Stuff, With Things In It

[gemsofgreece]

Tourlitis Lighthouse, Andros, Aegean Sea, Greece

[keshwyn]

I’m trying to figure out how long it took Atrus to give up and just write a Linking Book from the top of the rock, so he’d stop having to row a boat off the island every time he needed a snack.  He clearly didn’t do it early enough in the process to avoid having to build the stairs down to the water. Or maybe this was built by the people already living in the Age.

[trashmancer]

My take on the PreservationAux crew from The Murderbot Diaries.

From left to right, top row: Ratthi, Pin-Lee, Gurathin; middle row: Arada, Mensah, Overse; bottom row: Bharadwaj, Volescu, and SecUnit (image not found!)

I wasn't allowed to rest until I did this, so here we are.

[keshwyn]

I absolutely adore this image of Mensah. Headcanon accepted.

[andmaybegayer]

I think so much about the food people ate pre-Columbian exchange. Huge parts of cuisine extremely important on both sides of the pond just didn't exist.

You've probably heard a little about what was brought over from the New World, corn, potatoes, cocoa, cassava, peanuts, chili peppers, avocadoes, cranberries, pumpkins, and the like. Imagine cooking without chili! Without potatoes! Modern Indian cuisine contains enormous amounts of potatoes and we just didn't have those for the vast majority of history. The best of the nightshades all on one contiguous hunk of land. Hell, tomatoes! Almost forgot about those.

But we don't often look at what the Old World had. Wheat! Barley! Rice! A profusion of incredible grains, really, the finest poaceae has to offer. Carrots! Tons of rosaceous plants like apples and cherries and pears and peaches and apricots! Grapes! Soy and Bamboo! Okra and watermelon! All these things were simply never found in the Americas. The grains one is the wildest for me, the variety of grains available across Eurasia and Africa was truly astounding.

You know what binds together the food of all cultures across the world? Onions. Onions are fucking everywhere. There's probably onions growing near you right now. Allium Gang Unite.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[keshwyn]

Aliums FTW.

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

I saw this on quora and thought it was cool and wanted to share it on here.  Its a long read but crazy.  Its from Erik Painter

They did try. And they did capture Navajo men. However, they were unsuccessful in using them to decipher the code. The reason was simple. The Navajo Code was a code that used Navajo. It was not spoken Navajo. To a Navajo speaker, who had not learned the code, a Navajo Code talker sending a message sounds like a string of unconnected Navajo words with no grammar. It was incomprehensible. So, when the Japanese captured a Navajo man named Joe Kieyoomia in the Philippines, he could not really help them even though they tortured him. It was nonsense to him.

The Navajo Code had to be learned and memorized. It was designed to transmit a word by word or letter by letter exact English message. They did not just chat in Navajo. That could have been understood by a Navajo speaker, but more importantly translation is never, ever exact. It would not transmit precise messages. There were about 400 words in the Code.

The first 31 Navajo Marines created the Code with the help of one non-Navajo speaker officer who knew cryptography. The first part of the Code was made to transmit English letters. For each English letter there were three (or sometimes just two) English words that started with that letter and then they were translated into Navajo words. In this way English words could be spelled out with a substitution code. The alternate words were randomly switched around. So, for English B there were the Navajo words for Badger, Bear and Barrel. In Navajo that is: nahashchʼidí, shash, and tóshjeeh. Or the letter A was Red Ant, Axe, or Apple. In Navajo that is: wóláchííʼ, tsénił , or bilasáana. The English letter D was: bįįh=deer, and łééchąąʼí =dog, and chʼįįdii= bad spiritual substance (devil).

For the letter substitution part of the Code the word “bad” could be spelled out a number of ways. To a regular Navajo speaker it would sound like: “Bear, Apple, Dog”. Or other times it could be “ Barrel, Red Ant, Bad Spirit (devil)”. Other times it could be “Badger, Axe, Deer”. As you can see, for just this short English word, “bad” there are many possibilities and to the combination of words used. To a Navajo speaker, all versions are nonsense. It gets worse for a Navajo speaker because normal Navajo conjugates in complex ways (ways an English or Japanese speaker would never dream of). These lists of words have no indicators of how they are connected. It is utterly non-grammatical.

Then to speed it up, and make it even harder to break, they substituted Navajo words for common military words that were often used in short military messages. None were just translations. A few you could figure out. For example, a Lieutenant was “one silver bar” in Navajo. A Major was “Gold Oak Leaf” n Navajo. Other things were less obvious like a Battleship was the word for Whale in Navajo. A Mine Sweeper was the Navajo word for Beaver.

A note here as it seems hard for some people to get this. Navajo is a modern and living language. There are, and were, perfectly useful Navajo words for submarines and battleships and tanks. They did not “make up words because they had no words for modern things”. This is an incorrect story that gets around in the media. There had been Navajo in the military before WWII. The Navajo language is different and perhaps more flexible than English. It is easy to generate new words. They borrow very few words and have words for any modern thing you can imagine. The words for telephone, or train, or nuclear power are all made from Navajo stem roots.

Because the Navajo Marines had memorized the Code there was no code book to capture. There was no machine to capture either. They could transmit it over open radio waves. They could decode it in a few minutes as opposed to the 30 minutes to two hours that other code systems at the time took. And, no Navajo speaker who had not learned the Code could make any sense out of it.

The Japanese had no published texts on Navajo. There was no internationally available description of the language. The Germans had not studied it at the time. The Japanese did suspect it was Navajo. Linguists thought it was in the Athabaskan language family. That would be pretty clear to a linguist. And Navajo had the biggest group of speakers of any Athabaskan language. That is why they tortured Joe Kieyoomia. But, he could not make sense of it. It was just a list of words with no grammar and no meaning.

For Japanese, even writing the language down from the radio broadcasts would be very hard. It has lots of sounds that are not in Japanese or in English. It is hard to tell where some words end or start because the glottal stop is a common consonant. Frequency analysis would have been hard because they did not use a single word for each letter. And some words stood for words instead of for a letter. The task of breaking it was very hard.

Here is an example of a coded message:

béésh łigai naaki joogii gini dibé tsénił áchį́į́h bee ąą ńdítį́hí joogi béésh łóó’ dóó łóóʼtsoh

When translated directly from Navajo into English it is:

“SILVER TWO BLUE JAY CHICKEN HAWK SHEEP AXE NOSE KEY BLUE JAY IRON FISH AND WHALE. “

You can see why a Navajo who did not know the Code would not be able to do much with that. The message above means: “CAPTAIN, THE DIVE BOMBER SANK THE SUBMARINE AND BATTLESHIP.”

“Two silver bars” =captain. Blue jay= the. Chicken hawk= dive bomber. Iron fish = sub. Whale= battleship. “Sheep, Axe Nose Key”=sank. The only normal use of a Navajo word is the word for “and” which is “dóó ”. For the same message the word “sank” would be spelled out another way on a different day. For example, it could be: “snake, apple, needle, kettle”.

Here, below on the video, is a verbal example of how the code sounded. The code sent below sounded to a Navajo speaker who did not know the Code like this: “sheep eyes nose deer destroy tea mouse turkey onion sick horse 362 bear”. To a trained Code Talker, he would write down: “Send demolition team to hill 362 B”. The Navajo Marine Coder Talker then would give it to someone to take the message to the proper person. It only takes a minute or so to code and decode.

[keshwyn]

This is so cool.

[kleefkruid]

Giving this website full of autistics obsessed with ranking and categorising stuff a poll option is like giving rats one of those buttons that makes cocaine

[kleefkruid]

Turns out the button actually makes vanilla extract

[musashigouda-deactivated2019032]

hey ao3 can you like give the extra $38k you made from this month’s funds drive to charity

[blooming-wilting]

You know it legally is a charity, right?

If x charity aims for £10, but gets £15, would you expect then to give back the extra five or give it then to another charity? No. Any extra costs go into the “rainy day” fund; sometimes servers crash or break, sometimes false reports are made that require the legal team, sometimes you need to hire coders or what not to implement new features or fix bugs or deal with broken code … 

The money they aimed for is the bare minimum, which goes towards things like basic server costs and domain names and legal advice and so forth, but they don’t just “pocket” the rest (as people claim). It’s not a business. It has no advertisements. It needs some “rainy day” cash to function. 

You can’t ask a charity to give money to another charity. 

It needs what it gets to function and improve. 

[fangasmagorical]

kiena-tesedale replied to this post

They don’t “pocket” excess money. They have a publicly accessible budget - waaaay more info than most charities, in fact. In it, you can clearly see where each dollar goes. (Also, you are vastly underestimating either how much traffic AO3 gets or how much servers/hosting costs.)                    

In my experience, people who don’t work in web design and hosting just have no concept of how heavy a load something like AO3 would have. Not only is the traffic absolutely buck wild, but the quantity of data that archive needs to store is fuckoff crazy. I’m talking “more than the library of congress” crazy. The only reason it doesn’t require Netflix levels of data serving is that it’s text based rather than video.

AO3 is in the top 300 websites in the world, and the top 100 in the US. It is the number 2 literature website.

Number 2 in the entire world. JSTOR is 20.

It sees about 6 million people a day. About 250k an hour. Each of those people is loading multiple pages, many are running searches that execute on literally hundreds of potential variables per search. The demands involved are astronomical.

JSTOR, btw, makes 85 million dollars a year.

It’s 18 ranks below AO3′s traffic, and takes in 650 times the amount of money.

But let’s say you think that’s an unfair comparison. Would you say that the Project Gutenberg Literature Archival Group- another text based archive that handles literature operating outside traditional copyright requirements- is more similar?

Because it sees all of 4% of the traffic that AO3 handles.

Care to guess its budget?

Double that of AO3.

AO3 is doing shit on the kind of shoestring budget that I fully, 100% cannot comprehend. And that’s just the archival service.

The 130k also pays for the OTW’s legal team, which they use to defend the right of fandom to fucking exist.

It’s absolutely batshit fucked up that people are fighting to have the OTW defunded and AO3 shut down. They are the only organized group that actually stands directly between fandom- all the art and the fics and the vids and the music and the chats and the memes and everything we love about interactive, transformative work- and an incalculable amount of lawsuits.

[redvanillabee]

Can I also add that apart from running a legal team and the best online library around, they also run a free, peer-reviewed academic journal dedicated to fan studies called Transformative Works and Cultures.. They incorporate studies of fandoms from all around the world, and are able to follow very closely with fandom trends. Studies found in TWC are leagues better than those cringey ‘I heard about this fan-dom thing from my teenage niece’ essays. 

[superhumandisasters]

Just reblogging this to remind everyone that AO3 is fucking incredible and it has singularly transformed fandom.

[antisrterrible]

Antis trying to literally destroy any form of freedom & happiness in the world.

[salchat]

I’m so thankful for AO3. It makes such a difference to my quality of life, and the lives of millions of others. And, yes, it needs monetary contributions to continue doing its thing. But mostly… it runs on love.

[avidbeader]

tagged by @josilverdragon

favorite color: royal blue, purple, red and black together

currently reading: The Love Hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood

last song: “Fire and Rain” by Matt Kearney

last movie: I genuinely don’t remember

sweet/savory/spicy: Sweet

currently working on: a major work deadline so I can get back to writing fic

Tagging: @attheendofsummer @goldentruth813 @stlgeekgirl @rangergirl3 and anyone else who would like to play

[rangergirl3]

tagged by @avidbeader

favorite color: dark sapphire blue, pearlescent white, silver, and dark brown wood

currently reading: Um…so many books on my shelve right now…I think…I think right now it’s something by Virginia Woolf

last song: Let it Burn by Citizen Soldier

last movie: Encanto

sweet/savory/spicy: Sweet

currently working on: Getting various paperwork projects sorted, typed out, and filed so that I can read/write more!

Tagging: @callaeidae3 @arwenridem @justheretobreakthings @sunshine-hime @brushes-of-sage and anyone else who might want to play! :-)

[arwenride]

Tagged by @rangergirl3

Favorite color: red and black

Currently reading: god is not great by Christopher Hitchens

Last song: Better Angels by Black Veil Brides

Last movie: Not sure, I think it was a Star Wars?

Sweet/savory/spicy: savory or sweet

Currently working on: Halloween horror fic that I am rapidly running out of time to finish

Tagging @imperfection-you-will-find and anyone else who wants to join in!

[findmeinthefallair]

Tagged by @arwenride, thanks!

Favorite color: Deep red

Currently reading: On Being A Therapist by Jeffrey A. Kottler

Last song: Your Bayard from the Voltron OST

Last movie: Pan’s Labyrinth

Sweet/savory/spicy: Sweet

Currently working on: Owl House screencap edits where Flapjack is looking very very very sad..

Tagging @theaceofarrows, @randomlifeunit, @ladyspade101, @smellofsnoww, @haleykim84 and anyone else who’s interested~~

[haleykim84]

Tagged by @imperfection-you-will-find, thank you! <3

Favorite color: purple

Currently reading: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (it’s so good! I highly recommend it!)

Last song: Dusk till Dawn - Zayn & Sia

Last movie: The Woman King (soooooo goooood!)

Sweet/savory/spicy: sweet

Currently working on: myself 

Tagging: @noisypaintersong @wilting-willows-wallow @familyofpaladins @airstyledraconos and anyone else who wants to play!

[familyofpaladins]

Thanks for the tag @haleykim84 !!! (Whoops almost forgot about this post)

Favorite color: green!! (Like lime or grass green)

Currently reading: ehhh, nothing really at the moment (I have been reading some Riseof the TMNT fanfics tho -and before that A-team fanfiction-)

Last song: Blinding lights by the weekend

Last movie: Rise of the Teenage mutant ninja turtles (hence the fanfiction haha)

Sweet/savory/spicy: … sweet I guess?

Currently working on: some various rottmnt ideas (fornfanfic and art) floating in my head but that’s about it

Also still technically working on the post game of pokemon black 2 (but it’s been like 3 weeks since I’ve played it)

I’ll tag: @berryblu-arts @bloo-the-dragon @rangergirl3 @rohanrider3 @unhattar-ka-ankada @eastofthemoon @hufflepirate @groundzero-and-deku and anyone else who’d like to join! Yes that does include you! Yes you! :)

[rohanrider3]

Thanks for the tag @familyofpaladins!

Favorite color: Dark green, dark red, really any dark gem colors

Currently reading: The Last Unicorn 

Last song: House of the Rising Sun cover by Jeremy Renner

Last movie: Castlevania Season 4 Episode 9 The Endings

Sweet/savory/spicy: Hmmm….sweet I suppose

Currently working on: Trying to finish many different organizing projects so I can start creating more, well, creative works. (cries in housecleaning)

I’ll tag: @eringeosphere @disappearinginq @maychorian @hajnarus and anyone else who wants to join! 

[disappearinginq]

Tag games are always more fun when I actually remember to…like…do them. Whoops. Tagged like a month ago by @rohanrider3:

Favorite color: I feel like I SHOULD have one, but I don’t. It wildly depends on what it’s for - am I wearing it? Am I painting with it? Am I decorating with it? They probably tend to lead towards greens and browns, though - something that looks like a dark forest.

Currently reading: Ooooh, some ungodly amount of half finished…or 90% finished…books: Unravel the Dusk by Elizabeth Lim; Conjuring of Light by VE Schwab (I think I spelled that correctly); Crowfield Curse, by Pat Walsh; and Walk the Wire by David Baldacci. Oh, and I think Lies of Locke Lamora on my Kindle.

Last song: Wasteland by Woodkid because I was looking it up for some reason…

Last movie: Legend of Zorro

Sweet/savory/spicy: Savory

Currently working on: Trying to pay attention to any one of the multiple things I am supposed to be working on, not including to the eleventy billion random ass fic ideas I have (including an extended ending of Haunting of Hill House, a ‘are you fucking kidding me’ fix it fic for Yellowstone because I will die mad about how the writers and other characters treat Jamie, at least 5 Hudson and Rex whump fics, and original works requiring heavy editing). And there’s also crochet. And photography. And Thanksgiving menu planning. And Christmas shopping. And….you get the idea.

tagging: @amandagaelic, @waitingforthestarstofall, @itsjustdg, @vix-has-arrived, @dragonnan, and anyone else who wants to play that I can’t remember how to spell your URL name and therefore can’t properly tag….

[dragonnan]

Tagged by @disappearinginq

Favorite color: It shifts around. I tend to say red-gold but I deeply love all colors.

Currently reading: Bits of fanfic at the moment - my usual reading material of choice. I don’t have the mental space for a lot right now - stress and whatnot tends to make it harder to focus so I find myself rereading familiar stories.

Last song: “Gales of Song” from the “Belle” motion picture soundtrack - English dub (I massively recc this movie - it’s astounding!)

Last movie: “The Secret Life of Pets 2″

Sweet/savory/spicy: lol - depends on the time of day! Meals - savory.  Nighttime - varies between sweet and savory.  Spicy is something I crave but my body physically rejects if it goes hotter than a dusting of red pepper flakes. 

Currently working on: Several fanfics - the next chapter of “Sed Diabolus”has been stuck and I’ve tried working on other things while trying to muscle my way through it.  Also have a few client pieces active including a fantasy book I’m illustrating.  And I always have various art things in stages of disrepair on my work table.

Tagging: @kitcat992 @sgam76 @ceruleanmindpalace @theleftpill @ariaadagio @aelaer @hanuko @mrs-n-uzumaki

[aelaer]

Tagged by @dragonnan - I forgot I had this in my drafts and never finished it until now.

Favorite color: Midnight blue

Currently reading: Nothing beyond the occasional tumblr post and traveling help sites for my next trip. Put fanfic reading on the backburner for now. Real book reading is on and off haha.

Last Song: Beneath the Mask by Lyn on the Persona 5 soundtrack. My favorite streamer RTGame has been playing it recently and I just fell in love with the song.

Last Movie: I legit think it was Multiverse of Madness in May; I haven’t watched any films in ages since I like to watch movies with others and I’m living on my own now. YouTube and streamers are on my TV instead.

Sweet/savory/spicy: Never spicy, other two depends on my mood and type of food.

Currently working on: Improving my health; been investigating it with doctors since October and we’re just trying to go through various things to figure out what’s going on. I’ve also been doing a lot of writing as I’ve had a lot of creative spurts throughout the last month in particular.

Tagging: @whitefoxgone @mckiwi @keshwyn anyone else who would like to play, I’m not very good on the tagging side and that’s why this went into drafts in the first place lmao.

[keshwyn]

Tagged by @aelaer Favorite color: Cobalt blue Currently reading: _The Daguhters of Izdihar_ by Hadeer Elsbai, _Fourteen Talks By Age Fourteen_ by Michelle Icard, _Even Greater Mistakes_ by Charlie Jane Anders, and _The Dawn of Everything_ by David Wengrow and David Graeber. Last Song: I have not had time to play music today, as I’ve been in the basement dealing with frozen pipes, but I think it was _Elise_ by Gareth Emery Last Movie: I have no idea. I watch movies incredibly infrequently. It might very well have been _Avengers: Endgame_ at this point.  I wanted to make it to Multiverse of Madness and Wakanda Forever and Everything Everywhere All At Once while they were in the theaters, but I’m really, really bad at making it to the movies. Sweet/savory/spicy: Yes please. Currently working on: Chapter of 11 of Stardew Blog, chewing on some ideas for original fic, and also poking at some stuff I want to make on my Glowforge. Tagging: @lasrina because I think she’s the only person on tumblr aside from @aeleer who actually has a vague connection with me.

[jv]

can you make it so we can turn off people following us? it's getting crazy blocking a 100 pornbots every day. i'd rather just be able to turn off the ability for people to follow me on my blog. and i can't private a main blog, only secondaries of which i have none. i'm a no name blog and it's getting to the point all the porn blogs followers are making me hate coming here. i'll be willing to pay for this feature too. please. i need a break. the new polls option is great, but can we address the actual problem?

I don’t see that happening, because… Well, you know, probably not something that would be widely used.

Now, that being said, if bots bother you so much, why not just silence the notifications about when someone follows you and ignore them?

The actual problem is being addressed. I’ve seen the number of banned accounts in the past few weeks and it’s very impressive. Very. But the thing about bots is that at first they are undistinguishable from real humans. Even if someone could screen manually every single new account created (which we aren’t even close to be able to do), you couldn’t be 100% sure until they exhibit some… Not-human behavior. And that behavior usually involves bothering the real humans or other sentient beings that inhabit our little secret valley

[jv]

yeah, this is a ongoing war between some asshole programmers and the tumblr team dealing with spam. Like, this is literally some asshole (more probably: a bunch of them working together) programming scripts that create accounts, using the regular registration channels, based on … things they program. Of course, being accounts created by a program, they are going to have a certain number of patterns that can be recognized.

When you folks mass report them, you are helping the few tumblr folks working on the matter to feed info to their bot-killing tools so those patterns became obvious and we can shoot-down those accounts before they do much harm. You know, five weeks ago, a new account with a name-name-123 name, plus a young woman picture, plus a description 💩using 💩 emojis 💩 separing 💩 words 💩 24 💩 wasn’t specially noticeable, but now it makes all the alarms going off at the same time.

The number of banned blogs from this last few weeks have a lot of 0s, believe me. A LOT. An impressive lot. The safety team is shooting them down like if they were playing a 80s arcade shot-em-up.

The problem is that always easier to create more bots than to identify them: The moment the shitheads that are causing this storm realize their last wave lasted literal seconds in the platform, they realize we have caught some patters and spend some time changing things, so after a few days there’s a new wave with different characteristics. And once it gets here, it will take a while for our defenders to find those patterns: And there is where you reporting them makes their job MUCH easier. Because we, humans, are much much much better identifying patterns than any tool we could program, ever, and we just need a quick look to a new account to have a pretty good chance to detect if it’s a bot or not.

You see, in an ideal world, we could have human-supervision of every new account created. But, according https://about.tumblr.com/#quick-facts, yesterday alone there were 61k new blogs created. And it’s 200 of us in staff, and only a fraction of us are engineers, and only a fraction of those can work on fighting spam (not me, I just paint pretty things on the screen, I’m not smart enough to work on the war-on-spam). So you see, the ‘human supervision’ part on our side is kind of impossible. But you all can help us with that.

When this tsunami of shit will end? Well, this is all about money. The bot-shitheads aren’t doing this because they want to troll y'all: by the kind of resources they are deploying, it’s clear they are professionals. They are trying to make (shady) money by swarming tumblr. If we keep shooting them down and giving them more and more update work their returns will be small or non existent, and at some point they will give up and move their sights to some other targets that could be more bountyful.

Come on, this is tumblr, no one could barely monetize it even by legal ways, it would be pretty rich if the spammers could actually make money out of pissing people up. They’ll eventually give up. We just need to keep making them work for nothing.

[greenjudy]

And it’s 200 of us in staff, and only a fraction of us are engineers

Jesus Christ sir, I sure do as hell salute you and your crew

[keshwyn]

Journey Towards Skill Sticker by keshwyn

How do you get better? You practice your work. You get help. You fall on your face. You get up, knock the mud off, and run a retrospective. You lead. You break stuff. And you LEARN THINGS. • Millions of unique designs by independent artists. Find your thing.

I made this to help Junior Engineers (Software Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, TPMs - yes TPMs are engineers, I will argue you into the ground on that one, and so on) feel better about what they did, and also own what they did. For women and non-binary folks, so many are socialized not to own their work. So I wrote these words as the spiraling journey towards skill and excellence, to make it really clear - yes, these are awesome skills, and yes, it is possible to own them.

[crazy-brazilian]

[feminist-pussycat]

this is a more succinct political commentary than most of the cartoons today

[keshwyn]

Am Writing

1800 words today. Stardew Blog will update next week; it’s been kind of a rollercoaster over here.

[dear-ao3]

[keshwyn]

YES THIS.

[m0unta1ndude]

dr who’s on first, doctor strange is on second and doctor house is on third. theres no way theyre getting through a single inning

[four-rabbits-in-a-trenchcoat]

so who’s on first?

[you-say-that-so-often]

That’s right 👍🏻

[four-rabbits-in-a-trenchcoat]

that’s strange

[you-say-that-so-often]

No, he’s on second.

[four-rabbits-in-a-trenchcoat]

Well how’s he on second if he’s on first?

[you-say-that-so-often]

No no no, House is on third. Second base is Strange.

[keshwyn]

That sounds wrong.

[keshwyn]

It’s not cat vacuuming...

...when the cat is covered in slime?

I would seriously rather be writing than doing the logistical juggling nightmare that I’m currently involved in.

[feefal]

A ghost stegosaurus visiting their newly discovered bones. They’re so happy you found them!

[keshwyn]

Eeee. :-D

[va-draws]

A moment of light during the siege

[silly-jellyghoty]

It really does feel like that

[keshwyn]

So much this.

[elisalemart]

Albino peafowl X tegu hybrid

[kbspangler]

OMG it's Henry.

Okay. I'm just blown away by this art and I'm new to tumblr so if this is not how reblogging works, please recognize that (1) this creature has lived in my head for five years; and (2) I can't. I just can't. This is Henry. All respect to elisalemart for this gorgeous art.

Anyway. This is also Henry (unpublished story from 2018 where the pitch was "mysterious portal opens on Cretaceous Period, corporation jumps in with both feet and all the funding").

“Richard Attenborough is doing the interview?”

“I wish.” The man operating the camera chuckled. “It’s David Attenborough. Richard died before they began capturing celebrity personalities, but he’d be perfect, right?”

The woman blinked into the camera.

“‘Spared no expense,’ remember?”

More blinking. The creature on her shoulder fluffed its feathers, as if it had gotten the joke and was annoyed on her behalf. Maybe it was a classic film buff. It certainly seemed more comfortable with the big black eye of his camera drone than the scientist was. When the drone had first appeared, the little dinosaur had climbed up onto her head and given the machine a thorough sniffing before dismissing it as both inedible and uninteresting.

The cameraman sighed. “Forget it. Just have a conversation with me. The personality capture program will dub in Attenborough. When you see the final product, it’ll look like he was right here with you.”

“Okay, okay.” She was flustered, probably talking too quickly to be of any real value. It didn’t matter. The documentary was just an excuse to film the big showstopping carnivores, so this footage was sure to be cut. It was a shame--her dinosaur was stunning, with pure white feathers and bright pink eyes, and long feathers along its spine that rose and fell with its mood. The cameraman thought it looked like a four-legged cockatoo with a lizard's tail, except for those teeth.

When it yawned, it was nothing but teeth.

Okay,” she said again, as she reached up and stroked the creature beneath its chin. It preened and sank its front limbs into her hair. “This is Henry. He’s an Incisivosaurus. We’re not sure he’s a male, by the way. He hasn’t let us do a medical inspection. But he stays close to Bink, and she’s definitely got the coloration we associate with females.”

“There’s another one?” The drone swung around in a silent circle. The cameraman, sitting seventy-five kilometers away in a comfortable chair, couldn’t spot the second dinosaur until the scientist pointed it out.

The second animal--Bink?--was standing on a nearby tree limb. She was slightly larger than Henry, her feathers a dozen distinct shades of muted browns and golds. As the drone moved towards her, a crest of bright blue feathers erected along her head and neck. The little dinosaur hissed at the drone and dropped to all fours, as if preparing to run.

No, wait--all threes. Bink was missing a front leg.

“Careful,” the woman said, very quietly. “If Bink goes to ground, you’ll scare off Henry, too.”

He piloted the drone away from the female dinosaur. As it pulled back, Bink’s crest dropped, and she settled onto her branch. Henry made a burbling call like a teakettle full of crickets, and Bink returned it. The winglike feathers along her only front leg folded themselves flat as she sat, watching the camera drone with yellow eyes.

The scientist eased back into a shy smile. “We're almost positive they're from the Cretaceous Period,” she said. “We try to keep them from crossing over, but it definitely happens. The security teams are focused on keeping the big ones away from the portal, so little ones like Henry and Bink sometimes slip past.

“As for her foreleg? We think she survived an attack when she was young,” she added. “It’s probably why she stays with Henry. As far as we can tell, Incisivosaurus are a flock species. Strength in numbers, right? We think the two of them were driven from the flock, as albinism and physical impairments can be liabilities.”

The cameraman grinned. Maybe this interview wasn’t a waste of time. Get these scientists talking about their animals, and the words started flowing. “How can you tell they’re...what is it? Incisivosaurus?” he asked. “You’re the first scientist I’ve interviewed who’ll go on record with an actual name for the animals. Except for...you know.”

“The Utahraptors.”

He shivered theatrically before he remembered she couldn’t see him, and grumbled aloud about bright red raptors the size of monster trucks.

She ignored him. “It’s hard for us,” she said, as she tickled the little white dinosaur under its chin. “We spend hundreds of years studying these animals without their skin and flesh, and when we find them alive, we learn they’re also covered in rainbow duckling fluff. Makes it hard to put a proper name to them without dissection.

“I got lucky,” she said, as she held out her hand. “Here, watch. Henry? Scritchies? You want scritchies?”

The little dinosaur opened its mouth as wide as it could--oh God, those teeth!--and the scientist stuck her finger inside and began to scratch its tongue.

“Okay, that’s...that’s not good,” the cameraman muttered to himself. He toggled the joystick and the drone dropped half a meter to focus on the inside of the dinosaur’s mouth.

Teeth.

Teeth.

Nothing but teeth!

Except...

“Oh that’s adorable,” the cameraman said quietly.

“I know, right? He’s got buckteeth!” the scientist said. “Those are a dead giveaway for an Incisivosaurus. They’re easier to see on Bink, since she’s not pure white.”

He turned the camera towards Bink, and zoomed in on the female dinosaur’s face. Sure enough, a set of tiny white fangs drooped over her upper lip.

“You’ve found derpasaurs,” he said. “Everybody’s going to want one of these.”

“They might get them, too.” The scientist removed her finger from Henry’s mouth. The dinosaur reached out and grabbed her hand with a long-fingered forefoot, gently, like a cat telling its owner that it wasn’t finished getting an ear rub. She chucked him under his chin, and he let out a whistling sigh. “If Henry and Bink are a breeding pair, we’ll see if Henry’s tameness can be taught to the next generation.”

“You’re domesticating them?”

“Taming, and no, Henry’s taming himself. I’m just giving him some cues to follow.” She held out her hand, palm up. “Henry? Hop down.”

The little white dinosaur chirped once, twice, then leapt onto her open palm. It was an odd sight; he was large enough to overflow her hand, but he seemed to weigh nothing more than a bundle of feathers. The scientist lowered him to the ground.

“Good boy, Henry,” she said, reaching into her jacket pocket.

Henry tracked the motion and sat up on his hind legs, his white crest unfurling in excitement. He began to hop around her feet, chirping.

“Beef jerky,” she explained to the cameraman. “Fossil evidence was used to suggest that Incisivosaurus was an herbivore, but it turns out they’re omnivorous. They love jerky. Can’t get enough of it. They’ll eat chicken and turkey, but they’ll knock you down for beef.

“And mutton,” she added as an afterthought. “Pork, too.”

The cameraman piloted the drone in a low arc around the white dinosaur. Henry ignored the camera, dancing and peeping in eagerness.

“Henry?” The scientist removed a small plastic box from another pocket. “Henry, calm.”

The dinosaur settled itself, watching the hand with the beef jerky, its feathers shivering in eagerness.

“Clicker training?” the cameraman asked. “You’re treating him like a dog?”

“It’s Jacques’ law of canine domestication,” she replied. “Dogs are just scavengers that learned how to be cute. My hypothesis is that it can apply to dinosaurs.

“Some dinosaurs,” she clarified, as she hid the hand with the jerky behind her back. “Henry? Eyes.”

With effort, Henry looked away from her hand to meet her eyes.

“Good!”

A sharp click from the black box.

A large chunk of jerky in the air.

A streak of white, up, then down and into the underbrush.

The cameraman panned the drone around in a slow circle, but both dinosaurs were--

#

--gone.

They shouldn’t be here. The air was wrong.

The air was always wrong.

It was too thick, or too thin, or stunk of harsh fluids or cloyingly sweet flowers or a hundred different scents which toppled over themselves, spiraling into clustered pockets of floating wrong which lingered until disturbed, and then they crashed into Bink’s nose with the force of a lightning strike.

The air was wrong and her head ached.

Her head hadn’t stopped hurting since the humans appeared. They hadn’t always been “humans” to her, no, the portal had appeared before, and it had been open long enough that Bink’s family had attached their own name to those too-long, too-tall creatures: Delicious Ones. Sweet and savory at the same time, a taste unlike anything from home.

Her brother wouldn’t let them use that name anymore. They were now “humans,” and her head wouldn’t stop hurting.

***eat!***

Henry was there, pressing the meat he had taken from his favorite human into her hand. Ah! This, at least, was worth the pain and the smell and the wrongness of the air. She tore into the meat, and this, at least, was made of new smells that were pleasing instead of painful. Wood and smoke and blood burned into a twist of meat which fell apart between her teeth.

***good?***

Bink pushed her nose against her brother and let his scent soothe the pain in her head.

***good*** she replied.

Henry sighed and trilled in happiness.

She loved her brother so, so much! He was kind and gentle and oh! so smart! It had been his idea to go through the portal, his idea that there might be more humans on the other side of that glowing hole. Humans tasted better than anything and were the easiest prey, with the meat right there beneath their too-thin hides. He believed there might be a better life for them on the other side.

Who thought like that? Not their mother or their father or any of their family. Oh, they were clever in the way of creatures who depended on their minds instead of their mass, but Henry was brilliant. The day their family had died? He had taken her down to the stream to hunt. He would limp along, his bright white feathers shining in the sun, right at the edge of the stream bank. When a fish leapt at him, Bink was there, her incisors snapping through its spine so it would die, gasping, on the shore.

They killed more fish than they could carry, so they had returned to the nest to get their siblings.

They found blood.

So much blood.

They had mourned, and had fended for themselves for several seasons. They had been cold, and after the fish learned that white meant danger, they had been hungry. Henry had thought it was a blessing when the Delicious Ones had returned through the portal. They had come with their wood (which smelled wrong, but was a familiar kind of wrong) and their metal (which smelled wrong, but at least they had a word for the scent of cold too-hard earth), or their plastic (which smelled so wrong it had required Bink to scratch and chew on a piece of the stuff until the new word came to her).

But they had also come with food.

Meats wrapped in plastic. Soft, spongy stuff discarded when the Delicious Ones broke camp. Even their feces, full of half-digested grains, tasted sweet and oh! so good!

And that one day? That perfect day? That day when the Others came and did what they did best, greeting the Delicious Ones with tooth and claw? The Others had fed, and when they were done, they left behind pieces of the Delicious Ones. Warm, rich pieces, marbled in white fat, and, in a special case, still moving.

Yes, Bink understood why her brother had wanted to follow the Delicious Ones. He had probably been right. And now that they were here? Now that Henry had discovered that humans always had their own food, that they would just give him this food, that they gave him enough food for the both of them once he figured out how to ask for it? He was probably right to insist that the humans themselves should never be thought of as food again.

But oh! how her head hurt.

#

The next day, Bink was hungry again. Henry left her in the warm nest they had made from an old plastic tarp they had dragged into the hollow of a tall tree, and returned to the humans’ camp.

“Hey, little buddy!”

Many of the humans had become accustomed to him. He knew them by scent and voice; some of them, like this woman with the scrap of food dangling between finger and thumb, were safe. He fluffed himself up and chirped a greeting, and the food flew towards him.

So did a heavy foot.

“Fuckin’ rat!”

Henry was gone, the food abandoned. The man swung around, searching...

Nothing.

From his perch high in the trees, Henry watched the man turn on the woman, his large hands not quite wrapped into fists. “Stop feedin’ that thing!”

“What’s your problem? He’s just a big chicken.”

“What’s my problem? They eat us!”

Below, the man stomped and shouted.

Henry crawled down the far side of the tree, and disappeared into the underbrush.

There were burrows all over the island. These were small, rounded paths through the thorns and thickets, or holes which tunneled down beneath the ground. He didn’t know what had made them. By the time he and Bink had come through the portal, the Others had eaten everything that was native to the island. The burrows were beginning to grow over from disuse: the Others were too large, and Bink didn’t like to leave the safety of the trees. The burrows belonged to Henry. Sometimes he caught a thin thread of an alien scent, old and fading but still strong enough to conjure the image of fast-running meat, and he wondered if it belonged to what had come this way before him.

Henry paused at the gap between the end of his burrow and a metal barrier. The barrier sang to him, a high-pitched keening which never changed its tune. He refused to listen; he had seen the bodies of the Others who had touched it. But there were holes in the barrier, holes no bigger around than one of his burrows, and he was through and on the other side without as much as mussing his feathers.

He loved the humans’ camp. They had built dens for themselves of wood and metal and plastic, and other strange things which still lacked proper names. When he climbed to the top of these dens, he could go anywhere he wanted in the camp. He could explore...taste...learn! There were parts of the camp which shone in the night, and parts that were always dark, no matter how high the sun was in the sky. Food, yes, food was everywhere, he didn’t understand why they left food lying around where anything with a nose could smell it. There was also that high-pitched singing, different layers of shrill and whining, all around, all around. The whole place sang!

It was not an especially nice song, true, but at least the humans were trying.

Across the tops--one, two, three, four--and then down a clinging vine which had grown up the side of one of their dens. There was an opening in a wall, and Henry darted through this, trilling a greeting to his human.

#

“Is Henry ready?”

The scientist grinned, and shook the package of beef jerky. “Henry’s always ready to eat.”

The cameraman had been wrong. Truly, stunningly wrong. The producers had seen the footage of the little white Incisivosaurus and had lost their damned minds. He had been ordered to prioritize the scientist and her pet project. Someone back at headquarters had no doubt had a chuckle over that line, but whatever: there was talk of making the segments with Henry into a full episode, and that would mean a nice finder’s fee for him when the filming wrapped.

And, maybe, a nice dinner with the scientist to thank her for being so generous with her time, maybe? They could meet in person, maybe?

She had smiled at that, and said maybe.

“One of my coworkers back in Toronto? She’s an animal behaviorist.” The scientist held up a golf ball and a rubber dog toy. “I’ve been sending her vids of Henry. She thinks he’s at least as intelligent as a border collie. He might be as smart as a corvid...uh...as smart as a crow.”

“Crows are intelligent?”

“Just watch.” She placed the dog toy and golf ball on the ground in front of Henry. “Henry? Golf ball. Squeaker,” she said, pointing at the objects in turn. Then: “Henry? Squeaker.”

Without hesitation, the dinosaur scooped up the dog toy.

A click from the black plastic box, a chunk of beef jerky. Praise and tongue scritchies for the little white dinosaur.

The next hour was spent teaching Henry the names of different objects. At the end of it, the scientist’s office looked like a toybox had been upended on the floor, and the dinosaur had gone to sleep within the folds of a discarded sweatshirt.

The cameraman piloted the drone as close to the animal as he dared. The audio system picked up tiny pitiful squeaks: Henry was snoring.

“Oh my God,” he whispered. “You’re going to make a billion dollars.”

“Henry’s not a pet,” she reminded him, and turned herself into a liar by stroking the dinosaur’s downy feathers. Henry’s snoring took on a singsong tune, and he pillowed his head on her hand. “He’s tame, not domesticated. This little guy would eat me in a heartbeat if he could.”

The cameraman laughed.

“Seriously! Dogs and cats have been living with us for thousands of years, and they’ll still consider humans to be a food source if conditions are right. Henry would--”

Henry leapt up. Bink was at the window, chirping and hissing all at once, her crest high and the skin around her eyes a bright red. They were gone before the scientist could react.

“Ow! Henry, you turd.” The scientist pressed her hand against her chest and began to rummage around in a drawer.

“What was that?” The cameraman piloted the drone towards the window. There was no sign of either dinosaur.

“Oh, just animals being animals.” She opened a first-aid kit and pulled out a bottle of antiseptic, and began to douse the shallow scratches along her arm. “I’m going to contract some hellacious Cretaceous-era pathogen, I just know it--”

Screams.

Screaming everywhere!

The building began to tremble.

“Shit shit shit!” The scientist began to toss her own desk, hurling paper and electronics to the floor. Buried beneath the layers of productivity was a bright red button under a plastic cover; she flipped up the cover and hit the button, then dove beneath the metal desk.

The cameraman steered the drone to join her. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. She had managed to unhook a thick steel shield on the underside of the desk; he realized that the desk was built like a tank and was bolted to the concrete floor. “Nothing good.”

The shield came down like the door on a breadbox, shutting her away.

The cameraman took a breath, and then another, and then returned to his controls. He piloted the drone through the window, very slowly, expecting...

“Oh,” he whispered.

Huge. Red. And so, so many teeth.

The scientists might not have been able to identify each species that had come through the portals, but there was an exception: Utahraptors. Two meters tall, three meters long, and covered in bright fuck-all red feathers.

Red as a firetruck.

No, red as blood.

A Utahraptor was loose in the camp--the drone went up, high, higher--no, make that four Utahraptors.

Oh, look, they had brought their babies. Make that twelve Utahraptors, eight of them slightly smaller than a pony.

There was a breach in the electric fence, and blood and red feathers everywhere, and so so many bodies. There were buildings crushed to pieces, but how...? Ah, the raptors had been hunting, and had chased a herd of dinocephalians into the camp. The cameraman didn’t have a proper name for the stocky lizard-shaped dinosaurs, but if he had to guess, each of the Cephs weighed as much as a hippo. Maybe an elephant. There were dozens of them running loose in the camp. They must have hit the fence hard enough to short it out, and the survivors had torn a hole--

--there were screams, and blood, and--

Oh God, they were all just so big!

Nothing was left on the south side of the camp except rubble. The Cephs were looking for a way out, and their panic had turned into an accidental massacre of both humans and their own kind.

The raptors? They had already learned to ignore the Cephs in favor of the small, slow two-legged animals all around them.

He turned the drone in time to see a Ceph crash into the scientist’s office.

More screaming.

He heard himself saying, “...no, oh no, oh God no...” over and over again, and the drone swooped back to the earth below. The Ceph had torn apart the reinforced concrete structure as if it had been made of paper. Half of the heavy metal desk had been trampled flat. The shield had bent up along one side so he could see the scientist’s face; she was too pale, a pool of blood spreading from where her legs should be.

“Be quiet,” he whispered. “There’re raptors outside!”

The scientist pressed her hands against her mouth, and wept in silence.

“We’re coming,” he assured the scientist, even though he knew no such thing. What happened during a dinosaur stampede? Were soldiers on their way with guns? Or was it like a tornado and they had to wait for the crisis to end before they could rescue the survivors?

Whatever the case, it had been the right thing to say. She nodded, tears still streaming down her face.

Gradually, the screaming began to die down.

The earth stopped shaking.

“I’m going to go look around,” the cameraman whispered.

The scientist nodded. Her eyes were closed; she seemed to be having a hard time staying awake.

He took the drone up, and spun it around in a slow circle. Only now did he realize that this had been the kind of disaster that could make his career, and he had spent it trying to comfort the scientist. He wasn’t sure if he should be angry or proud.

Whatever. There were cameras all over the place. There’d be a hundred different pieces of footage to capture these last doomed moments.

It seemed quiet enough. There were no more Cephs to be seen, and the raptors were dispersing now that their easy meals were in hiding.

He returned to the scientist.

She wasn’t alone: Henry and Bink were there. Henry was sitting on her shoulder, while Bink was sniffing the bloodied edges of the desk.

Henry pressed his face against the scientist’s hair, crooning softly. Then--

The cameraman gasped.