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For instance, I went the other day into our local drugstore and asked them how I would go about getting enough arsenic to poison a family of six. I had expected that they would behave as people would in any proper Agatha Christie book; one of them, I thought, would engage me in conversation in the front of the store, while someone else sneaked out back to call the cops, and I was ready with a perfectly truthful explanation about how the character in my book had to buy arsenic and I needed to find out how to go about it. In-stead, though, no one really paid any attention to me. They were very nice about it; they didn't have any arsenic, actually, and would I consider potassium cyanide or an overdose of sleeping pills in- / end description
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I had just gotten back from my dog's neurologist appointment, which was...4 hrs long and stressfulđ Planned on eating a nice lunch and then getting some work done while there was still time in the day.
Only to watch a myna with a fat grub in it's beak land by my back door and then deliberately drop said grub and stare at it for a moment before flying off with a little "bwee" sounding coo.
And then I watched the grub move.
And then the horror dawned on me that it was not a grub.
it was this fucking thing:
I had a very ugly reaction that I will not describe in detail but fuck me đ I did not need this rn.
because I knew. I KNEW no rehabber here would take a myna hatchling. And I was right. Was basically told "congrats, it's urs" or "let nature take its course". It's such a strong, spirited little guy, if he's gonna die, he's gonna die warm with a full belly. Got a heatlamp and the appropriate food.
Let me be frank, I have no hope for this guy.
I have hand reared chicks before, but never this young. I hated doing it back then and I never wanna do it again. but this guy...He is like..1-5 days old.
SO, my life for the next week is gonna be waking up at 5:30am to feed this guy every 30 minutes until midnight. All day, every day. Assuming (biiig assumption) he doesn't just die overnight.
usually, when a parent kicks a chick out, it's because the chick is obviously very unwell and tending to it further is a waste of resources.
This chick, however, is very strong and determined AND had apparently been fed prior to abandonment. So--not unwell and not a waste of resources.
my first plausible theory is that these are first time parents who are very stressed by the monsoons and LOUD construction taking place across the street. Filicide can occur under such conditions.
folks are already vested in Grub and I'm so nervous abt this being a sad ending. Please don't hold your breath for this little guy, the odds stacked against him are monumental.
When I weigh him tomorrow, I wil be able to get a clearer picture about whether or not he is on a trajectory of healthy development or if his growth is stalling and he is failing to thrive.
He can look good and strong, but if he can't absorb the requiered nutrient load and grow, then that could very well be the end for him.
I've been watching him around the clock and his behaviors seem good so far as my eyes can tell me...but more importantly, pls look at his tiny feetie claws
you can also see the eggtooth still clearly present at the tip of his beak here.
He hasn't been food begging in a little too long... this is the longest he's gone without gaping and I can't get him to do it. The last I fed was just before the previous update.
Very worried that this might be it for him, as there's really no way to safely force feed at this stage.
Not sure what happened. I'll continue keeping an eye with food at the ready--but this might be it for him.
also, I like to think this looks like some development:
but it could just be the lighting hah...
Tho...even just looking at the size of the fibers on the towel compaired to the size of his head...hm.
Wigh time is in another 2 and a half hrs, but I'm realizing a critical flaw: I should be weighing him in the morning when he hasn't eaten for a few hours. Not in the afternoon after eating all morning. Oh well.
I'll start weighing him properly in the morning if he wakes up to see another sunrise tomorrow. But I'll also keep up the 1pm weigh-ins as well.
It's been a long time since I've had to do anything like this.
the ugly Grub's morning weight, on a completely empty stomach is 10g. Which is good! Up over 10% from his full-gut weight in that first 9g weigh-in. Only down 1g from the full-gutted weigh-in yesterday afternoon.
I will weigh him again at 1pm just for my own peace of mind. But tomorrow morning's weigh-in [if he's alive for it] should bring him up to 11g or bust.
We're on day 3 now and I still have so many worries about him. Especially respiratory...feeding the little guy is genuinely so scary đ« But we persist.
Fr tho, he's gotten so good at just holding the food in the back of his mouth [I use a tiny coffee stirring spoon to feed him], and every time he does this, it gives me a fucking heart attack. Please ;; just swallow the food. Don't give yourself the chance to breath that shit in, you daft little grub. You'll literally die. I'm begging u.
Last year, I befriended a Catholic seminarian. We've gotten to be pretty decent friends. Seeing as he was staying in town for the summer and I wasn't, I entrusted him with caring for my plant.
He did a wonderful job, but as he was returning my plant to my custody, he explained "I watered her every other day, I gave her new dirt, moved her into the sunshine, prayed the rosary-"
"What?"
He looked at me, confused. "Isn't she a plant you pray with?"
"No," I said slowly. "She's a prayer plant. That's the... colloquial name of the plant."
Upon seeing his stricken face, I realized something went wrong. Turns out, this entire time, he's been including my plant in on his prayers and leaving her near icons.
Listen, totally cool. My plant becoming Catholic is a great deal for her not dying over the summer. But now I must navigate this interfaith household. Keep me in your thoughts.
Super big fan of the way the Nie Mingjue severed head Empathy segment of the book opens with a hard cut to his decapitation of Wen Xu, and the description of how Wen Xu's body was immediately thereafter torn limb from limb and systematically desecrated by Nie Mingjue's allies, and the head put up on a spike.
Because I think it really centers one of the key narrative tensions around the characters' life choices, and the question of the very definition of 'crime.' And how it's a contextualized process, rather than a hardcoded binary of actions that are okay and actions that aren't.
It maybe wasn't good to do that to Wen Xu's corpse, but it was war after all, so it's also not a big deal and the cultivators involved don't carry any lasting culpability, even though it wasn't even useful to the war effort to do that.
There's no need to figure out who it was exactly, and attach a stigma to them for vengeful corpse desecration.
But Jin Guangyao having done the very same thing to Nie Mingjue that Nie Mingjue did and allowed to be done to Wen Xu--well that's bad, right? Because it's not war, now. Because it's politics and personal relationships, and the rules for those are different. It's different.
And Jin Guangyao is like, is it though? No. That's bullshit you all tell yourselves. Lines drawn in water, to make sure you're always in the right and anyone else who resorts to violence is wrong.
The rules aren't ever different. Some of us are always at war.
Which is simultaneously the mindset that makes him a dangerous untrustworthy person who makes everyone around him less safe, and He Has A Point Tho.
All of which juxtaposes really interestingly with Wei Wuxian, who in the two phases of his Terrifying Necromancer era did exactly the same things under what were, to him, about the same circumstances (i.e. people he loved had been killed on a pretext that he'd started it, by people who self-professedly weren't going to stop until they'd taken everything he had left) but when it was war he was a hero (albeit controversial), and when it wasn't war anymore he was a criminal, unforgivable, had to be put down.
Still 'killing people and corpse desecration.' By the same person, using the same methods, with almost the same motives. And all it took to take him across the line from 'basically like when Nie Mingjue did it' to 'basically like when Jin Guangyao will do it' is an alteration in the story being told.
I deeply appreciate that Dr. Mensah Goes To Therapy For The Whole âBeing Kidnapped And Almost Murderedâ Thing is an important plot point depicted with sympathy and emotional weight
but can you IMAGINE being her therapist
Therapist: itâs in the past. The corporate powers canât reach you on Preservation. Your reactions are designed to keep you alive and aware of it happening again, but they take root even where they are no longer needed; process them, thank them, and let them know they canât harm you. Know that you are safe, Preservation is safe, and it wonât happen again. You can be able to say, is this fear supported by my present reality? No one is going to get kidnapped.
Mensah: hang on Iâm getting a call I have to take this
Mensah:
Mensah: my daughter, my brother-in-law, and several of my friends just got kidnapped by murderous raiders
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Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenterâs The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit childrenâs animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes. Noot, Noot.
As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him â thatâs where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such⊠but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. Thatâs what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES â JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality â people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! Thatâs a big deal! Iâve never thought about it before but now that I have, itâs ridiculous to me that thatâs not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why donât we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
Itâs July 20th. Thatâs the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. Iâm ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and Iâm going to have a goddamn potluck. Youâre all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
stop using chatgpt!!!! take a bronze pin and carve your questions onto an ox scapula, then toss it into the fire!!!! use the cracks to divine the gods answer!!!!
citations still have to be APA 7th edition though. if you plagiarise, the gods will flood the yellow river again. and you'll lose your academic standing.
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divingbelles are mermaids in the selkie family who use humanoid skins to house aquatic forms instead of the other way around.
as this lovely lady demonstrates, some of the more delicate divingbelles that take after jellyfish or molluscs hold onto their skins kind of like snail shells. they dislocate the pieces to unfurl from the spaces between when under water, and pull the bits back together when they want to hide or walk around.
Dragons are fireless until they undergo the Hroom, the traditional draconic ceremony where a fledgling dragon will go out into the world and make a bargain with a spirit of elemental fire to live in their soul in a state of mutual symbiosis. The spirit receives shelter and nourishment, while the dragon receives a source of elemental fire, which it can only now use to defend itself.
In many draconic cultures, the Hroom marks a dragonâs coming of age, a time to recognize that a dragon is now of a proper age to hold a weapon and defend itself. Some dragons believe that it is only by bonding with an elemental spirit that a dragon has a soul, and that a dragon is only a whole dragon when it has both the mortal shell and the inner spark.
There has been a backlash to this in recent centuries, of course. Fledglings these days are going out and making bargains with all kinds of things. This is usually spirits of elemental lightning and ice, but more than one dragon has come back to their clutch with a fairly bewildered witch.
#Does the witch live inside the dragon's soul after...?
Metaphorically, yes. One dragon had married the witch she brought back to her clutch, and she said that meant their two souls had become one, which was basically the same thing.
The other dragons in her brood said it didnât work that way, but she was able to breathe pure magic afterwards, so it at least worked that way for her.
Bonds with a pistol shrimp and ends up breathing plasma but with a multimegaton volume of sound, but mostly sits around doting on the shrimp and making sure the aquarium is clean with good pH levels and the shrimp gets lots of enrichment. World's most adorable dragon marine biologist but watch out!
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she's platonic about it but in my opinion, stratt 100% treats grace as her dead wife. she keeps a tacky fox trinket in her coat pocket. there's a framed photo of him in her study . he's grinning goofily in it (bc he's a dork). new guy like: is that her husband? / no, dumbass, it's dr. ryland grace, 1/3 of the hail mary mission. / oh, fuck. were they... ? / yeah, it's unclear. black-and-white montages of grace messing around in high-level meetings play every time stratt contemplates committing more environmental crimes. she looks up at the night sky and vaguely wonders if he's enjoying his space ramen. that's her dead wife. she killed him.
Iâm not trying to play devilâs advocate about the Tolkien and race post, I agree with most of what youâre saying about the denial. But modern non fiction Marxist critics forget one thing that hopefully fandom doesnât, that is to give the author grace instead of immediately deciding that the racial politics of his work is intentional. I accept Tolkien was a conservetive, but I find it hard to believe that he was exposed to anti racist thought like we are today. I think itâs important to acknowledge the biases in his writing, but not decide it as intentional, because heâs a linguist based in a very white part of England, whose background is in European history who did not anticipate a world where migration is the norm. Of course that doesnât make the text less racist but itâs an important thing to consider. Thatâs all, I agree with your other points.Â
Thanks for the question, and please bear with me re asks gang, I was stupid enough to leave inbox on for a while, not realising the post would break containment, so Iâm snowed under atm â ïž
So thereâs a lot of talk about Tolkien being âof his time and classâ but precious little about what that environment actually looked like other than comparing him to his fellow religious conservative Oxford dons. âOf his timeâ is not a neutral statement and it certainly isnât applicable to Tolkien, but more importantly, ânorms of his timeâ seem to often be, in this fandom, calibrated to âwhat Tolkien saidâ rather than âwhat was actually happening thenâ.
Anyway, I will try to be a little more direct than in that last post. So the âthe fundamentally racist elements of the legendarium are because Tolkien was a man of his timeâ line really annoys me (and others!) because imo it lets Tolkien's own Oxford tea table stand in for the entire twentieth century as if there wasn't an entire world outside the Inkling Orgy arguing furiously about race and empire.
I can give you an example literally from Oxford itself! The Indian Majlis had been meeting at Oxford since 1896! The Majlis, for those who might not be aware, was a full-on political and debating society which produced a fuckton of the people who'd go on to lead independence movements across South Asia. This was not some obscure footnote he would need to trudge to a specialist archive to dig up, and I can confirm that attending debates and discussion groups is, was, and has always been a large part of Oxford University life. Ie this was happening in his university in his lifetime among people of his class group he'd have had every opportunity to meet and engage with, whose existence he absolutely would have been aware of.
Beyond the Oxford ventures, you have things like Moodyâs League of Coloured Peoples, founded in London in 1931 and organising against colour bar practices in Britain itself. The West African Students' Union had been running since 1925, building a public anticolonial intellectual culture that fed directly into multiple independence movements of the following decades. CLR James was in England from 1932! And so on and so forth! And many in these organisations were white British activists or public intellectuals or writers! This was a live political and literary scene running in parallel with Tolkien's and explicitly arguing against the racial categories his fiction sought to preserve. Which is to say, I think whatâs more likely than âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race because Tolkien didnât know any such antiracist thought existedâ is that âthe legendarium is the way it is with regards to race specifically because Tolkien did know such antiracist thought existedâ.
can i say i am so glad the guy was not a lazy writer and also that he disliked direct allegory because if one of sharkyâs minion gangs in scouring of the shire were called the hobbiton majlis or something, i would probably start cooking peopleâs cats
Anyway, Iâm so tired of how âof his time" just keeps getting used to mean "the time as understood by conservative Oxford dons," when the actual record shows Black British and colony diasporas and white progressives were producing sustained public counter-discourse in the same space the whole time, in his own country, in his own language, in his literal university. So when people say he was "just a product of his environment," I just always want to know which environment they mean exactly, because the one he was actually in very much did sustain quite a lot of anticolonial thought.Â
Also just to get into the basics again, bro was famously a philologist, ie not exactly a profession where you could plausibly bumble through life without ever encountering race-as-a-formal-category. Philology in this period, and especially in Oxbridge, was literally a primary engine of race science. The Indo-European/Aryan linguistic apparatus that mapped language families onto racial stock was built by people doing Tolkien's exact job, so I really donât think he passively inherited racial categories without noticing, he inherited them deliberately through years of formal study, with copious footnotes and his own academic judgement. Like I always find it so funny when people, even on that post, refer to the racial dynamics of the legendarium as âunconscious biasâ because I just know Tolkien is spinning like a power drill in his grave every single time, because they just implied he was shit at his job đ
Anyway, the entire feudal value system of the legendarium runs on inherited blood as a determinant of worth (even within the Shire, ie the most ânormal people not kings of menâ place, where Sam is placed as a Good Man Friday), and this is a very well known fact within fandom. Aragorn's legitimacy is genealogical-first and earned-second, the blood of NĂșmenor "running true" in some lines and "thinning" in others is outright presented as a real, quasi-biological fact about a person's capacity for greatness, and not to forget Faramirâs entire speech about greater and lesser men, and the âchildless lords sit alone while barbarians bay at the gatesâ bit.
Or if you prefer a Silm example, (note: the context of the exile and whether or not you think they deserved what they got is irrelevant to this point) but the Doom of Mandos and the Noldorin re-entry ban, when viewed as a mechanism detached from context, is fundamentally just the ontological excision of a âbirthright citizenshipâ as a consequence of a personâs actions. Idk how big this was outside the UK but remember when Shamima Begum was extensively groomed as a child and fucked off to join ISIS and the UK decided to strip her of citizenship and leave her stateless? This is basically just that, ie the legitimisation of an ontologically confirmed birthright citizenship that can be granted to exceptional cases at the behest of the ruling body (see: Hobbits, Peredhels) due to their extraordinary actions, but also can just as easily be taken away by the same ruling body in response to a transgression. Like this is literally just present-day âmigrant criminalityâ discourse, how can you say he didnât anticipate the rise of postcolonial global migration đ
(once again to the reader, please let me reiterate i am simply comparing the mechanism of the exile alone, i am not saying that the FĂ«anorians are fucking ISIS, and i certainly am not saying that the exiled Noldor are the equivalent of stateless refugees, so pls donât jump up my ass đ)
Tolkien wasn't writing this in a vacuum where phrenology was a fringe pseudoscience nobody respectable touched, it was institutionally embedded and state sanctioned British science well into the interwar period, with its own society and journals, and an enormous presence in Oxbridge. Moral and mental character of Great Menâąïž being first fixed by descent and the subsequent positive/negative shaping of character by choices and environment being seen as a somewhat effective yet undeniably secondary mechanism, is literally the loadbearing premise of race science. Itâs not a borrowed aesthetic! The entire legendarium runs on this logic!Â
Once again, and this is also re: a few reblogs of my original post that take a similar route, what do you mean âhe did not anticipate a world where migration is the normâ??? đThe legendarium isnât a product of 1937 alone, bro was notoriously still tinkering with its genealogies and societal architecture well into the 1960s and early 70s and pretty much until the day he died, like a fucking dweeb (for once, complimentary), hence why it takes the fragmented form it does. That's a working lifespan that runs through major global decolonisation, Windrush, the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, through literally the entire long and convoluted and drawn out process by which Britain had to publicly and unavoidably reckon with the idea that the empire's subjects were now their neighbours. At some point we need to truly engage with what "of his time" means, ie we have to reckon with the fact that âhis timeâ kept moving and the foundational elements of the legendarium didnât.Â
And to bring up the same example from my original post but in a different light, Tolkien was completely capable of precise and deliberate racial argument the second it was framed as being about himself rather than his fiction. In said well known example, in 1938, some German publisher wants confirmation of his "Aryan" descent for translation rights, and Tolkien's (drafted) response is sharp and furiously specific, knowing exactly what's being asked of him by the Nazis and exactly why it's grotesque. Compare that to the total absence of literally any comparable interrogation applied to the Haradrim or orcs, or the entire chronology and geography of Middle-earth where evil consistently arrives from the same two compass directions wearing the same coded features. Man like. Tolkien was honestly a pretty clever guy, and ngl I feel it does him a (very funny) disservice to assume he didnât have the capacity to scrutinise race to the level he does â ïž
Anyway I think where the fandom focus on âunconscious bias of the era" does not actually originate in a true desire to absolve Tolkien (fair enough, because this is a man who has never once asked to be absolved of the opinions he holds strongly enough to work into his narrative at such depth) the individual, and but rather in the interests of keeping the emotional crutch of loving a beloved childhood text without having to acknowledge that the person who made it was making choices in the same way Rudyard Kipling or Rider Haggard was making choices, and yet very few people offer Haggard this kind of protective custody in present day.
Almost nobody aside from hardcore conservatives sits around saying King Solomon's Mines just "reflected the assumptions of empire" as if Haggard had no hand in shaping said assumptions himself, we read it (correctly) as a deliberately shaped ideological project worth taking seriously as an argument. Tolkien, specifically due to the fandom culture around him both then and now, often gets a pass that even Kipling doesn't, and imo it's not because the textual evidence is thinner but because the fandom loves him more and flinches harder when heâs hit. Which is to say, the insistence on âTolkien was of his time and his time was badâ being the chosen interpretive lens is less a claim about âthe timeâ Tolkien existed in than it is a claim about us as a fandom today.Â
On a vaguely related note, I also think âthis fandom gives grace to the authorâ should not be treated as a complimentary statement, especially because one of the elements of the Tolkien fandom which genuinely baffles me is the general air of author-genuflection across the board regardless of what fandom pocket youâre in (and a towards Christopher LMFAOOO) never have I been in a fandom that consistently deifies the creator to this extent, and itâs doubly baffling considering that he isnât exactly a sensitive up and coming artist but a dude who has enormous mainstream cultural impact and, crucially, has been dead as a doornail for decades.Â
Like it is quite funny but also on a serious note, whilst the sentiment is understandable because yeah the world and its languages are as immense as the work he put into it and it is very important to so many of us, I think a publicly performed culture of âgrateful to the author for this wonderful worldâ is one of the things that preclude a deeper critical understanding of the legendarium itself. Amusingly, this is literally the only thing that makes me miss the bloodsoaked battlefields of anime fandom, because Masashi Kishimoto may have painstakingly drawn 3 billion pages of Naruto, but 95% of the fandom would probably, upon meeting the guy, tie him to a chair and beat him repeatedly on the head with a rubber hammer going âwhy the fuck did you do this? what the fuck is wrong with you? did you hate twelve year old me personally?âÂ
I have a longer post cooking abt the historical elements of Tolkien as a man of his time re ideological genealogies and contemporaries, but in the meanwhile I just want to say by his own letters (letter 83, written in 1944), Tolkien was an avowed supported of General Franco, which a) most writers of his generation were in active and public opposition to Franco and b) Tolkien spends a not inconsiderate part of his letter bitching about how the notoriously conservative C S Lewis himself is opposed to Franco and infected by "Red propaganda" and c) if it comes to fellow Catholics, Graham Greene himself opposed Franco, even if he was unhappy abt murders of priests. And I also think it is very important to note re the stewarding of these conversations that there are exactly two papers on Tolkien's support for Franco, one by an independent scholar and one by the head of the Tolkien Society in Spain, who managed a private interview with Priscilla Tolkien and who cited her godfather having been a Francoist himself - and THAT author is, guess what??? a fucking Francoist himself. The conversations and scholarship about Tolkien are NOT happening in a neutral and "normal" space.
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