Faerye Nonsense

Occasional prose, whatsits, and whynots by SFF author Felicity Shoulders 🐦‍⬛ (pronouns she/her; languages mainly English & French) 🦖 I love books, dinosaurs, language, and our wide haunted planet

[fshoulders]

I am so crazy about this little kitty.

[herpsandbirds]

Eurasian Hoopoe (Upupa epops), FEED BABBY A TASTY BUG!!!, family Upupidae, order Bucerotiformes, China

photograph by C. Low

[urie]

stop calling it a girl dinner and call it by its formal name: Fend For Yourself dinner in an ingredients household

[fshoulders]

Just going to sit down for a minute and process that other ingredients households also specifically used ‘fending’ in this context.

🤔

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Everyone: Agatha Christie's mysteries are generally very surprising

Me reading the Mysterious Affair at Styles: That was probably very true when they were written, but there's a whole genre based on her work now. It's probably more predictable to those of us who have experienced so many derivatives of her work in the hands of other authors.

Me finishing the Mysterious Affair At Styles: Oh hot damn. Those were literally the only candidates I didn't suspect even once in the entire book.

[poll-position]

You are given a short-lived curse in which you have a song stuck in your head for a week. On the bright side, you get to pick the song. Which do you choose?

American Pie (Don Mclean)

Bad Romance (Lady Gaga)

Cotton Eye Joe (Rednex)

Bohemian Rhapsody (Queen)

Dancing Queen (ABBA)

Happy (Pharrell Williams)

Hot n Cold (Katy Perry)

Single Ladies (Beyonce)

Take Me Home Country Roads (John Denver)

Wannabe (Spice Girls)

We Didn’t Start The Fire (Billy Joel)

9 to 5 (Dolly Parton)

Voting ended onJul 16

[fshoulders]

I get to pick the song?! This cursegiver is so much kinder than my usual provider!!!

[apolladay]

Which magical immunity would you choose:

Immune to all viral infection

Immune to all bacterial infection

Immune to all parasites, internal and external (ticks and mosquitoes, etc.)

You forgot fungus/vanilla extract/see results

Remaining time: 2 days 1 hour

[fshoulders]

My poll came out! This is the kind of thing I think about at stoplights. Came from wishing I never had to worry about ticks and Lyme disease, and developed into a thought experiment from there.

[passerinethehallway]

By what mechanism does this operate?

For example, if someone’s gut flora got completely wiped out, would introducing new gut flora constitute an infection?

Also, how are we defining pathogen vs parasite when it comes to eukaryotes, particularly multicellular eukaryotes? (E.g. parasitic molds, protists like malaria.)

Additionally, what about typical internal and external organisms which ordinarily do not cause problems or are even beneficial, but when breeding out of control for some reason or another, cause some kind of disease?

[fshoulders]

Works by magic!

So I tried to sidestep the microbiome question by saying “infection” specifically: to my understanding, my gut and skin bacteria et c. are just hanging out, not infecting per se. (Perhaps the distinction is clearer in the case of skin than of gut.)

But I reckoned: the immunity is magic, so it just knows which things are harmful/disease-causing and which aren’t. You’re not in some kind of “my superpower makes me immune to bacterial infection, but also ruins my digestion!” sad-x-man double bind.

(Of course, I’ll freely admit that that simple and arbitrary distinction is insufficient to cover all cases. For instance, there’s some evidence that if I, a person with asthma and other inflammatory/atopic conditions, got parasitized by hookworm, it would improve my general state of health!)

The imbalance problem is thornier. I suppose if you go with authorial intent, I would say this magic immunity doesn’t address that. Because if it did, I would probably have chosen bacterial myself! (Skin microbiome imbalance — my eczema flaring and leveling up — has been the bane of my existence for the better part of the last year.)

Edited to add: I think protists and molds come squarely under “you forgot ___”: if they’re not in the arbitrary category, they’re not covered by the spell. Malaria, of course, and tick vectors for acquired allergy (also not otherwise covered) could be avoided by selecting immunity to parasites. It’s a rather arbitrary and stodgy multiple-choice genie, I suppose!

[apolladay]

Which magical immunity would you choose:

Immune to all viral infection

Immune to all bacterial infection

Immune to all parasites, internal and external (ticks and mosquitoes, etc.)

You forgot fungus/vanilla extract/see results

Remaining time: 2 days 1 hour

[fshoulders]

My poll came out! This is the kind of thing I think about at stoplights. Came from wishing I never had to worry about ticks and Lyme disease, and developed into a thought experiment from there.

[michaelnordeman]

A young Great spotted woodpecker/Dendrocopos major/större hackspett. Värmland, Sweden (13 July 2024).

[fshoulders]

The double-edged sword of your movie-loving partner both finding an actor who is in everything extremely forgettable; and disliking their work when he is reminded who they are.

[fshoulders]

(watching a movie starring the guy)

Co-protagonist: “Wait. Is that that guy I can never recognize?”

Me: “Yup.”

Co-protagonist: “You know how I figured it out? Because I couldn’t recognize him.”

(He thought the guy was good in this, and clarifies he doesn't really dislike the guy: it's just that of the 4 or 5 things I list off every time he asks what he's supposed to have seen the guy in, he only remembers the performance he disliked.)

[soup-mother]

Sober as fuck at the back of the club going onto Wikipedia and typing "List of birds"

[homunculus-argument]

could be that people are concerned about crashing? since just having a bee in your shirt doesnt have the added risk of “being distracted while operating a zooming box of metal and glass”?

I guess I'm just dumbstruck by the sheer amount of people whose first response to "don't freak out or you will die" situations is to immediately freak out. I guess disaster movies aren't that unrealistic after all.

[fshoulders]

Interestingly, this hypothetical situation has been used as a metaphor for precisely this: the irrational freakout that causes much worse harm than the triggering danger could have inflicted*.

An excerpt from the first few pages of Wasp, a 1957 sci-fi novel by Eric Frank Russell (re-issue blurb from Terry Pratchett: “I’d have given anything to have written Wasp. I can’t imagine a funnier terrorists’ handbook.”)

So this tendency for asymmetric freakout has been remarked on before as quite irrational, but so common as to be almost axiomatic!

*assuming no wasp sting allergy in play. Believe me, I know the increased difficulty of being calm around stinging insects when a sting might itself mean death: it me!

[fshoulders]

No one: …

Absolutely no one at all: …

My cat Alma: DON’T SPEAK TO ME OR MY LARGE ADULT BROTHER EVER AGAIN

[herpsandbirds]

Red-breasted Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus ruber), family Picidae, order Piciformes, NW United States

photograph by Mark Wangerin

[fshoulders]

So I’ve got this MFA in Writing. It was a low-residency program, so instead of semester-long classes, I’d go to intensive 10-day spates of lectures, then get individual mentorship on my writing for the rest of the semester. No one was going to make the fiction writers turn up to all the poetry talks, but I was raised only two generations from the Great Depression, so I definitely went to allll the lectures. I learned loads of good stuff from the poetry profs.

But one of the poetry profs taught an extremely valuable thing outside of craft talks or workshops. In the evenings the faculty and visiting profs gave readings (and there were readings from the graduating students, and one for current students every semester too as I recall) and this guy listened with his whole body. He was always ramrod-straight in his chair, paying total attention to what another writer was offering up; and whenever something, a turn of phrase or an image or what-have-you, really hit him, he would exhale audibly. He rocked slightly in his chair. You could hear it throughout an auditorium, that hiss of breath.

Sometimes something, a line or an ending, would really knock his socks off; and instead of just the breath, we’d hear his voice, quietly: “Jeez!” It was the highest honor. I think I got it once, at my graduate reading. I don’t remember for what. I just remember blinking through it, reading on, storing it for later.

And these days, when I’m watching movies with my spouse or reading alone, when I take a hard smite to the heart — right through the brain, right through the metaphor, or right through the afterimage of every piece of art I’ve seen etched into my eye — I need to say something. I want to somehow recognize that someone was so artful and careful and smart that they did this to me deliberately. I need to say “hey look! this beautiful jerk reached into my heart without knowing my name, made this darkening world light for a moment with the sheer ingenious gorgeousness of their art, this astonishing person knew exactly what they were doing,” and I find myself exhaling, “Jeez!”

[thelawfulchaotic]

Another funny thing from the art museum.

I was wandering through a gallery when I turned around and saw a portrait of a woman and audibly went 'oh fuck.'

This is extra funny because I've only ever had this reaction once before, on a painting I saw in a museum in Fort Worth, Texas (extremely far away from where I was yesterday). The painting in Fort Worth was this one:

It's a painting of Alice Vanderbilt Shepard, by John Singer Sargent. I was so affected that I bought a print of this painting in particular when I got home, as the museum did not offer this particular painting in print.

Yesterday, the painting that yanked me out of my art museum stupor was this one:

Important notes:

It was in a gallery of many different painters

My left eye wasn't working great and I couldn't read any of the signs until I got up close

I have never seen this painting in my life

Gang do you want to know who painted that painting? Do you want to take a stabbling? A little baby guess?

Because apparently it was John Singer Sargent.

And this guy nonstop slaps? Every portrait is an absolute banger? Some selections from the first handful of pages on wikiart:

The portrait of the guy there is entitled "My Friend Chadwick" and yes, that's most certainly Chadwick, my friend. There could be no additional Chadwick friendness about this painting than there already is.

[fshoulders]

Huge fan of Sargent. I’m lucky because my Dad already loved Sargent before I had really heard of him, so we trucked up to the Seattle Art Museum for a visiting exhibition when I was 13 or something and I got to be introduced to Sargent by being pummeled relentlessly for several rooms by his brilliance!

They had sketches and travel watercolors and allegorical portraits, but they had so many of his hard-hitting, magical portraits. So many PEOPLE. Like, they had Lady Agnew of Lochnaw. I think she was toward the end of the exhibit and I had exactly (though less profanely as a prim 13-year-old) the OP’s reaction to her. That is a Person. I felt we had Met.

[chuunifox]

Autism Representation written by an allistic: My name is John Autism and I like the designated autistic interests

unintentionally autistic character written by the creator who hasn't really thought about whether or not theyre autistic: I wish I could be human like the way everyone else is but I know they can tell I'm not. And I know they're right

[fshoulders]

This kind of cuts both ways: I (an allist) made an RPG character whose brain I wanted to work differently from the others’. I invented a whole unusual way of experiencing the world (partly impossible, since it was not our world but Amber/Chaos universe) which was a really fun challenge to play. Success!

…And after a few sessions I found out that several players in the sprawling game thought she was autistic (including I think at least one person on the spectrum). Stressed me out a bit, as I am quite allistic, I didn’t mean her as Autistic Rep, and I didn’t feel qualified to do Autistic Rep!

(Obviously I just kept representing That Girl I Made Up, but it was odd knowing other people had headcanons for her.)

[fshoulders]

Never realized before yesterday that the voice of Kaidan Alenko (Raphael Sbarge) is in Independence Day (1996, dir. Roland Emmerich). No wonder Earth survived!