Musings, and other such things

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

I know nothing about her

Ha ha! Well, I was being a little facetious before: Betsy Balcombe wasn't exiled to Saint Helena. But she did live there with her family: mother, father, a sister and two brothers.

We often forget that like, Saint Helena isn't really a deserted island. Until the Suez Canal, it was vital to trade. The Portuguese even used it as a bit of an "ace in the hole" when they discovered it: an island with fresh water and the capability to be farmed almost halfway between the water route between Europe and India? That is like, a save point, or a gas station, and hundreds of ships stopped at Saint Helena every single year, including the years of Napoleon's imprisonment. Which is one of the many reasons I think the idea that Napoleon could never have escaped the island laughable: he didn't, because Hudson Lowe was good at his job, but that was by no means a guarantee.

Like, people live there even today. And they pay rent and everything. And I don't blame them. Ignore everything Napoleon says about Saint Helena being nothing more than a rock to chain "Prometheus" to. Like:

It's gorgeous. The Duke of Wellington probably wasn't even lying when he claimed that he believed that Napoleon could be kept comfortably there. Wellington had stayed there before, too, and indeed even met a toddler!Betsy.

Anyway, so Betsy's father worked on Saint Helena as a provisioner and naturally kept his family with him. Which brings about when Betsy and Napoleon enter P v P mode.

The people of Saint Helena learned that Napoleon escaped from Elba, reclaimed the throne of the French, lost the battle of Waterloo, abidcated again and was being exiled to their island about 24 hours before Napoleon landed on the island. They had to learn all of this in about one conversation. I imagine many eyebrows were raised.

Anyway, since they learned Napoleon was coming approximately around the time they would've seen his ship on the horizon, they didn't really. Have a place to put him. Like, it was unsafe to keep Napoleon at an inn in Jamestown for too long and also he doesn't want to do that, but where do we put him?

Enter: the Balcombe house.

While being taken on an excursion to review where his future home/prison would be located, Napoleon saw the Balcombe house, known as the Briars, and asked if he could stay there instead. And the Balcombes said, "uh, I guess."

And so Napoleon Bonaparte became the weirdest house guest anyone could ever expect with less than 24 hours notice. Betsy, meanwhile, had grown up hearing the whole "if you don't do your homework, Boney will eat you" schtick, and so was a little weirded out when Napoleon Bonaparte was just. Having dinner in her house.

Fun fact: the Balcombe adults did not understand or speak French. And Napoleon's English was ass. Betsy, however, knew French from having a French governess. So she became de facto translator.

I like to imagine that his first dinner there with the middle class family had to be the weirdest experience anyone there had had. And Napoleon had had a lot of weird experiences but I feel like this had to rank among them.

Napoleon stayed with them for a few months and even when he left he remained on friendly terms with the family, although he does seem to have had a falling out with the father probably becaues Mr. Balcombe may or may not have been using Napoleon in a weird embezzlement scheme or because Napoleon may or may not have been sleeping with his wife.

Anyway, Betsy would proceed to menace Napoleon like it was her job or something. She pushed him down a ravine, burned him with hot wax, tried to stab him with the sword he wore at Austerlitz, sicced her dog on him, tried to destroy his memoirs, cut the coat he wore at Waterloo, laughed at him when he was in pain post-tooth pulling, may or may not have bribed her brother to give Napoleon poisonous candy, insulted Napoleon for wearing his jammies too late in the day etc. al; Napoleon, for his part, stole a dress she wanted to wear to a ball, weirdly taught her how to shoot a gun which brings about the question of why we still allow Napoleon to have guns, gaslit her into thinking she was haunted by a ghost of her dead tutor, and tried to bribe her into setting the French commissioner on fire.

She may not have been exiled to Saint Helena

But I feel like she would have deserved that.

Ironically, she and her family were later exiled from Saint Helena, either because they were too friendly with Napoleon or because, again, Betsy's father may have been skimming so much money off the top with embezzlement that the government couldn't ignore it anymore. Scam everyone even your government.

humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast

vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast

humans: hahaha yeah

humans: it did tho

vsa: IT EXPLODED

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip. 

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how. 

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want. 

“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.

“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”

“That was ONE TIME.” 

There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity. 

And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans

KIRK: Don’t worry. We got this. *calls engineering* Hey Scotty, you were in the dorms at Starfleet, right?

SCOTTY: Aye.

KIRK: And you weren’t allowed to have large appliances in your dorm rooms, right?

SCOTTY: Nae, we were not.

KIRK: Ok. So, the ambassador and co are gonna be here in an hour, and we need to set up a feast for them. And we have no replicators.

SCOTTY: *catching on* Right! I’ll take me team to the mess hall and we’ll get right on it!

KIRK: Thanks. Kirk out.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: …What just happened?

KIRK: Ah, you weren’t in a dorm, I see.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: No, I was part of the offworlders’ fraternity… we had a kitchen…

KIRK: So, you never fried eggs on tinfoil on a flat iron. Never painted a can of stew black, poked a hole in the top, and set it in a sunny window to slow-cook all day. Never used an instant coffeepot to boil rice to pour the stew over.

ANDORIAN YEOMAN: *horrified* N-No, sir.

KIRK: We’re gonna treat the ambassador’s team to a Genuine Earth-Style Scholar’s Feast!

*comm chirps* *Kirk answers*

Are... are your organs covered in blood??? Since blood tends to flow thru the blood vessels, and if your body is healthy and all your blood vessels are imtact then your organs shouldn't be covered in blood, right? But just saying that feels wrong.

Book 1 tipping Rankin out of his chair and scruffing him like a cat

Book 9 just pushing aside the sword of the captain trying to mutiny bc he has something more important to say lol

Dangers of working on a set.

he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks

refused to use any prop swords that weren’t actual steel

basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible

often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended

repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off

had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming

the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained

carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported “a wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington

an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggo’s face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot

infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot

Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface

A fandom is like a community garden; the plants and trees are fanworks, the paths and benches are structures like ao3 and kinkmemes and themed weeks or months. Comments, and kudos? Those are fertiliser. You don’t necessarily see them at work, but they make the trees grow stronger and the flowers bloom brighter. When you comment on a fic or piece of fanart, you are nourishing our shared garden and helping to make the soil fertile for future works.

I want commenters to feel proud of that contribution. Whether you turn up with a wheelbarrow of the stuff to tip on your favourite flowerbed or just drop a heart emoji in the donations box, you are helping to make the soil richer, the garden more beautiful.

And you know what? Sometimes you need to just sit in the garden without feeling obliged to do anything to maintain it. That’s okay. It’s your garden too! As an author, I don’t want people coming to my stories with a sense of obligation; I want them to be able to enjoy them and be restored by them. If they don’t have the energy to comment right now, that’s okay.

But a comment isn’t the price of an entry ticket to someone else’s garden; it’s an investment in your garden, in your community. You won’t always see it bear fruit, won’t always know what part of the whole it helped grow. But you can know what you put in, and feel proud of being part of the team nourishing and maintaining this wonderful space we all share.

Like more than once I’ve seen posts be like, “you should buy one $200 Real Wool Sweater instead of 4 $50 acrylic ones, trust me it’s worth it.”

And what the post means is, the wool sweater will feel nicer to wear, keep you warmer, and last longer than the 4 $50 ones combined.

(vimes boots theory obligatory mention)

And then someone comes on and replies, “yes this is probably a good idea but we must remember that industrially produced wool yarn has complex chemical treatment in the process, so the wool sweater is still not perfect environmentally speaking.“

And it’s like. That’s not factually wrong. But it has no bearing on what OP was saying because even without it being outright spelled out it’s pretty obvious OP was recommending real wool for properties, not impact. This is also where I’ve seen several different posts about rayon go off the rails, for obvious reasons.