The Marsupial Perspective

Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

Like the main characters older sister, the empress, is canonically a queer woman (possibly lesbian coded). Her beloved is the noble consort that the emperor is besotted with. The empress does not like the emperor but tolerates him because she gets to spend all her time with her girlfriend while being thr most powerful woman in the country.

The noble consort is pregnant with the emperor's child and the empress is like "that's my son now. I mean legally I'm the child's legitimate mother but that's son i share with my girlfriend. That's our son."

I didn't read the novel carefully enough to figure out whether or not the emperor is aware of his wife/concubine being girlfriends but it's still a hilarious set up.

Let's also talk about Straight TM female writers.

Like I know 月下蝶影 (Yue xia die ying/butterfly shadow under the moon) is married and has a kid but like the way she describes women

Like in almost every woman-centered novel, she talks about how women are more beautiful and attractive than men. And like every single woman in that novel would marry another woman if it was acceptable. Like she writes about women being in love with other women as an universal experience (it's not hun 🤣🤣🤣)

You can convince me that she's not at least a little bi but also dealing with China being super heteronormative

This woman as definitely done double takes at beautiful women (and like same tbh)

Here is a link to one of here translated novels.

Let's also talk about Straight TM female writers.

Like I know 月下蝶影 (Yue xia die ying/butterfly shadow under the moon) is married and has a kid but like the way she describes women

Like in almost every woman-centered novel, she talks about how women are more beautiful and attractive than men. And like every single woman in that novel would marry another woman if it was acceptable. Like she writes about women being in love with other women as an universal experience (it's not hun 🤣🤣🤣)

You can convince me that she's not at least a little bi but also dealing with China being super heteronormative

This woman as definitely done double takes at beautiful women (and like same tbh)

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

"A Scottish field once home to mono-crop barley has become a pollinator’s paradise after intervention from a local trust saw bumblebee numbers increase 100-fold.

Entitled Rewilding Denmarkfield, and run by the Bumblebee Conservation Trust, the project has also seen a sharp increase in the number of species passing through the rolling meadows after they were reclaimed by dozens of wildflower species.

The area north of Perth is about 90 acres in size, and surveys of bumblebees before the project began rarely recorded more than 50. But by 2023, just two years of letting “nature take the lead” that number has topped 4,000, with the number of different bee species doubling.

“This superb variety of plants attracts thousands of pollinators. Many of these plants, such as spear thistle and smooth hawk’s beard, are sometimes branded as ‘weeds’. But they are all native species that are benefiting native wildlife in different ways,” Ecologist Ellie Corsie, who has been managing the project since it began in 2021, said.

“Due to intensive arable farming, with decades of plowing, herbicide, and pesticide use, biodiversity was incredibly low when we started. Wildlife had largely been sanitized from the fields. Rewilding the site has had a remarkable benefit.”

Similar increases have been recorded in the populations of butterflies, with a tripling in the number of these insects seen on average during a ramble through the field.

The numbers of both insects are now so high that Rewilding Denmarkfield offers bee and butterfly safaris to visitors.

Local residents told the Scotsman that on spring and summer days, the field is awash with color, and hums with the sounds of bees and birds. Even as multiple housing developments expand around the Denmarkfield area, the field is a haven for wildlife."