Faerye Nonsense

Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops), FEED BABBY A TASTY BUG!!!, family Upupidae, order Bucerotiformes, China

Me reading the Mysterious Affair at Styles: That was probably very true when they were written, but there's a whole genre based on her work now. It's probably more predictable to those of us who have experienced so many derivatives of her work in the hands of other authors.

For example, if someone’s gut flora got completely wiped out, would introducing new gut flora constitute an infection?

Also, how are we defining pathogen vs parasite when it comes to eukaryotes, particularly multicellular eukaryotes? (E.g. parasitic molds, protists like malaria.)

So I tried to sidestep the microbiome question by saying “infection” specifically: to my understanding, my gut and skin bacteria et c. are just hanging out, not infecting per se. (Perhaps the distinction is clearer in the case of skin than of gut.)

But I reckoned: the immunity is magic, so it just knows which things are harmful/disease-causing and which aren’t. You’re not in some kind of “my superpower makes me immune to bacterial infection, but also ruins my digestion!” sad-x-man double bind.

(Of course, I’ll freely admit that that simple and arbitrary distinction is insufficient to cover all cases. For instance, there’s some evidence that if I, a person with asthma and other inflammatory/atopic conditions, got parasitized by hookworm, it would improve my general state of health!)

The imbalance problem is thornier. I suppose if you go with authorial intent, I would say this magic immunity doesn’t address that. Because if it did, I would probably have chosen bacterial myself! (Skin microbiome imbalance — my eczema flaring and leveling up — has been the bane of my existence for the better part of the last year.)

Co-protagonist: “Wait. Is that that guy I can never recognize?”

Me: “Yup.”

Co-protagonist: “You know how I figured it out? Because I couldn’t recognize him.”

An excerpt from the first few pages of Wasp, a 1957 sci-fi novel by Eric Frank Russell (re-issue blurb from Terry Pratchett: “I’d have given anything to have written Wasp. I can’t imagine a funnier terrorists’ handbook.”)

So this tendency for asymmetric freakout has been remarked on before as quite irrational, but so common as to be almost axiomatic!

Red-breasted Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus ruber), family Picidae, order Piciformes, NW United States

I was wandering through a gallery when I turned around and saw a portrait of a woman and audibly went 'oh fuck.'

This is extra funny because I've only ever had this reaction once before, on a painting I saw in a museum in Fort Worth, Texas (extremely far away from where I was yesterday). The painting in Fort Worth was this one:

It's a painting of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, by John Singer Sargent. I was so affected that I bought a print of this painting in particular when I got home, as the museum did not offer this particular painting in print.

Yesterday, the painting that yanked me out of my art museum stupor was this one:

Important notes:

It was in a gallery of many different painters

My left eye wasn't working great and I couldn't read any of the signs until I got up close

I have never seen this painting in my life

Gang do you want to know who painted that painting? Do you want to take a stabbling? A little baby guess?

Because apparently it was John Singer Sargent.

And this guy nonstop slaps? Every portrait is an absolute banger? Some selections from the first handful of pages on wikiart:

They had sketches and travel watercolors and allegorical portraits, but they had so many of his hard-hitting, magical portraits. So many PEOPLE. Like, they had Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. I think she was toward the end of the exhibit and I had exactly (though less profanely as a prim 13-year-old) the OP’s reaction to her. That is a Person. I felt we had Met.

…And after a few sessions I found out that several players in the sprawling game thought she was autistic (including I think at least one person on the spectrum). Stressed me out a bit, as I am quite allistic, I didn’t mean her as Autistic Rep, and I didn’t feel qualified to do Autistic Rep!