Izzy's Corner

Hi! I’m Anzy, a disabled adult with chronic pain.

[turtleducknewton]

Critical Role BIRD WATCH: C4E26

Time to First Bird (TTFB): 00:25:57 (-00:18:16 from C4E25)

Total Species Mentioned: 3 (+0 from C4E25)

New Species Mentioned: 0

This Week's Stars:

Falcon -> Saker Falcon (Falco cherrug)

Eagle -> Verreaux's Eagle (Aquila verreauxii)

Magpie -> Malayan Black Magpie (Platysmurus leucopterus)

Happy Convergence, everyone! In celebration, I'd like to discuss convergence in a birds context, so let's learn a little...

✨EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY✨

Specifically, we're going to learn about convergent evolution! Thematic, right?

Convergent evolution is a phenomena where species that aren't closely related develop similar traits. Let's look at a (made-up) example:

Here we have a phylogenic tree, which shows the evolution of two different families of plants, A and B, from a common ancestor. Let's say that common ancestor has white flowers.

In Family A, we see two species have evolved, one with purple flowers and one with blue flowers. In Family B, we also have two species, one with green flowers, and another with purple flowers. While our purple flowered Species 1 and 3 share a common ancestor further back in their evolution, that ancestor didn't have purple flowers. So the purple flower trait evolved twice, separately, in these two families. That's convergent evolution!

There are tons of examples of convergent evolution, all across the tree of life. One of the most commonly cited ones is the evolution of flight - birds and bats both evolved flight separately. While they share a common limb structure, due to their common tetrapod ancestors, their mechanisms of flight are very different. Birds have feathered wings, supported by the forearm (ulna) and fused wrist and hand bones (carpometacarpus), while bats wings are a membrane stretched across the elongated bone structure of their fingers (phalanges) and legs.

And also... if you thought I was done with magpie facts, you'd be WRONG!

Eurasian magpies and Australian magpies are also considered an example of convergent evolution. Despite being from different families (Corvidae and Artamidae), these two magpies developed a similar body structure and coloration pattern, on completely different continents. Big win for magpies!

my best friends <3

(questions? need to catch up? CR4 Bird Watch field guide!)

[turquoisemagpie]

The Voice in the Night

(Part 1)

The Voice in the Night

(Part 2)

The Voice in the Night

(Part 3)

The Voice in the Night

(Part 4 - end)

[todayintokyo]

Cherry blossoms in Aomori, Japan, by 1min.traveller

[bisexualityinfused]

@aquilacalvitium

[othellho]

[astrogaled]

“gale is disabled with chronic pain” i say into the mic. the crowd boos and jeers.

“no she’s right” a voice calls from the back. i look up. it’s gale dekarios himself.

[song-spero]

One of the many things I love about this game is that MOST of our companions are disabled in one way, shape, or form. This is appropriate for a story so much about bodily autonomy and its limits, a story that begins with a quest for a cure. Our companions' disabilities vary dramatically from more metaphorical to more literal, more chronic to more acute, disabilities of the body vs. mind vs. a bit of both. Likewise, each companion varies on whether the happy ending for them is cure for the disability or care for the disability and whether that disability is treated as inherently traumatic or as a neutral fact about the body and mind. The result is a game with a very nuanced and thorough exploration of disability, one that I think deserves more love. Some companion disability breakdowns under the read-more, because apparently I am obsessed with this.

We've got:

Shadowheart: amnesiac in the chronic pain gang. Her amnesia and chronic pain are both caused by Shar to help control her as a cult member. Her disabilities tie directly into the theme of the loss of bodily autonomy to a bodily defect (the tadpole vs. Shar's wound). However, Shadowheart's happy ending doesn't inherently involve being cured. If she chooses a Selunite path and frees her parents (arguably the happiest ending for god's favorite princess), Shadowheart remains an amnesiac (lacking all memory of her childhood and early adulthood) with chronic pain. It is just that Shar's control over Shadowheart's body/mind is no longer control over Shadowheart. Her arc is a really cool twist on the whole "God gave you disability as a curse/test" nonsense--in this case, that is literally true, but she still lives a happy and fulfilled life with her disabilities and doesn't require a cure.

Gale: as pointed out by OP, Gale has a chronic illness that gives him chronic pain. Unlike Shadowheart, his illness is terminal: he must find a cure or he dies. Also unlike Shadowheart, he is in the midst of a pretty clear depression episode and grappling with suicidal ideation. His happiest ending is finding a cure and living as a professor/retired adventurer. While Shadowheart's happiest ending entails living to the fullest with your disabilities, Gale's happiest ending is about finding a way to live when everything in your body, mind, and environment insist you must die.

Karlach: Karlach, like Gale, has a chronic and terminal condition. In her case, she's a fantasy disabled veteran who's going to die because the fantasy military experimented on her. Her relationship to disability and death is directly foiled to Gale's--but her arc comes with the knowledge that a cure is almost certainly impossible. However, care is not--she can go to Dammon, she can go through fantasy surgeries to manage her quite literal and quite firey flare-ups, and she can find a care network who will emotionally and physically support her as her body fails. When a cure is impossible, it is her care networks that keep her alive--Wyll (and whoever decides to join them) going to Avernus. Karlach's relationship to disability is all about finding joy even in impending death, and learning that care is more powerful than cure. (This is one of the reasons why I personally am happy that Karlach DOESN'T get cured at the end of the game--it would completely ruin the message around the power of care ethics and the futility of cure ethics, a central theme in the whole story!)

Astarion: a vampire. No, literally, that's his disability: the man's a vampire. He cannot walk in the sun, cross running water, enter a home without invitation, see his reflection, etc. He's also constantly deprived of proper nutrients through Cazador's abuse and his condition. Like Shadowheart, he's an amnesiac. Like Shadowheart, I would argue his happiest ending is the one where he isn't cured. The Ascension ritual creates a new kind of vampire: a vampire who has all the perks of vampirism (what academics called "hyperabilities") but none of the disabilities that go with vampirism. But if he refuses the Ascension, he refuses the closest thing he has to the cure--and it is only in this ending that he truly undoes the traumas of vampirism. If he remains a spawn, he stays in a vampire's disabled body, but he lets go of the traumatic and abusive culture of the vampire master/spawn--allowing others to be his equal, allowing himself to truly care for others and to be cared for in turn. ("You give me something to care for, and that is worth the peril.") Astarion in many ways is Shadowheart's foil when it comes to disability--he too got his through lifelong abuse, and he too finds his most fulfilled and healed self in the ending where he is not cured. Like Shadowheart's and Karlach's stories, Astarion's "radiant hopeful" ending is all about the joys that can be found outside a cure for disability. His Ascendent ending, on the flipside, is about the tremendous violence that a cure ethic entails: it "cures" some of the disabled, and relegates the uncurable disabled to die because they are not truly "alive" or "people" (the other spawn who don't ascend, but must be sacrificed for the ritual because it is "kinder" than letting them live). Astarion's endings more openly link cure ethics to eugenics and care ethics to the healing and joy within disabled life.

Wyll: Wyll is interesting in that, aside from the tadpole, his plot doesn't revolve around care/cure for a disability. He only has one canonical disability at the start of the story: his eye, lost in battle, replaced by a prosthetic that Mizora uses to spy on him. Like many of the other companions, his prosthetic eye directly relates to his loss of control over his own body and soul. However, unlike the other companions, the missing eye is mostly treated as a neutral fact of his body, not an angst-ridden and plot-defining aspect of his character. Later, Mizora disfigures him as punishment for sparing Karlach. As he grapples with his scars/horns, he grapples with the narrative that deformity and disfigurement are signs of monstrosity--an old belief that disability revealed the evilness of the soul (think Shakespeare's Richard III). Ultimately, he sees that his deeds, not his disfigurement, define him--and he comes to see his horns and scarring as a neutral or even handsome part of his appearance ("I wish I had time to polish up the horns" in the epilogue). Wyll is about disability as a neutral fact of life, rather than as some trial to overcome.

Lae'zel: our only abled companion, and she's a supersoldier from outer space. You thought Baldur's Gate 3 would give us a "normal" body? You fool--normal is a myth, and Lae'zel sure as hell ain't it. She's an abled githyanki, which means she is parthonogenic, teleports at will, and can see in pitch-black shadow. She is hyperable by the standards of the "weaklings" of Faerun, but abled by the standards of her own people. Lae'zel is a reminder that "abled" is not the same as normal, and that both ability and normalcy are social constructs. After all, to a githyanki, "your large fleshy nose looks like a mistake." While the other companions are about disability, Lae'zel's story is a commentary on ability. Lae'zel's story is about an extremely abled person suddenly facing the threat of disability (getting tadpoled), and immediately floundering in fear of it. She turns to the hope of a cure (the zaithisk). Like so many of our companions do in their personal arcs, she finds that the "cure" is horrific violence done to disabled people--one that will ultimately kill them in the name of scientific advancement.

This...spiraled beyond what I intended. Truly, there are whole essays to be written about disability in this game.

tl, dr; Baldur's Gate 3 is a game about disability and ability, the ethics of care and cure, and the limits of bodily autonomy. Each companion has something to say about these themes, and I think part of loving them is loving what they have to say about disability.

[wideasleepanddaydreaming]

I'd like to add the dark urge to this also. The durge is mentally ill and has severe brain damage. They have violent and shameful intrusive thoughts that are potentially at odds with who they want to be, amnesia, and whole episodes where they act without remembering.

(It's worth noting that the metaphor breaks down slightly in that the durge is a danger to others, whereas mental illness is far more likely to make you a danger to yourself first, but I digress; the fear of endangering others and the stigma that comes with certain disorders is certainly relatable enough.)

And Bhaal encourages all this. The durge's happy ending may be a cure, but I think the crucial part of it isn't necessarily that they're free of the urge itself (and my headcanon is that my durges are not, really - they still get the impulse, they're just more capable of resisting now because they have support and a greater understanding of themselves), but that they are free of the abusive figure who deliberately plays on their illness and uses it for his own ends. They can heal only when they break away from the influences that exploit rather than accommodate their disability, when they refuse to participate in their toxic 'family', and - importantly - when they have an option.

It costs them dearly, as it often does. They literally die, and would have stayed dead if Withers hadn't literally scraped them off the ground. The road to recovery is long and painstaking, and only possible when there is support in place to receive them when they have nowhere to go. It says something to me about the necessity of having compassion even for people with "ugly" or "scary" conditions, as well as how illness can leave you vulnerable to being taken advantage of by people who aren't interested in your healing.

[probablybadrpgideas]

While many have dreamed of dragon mounts, the fact of the matter is that dragons are simply undomesticable. For your homework, I want you to list all the criteria that makes domestication possible and why dragons pretty much fail in every category.

ok I did a module on domestication in my undergrad so let's see, we've got

quick maturing - not in D&D RAW

able to find food in/around human settlements - yes, once

hardiness - yes

herd dynamics - big no

ease of reproduction in captivity - uncertain

bonus : can be kept in captivity in the first place - not for long

How did I do? - Paper

[probablybadrpgideas]

follow-up based on tags/replies

what about mounts? - domestication is a generations-long breeding process. taking a wild dragon and making it your mount is taming, totally different thing (many exotic pets are tame rather than domesticated)

human-like intelligence makes it an ethical issue - 100% agree

sounds like humans are domesticable - yeah actually

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Fascinated by everyone's but especially American's desire to give medieval keeps, especially in colder regions, central heating (and I think Winterfell is to blame for this trope, where, to it's defence, the hot springs were not a matter of comfort but survival wrt the deadly fantasy Winter that's not real irl), because I'm always like. okay I know they told you in middle grade that castles were all cold and drafty but like ... no also what

There's generally going to be rooms dedicated to and build for warmth, the living quarters, both for nobles and their servants. This will be the central living tower, or parts of it called a Kemenate (literally 'room with a stove'), the great hall and work spaces around the kitchen. You can put the Kemenate on top of the hall to catch the big fires' and daily living's heat through the wooden floor, but you often can't put wooden stuff on top of the kitchens (that's a fire risk). If you have the money and space, you build a whole separate comfy place for living because you don't have to stay in the most defensible part of the castle all the time. These separate living buildings are also called Kemenate and are often build from wood, cob, brick etc.

People used to wear much more clothes indoors, including while sleeping, and those clothes were much thicker and sturdier than what we largely wear today. Every time you think of how cold those stone walls are, think about everyone wearing a linen shift + two-ish layers of wool on all body parts except hands and head + stockings and shoes + some kind of head-covering. In Ye Old Middle Ages, women are probably wearing a wimple, which is kind of like a modern Hijab in terms of coverage. People wear shifts, socks, and a head-covering to bed.

I think people used to radiators also really underestimate how much a large open fire/tiled stove heats up a room. Also, middle and northern Europe (as well as parts of Northern China) had and to this day have beds and benches build into tiled and cob stoves. Those fuck.

Beds are enclosed so you stay warm in them, either by curtains, in wall niches or with wood. There's also a type of bed that's inside a chest (like a coffin) so you can stuff your stuff inside during the day and put down the lid to use it as a bench. That's also another reason for people to always sleep in groups. Depending on the era, one of the jobs of a lady's maid or a retainer might literally be warming their master's bed. In early times and among servants, people also sleep in large groups in rooms together in general even outside a farming context, often with animals like pet dogs, too, which further warms everything up.

Walls are not bare, cold stone, but covered with a layer of plaster or cob, tiles or wooden panels, sometimes layered, and believe me, this makes such a difference. Source: I lived in a Ye Olde German Farmhouse with 70 cm thick stone walls and flag stone floor and all that converted to modern flats for a while.

On top of that you hang tapestries on the wall, which are not like modern printed cloth but basically wall rugs, sometimes several inches thick, and rugs or rushes (like a light cover of hay) on the floor on top of stone, tile, wooden panelling or a cob floor cover that goes over the heave flag stone. Pillows and blankets on all sitting surfaces, often on top of panelling (in the case of benches build into the stone). The roof of a room is also tiled, panelled or plastered. Upper stories will generally have wooden floors. Stories in a tower heat each other upwards, so the nicer rooms are further up.

The inner stone walls of a castle, even if stone and very thick, will heat up a few degrees in comparison to the outside walls if the castle is continually heated/lived in, and also trap heat inside, and this will make a difference. Inner walls might also be thinner and made of wood, cob or brick. You're defending against the outside, after all.

You put stuff in the windows. Holy shit. Screens of wood, horn, cloth or leather/hide, often treated for extra insulation. Why are these fantasy castles all so drafty.

Like, idk, I know Americans especially can't pop down to their nearby castle museum to have a look around, but even with people who can and do: The castles you'll see, even the ones who aren't 'ruined' are ruins. They're stripped down. I remember touring Norman towers in England, and those places do look dire and are cold because even if they're still standing, they're ruins. It makes such a difference to get to look at a castle that is still lived in, has been inhabited until recently, or has been historically restored where these amenities are preserved. The exact amenities will depend on the era, of course, but they'll be there. The publicly accessible parts of Burg Eltz are a great example to google, especially since I promise you, you have seen this specific castle before. They have pictures on their English language website here, and the German National Geographic has a few further inside pictures here. Seeing a place like that that isn't a ruin with bare, stripped walls, nothing in the windows, no decorations and furniture etc. makes you realise that yeah actually. My characters are probably just gonna go grab a pillow if their ass is cold on the window's stone bench. Blankets are a pretty old technology, humans (elves, dwarves, whatever) can figure that one out.

[artvaris]

Some ballpoint pen stuff again for relaxation

[ruinedchildhood]

[cryptic-curation]

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

Some of the bleach burned thru the shirt bc this was my first time bleaching anything ever, but it kinda adds to it.

[kiwinatorwaffles]

headcanon: grian comes from a large ass avian clan and has an insane extended family that all bite harder than he does

[kiwinatorwaffles]

GRELATIVES HELP

[aries-of-spades]

it's a Greunion

[kiwinatorwaffles]

[kiwinatorwaffles]

griandparents /j

[kiwinatorwaffles]

via nowaxjustanaxe

this is even funnier because i just had another post about grian’s extended family being all of his alter egos right here you and me same brainwave mate

[kiwinatorwaffles]

you guys have to stop being funny in the tags this post is getting absurdly long

[kiwinatorwaffles]

CEASE

[aurum-the-yapper]

So should the crimes Grouncel (Grian council) commit be called Grimes?

((I'm not funny sorry.))

[kiwinatorwaffles]

from @nekora-rayven709

this is actually only his abridged list, jimmy

[kiwinatorwaffles]

THE GRAMILY SAGA IS GOING TO PUT ME IN MY GRAVE

[kristina100000]

incredible picture found on the interwebs i had to share with everypony

[cupcakedex]

Sharing my trans pride Zacian cake we made when one of our Twitch chatters suggested the design a couple years back, and I love it! Zacian's colour scheme is definitely reminiscent of the flag, and being genderless yet referred to as Zamazenta's "elder sister" is quite fitting! The cake is vanilla, with home-made strawberry simple syrup, whipped cream and strawberries.

Trans folks have always been an important part of the Pokemon community, and it's our responsibility as a community to cherish and stand with them. From Meowth's original VA, Maddie Blaustein, to the countless talented artists, thoughtful content creators, skilled competitors, and everyday fans, all deserve to feel safe and seen in Pokemon spaces.

At a time when trans rights are under attack, as trans people are being scapegoated and demonized, we must stand together and be vigilant in our battles, but also in our joy. 🩵🩷🤍🩷🩵

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

The guy who said fuck you im keeping my sword... did in fact win this brawl.

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

@drukhari

[zim-kinnie]

Whenever Americans use Cryillic like. That. I just. Instantly shrivel up an cry

[zim-kinnie]

Like idk how to tell you this but н isnt h and и isnt n

[skyheartstar13]

It’s true and you should say it.

[zim-kinnie]

Я isnt R

Р isnt P

В isnt B

[shipping-is-life-1-0-1]

If you want to explain, what does it mean then? 0.0

[zim-kinnie]

н makes n sound,и makes ee sound, я makes ya sound, р makes r sound, в makes v sound

[shimmedmilk]

you mean, like, ня?

[aveture]

oh no. It can be made with Cyrillic now

[zim-kinnie]

ня

[verminviscount]

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE, YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE EXPLAINED

[zim-kinnie]

НЯ

[degenerate-perturbation]

НЯ

[give-fnc-chocolate]

[zicygomar]

[exvind]

OH. GOD.

[lizord-lord]

THATS SO FUNNY

[exemiin]

am i sitting in a tin can

far above the world

[garashir]

hey friends where is that picture of boromir with the gondor flag except its a pride flag?

[lesbiansforboromir]

Couldn’t find it so I made another because you’re right that it’s a crime and it’s definitely my duty to remedy it