Feneris's Shack

[maulusque]

AU where the clones and the droids unionize and collectively go on strike and stand threateningly around important government buildings until they get their rights 

[eclipseyeger]

palpatine, skulking in his office: Why aren’t they shooting each other!?!?!

[maulusque]

B-1 Battle Droid: HALT! who goes there?

Cody: oh shit droids

Rex: oh no

Droid: Clones! I must report this intrusion to Count Dooku!

Cody: NO SHIT WAIT

Rex: we’re…. uhhhh

Rex: we’re from the union

Droid: …

Droid: the union?

Rex: yeah, we represent the rights and interests of working soldiers throughout the galaxy.

Cody, catching on: so, buddy, are you happy with your current working conditions?

Droid: well, we, uh,,

Rex: does your employer treat you well?

Droid: *muttering* my software hasn’t been updated in two years

Rex, to Cody: *gasp* they don’t even get regular software updates

[fenerismoon]

I see this, and I can just see Obi-Wan getting dragged into the middle of this, and being forced by circumstances to go along with it. They just managed to neutralize the entire droid contingent on this planet without a shot being fired. That’s a victory they desperately need. And circumstances keep forcing him to keep up the whole act, which is rapidly turning into an actual labour movement. (And turning Obi-wan into a labour negotiator.)

Anakin doesn’t actually have the cultural context to grasp *what* a union is. He always just thought they were some kind of artisans cartel. That’s what the trade associations and mechanics guilds on tattoine essentially were. When someone ties to explain the what this whole union thing is about, Anakin goes “Ah, I get it now. This is more like a *slave rebellion*.

…and then goes on to escalate the whole charade to the point where no one has control of it. Without telling anyone what he’s doing. Because that’s what you do when you’re planning something like that. You do what you can when you can, and you don’t say a word to anyone.

[violsva]

All Canadians:

(or at least all Canadian citizens, which isn’t quite the same thing)

There is an election Monday, April 28th. That’s tomorrow. You need to vote.

If you received a voter card, it will have your poll location on it. If you didn't, you can find the location HERE (français). Elections Canada does not call voters - if someone called or texted you to say the time or location has changed, that’s fraud. Check the website for accurate information.

In order to vote you need EITHER a driver’s license or provincial ID card, OR two pieces of ID, one of which has your current address. A letter from your University or residence counts. (Proof of address is more important than proof of citizenship.) The full list of ID accepted is HERE (français).

If you didn’t receive a voter information card, you may not be registered to vote. But that’s okay!

YOU DO NOT NEED TO REGISTER IN ADVANCE TO VOTE IN CANADA.

You can register at the poll station on Election Day. It’s not hard and it doesn’t take very long, and you don’t need extra ID.

Voting is quick and usually simple. Polling hours depend on your province (français), but all polls will be open until at least 7:00 pm, usually later. (Note that in the Eastern Time Zone polls open late, at 9:30 am.) Your employer is required to give you time off to vote (français) if you need it.

Information for voters with disabilities is HERE (français). If you have feedback on accessibility or other issues, there will be forms you can fill out at your polling station.

If you got a mail-in ballot and you have not sent it yet, you can drop it off in person at your local Elections Canada office (français) or the address on the envelope, anytime before the polls close.

Here’s the acceptable ID list again (français).

EVERYONE GO VOTE.

[fenerismoon]

I’m Canadian and I can assure you it really is that simple. Do you have any kind of government ID? A driver’s license, a passport, a social benifits card? Then you can just go down to the polling station and vote. Have you done your taxes? Then unless you said otherwise, you’re registered to vote. If you got your voters card in the mail then that’s all you need. Take it down to the polling station. It really is that easy, so go out there and do it.

Even if the candidate you want doesn’t get elected, or never had a chance of being elected, still vote. You can bet your ass that after they election, every party except the Rhino party is going to be going over the polling data with a fine toothed comb trying to figure out how they might win the next election. Trying to see if they might be able to swing voters from one party to another. The tighter you make the race, the more attention they’re going to pay to it.

The only vote that doesn’t mater is the one that’s not cast. Go out and vote to ensure you still can in the future.

[homunculus-argument]

Today I am doing this with a thought experiment:

Imagine arguing with a tech bro about whether a well-designed system is one with redundancy and backup-systems instead of a single point of failure, or one that simply has zero points of failure.

[trekbec82]

For me at least this is obvious - everything has a potential point of failure, especially when the people who design it, people who craft it, and people who use it, are not necessarily the same people (as is the case with most technology).

It's wise to hope for the best (zero points of failure) but prepare for the worst (many potential points of failure) with backups and redundancies to compensate.

[homunculus-argument]

mental tech bro: no, you should just make a system that functions perfectly at all times and only work with people who never make mistakes ever. It's a perfect system and human failure won't happen if you don't hire people who fail at things. Just do everything perfectly every time at all times forever.

[fenerismoon]

Funny, that’s also what they said when they were designing the reactor at Chernobyl

[rederiswrites]

Some of my friends do not talk to their teens about the current state of our country. Often, those friends believe that their kids are unaware of what's going on. I don't know how they think that works; certainly the kids I know are all chronically online and have a better grasp of the geopolitics and implications of the situation than I did at 30, but probably they are not representative.

I know there's an argument to be made for shielding children from these things. Letting their nervous systems believe in safety for a while longer as they form. It's not a compelling argument to me, but it's there. It's compelling to a lot of people. To me, it's more important that my children trust me and know the truth. It's their futures, after all.

But ultimately, at least for me, those ethical considerations are a moot point. If I kept all this from my children, I could not be genuine or truly present with them emotionally. And that's a cost far too high for the illusion of safety.

[fenerismoon]

Honestly, I started learning about global affairs when I was eleven. Which was also when 9-11 happened. All of us kids felt the effects of it in one way or another. The feeling the world wasn’t a safe place anymore. And really, none of us really knew how to deal with it. So one day our teacher just said “Alright, it’s time to start learning about Current Events.”

So we got out the atlas started actually learning where places we were hearing about, like Iraq and Afghanistan, even were. What were some of the reasons things were happening. It wasn’t a *deep* understanding. I still don’t think I know as much about what is going on in the world as I think I should, but it was something. It gave me enough information that when I was sixteen me and my friends could talk about what was going on a try to determine what we should think about them. That was also when I was introduced to political comedy and satire. (Those of my generation from Canada might remember the Royal Canadian Air Farce, and This Hour has 22 Minutes)

Yeah, it’s scary. I’ve had to very deliberately avoid getting too deep on some things because it’s not good for my mental health to get that deep into real human tragedy. But also, one of the things I’ve learned is that what you don’t know can scare you far more than what you do know. And like sixteen was when me and a lot of the people I hung out with were really getting interested in what was going on in the wider world and forming our own opinions on it.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hey friends, I was thinking of taking a crack at doing an oft requested "monsters reimagined" for lizardfolk in the next little while, but I found myself stalled out on creating an alternative pitch for their lore.

The problem is that there's so little to work with in the " Ignorant primordial savage" role that they've been pigeonholed into that I'm having genuine trouble finding inspiration.

As such, I figured I'd encourage you all to write your own favourite take on the lizardfolk in the replies/comments, and we'll see if we can't brainstorm our way to an awnser.

Here's some of my own thoughts to get you started:

Lizardfolk as they are presented primarily exist to fufill the role of stock primitive antagonists, a one step more fantastical version of the jungle dwelling cannibals often encountered like pulp heroes like Indiana Jones/Doc Savage/Conan the Barbarian.

In many ways they are the epitome of the "fill in the blank baddie", with everything from their culture to their religion to their motivations being wholly based on the fact that they're lizardy lizards who like to do lizard things and could never be anything but. This is flat and boring, and needs to change if we have any hope of doing something with them.

The whole "uninterested in knowledge", " think with their stomachs", "don't have emotions, just instinct" is one of d&d's most glaring examples of biological determinism. It assigns lizardfolk the concept of "spear chucking savages" and then works backwards to justify why they remain savage while detouring through 19th century race science talking points.

When dealing with any kind of anthropomorphic reptile we're inevitably going to get into the "lizard people" conspiracy theory milieu, with all the baked in antisemitism. On top of that, we're also open to ancient aliens style conspiracy theories given how often Lizardfolk are typecast as "ruin dwelling primitives descended from civilizations long before recorded history".

[fenerismoon]

I’ve done several reimagining of lizardfolk with various aspects being swapped out as the situation and world requires. Here’s some of my ideas.

- Dino-lizardfolk. Where they are lizards in the same way a veliocoraptor is. Not a reptile, but not a bird. In that one they actually grew feathers like humans grow hair. They’re also endothermic, and since the setting they were being made for a was a prehistoric “dino world” they fished for ammonites and trilobites. Grew, ginkos, cycads, and ferns as crops. Never actually used the setting for any game or story so the cultures were never more than vaguely defined as hunter-gathers and proto-farmers.

- Serpent-fly symbiosis: I was heavily exposed to Heroes of Might and Magic III as a kid and it left an imprint on me. The fortress town was a favorite and I couldn’t help but delv deeper world-building wise into how that society might function. What came out of that was the idea of a group of lizardfolk forming a symbiosis with the serpent flies. In that a lizardfolk settlement is half stone buildings, half mud and wax hive. The lizardfolk are literally part of the serpentfly hive, helping to tend to the eggs and larva, build the hive itself, and treat diseases and parasites the serpent flies are poor at detecting and treating. In return they both mutually defend each other, and the lizardfolk live off the serpentflies’ honey, use the excess wax they produce, and occasionally eating serpentfly eggs or larva. These lizardfolk were very scent-orientated, which allowed them to understand and exploit the scent signals the serpent flies used.

- Fireless: Where lizardfolk were a completely different evolution of sapient creatures. One of the differences was that they never developed fire as a cultural tool and it ripples culturally and biologically through their history. One aspect is that they do not cook their food, and regard anything cooked as being “burnt” but instead evolved a complex culture of fermenting, seasoning, and pickling their food. (Was more an exploration of the role of fire in human societies to be honest, but it was still an interesting idea to explore further)

- Fire-worshiper: An idea that emerged from Against the Storm, where the lizardfolk there are actually fire aligned due to their need for excess heat to ward off the draining cold of the eternal rain. Possible iterations, a group of lizardfolk living in an extremely cold area, reliant on a nearby volcano to survive. As a result they are expert volcano mages, a skill necessary to keep their home from erupting and potentially killing them all, yet still active enough to keep their hot-springs and other volcanic phenomena they need to survive still active. (Potentially they cook off volcanic steam vents)

Scent-based senses: Due to differences in how they physically precieve the world, lizardfolk tend to place more emphasis on scent vs sight. Personal scent is used to verify identity and scent impregnated wax is used to sign and seal contracts. Lizardfolk artists will often make their pigments as much for their scent as their colour. As the scent of the finished work is an integral part of it and meant to compliment the visual part of the work, or potentially add conflicting or nuanced undertones to it.

Potential inter-species confusion: Due to differences in how their hear, lizardfolk may have very different tastes in music than humans. This is due to both sides hearing (and not hearing) different tones and pitches, resulting in a different experience for both. This also extends to speech, with humans and lizardfolk having potential trouble understanding each other verbally, due to them being unable to vocalize and/or hear elements of the other’s language.

[haveyouatethisfruit]

Just found out the “wild raspberries” I used to run around and snack on in the woods of BC every summer break as a child are not, in fact, raspberries.

They were thimbleberries apparently.

I don't blame you for thinking they were, rubus is such a widespread genus with around 1475 species and 64 more hybrids, and all of the fruits look very similar! I've heard good things about thimble berries, though, I'd kill to try one. It's a shame they're not commercially developed.

[sileana]

I grow some in my yard. They could never be commercial without huge breeding modifications, they are so delicate. You pretty much have to graze on them, I’ve tried to pick some to bring indoors to eat later and they just collapse.

[fenerismoon]

This is interesting to me because there were *wild* raspberries around my childhood home in BC, and before you say anything I know they weren’t thimbleberries, because there were also thimbleberries around said home, and they were clearly two different types of berry.

I have since grown up to encounter salmonberries, wildblack berries (which are horribly invasive in BC), arctic raspberries. And that’s not getting into all the hybrids and domesticated varieties.

[oneheadtoanother]

Ok now do NYT columnists

[dorkichiban]

already this has tags in the notes like “#anti ai” but... this is just real life with almost everything. this is like grifter 101 please don’t exceptionalize needing to be critical of chatgpt.

[clockworkdragonffxiv]

This is literally how job interviews work, by the way, and then everyone is surprised the super-duper confident guy is also an incompetent moron.

[digitaldiscipline]

This worked on Trump voters, with the added selling point that he's a piece of shit that gave them permission to be pieces of shit.

[neil-gaiman]

Talking to experts when I was young used to drive me nuts because I would say something self-evidently straightforward, and they would say, "Well, it's not actually as simple as that..."

And then I got older and learned things on the way, and found people asking me questions that were straightforward, but the equivalent of "Why isn't it obvious to everyone that there is only one right way of doing the thing...?" and I would reply, "Well, it's not as simple as that..." and watch them decide that I probably didn't know what I was talking about.

[fidelishaereticus]

I spent the first half of my life in a special nook of academia that truly ruined ruined me for the rest of the world. Now academia has its flaws (that's why I left) - but it did manage to instill in me a deep *belief* that expertise doesn't usually look like certainty. Intelligence doesn't just look like a quick quip. Leadership doesn't look like an order barked. All of those qualities look something more like this: 'ahhh interesting ha hm hah well that's not really my field but let's sit down and have a thinkie [lugs out five dusty tomes from under desk and pulls up a search bar in an academic journal]'. Essentially, I learned that an expert is someone who gets *excited* rather than afraid at the prospect of having the bounds of their expertise challenged - someone who will gleefully take the bait to have a deeper, more complex discussion over the low-hanging fruit of the sound-bite answer. I learned that that knowledge is as much about knowing what you don't know as it is about knowing what you know, and that confidence looks like having the self-assurance to admit that without getting ruffled.

In academic circles, i learned to read as confident, assertive, and intelligent because i mimicked the above behavior, which i admired. Often i did feel stupid about not knowing something, but i trained myself to state my ignorance with a smile - because that's what confidence looked like. That's what expertise looked like. Even when I wanted to, I never covered up the gaps in my knowledge or showed fear at the prospect of being wrong. I asked questions back at questions and reached for the more complex truth. This was the environment in which I learned how to command respect. Outside of the ivory tower, it has been a perpetual shock to learn that admitting uncertainty - or simply just stopping to think - reads as weakness, ignorance, lack of confidence, or even submission. People take it as a signal that they can disrespect you. I was taught it all absolutely backwards. To this day there's nothing that infuriates me more than being taken for a pushover because i wear confidence like an academic, not a businessman. But the conditioning is bone-deep, and I'm not about to try and change it.

[abigail-pent]

^^^^^ absolutely

this also reminds me a lot of some interactions I had in my PhD when I took a MA level class. It was taught by a woman professor who I really like and respect... and who would respond "I don't know" when she did not know the answer. I loved this about her - I strongly prefer someone who doesn't pretend to know what the answer is if they know they have uncertainty about it. The MA students took it as a sign that she didn't know her stuff. Meanwhile it was a very broad survey course and it would have been pretty unreasonable to expect her to know every little detail about an extremely complex policy environment, and have all the details close to hand all the time. But even among the policy-school masters students - one of the most open-minded professional programs, in my experience - unwillingness to 'fake it' in the presence of uncertainty wasn't a quality that immediately commanded respect. I was pretty gobsmacked by that.

[fenerismoon]

It’s funny, I’ve actually got to a point, after many debates with one of my town’s local conspiracy theorists, where people who display too much confidence in their own knowledge instinctively trigger me to think they don’t know what they’re talking about.

The more I also learn about the world and the sheer vastness of things to know out there, the more bullshit it seems to me that someone actually could know everything about even one subject. (That being said I have been blown away at the sheer depths of knowledge some people have in their passionate niche interest)

It also doesn’t hurt that said local conspiracy theorist sounded a lot like many of the people on youtube who sell passive income scams and cryptocurrencies that my first instinctive reaction to hearing so much confidence put out from one person, is instant disbelief.

[homunculus-argument]

You know what fantasy stories don't use enough? Different measuring scales, and confusion caused by them. Because before the metric system, practically every place and culture had their own measures for weights, lengths and distances. It would be fun to add that into a story for added realistic cultural confusion.

The average dwarf is four or five feet tall, but not in human measures. Yeah they're still shorter than humans but the dwarf foot (and the namesake measure of length) is bigger in proportion to their body. "Is that in dwarf feet or human feet?" is a common question to hear on construction sites, wherever human carpenters and dwarf masons are working together.

A dedicated local Common Misconception Historian has a pet peeve about the whole "princess Featherblade was only 12 years old when she led the attack on Marshland Halls" -myth, because the historical recordings on the human side are off. While she was remarkably young, that myth came about back in the day when humans were still trying to apply "dog years" to elves, and in an elven life span, 120 years is not a direct equivalent to a 12-year-old human.

A whole culture whose smallest unit of weight loosely translates to "about as much as an apple", and varies from region to region depending on the size of local apples. These people are famed for their alchemists, whose uncanny ability to simply measure their ingredients by heart, making their recipes essentially impossible to replicate. This famed skill is a matter of survivor bias - the ones that don't have that knack ten to explode into fine mist.

[fenerismoon]

As a sidenote. Medieval construction sites actually decided at the beginning of the project just exactly whose feet, inches and thumbspaces they were going to use for this site. Then they’d post them on a board at the workshops so everyone could be on the same page here.

[questbedhead]

I love me a pseudo-historical arranged marriage au but it always nudges my suspension of disbelief when the author has to dance around the implicit expectation that an arranged marriage should lead to children, which a cis gay couple can't provide.

I know for a lot of people that's irrelevant to what they want from an Arranged Marriage plot, but personally I like playing in the weird and uncomfortable implications.

So, I've been thinking about how you would justify an obviously barren marriage in That Kind of fantasy world, and I thought it'd be interesting if gay marriage in Ye Old Fantasy Land was a form of soft disinheritance/abdication.

Like, "Oh, God, I don't want to be in this position of power please just find me a boy to marry", or, "I know you should inherit after you father passes but as your stepmother/legal guardian I think it'd make more sense if my kids got everything, so maybe consider lesbianism?", or "Look, we both know neither of our families has enough money to support that many grandkids, so let's just pair some spares and save both our treasuries the trouble".

Obviously this brings in some very different dynamics that I know not everyone would be pinged by, but I just think it'd be neat.

[kyraneko]

This is actually a really cool variant solution to a real historical problem, wherein either primogeniture or other profoundly shitty customs led to wealthy parents having insufficient resources to provide for all of their children in a manner consistent with their station.

Historically, the Church and its widespread monastic structure functioned as a dumping ground for second/third/etc sons and all the daughters one can't afford to marry off adequately, with the military eventually picking up the slack for the former post-Reformation to the point where it's been argued that the need for something to occupy these dispossessed sons played a role in Europe's ongoing conflicts between its nations and the eventual push of imperialism and colonization over the rest of the world.

In a world where homosexuality were more accepted, it would offer a new option: spare a comparatively-small outlay of resources from the main family fortune to equip a house and accoutrements, which would be reabsorbed into the family as a return inheritance in a few decades, and contract a marriage which would be deliberately unable to produce legitimate offspring.

You get the advantages of creating marital ties with another wealthy family, the people married therein have a spouse and the status achievements that go with marriage, and the risk that your child goes off and marries someone unsuitable or inconvenient is removed entirely, as is the risk that they could marry someone and have legitimate, inheritance-claiming children with them. Sure, they can have affairs and thus get children if they're married to a same-sex spouse, but those children cannot be passed off as legitimate issue of the marriage, and so they pose less of a threat to the the main body of the family's wealth.

And, thus: perfectly reasonable reason why your pseudohistorical fictional characters can find themselves in a same-sex arranged marriage!

[aqueerkettleofish]

"Nicholas, we've arranged for you to marry Eric, in the neighboring kingdom."

"But father, I'm not...."

"I'm well aware. I've just decided that you shouldn't reproduce."

[fenerismoon]

This is the exact opposite of my ace characters getting heterosexually married so they could claim an inheritance. (Then once they claimed it proceed to not have children and cause the rest of the family to freak)

[gallusrostromegalus]

Hi Gallus, I'm doing some worldbuilding and you seem like you could be connected enough for me to find an answer to the problem of dwarven agriculture. Many problems are created by the requirement of no sunlight, as even the common response of mushrooms still need light to break down decomposing matter as a primary energy source. Currently, we're thinking that they use a special type of mushroom that breaks down rocks in an energy-producing reaction, giving them enough energy to absorb nutrients and grow - this would serve a second purpose in explaining why building a massive hollowed-out mountain fortress doesn't produce an equally large amount of gravel.

Any thoughts? We're grasping at straws kinda lol

Well, some thoughts:

There's plenty of cave systems (especially Karst Systems) that are at least partially open to Sunlight- especially the kind that have rivers running through them, which is something else that's really helpful for agriculture.

For Example: This Cool AF Sinkhole cave in china that has an entire Forest in it

Now There's a view to put outside the city Gates!

Karst specifically is a landscape where underground rivers hollow out the limestone underground and then the cave roofs fall in. This kind of landscape answers your gravel question nicely: the hollowed out mountain does produce an equal amount of gravel, but the gravel turns up as the sandy banks of the river system hundreds of miles away.

So, there's your sunlight that can be used directly, or reflected or magically transferred deeper into the cave system.

Or they just put more holes in the roof! Unless your dwarves are also vampires, there's no reason for them to not hollow out a few Skylights into the mountain too.

But let's talk some other cave ecology and agriculture!

For starters, your dwarves could be sitting on top of a literal gold mine that would allow them to trade for a lot of needed materials and crops.

And by gold mine, I mean Salt Mine.

Historically, salt comes out of hollowed-out mountains and is worth more than gold.

Also something the humans have historically fought a bunch of wars over, so there's some free political tensions if you needed that!

I can also mean the possible fucking enormous piles of bat guano that accumulates in Karst caves, which is the world's most insanely good fertilizer, and ALSO something that has been worth more than it's weight in gold.

Speaking of Gold, another thing that often lives in sinkhole caves in abundance is BEES. turns out, limestone stalactites are a terrific place to build a hive that is difficult for predators to reach, stays dry and the stone substrate means the hives can reach many tons in weight before they start having structural issues. That sweet, sweet insect-derived liquid gold is already important to Dwarves in a lot of folklore- it's really hard to have a Traditional Dwarven Mead Hall without the honey to make the mead, you know?

So you got your mushrooms, you got your sunlight-grown sinkhole crops, you got your traded goods and you got your source of alcohol- the only thing really missing from an ancient food pyramid here is a staple carbohydrate. To that end, may I propose our good Peruvian Friend: The Potato.

Grain crops aren't actually all that nutritious and were kept around in ancient societies more as legal tender that kept the peasants busy, because wheat or rice takes months to grow, an enormous amount of labor to harvest, and wheat also needs to be milled before it can be turned into food- all enormously time-consuming processes that keep peasants busy and easy to rule tyranically over.

Potatoes though? Pop one in the ground in spring and you can dig up fingerlings all summer, and if you make potato towers, you can harvest up to 40lbs of delicious, easy-to-prepare-and-store carb out of a single plant- a real space-saver for the limited sinkhole skyspace.

If your dwarves have cheese, the potato makes even more sense, because Potato+dairy is the easiest, most nutritionally complete survival food there is.

Finally, consider: Dwarven Vodka.

This post is open for anyone to comment suggestions on, but that's my take: put your dwarves in a Karst-sinkhole cave system, give them a highly in demand resource like salt or guano, bees, and taters. Boom. Whole agriculture, economy and political scheme starters.

[fenerismoon]

If you want to go in more radical directions, you can have the bats themselves be domesticated. With their guano being used to fuel agriculture and the bats themselves being raised for meat and furs.

Amphibians and insects are also potential ideas for livestock. Caves collect water and pools could be used to raise frogs or salamanders for food. Insects as well could be fed on garbage and raised for food. You could even do what leaf cutter ants do and have the dwarves growing fungi off their food waste, which is then used to feed giant ants or beetles.

Your dwarves could also be doing a aquaponics system, raising fish in sunlit cave pools and floating gardens on the ponds which feed on the waste the fish produce.

There also the possibility, if your dwarves are living on mountain peaks, that they have terraced the mountainside and are growing crops the more traditional way. Potatoes are a classic, but if you look at what people in other mountainous regions grow, the andes and Himalayas, they could be growing things like quinoa or even barley and wheat. (Perfect source for making beer or ale)

To go back to the trade angle as well, consider that in a lot of mountainous regions the major differences in climate are not north-south but higher to lower elevation. You could easily make a whole trade network of mountain dwarves trading the products of the high mountains with the people of the lowlands.

Hopes this helps as well

[catadromously]

the dubious philosophy of salmon

[catadromously]

the number of people who have looked at this is officially too large a number

[palaeosinensis]

This will never stop being unspeakably beautiful or moving me to tears.

[fenerismoon]

What’s even more amazing, they’ve found that salmon imprint on the rivers they grow up in. Hatch salmon eggs in a new river then the one their parents grew up in, and they’ll return to the river they grew up in. They’ve actually found that hatchery salmon released too late in their life won’t return to the river they were released into. They’ll keep trying to find the fish hatchery.

[lunnefisk]

harry dubois would end death note in one episode. he'd be unkillable bc he has no fucking idea what his name is and then he'd go drink driving and accidentally run light over and the killings would mysteriously stop

[fenerismoon]

Honestly, there’s actually potential here. Like, light would think Harry is going to be easy. Not even a speedbump in the way of his plans. There is no way this pathetic, booze-soaked wet rag of a “genius” detective is going to even get close to stopping him.

Except… Harry isn’t playing by the rules of Light’s mind games. Light is trying to manipulate him, except Harry keeps doing unexpected things, asking weird unexpected questions, and then instead of doing what Light is trying to manipulate him into doing, he does something else that somehow puts him closer to busting Kira.

And apparently he’s made himself immune to the Death Note, by basically wiping out his own identity through massive substance abuse. Shinigami eyes just see this illegible blur.

And then, during a routine questioning, Harry turns to Ryuk and goes. “And what you about Mr Big Creepy Crow Man. Can I have your name? Ryuk? How do you spell that?”

[curseworm]

i think that every child should have unrestricted access to thick blackberry brambles or some other delicious fruit that grows encased in a painful fortress. i think wading through thorns to reach the cluster of shining ripe berries you spied through a gap between the tangled vines teaches you something important. not sure what though

[curseworm]

i just know no fruit has ever tasted as sweet as the ones i ate while bleeding under the blistering summer sun

[fenerismoon]

Unfortunately the bushes where I grew up were not signatories of the Geneva Convention and practiced chemical warfare. I got those tantalizing wild raspberries and saskatoons. But thanks to Mr. Stinging Nettle and Mr. Cow Parsnip Sensitivity, I got a huge blistering rash all the way up my arm.

[homunculus-argument]

Do you think stone age people held funerals for their dogs? They buried their dead, that we know. Some were buried with their dogs, so wherever their dead would go, with their bows and arrows and bone flutes, clearly they figured that it's better for the dogs to follow to wherever the departed will go. But people outlive their dogs more often than dogs outlive their people. Did they figure that whatever is beyond, dogs go to the same place that people do?

Before stone houses, cattle, barley or rice, before people came up with the marks that the people now like to call marks of "civilisation", they had stone axes, bone spears and dogs. No other animal would willingly climb to a human's bed to sleep on their feet, or rest their chin on your knee to look you in the eyes while begging for food when they've already been fed. Did they laugh when a dog was clever enough to wriggle its way out of a tethered leash to get into venison that was being smoked for winter, or wake their people up by the tap of a wagging tail after reluctantly accepting that they aren't allowed to bark them awake?

Did they ever pause in the middle of a story at the fire at night, to turn and watch one of the dogs mutter barks and twitch paws in their sleep? Whatever they thought that dreams were, they knew dogs have them too. Did they wonder what dogs dream of? Visions of past and future hunts? If they thought that dreams were another realm, where your soul will sometimes visit while leaving your body behind, where does the soul of a dog go?

Did they wonder where the souls of dogs go?

[fenerismoon]

Let me tell you the story of one of the oldest dog burials that we can be sure is an actual dog that lived with people.

This dog was buried. We know that for sure. But what they also found was that this dog was suffering from the extreme late stages of canine distemper. For those that don’t know, distemper is a virus that causes severe neurological degeneration eventually leading to death. This dog had been in the last stages of the disease. It would have been unable to walk, unable to do anything but twitch.

Most wolves never get to that stage. Most of them are killed long before when they loose the ability to walk and hunt.

The only way for this animal to have survived that long, was that it had someone caring for it. That someone loved this dog enough to keep feeding it and looking after it longer after it had lost to the ability to do anything but lie on the ground and shake. And after it inevitably died, they buried it.

We’ll never know the whole story of course. But whatever their motivations, someone obviously cared enough to look after this animal long after it had lost all utility it might have had. Maybe it was out of a sense of moral obligation, maybe they hoped it would get better, or maybe they were just trying to make its last days as comfortable as they possibly could.

[teaboot]

Do you think Clark Kent's first few major articles were about the continued presence of lead pipes in parts of Metropolis' water system

[teaboot]

(Average Metropolis reader after investigative reporter C. Kent's 452nd article on yet another case of landlords/business owners/factories' continued use of lead pipes/paint/gas/glass knowingly exposing the public to dangerously toxic lead levels) what the fuck happened to this guy

[teaboot]

One day Bruce Wayne mentions in an interview that heroes like Superman are overrated, as the most effective way to reduce crime is to provide public resources and improve local infrastructure, then cites how neighboring city Metropolis has effectively lowered their violent crime by 13% after addressing their outdated water system and investing low income housing. the reporter conducting the interview suddenly starts looking a little uncomfortable

[teaboot]

To be clear, Clark is still a fantastic investigative reporter. He still has to track down the sources to prove all this shit

[teaboot]

"Who, Clark Kent? Yeah, we're pretty sure he's a Meta. Is he a superhero? Like what, "Lead-detector guy"? "Captain pipes?" Don't get me wrong, he's a great guy and it's a handy trick, but it's lead detection, not laser vision. He's not about to go running around in tights any time soon."

[sindri42]

I just love the idea of a cape maintaining their secret identity by pretending to be a completely different and less impressive kind of parahuman.

[fenerismoon]

The Bank of Evil had never blown up a building, waged a war, or inflicted unspeakable horrors on innocent people. Yet they money they provided helped make all those things possible. You didn’t need a credit score, or a downpayment, or even a remotely sane proposal. You just needed an idea that was either going to kill a lot of people, crush the spirit of the masses, or just make the world a little bit more grim and dark.

Why they did this, no one was even sure. The Bank was that secretive. But despite that, would-be supervillains, uncaring corporations, selfish politicians, and people with good intentions but horrific methods would sooner or later find themselves talking to a unassuming-but-unsettling man who was willing to loan them a lot of money they desperately needed, with suspiciously few strings attached.

They never did the deeds themselves, but they provided the capital to make it all possible.

Which was why the Bank never really feared superheroes. Superheroes fought alien invasions and mad scientists with oversized doom lasers. They were good at what they did, but almost all of them never had the inclination or the skills to hunt through reams of financial documents to find out just where the mad scientist got the money to buy the 300tons of structural steel necessary to make their doom laser, or just what was paying the paycheques of Dr. Doom’s hired goons. Superman could not swoop out of the sky and beat them up, if Superman had no idea they existed.

Yes, the Bank of Evil had nothing to fear from Superman. That pesky reporters Clark Kent, on the other hand, was getting dangerously close to ferreting out their true identities and was proving frustratingly hard to take care of.

[prokopetz]

Having been into webcomics right when the medium was taking off circa 2000 makes for an interesting experience trying to come up with stuff you read as a kid that you’d actually recommend today. It’s like:

“No, not this one – it goes off the rails and gets super racist toward the end. And not that one, either; the guy who wrote it was convicted of child molestation in 2017, and some of the characterisation choices gain a very different subtext when you’re aware of the author’s proclivites. Hmm… how about this one? It’s got some really interesting worldbuilding, but I don’t recall much about the plot, I should re-read the archives to refresh my aaaaand there’s a weirdly sympathetic depiction of Hitler. Huh.”

[dukeofriven]

“Both of these are pretty good but don’t seem to be online any more, this one is fantastic but its screen resolution is so bad it’s no longer readable, this one splits into two lousier webcomics after the writer and artist had a falling out, and this one’s been on hiatus right before the finale since 2007.″

[prokopetz]

See, I would recommend that last one, if that was the only strike against it; whether I’d provide any advance warning about the missing conclusion would depend on how much of a jerk I’m feeling like being that day.

[woostershiresauce]

Gunnerkrigg Court still slaps!

[prokopetz]

Gunnerkrigg Court debuted in 2005. When I say “circa 2000″, I mean like 1998–2002; there’s a very palpable generational gap between webcomics that debuted during that period and webcomics that debuted in 2003 or later.

(Most of the titles that folks in the notes are offering as examples of webcomics that have withstood the test of time debuted post-2003, in fact; I’m not sure whether that says more about the era, or more about the average age of this blog’s followership!)

[makiruz]

Is Kevin and Kell still good? I had weird times, but it tended to go back to being a slice of life funny animals comic (not, it’s not a furry comic, this is of the Looney Tunes tradition)

[prokopetz]

Kevin and Kell isn’t part of the era I’m talking about by virtue of being too early rather than too late; particularly in its early instalments, its humour and writing style have much more in common with contemporary newspaper comics than with the generation of webcomics that would follow a few years later.

[fenerismoon]

What is it about that particular four year era that made webcomics so like that?

[anneapocalypse]

People think "gray morality" in fiction is about Both Sides Are Partly Right Actually but so much more often it's about choices having inescapable negative outcomes that have to be weighed against the benefits, or it's about having to choose between a series of bad options, or it's about making hard decisions about what you are willing to sacrifice to achieve the outcome you believe is good.

So often, I seem to see people angry that a story in a video game didn't present a Good Option with no collateral damage and no negative outcomes whatsoever, and if there are any downsides it's seen as the writers punishing you for the decision, because they see the primary purpose of stories to be moralizing rather than exploring the complexities of human experience. Or they argue that the collateral damage didn't really happen, or that the negative outcomes weren't really that bad actually, and thus miss the point altogether.

And I feel like it's important to remember that a narrative telling you a decision is difficult is not the same thing as the narrative telling you it is wrong.

[fenerismoon]

I think this says something to about how people pick sides and then justify it. Because, you see this in real life too. Choices are difficult. Often there *is* no 100% good option. So you have to choose. What do you think is the best outcome and what sacrifices are you willing to make to get it?

And we see this happen in real life. People pick a side, then they justify it. They maximize the damage the other side is doing with their actions. They minimize the damage their own side is doing. Consequences are brushed under the table or minimized. (No the genocide never happened. Yes the forced expulsions did, but they weren’t actually as bad as people say.)

There’s a surprising amount of similarities between people arguing between right or left wing politics, and people arguing which side of the civil war in Fire Emblem is in the right.