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#5yrsago The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man's Canyon

SS Taylor’s The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon is a fantastic YA novel that manages to hearken back to the golden age of kid-detective novels while still telling a thoroughly contemporary story. It’s set in a strange, hybridized alternate world where computers arrived on the scene much later than they did in our timeline, and then, inexplicably (and mysteriously) failed, plunging the world into a dark age from which a kind of dictatorial dystopia has emerged.

The new dictatorship is based upon the “New Age of Exploration,” a strange golden age in which new, unmapped and unsuspected lands are regularly discovered by explorers who find that the old, computer-generated maps are wrong, omitting vast lands. These lands are ripe with natural resources for plundering, and if the occasional indigenous population gets in the way, well, that’s nothing a few jackboots can’t take care of.

Kit, MK, and Zander are the children of Alexander West, a storied explorer who is missing and presumed dead. Though they are orphans, they have been left to fend for themselves in the rambling old house in the explorers-only neighborhood where they were raised. They scrape by on what little they were left, selling the family possessions for food.

But when Kit receives a mysterious book and it leads him to half a treasure map, the chase is on. The children’s father has sent them on a kind of high-stakes scavenger hunt from beyond the grave, and the secret police and the establishment they represent are keely interested in the outcome, which may or may not be a treasure-trove of ancient Spanish gold.

The Expeditioners rollicks, twists, turns and chases through canyons and arroyos, along airships and gliders, through boxcars and crumbling mansions, and on the way the heroes uncover all sorts of fabulous mysteries through their own cunning and bravery. It is a thoroughly smashing read.

It’s published by McSweeney’s and as you’d suspect, it is therefore gorgeous. Lavishly illustrated, with amazing printed boards and endpapers as well as a gorgeous dustjacket, it hearkens back to the great illustrated novels of my parents’ generation, but with all manner of up-to-date settings and scenarios and a million clever gadgets. Best of all, it ends with the promise of more volumes to come!

The Expeditioners and the Treasure of Drowned Man’s Canyon

https://boingboing.net/2013/08/20/the-expeditioners-and-the-trea.html

drferox

Given the high probability for things in Jurassic Park to go 100% haywire, would you still take a job there in order to treat a stegosaurus?

I would most definitely take a job at Jurassic Park, IF I got to make recommendations that would be actually listened to and wouldn’t be fired for swearing. The job of a veterinarian should not be to do what you are told by your employer, it should be to solve problems and advocate for the welfare of the animals in your care.

The Tyranosaus get’s enrichment, the sauropods get enrichment, the stegosaurs get enrichment, everybody gets enrichment.

Misuse of the clicker in clicker training will result in the device being inserted somewhere uncomfortable.

We are not feeding Jurassic carnivores meat from mammals which they are likely ill-suited to digest and metabolize. We know aquarium fish, which are not adapted to eating mammals, develop cardiac and fat distribution problems if their protein is supplemented with beef so let’s aim for a slightly more ‘natural’ diet of bird and reptile proteins (crocodile, anyone?)

Like, seriously, let’s not train a prehistoric reptile, brought back to the modern world with no parents to teach it about food, to see mammals as a source of food. It shouldn’t have any innate instincts to do so, so lets leave well enough alone.

In fact, let’s not give them live prey at all. I think not training the dinosaurs to hunt is probably a good idea.

Lets get somebody who knows what they’re doing to design enclosures so we can see the animals, and give them enough space to not go stir crazy.

While we’re at it, the enclosures for larger animals can have more safety features - bolt holes for humans that the biggest critters can’t fit through, honestly we even have these in livestock handling facilities, it’s not that hard!

We are not going to introduce DNA from modern species which are potentially parthenogenic

So, so much quarantine.

Some modern reptiles would need to be kept in order to seed the local environment with suitable microflora and microfauna for the dinosaurs to pick up. You might have cloned a dinosaur, but I’d bet dollars for donuts you didn’t clone it’s intestinal flora!

Quarantine again. Nothing is getting off the island, and ideally nothing from visitors is contacting anything in the exhibit.

Ian Malcom has to walk around being opinionated about everything, and suitably paranoid.

The roof of every building gets an evacuation point for a helicopter.

The stegosaurs get extra treats.

drferox

(Image reads: #there would be fewer catastrophes #and boring movies #but I’m here for this)

Oh no no, we could have the best movie ever.

We just need a really good, enthusiastic, Steve Irwin type character who just thinks these dinosaurs are wonderful, let him do whatever he wants, and make Ian Malcom follow him around.

Steve: This is a T Rex.

Steve: She’s a beauty.

Steve: I’m going to wrestle her.

Ian: I, uh, must politely protest.

therobotmonster

It would be an interesting Discovery special or mini-series. An examination of how a “real world” Jurassic Park designed the way an ethical real-world animal attraction is designed. The pop-culture comparison framework would get viewers to tune in, wherein they’d get to learn both about dinosaurs and responsible zoo design.

dankmemesreasonforliving

biglawbear

This is so real, honestly I’m just trying to make it to play Kingdom Hearts III

eevee-nicks-deactivated20200325

Years ago when my PTSD/depression was really bad I always made sure I had some kind of cookie dough or cookie dough mix in the house. And then if it escalated and I got the impulse to kill myself, I’d start baking cookies instead. And then I couldn’t do it because the cookies were baking. And once the whole process of preparing the dough, preheating the oven, baking the cookies, and letting them cool was over usually at least half and hour had passed and my meds had kicked in and I’d be like “well I guess I have to live now because I have freshly baked delicious cookies.” And then I’d just snack on suicide cookies a little bit at a time for the rest of the week and weirdly enough it helped.

biglawbear

This is brilliant. I need to do this. I love baking so much. It’s one of my favorite hobbies. I should make a fuckton of cookie dough and freeze it. I also need a recipe for perfect freezable “suicide cookies” because that’s just the perfect dark millennial humor that tickles me.

eevee-nicks-deactivated20200325

I’m glad you like this idea because I always want to tell people about the concept of “suicide cookies” (or really any kind of physical self harm cookies) but not everyone has my fucked up sense of humor and I worry about offending people by accident.

knitmeapony

I feel like much like we called a drink with all the sodas in the fountain a suicide, good suicide cookies would have all the things in it. Like, chocolate chips, butterscotch chips, peanut butter, crushed pretzel bits, nuts if you’re not allergic, maybe even white chocolate chips.

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

the most fucked up thing about married straight couples in paranormal reality shows is that the husband is almost always the skeptic and the wife will be like terrified to exist in her own home and she’ll beg her husband to believe her and she’ll be crying every night and he’ll straight up look at the camera and be like “I don’t know I guess I just thought she was imagining things.”

like this is beyond belief in ghosts what it comes down to is one member of these couples was so distressed they were in tears nightly or at least weekly, BEGGING their partner to listen to them, and their partner was like “whatever this’ll blow over.”

how does your relationship survive that?? how are these people still together?? if my wife came into the room crying and told me she’d seen bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, manifest in our kitchen and tell her he didn’t like our wallpaper, I’d like. obviously have some questions. but I’d fucking address her distress and take steps to make her feel better lmao???

these husbands are all garbage and they feel justified bc they weren’t the “crazy one” who believed in ghosts.

they were the good, logical, “sane” spouse who did rational and good things like, completely and purposefully ignore their partners’ growing and life-altering distress for months.

crescellerose-deactivated202202

reblog if you want bill watterson, author of acclaimed comic calvin and hobbes, to manifest in your kitchen and roast your terrible choices in wallpaper

the-real-seebs

this post caused [reads smudged writing on hand] bill watterson? to physically manifest in my house

therobotmonster

As a skeptic, I find these kinds of scenarios just as irritating, because in my book, and those of the skeptics I associate with, the idea is that one doesn’t doubt there was an experience, its what that experience is that’s in question. “I don’t doubt you saw something, but saying what it is will require investigation” and all that.

If anything, the skeptic is the one who should be pushing for them to go to a hotel for the night, because carbon monoxide poisoning produces the effects of a haunting.

So if your spouse, who is spending more time at home than you are, is reporting scary inexplicable shit, then the first place a skeptic’s mind is going to go is something in the environment causing it. Probably carbon monoxide, but there’s all kinds of gases and molds that can cause hallucinations, not to mention infrasound if the acoustics are just right. Regardless, anything that can cause you to see Bill Watterson materialize in your kitchen is probably dangerous, and the solution to that problem, be it a legitimate ghost or an infestation of ergot in the wallpaper, is to leave the dangerous area until the problem is identified and dealt with.

None of the creepy stuff from hauntings is really stuff you’d want to ignore even with its mundane causes. Even if it does come down to a 100% ‘in your head’ kind of thing, that means the house is causing a sharply negative psychological reaction and you shouldn’t stay there.

I’d totally dig the reverse film, though. Believer spouse is too stubborn to be chased out by the ghost, while the skeptic spouse is pulling their hair out because they’ve bought this money pit that just develops one problem after the other.

mostlysignssomeportents

Woke Giant, retro political art for third century America

Over at Woke Giant you’ll find some seriously cool, retro-styled “political art for third century America.” Don’t miss the downloadable protest signs!

https://boingboing.net/2018/08/16/woke-giant-retro-political-ar.html

sanders-aside

chemfemme

strange and weird that me not shaving my legs & leaving them in their natural fuzzy state and really never thinking about it is seen as an active choice, and maintaining nakey bald legs with careful weekly upkeep is seen as a default

unbfacts

How the Old Spice commercial was filmed. Practical effects.

Not at all what we thought!

boss-hoody

This makes these commercials 100 times better

deactivated-19871314-deactivate

Good lord I love practical effects

scarecrow-hero

Old Spice - 1 Most movies these days - 0

garrettauthor

I got real petty over on the Facebook page and IT WAS GLORIOUS.

wintergrey

This is me, going to check out Legendary Books now…

thefingerfuckingfemalefury

Publisher: We think that the way the fantasy genre treats women is problematic so we’re going to try and do better

A Fool: If you don’t like it why don’t you make your own!

Publisher: That

That is literally what we just said we are doing

garrettauthor

GUESS WHO’S BACK, BIGOTED FUCKWADS?

BOY it feels good to be back in this particular saddle!

garrettauthor

AHAHAHAHAHA we have a winner for today!

yaddle-archive-deactivated20181

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

deputychairman

Don’t come to me with your ‘behind the scenes’ nonsense, this is 1000000% how Leia Organa runs the Resistance

zackpaslay-deactivated20190708

a worthy contribution from Twitter

ithelpstodream

Once the children were asleep, Sajjad headed out on an urgent shopping mission. “We are Muslims and we’d never had a Christmas tree in our home. But these children were Christian and we wanted them to feel connected to their culture.”

The couple worked until the early hours putting the tree up and wrapping presents. The first thing the children saw the next morning was the tree.

“I had never seen that kind of extra happiness and excitement on a child’s face.“ The children were meant to stay for two weeks – seven years later two of the three siblings are still living with them.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/03/muslim-foster-parents-it-has-been-such-a-blessing?CMP=fb_gu

philtippett

this is a beautiful article and i just want to include a few other highlights from the above family as well as another profiled:

…she focuses on the positives – in particular how fostering has given her and Sajjad an insight into a world that had been so unfamiliar. “We have learned so much about English culture and religion,” Sajjad says. Riffat would read Bible stories to the children at night and took the girls to church on Sundays. “When I read about Christianity, I don’t think there is much difference,” she says. “It all comes from God.”

The girls, 15 and 12, have also introduced Riffat and Sajjad to the world of after-school ballet, theatre classes and going to pop concerts. “I wouldn’t see many Asian parents at those places,” she says. “But I now tell my extended family you should involve your children in these activities because it is good for their confidence.” Having the girls in her life has also made Riffat reflect on her own childhood. “I had never spent even an hour outside my home without my siblings or parents until my wedding day,” she says.

Just as Riffat and Sajjad have learned about Christianity, the girls have come to look forward to Eid and the traditions of henna. “I’ve taught them how to make potato curry, pakoras and samosas,” Riffat says. “But their spice levels are not quite the same as ours yet.” The girls can also sing Bollywood songs and speak Urdu.

“I now look forward to going home. I have two girls and my wife waiting,” says Sajjad. “It’s been such a blessing for me,” adds Riffat. “It fulfilled the maternal gap.”

[…]

Shareen’s longest foster placement arrived three years ago: a boy from Syria. “He was 14 and had hidden inside a lorry all the way from Syria,” she says. The boy was deeply traumatised. They had to communicate via Google Translate; Shareen later learned Arabic and he picked up English within six months. She read up on Syria and the political situation there to get an insight into the conditions he had left.

“It took ages to gain his trust,” she says. “I got a picture dictionary that showed English and Arabic words and I remember one time when I pronounced an Arabic word wrong and he burst out laughing and told me I was saying it wrong – that was the breakthrough.”

The boy would run home from school and whenever they went shopping in town, he kept asking Shareen when they were going back home. She found out why: “He told me that one day he left his house in Syria and when he had come back, there was no house.” Now he’s 18, speaks English fluently and is applying for apprenticeships. He could move out of Shareen’s home, but has decided to stay. “He is a very different person to the boy who first came here,” she says, “and my relationship with him is that of a mother to her son.”

ikkimikki

What a beautifully loving family.

shook-ti

blindlamar

I feel like this could be anything.

Take your meds. Flip off that asshole. Be unapologetically loud and brash. Love with your whole being.

sergeant-angels-trashcan

lmao ok but “high five–for morale!!” is a ploy used by BOTH Eliot and Hardison to do something that is rude/painful/not actually good for morale and they both never see it coming