I thought I was the one obsessed with potatoes but it turns out that when you point it out people come with 82493 justifications about why potatoes (and it's always just them, even in my other posts few people wanted to talk about say, coffee in space) are always justified actually and you don't need to think about them
noooooooooooooo I don't wanna think about the thousands of years of civilization and culture in the Andes please please please don't make me think about other cultures pleaaaaaase just let me have my knights and wizards noooooooooo
I'm trying to be reasonable here but when you really think about it it's funny, I'm just pointing out that potatoes aren't from Europe and people instead of saying "huh, you're right, maybe I should consider that fact for my future writing" are like NOOOOOOOOOOO BUT WHAT IF A WIZARD BROUGHT THEM, there's a whole other post about how "we can't deny our fantasy characters the potato" fair, I love them too, but why don't you want to learn where your stuff came from, why do you want for "wizards" to make appear them out of nowhere instead of learning there are real people with thousands of years of history who domesticated and created those things you take from granted
are you so scared of learning some of your things actually came from other cultures that were actually not Europeans who live in castles?
"The full documentary, “ᏩᏯ Waya, Saving Our Red Grandfather,” is now streaming!
Our productions team created this documentary in partnership with Cherokee Nation’s Natural Resources Office and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It explores the historical and cultural significance of the Red Wolf, along with efforts by conservationists, governments and other partners to save the species from extinction.
Also referred to as our “Red Grandfather,” Red Wolves are sacred in Cherokee culture because of their connection to our tribe’s largest clan, the Wolf Clan. We’re proud to help bring this powerful story of resilience and conservation to the spotlight.
This #EarthDay, we invite you to watch and learn more about the Red Wolf’s connection to Cherokee people, and our responsibility we share to ensure this special species survives."
There is a reason my fursona is what it is. It's deeply cultural and extremely personal. I worked as part of the conservation program and my nation's stories of them mean a lot to me. Maybe if you catch me on a good day I'll explain why, but for now I invite you to learn about why they are important to my folk.
Red wolf conservation has deeply been pushed and driven for by Cherokee from it's beginnings. Our red grandfather is a vital part of the ecosystem as well as a our culture. They are a unique predator worth fighting for.
The wolf really could be the face of the ecological devastation of colonialism. Bounties were put onto the wolf and they were villainized through generations of propaganda. Removed for farm, profit, zealotry , and a need to dominate.. The red wolf specifically use to exist all along the east coast, but was reduced a small louisiana pack before the conservation program.
They are currently critically endangered and are the most endangered canine.
They represent the fight and effort, and policy failure, around US predator conservation and the need for indigeneity in conservation and ecological policy.
"Sys how is your decent into fiber arts hell going"
Glad you asked. I have arrived at 'modern flax is Bullshit compared to what we had in historical textiles, the flax widely available for handspinning is basically the tow that would be discarded from textile creation and used with tar to caulk ships back in the day'
This naturally led me down a hole of 'why is the staple length of this stuff a bullshit 6 inches' and the answer is 'we have bred modern flax more for the oil than the fiber because cotton usurped the place of everyday textile thanks to slavery and the cotton gin'
Anyway, THIS led me to a rabbit hole that culminated in me finding flax seed bred for proper 30 inch tall plants for fiber, sold by some fellow minded nerds on a website that has not been updated since 1998 and you have to email them to buy anything.
I FAILED YOU ALL here is the site. You can also buy flax fiber from them. The PROPER shit, not the hot garbage ass tow fiber sold as flax top for handspinners.
'machine combing shortens the flax fibers by several inches'
This right here is part of why modern linen is a pale shadow of historical linen. Legitimately it cannot be properly replicated by machines. It HAS to be made by human hands if you want the best quality.
Like a month ago I messaged a craft group about accessibility for wheelchairs and the answer I got was “there’s a lot of stairs but we have cute boys who can carry you”.
And it’s…not good. As a wheelchair bound person I largely depend on people when I want to go out and do *anything* so I’m used to it, I laugh it off, make an annoyed post about it and off I go. But I wanna just say a thing real quick.
Even if I wasn’t gay, wasn’t a survivor scared of men, getting help as a disabled person is just…Not a pleasant thing to us! Imagine for a sec how you’d feel being carried up a flight of stairs. You’re a grown person. You’re being touched in an awkward way. You’d rather do it yourself. You’re So Uncomfortable. It’s not where I look for the beginning of a romantic relationship.
So like…could abled people stop doing this thing where they think helping us in a condescending and infantilizing way is cute? Cause I’m real tired. Just get me a ramp or lift and I’m cool. I don’t need a dating service when I’m just trying to go about my day
(Also, people who use wheelchairs are not the only people who have problems with stairs - anyone who’s using a cane, or crutches, or who just has dodgy knees is gonna wish you had access to a lift, a ramp, or some other place to meet).
I must plug the app RollMobility here, which is a mobile app on which you enter your location and how accessible it is. My friend who uses a chair sometimes desperately wants more abled people to use this app, because there are WAY more of us than there are of chair-users. Every little bit helps!
Game which initially appears to be a straight Ocarina of Time pastiche, except following the tutorial dungeon it's revealed that the obnoxious fairy companion is two-timing the apparent protagonist and actually has like three different Chosen Ones going in neighbouring regions, each fully convinced that they're the Chosen One and whatever local issue the fairy has them dealing with is the big world-ending threat. Over the course of the game, their paths begin to intersect, resulting in co-op dungeons with entire puzzle mechanics revolving around ensuring that two Chosen Ones are never in the same room at the same time. It's textually unclear whether anything bad would happen if they found out about each other, or whether the fairy is just keen to avoid awkward questions.
(The final boss is, of course, a multi-phase affair in which each Chosen One is conveniently incapacitated at the end of their respective phase just in time for the next Chosen One to show up. They encounter each other for the first time in the post-victory cutscene, which cuts to black just as the fairy is like "okay, let me explain".)
Give 'em all really distinct mechanics, tie the narrative to the design by forcing the player to occasionally drag the "wrong" chosen one through a given area, crank up the dramatic irony as high as possible by having each of them comment on how "the prophecy" keeps giving them convenient paths forward (when the player knows it was really a DIFFERENT CHOSEN ONE working their asses off)...
The only meme part is the refusal to explain at the end tbh, because "three chosen ones who all need to think they're solitary" is a premise that promises the masquerade will collapse at some point, and IMO the amount of tension you could wring out of it far outweighs the value of the cut-to-black gag. Have the fairy forget to swap out parts of the prophecy at one point, leading to one chosen one thinking that the prophecy was either changing or had been falsified. Have one chosen one catch a shadowy glimpse of another, resulting in an imagined rivalry with their Dark Mirror. Have one of them figure it out right before the end, resulting in an emotional breakdown until the fairy convinces them how important it is to keep the other two in the dark.
The two are by no means incompatible; you could do all that and still rug-pull the player right at the end by cutting away just as the fairy is about to finally explain the real reason why all of this was necessary (any explanations given earlier implicitly being at least party bullshit).
Carl Jung isn't exactly less full of shit than Freud, but he's admittedly full of shit in a much more entertaining way. "Guy who's basically a practising wizard but gets super annoyed if you point that out and loudly insists he's a Man of Science" is a type of guy you just don't see much of these days.
#wait Jung did more than just philosophy? (via @inksandpensblog)
Carl Jung was actually, genuinely a practising mystic and occultist. Large portions of his theories of human consciousness are founded in esoteric interpretations of the principles of medieval alchemy. When I say the guy was basically a wizard, I'm not being snarky about pseudoscience or constructing an obtuse analogy; I mean it 100% literally. This was remarked upon by his own contemporaries, and he reacted by simply insisting against all evidence to the contrary that everything he was doing was perfectly scientific!
you may also notice that the babies have tiny little nubbin beaks! they hatch like that so they fit in the eggs- the beak doesn't actually grow in for another week or so.
I just want to make sure that everyone is aware that even if you turn this off, Google is still scanning all of that information, and from 2004 to 2017 they did it to serve you ads instead of training AI.
Google cheerfully reads your emails and looks at your photos and watches your videos and it always has and always will.
Don't bother turning off Gemini, for the love of fuck please just stop using Google.
(Protonmail is a good free, privacy forward option. Don't bother with Hotmail or Outlook, Microsoft reads your emails too. Also email is inherently insecure don't trust sensitive information to email)
telling people to stop using google isn't gonna work that well when people already have google accounts and those accounts are the only ways to use certain things (like, oh i don't know, the largest video platform in the world).
quitting google services as much as possible is great but not everyone is gonna go that far unfortunately, so it's still useful to tell people how to stop certains kinds of privacy breaches that corps like google like to pull. how long does it take to change the apps and services you use for better alternatives? you have to figure out the best choices for yourself, and that takes time normies aren't willing to waste on something they barely care about. doing the extra effort that google saves them isn't what boomers, kids and "regular people" want.
because if someone is still gonna use google, at least tell them how to minimize the awful shit.
The problem is that Google *is* a privacy violation. There's no way to use Google products in a privacy-preserving way because that's not what they're for. They exist to extract information from you. You can't minimize the awful shit being produced by the awful shit factory.
Turning off any of these features *will not* keep Google from collecting and using your data because "we get to collect and use your data" is part of Google's ToS.
The reason I find posts like this frustrating is because you can go through the notes and see thousands of people saying "Google, why would you do this without asking for permission," "Google this is a privacy violation," "i just turned this off #privacy" - people are *completely unaware* of the fact that Docs and Gmail and Chrome are now and always have been ways for Google to take your data. "Harm reduction" doesn't work as an approach here because it gives casual users a false sense of security. They think if they opt out of model training their data isn't going to be collected for marketing. This is very incorrect and it's worth saying loudly and bluntly.
You should stop using Google as much as you possibly can because every free Google product exists *only* to sell your data to advertisers.
Some stuff is inescapable - you're correct, there's not a good alternative to YouTube. But there's a huge difference between "i have a Gmail account because I need one for my android device and to upload videos to a major video platform" and "I'm putting my entire life on google calendar, using Gmail for all my e-commerce logins, and use Chrome as my browser across devices."
Hell, there's a huge difference between using YouTube logged out and in the browser versus using it as an app on your phone.
Uninstall Maps! Turn off location! Use Firefox! Store photos locally!
Ceding privacy for convenience turns out to be inconvenient! Fork found in kitchen!
Anyway if anyone is interested in more serious degoogling here's a free pamphlet on that.
because i love y’all, i’m sharing my family’s recipe for apple tea (traditional fall/winter drink in west asia, turkey, and many areas of the balkans)
it’s like a more delicate version of apple cider and i basically live off of this stuff when the weather starts to cool!
Apple Tea (for two)
1 large apple or 2 small, shredded (you can use a cheese grater)
3 cups water
1-2 cinnamon sticks
2-3 pc clove (optional)
honey to taste
1 tsp of lemon juice (add at end)
green tea (optional! the lebanese version usually calls for green tea but i actually prefer it without. up to you!)
throw it all in a pot and let it simmer on a low temperature for an hour or so. while it’s simmering, it will also make your home smell delicious! (if you make it with green tea, add the tea at the end, about five minutes before taking it off the heat so the flavor doesn’t become bitter from oversteeping). strain into your cups and enjoy hot.
So I just saw the most incredible production of Macbeth that wove parental grief into the whole regicide plot in such a fascinating way.
So at the very beginning of the play there was a scene where Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are at a funeral as the primary mourners. A stretcher is carried on with a covered body. The body was notably very small. They laid flowers on it and Macbeth immediately left for battle.
Now *I* studied Shakespeare in college so I immediately knew there is one single line that implies that the Macbeths lost a child at some point. Most of the time this isn't utilized in productions; it's just a throwaway line, intended to paint just how determined Lady M is for this regicide thing to work and how furious she is that her husband has cold feet. In this production she delivers "I have given suck, and know how tender tis to love the babe that milks me" nearly in tears. She takes a moment to steel herself before saying, "I would while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums and dashed the brains pit, had I so sworn" and she very nearly SCREAMED this in Macbeth's face.
Also noted was how the Macbeths looked at Macduff's children. Lady M was clutching her heart, nearly breaking watching them embrace their parents. Macbeth could not even look at them.
At the end of Lady Macbeth's plot, when she is sleepwalking and sleeptalking, she is typically portrayed as speaking to no one or to her husband. However, at a certain point of her monologue she got on her knees, raised her voice to a comforting octave, and began miming tear wiping, hand holding, hair and face stroking, around a child-sized figure. "Wash your hands, put on your nightgown, look not so pale. I tell you yet again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave." Then she stands and appears to take the child's hand. "Go to bed, go to bed. I can hear knocking at the gate-" then she looks down and realizes that no one is there, followed be the most heartbreaking shriek I've ever heard followed by a full minute of her just weeping while curled up on the floor before she stood up, finished her monologue and left the stage.
Most of the time when the loss of a child is utilized in a performance or adaptation, it is assumed that the child was an infant and lost some time ago. To imply that the child died IMMEDIATELY prior to the events of the play and had been cared for and loved by their parents for a few years adds such a fascinating layer to the desperation to ascend to the throne, Lady M's madness, and Macbeth's initial hesitation into "in for a penny, in for a pound" attitude, Macbeth's fury that Banquo's, not his, children will take the throne, and even Macbeth's eventual demise following a frenzied final battle.
How far will grief push you to fill a hole? How far will grief push you to desperation? And what happens when none of your new pursuits are filling the void left by the one you lost? And what happens when you realize you have nothing left to lose?
AU where instead of trying to cure her infertility Yennefer just goes around saving random people’s lives and invoking the law of surprise bcos she figures sooner or later it’ll net her a baby. she hasn’t got one yet but she has amassed about 2 dozen dogs so she’s doing pretty well for herself.
1) after a while her habit of swooping in at the last minute to save the day gets her a rep as a legit superhero. she’s like ‘no you don’t understand. I Am Not Nice. I’m doing this for very selfish reasons - stop praising me you don’t get it’
2) ‘I’m starting to think that destiny must be a real thing. there’s no other explanation for how many of my surprises are dogs. destiny is real and destiny wants me to have dogs for some reason.’
Okay but her doing this beFORE Geralt does it and when she finds out that he only had to invoke the law of surprise ONCE to get a baby she goes absolutely feral on him. Just dead silent, furious, finally starts pulling off her jewelry like, “bard, hold my earrings.”
To anyone who sees this, I hope you have an experience of whimsy today. I hope you see something utterly joyful, silly, and ridiculous, and I hope you see it and smile. I wish that for you today.
What's this? Another minizine for the Narrative Podcast Zine Fest? Were you starting to hope I'd run out of steam?
well, tough luck! I'm like a cockroach.
These podcasts are for when you want podcasts about things that would be creepy if the characters interacting with them weren't so completely nonchalant about living through Eldritch Bullshit.
Transcript below the cut!
Cover Front: Three Podcasts That Are Eldritch But Cozy
Cover Back: A minizine of podcast recs by kadharonon-art
Spread 1 left:
Welcome to Night Vale
Join Cecil in the peculiar town of Night Vale for community news, traffic reports, and The Weather.
Spread 1 right:
Night Vale may be a little outside of our world (or at least, it used to be), but its people and concerns are all-too-familiar, even if their day-to-day life is a little bizarre.
I'd been listening to narrative podcasts for a few years when I finally decided to pick up WTNV and it made so, so many of the framing and narrative choices made by that crop of narrative podcasts from the mid 2010s suddenly make sense. This is the Granddaddy podcast of them all.
(Go see a live show if you get a chance, they're spectacular.)
Spread 2 left:
The Hidden Almanac
Join Reverend Mord for history, hagiography, and updates from the Hidden Almanac Test Garden.
Spread 2 right:
The world of the Hidden Almanac might be a few steps removed from ours, and a little more prone to eldritch invasions, but it's hard to upset Reverend Mord all that much unless something is threatening his garden. (Or Pastor Drom has invaded his recording studio again to flog her raunchy self-help books.) (That's when he breaks out the sigils.) (Why is there a sigil for hot flashes, anyway?)
The three-days-a-week minisodes always gave me something worth looking forward to from 2016–2019, and I miss it dearly.
Spread 3 left:
World Gone Wrong
Join Jamie and Malik, erstwhile roommates, as they attempt to navigate the changing world together, but apart.
Spread 3 right:
Everything in the world may have become suddenly unreliable, but Malik and Jamie are here for each other—and you—through it all, ready to make sure things stay baseline despite the chaos and guide you through your new circumstances to the best of their ability, whether it involves werewolves, The Hut, or—sigh—Leonard. Again.
I can actually answer this! So the latex/rubber they used, while standard for Hollywood at the time, reacted REALLY BADLY to being doused in pouring water nonstop for an entire day of shooting. They ended up corroding, which caused them to stink really badly and glob together at the seams. The original plan was to hand out masks to various crew members on the final day of shooting as souvenirs, but the sopping wet, melting, rotting rubber got so gross that by the end of that shooting day they’d already thrown most of them out. Somewhere in a landfill are hundreds of disgusting, bloated, slimey Hugo weaving heads fused together into a nightmarish rotting amalgam :)
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