Tit for Tatt

Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight. Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!

Oh my god, this is beautiful.

A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.” Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup and refrains from doing it again. He hears the child’s pain; no glorious battle this, but one of fear and wretched survival.

He invites the child to sit with him, offers the choicest mead and instructs his men to bring a sword and shield, a bow and arrow, of the very best materials and appropriate size. “Here,” he says, “you will find no man who dares to harm you. But so you will know your own strength, and be happy all your days in Valhalla, I will teach you to use these weapons.”

The sad day comes when another child enters the hall. Odin does not slam his cup; he simply beams with pride as the first child approaches the newcomer, and holds out her bow and quiver, and says “nobody here will hurt you. Everyone will be so proud you did your best, and I’ll teach you to use these, so you always know how strong you are.”

————

A young man enters the hall. He hesitates when Odin asks his story, but at long last, it ekes out: skinheads after the Pride parade. His partner got into a building and called for help. The police took a little longer than perhaps they really needed to, and two of those selfsame skinheads are in the hospital now with broken bones that need setting, but six against one is no fair match. The fear in his face is obvious: here, among men large enough to break him in two, will he face an eternity of torment for the man he left behind?

Odin rumbles with anger. Curses the low worms who brought this man to his table, and regales him with tales of Loki so to show him his own welcome. “A day will come, my friend, when you seek to be reunited, and so you shall,” Odin tells him. “To request the aid of your comrades in battle is no shameful thing.”

———-

A woman in pink sits near the head of the table. She’s very nearly skin and bones, and has no hair. This will not last; health returns in Valhalla, and joy, and light, and merrymaking. But now her soul remembers the battle of her life, and it must heal.

Odin asks.

And asks again.

And the words pour out like poisoned water, things she couldn’t tell her husband or children. The pain of chemotherapy. The agony of a mastectomy, the pain still deeper of “we found a tumor in your lymph nodes. I’m so sorry.” And at last, the tortured question: what is left of her?

Odin raises his flagon high. “What is left of you, fair warrior queen, is a spirit bright as fire; a will as strong as any forged iron; a life as great as any sea. Your battle was hard-fought, and lost in the glory only such furor can bring, and now the pain and fight are behind you.“

In the months to come, she becomes a scop of the hall–no demotion, but simple choice. She tells the stories of the great healers, Agnes and Tanya, who fought alongside her and thousands of others, who turn from no battle in the belief that one day, one day, the war may be won; the warriors Jessie and Mabel and Jeri and Monique, still battling on; the queens and soldiers and great women of yore.

The day comes when she calls a familiar name, and another small, scarred woman, eyes sunken and dark, limbs frail, curly black hair shaved close to her head, looks up and sees her across the hall. Odin descends from his throne, a tall and foaming goblet in his hands, and stuns the hall entire into silence as he kneels before the newcomer and holds up the goblet between her small dark hands and bids her to drink.

“All-Father!” the feasting multitudes cry. “What brings great Odin, Spear-Shaker, Ancient One, Wand-Bearer, Teacher of Gods, to his knees for this lone waif?”

He waves them off with a hand.

“This woman, LaTeesha, Destroyer of Cancer, from whom the great tumors fly in fear, has fought that greatest battle,” he says, his voice rolling across the hall. “She has fought not another body, but her own; traded blows not with other limbs but with her own flesh; has allowed herself to be pierced with needles and scored with knives, taken poison into her very veins to defeat this enemy, and at long last it is time for her to put her weapons down. Do you think for a moment this fight is less glorious for being in silence, her deeds the less for having been aided by others who provided her weapons? She has a place in this great hall; indeed, the highest place.”

And the children perform feats of archery for the entertainment of all, and the women sing as the young man who still awaits his beloved plays a lute–which, after all, is not so different from the guitar he once used to break a man’s face in that great final fight.

Valhalla is a place of joy, of glory, of great feasting and merrymaking.

Oh, did you want Us to pay attention to you? How cute.

Shots from last night hanging out with

i can finally show off the Necromancer trench since theyre going into production now!

like recently one of my friends linked me a funny paragraph from a very badly written erotic novel. it was so bad that I thought "I wonder if this is real", so we looked up the book it was from and learned it was a vintage horny housewife type story by someone who wrote a lot of shitty cheap porn back in the 80s, all of which now seems to be completely out of print.

in the course of googling the author, I discovered that one of their works had been cited in a 2004 court case over a prisoner's right to keep erotic novels in his personal library after the prison confiscated them. a bit more googling turned up the case details in a legal database. the guy had received the books by mail and kept them, among others, in his cell. the prison seized them, citing a policy against prisoners having pornography. his lawyers argued that 1. erotic novels are distinct from pornography because they have artistic and expressive content beyond the depiction of sex acts, and 2. since he received them by mail they are therefore protected under his constitutional right to freely access non-disruptive information from outside the prison. I don't know if he got his books back, but he won his case.

then we googled the defendant and found out he was in prison for helping a woman to drug and murder his boss (who she lived with), mutilate the body with acid and dump him in a ravine.

Stuffed animals and dolls get burnt in many ways. Some are in fires. Some get burnt in the dryer, or with a blow dryer, in an attempt to dry them after a wash. But another common burn is from a lightbulb. Sometimes, you catch the burn early, so there's just a touch of discoloration. This happened to one of my teddy bears when I was in college... he fell off the bed onto a light. But I caught him pretty quick. Here he is today with some of his friends: Eeyore, a quoll, and a quokka:

'and here's his burn. It's on the back of his leg, and it still feels like the rest of his fur, so 'and here's his burn. It's on the back of his leg, and it still feels like the rest of his fur, so I've opted to leave it as is. Any transplant wouldn't match perfectly, and would be pretty invasive surgery. He earned his scar and he's proud of it. :-)

But sometimes, patients get really burnt by lightbulbs. As in charred, third degree burns. And that's what happened to Kitty. She was sitting on a light that was accidentally turned on and no one noticed till it was too late! Here is her diagnosis photo:

The (nice?) round burn went all the way around to her backside, but was quite localized. Burning had not only changed her fur color, it was charred, the fur melted, and so did some of the stuffing underneath. For this type of burn, the treatment is to excise the burnt fur and stuffing, and then give the patient new fur and stuffing as needed to restore the damaged areas. This is different from the usual fur transplants for bald spots, which go over surviving skin. Kitty's family decided she would get a spa too. She arrived and after stuffingectomy, started her bubble bath:

She got new stuffing, with a heart of original, unburnt stuffing:

And then she had surgery to treat the burn itself. Here she is all better and ready to fly home:

It's pretty hard to see the new fur, which was great! And it will blend even more as she's hugged in her natural environment. Her family wrote "Oh wow! She looks fantastic! :) I just shared photos with my wife, and she’s very happy :) .... couldn’t be more pleased!"

Ursula was very well loved by her little girl. Ursula's family's mom wrote that she "was won at a carnival game, so her materials are probably not top quality. However, she has been loved to pieces (almost literally) by my five year old over the past three years. This includes my daughter using her as a pillow every night and carrying her around by the horn all the time."

Here is the first photo of Ursula I saw:

As you can see, she was a bit droopy and had lost the original glow on her horn and hooves, but she was still pretty stable. I proposed a spa and recovering her horn and hooves in new fabric. Her family agreed and Ursula flew in. Here she is in her bubble bath:

She's getting nice and clean and don't worry, she'll be plump soon! You can also see a bit of the glow on her hoof and horn, but we still planned to recover them as the fabric was quite thin.

Here's here heart being made and installed with a bit of her original stuffing. I have special unicorn fabric for their hearts... mostly because I saw the fabric and couldn't resist. :-)

Once she was mostly stuffed, it was time to find new pink glowing fabric for her. That took a bit of doing. She originally had sparkles, which were long gone, and a perfect match in color and sparkles was nowhere to be found. Here are the three options I found (the one on the left has sparkles... don't know if you can see them):

Her family opted for the panne velvet in the last image... a really close color match with some shine.

Surgery proceeded and soon Ursula was ready to fly home:

Usually, when a person writes to me with a story about a dog, the dog has torn up a cherished animal of the human. This makes sense to the dog... the animal smells like the human, so it is something that must be important, and for many dogs, playing means tossing and tugging and they don't know the stuffed animal can't handle it. Other dogs sleep on the animal, or hide it safely away, but those don't end up in the hospital. The dog and the stuffed animal playing though, it's kind of like my dog and cat who really do want to play together, but can't seem to figure out how to safely play chase (although they do sleep together, and clean each other).

Anyway, this is a different type of story. Squirrel is an heirloom stuffed animal that has gone through two generations. Not that unusual. Many of my patients have gone from mother or grandfather to child, or big sister to little brother. But Squirrel went from one dog generation to another!

Squirrel's family wrote:

Squirrel is 15" long and is no longer very stuffed. Squirrel belonged to our dog Faith, who died 2/25/2022. At that time, our 6 month old puppy Matilda adopted him. Squirrel was already about 9 years old then, and fairly flat. I don't know if he can be repaired at this point. I haven't been able to find a suitable replacement. Do you think you can help?

Here were the photos they sent for diagnosis:

What you can't see very well in the photos, is that in addition to stuffing compression, and many facial wounds both old and new, Squirrel had quite a bit of balding.

We agreed to supplemental stuffing, and wound repair, and when Squirrel arrived at the hospital, it was clear he needed transplants too so he would be sturdy enough to play with Matilda for many more years. I don't clean animals that belong to dogs, because smell is such an important part of how dogs identify their world, so I try not to change the scent.

Here is Squirrel, all better:

As you can see, his transplants are slightly paler in color, but they're very good texture matches... for dogs texture is more important than color. He's sturdy, and plump again, but still squishy enough to easily hold in a dog's mouth.

Well, Squirrel flew home and since his true being is a canine, I can show you a photo of him back home with his warm blooded being! No privacy issues for dogs. :-)

Here they are happy together again:

Back then the father of said violent candidate was riling people up against the “tree people”. Fred, Barney, and other soldiers fought what they believed to be a defensive measure against the tree people. Turns out, it was actually an invasion, in order to kill off the tree people and take over their forest to build Bedrock.

That’s what Fred means when he says he and Barney participated in a genocide. They literally did.

http://readcomiconline.to/Comic/The-Flintstones

“The jellyfish doesn’t actively move anywhere; it’s just moved with the tides.”

According to the bear's owners, the Cocaine Bear has the authority to officiate legally binding weddings in the mall where it is kept due to Kentucky's marriage laws. This claim is only partly true; the bear does not have the authority to solemnize weddings, but the state of Kentucky cannot invalidate marriages performed by unqualified persons if the parties believe that the person marrying them has the authority to do so. As such, it is a belief in the Cocaine Bear's authority that allows it to officiate legally binding weddings in Kentucky.