Essek may have internalized it under the guise of needing to know more about dunamis and the potential the Luxon Beacons had, but under all of that thirst for knowledge was an entirely different thirstāa hungerāthat he could never have uncovered on his own. Essek was lonely.
It wasnāt that there was no one around him. It was that there was no one around him with similar interests and values, no one willing to do what he was willing to do. No one willing to challenge the shackles of rigid tradition, religion, and culture that the Dynasty is mired in and seek more. To reach further. To question why. No one to match him intellectually on the levels he found integral to his passion for magic and knowledge.
Essek was so desperate to find someone who understood his thirst for knowledge in this particular regard, even the tiniest bit, that he reached out to the ENEMY NATIONāS corrupt, powerful wizard circle to find that connection.
And he thought he had found it. He was so sure he had. Until he was finally faced with someone like him; someone who challenged every box that held him, who looked for more, who reached further, who questioned why. Essek met Caleb, and within a very short time, realized he had been missing someone like him his entire life.
Essek Thelyss had been looking for a Caleb Widogast for a very, very long time but was too entrenched in both his selfish drive to further his own knowledge and his disillusionment with the way the Dynasty treated research into dunamis, that he became blind to it.
No wonder he was suddenly faced with the vacuity one becomes intimate with when everything theyāve been building towards suddenly falls out from under their feet, no wonder he unraveled so quickly and fell straight into an existential crisis.
The Mighty Nein helped shape Essek into someone who no longer had to stand in the presence of loneliness and not recognize its face, but Essek no longer has to hunger for someone who would get it; because Caleb does.
I know I have close to zero Tumblr fame, which I normally appreciate, but I would love it if this made it into the world and got fully backed. You can even pledge to get the digital content and send a real copy to a school in Africa or to a HBCU or community library of your choosing!
My biggest tip for fanfic writers is this: if you get a character's mannerisms and speech pattern down, you can make them do pretty much whatever you want and it'll feel in character.
Logic: Characters, just like real people, are mallable. There is typically very little that's so truly, heinously out of character that you absolutely cannot make it work under any circumstance. In addition, most fans are also willing to accept characterization stretches if it makes the fic work. Yeah, we all know the villain and the hero wouldn't cuddle for warmth in canon. But if they did do that, how would they do it?
What counts is often not so much 'would the character do this?' and more 'if the character did do this, how would they do it?' If you get 'how' part right, your readers will probably be willing to buy the rest, because it will still feel like their favourite character. But if it doesn't feel like the character anymore, why are they even reading the fic?
Worry less about whether a character would do something, and more about how they'd sound while doing it.
ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr
When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them
by their very definition, they are gone forever
there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today
but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals
there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious
There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous
the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota
whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were
the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous
"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa
the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs
and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.
it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet
before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.
This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover
My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time
Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!
Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!
This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):
The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!
Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!
Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??
I want to see those big fungal spike tree things that were the first tall plants.
I want to see the vast braided river plains of Rhodinia, because before root systems could hold together riverbanks, single, stable river channels were nearly impossible ā there were vast boulder and silt and gravel fields like 100x versions of this glacial/lahar runoff channel I photographed below Mt Hood that clinked and clattered...
I want to see the first fall colors on Earth, the vast Edenic forests of glossopteris trees, like nothing in the world today, spanning the whole of Gondwana's subcontinents in an unbroken canopy halfway around the planet. Did they pile up in drifts too fast to break down? Were they an adaptation to cold or insect predation?
i want to see the dinosaur-tended Amazon forest, huge tree columns and a sort of ferny open parkland beneath, far more fertile from all the dung but kept open by the long reach and numbers of giant grazers.
I want to see Earth's purple oceans during the Boring Billionā wearing a gas mask and oxygen supply, of courseļæ¼ ā with perhaps a pale green sky, due to more sulfur but low oxygen. I want to see how the acidic rains of CO2-rich and sulfur-producing bacteria (binding with water to produce sulfuric acid) accelerated weathering on the lifeless, rusting land, creating a Martian landscape scoured by Dune-sized dust storms and sand storms, an accelerated nutrient delivery system for early life in the euxinic oceans.
I want to see the higher-oxygen carboniferous swamps that made giant insects possible, but also mega wildfires, and may even have made lightning bolts more colorful.
I love this thread and all of it. I'm not a paleontologist, so I may have some of the details wrong, but I devour articles, books, and documentaries (which appear to be well-researched) on exactly this kind of thing.
(Nova's "Ancient Earth" miniseries last year, with interviews with scientists interspersed with CGI reconstructions of what early Earths may have looked like like, was a real treat).
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.
Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.
You mean like slavery?
No, weāre giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!
Right. Like slavery.
Itās not like slavery!
Can they leave?
No.
Can they refuse work?
No.
So how exactly isnāt this slavery?
We DO pay them!
Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?
No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.
Right. So like slavery.
BUT.
No.
Image then links to this url.
Prison wages come up again and again in the context of prison conditions and policies. So, we found the most up-to-date information for each
Below URL image reads āfun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants arenāt taking your jobs. Slavery is.
End description.
Iād also like to add itās not just private prisons. Itās also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.
a hefty chunk of items with that āmade in americaā sticker are in fact made by prison labor
at the very least anything that is a product of prison labor should be required to have a similar sticker to inform consumers they are taking part of this system, which is difficult to track because prison made manufactured goods include almost the entire uniform of a US soldier, road construction in most southern states, and agricultural goods sold in most stores
(Just to clarify, Iām not saying youāre wrong. Iām just giving you more information because youāre right, and I like your blog, and I want you to have sources in case you need them.)
Itās not even covert. Itās blatant and overt. Itās even called slavery in the constitution.
āSlavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime.ā
SECTION. 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, sh
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
People just donāt care because they think itās all murderers and rapists, despite the fact that the number of violent criminals in jail is so small it might as well be negligible.
As of September 30, 2009 in federal prisons, 7.9% of sentenced prisoners were incarcerated for violent crimes,[39]Ā while at year end 2008 of sentenced prisoners in state prisons, 52.4% had been jailed for violent crimes.[39]Ā In 2002 (latest available data by type of offense), 21.6% of convicted inmates in jails were in prison for violent crimes. Among unconvicted inmates in jails in 2002, 34% had a violent offense as the most serious charge. 41% percent of convicted and unconvicted jail inmates in 2002 had a current or prior violent offense; 46% were nonviolent recidivists.[46]
Itās literally slavery, just dumbass racists and capitalists donāt care enough to figure out why weāre calling it that.
Alsoā¦ even if someone has committed a violent crime, enslaving them isā¦ ya knowā¦ still a fucked up thing to do? How is that even in question?
The whole discourse of āwell theyāre not even all violent offendersā has this weird undertone of āif theyāre good people they shouldnāt have to be slavesā that horrifies me. Even if 100% of them were violent, Slavery. Is. Wrong. All humans have rights.
i would highly recommend āAmerican Prisonā by Shane Bauer. itās a sickening read, by a journalist who went undercover as a prison guard and the things he saw and was made to do and did voluntarily. but extremely good, and in many ways necessary. he has some articles that are basically abridged versions as well, if you donāt want to or canāt read the whole book
Everyone: Please please please don't write your books in Google Docs. Frankly don't use Google Drive for personal stuff.
Their terms of service say they take down stuff like content related to terrorism and trafficking, but this Google Sheet was literally a list of movies I'd watched this year and books I'd read.
Holy smokes, guys. It's way worse than I thought. Google actually took away access to every single file of fiction writing I'd made on that account. BUT I backed it all up on Scrivener yesterday by coincidence. So I haven't lost my work, but I could have just lost the 12,000 words I've written this month after a year of really intense writer's block. I honestly don't know what that would have done to my psyche.
That is awful! If you're looking for a gdocs-like replacement, Ellipsus @ellipsus-writes is an explicitly queer friendly, anti-AI equivalent with online syncing and sharing - I've been using it for almost a year now as a replacement for gdocs and absolutely love it. They are pro-fanfic, so much so that they have a dedicated "export to Ao3" option that preserves all your formatting. They don't have an app (yet) but you can add it to your home screen via your mobile browser if you want.
I do still back up all my work to local storage on LibreOffice (free to download, Microsoft Office equivalent) too though, thank goodness you backed up to Scrivener OP!
it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?
š How to Build a Culture Without Just Inventing Spices and Necklaces
(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)
So. Youāre building a fantasy world, and youāve just invented:
ā Three types of ceremonial jewelry
ā A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed
ā A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn
Cute. But thatās not culture. Thatās aesthetics.
And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your storyās probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.
Hereās how to fix thatāaka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
š Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style
Ask yourself:
ā Whoās in charge, and why?
ā Who has land? Who doesnāt?
ā Whatās considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?
Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. Thatās where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.
Start there. Not at the embroidery.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
2.šŖ Culture Comes From Conflict
Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?
ā What was destroyed and mythologized?
ā What do the survivors still whisper about?
ā What do children get taught in school thatāsā¦ suspiciously sanitized?
No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
3.š§ Belief Systems > Customs Lists
Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about:
ā Death?
ā Love?
ā Time?
ā The natural world?
ā Justice?
Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everythingāfrom prison sentences to griefācompletely differently.
You donāt need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
4.š« Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)
Culture shows up in:
ā What people apologize for
ā What insults cut deepest
ā What people are embarrassed about
ā Whatās praised publicly vs. whatās hidden privately
For instance:
ā A culture obsessed with stoicism wonāt say āI love you.ā Theyāll say āHave you eaten?ā
ā A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.
This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
5. š Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals
Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about:
ā Breakfast routines?
ā How people greet each other on the street?
ā Who cooks, and who eats first?
ā Whatās considered ācleanā or āproperā?
ā How is parenting handled? Divorce?
Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your characterās assumptions, language, fears, and habitsāwhether or not a festival is going on.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
6. š¬ Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture
A culture isnāt a monolith.
Even in deeply traditional societies, people:
ā Rebel
ā Question
ā Break rules
ā Misinterpret laws
ā Mock sacred things
ā Act hypocritically
ā Weaponize or resist whatās expected
Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. Thatās where realism (and tension) lives.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
7.š§¼ Beware the āPretty = Goodā Trap
Worldbuilding gets boring fast when:
ā The protagonistās homeland is beautiful and pure
ā The enemyās culture is dark and ābarbaricā
ā Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like
You canāand shouldāchallenge the aesthetic hierarchy.
ā Let ugly things be beloved.
ā Let beautiful things be corrupt.
ā Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.
āāāāāāā ā¦ āāāāāāā
š TL;DR (but like, spicy):
ā Culture is not food and jewelry.
ā Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction.
ā Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter.
ā Let your world feel lived in, not curated.
The best cultural worldbuilding doesnāt look like a list.
It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters canāt escapeāeven if they try.
Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)
ārin t.
// writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range
// thewriteadviceforwriters
Sometimes the problem isnāt your plot. Itās your first 5 pages. Fix it here ā š¤ Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:
ā¦ A free (and actually helpful) guide to leveling up your first 10 pages ā¦If you're unsure whether your opening is āØdoing enoughāØ to hook re
šÆļø download the pack & write something cursed:
A gothic prompt pack for writers who love cursed universities, secret societies, and scholarly rot.ā Write the Darkness āA 75-prompt horror
fake relationship but its a king and his concubine that was once an amazing soldier but he couldnāt go up the ranks for whatever reason so the king was like listen. hear me out. you can be my strategy dude. u just gotta be okay w walking around shirtless a lot. and soldier dude is like man thatās an UPSIDE and yknow they end up falling in love
some idiot advisor: I canāt believe his majesty lets his boytoy attend these council meetings, itās an insult to the noble institutions that uphold our nation, itās an outrageā
a somewhat smarter advisor: youāre just mad bc he pointed out how dumb your naval attack strategy and no one laughed when you made a mean joke about him
Boytoy has gone from a top fighter who was well respected but in constant danger to wearing silks and eating grapes on daises. That fucked up rotator cuff was the best thing to ever happen to him
Bonus points: at least half the other concubines are experts in assorted fields, the monarch brings them to relevant meetings to both play up a reputation for frivolity, and make sure at least one person there doesnāt have an outside agenda.
The kingdom is an absolute monarchy but the harem has become a secret meritocracy. The nobles and official advisors kind of side-eye His Majesty because wow some of these consorts must have likeā¦really good personalities. Kings of the past have had their own specific tastes of course; size, shape, age, color, et cetera. More than one ruler has interviewed consorts feet first and Ardwin the Adventurousās obsession - God rest him - with snuffling armpits like a sow rooting for mushrooms is well known despite never being alluded to in polite company.
The worst part of it is that the new king takes at least part of his harem with him everywhere and itās so embarrassing. The Counselors of War have never once met with His Divine Majesty without that hulking battle-scarred consort interrupting with muttered growls or scornful snorts. And the Ministers of Finance all flinch at the sight of that fox-faced one, rumored to have been rescued from the gallows because His Augustness took a fancy to his eyes or some such nonsense. General petition days are even worse, with practically the entire harem drifting in and out of the Grand Hall in turns, insouciant and smug like granary cats who know theyāve been given full run of the courtyards and barns.
Itās absolutely infuriating that the kingdom has never before known such a period of peace and prosperity under this ridiculous monarch.
Heās got specific lacing advice for skates and tall boots and there are decorative patterns and I recently relaced my skate shoes for both a wide forefoot and less friction on the laces so itās easier to tighten and loosen them but he also has lace-locking patterns so that shoes stay exactly as tight as you laced them the first time and it is just a VERY GOOD website.
Like. Iāve been buying shoes the wrong size because itās often hard to find wide shoes but the lacing pattern for a wide forefoot means that my big hobbit feet actually fit into the previously too-tight running shoes and sneakers I had.
Fuck it, I didn't want to make a post on this but it's bugging the hell out of me so let's exorcize the thought.
Lilo and Stitch is an extremely good children's movie. I've been working at a daycare for over five years now, and out of all the children's movies I've shown to an auidence of twenty or so school-age kids (i.e. between the ages of 5 and 12), the only movie that's held their attention as well as Lilo and Stitch is The Emperor's New Groove, and the only one that's held it better is An American Tail. Of those three, Lilo and Stitch has won the vote of "what movie we will watch" the most. It not only entertains kids, but emotionally captivates them from start to finish, because it very thoroughly understands how to engage children on their level. It's a smart, tightly written children's movie.
The feat of story-telling genius it pulls of lies in its ability to reach both where children's imaginations want to go and where their lived real-world experiences lie - most children's movies focus on one or the other, but Lilo and Stitch dives deep into both. On the imagination side, there's Stitch's whole plotline of being a little alien monster being chased by other weirdo aliens onto earth because they want to stop him from running amok and causing havoc (which, of course, happens anyway in fun cartoony comedy/action spectacle). On the real-world side, you have Lilo's plotline of being a troubled little girl who has an abundance of very real problems that, like an actual child, she struggles to comprehend and deal with, as well as the many adults in her life that care about her to some degree but all struggle to fully understand her. Kids want to be Stitch and run amok and cause cartoony havoc. Kids, even the least-troubled kids, relate to Lilo, because all of them have been in a similar situation as her at least once in their lives.
Balancing these two very different stories, with very different tones and scopes to their respective conflicts, is a hard writing task, but Lilo and Stitch manages to do it in a way that seems effortless with one very powerful trick. The two plots are direct mirrors to each other, complete with the characters involved in each having foils in the respective plot. To break it down:
Stitch, the wild and destructive alien gremlin who everyone has labeled as a crime against existence, is Lilo, the troubled young girl who's viewed as a "problem child" by all the adults in her life. In both plotlines, Stitch and Lilo are facing the threat of being "taken away" from the life they know because they act out, and in both plotlines, we see that this is an unfathomably cruel thing to do to them and will not actually solve the problems they have.
Dr. Jumbaa, the mad scientist who made Stitch because making monsters is what mad scientists do, and who had no intentions of ever being nurturing or parental to anything or anyone in his life, is Nani, Lilo's older sister whose parents died when she was young and now is forced to act as a parental substitute despite not being mentally or emotionally prepared for that responsibility yet. Both Dr. Jumbaa and Nani are trying to get their respective wild children in line with what society wants them to be, and both are struggling hard with it because they in turn have a lot of growing to do before they can actually accomplish that.
Pleakley, the nebbish alien bureaucrat who ends up being assigned to help Dr. Jumbaa despite being mostly uninvolved in creating the whole Stitch situation, is David, the nice but mostly ineffectual guy who's crushing on Nani and wants to help her but doesn't really have much he can provide except emotional support. Ultimately Pleakley and David prove that said emotional support is a lot more helpful than it seems on the surface, as they give Jumbaa and Nani respectively a lot of the pushes they need to become better in their parental roles.
The Grand Councilwoman, who runs the society of aliens that is trying to banish Stitch forever for his crime of existing, is Cobra Bubbles, the Child Protective Services agent who is in charge of deciding whether or not Lilo needs to be taken away from her home forever for, ostensibly, her own good. Both are well-intentioned and stern, with a desire to follow the rules of society and do what procedure says is the most humane thing to do in this situation, but both lack the understanding of Stitch/Lilo's situation to actually help until the end of the movie.
Finally, we have Captain Gantu, the enforcer of the Galactic Council who is a mean, aggressive, sadistic brute but is viewed as a "good guy" by society because he plays by its rules (well, when he knows can't get away with breaking them, anyway), who is the counterpart of Myrtle, the mean, aggressive, sadistic schoolyard bully who is viewed as a "good kid" by other adults because she plays by the rules they established (well, when she knows she can't get away with breaking them, anyway). Both Gantu and Myrtle are, in truth, much nastier in temperament than Stitch and Lilo, but are better at hiding it in front of others and so get away with it, and often make Stitch and Lilo look worse in the eyes of others by provoking them to violence and then playing the victim about it - in fact, both even have the same line, "Does this look infected to you?", which they say after goading their respective wild-child victims into biting them.
The symmetry of these two plotlines allows them to actually feed into each other and build each other up instead of fighting each other for screentime. The fantastical nature of Stitch's plot adds whimsy to the far more realistic problems that Lilo faces so they don't get too heavy for the children in the audience, while the very real struggles of Lilo in her plotline bleed over into Stitch's plot and make both very emotionally poignant. When both plotlines hit their shared climax, they reach children on a emotional level few other movies can match - the terror of Lilo being taken away from her family, and the emotional complexity of that problem (Cobra Bubbles pointing to Lilo's ruined house and shouting at Nani, "IS THIS WHAT LILO NEEDS?" is so starkly real and heart-breaking), is matched and echoed in the visual splendor and mania of the spectacular no-way-this-is-going-to-work chase scene where Stitch, Nani, Jumbaa, and Pleakley all team up to rescue Lilo from Gantu.
The arcs of the characters all more or less line up. Nani confronts her own failures to be a guardian and parent to Lilo and resolves to do better and learn from her mistakes. Jumbaa, who through most of the movie protests to be evil and uncaring, nonetheless comes to not only care for Pleakley, but more importantly for Stitch too, and ends up assuming the role he never wanted but nonetheless forced himself into from the start: he is Stitch's family. Hell, the moment that reveals this is really clever - Stitch goes out into the wilderness to try and re-enact a scene from a storybook of The Ugly Duckling, hoping, in a very childish way, that his family will show up and love him. Jumbaa arrives and, coldly but not particularly cruelly, tells Stitch that he has no family - that Stitch wasn't born, but created in a lab by Jumbaa himself. But in that moment Jumbaa is proving himself wrong - because Stitch's creator, his parent, DID show up, and did exactly what happens in the story by telling Stitch the truth of what he is. It can't be a surprise, then, that later in the movie Jumbaa ends up deciding to side with Stitch, to help him save Lilo, and to stay on Earth with his child.
David and Pleakley go from being pushed away by Nani and Jumbaa respectively to essentially becoming their partners in the family. The Grand Councilwoman and Cobra Bubbles finally see how cruel their initial solution of isolating Stitch and Lilo from their family would be, and bend the rules they are supposed to enforce to protect and support this weird found family instead of breaking it apart. Gantu and Myrtle are recognized for the assholes they are and face comeuppance in the form of comedic slapstick pratfalls. And most importantly, Stitch and Lilo both get the emotional support and understanding they need to thrive and live happy lives as children should be allowed to do. It's like poetry, it rhymes.
It's a very precise, smartly written movie. It's a delicate balancing act of tone and emotions, with a very strong theme about the need for family and understanding that hits children in their hearts and imaginations. It's extremely well structured.
...
So it'd be kind of colossally fucking stupid to remake it and start fucking around with the core structure of it, chopping out pieces and completely altering others, with no real purpose beyond "Well, the executives thought it might be better if we did this."
Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.
The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.
The āAā profile in his soil is now 47 inches deep compared to less than 6 inches in 1971 and acts like a giant sponge for water infiltration and retention.
From 1971 through 1989 David used an average of 150-250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre to grow his corn crops. After adding peas and radishes as a cover crop mix, he cut his nitrogen needs in half and was able to get it down to 125 pounds per acre.
When he added multiple species and became more aggressive with his cover crop mixes, he was able to achieve an additional drop in applied fertility. His starter fertilizer is now just 2 lbs of N, 4 lbs of P, and 5 lbs of K. His corn crop now only requires 20-30 lbs of N throughout the entire growing season. He requires no fertility for his soybeans, relying on fertility gained solely through his cover crops. He uses only 40 lbs of 10 N ā 10 P ā 10 K for his small grains.
Ten years ago (source study published 2019) David stopped using any fungicides and insecticides. This occurred at a time when fungicide and insecticide use has increased significantly with the average commodity farmer.
Four years ago he stopped using any seed treatment, including neonicotinoids.
His cash crop yields have been increasing by an average of 5% annually for the past 5-6 years, with far less fertilizer and no fungicides, insecticides or seed treatment.
What started as a basic heavy clay soils when David purchased the farm in 1971 have been officially re-classified by Ohio State University soil scientists as a highly fertile silty loam soil.
I know I've said it before, but--that first point, there, about the "A" profile of his soil? Every time I think of it, I am taken aback with genuine awe.
So this is a picture of the soil horizons. The O profile/O horizon is stuff like fallen leaves, sticks, and so on, which are biodegrading into the A profile. A fair amount of soils might have no O profile at all.
If you are a gardener, the A profile is what you're concerned with most of the time; it's what we also call "topsoil." Your seeds germinate into it, and shallower plants might root into it alone without ever reaching the B profile. Worms and other small delvers live in it. It's what you're amending, what you're testing, what you're tilling, what you're trying to fill up with good microorganisms to work with your plants and provide you with food or flowers or cover.
I see this quote around sometimes, attributed to radioman Paul Harvey:
Man ā despite his artistic pretensions, his sophistication, and his many accomplishments ā owes his existence to a six inch layer of topsoil and the fact that it rains.
Without the topsoil, bluntly, we starve. And there are other problems, in places with a lack of it; without the topsoil, when the rains come, the water strikes hard soil. Hard soil doesn't accept water easily, so instead it pools and runs downhill. That action makes flooding, makes flash floods, makes standing water that carries disease, it contaminates the water table. Cholera is a huge problem in places with a low A profile that receive too much water at once.
We are seeing topsoil depletion across the US. I can't speak for other countries, but the heavy-tilling agricultural habits we've adopted here have obliterated inch after inch of our topsoil; in the 1800s the average depth was fourteen inches! Today it is six. Many suburban lawns have even less. This has knock-on effects we don't even consider on the day-to-day (for instance, there's some suggestion that the lower amounts of various minerals in vegetables and fruits today in comparison with earlier decades might be because of the lower amount of minerals in the soil for the plants to take up into themselves).
And this gentleman took soil that had been that abused and not only returned it to what it had been before the aggressive, destructive European agricultural policy had its way, but trebled that earlier depth.
His land protects the land around it from flooding. His land grows plants less susceptible to disease, because of all the various stressors and pressures those plants aren't confronted with. His land almost certainly has a considerably higher concentration of microorganisms and it would follow that we'd also see greater diversity of macroorganisms thereby.
