I remember someone saying "mad scientists in fiction aren't scientists because there's never a control group"
I think if you've created an elixir that turns people into goat men you have sort have gone past the need for a control group. The control group is not going to placebo themselves into goat men. You can probably not run the control group, and safely assume that none of them would have turned into goat men. That said, having a control group for that would make the mad scientist seem extra crazy and be really really funny, especially if he was carefully testing them for goat like features from the dyed water they drank instead of the elixir
when whitman said “i contradict myself. i am large… i contain multitudes” and wilde said “what are you? to define is to limit” and sumney said “i insist upon my right to be multiple”
and when mahmoud darwish said “I am besieged by contradiction” and when lewis carroll said “I knew who I was this morning, but I’ve changed a few times since then”
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.
Which brings me to my wife.
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet.
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.)
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.
Because.
After several months.
The mini fridge died.
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.
[gripping the sink] perfectionism does not help me avoid embarrassment or shame. perfectionism is in itself a form of shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame. when i struggle with perfectionism i struggle with shame
Even humans start to act super weird when isolated even for a month or so and Rocky was alone in Blip-A for 50 years and then alone with an alien for a while. His behaviour should be unhinged.
Things Rocky does when he got back from Adrien that weirds out other Eridians:
He (subconsciously) picked a facet of his body as his "face" and turns it sometimes to orient towards people or objects he's paying a lot of attention to or concentrating on.
That thing I've seen Chinese people on social media discuss where they use their own characters to reproduce an English word phonetically, with the actual meaning being a fun sidepoint. Rocky reproducing his closest approximation of words without existing Eridian equivalents (relativity, caffeine, all the colours) that sound like gibberish or odd mashes of existing Eridian terms.
Thumbs up (down)
Making "random" components of structures transparent for no apparent reason (Grace can't be here, Grace will never be in this part of Erid, but if he were, he'd be able to see)
The Eridian word for "See" is probably something to do with detecting light. Rocky would use this odd, scientific phrase the way a human uses "Oh, I see!" to mean "Oh, I understand." Like someone saying "I've used a Geiger counter to verify the radioactivity of this abstract concept" when they mean, "I get it."
You need to be Silent when watching someone sleep because you could wake them up. A completely incomprehensible idea to Eridians.
You discovered it, you get to name it! No, actually you're Not allowed to call the new molecule "Low Friction, high thermal stability two-parts-carbon-to-four-parts-fluorine" try naming it after your pebble!
1, 2, 3, eyes on me! (Eyes being another phonetically assimilated word)
Odd, overly clear accent. To make sure the software translated his words properly, Rocky was probably taking special care to perfectly reproduce words in the exact same inflection every time, no slurring or mumbling his way through.
i dont think its a "sin" to "destroy and betray yourself for nothing" because there's no such thing as sin, there's no such thing as yourself and there's no such thing as nothing. and destruction and betrayal are subjective. you're most likely totally fine.
really love looking through a bunch of 100+ year old paintings or sculptures by one artist and seeing the same face pop up again and again on different characters. especially when the features are distinctive enough that you know that face must've belonged to a real person, but the model is unnamed and unknown. you were most likely a sex worker who posed on the side for extra cash and the world probably looked down upon you, yet the snowy marble angel on the pedestal wears your face without shame. you are nameless and long dead, but you are ophelia or aphrodite or danaë, immortal. we never met and yet here you are, locking eyes with me across the garden like an old friend
*takes the hand of a period drama writer gently* A queen consort is not a queen regnant. A dowager queen is not a queen regnant either.
There is very little intrinsic institutional power in queenship. The power a consort, dowager, or queen mother has depends mostly on how much the reigning sovereign (usually a man) is willing to grant her. Needing a queen to serve as regent is exceptionally rare, and the regent is more often a male relative.
Queen regnant: woman who rules in her own right, not on behalf of someone else.
Regent: Someone who temporarily assumes the powers of the monarch on account of the monarch being too young or too incapacitated to govern.
Queen consort: Woman who is married to the monarch.
Dowager queen: Woman who was married to the monarch. The monarch is dead, and she is owed support as his widow.
Queen mother: Woman who is the mother of the monarch. Usually the dowager queen, though there are exceptions if there isn't a straight line of succession.
Madcap comedy where the Dowager Queen and Queen Mother are aging sisters-in-law and lifelong snarky besties, their nephew/son (respectively) is around - he's a perfectly competent king but will never be an adult to them - and the Queens get up to hijinx as they have basically no responsibilities and the only person who can tell them "no" is The King who is busy and will also never not see them as his mom and aunty.
Ryland Grace and his popularity as a character feels like such an important step in repairing the cultural tsunami left by the long running trope of every genius character needing to be an insufferable asshole to everyone in a ten mile radios about it.
Conversely, Eva Stratt is doing wonders for repairing and inspiring a appreciation for commanding women with dubious moral convictions who are fully willing to bend laws for the greater good without hesitation.
You can survive your childhood and escape the horror of your parents by creating and existing solely in a rich inner world in which you contain all your thoughts and feelings and this will not have any effect on your relationships as an adult
“Listen to me, your body is not a temple. Temples can be destroyed and desecrated. Your body is a forest — thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the underwood. You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.”
—
Beau Taplin || T e m p l e s (via cosmofilius)
My parents’ front yard had a huge Elm tree in it–stretching up past my bedroom window, above the house, into the sky, a resilient survivor of Dutch Elm disease and everything else nature could throw at it.
But last year it had to come down: it was hollow, unstable, sick, and if it fell in a storm it would crush the house.
My mom says it felt like an earthquake when the huge branches dropped.
My mom’s a gardener. She’d taken the grass out of that yard and put in beautiful things, a Japanese maple, a blue and pink hydrangea in memory of my grandma, trillium she rescued from construction sites and uncountable things I can’t name.
The garden was crushed by those huge falling limbs. She walked out when the last of the tree had been hauled away, and she mourned for the broken Japanese maple and the hydrangea she couldn’t find trace of and the mud and mess of this place she birthed and nurtured and loved.
But.
But the thing about all of these plants is they come from forests, and in forests, trees fall.
So in the spring, things changed:
The Japanese maple is gone, but there’s a few tiny seedlings trying to be born.
The hydrangea is sending up new branches from its broken stem.
The trillium bloomed, the ferns uncurled, the dogwood, damaged but unbroken, thrived in the sunlight.
And from the roots of that elm tree sprouted a whole flock of saplings.
So many that Mom’s had to cut them back. So many that for years she’ll have to play tug-of-war with the living roots of that dead tree to keep the front yard from turning into a forest of spindly elms.
She laughed, last week, when she told me about it.
“There’s a story there,” she said, shaking her head on my computer screen. “Something about resurrection.”
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