Proud Aro/Ace

#nothing is above critique but also so many ppl are dogshit at criticism so here we are

#nothing is above critique and that includes your critiques

I felt like I needed to clarify some things before we could continue any more conversations on this godforsaken website.

American badger: pallas cat of a wolverine.  Very defensive.  Fuck immediately off. 

Bonus African badger:  Silverback gorilla of mustelids.  Should be a cryptid.  Bro, don’t even.  You are nothing to him.

gets a bad rap

eats A LOT of ticks

“plays dead”

cute

VS

Possum (AUS)

Looks soft, isn’t

Quills are thin and flexible like hairs

Can climb trees

Perpetual bedhead

Smelly

Porcupine (Africa)

Does not look even remotely soft

Very long, stiff quills, especially on its back half

Can rattle hollow quills in its tail as a threat

Cannot climb trees

Will ram you ass-first to stab you if it’s mad

Porcupine (South/Central America)

Prehensile tail like a monkey

Short, thick quills

Snout looks like a marshmallow

Can hang from tree branches by its tail

The issue is that the hatcher tray in the bottom of my incubator does not hold 300+ eggs. It comfortably holds around 200, 250 would be pushing it. And I knew that there was going to be a problem, I'd kind of been low-key stressing about it for a few days.

So as I'm standing there, high-key stressing as the space in the bottom of the incubator disappears and I get closer and closer and closer to having to decide what to do, my partner pokes his head into the quail room to tell me he's off to hang with his friends for the night.

"These aren't going to all fit, all these eggs are not going to fit in this hatching tray," I tell him. There's maybe 6 square inches left. I haven't even finished the 4th tray.

He stares at me wiggling eggs around in their bags, trying to make one extra inch, knowing full well that that's not going to solve the problem. I'm thinking I can probably just leave the remainder on the turning racks. The quail have never really had an issue hatching no matter where they are, they've hatched on the turner fine before.

After a second, he asks me: "What... is that expensive piece of equipment that your other expensive piece of equipment [the cabinet incubator] is sitting on top of right now?"

I look down.

You see, my big $1000 cabinet incubator

sits on top of

my big $600 hatcher.

the thing made specifically for hatching eggs in

the thing for putting eggs in when they're ready to hatch

the hatcher with more than enough room to hatch 300 eggs. It could hatch nearly 1000 quail eggs, I think. Maybe actually 1000 quail eggs.

because its only function, it's ONLY function, the ENTIRE reason i got it

was for this situation.

I made reference to an artwork - “oh, it’s like that piece thats three feet of air above a pedastal that contains a curse or a blessing from a witch.”

I sure baffled a bunch of students, right then.

Tom Friedman, “Untitled (A Curse),” 1992

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

The Elves are not the children of the Valar, they are the Children of Eru. The Valar themselves are "creations" of Eru but not his children, per se; there's a distinct difference between the more ambiguous relationship of Eru to the Valar and the firmly paternal relationship of Eru to the Elves (and Men). However, it is true that the Valar act like somewhat overprotective parents to the Elves that live in their domain.

The only Elves we meet in LOTR who lived in Valinor are Galadriel and Glorfindel, not Celeborn. It is true that Tolkien had some drafts where Celeborn also lived in Valinor, but those were retcons written after LOTR had already been published, and do not make sense with the text of LOTR. In the published LOTR, Celeborn is a Sinda elf who never went to Valinor, but he was a relative of Elu Thingol, an Elf king who was married to Melian the Maia, who lived with her husband in Middle-earth and definitely influenced their kingdom.

(Also, Glorfindel is doubly unique in that he came to Middle-earth from Valinor, died in Middle-earth, was reborn in Valinor, and then came back to Middle-earth. Galadriel just went the one time and stayed.)

The power of the Elves and of the Numenoreans has less to do with "proximity to Valinor/the Valar" and more to do with...well, for the Elves, it's connection to and mastery over the Soul, an for the Numenorean Men it's literal direct ancestry from both Elves and Maiar that gives them the foundation to build on that same kind of mastery. This is a complicated subject, and while geography plays a role in power, it's not as important as other aspects IMO.

Elrond having less power than Galadriel is...debateable. Personally I would rank them about equal. He is certainly less flashy with his power than she is, though.

Technically Beren was the ancestor of the Numenorean kings, so yes "part of the line," but again it's more complicated than that... Luthien (daughter of Melian and Thingol, half-Maia and half-Elf) is the ancestress of Aragorn, but it's also important to note that her granddaughter Elwing married another half-elf, Earendil, whose mother Idril was a Valinorean elf living in Middle-earth. Their children are Elrond, who chose to be an Elf (and has a lot of magical power!) and Elros, who chose to be a Man and became the first King of Numenor. Eventually Elros' Numenorean descendants founded Gondor and Arnor, etc etc etc, and Aragorn is the product of all that impressive ancestry - with a lot of human generations in-between to water it down. Arwen, as Elrond's daughter, is much more closely related to the original Elf-mortal couples (and her mother, Elrond's wife, is the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, mixing in even more impressive ancestors!).

Aragorn's power is not just to do with his ancestry, though; like with the Elves of old, it's a lot to do with his own internal mastery of his spirit. Faramir, also of Numenorean ancestry, has similar capabilities - but notably, his brother Boromir did not. This is because insight/foresight/"magic" was something he both had talent in and worked to master, like Aragorn. (Aragorn had the benefit of being raised by elves.)

The analysis of magic objects is spot-on, and the most relevant part of this discussion, so great job there. I would just like to emphasize the discussion of willpower, because that's really what it boils down to: yes, proximity to the Valar helps; yes, elven ancestry helps, but when you come down to it, the most important thing is strength of will. Elves, Maiar, Valar, Numenoreans, even regular humans and hobbits (and dwarves) - some might have a leg up when it comes to their innate willpower and connection to their own souls, but any one of them, given the strength of will and the practice of making it stronger, has magical potential.

At the time of LOTR, Cirdan has long since given his Ring of Power (Narya) to Gandalf. The third ringbearer is actually Elrond. (Again, not less powerful than Galadriel, just not as obvious!)

Another example of the Ring's (Sauron's) will dominating its bearer is when Sam briefly carries it, he has a vision of ruling over an amazing garden. Being Sam, he has the practicality to not fall for that temptation, but it goes to show that the Ring will manipulate its bearers with whatever would work best against them.

their dynamic is more fraught and tragic than you could ever comprehend……