I get to tell it again, someday, to people who actually listen, to the masses who came to actually support immigrants, and not just to the dredges after they’ve been gassed and are running for shelter while I’m coughing myself.

This is what I had to say.

Olivia: I came to the United States when I was 7 years old. And I became a citizen when I was 20. But I am on this stage to ask: if you will give me 3 minutes of your time, *cough* I will give you 300 years of American History that has been taken from you.

There are five crops that changed the world as we know it. Bananas. Coffee. Tobacco. Sugar. And Cotton.

First grown by slaves in the New World, these crops all happened to also grow in a little bean-shaped country that my parents lived in near the Caribbean called Cuzcatlan, ‘The Land of Precious Things.’ It would be renamed El Salvador in the 1800’s. 

But the precious things remained after the name changed. And the people were captured, and they were forced to work for pennies on the dollar to dredge the precious things from the soil, and the sea, and the mountains, and the sand. Cuzcatlan was not precious just to us, you see. It was coveted by the Americans. And once they saw our jewels, they would never be satisfied again. 

The people suffered. And how we suffered! Dying in the fields, raped by their masters, buried in the shining black volcanic sands, their blood fertilizing the crops.

Of Bananas. Coffee. Sugar. Cotton. And Tobacco.

Until one day, the people of Cuzcatlan said, ‘We can bear it no more.’ And they broke their shovels in half, and they plunged the stems into their masters, and they rode through the streets on their masters’ Spanish horses, and they cried out that Cuzcatlan would no longer belong to the American companies that demanded their precious things without paying precious prices. Perhaps, soon, those business leaders would learn to negotiate for the labor and crops they so needed.

And the Americans? The Americans could not stand it! They would not abide such a story be told. And so you never heard it! The American companies, and all of their corporate masters came down on Cuzcatlan, with a fury seldom seen before. They killed everyone.

Instead, you heard a story about “Communists” and “Terrorists” in Central America, spreading a disease that would destroy your country and families. You heard a story that we have no good will towards you. That we wanted you to starve, that we were lazy, and formed gangs, and were lawless, and wore weapons to sell you drugs and fund terrorism. 

But you never heard the story of Cuzcatlan, because it was a sad story, and sad stories do not sell fruit, and coffee, and cigarettes!

No, they came to my country, and they wiped out entire villages. The Archbishop, Don Remar - er, Don Romero, himself, was shot by the military during his Sunday Mass, for having dared to wonder whether the workers deserved some mercy. Assassinated for having dared to wonder, and he was left bleeding on the pulpit, even as worshippers bowed their heads. 

EVERYBODY was KILLED. 

EVERYBODY! The women, with their children still in their arms. Anyone looking for cover; people who found cover, people who didn’t. People who worked, and people who had no jobs. Communists. Catholics. Those who didn’t know how to read, those who didn’t know what labor rights were. Simple folks. Smart folks. 

And they didn’t stop there. They went through the countryside, and they killed everyone they thought was hiding labor organizers or communists sympathizers. Banana union men and women, who they labeled terrorists. And in one village, we still only speak about in whispers, called “El Mozote.” The Americans tied women and children to trees, and they threw their babies in the air, and they shot them. Everyone was killed, to send one message, and that is: “A union is a threat to the American Empire. Not one union man or woman will hide in your village, or any other. And if you hid one here, now or ever, you will never breathe to hide one again."

And I tell you this because I am you from the future. You and I, all of you, are very much alike. You worked very hard to buy the precious things you have from the ground, the sky, the water, and the aether. You all wrote stories, you filed insurance policies, you taught children, you rung people up, you made sure whatever sorry system they had worked, not because you believed in it, not because you wanted it, but because it was all you could do. 

And in exchange, they offered you cheap bananas. Coffee. Sugar. Tobacco. Bananas.

But I will tell you a secret. They were never cheap. They were precious. And so are you. 

And they stole you, and they stole us, and they stole it all, and they told you: if you look the other way, you get to be satisfied and at least well-fed. But who can afford the luxuries of cigarettes or vapes or groceries anymore? Even that is being taken from you. And even if you have them, your food or your small pleasures won’t satisfy you. Not more than knowing the truth about Cuzcatlan, not more than knowing the truth about El Salvador. Today, where our precious land once stood, they built a concentration camp called CECOT. And not just for our precious things, our people, but yours. Your citizens, your dissenters, your unwanted disappeared into the hole that America built. 

And what will we do when they start building incinerators at the camps? What will you do when they open up mass graves? 

For our people, the most precious gift of all: do not take my warning lightly. The story of Cuzcatlan is not just from the past. It is from the future. The workers face the same enemy, and the enemy never had your interest in mind. From the moment they had you, the plan was to have a worker. From the moment you existed, it was to create another soldier against the people of Cuzcatlan and the rest of the world. You were a commodity to them. 

But we have written you a new future. One in which we no longer point guns at each other. One in which our billionaires fear the land of precious people from learning they are no longer precious things. 

Turn to me now! And tell me you will not forget the last three minutes. You will never again be ignorant of this story. And you will not let it happen here. You will close the camps. You will destroy ICE.

Spectator: Yeah! Olivia: You would rather have seasonal bananas or never see one again than have it covered in blood. 

Spectators: That’s right! Yeah! 

Olivia: You would rather trade fairly with other union workers than kill your fellow man, wouldn’t you? 

Spectators: Yes! Olivia: Tell me you love me, and that our fates are tied! Tell me you’ll stop them from dragging me down from this place, and I’ll never let them do to you what they did to us. I promise. El pueblo unido…

Spectator: JAMÀS SERÀ VENCIDO!

Olivia: Nunca será vencido. Amen.

I know I stuttered a bit, as I had just been gassed, as it took place not but 400 feet maybe from the Portland ICE facility.

One correction among many tiny ones:

“You worked very hard to /ply/ the precious things you have from the ground, the sky, the water, and the aether.” - And that work, it is very precious.

Happy snow sausage

opening paragraphs of all time

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Cara Gee as Camina Drummer in The Expanse -> Season 3