Hi, I'm Jade! (They/them.) This blog is owned by my special interests. I write things, I draw things, I talk about writing and drawing things (a lot), and sometimes I play video games. I estimate that this blog is approximately 70% Voltron AU, 20% me being an absolute nerd, and 10% of ??? who knows???? I will probably talk about my Voltron fics excessively and at all hours of the night. Please ask me about my obscure tagging system for all your tag blocking needs.
I have spent, like. The ENTIRE day trying to get my mind to even form a single, tiny idea for a fic involving pretty much any of my big pile of disability headcanons, doesn’t even have to be a particularly polished idea... but instead I have only achieved a whole lot of self-loathing and despair.
...At least I can still say I achieved something lol
But no, seriously, I'm pretty sure my intense dislike of what I apparently referred to in a post years ago as "Hell Night" is probably contributing to... eh, at least a third of that. And apparently complaining about July 4th is a tradition on this blog now, so time to celebrate that I guess
Anyway it's a really rough feeling when your own favorite headcanons (by which I mean 'most likely to be able to spark inspiration', as well as just plain 'favorite') just make your brain go "...?"
Today I had a realization about all the fics I've never finished, never started, or never let myself start or continue, and I've thought about it before, kind of (I mean, I literally think about my fic series every day even if tumblr radio silence might suggest otherwise), but it never hit me like it did just then: All the sprawling and flowing storylines, the details, the realizations (of characters' potential, of plotlines, of foreshadowing), all the things that could have connected and grown and blossomed, and the actual, epic beauty of all those many, many stories I could have told (high praise from me, my own harshest critic, but I'd say it's genuinely honest)... it's just not a thing. Hasn't been. Because I was too insecure, or scared, or something. And realizing that honestly made me want to cry.
I've been trying, and I'll keep trying. It's supposed to be fun. I don't know when it stopped being fun, but I still love this story I've been telling so much that there's no way I can just let it be a lost cause, no way at all. It's still one of the brightest parts of my life.
I think, after a while, the amount of toxic attitudes I saw in fandom in general got to be too much for me (even if I luckily only ever saw it from the sidelines), so I had to step back. Except now, even though I've spent so long trying to get that Ghost Of Negative Environments Past out of my mind, I'm still a bundle of anxiety who just wants to hide everything, to the point I’m scared to write even only for myself. And I'm really, really sad about that right now.
Jade out here still providing us that tasty ZarGar GOOD SHIT. Thank you for the meal.
This has been sitting in my inbox for more than four months and I'm so sorry, but thank you so much! Honestly, I really loved seeing this, it lifted my mood so much.
I intend to keep the Zargar coming! I mean, you know, as long as I can actually write, but I've been trying really hard to get through this block I've been stuck in. Seriously though, I have exactly zero intention of stopping, even if things go through a slow period now and then, and I'm glad you're excited to read!
Chapters: 8/13
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Haggar/Zarkon (Voltron)
Characters: Zarkon (Voltron), Haggar (Voltron)
Additional Tags: Memory Loss, Permanent Personality Change, Cognitive Dissonance, Angst with a Happy Ending
Series: Part 4 of star-hewn colossi
Summary:
He wakes and does not recognize himself. She is awake and recognizes him even less.
After returning from death, Zarkon is changed. His planet is destroyed, his friendships fractured, and though his wife is alive, she remembers nothing from before, not even her name. As he leads the Galra Empire in clawing its way from broken to brutal, Zarkon faces the task of not only sorting out the pieces of his own mind, but understanding the paradox of Honerva: Who she was, who she is, and who she will be.
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Haggar/Zarkon (Voltron), Haggar & Zarkon (Voltron)
Characters: Haggar (Voltron), Zarkon (Voltron)
Additional Tags: Chess, Chess Metaphors
Series: Part 12 of star-hewn colossi
Summary:
Peddled by mysterious sphinxes, chess is a game with a thousand variations across many thousand worlds. Over millennia, Haggar played hundreds of these with her emperor, but when an old variant stirs up that which is better left forgotten, she must once again contemplate the terrible, undying legacy of the forgotten world that is Altea.
Using technology known as lidar, a team of archaeologists found evidence beneath the jungle canopy in Guatemala of how the Mesoamerican civilization altered its landscape.
Images made using lidar technology reveal previously unknown ancient Maya settlements with houses, temples, forts, ditches, moats and roads.Credit Luke Auld-Thomas and Marcello A. Canuto/PACUNAM
Hidden pyramids and massive fortresses in the jungle. Farms and canals scattered across swamplands. Highways traversing thickets of rain forest. These are among more than 61,000 ancient Mayan structures swallowed by overgrowth in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala that archaeologists have finally uncovered using a laser mapping technology called lidar.
The discoveries, published Thursday in Science, provide a snapshot of how the ancient Maya altered the landscape around them for more than 2,500 years from about 1000 B.C. to 1500 A.D., and may change what archaeologists thought they knew about aspects of the ancient society’s population size, agricultural practices and conflicts between warring dynasties.
The ancient Maya flourished in what is today southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and western Honduras. They left behind a rich written history painted and inscribed on wood, stone and ceramics. Detailed in their intricate hieroglyphics were tales of kings, queens and war.
“You’re looking at a series of kingdoms all involved in this ‘Game of Thrones’ political story where they are marrying, fighting, killing each other and backstabbing,” said Thomas Garrison, an archaeologist at Ithaca College and an author of the paper. “Lidar reveals the stage in which these dramas recorded in texts played out.”
Lidar is similar to sonar or radar, but it uses bursts of laser light to map an area.
In 2016, Juan Fernández-Díaz, a senior researcher at the National Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston, and his team flew over more than 800 square miles of forest in northern Guatemala in an airplane equipped with lidar. The plane was about 2,000 feet above the jungle canopy, and for every second they flew the lidar sent about half a million laser pulses.
“It’s basically like mowing the lawn. It’s going back and forth, flying very parallel lines along the jungle,” said Dr. Fernández-Díaz.
The 3-D map they made revealed new settlements with houses and temples, defensive fortifications like ditches and moats, as well as agricultural terraces and roads.
“My jaw dropped many times as I opened these images,” said Francisco Estrada-Belli, an archaeologist from Tulane University in New Orleans.
For him, the biggest surprise was uncovering vast areas of wetlands filled with channels and canals. “All of these hundreds of square kilometers of what we thought were unusable swamp were actually some of the most productive farmland.”
He said when the Maya were there, their farms probably resembled what we see in present-day Southeast Asia.
The team, whose work was funded by PACUNAM, a foundation that works to preserve Maya cultural heritage, had announced their discoveries in February through National Geographic that they had found the ruins, and have now completed their analysis.
“This is the largest survey of its kind in Mesoamerica to date,” said Marcello Canuto, an archaeologist also from Tulane University.
From the data, the team estimates there may have been about 7 to 11 million people living in the central Maya Lowlands during what was known as the Late Classic Period, which lasted from about 650 A.D. to about 800 A.D.
A lidar image of the Maya settlement Naachtun, where yellow dots and red patches represent buildings and causeways are marked in gray.Credit Luke Auld-Thomas and Marcello A. Canuto/PACUNAM
“When you’re talking about three to four times more people than you previously thought, you have to reconsider how they fed themselves, how they got along and how they handled being overcrowded,” Dr. Garrison said.
After constructing their map, members of the team revisited parts of the jungle that they had previously studied in order to verify that the structures they identified with lidar actually existed. Dr. Canuto discovered a road that he said he couldn’t believe he had missed previously.
“I went there immediately and was like ‘Oh my God, there it is!’ ’’ he said, “And then I walked on it.”
For Dr. Garrison, using the lidar map revealed that only about a hundred feet from where he had once toiled in the jungle doing research there was a fortress concealed by the foliage.
“The power of lidar first hit me in the imagery,” he said. “But taking it into the normal world of fieldwork was mind-blowing.”
