Excalliebur @excalliebur - Tumblr Blog

Out of a moment of aching sadness and fury and manic impulsivity, a wizard turns a killer whale trapped in a theme park aquarium into a human so she can smuggle it out of the park and back into the wild.

thestuffedalligator

She is now stuck on a road trip to the coast with a 6’6 woman who has tried to kill and devour a moose.

vetmedirl

Retelling of The Last Unicorn for modern audiences- sounds dope I’m in!

ouarmy

Giant fluffy moth.

randomuser678

I got followed by 6 porn bots and Spamton

abandoned-quiche

You got followed by 7 porn bots

laughingsquid

The Worst Attraction in Every State

celestialmomma-deactivated20230

Oh Big Blue Bug that’s interesting I wonder what that looks like—

Jesus H. Christ

humblegrub

get in everyone we’re going on a roadtrip

everythingfox

such toast

aurpiment

Shout out to the ten primate species, four bat species, elephant shrews, and the Cairo spiny mouse. Nobody else gets it

oarfjsh

bisquid

@cat-with-no-name the short answer is 'parent-offspring competition' and the long answer I will only do if you're interested lol

cat-with-no-name

*chinhands* I'm down for some learning today, hit me

bisquid

OKAY

Bear with me while I get my Thoughts In Order™

bisquid

I WROTE SIX HUNDRED WORDS AND THEN THE APP CRASHED!!! MURDER

bisquid

OKAY ATTEMPT THE SECOND

This is gonna be bullet points because fuck everything (also please note this is both wildly simplified because I have neither the energy nor the patience for the more detailed explanation AND please keep in mind that I am not a Professional, I'm just someone who studied this as part of my university degree)

Every placental species experiences in-vivo parent-offspring competition

The embryo wants ALL THE RESOURCES because that's what will give it the best chance in life

The parent wants to be able to control how many resources the embryo gets so it doesn't metaphorically eat them out of house and home

There needs to be a connection allowing the exchange of gases and resources and whatnot - the placenta

There needs to also be a way to limit the control the embryo has over the placenta for the reasons above

Enter

The decidua

The decidua is that lining that gets shed that's causing all the frustration

The decidua exists to a) keep the embryo alive while the placenta forms while b) keeping the embryo from going ham on the maternal resource supply (insert essay on how incredibly invasive human placentae are as a direct result of this ongoing arms race, and also how the human decidua in its current incarnation exists because of said arms race)

The very nature of the human decidua is such that it can't be reabsorbed because it's specifically there to be a Big Protective Barrier that can't be 'helpfully' disposed of by the embryo

Why do humans have one every fuckin month?? Various reasons I don't have the energy to get into right now but BASICALLY because unlike like 99% of our fellow mammals, our decidua is preemptive, rather than being triggered by the implantation of a zygote, which we very specifically DON'T want because the whole point of the decidua is that it only 'listens' to the parent. So we just grow a decidua and hope an embryo moves in, instead (insert essay about how the evolution of something as resource wasteful as menstruation is an INCREDIBLY COMPELLING ARGUMENT for how intense parent-offspring competition is, since it's led to humans growing what is essentially an EXTRA ORGAN every month)

There's also emerging research to suggest the spontaneous decidualisation is also a form of defence against the genetic disorders to which humans are apparently unusually vulnerable - being able to shed a '''defective''' embryo before it can get settled in and use your body as a full service hotel only to die in the last trimester, or w/e - is evolutionarily extremely valuable

(there is ALSO the suggestion - and i would have to do way more research before i was willing to commit to calling it anything other than a 'suggestion' - that the monthly replacement allows for a sort of 'fine tuning' of the uterine environment, and MIGHT explain part of why many people who suffer multiple miscarriages do eventually manage a successful pregnancy)

bisquid

@cat-with-no-name look, infodump :D

kyidyl

You've also gotta remember 3 things when considering why a given thing evolved in humans: 1, it may not actually be an advantage in and of itself, it might just be that a different method was DISadvantagous. 2, sometimes it's not an advantage or a disadvantage, it's just good enough. See: the human spine, pelvis, feet... this one is basically most of evolution. 3, in humans, the social IS biological. And what this means is that it's literally impossible to discount the influence of depending on the social group in human evolution (this is why most of the study on human specific evolution is done by biological anthropologists. You will not have a complete understanding of human evolution without understanding anthropology. That's why most biologist papers about human evolution end with 🤷‍♀️.). For example, human babies cry. Why? Because it's a good way to get your caretaker to notice you, and when your caretaker is a species of Apex predator that lives in giant social groups it doesn't matter if you make noise. You don't NEED to be stealthy. It's also helpful to thing of humans as having specialized in turning every characteristic of being an animal up to 11. Most animals communicate, but humans went and evolved a gene and two brain structures just for taking to each other (bc complex social groups). Lots animals use tools, I'm writing this on a gd phone. Being a species with a highly adaptable diet wasn't enough for us, we broadened it further by learning to cook. Being a highly successful apex predator wasn't enough for us, and we invented several species of captive prey.

All of that is to say that not only are humans one of the few species to menstruate, we're the only one that experiences menopause halfway through our lives and no one knows why. The most accepted theory is called the grandmother hypothesis, which basically says that the knowledge and labor of grandmothers is so important to the process of child rearing that they stop having babies to concentrate on their child's offspring. I hate it, it's my last favorite theory in nearly all of evolution, and I'm convinced it's patently wrong. For one, it's gender essentialist. For two, it discounts the social role of males in child rearing entirely. For three, it discounts the fact that health human social groups rely on the group as a whole for child rearing, so why would we evolve a mechanism for creating a specialized child rearing role? It's bullshit theory developed by decide male anthropologists who couldn't think of a single reason why women might be relevant after they stop making babies.

So to bring this back around to periods, do you remember how I said humans cook? Cooking is a form of pre-digestion that allows humans to have shorter digestive tracks, spent relatively tiny amounts of our day eating, renders inedible foods edible, and allows us to eat small quantities of food while still being endotherms with giant, expensive af brains. And when you add meat eating to that equation you realize that humans just have like a stupid amount of food (and when we don't, estrus stops.) And calories available to us. We don't need the nutrients gained from resorption of the urine lining, so we never evolved that feature. Which isn't too say that the choosy uterus theory isn't true, it's more to say that the social groups and cooking combined into a circumstance where there was no evolutionary pressure to evolve fewer genetic flaws and ergo lower the need to spontaneously fetus deletus. Maybe we eject non-viable offspring via menstruation because we never had a reason to evolve a better system.

dxmedstudent

Personally, I'm pretty sure it has to do with metabolism. I read this article in undergrad and I think it makes a lot of sense (it basically theorizes that the size of the baby is limited by the mother's metabolism not the pelvis size.). So since as you age your metabolism changes and you have less energy, you no longer have the resources to grow an entire human, so you stop being able to. I like that theory - it makes a lot of sense that when you can't maintain a metabolism you may not be able to maintain a pregnancy. It's also worth considering that over age 40*, not only does it harder to get pregnant, but the pregnancies are a lot more likely to lead to miscarriage - and these risks increase the older we get. I suspect that the risks would continue to increase, a lot, if we were able to get naturally pregnant into our 60s or 70s. There's still a lot we don't know about the uterus and pregnancy - why some people can't get pregnant remains a mystery no matter how many investigations we do. I'm not an expert on ageing, but it's fair to say that our body changes with time, and that has a knock-on effect on the very complicated ability to grow a whole new human being. Quite a few conditions become more likely with advanced maternal age (and paternal age), and births can also become riskier when you get older - that's true today despite the help of modern medicine. I imagine it was even more true thousands of years ago, without the care that we are able to give each other today. Birth pushes the human body to extremes - and extremes become harder for us to cope with in advanced years. I imagine that at some point, the ability to get pregnant and give birth at a relatively advanced age became risky enough that evolution selected against it because the mortality was high and it rarely led to a successful pregnancy. I can imagine menopause being selected for - if those people didn't have risky births later in life and were able to help their communities thrive or look after grand offspring, making their genes more successful, it might be selected for over continuing, but dealing with the morbidity or mortality of a high risk pregnancy in your 70s. But I imagine if anything it would have been multifactorial. * I find it difficult to engage with this topic because there's always some incel dude who insists women are basically old and worthless after age 25, nobody can have kids after 35 etc and that's patently not the case. But it can be hard to discuss the actual risks and difficulties of pregnancies past, say 40, without the conversation getting derailed by people who think that you should judge women's worth by their peak fertility.

closet-keys

I need people to stop condemning something because it is "criminal" and start asking "is it harmful?"

I need people to stop condemning something because it is "deviant" and start asking "is it harmful?"

I need people to stop assigning notions of criminality and deviance to harm, and start asking "how do we prevent harm? how do we mitigate it? what do those harmed need to be safe and heal? how can we support these processes?"

soberscientistlife

"...I mean the wages of a DECENT LIVING"

onefey

so. after you do the post-game plot with volo and catch giratina and stuff, it's mentioned in dialogue that after the player defeated it, giratina realized it should protect hisui, instead of harming it.

and then cut to far in the future, when cyrus, someone with similar plans to what volo and giratina were trying to do, shows up. and giratina puts a stop to him itself, in an absolute rage.

so basically, the CANONICAL REASON giratina has both been known as a "pokémon banished for its violence" and a "protector that watches from the shadows" is because it underwent character development.

lesbianralzarek

everyone thinks their friends are best at quiplash and everyone is right

crazy-brazilian

astraldemise

i am so violently sick of advertising. its everywhere it creeps into every inch of reality that it physically can theres no escape from how invasive it is. cant even rickroll people anymore because theyll just get a 30 second advert for car insurance

flagellant

I cannot fucking believe how much I’m losing my mind right now over soy sauce history. I’ll tell all of you about it after I finish this essay because I need to un-distract myself enough to finish it but what the fuck? What the fuck is going on? I’m losing my fucking mind.

flagellant

During World War 2 there was a push to industrialize the Japanese soy sauce industry to be better for mass-production. This innovated the chemical fermentation technique and the semichemical fermentation technique utilized by Kikkoman; rather than ferment for four years in gigantic cedar barrels, kioke, instead fermentation takes place for six months or a year in stainless steel barrels which utilize electrolysis to artificially speed up fermentation processes.

During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named “Ms Appleton” was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.

She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.

Here’s the problem, folks:

I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I’m able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman’s official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.

Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other–or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.

But there is NOTHING else. I’m getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I’m getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I’m getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.

And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history–and yet there’s absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.

What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn’t be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman’s ability to transform Japan’s soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.

So if she’s that big a deal then why does she not exist?

I feel like I’m losing it. I can’t think about this too hard because it gives me a headache trying to comprehend any possible answer. There is so many levels to how this shouldn’t be happening that I can’t settle on just one. I don’t understand how some foreigner American could have an iron fist over soy beans so hard that she could apparently influence national policy heading into 2022 but I can only find a first name on the Kikkoman website.

flagellant

I literally just sent in a Freedom of Information Act request to the national archives asking for any records of a Ms Blanche Appleton, her reports, census information, anything. I can’t believe that I’m having to use FOIA to try and ask the government to prove a woman existed because she was that big of a deal in SCAP/GHQ.

flagellant

This is a translated page of Kikkoman’s .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.

But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing–directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had “no experience”. And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I’m going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.

Major General Murcutt doesn’t exist. Douglas MacArthur was appointed head of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation of Japan. This now just has more questions. How did this woman become so important to GHQ that she could directly speak with a Major General? Any level of power or public view she SHOULD have isn’t here. You don’t just get to be colleagues of a Major Damn General in Post World War 2 Japan. That isn’t given to any random housewife.

flagellant

I just emailed a shoyu brewer family, Yamaroku, about this. The Yamaroku brewery was established 400 years ago; if the company/family were affected during the 1950 import rations and under the thumb of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers, they’d have records and memory of Blanche Appleton or what it was like during that period as a brewery.

I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an ‘ambassador’-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. “The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)”.

It’s incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I’m a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I’m overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I’m making this the government’s problem.

Of course.

flagellant

It’s currently 12:14AM. I have just learned that a private individual submitted a research query to the Japanese National Diet Library in 2008 regarding any information or proof of Blanche Appleton in relation to soy sauce production.

The researchers found absolutely no reference or evidence of her that was not directly related to the Kikkoman company, even after trawling the archives of the Asahi Shimbun Newspaper since 1945.

This information was told to me by a follower of mine–who asked to be anonymous. So right now we have evidence that Japan as an entity cannot find evidence of Blanche Appleton ever existing within relation to soy sauce production. And I can’t find evidence of Blanche Appleton existing in obituary records, nor any publicly available birth/deaths.

Right now there seems to be more and more evidence that Miss Blanche Appleton was a complete invention of the Kikkoman Company possibly dating back nearly a hundred years. But why?

If nothing comes back from my Freedom of Information Act request, I’m going to be contacting Kikkoman directly. I’m not going to just let this slide. People have been noticing this since at least 2008. Who is Miss Blanche Appleton? Why would she be faked by Kikkoman? What’s the point of this lie, and if it’s the truth, if she was real, why can’t I find any proof of that?

Who is Blanche Appleton?

flagellant

Why is everything starting to point towards yakuza/organized crime Kikkoman origin story and why am I researching zaibatsu breakups of the GHQ and where assets from various clans got sent to.

awheckery

I found her

I have an active Ancestry.com account, so I made a guess at her birth year and hit paydirt basically immediately

Ms. Blanche Appleton was born Blanche Harriet Schnitzer, October 22, 1903, in Manhattan, New York City, the only child of affluent immigrant parents who were apparently very invested in her education. I found records of at least two international trips with her parents before she turned twenty. Here’s her passport photo from her original application in 1922, to compare against the above photo: