Mothematician

I've received a handful of commissions to draw people's pets and monks but this is definitely my favorite one so far

[me] *and litter

[U] Grace taking the human urge to litter and upgrading it to litter heavy duty Eridian xenonite

[me] hopefully whatever exotic metallurgy is under the xenon is as neutral in Adrian's atmosphere as it is in Earth's (probably, the real question is how it reacts with xenon at all)

[U] Sequel: Adrian’s intelligent life has to go on a space journey to seek an answer to the poison recently introduced to their atmosphere that is killing the planet… (I don’t know why going to space would help here though)

The book doesn't say much about the planet Adrian, at least that I can recall — it has a surface gravity of about 1.4g, and its upper atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide and opaque on the human visible spectrum. However: it also contains astrophages, the most ludicrously overpowered phototrophs in the known universe, as the base of its ecosystem.

The maths should be doable, though I haven't bothered to actually do them. An organism's trophic level is calculated based on how many links of the food chain are between it and its basic energy producers. Only about 10% of any creature's food is retained after digestion, which means the total energy available decreases exponentially; the apex predators of Earth's biosphere cap out at about trophic level 5 at most, because between them all combined they have only 1/100000th the energy of all the plants in the world and that isn't enough for anything else to survive by specialising in hunting them. But Adrian's base trophic level aren't mere plants, they're migratory sky plankton that sup directly from the solar corona — they'd easily overshadow the energy input of ordinary photosynthesis.

That isn't even getting into the fact that astrophages didn't evolve in the vacuum, and there are certainly other species in its family tree with the same specialised organelles for absorbing light, that just didn't develop the adaptations that turned astrophages into a celestial plague. Adrian's ecosystem must be ludicrously energetic.

Back to the premise. U wasn't sure why going to space would help, but it makes sense to me that if the problem is poisonous rocks falling from space, the obvious solution is to throw them back. Technically, that doesn't require space travel — if you don't care about the integrity of the payload, all you need is a really big cannon that can fling shrapnel at escape velocity. But, once you put all that effort into building a giant railgun... are you just going to expensively dismantle it again? What if we put a computer in it and shot it a little more slowly so it could look around and then fall back into the atmosphere and tell us what it saw? What if we gave it a little fuel so it could alter its ballistic trajectory and stay up there? What if we put someone in it? And I'm really enticed by the idea that the native Adrians' first spacecraft would make Jules Verne proud, because that means humans, Eridians, and Adrians would all have three completely different methods of basic orbital spaceflight informing their approach to the stars.

Humans gave up on the space gun idea because it frontloads all the acceleration into a single sudden impulse that would pulp anyone in the projectile. But do you know what kind of multicellular organism evolved to handle incredible g-forces without effort? Peregrine falcons.

An African Abbot in Anglo-Saxon England

To commemorate Black History Month in the United Kingdom, today we remember one of the first Africans to live in Anglo-Saxon England. The man in question was Hadrian (d. 709), the abbot of St Peter’s and St Paul’s at Canterbury, who played a pivotal role in the development of the early Anglo-Saxon Church.

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.