Laina Has Too Much Spare Time, but make it tumblr

Good morning, lovelies. I’m downing my usual 4 cups of coffee to prepare for yet another day of work and reading and blogging and all the other fun things. 

Is this person seriously bitching about a character in a supposedly Regency period drama having her hair in a bun. Is she seriously characterizing that as a "servant" thing. In the fucking Regency era.

I swear the costume designer from Br*dgerton has so much to answer for in terms of public perception of early 19th century fashion. You can say all you want that it's "not supposed to be accurate," but it DOES color how people see clothing from that era, whether you like it or not 

I think it honestly makes sense to do a different hairstyle when you are trying to make a character being played by the same actor look significantly younger instead of casting another actor. It's basically the "stick a bad wig on the actor" approach to deaging lol.

And when you see her as a child, she looks like this:

So it's a similar look that connects her as a child to her as a teen or VERY young adult.

And the only times you see adult Sophie with her hair down is in intimate scenes, usually only during or after sex, so Sophie with her hair fully down isn't going to read as younger to most viewers. Plus it's a funeral so you would want it to read as more formal.

Whether you like that or not, whatever, lol, I'm not riding that hard for Bridgerton, but there is logic to it.

On the left, it's a bit of an odd photo - it actually might just be a costume test or something. In the actual scene, her hair is mostly up with just two big ringlets coming down (and it's her wedding obvs so it's not normal day hair)

this conversation was the beginning of this thought btw:

dubois & shapiro (trying to see if they can get grace to join them): oh yeah we were totally just engaging in fun sexual intercourse in the bathroom :3

grace (THEE aroace of all time, NOT picking up what they are putting down): ooooookay...? why are you telling me this

"The Marriage of Froggo Amphibini and Giopiggi Porculini"

On most public lands units the MO for staff is to let nature take its course. If people stepped in every time an animal was injured, there would be a ton of sick, injured animals living unnaturally long lives, there would be less prey for predators, and you’d be preventing the natural course of the ecosystem.

It’s additionally cruel to artificially prolong the life of a wild animal in pain. Prosthetics need to be removed, cleaned, repaired. Medical intervention often requires followups. For ungulates injured limbs often cause life long pain and long slow recoveries, which is why even much loved horses often need to be put down due to broken limbs because their quality of life during and after healing is often MUCH reduced.

Feeding wild animals often causes dependency, and results in animals who don’t know how to forage for their own food. It also makes them more susceptible to disease (which is why a lot of winter ungulate feeding is getting shut down right now with CWD all over the place).

In the end, intervening for this moose would deny money to programs that help at an ecosystem/landscape level, probably not extend the animal’s life all that much, and deny a meal to predators and scavengers.

People are absurd, I would love to see them try to carry out literally any of their suggestions.

There was this girl on tiktok a year or two ago who found a baby moose in her yard and people kept commenting stuff like, "Just throw it back over the fence," and meanwhile animal control was telling her not to do that, at all, because that was stupidly dangerous and again, ILLEGAL for her to touch it.

People do not how big and dangerous moose are.

Relevant

so here's a few things humans are particularly good at for all your 'being human is pretty cool actually' needs!

1. swinging on your arms

humans can climb pretty okay, but eridians have more limbs than us and their muscles are steam-powered! they can hold on for longer, and they can do so more easily with more points of contact. what they DON'T have are clavicles and rotation support on their shoulders or lower limbs. see, primates are capable of swinging under the branch, called brachiation, and it's a pretty unique locomotion style!

so imagine them being on centrifuge but the settings are off so things are all kind of upside down. Rocky watches Grace monkey bar over to the right controls and fix it, and is kind of baffled he did that at all. or just Grace somehow turning on a hanging bar, that's pretty impressive!

2. throwing things

so we know apes and specifically hominids have some really specialized hands for fine motor control. but did you know humans have a special adaptation on the wrist just for throwing things like a spear? other apes can only throw things by big arches of the whole arm, they can't direct throws or make them go as far as a human can. we are superbly good at throwing!

now when it comes to eridians, they have a lot of raw strength on their limbs. again, steam-powered muscles. but how can they aim throws when they can't even rotate their forearms, much less have wrists at all?

I can just imagine Rocky's surprise at Grace somehow aiming a paper ball throw from across the lab, why bother yknow? but then the thing sails and just barely misses?? how?!?!

3. mimicking

sure, humans aren't lyre birds, but our ability to produce and mimic sounds is pretty damn impressive. we can not only mimic each other, but we can also figure out ways to mimic animals and even inorganic noises. Eridians are described in the book as using a similar system as whales, pulling air back and forth through their vocal chords instead of just one way. them not having lips and - i assume - a tongue would also limit them quite a bit.

not saying that Grace will be a very good mimic, it's a skill to be trained like any other after all, but I think Rocky will be pretty amused at whistling, and then beatboxing and imitation competitions.

4. teeth! chewing!

as i mentioned above, eridians don't have teeth! they manually tear up their food as much as they can and pop those suckers in right away. if you wanna stretch the whole 'exotic eating habits bit', you can have Rocky be very put out by the concept of a mouth with weird boney protusions.

not only that, but the oral fixation humans have must be rather absurd. what do you mean they just, stick random shit on their mouth and chew on it just because?? no Grace put the pen down stop slobbering on it, it's been all over! and what do you mean human mouths are full of harmful bacteria if they bite each other and break skin??

that's freaky stop that!!

5. horrifying immune system

we know Erid has single-cell life, and it's not a stretch to think there are illness inducing bacteria out there. jury's still out if they have stuff like viruses but whatever. Eridians use their hot system as a way to sterilize their own food when they eat, so i imagine their immune systems are a little handicapped when it comes to biological attacks.

meanwhile humans are leaky space blobs that easily coexist in symbiosis with unrelated bacteria for stuff like digestion, and you could say humanity has domesticated bacteria responsible for fermentation. we eat rotting stuff all the damn time! bread, pickles, aged meats, kimchi, beer, we can't get enough of it. no wonder Rocky thinks humans eating is gross!

You know, Grace is around 40 and has a teacher's insurance.

Recently I read a retelling of a classic public domain work by a Black author. The publisher has thrown a ton of marketing force behind this book: it’s Classic You Know From High School! But Black!

What they did not do was give it even one historical accuracy edit or copyediting pass to ensure that the author looked like they understood the text they were working with. The text was riddled with inaccuracies. Because of the marketing, a lot of people are going to pick it up, and any of them who know anything about the work it’s retelling will know it is inaccurate.

This is, in essence, “feeding shelter cats to the coyotes”. You’re feeding a Black author to every critic who is primed (consciously or unconsciously) to object to a racebent retelling of a “white” classic. You are relying on the retelling angle to attract thousands of eyes to this person’s work and have given them no support for acquiring the author’s first line of defense, which is good trade reviews. You have also made it more difficult to any other Black author to retell the same public domain story: if this book doesn’t do well editors will say “there’s already a Black version and it was poorly executed”.

Well yes obviously if a book isn’t great that’s partly the author’s fault but that isn’t really new information, it’s just the sort of baseline assumption everyone already has, so I didn’t think it was necessary to articulate.

If a publisher is CHOOSING TO PUBLISH the bad book an author wrote, without even improving it, that is not the author’s fault. This is an industry and if the industry pressure is to produce hasty half-assed work of course people are going to produce hasty half-assed work, like why wouldn’t they?

But the result is that people are chewed up and spat out because their publisher doesn’t really care to protect them when they misstep, or they don’t have enough followers to hit a list and they burn out, and in five years no one remembers them… or else if they’re happy with being a cog in the wheel they produce half-assed works at a rate of 400 pages of a year until they die or become James Patterson

WHO'S ME.

Harrow, girl, you cut her arm off and grew her a new one from her own bone. While sitting on her thighs.

WHO'S ME.

Harrow, girl, you cut her arm off and grew her a new one from her own bone. While sitting on her thighs.