Lord of the Midnight Sun

I was driving through Vermont with a friend, and we pulled over at a tiny shop offering Maple Items. We were on the state highway, not the interstate, so "pulling over" meant "squeezing my tiny car into a parking bay the size of a broad highway shoulder."

As we got out of the car, an older woman emerged from behind the building where she had been pruning her roses. She introduced herself as Tammy.

Her shop offered the promised variety of Maple, but also a number of small antiques and a plethora of dog figurines, plaques, and clearly-hand-stitched garden flags.

A huge purple ribbon hung on the wall behind the register, along with many pictures of small dogs. This was no county fair ribbon. It was the size of my torso. The material had the soft sheen of actual silk.

As I placed my purchases on the counter, I asked, "Do you... Breed dogs?"

Yes. She does. She has bred Yorkies for the last 40 years. Her mother bred Yorkies before her. The purple ribbon was from her national championship winning Yorkie.

You may be expecting that the infodump was going to be about Yorkies.

It was not.

It was about 40 years of drama in the Yorkie breeding community. Where – you must understand – the judging at shows is often about who you're in with, not about the dogs. This is especially true when Tammy's opponents win anything.

And Tammy's mother! Well. Phyllis has been on the Yorkie scene since Yorkies were invented. Because of this, many women of equally venerable age hold deep grudges against Phyllis. The sort of grudges that result in episodes of Midsommar Murders.

This led to deep injustices against Phyllis on the part of judges and prevented her dogs from winning so often she retired from the scene. Judging is all about who you're friends with, after all.

After 20 years in hiding, Phyllis – the One True Queen of Yorkie Breeding – hatched a plot. She may have been out of the show circuit, but she was still breeding dogs. She entered an absolutely perfect bitch in the national competition, but sent her with a handler rather than go in person.

None of the usurpers knew who this dog belonged to, and in dog-breeding circles this Does Not Happen. This could have resulted in further injustices, but Phyllis was crafty. She knew this tournament was being judged by a man from the UK, who knew naught of the drama in the US Yorkie Empire.

With these advantages – and being the best dog there – Phyllis's bitch won the highest honor at the show.

Incensed by this insult to their ill-gotten supremacy, the other owners descended on the handler after the show, demanding to know for whom he was working.

"Phyllis," said he.

The name of the overthrown queen evoked horror in the usurpers.

"PHYLLIS!? She's still ALIVE!???"

Yes, Phyllis yet lived, and this bitch – the dog, not the woman – went on to mother Tammy's current dogs. One of whom, Lucy-Fur, is the reincarnation of Tammy's sister (also Lucy). This is certain for two reasons.

Firstly, Sister Lucy absolutely went straight to Hell upon her death, and Lucy-Fur the dog is positively as evil as Sister Lucy was.

Happy 40th, Metroid!

This is what I mean when I say being "progressive" or being on the left doesnt mean youre in the right. It's super easy to manipulate people with pretty words (or just threats and shame) to normalize bad things.

Fat Horse No. 19

It’s the year of the horse and I’ve always been a horse girl at heart, so I’m finally taking advantage of the excuse to fill the world with fat little horses! These felted friends are about the size (and shape!) of an apple, and if you happen to have any apples to share I’m sure they’d help you out! When I started making these, I knew I absolutely had to make the Lascaux cave painting horse. There’s no more classic fat horse in the world!

The core of Bond is not the British Empire, the core of Bond is cool spy shit. If you're bringing up how bad Muslims are on a subject that has fucking nothing to do with it, you're just as deranged as those Bluesky people who turn everything into a conversation about Trump, except you hate a larger group of people.

Also Amy Pascal has produced a bunch of very good movies including all the MCU Spider-Man movies, the Spider-Verse movies, and the most tolerable of the Spider-Man Without Spider-Man movies (the Venom series), and not the shitty ones like Morbius and Madame Web. Spider-Verse was a really different take on the character and was phenomenal! Her non-Spidey filmography is the atrocious Ghostbusters 2016, and then what looks like banger after banger after banger with every movie getting multiple Golden Globes or Oscar nominations, herself being nominated for Outstanding Producer five times and winning twice (for the two Spider-Verse films). This year she did Project Hail Mary!

From what I can tell Pascal has actually learned her lesson from the 2010s and has decided to just be good at her job. And you yourself just said Bond needed a new take anyway. He certainly needs a fresh take after the utterly leaden Spectre and No Time To Die.

It's great to want to make a cool and unflappable character doing secret agent-type shit, but the Bond franchise has done its thing and it's past its time. If we are going to keep making Bond movies then it's time for them to start being period pieces.

Anyway, I’m kind of intrigued by the “trickle down stupidity” statement, because overall the homeschooled teenagers and post-homeschooling adults I’ve known were solidly at or above grade level at basically everything, with the exception of the young earth creationists being young earth creationists (obviously).

I’d say the major downside is that every homeschooled person is noticeably socially delayed, and it’s one that I rarely see mentioned by people in education policy, probably because they don’t want to admit that self-teaching from a textbook works no more poorly than middle school. But there’s absolutely a “homeschooler voice” that you can learn to pick up on, mannerisms, and so on. It’s almost like “induced autism” for lack of a more tasteful description. You’ll have these people who are obviously mentally operating at a high level, but they’re just slightly off in terms of interacting with their peers, or any adult they don’t perceive as a parental figure.

There are obviously huge confounding variables here, in that all secular homeschool families basically do it to protect their overly sensitive children from the school system and most of those kids are neurodivergent, but it does seem to delay many social milestones.

Generally speaking, they know the material, but if I ask them to go beyond the material or use it in new and different ways, they often can't do it. One of the advantages of school education is you get exposed to lots of different teachers and other students and all of their ideas and ways of looking at things.

Also, homeschoolers are not required to follow school schedules and many semi-educational recreational venues that host after-school activities or field trips for traditional school students often specifically court homeschooling families as people who are available to use their facilities at under-scheduled times. This is no more inappropriate than anyone else taking their kids to these places at other times.

Also, the use of “Land Rover driving yoga mom” as a pejorative for homeschooling moms is honestly kinda odd, because I doubt that beater driving fatties would be less criticized.

Irt the social skills, have any of you met a person who was raised in another educational regime? For example a residential school or a foreign school system? The traditional American dayschool system socialization is not neutral and only is considered normal because of its dominance in America culture.