Rebellum

"I do hope they get along," one dragon said.

"Are they talking?" said the other.

"Heads close togeth- Oh!"

Which is a clear case of survivorship bias; A knight might trot back, Princess in tow, and give a stirring account - Well, eventually stirring, as one tends to polish one's stories over time - of the battle.

A knight who is currently a fan of greasy ash, on the other hand, tends not to have much to say without a good Medium.

I've been sitting on this hill making notes.

What i can tell you is that a dragon will evaluate a knight, and if they're not quite right… They get more or less vaporised with very little extra fuss.

On the other hand, one who's met whatever criteria a dragon decides is relevant, gets to have a thrilling battle which they always survive, though barely.

And the vanquished dragon seems quite lively and rather less gravely wounded than one might think.

Look: That one is re-stocking the hoard already, and the knight and his damsel are barely out of view.

Now, incidentally, if you recall the line of succession form a few centuries back - their portraits are up all over the place - You'd recall certain… ah, notable deformations to the jaw and such. Which of course was due to the last Voringnovian King being his own uncle and also three of his own cousins.

I noticed that this has improved through a member of the royal families do… well. hmm. You'd know one if you saw one.

Which leads me to a passing fancy: What if the royal family is a breeding project for Dragons?

And more to the point, what are they breeding for?

A recent study by a team of researchers in Spain found that hand-stencils made deep within caves represent all members of society. Children, and even infants younger than three years old, participated in making hand-stencils alongside adolescent, adult and elderly individuals. The youngest undoubtedly would have had to be held still by an adult as ochre was sprayed over their hand to produce the stencils, giving an intimate glance into the making of this art. As discussed by the authors of this study, the social nature of this behaviour suggests that the making of art was not limited to a privileged few, but was an activity that involved everyone, enhancing group cohesion in the process. […]

Making hand-stencils seems to have been a practice that was repeated by different cultural groups throughout the Ice Age world, from the caves of Pech Merle and Gargas in modern-day France to Leang Timpuseng cave in Sulawesi. […] Even within the same cave, hand-stencils may be separated by several thousand years, implying that people returned to the same place and added their hands to the assemblage of their ancestors’ hands. This behaviour was likely a visceral experience for Ice Age people; an ancient form of handshake between hands reaching through time, and a more-or-less permanent record of having been there. […]

How much more meaningful is it, then, that children actively participated in this important cultural practice? Not only did adults install themselves within these environments, engaging with the hands left by their ancestors in the process, but they encouraged their children to do so too. […] Echoes of children’s playful behaviours can also be glimpsed in […] finger flutings – marks made by tracing fingers through the soft clay-like ‘moonmilk’ that coats cave walls. [They] were often made by children, perhaps as young as five years old. There is a distinctly childlike feel to these ribbon-like marks preserved in the cave wall; one can picture children running alongside the wall, fingers firmly pressing into the pliable, muddy surface.

[…] Children’s footprints are also often present in the same caves […]. The footprints are sometimes chaotic, with small feet overlapping one another and no clear direction from one area of the cave to another. Some have suggested this represents children dancing, painting a vivid image of children playing under the dim glow of firelight. Small crawl spaces within caves, too, were perhaps only accessible to children. The small, clumsy drawings within these spaces likely reflect children practising their own art […].

Ice Age children, much like our own children, joyfully engaged with the world in messy and creative ways – and, it seems, were actively encouraged to do so by their parents. These hand-stencils create an intimate connection with these children. Their small hands, which last touched the rock surface of cave walls tens of thousands of years ago, reach out to us from that distant and largely unknowable past. It is as if they are enticing us to connect with them and reach back in response: a tender handshake across time. »

[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]

A few weeks ago, friends and colleagues of mine (I was not involved) published this incredible new species of legless skink that makes distinctive zig-zag markings in the sand as it 'swims' through it.

[Miralles et al. 2026 CC BY-NC 4.0]

So they called it Zig zag.

ZIG ZAG, CORAL!

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.

[image description: a two-panel photo of a person dialling a number and then placing the phone to their ear. the contact is saved as ‘Ursula K. Le Guin’ /end ID]

context is this quote by her: