a defiant potato

One of our air attack pilots happened to fly a mission into Wyoming, which allowed him to sneak home. While at home he picked a bunch of stuff from his garden and flew it back to Colorado with him. This included many peppers.

He set a selection of these peppers on one of the desks in the dispatch office, held up a thin orange one that was about three inches long, and said, "I honestly don't know what this is. I think something hybridized. But I can smell the spice and it scares me."

And then he left.

Meanwhile, my boss, who the entire time I've known him has had an old One Chip Challenge (you know, the ones that were pulled off of shelves for being potentially deadly), and is constantly trying to convince everyone to eat it with him, and who is DEFINITELY dealing with some PTSD and insomnia due to the events of the summer, well, he's eying this Mystery Pepper with immense interest.

He does not touch the pepper for a whole day.

Day two of this pepper sitting on the desk rolls around and suddenly I hear, "I'm gonna do it" and a crunch.

I looked over and this man has just eaten the ENTIRE Mystery Pepper in one bite.

For about two seconds he was fine, then he starts spluttering and saying he can taste it in his ears. He then scrambled over to our fridge and downed probably a full cup of half-and-half before coming back to his desk still looking vaguely red.

"I feel like you should probably tell your therapist about whatever just happened," I said.

but it's also important to remember that at least in the US, where I write from and where many of you clutch your pearls, virtually every aspect of existence, no matter how fundamental to human indignity and comfort, is criminalized for people who are experiencing homelessness. sex is illegal, asking passerby for money is illegal, sleeping outside is illegal, standing around any one location for too long is illegal, urinating or defecating outside is illegal despite a critical lack of public bathrooms to use instead.

iukhimov was ukrainian by the way, possibly from odesa though there’s very little info on him i can find in english. his now-dead website exists on the internet archive but text only sadly. someone on the tolkien collector site i’ll link below at one point compiled a bunch of his illustrations on weibo though that link seems to be defunct now unfortunately

The figures look like, say, the illustrations in Old English Genesis A. There might be a little Eastern Orthodox icon style creeping in, or it might just be that that style has a lot in common with early medieval British and Irish manuscript illustration (ca. 600-1100 AD). These are great, and an extremely clever nod to the texts Tolkien was drawing from, and even the literal manuscripts in which he was imagining his work (or at minimum Bilbo’s work, in-universe) to be written:

As Tolkien says, “Further information will also be found in the selection from the Red Book of Westmarch that has already been published, under the title of The Hobbit.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, “Prologue: Concerning Hobbits”). Or, perhaps, in the Red Book of Hergest (Welsh, Llyfr Coch Hergest) — another Red Book of the West (or Wales, that is). Obviously The Hobbit does not actually show up in one of the most important medieval Welsh manuscripts (currently housed at Oxford), but from the very first page of lotr, Tolkien was playing with an incredibly specific manuscript history!

Common Loon or Great Northern Diver (Gavia immer), LEUCISTIC, family Gaviidae, order Gaviiformes, BC, Canada

Blue-banded Pitta (Erythropitta arquata), family Pittidae, order Passeriformes, endemic to Borneo

why do i give a shit about social media restrictions? well, i went to the library three months ago with my two teenage brothers to sign them up for new library cards (they just moved) and i was told that under 18s can't have a library card, even a restricted kids-books-only card, without a parent there in person to give consent.

that's fucked for abused kids for sure but that's also fucked for kids whose single mum works two jobs and can't get to the library while its open. and there is NO good reason for it except to appease parents who want to control what their kids can read.

people coming onto my posts telling me 'kids should just do X' have not actually looked into the possibility of doing what they are suggesting. kids now cannot do what you did when you were a teenager even a decade ago. abused kids, disabled kids or kids from low income families ESPECIALLY cannot do those things. they are running out of places to go.

interviews and studies with teenagers repeatedly prove that they WANT to hang out with their friends in real life, and it is getting harder and harder to do it. the internet is one of the only places they can all spend time together, unsupervised, without spending money or getting hassled or moved on by adults.