Nudity and Nerdery

I was bulled extensively in elementary school, but 1. Mostly by my teachers and 2. Not during this, because we ALL had PBS Nature and as Deer, I was allowed to gouge, kick, bite, keep running even after being grabbed, or body-check the larger children into the picnic tables and other architecture.

You know, for realism.

When Rocky tosses the zenonite container with his message inside and Grace doesn't get it and it just bounces off the hull the speed at which Rocky gets the second container ready (it's literally seconds) and sends it flying over makes me think that no, he didn't think Grace was stupid for not catching the first container, and instead implies the much funnier idea that Rocky had at least two, probably three, canisters with tiny star-system maps inside them locked and ready to go because he had no idea what kind of alien race he was about to encounter either and he realized he might have to try sending the message more than once.

Some years ago, @troubledminnesotan put out a zine, "Jinkies!" about Velma and Daphne.

It is one of the most fun zines you'll get digitally.

There are stickers. There are four stickers from this series, to be precise.

I think you should have a look, because they are delightful.

I think you should have a look and if you purchase them and then are paralyzed with where to put them

-- please listen (imagine) my soft, slightly lispy voice echoing across the time --

because this is super, incredibly important.

Making the art for sale is almost exclusively expensive.

And then once it is made, you have the whole incredible machinery maze of logistics

i.e. getting Thing Made and then Getting Thing Mailed. Safely on time, at a reasonable cost (or folding in the price to the retail cost.)

When I say "this is more than an industry, this is a large number of jobs -- it could easily be considered several industries, not just a single industry"

I know what I'm talking about.

And I talk about it a lot.

I could be talking about it right now hey where are you going I have so many things to discuss about shipping weight and container selection

Right right right the ramble.

Getting back to the point.

Getting back to Elise's sticker shop.

(Shrek at the Receptionist Meme Voice: "She even offers a Hex Girls sticker.")

Stickers are (fairly) inexpensive to produce and (reasonably) easy to ship, which is why so many artists sell them.

When you support an independent artist by buying their stickers, you are directly supporting the arts.

Your sticker wall...

your notebooks...your cabinet, e-reader, phone...

...your sticker book with release paper so you don't actually have to panic about placement.

Btw.

There are sticker books/albums with "release paper" so you can re-stick your stickers and not make permanent decisions.

Becomes as a gallery space.

It is not unreasonable to buy a sheet of bright paper, or sticker release paper, make a collage of stickers, and then frame it.

Building a traditional (with non-traditional objects) gallery wall. This is one of the ways I'm going to decorate the studio space in the coming years.

If you have a sticker, stick it.

Tape it, washi it, remove the backing and make a permanent mark, put it on sticker paper and do not make it a permanent mark.

In six months or six years or six seconds you regret the decision?

The placement?

"I shall save a handful of coins up and buy another sticker. From Artist. Or someone else!"

A richer, more vibrant world is possible and will be built with (no pun intended) paper thin layers.

(The zine "Jinkies!" is on a different site, btw, and is "name your price.")

Are your dueling skills starting to rust?

Its time to heed the call of Battle my friends with my new project Finger Bat'leth!

Sean: .....yes. absolutely

Elijah: 100 percent.

The Shire is excellent farming country, with consistently good weather, and only one tough winter in living memory; hobbits like to produce large families; they’re resistant to disease, rarely violent, and encounter few dangers. It is usual for hobbits to produce many children, so that (for example) Bilbo and Frodo are unusual in both being only children, with no siblings, and not having children of their own. All of this should point to a population that increases every generation if not doubling outright. Young people (and their ideologies!) should rapidly outnumber the old with an ever-increasing effect and impact on society. However, the Shire has a surprisingly stable history; it never seems to increase or decrease greatly in population, and the bell curve of age seems… demographically balanced? There certainly isn’t a conflict from rising young bloods challenging the middle-aged reactionaries; there’s no unemployment; there are no housing crises or waves of emigration, or even a tendency for young people leaving home to marry. Meanwhile, not only does the Shire not suffer from internal pressures, but it remains obscure and hardly noticed in global politics.

What makes sense here is that adult hobbits form a loose group. Four parents in a polycule, between them all, may produce four children. All four parents claim to have four children. An outsider would assume this meant the adults had eight children.

Hobbits therefore are not especially fertile or fecund. They simply have large families. Much of their interest in genealogy is due to the complex relationships of blood-kin, hearth-kin, love-kin and pledge-kin, who must all be carefully tracked and measured - not just because you need to make sure that you don’t climb into bed with an un-permitted degree of blood-kin, but to track family alliances and carefully quantify the precise level of thoughtfulness to put into the proper present to gift your father’s lover’s lover (too much implies a degree of intimacy that might upset the polycule.)

Thus, while a hobbit matron may tell a startled dwarf that she has seven sons, she might only have borne five of them herself, and have one hearth-son by her wife, and a pledge-son of her first husband’s. There are between three and four fathers involved at various stages of production, from conception to pledge-duty, but there is debate about the precise number of fathers, as one child was festival-conceived and therefore provisionally pledged to the Brandybucks until more distinctive paternal traits should materialise. It’s expected that four of the sons will be uninterested in women, and their contribution to family life will be in raising hearth-children and pledge-duty. However, this level of detail is normally negotiated later in conversation, as a mutual overture of friendship. So she’s just clear and simple: yes, certainly, she has seven sons. Yes, they’re all hers. Yes, that’s fairly normal - yes, hobbits like big families. How big? That’s really hard to say! Well, about thirteen hobbits live in her house… er, she has forty-three nieces and nephews. Yes! She has nine siblings, that’s correct, but some of them are still babies themselves..

In this way, a bewildered dwarf might assume that hobbits are absurdly fertile, producing an average of seven children per couple, at an absurd pace.

When in fact, with about half of hobbits never bearing biological children, the population of hobbits is pretty much always the same.

Tl:dr, hobbit population works perfectly well, both internally and in the perceptions of outsiders, if the majority of the Shire is gay, they’re all polyamorous, and they all firmly claim to be parents of high numbers of children. Of course Frodo fathered Sam’s kids - he named them! They were pledge-kin but not hearth-kin, as Frodo needed a lot of quiet and stability in the home.

In short, all of the hobbits enjoyed achieving even larger families on their adventures, legally and without argument or debate. It’s free real estate. If nobody else is going to sibling these losers, we will. (The condensation of so many entanglements at once also legally made Pippin his own father-in-law.)

Gandalf never explained.

Inheritance follows parent-child pledge as the primary consideration, with matrilineal descent as the secondary. Pippin would have been bewildered to gradually understand that Denethor held his two sons in such odd and different standing :-/ hobbits don’t recognise kingship so it would’ve been very upsetting and disappointing to Pippin to understand how Denethor stood in position of sworn-father to a whole city of people without even being slightly fair to his younger hearth-son. Aragorn is demonstrably much better dad-material and therefore had Pippin’s vote. Pippin, by virtue of being an excellent father-in-law to a spectacularly promising young son-in-law, also considered himself a better candidate for king of Gondor than Denethor, by outranking him in Dad Competence - but was too busy by the time he realized this to point this out .

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