Raiyana @joyfullynervouscreator - Tumblr Blog

The new chapter of 'In Whiskey, Wisdom' is now up - I promise I am prepared to be yelled at by @lathalea xD

We clocked in at 6.9k and I think there’s only one chapter left in this tale now... maybe... next up: Dori and Erebor.

In Whiskey, Wisdom - Bofur/Eyja(OFC Dwarf), Blue Mountains | Ered Luin, Dwarf Culture & Customs, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gimli is a little shit and a matchmaker, Journeying across Middle Earth, post-hobbit canon, instances of Canon-Typical Violence

The first person Bofur recognised as they walked into the Drunken Trout wasn’t actually someone he saw.

Instead, Eyja, her hand warm in his, gasped out a familiar name, towing him along as she made for a corner table with an unobstructed view of the door.

“Nori!” Eyja exclaimed, her cry hoarse with emotion. Bofur squeezed her hand once though he let go when he caught Nori glancing at their linked hands before he wrapped his arms around Eyja’s shoulders. Bofur tried to convince himself that his ears weren’t burning.

He was not very successful.

“Nori,” he greeted, nodding at his fellow Companion – friend, too, and at one time occasional lover. It seemed so long ago now.

Nori grinned at him, a crooked thing full of mischief, before he pressed his forehead to Eyja’s greeting her with a gentle kin-blessing.

The sight made Bofur’s heart hurt, wondering how long it had been since anyone had done that last – perhaps when Dori left Ered Luin? He vaguely recalled that the Ri-siblings had been waved off by a blonde dwarf, despite being too focused on his own family to do more than note the addition of the three ri’s to their party. The beautiful sorrowed smile on Eyja’s smile was one he recognised; soft sorrow and yearning – Bofur had seen it more than once on the journey when her thoughts turned to Dori, though he had not asked after her relationship with Nori at all, something that felt like an oversight now. Bofur silently readjusted his vision of how well she knew Dori’s family. The people for whom Nori would show genuine fondness could be counted on his fingers; and even the addition of the Company to the list of people he cared for had not moved much on the list of those to whom he would show it. Nori grinned, knocking his forehead gently against hers in parting. Despite Eyja’s belief that the fault for their rift lay on both sides, Bofur was convinced rather more of it rested on Geisli’s shoulders, and more still on Eyja’s uncle’s; he could not, even in his own mind, picture the two cousins sharing a moment like this, so common to their people, and yet Eyja looked like she had done so with Nori a hundred times before.

“I missed you, sunshine,” Nori muttered – the words almost lost in the loud bustle of the busy taproom – into the small space between them. Bofur tried not to envy the casual intimacy of the gesture – would she accept him like that some day? Had Nori ever wanted what he now craved, having Eyja’s hand in his as the hammer fell on their forging? “But don’t –”

“Tell Dori I saw you?” Eyja continued, interrupting him with a small chuckle. She put her hands on his shoulders, holding him away from her far enough she could see his face, his crooked grin mirrored by her own. “Back to your old tricks, eh, Nori?”

Find new chapter here on Ao3

malinaa

what if we all explode

derring-do

This very production of Orpheus & Eurydice is now available to stream, free, for the month of June.

beardedmrbean

mcnostril

Family is whoever says nice things about your new hat.

Yes, behold the shocking implication that renowned magic mercenary Jonna never graduated from wizard school for trifling academic arson reasons.

mcnostril

The real treasure was the fancy hat we found along the way.

As a rule of thumb, if you have to dig it up it's a crime, but if you can just yoink it then it's a-okay.

PS: Please note that some steps of the Troll Dance® were simplified for artistic purposes and I am not responsible for any of your characters being turned into sauce.

ororium-z

Happy Pride!

rootbeergoddess

Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions

thesaltofcarthage

I love that four different people on my feed scheduled this joyous person to reblog by 8am on June 1. I look forward to seeing this a dozen more times today.

kawuli

random PSA, I know a lot of people use duckduckgo as a Google alternative search engine, but it always kind of annoyed me when I was using it because it felt like No Name Brand Google

I have switched to using Startpage.com and vastly prefer it. for one thing, instead of displaying an "AI summary" at the top of the search results (unless you turn it off, yes I know), it displays the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, with link, whenever it finds one that's relevant.

also a waaayyyyy better sense of design than duckduckgo

also private, European based, least annoying search I've used lately (RIP old "don't be evil" Google)

yomikoreadsbooks

Keeping a list of Google alternatives just in case…

saxifraga-x-urbium

i have one of those, scraped from multiple different rec posts:

Search Engines

Infinity Search is an alternative search engine with a special focus on privacy

DuckDuckGo is a popular search engine for those who value their privacy and are put off by the thought of their every query being tracked and logged. Uses bangs, ![site] for in-page search (sells your data to microsoft and draws from fucking bing)

WolframAlpha is a privately owned search engine that allows you to “compute expert-level answers using Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.” A data search engine.

Boardreader is a search engine for forums and message boards. It allows you to search forums and then filter down results by date and language.

Based in France, Qwant is a privacy-based search engine that won’t record your searches or use your personal details for advertising. Uses “&” as a bang search.

Another privacy-based search engine is Search Encrypt, which uses local encryption to ensure that users’ identifiable information cannot be tracked. Metasearch across multiple engines.

Offering unbiased results from several sources, SearX is a metasearch engine that aims to present a free, decentralized view of the internet. Can be self-hosted.

Gibiru’s tagline is “Unfiltered private search” and that’s exactly what it offers. Requires AnonymoX Firefox add-on for privacy.

Disconnect allows you to conduct anonymous searches through a search engine of your choice.

Swisscows provides fully encrypted searches to protect your privacy and security. Built-in violence/porn filter cannot be overridden.

MetaGer offers “Privacy Protected Search & Find” through its anonymised search. A plugin will allow it to be made a default.

Gigablast is a private search engine that indexes millions of websites and servers real-time information without tracking your data, keeping you hidden from marketers and spammers. Variety of filtration and refinement options for searching.

Oscobo is a search engine that protects your privacy while you search the web. By not using any third-party tools or scripts, your data is protected from hacking and misuse. Has a Chrome extension to allow use in toolbar.

https://search.marginalia.nu/ an independent DIY search engine that focuses on non-commercial content, and attempts to show you sites you perhaps weren't aware of in favor of the sort of sites you probably already knew existed. Use old-school searching rather than query-based for the best results.

https://www.mojeek.com/

https://wiby.me/ - It’s goal is to index as many personalized websites as possible, and NOT commercial sites.

https://4get.ca/ it works a lot like SearX, but honestly better. It doesn’t have its own index, but pulls from many others. I think it’s the best for research, since it allows you to search for answers from different indexes, is easy to configure, add free, and avoids censorship as much as it can.

https://www.searchenginemap.com/ for more on how search engines relate to each other.

https://yep.com/ is a crawler

https://www.etools.ch/ retrieves from Google, Mojeek, Bing, and Yandex, like Searx

https://www.dogpile.com/

https://searxng.org/ (next gen Searx)

https://luxxle.com/ - possibly conservative?

https://presearch.com/ - good for academic?

https://kagi.com/smallweb - free/randomised Kagi.

Other Searchers

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free.https://cosine.club/ is an electronic music similarity search engine

Claymation

lmfao

sometiktoksarevalid

librarycards

gentle

kedreeva

Kinda grim question... is failure to thrive in animals the same thing as failure to thrive in human children or is different? Or do we just... did we just decide culling babies is a bad thing?

Breeding livestock animals and selectively culling to improve stock or end suffering is completely different than practicing eugenics on humans, yes.

I don't know enough about human baby medical conditions to say if failure to thrive is caused by the same things as in quail, but it seems likely that there's at least some overlap.

With humans, we have advanced medical care to work to fix some problems (like organ transplants for organ failures) and the ability to reduce or eliminate suffering (like pain medication), as well as (eventually) the ability to explain the situation to the person experiencing it. None of these things are available to a 1 week old quail. Hard culling it IS the kindest treatment available, on top of being the most practical consideration for the improvement of the flock.

People having human babies are not doing so in an attempt to improve the stock of the human race, they're doing it to make a family. This is not the goal of raising livestock. Most livestock is being raised for food (or use, like riding horses or shearing sheep etc), and most humans don't participate in cannibalism, nor do most people feed their dead to animals. The cultures that do participate in these things still aren't raising humans specifically for this purpose.

Lastly, humans DO sometimes make the call to end a life before nature would, though we don't think of this as culling. Abortions do happen where something has gone very wrong with the fetus to where it won't survive, and a choice must be made, particularly in instances where the mother's life is in danger. Even a healthy fetus could endanger a mother's life and a worse choice must be made. Abortions happen for many other reasons, too, by the choice of the mother (or in situations where she may be unable to make the call, the other parent, a relative, or a doctor). We also have (in some places) protocols for allowing patients to end their own lives in hospital settings if they choose- DNRs are a thing, but we also have euthanasia cocktails that terminal patients can choose in order to take control of their own suffering and end. But these are almost always welfare considerations made for (and by) the people they concern (the mother, the patient) rather than a measure of selective breeding.

I was going to put this into the tags but it belongs in the post. Please do not attack Anon over this ask. This is actually a really common struggle people have when it comes to culling livestock, because they understand "we don't kill human babies for this" and they often believe pet animals aren't culled (many of them ARE, though you might not see that side of things, but the runts are often culled and pet animals experiencing severe medical problems are often euthanized for a variety of reasons), so they have a hard time compartmentalizing livestock from the similar situations they're familiar with already. This person has asked from the other side ("it makes sense when you say it for animals, why don't we do that for ourselves") but the conflict of information is the same. It's a normal consideration to go through, for some, and I prefer that people feel comfortable enough to ask me, rather than struggle or come to a conclusion that will bring harm (either "we should do this for humans" or "we shouldn't do this for animals"). This is also a COMMON tactic among ARA groups ("we wouldn't do this to humans, what gives us the right to do this to animals" welfare concerns the animal can't understand, next question), and one that's easy to fall prey to if you haven't learned better before encountering it. Asking is always better than ignorance.

a-voltage

Really well put. After following your posts about the quail, I'd been thinking over the same thing. I can see the logical steps that would lead people to doing horrific things. I knew it felt wrong, but I couldn't put a counter-argument into words.

The missing piece is just like that Terry Pratchett quote, " It starts with treating people like things". People are not livestock. I mean, obviously. But then that leads to the question of "why do we do this to animals then?"

As a city-slicker who hasn't had a huge amount to do with livestock, I really appreciate you speaking on the thought process that goes on as a breeder and carer.

As you say, I think that because humans are so social and wired to pack-bond with everything, there's definitely a tendency to assume that all other animals are just like us. It's easy to anthropomorphize instead of taking into account the animal's actual needs when you don't have as much first-hand experience.

kedreeva

Livestock are not things, either, but the management of them does absolutely fall into the "they're not humans, either" category. Anthropomorphizing is a HUGE PROBLEM when dealing with animals in general, but with livestock especially purely due to the numbers produced.

The thing I didn't mention, and something that people rarely consider from this perspective, is that nature culls. In the wild, FTT animals will suffer and die slowly. They might be lucky enough to be caught by a predator and ended violently but swiftly. Animals not suited for their environment will suffer and die off at some point. Sick animals will suffer until their body gives out and they die. Injured animals will suffer, often rotting on their feet, before succumbing to the injury. If they make it, they may recover fully or they may be lame in a way that causes them to suffer hunger or pain for the rest of their lives with no way to abate it. It will probably mean their (slow, painful) death at some point. Predators may assist with swifter but violent ends. Even healthy animals may die to accidents, predators, etc. Survival of the fittest and all that. This is natural, sure, but also horrific. The two are not mutually exclusive. And it's necessary, for this balance to exist, or animals would overwhelm their environments and none of them would get to live.

In an artificial environment (ie, domestically-kept animals), humans are acting as nature, and I feel it cannot be stated enough that we are far far far FAR kinder about it all than nature will ever be. Well-kept domestic animals experience a life of luxury that their wild ancestors could never hope to have dreamed of. They get rich foods, endless clean water, a safe place to live and sleep, health care as needed, and a swift, gentle end. Their progeny will produce progeny which will produce progeny which will produce progeny, into time everlasting as far as they're concerned. For creatures whose goal in life is to pass on their genes, that's a pretty damn successful life

But the other side of that is that the domestic animals (as a whole) ARE wildly more successful at reproducing, and those offspring are wildly more successful at surviving, which means there are far more of them than would exist in nature. Humans must act as nature in this case; and this means that responsible keeping involves pruning the animals not suited for the environment they are in (in order to make animals that do not suffer in this environment), gently putting to rest the animals that are suffering (particularly in ways that cannot be healed), and, yes, pruning the excess to feed ourselves, in return.

Humans keeping domestic animals is mutualism. They gain a comfy, stress-free life, success in passing on their genes, and a kind end, and we get food (or company, or in some cases, work). The question "why do we do this to animals" seems a lot sillier a question when you actually consider the animals as the animals they are and what "nature" actually means, and look at what good, responsible breeders are doing, and realize that they usually aren't doing anything "to" animals, but rather "with" them.

bomberqueen17

And as kind of a side note, a thing I think that doesn't get said enough about eugenics in humans is that it doesn't work. It seems logical: you can breed a better cow, you should be able to breed a better human.

But the logic breaks down because what makes a human better is impossible to define. A better livestock animal is bred for a small handful of characteristics: more efficient conversion of feed to meat, larger frame, docile temperament, etc. (And most of those are compromises at best.) A better human??? You can breed for height or coloring or muscle mass/body composition. You can even ostensibly breed for temperament but human temperaments are much harder to anticipate. You can't breed for intelligence, for compassion, for moral certitude, for ability to endure stress. None of the things that make humans human are purely heritable traits.

And yet so many people still have this idle belief in the backs of their minds that eugenics is real but it's just immoral for some reason. No it just literally doesn't work.