Darling Macabre

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#literally the basis of every conversation they have

First, I checked "what counts as a body of water?" and while it can technically include puddles, any semi-permanent collection of water will generally do. This means seas, lakes, and ponds, but also areas where water moves from one place to another like rivers, streams, and creeks.

With that established, I next had to find out which of the waterways near me is large enough to count as semi-permanent! There's a tiny creek only a little ways east of me, which flows above ground for only a few hundred meters before returning to the storm drains and culverts that redirect the city's smaller waterways below ground, but it does flow pretty much year round. So it would seem that my answer to the poll would be East!

But-

That creek doesn't actually appear on Google Maps that I could find, so it would seem to be too small to have a name. If it doesn't have a name, does it really count as a body of water? For the sake of the poll, I'd say it does not, since I can't really report what the body of water IS unless it has a name. If the creek in question doesn't have a proper name, then the next closest body of water is the river, which is West not East! Am I doomed to give an only technically correct answer to the poll? To answer 'West' even though my heart is called eastward to the little creek?

However, I'm not giving up on my little creek so easily!

Just because Google Maps doesn't have a name listed for my little creek, (only a few hundred meters away!) doesn't mean there isn't one! So, it was time to reach out to the local experts on our waterways - the local Conservation Authority. Their website had a general inquiry line, which put me in touch with a friendly and helpful woman who admitted she had no idea how to help me, but - proceeded to tell me how to get the main operator at the front desk to send me to someone more serious once she connected my call there.

Having reached the main operator, and exchanged the code phrase ("I've already spoken to 'x', they said they can't help but you might know someone else"), I was then connected, to my surprise, to the Senior Manager for Hydrogeology Engineering Services, a lovely fellow named Don. Apparently my inquiry was getting routed ALL the way up the chain of command! (Or, as Don put it, "they tend to just direct questions my way as soon as they hear the word 'water' in them") Gotcha - Don is the head water guy, so now identifying my little creek is his problem.

I spent a little time on the phone with Don establishing exactly what waterway I was referring to with regards to my little creek, and after a few minutes he was also looking at the same unlabelled area of the map as I was. He admitted he also wasn't sure if the little creek had a name, but... he knew a guy. This made sense to me. If you've been a hydro-geologist for 22 years, you probably know a guy for just about any kind of water question! I left Don my email, and took his down as well with promises to get in touch at the end of the week if I hadn't heard from him.

And that, I figured, was going to be that. I'd eventually find out if the Conservation Authority had anything in their maps for my little creek.

In the meantime, I started looking for other avenues to maybe identify the creek. Perhaps historical records, or the golf course where my little creek joined the main river might know? Sadly, the golf course was closed for the winter, and accessing historical maps isn't a fast process because they're generally not digitized, just recorded in a digital archive. But I'd only just gotten started when I got an email from Don! It hadn't even been half an hour! I guess his guy was in the office and also had nothing better to do than look into a tiny mystery? (This is more common than you'd think. People who work in offices, especially in STEM related fields, are often delighted to be given a tiny mystery as a distraction. It's a form of enrichment for them.)

And lo and behold, we had a name! The tiny creek by my house wasn't a creek at all! It was a brook! Wilson Brook, to be specific. I finally had a name for the brook that runs along the trail just East of my house, and most importantly, I could answer this poll with confidence I was being honest about my answer.

One of my favorite things to happen in the history of fiction media is in Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2 episodes 13–14, in which we are introduced to The Judge—played by "where have I seen that guy before?" actor Brian Thompson—an incredibly powerful demon who according to the lore cannot be harmed by any weapons. And for most of the story, that holds true, he proves to be invulnerable to any form of attack.

So how does Buffy save the day?

She shoots him with a rocket launcher, successfully blowing him to bits. Which works because he was only invulnerable to the weapons that were available when the lore was written. Modern weapons have significantly surpassed those limits.

As far as I recall, this is the only time I've ever seen anything address the idea that "Ancient lore" was created within a historical context, that concepts like invulnerability are relative to the weapons available at the time. "Ancient evil awakens" is such a common trope—honestly it's the plot of like a third of Buffy episodes—and nobody seems interested in the idea that the accompanying lore isn't perfect. Like, who's to say that a taser doesn't work on a vampire? How do fae react to rubber and plastic? Maybe Febreze reverses a werewolf's transformation. Exploring how modern technology interacts with ancient mythology is so much more interesting than "Read the book, the book is right," but it seems like nobody wants to do it.

top 10 anime betrayals

They didn't just cut out the parts with the oat milk, they skillfully edited over all the god-damn branding and replaced the audio.

But what I still find most hilarious about this whole commercial is the fact that everything they show in this solar punk world seems to be made with sustainable, zero waste and reusable materials.

Everything EXCEPT THE FUCKING CHOBANI BRANDED STUFF! The only plastic you see in this whole commercial is all the straight to the landfill packaging made by the very corporation that tries to sell how sustainable and "green" they are. Unintentional self satire at its finest.

They couldn't even show their yogurt and milk in (basically infinitely reusable) glass containers because they pretty much only sell their shit in plastic

Another really interesting thing about this edit is that they changed the label on the side of the apple-picking machine.

From "donations" to "commons". It's a subtle change, but it makes a huge difference in the world-building of the video. The former implies that this big orchard belongs to an owner and that they're donating the fruits to "the less fortunate" (and, by extension, that poverty is still a thing); the latter implies that the orchard belongs to everyone and that the fruits are free to take in the spirit of solidarity.

Art by Michael Wilson

May’s Theme: #BarbarianConqueror

Presented by CDQ Magazine

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