Squidling Farseeker

My problem is that they look like duck-faced beavers, so I expect them to *be* the size of beavers.

I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book

Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.

Book binding? In there.

Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.

Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.

Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.

king arthur was welsh. merlin was welsh. camelot was in wales. the lady and the lake she pops out of; welsh. excalibur; magic inanimate welsh object. etc.

on the way to see family, i drive past a lake that in which is welsh legend, is the last resting place of excalibur.

Arthur is a Welsh name. It means ‘bear’. He’s likely derived from a Gaulish bear god

In the form of King Arthur, he is an anti-Saxon mythological WELSH figure, representing the native Brythonic people of Britain against the Anglo-Saxon invaders, dating from the 500s AD

The version appropriated by the English in the 1100s is the shitty boring sanitised version - they did it because they were trying to compete with the romance tradition on the continent at the time but didn’t have anything of their own to romanticise

Merlin is called Myrddin

Percival is Peredur

Kay is Cei, and also was subject to enormous character assassination in the English version - in the Welsh version he’s much closer to Arthur’s right hand man

Guinevere is Gwenhwyfar

There is no Lancelot, no Galahad, no tedious affair story

There is no Camelot. Arthur’s seat was Caerllion - modern Caerleon, putting him into both the region of the Silures (one of the most fearsome and warlike of the British tribes, modern South East Wales) and the old Roman fortress, which would have been an impossibly huge Palace for a warlord at the time.

They all have super powers and get up to wacky hijinks involving hair care, giants, strange giant wildlife, spectral revolving/glass fortresses in the Celtic sea, and a really fucking weird chess match. Also a cloak made out of beards.

What the fuck is the round table

They've both adapted their way of speaking for each other.

Rocky dumbs down his speech a lot for Grace to be able to understand him at the start (but by the end of both the book/movie he is fluent enough for Rocky to not need to do that anymore). And Grace also simplifies his speech though not as much as Rocky does... like:

- "Yes. Old technology. Very old." - "Light difference is very very small. Need human eyes to detect. Angle is good."

or

Rocky - "No work. We die."

Grace - "Why no work?"

For the first good chunck of meeting they kinda create their own little pseudo-version of english (Cause Rocky finds it easier to adapt to Grace rather than the other way around) Rocky even taking on a bit of english's grammar/sentence when it isn't the same as Eridian's sentence structure. And Grace simplifies his words while they build a vocabulary, and in times where he want to make sure he is being clear. Also they've taken mannerisms from each other's culture.

Felt like drawing something simple tonight.

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From traveling companions…  

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to something……

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And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.