Verbs, Vaults, Verbena

According to a few colleagues it’s either a plant, an algae, or a fungi. So that’s been helpful.

After a day with some sunlight I think I might be seeing some chloroplasts.

I’m going to be in the field for the next 2 or 3 weeks but soon after that I hope to once again try to ID it.

Any botanists/mycologists who want to help out? I’m afraid if it’s not algae my ID skills are very rusty.

Here it is, in all it’s glory, after 2 years in isolation.

The Silver Swan, built by John Joseph Merlin and James Cox, 1773.

you go to the well to get some water, and here’s Miriam’s boy, staring at the sky, completely still. his expression is unreadable. you hazard a hello and ask how he’s doing, and he slowly, unblinkingly, lowers his gaze on you (he’s 8 and is missing his frontal teeth, not that this is making you any less uncomfortable) and says “I cannot speak of the state of my being, Nathan son of Saul, my brother, but rejoice for the water you shall take today will be as pure as the soul of the children of Heaven”

*sees J boy, 8 yo, staring at you from across the street*

kid JC, coming home at twilight, a single white dove following him and chirping with weirdly human-like precision:

 moth̫́er,̦͌ ̮̉i h͙̉av͔̽e ͓͗b̘̃r̞̓o̮͘u̲̒gh̟͒t̺́ you a do̗͐ṽ͙e̢͘ ͈̾m͒͢a͈̽dē̝ ỏ̘f ͈̓c̆͜l͔̂aỷ͇ aṋ̑d̳̿ g͢͞i̹̾fted̖͡ ̻͐it ͓͂w̖̿it̎͜h t̥̃h͙͒e ̨̒m̧̂i̡̍ŗ͒â̫cḷ̔è̤ ̛̻of̞̅ l̘̈i̛̦fè̳

Miriam: ! that’s my little boy :) now let’s go get ready for dinner :) 

her husband Yosef, a carpenter who only marginally got signed up for this: 

(this was originally written in response to the email announcement sent to membership but I'm also posting it publicly because fuck this noise)

To whom it may concern:

This partnership with FloSports creates two issues.

The first one is access: putting all USAG events behind a $150 annual or $30 monthly paywall is not going to grow the general public's interest in the sport and will be particularly harmful for the less popular disciplines which already struggle to get a sizeable audience on a completely free stream. Frankly this borderlines on extortion of the families and friends of those athletes, who just want to watch them compete but may not be able to travel across the country to the major meets they participate in.

The second, FAR more important one, is that FloSports as a platform has demonstrated it does not have the gymnasts' best interests at heart. Please recall how back in 2014, when a major iCloud hack exposed McKayla Maroney's nudes, taken when she was underage (alongside those of many other female celebrities), FloSports made the decision to post an article which LINKED DIRECTLY TO THESE IMAGES. They only took the link to child pornography of a USAG athlete down when USAG threatened them with loss of credentials to cover domestic meets - and now you are handing over all coverage rights to them? This is ridiculous and absolutely unacceptable, and makes a mockery of protecting the athletes - which should be USAG's first and BY FAR most important goal, now and in the future.

USAG changed the new name of the JO levels from ACE to DP after a few people pointed out the ACE acronym is also used for "adverse childhood experiences". The disgusting choice to partner with an organization that has LITERALLY DISTRIBUTED CHILD PORNOGRAPHY OF ONE OF YOUR ATHLETES is considerably worse than the mere branding problem that the ACE name presented, and this decision should also be walked back.

No amount of kickbacks from subscription purchases and advertisers should be worth the safety and privacy of USAG's athletes. As an organization you have struggled with this idea in the past, and clearly you continue to struggle with it now. I don't see how any parent could look at this announcement and decide USAG is an organization that they should continue to trust with their child's physical, mental and emotional health.

The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.

Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.

You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.

“Sorry, what the fuck?”

What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like. 

Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.

What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:

We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.

Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”

That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.

So how does magenta factor into this?

Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.

What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?

Fucking green.

Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.

So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green. 

And so it made up magenta.

So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”

No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:

Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.

Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?

Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.

Yall.

This means that for me, Stygian blue is an intense cosmos-levels of dark violet, Hyperbolic orange is the only one that looks the same as the provided example, and Self-luminous red…is fucking magenta.

Thanks, mutant eyeballs.

I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

1. trump being (the former) president sounds and is and was just absolutely ridiculous, but even back then people knew he was a con man with exactly as much unearned and often pretend wealth as it would take to successfully buy the presidency, the conman’s instinct for finding out what people wanna hear and saying it over and over and the ego to be magnetic to those who are, frankly, pathetic. The Simpsons was a show that started out being reviled by a lot of Middle America. The creators were always aware just how backwards America could be, how much conservative backlash we were capable of. And trump banked on that. And he was the kind of guy that the people who were in a position to stop him would dismiss with a, “pfft, he’s a sideshow, he’ll never make it, it’s absurd”. Right up until he’s dismantling democracy from the Oval. The Simpsons was known for imagining ridiculous but not 100% impossible scenarios and just flying with it. They were the walking definition of “your chances of being killed by a cat are extremely, extremely low, but never zero.”. The chances of trump being POTUS were extremely, extremely low but sadly not zero.

2. Any female head-of-state would have to have a certain look, because misogyny. They’d have to ride the line between not too masculine (so no strong blues or reds, no neutrals) and not too feminine (no pink, yellow or pastels), not too adorned and not too plain, not so rich looking it puts the middle class off (no diamonds or big stones) but appropriately coiffed enough to make her success evidence (so some jewelry must be worn). A cool purple is a good color because it can feminine-to-neutral (a male executive could wear this as a tie color and no one would think twice) while still lending itself to an outfit that’s the spiritual heir to Hilary’s power pants suit. Pearls, as well, ride that line. They’re classy, but not flashy, they’re classic but never outdated. Reasonably good looking fakes can be obtained by the lower classes yet the upper classes continue to wear them so their status as a class marker remains. 

If I were thinking carefully about how a smart, determined woman like a grown President Lisa Simpson would present herself, I’d pick just about this outfit. 

The hedge funds never actually owned these shares to begin with because they were short selling so they never actually paid for them.

Redditors saw this and decided to buy up all these shorted shares to gamestop a company that wasnt failing that the hedge funds would then be forced to buy back as they never actually owned the shares.

rich hedge funds have the ability to sell stocks they havent paid for yet that other people actually own and then pay for them after a certain amount of time. they can sell these stocks trade them whatever but they will eventually have to buy them back.

So they shorted gamestop shares from 20 dollars all the way down to 3 dollars, meaning they borrowed shares to then massively sell.

they sold shares at like 20 dollars and then 18, etc. and because when investors see massive amounts of shares being sold they get nervous and then sell their shares which drives the price of the stock ever further down.

so they took something worth 20 that they sold for 20 dollars and all its downward prices and instead of paying for it at $3 dollars they thought theyd CONTINUE to short the market, meaning they kept driving the prices down because apparently this obscene amount of money wasnt good enough.

Redditors who dont say the stock market is magic and mystical astrology saw this very obvious evidence that these hedge funds would be forced to buy back all these fucking gamestop shares and decided to drive the price of these shares up knowing that the hedge funds would then be forced to buy back the shares they have yet to pay for at increasingly wild prices.

what they were looking for was over 100% of all stocks shorted on a company that wasnt even failing or in complete disarray

they used this knowledge to bring stock that was 20 dollars brought down to $3 all the way back up to $140

the hedge funds still have to pay for all of those shares they never technically even owned in the first place which these redditors knew so they held onto these stocks they bought in a company whose shares were oversold.

INSTEAD of acknowledging this they decided to have media campaigns lie and make the stock market look even more mystical and crazy to people who dont know shit about finance so that your average folks wouldnt catch them in the act of just getting a fucking 2 billion dollar bailout for being greedy fucking pieces of shit.

They also dont want your average person to KNOW they do this shit especially when they drive shares so deep into the ground ($3)

TL;DR: Every time you call the stock market magic and mystical and ooo makes no sense, you pretty much allow these motherfuckers to get away with robbery of the average person (given a government bailout is paying for this)

Understanding how these things happen and knowing what to look for allows people to work together and not only stop it but rob back from the billionaires when they pull this shit.

Now, the one thing you need to the know about the stock market is that it is run by PEOPLE. And people are panicky. It really doesn’t matter how “well” a company is doing if its stock is being sold off en-mass. People panic, think that somebody knows something they don’t, and sell their stock/refuse to buy. 

The hedge funds basically bought a very specific kind of bike and pawned all of them. They bet that people would see a lot of a specific brand of bike at the pawn shop and refuse to buy because there MUST be something wrong with that brand right? Why else would a ton of them be in a pawnshop? Better ditch your own right now or risk the wheel falling off or something. 

So, Gamestop’s stock is in the toilet and the hedge funds are about to make a shit ton of money. 

Enter reddit.

Upon seeing that Gamestop’s stock is artificially low because of hedge fund dickery, one forum decides to start buying Gamestop stock out of spite. Buying raises the stock price. The Redditors raise the price enough that the hedge funds start panicking. The time when the HAVE to buy back the stock is coming due and now it is WAY more expensive than they sold it for. Its like Bob walking pass the pawnshop and seeing the bike’s price is now three times what he sold it for. Bob panics. Bob makes a horrible decision. He complains to everyone about this. EVERYONE. 

Hedge funds were on tv whiny and attracted the attention of people who REALLY DON’T LIKE THEM. People like Elon Musk whose company has been targeted by shorting before and has no problem finding the cash to buy the inflated Gamestop stock and have the social media platform to shine an even bigger spotlight on this. Now other people outside of the Reddit forum are joining in because they smelled blood in the water. 

Summer and I have been talking a lot about systems of magic and relating to magic, as a sort of offshoot of the conversation she was having with her friend Lucy on the same subject. If I had to pick the one approach I like best, it’d have to be Ursula Vernon’s, and I certainly have enough of the Carlos the Scientist approach in me to justify Summer’s new “the sleazy the sublime and the scientific” tag. (You probably don’t want to get me started on magosynthetic plankton/simple plants and the resultant magic based ecosystems.) But when I was teeny tiny my dad had this book of Swedish fairytales, which I later kidnapped and have on my lap at the time of writing this. These stories have their share of problems. Many, many… many problems. But they were an early and important influence on me, and there’s one story in particular which is required reading for anyone who has developed some inexplicable interest in how I relate to fantasy worlds and structures. I can’t find the collection in an electronic format, and even the dead tree format was difficult to locate in the past, though recently I have seen it on Amazon for cheap. (I don’t know how long it will stay cheap, or available at all, considering it was nowhere a few months back, so… consider it? It’s worth it for the illustrations alone.) Anyway, I’ve decided to transcribe this one story here for easier sharing.

Warning: this is an exact transcription of the text from the book, and it’s a bit racist. The contrast in appearance between the troll girl, who is dark-skinned with black hair and eyes, and the princess, who is very pale, is played up throughout the story, with a general sense that the princess is the more beautiful of the two because of these features. It helps a little that both are protagonists, but I feel like this still merits an acknowledgment. I don’t wanna ruin anybody’s day with racism, and I hope readers who might not have noticed will read it a bit more critically with this in mind.

Tom Nook animated with my left hand.

Tom Nook animated with my right hand.

Look, I’m a big fan of your work and I’m not trying to be rude or make you look bad, but I’m going to have to criticize you here. Do you understand how hurtful this is to mixed race people and light skinned POC (such as myself)? And how limiting this is to artists (again, such as myself)?

A lot of this is basically saying you can only draw non-white people one way or another, which is incredibly harmful because it makes every non-white person look like a hivemind. And I’m not sure if this was OP’s intention, but it makes it look like they’re saying that anyone BIPOC that has light colored eyes/skin/hair are bad/not real BIPOC. Which is… Yikes.

You said in your Cringy Pony OC challenge that limiting artists was a bad thing. Yet this is doing the exact same thing. And a lot of these are taken completely out of context.

With that in mind… Let’s talk about these characters in depth

The “mammie/black friend” archetype

Monique (Kim Possible) - This is really the only character that kinda fits into this trope, but even then, it’s not entirely accurate. Monique is Kim’s best friend (besides Ron) but that’s not her only personality trait! Monique is portrayed as a bit of a smart-ass. She openly teases (and even criticizes) Kim and Ron several times. At times she can be seen as weird and quirky, she’s never seen as “just the black friend” ALSO. She’s not the only non-white character in Kim Possible. There’s Wade, who makes all of Ron and Kim’s gadgets (and fits more into the “tech nerd” trope), there’s Monkey Fist, who’s Asian and a recurring antagonist. There’s Yuri, a young Asian woman that Ron befriends. There’s May Lin, Ron’s adopted baby sister. And there’s Sénor Senor Senior and his son, Sénor Senor Junior, who are Hispanic and are also recurring antagonists. Also, if Monique was just “the white girl’s friend” then why are there “Best Of Monique” compilations on YouTube?

Gerald (Hey Arnold) - I’m gonna be honest… I’ve never actually seen Hey Arnold!, so I’m just going to ignore him for now 🤷

Susie (Rugrats) - For one thing, she’s a really young child. Young kids tend to cling closely to their friends, regardless of race. And secondly, she never “serves” anyone. She openly calls out Angelica for her bratty bullshit, aspires to be a doctor like her mother, and has an interest in cooking. There’s even an episode focused almost purely on her and her family as they celebrate Kwanzaa. That’s the opposite of “just there to help white people”

The “stoic savage” archetype

Pocahontas (y'all know what movie this is from) - Ok, I can kinda see where OP is coming from here (Disney’s Pocahontas is definitely not the best representation of Native Americans by any means). But still, it’s not entirely accurate. Saying that she “supports invasion” completely goes against her character and her motivations. Her main motivation is to have peace between both worlds, not for one to overpower the other. Hell, when John Smith says that he and his people are quote unquote “improving” the lives of “savages” she calls him out on it. When he brings up building new (more European) homes, she responds with, “Our houses are fine!” and when he says she just “doesn’t know any better” she responds by attempting to walk away from him. Not only that, she also calls him out for using words like “savage” or “uncivilized”.

Chel (The Road To El Dorado) - Is OP serious? CHEL DOESN’T ACTUALLY WANT TO BE A GUIDE! SHE ONLY DOES IT OUT CONVENIENCE FOR HERSELF! For those who haven’t seen the movie, The Road To El Dorado is a DreamWorks animated film about two runaway Spanish con men named Miguel and Tulio. Who accidentally stumble upon the ancient city of El Dorado. A mythical city that’s almost entirely made out of gold. After being mistaken for gods, Miguel and Tulio decide to con the citizens of El Dorado for some of their gold with Chel’s aid. To say Chel is open to invasion is extremely dumb because the reason why she helps Miguel and Tulio in the first place, is because she wants to leave El Dorado and have a portion of the gold. Hell, she actually stops an invasion from happening toward the end of the movie! When Spanish conquistadors are about to invade El Dorado, Chel helps Miguel and Tulio figure out a plan to block the entrance to El Dorado to prevent the conquistadors from getting in. She actively teases Miguel and Tulio throughout the movie (she even falls in love with Tulio at some point), and is always one step ahead of them. She only really “guides” them like once or twice in the entire movie and that’s it. Yes, Miguel and Tulio do see her as desirable at first, but they stop themselves because they fear Chel might double cross them at some point (she doesn’t). Chel is actually the one to approach Tulio in a flirtatious way! She’s who starts their relationship, of her own free will. She doesn’t fit the “stoic savage” archetype at all!

The designs

Esmeralda (The Hunchback Of Notre Dame) - Are you kidding me?! HER NAME IS ESMERALDA! A name that literally translates to “emerald”! Of course her eyes are going to be green or a shade of green! “It’s not uncommon for BIPOC to have light colored eyes/hair!” Then why are you complaining about it?!

Kida (Atlantis) - She’s not even part of a real human race? She’s an Atlantean. A 100% fictional race made up for the movie. Fictional races are allowed to have weird hair colors. That’s like saying the Drenchens in The Dark Crystal: Age Of Resistance shouldn’t have green hair, because no one has naturally green hair.

Storm (X-Men) - She’s a superhero! A lot of superheroes have unnaturally colored hair! I’m not even an expert when comes to superhero comics and even I know that this is true! In X-Men, there’s Wolverine, who always has a blue-ish tint in hair, there’s Nightcrawler, who’s entirely blue with yellow eyes. There’s Rouge, who has both red and white hair. And there’s Mystique, who not only has blue skin, yellow eyes, and neon red hair. And her power is controlling weather right? Things like wind, snow, clouds, and storms right? And what color is most associated with things like wind, snow, clouds? That’s right, white. She has white hair bc it fits with both her powers and her theme. Not just because “it looks cool”

Princess Yue (Avatar: The Last Airbender) - @lopoddityart didn’t you watch A:TLA? Because Yue’s hair isn’t naturally white. It got that way because the moon healed her when she was a baby. The white hair was a side effect. Also, literally every single person from the Water Tribe has blue eyes. And Firebenders all have yellow/orange eyes, so the “unnatural” eye color thing really doesn’t fit here.

Colorism

Lacienega, Gross Sisters (The Proud Family) - What does OP even mean here? I’m asking that out of genuine confusion. What do they mean by “desirable”? Like are they talking about being popular within the shows universe? By the audience’s standards? Or as in beautiful and/or good person? Because Lacienega is (other than being rich) never portrayed as being desirable by the show’s standards. Penny always seeing through her fake “nice girl” demeanor. She sees her as spoiled and shallow, and so does the audience along with her. And though the Gross Sisters are antagonists, I wouldn’t go so far as to describe them as “repulsive”. In fact, there are several moments in the show where they’re portrayed in a far sympathetic light. Like there was one episode where Penny gives one of the sisters a makeover. Said sister is incredibly happy about it, and Penny genuinely starts to care about her because of it. There’s one episode where we meet their father, who’s portrayed as big and intimidating (implying that maybe the family relationship isn’t all that great). And the Gross Sisters are stated to come from a poor household, which is why they steal money from the other kids. Also, Penny is the daughter of a light skinned black woman and a dark skinned black man, and two of her friends (Dijonay and Sticky) are also dark skinned, and so are several other within the show. And neither are portrayed as better than the other (I find odd how OP complains about BIPOC characters having European features and unnatural colors in their design, which is kinda colorist, but now colorism is suddenly a bad thing). And wasn’t The Proud Family created by a black man?

Polymorph Trope

(Ok I’m just gonna list all of the characters here because I pretty much have the same thing to say about all of them)

Tiana, Kuzco, Kenai (The Princess And The Frog/Emperor’s New Groove/Brother Bear) - I’m just gonna be honest here, I never understood the criticism of “this doesn’t count as good representation because the main character spends most of the movie as an animal” I’d might understand if they were completely 100% non-sentient, non verbal, regular animals. But. They’re. Not… They are just as human as they were before they were transformed. They talk, they share their thoughts and feelings, they still act like their human selves. Y'know anthropomorphism? The act of applying human traits onto something non-human? “They’re often pushed around by outside forces to each plotpoint until they’re turned back into humans” Umm… No?! Tiana is active player in the entire story. She works hard her entire life for her restaurant, is always calling out Naveen for his immaturity, travels to Mama Odie’s because she thought she could turn her back into a human and give her the restaurant she always wanted, and actively fought the shadowman and ended up defeating him. Saying she didn’t do anything herself or isn’t a good role model for BIPOC because she “isn’t fully human” is soooo disrespectful. Kuzco only got transformed because Yzma was trying to kill him! And I find it odd that OP even included New Groove in the first place considering that Kuzco spends a majority of the film following Pacha, a POC who stays human for the whole movie. Kenai got transformed because a) that was part of his people’s beliefs. They believe in spirit animals and are given totems when they become of age, and b) he went against his totem by killing a bear. So he was transformed into one. And again, he too is an active player in his story. He follows Koda to the salmon run because he knows it’s close “The Mountains Where The Lights Touch The Earth” a place where he believes he can get changed back, he always protects Koda from danger when need be, and later chooses to remain as a bear to stay with Koda. So saying he was just pushed around is kinda dumb. Also, why is it okay for characters like the Prince from Beauty and the Beast to be a polymorph or Saoirse from Song Of The Sea to be a polymorph, but as soon as a non-white character does it, it’s suddenly a bad thing? Idk, I’m smelling a bit of a double standard (y'all know stories of people transforming into animals have existed for literally thousands of years, right? A lot of them originating from black, and indigenous cultures? Things like skinwalkers, rou garous, demons, etc)

TL;DR

I really hope you see some of the major flaws within this post. The main two being it’s incredibly hurtful to us mixed race individuals (we get enough shit for not looking either “light” enough or “dark” enough as it is, we certainly don’t need any extra grief). And because it both limits what people can create and what people consume. People should be free to make whatever kind of character they want, as long as its not actually harmful, then it should be fine. Instead of looking at characters purely as archetypes, we should see them as… Well… Characters! Their likes, dislikes, goals, and how interesting they are as characters. And if I’m being honest here, I quite like a lot of the characters mentioned here, just because I think they are good, well written, and intresting characters.

Every morning I must get out of bed The Normal Way, which consists of a dramatic flailing full body roll to the opposite side of the bed, steam rolling all who happen to be in my path

While he’s getting dressed I must say “I like your pants”, if I do not do this in a timely enough manner he’ll follow me around doing a dramatic “superman stares off to the distance” pose until the ritual is complete