In real

You all know how big a rabbit is.  Jack Rabbits and hares are much bigger. they’re the size of large cats or small dogs or just-walking-age children.

They also like to hang out in gangs of a hlf dozen to over 30.

and in the middle of backcountry dirt roads.

perhaps they’re dustbathing

or blood sacrifce

I don’t know because when you come up the road at night because your dog has a tiny bladder and needs to go out at midnight and you have no yard so you’re walking him on the dirt road around your neighborhod because you might aw well get some stargazing in, and you come just over the ridge to see a coven of twenty jackrabbits in the middle of the road

and

they

all

stand

up

not just onto all fours like a proper prey animal

No they get up on thier hind legs and don’t just sit but STAND like tiny rabbit-skinned toddlers, wobbing slightly as they stare directly at you eyes shining in your flashlight’s glow

…Blood Red.

And a chill goes through you on that warm july night because while they’re a puntable size and allegedly herbivores they’re standing and watching you just like people and you are vastly outnumbered.

everyone freezes

you’re considering your odds aganst roughly 200lbs of Suspiciously Humanoid Hare

and they’re considering their odds against you

the only sound in the never-ending high desert wind 

somewhere in your peripheral vision you can see the streetlights but they seem awfully far away

The nearest Jack Rabbit

Blinks

and takes a single shuffling step

forward

You area an overdevloped monkey and your prefrontal cortex is capable of some amazing feats but it runs very slowly compared to the reflexes of a rabbit and you’re frozen as you desperately scramble for the appropriate course of action, hands feeling thick and useless, mouth dry and feet imeasurably heavy there’s no way you’d outrun THESE, god there’s a rabies outbreak going around that shit’s not curable-

The Dog

L U N G E S

It’s only the briefest of movements but the animal you’d picked out for his gangly legs and floppy ears and goofy smile is suddenly a dark shape of muscle and teeth and had flung himself at the horrible goblin rabbits faster than mere physics should dictate, appearing in the circle of the flashlight for only the briefest of moments before the jolt from the leash makes you stumble and the light falters

The Jack Rabbits

Scatter

Vanishing into the faintly starlit sagebrush in as so many faint gray shapes that might be mistaken for the dustclouds they kick up

Later, you sit on the couch disquieted

and you wonder

If the sight of the Jack Rabbits standing and studying you was frightening enough to make you yearn for the safety of the yellowed streetlights

what must it be like from thier end?

what terrifying creature 

deliberately ties itself

to something so horrible

CONGRATULATE, THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I WAS GOING FOR.

The Creative Act of Listening to a Talking Frog

Art of Arthur Lester by @bohemobones on instagram

FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.

So what REALLY got me was how Google was NOT trying to show me anything when I went to look this up. Why y'all don't want me to see all the "fun" everyone's having?? I wanna see the "destressing" everyone's getting!

and in Spanish speaking circles online they sharing gore pictures of dead African babies in online chats so much it has a label named “BND”? Another Black teen was murdered recently by an Asian American store owner convinced he was stealing despite putting items back. He shot him in the back.

yall dont deserve nothing from Black people in any part of the diaspora, irdc. this shit makes me so angry but the demands for an expectation of actionable organizing and dismantling of the white supremacist project that is the US is laid at our collective feet and no one else’s is so crazy to me. how are Black ppl supposed to generate trust for nonblack ppl that hasn’t been demonstrated in a sustained, recent, manner, without us having to force the rest of the world to see us?

Idpol is divisive until it’s time to self adopt the moniker of the Global South and that often doesn’t include & backseats Black African exploitation/extraction. it’s hella transparent how nonblack leftists only mention Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. as afterthoughts to their awareness and solidarity posts focusing on Palestine but feel entitled to call Black leftists “zog slaves” for not making dedicated media to the issue they feel the most important, regardless if to these Black leftists making Black issues their focus and niche.

I do too. But it lives its whole life. So you have to take it seriously eventually, right? And be respectful and shit.

and in Spanish speaking circles online they sharing gore pictures of dead African babies in online chats so much it has a label named “BND”? Another Black teen was murdered recently by an Asian American store owner convinced he was stealing despite putting items back. He shot him in the back.

yall dont deserve nothing from Black people in any part of the diaspora, irdc. this shit makes me so angry but the demands for an expectation of actionable organizing and dismantling of the white supremacist project that is the US is laid at our collective feet and no one else’s is so crazy to me. how are Black ppl supposed to generate trust for nonblack ppl that hasn’t been demonstrated in a sustained, recent, manner, without us having to force the rest of the world to see us?

Idpol is divisive until it’s time to self adopt the moniker of the Global South and that often doesn’t include & backseats Black African exploitation/extraction. it’s hella transparent how nonblack leftists only mention Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. as afterthoughts to their awareness and solidarity posts focusing on Palestine but feel entitled to call Black leftists “zog slaves” for not making dedicated media to the issue they feel the most important, regardless if to these Black leftists making Black issues their focus and niche.

that's right

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.