owlet's nest

I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond. 

Yes, it’s often hard to say things for sure about history. The farther back you go the harder it is to be confident about what happened; the more recent an event, meanwhile, the more politically fraught the interpretations are. All history is interpretation, drawing inferences, trying to construct narratives about who and what and why based on the information we have. Original sources (letters, diary entries, newspaper reports) are biased. Archaeological discoveries are interpreted by archaeologists. Multiple interpretations for certain people and events are very common. A lot of the time, the best we can say is “this was PROBABLY that” or “these were PROBABLY NOT used for this.” However, qualifications and details like this for every fact that needs one are hard to reduce and are the reason history books exist. So like, was Louisa May Alcott trans? I do not think the evidence supports it. Was James Barry trans? I do think the evidence supports it. Those are interpretations, yeah. And this is the eternal complexity of history, that historians don’t always agree with each other about what historical evidence means, and that is often informed by their biases, but it also does not mean they don’t actually know anything and that your complete lack of studying any of this creates just as valid an interpretation.

And this is something where I ENCOURAGE you to do your own research! Read the historical sources! Learn about who was writing them and why! Read about the social context of the time and place! Read the people’s own words, or read the archaeological reports! I will gladly help you get your hands on any I can! Doing your own research should mean doing research, though. Not just assuming you know better by virtue of being queer or a leftist.

And not quite as egregious but still an example of historians not questioning what was written before them: Entire generations of historians claimed that Ancient Roman ladies wore wigs because they could not imagine that the hairstyles found on statuary were real. One dude claimed this about a century ago, and everyone just copied what he wrote and took it as fact. Until Janet Stephens looked at the written sources mentioning needles and sewing in connection to hair and figured it out.

One of the big problems is that there is a huge disconnect between the actual science and what gets communicated to the public - I bet there are school teachers even today who teach that the Great Pyramids were built by slaves, even though this was disproven decades ago. That goddamn documentary about the Belt of Orion thing is still on TV. As is that one about Ancient Roman tech that manages not to mention the word "slave" even once.

It happens during the whole vampire questline. It's not related to vampires. I may misremember details so forgive me for that. But you have to go through old dwemer ruins and you meet the last living snow elf in Skyrim. You know, the snow elves. Who were enslaved by the dwemer and went blind and feral and still live in the ruins long after the dwemer are gone. The falmer is what they're called now. Here's the last one who's in their original form.

And oh hey, to get to where you need to go you have to take a path that's an old snow elf coming of age rite of passage. And he's going to take you through it and you're going to learn about this dead culture, this culture that was killed.

And now you've got what you came for and there's one way out. Now that you've learned what the falmer used to be, where they came from, what was lost because of the dwemer enslaving them, you have to go through a falmer village.

It's a narrow canyon lined with huts. There's no way to avoid it, in order to get through you have to kill them. They attack you because that's what they do to people invading their territory. You're invading their village. You have to kill them or they'll kill you. It's the only way out. You feel terrible.

If you stop to loot one of the huts on your way out you'll find a book full of unreadable text. Take it to the winterhold college and give it to the librarian and he'll tell you that it's a remarkable find because it's evidence that falmer have retained intelligence. They're not just mindless feral monsters. They have this book, they've kept this book even though they can't see. They have a culture. Maybe they still remember what happened to them. Maybe that's why they're so mad.

You just killed so many of them. You're going to have to kill many more.

Anyway.

It's a game about a dying world with its ecosystem in active collapse, where your colony ship, initially bound for a desert planet, has ended up by mistake. Your task is to ensure that the 40k colonists, asleep in the quartz storage of the wreckage of the ship, will have a planet that is capable of sustaining human life, even if that life requires adaptation on the side of the humans.

The planet has a lot of lifeforms, some of them cute, some of them dangerous.

You know what some people are howling about? That they don't get to kill the predator species. The devs outright said that they are not planning on implementing the ability to kill hostile mobs in Subnautica 2. From an in-universe perspective, it would make all kinds of sense not to. To try to keep your impact on the ecosystem as small as possible.

Feel awkward about people maybe thinking you’re queer but still want to clearly signal “queers are okay with me”? SURE. LOVE IT. HERE’S YOUR WEIRD FLAG.

Don’t fucking at me about allies right now, they are ALSO actually getting fucking killed over us. Take your puri-gay shitty tent somewhere else mine is great with people’s cishet friends and relatives showing up to have our backs.