Highway to Hel

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

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Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)

(someone asked about the full version of this, so here u go)

“Wait,” says Sam, “you had a publicist?”

“For my first five months at S.H.I.E.L.D,” says Steve. “Then she quit. Uh, decisively.”

“Well yeah, she had to keep you in line,” Bucky says with a half-smirk. “How many times did you make that poor lady want to sock you in the face?”

“Lost count,” Steve admits. “I did offer to let her, once. Seemed fair.”

Sam laughs. “I feel like you’re sitting on a story here.”

“There’s no story,” Steve tells him. Sam raises his eyebrows. Bucky’s half-smirk tilts towards a full smirk. “Seriously,” Steve repeats, “no story.”

Interlude: The Story of Steve “Walking PR Nightmare” Rogers, and How For a Short While He Single-Handedly Destroyed the Emotional Health of Eva Laura Ortiz, His Now Ex-Publicist

Ok, so, I'm going to do some GENERALIZATIONS about mythology and folklore here, and in my experience when you make a GENERALIZATION about mythology and folklore there is always some PEDANTIC SHITHEAD who tries to treat it as though you made a UNANIMOUSLY TRUE STATEMENT ABOUT THE ENTIRE BREADTH OF MYTHOLOGY AND FOLKLORE IN ALL CULTURES AT ONCE, and then tries to "Um, actually!" you with one obscure counter-example so they can get that sweet endorphin rush of feeling smarter than someone else on the internet. It is also one of my biggest pet peeves when someone does that, so I'm typing this paragraph to preemptively tell anyone who does that to this post that I am personally sending a demon from hell to eat your toenails tonight. As soon as you sleep he's going to slip his clammy fingers under your sheets, tenderly caress your feet, envelop one toe at a time with his grimy mouth, and slowly suck the nails off your toes. And they'll never grow back, either.

Ok, now to actually answer this question. The Wolf Man popularized what is currently the most popular take on werewolves - namely, that a werewolf is a person who involuntarily transforms into a wolf (either a normal wolf, a wolf/human hybrid, or a monstrous wolf beast) based on some sort of stimulus/trigger, such as the full moon or excessive emotional turmoil. By day they're a normal person, by night they're a ravenous beast.

While there are examples of this take on werewolves appearing in fiction before The Wolf Man came out (The Werewolf of London is a werewolf movie with the same rough premise that came out about a decade before), they were by no means the most popular/dominant take on the monster. There are, of course, dozens if not hundreds of variations on the werewolf concept in mythology and folklore (like that one that went memetic on here a while back, the Wulver, who turns into a wolf-headed man at night that gives people anonymous gifts of free fish), but GENERALLY SPEAKING, two were the most common: the Garwolf, and the Bisclavret.

(I am using these terms because when I first heard this distinction articulated at an academic conference, those are the two terms the speaker used, so don't come at me with the "Um, actually, that only refers to one specific story" bullshit or some other pedantic nitpicky criteria).

The Garwolf is the most common take on a malevolent werewolf in literature, and is explicitly a witch who transforms into a wolf in order to commit violence more easily. The witch does so by wearing a belt or cape of wolfskin, or by spreading a special salve on their body - either way, these transformation trinkets are generally provided by The Devil or some other evil spirit. The Garwolf is conscious of their actions while in wolf form, a murderer who commits their crimes in beast form both to hide their identity and to increase the gruesome spectacle of their kills.

The Bisclavret is the most common benign take on werewolves in literature, being a person who, for reasons that often aren't explained, has to transform into a wolf routinely. To do so, they take off their clothes, and they can't transform back into a human without first getting back into said clothes. The two main Bisclavret stories I know - Marie de France's "The Bisclavret" and the Arthurian tale of King Gorlagon - concern bisclavret werewolves whose wives discover their secrets, steal their clothes, and leave them trapped in wolf form. In both tales, the bisclavret is discovered by a king while hunting, and the king takes note that while the bisclavret may be a wolf, it acts more tame and intelligent than any trained hunting dog, and quickly adopts them as a loyal pet. In time the wife of the bisclavret goes to visit the king/noble at court, at which point the bisclavret acts predatory for the first time ever, snarling and biting at her. Realizing there must be some reason for it, the king/noble uncovers the truth, returns the clothes to the bisclavret, and punishes the unfaithful wife. What we take away from this is that a bisclavret werewolf is still human in mind while in wolf form, transforms reluctantly/against their will, and wishes to be purely human (or at least not lose humanity while in wolf form).

The Wolf Man essentially combines these two modes of folkloric/literary werewolves into one, giving us a human who is reluctant to transform because their wolf self is a vicious, dangerous monster. Like the Garwolf, they are a terror and a blight upon the world, but like the Bisclavret, their transformation is not by choice and they are trying to keep their humanity despite it. What The Wolf Man adds is the lack of conscious control in wolf form - there is no human intelligence behind the modern werewolf's actions, just a vicious, malevolent beast bent on killing as much as possible. It's a take that combines the dramatic elements inherent to the two main folkloric werewolves and heightens it by mixing them together with an extra new ingredient, and the result is incredibly compelling - I think there's a reason this mode of Werewolf story became the dominant one, to the point where werewolves who work differently than The Wolf Man feel like they're subversive and new even if they're explicitly in the older mode.

And he's got a point - firstly, for some time Mr. Hyde was just as famous, perhaps even moreso, as Dracula and Frankenstein. Jack the Ripper was called "a real life Mr. Hyde" by newspapers, the stage show based on the play got adapted several times, he had a movie in the 30s around the same time as Drac and Frankenstein (though it was done by MGM rather than Universal) which in turn got remade in the 40's with big movie star Spencer Tracy in the starring role(s). Mr. Hyde may feel slightly more obscure now because he's not part of the branding that the Universal Monsters got, but he was a big deal.

But you know who usurped his place? The fucking Wolf Man. One could argue The Wolf Man has more in common with The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than any pre-existing werewolf story, and it certainly shares the dramatic crux of the novel where a good(ish) man unwillingly turns into a depraved, murderous monster while everyone else is left in the dark about what's actually going on, though The Wolf Man adds the wrinkle of Larry Talbot actually trying to tell people, unlike Jekyll, who tries to keep it a secret - and the fact that Larry tries to warn people only for them to refuse to believe him is, in my opinion, what gives The Wolf Man is special sauce, because the horror of knowing you're responsible for murdering people and that you can't be stopped because no one believes you is so goddamn maddening, and few horror stories, including the wolf man's descendants (and even its goddamn remake) ever bother to include it despite how potent a plot element it is.

For years I’ve been fascinated by accounts of people encountering bipedal canine cryptids, and at the forefront of the study of these cryptids is a woman named Linda S. Godfrey. She’s written multiple books about all sorts of strange creatures, with a focus on anomalous canids, with her work mostly covering peoples accounts of what they say they saw. She’s been doing this for years, and over the course of her interviews she’s discovered that there’s a specific segment of people who claim that the creature they saw is basically the spitting image of the 1941 wolf man, with some slight variations; in particular, there’s a tendency to see the creature as wearing a plaid shirt, which wasn’t in the original movie but seems to have culturally drifted/mandela affected its way into the image of the werewolf. It’s a distinctive enough characterization that Godfrey basically states that when she gets accounts like that, while she doesn’t outright disbelieve people, she tends to err on the narrator being affected by the cultural imagery around werewolves in some way that skewed their perception.

And, like, the normal episode formula for this show so far has been “Some new normie meets the Addams family with some sort of ulterior motive, gets freaked out, and eventually abandons their schemes out of fear.”  But while the episode began in that direction, the greaser actually starts to like the family because, you know, they accept him for who he is.

It turns out his dad is trying to track him down and make him conform to societal standards, and the Addamses, not knowing this, invite the dad over for a birthday party they’re throwing for the kid.  And though the dad is also initially put off by the Adams family, he sees how his son loves them because they loved him unconditionally, and is shamed into opening his mind towards his son.

but apparently this photo is fake which is an enormous burst of relief to my already fragile, suddering psyche.

sadly though THIS photo of a barrel jellfish is real

Some of my favorite jellyfish (sorry if I go on a tanget and vear off jellyfish)

are the Stygiomedusa gigantea, which I believe is also called the blanket jellyfish, but like dude look up a video of it moving it is chilling and fantastic! This thing is 10 meters long, so not the largest here, but ohohoho look at my love

It is a deep sea jellyfish and is one of the largest invertebrate predators known. However, according to Cambridge, it has been consistently recorded in the twilight and sunlight depth zones down south so do with that what you will :)

If we want to keep going down the large and length category of ocean creatures, allow me to introduce the current longest recorded ocean animal. A deep sea siphonophore that clocks in at around 46 meters; my beautiful death halo

Technically siphonophores are hundreds upon hundreds of tinier organisms that grouped together to make a bigger one, but for all intents and purposes, this is one animal. Some of them are incredibly beautiful!

However there is also ones not so pretty, main one was something I saw a month or so ago and it looked like someone had fused like a dozen human limbs together and they were flailing to move and jesus christ yall can go mentally scar yourselves.

Day 11- #MerMay2026

mermaid internet cafe in an upside down boat, where the mermaids go to read fanfiction, and do whatever else they do on the internet. remote work, probably.

mermaid megafauna