tumble, tumble, tumble past the dragon!

me messaging a best friend w/zero lead-in:

guess who i’m talking about

did you guess? Well you’re fucking WRONG because it’s Susan goddamn Pevensie

They gave her light armor, appropriate for a small archer:chainmail, an arm brace, chest plate, and a light skirt she can easily run around murderizing dudes in the face in

her hair is also only loose in the promo pictures because Susan is fucking busy not dying because her hair was flying into her eyeballs so she braids that shit back

her mail shirt is also loose enough that it doesn’t impede her arm movements it’s almost like she’s dressed for a fight wow

VERALIDAINE SARRASRI, THE WILDMAGE

I've got wonky immune system problems, although I'm not technically immunosuppressed or on immunosuppressents, but I cannot afford to lose more ground on health stuff so I am extremely careful when I do travel for photography things.

My general rule for travel is to choreograph things as much as possible ahead of time, so I know I'll have safe places for mask breaks. A style of N95 that you're able to wear for long periods and don't worry about the seal breaking is really important. (Multiple styles to avoid ear/face fatigue is a good idea, if you can). Bring more than you think you'll need and always have an extra in your pocket or bag. You can add a sip valve to a mask so you can drink without unmasking if that's within your comfort zone.

My other general habits for travel are keeping hand sanitizer on my keychain at all times, because it's easy to remember when it's bumping against your hip, and bringing a small HEPA filter with me on travel so that I can clear the air in hotel rooms. The latter can feel like overkill for people who aren't high risk for health stuff, but it makes a massive difference mentally to have a space you know has safe air to come back to after a long day around people/crowds. I normally run it in any new space for an hour before I unmask.

A lot of people will recommend various nasal sprays or mouth rinses, and honestly a lot of the "data" for those are based on one or two studies (even if they're decent ones). I've road-tripped with and without over the past few years and didn't really notice a difference. However! One thing there does seem to be good evidence for is that keeping your nasal passages warm/moist helps your immune system; that whole "people get sick when it's cold" appears to be linked to the impact of cold/dry air on the immune regulation inside your face. And they were seeing a difference even at like ... 5C/9F below whatever they used as "room temp". My solution to this has been: if it's chilly outside, I mask up, even if I'm alone, so that I'm not setting myself up to be disadvantaged if my mask seal isn't perfect when I'm around people.

I haven't resumed flying yet for a number of reasons, so I can't comment on airport specific safety stuff, but I'll tap in @kaijutegu because she also is illness-cautious and has flown safely quite a few times. I don't know how Canadian airports handle it, but I do know that the US TSA does require you to unmask quickly when they check your ID, even if you've paid for the pre-check verification stuff. I think basically what people do is hold their breath, put the mask back on, breathe out fully to clear it - like clearing a dive mask, basically.

I’m trained in literary criticism, I personally study a lot of stuff from people with stupid opinions in my freetime, including opinions about people like me, I enjoy reading in general. What is it about Harry Potter that makes me just not want to come back to it?

I think it’s kind of how it became a part of culture for a while. And at the time it wasn’t criticized as heavily as other things I witnessed, at least from my child’s perspective. Poking holes in media has been a favorite pastime of mine for long time, including with Harry Potter, but the fundamental emotional core of the thing never quite felt flawed.

Yes Rowling put some stupid things in there but that’s to be expected from a white woman in Britain who has had most of her life being taken care of for her. At the end of the day, the intentions always felt solid even if the execution was less than perfect.

Then came the slow eroding of her reputation. I picked up on it before most people did. The moment she went “mask off” in 2020 I and many others were surprised that people saw it that way. She’d been consorting with transphobes for years at that point. In online trans spaces she’d been a known radfem apologist for a long time.

But then she got worse. Like she started materially hurting people with her money. And that’s about when to me I really started to get sick when thinking about Harry Potter.

It’s like. She’s not just a privately bigoted person who accidentally made a story about misfits finding a place that they belonged. She’s taking the power that the marketing machine behind that series granted her to cause active harm right now.

It’s at about that point I no longer found myself with the ability to turn on my critical brain trained in the ways of lit analysis or my casual consumer brain just liking fun things even if they’re bad. I just felt a pit in my stomach. I moved the family copies of the Harry Potter books from my room into the communal family bookshelf and then into my dad’s room because I couldn’t stand looking at them anymore.

It’s not just that Rowling is an author with bad opinions. I’ve read plenty of those. It’s not just that the series isn’t what I thought it was. That’s par for the course of most things you read as a child and revisit as an adult. It’s the combined power of her and her brand being everywhere and inescapable and her currently using the power that gives her for evil. Not only was the core of the series disingenuous but the series itself is currently actively causing people harm and normies just casually walk by it at Barnes and noble vaguely wondering if they should buy a mug for their cousin not knowing or not caring what that actually represents.

I can read dumb shit. I can handle my beloved childhood media being worse than I remember it. I can even handle my favorite authors turning out to be absolute garbage but the level of how all this happened with Harry Potter almost has no equivalent that I can think of because it is so big and so destructive and so intertwined with its author in the way that very few other things are.

The author cannot be dead with Harry Potter because she keeps coming back in to twist the knife. She has implanted herself into the series itself so firmly that trying to remove her from it make the entire thing implode on itself into something else entirely. And she uses that firm rooting that she’s established to materially harm people. People like me just one continent over. I’m sure she’d also interfere in other countries politics if she legally could.

It’s like. You can’t think critically through the full scope and ramifications of something when she hasn’t even stopped twisting that knife of hers. I can playfully stick my tongue out at shakespeares bad opinions because he isn’t alive right now spending his money on bad things. And even most authors alive now don’t have financial knives big enough to make much of a difference.

Rowling though? She can just throw a million dollars at something. It’s no wonder I can’t look at those books. My siblings are being threatened with them. It’s a lot easier to study a knife in a museum than one that’s currently being held to someone’s throat.

Blue herps and birds with dots.

Here are the first two that come to mind...

Blue Poison Frog (Dendrobates tinctorius) "azureus", family Dendorbatidae, found in Suriname

Once considered a distinct species, D. azureus, it is now generally considered to be a regional color morph of the Dyeing Poison Frog, D. tinctorius, though some herpetologists consider it to be subspecies.

There are also other populations of blue D. tinctorius, that some in the pet trade and zoos call “azureus”, as well.

Usually, D. tinctorius is yellow and blue, with black markings.

photograph by Quartl

Blue Whistling Thrush (Myophonus caeruleus), family Muscicapidae, order Passeriformes, India