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bestworstcase · 19 days

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i am asking you about tdt! remnant with particular interest in unhinged climate

it is so kind of you all to enable me (@meltedintoair @froginboillingpastawater @lemon-embalmer @blakistan)

don’t mind the unfinished continent i’m still (through gritted teeth) figuring the strandlines out… also if you’re wondering why solitas looks like that it’s because for narrative reasons i needed land at the north pole here’s what she looks like Put Together

ANYWAY you will notice that i’ve moved things around. anima and menagerie north by a solid 30’ and rotated sanus a little bit counter-clockwise for the sake of not having vale and vacuo on almost the same latitude. mostly this is for the sake of bringing the various climates of these places into more reasonable bounds for an earthlike-ish climate—except for vale, which has a maritime climate with cool summers and coldish winters at 6’N, because i fixated on the puzzle of “earthlike climate except for this One Region” like you would not believe.

but before we get to Refrigerated Vale we have to talk about

✨the moons✨

yes moons plural. because i looked at the broken moon and heard the siren call of THE TIDES. tdt!remnant has three moons: mar, the original, which is (like the canon moon) not tidally locked and has a massive dark crater on one side (THE MOUTH OF THE MOON–), and the much smaller anthe + ogmios, which formed through the accretion of debris flung away when the god of darkness exploded the moon and are smaller.

INCIDENTALLY the hegemonic calendar is a lunisolar calendar with months correlating to mar’s cycle and 8-day weeks (octs) correlating to ogmios’ much shorter cycle; anthe is culturally associated with the god of animals and khimerism—that’s the monotheistic worship of the god of animals practiced by many fauni—has an anthean lunar calendar that is wildly different. the vytali common calendar has 12 months divided into 8-day octs (with some gnarly intercalation going on to align the calendar with the solar year); the khimeric calendar has 17 months divided into 9-day enneads with an intercalary month and handful of three-day-long leaping festivals that rotate the calendar through the solar year in a fifteen year cycle. it would be remiss of me not to plug fantasy-calendar for all your batshit calendar making needs. i have a spreadsheet where i pin down all the math and then just set everything up in FC it has never let me down.

back of napkin math:

on average the tides are about +/- 3.9 m. neap tides where all three moons pull against each other, +/- 3.7 m. spring tides where they line up, +/- 4.2—these are the open ocean tidal range, coastal tides are highly variable but as a very rough estimate tidal ranges along the (habitable) coasts are probably somewhere between ~2 and ~16m, with significant amounts of uninhabitable coastline where the tidal range is much larger and building on the high tide coast means your settlement is several kilometers inland at low tide. riverside building is also quite difficult because tidal bores are. pretty extreme

port cities don’t have harbors the way we think of them. they have either sprawling, complicated systems of locks operated by konurgists (=professional practitioners of dust-based magic) or they have cliffside dry docks designed for lightweight vessels to ride in and out with the tides. vale’s wharf district is a maze of locks and caissons. argus and kuo kuana have dry harbors.

the other thing about multi-moon systems is you get more significant tidal flexing ergo more volcanism

so where earth experiences ~70 volcanic eruptions per year on average, remnant the triple moon tsunami tides planet gets to have a “statistically there is always a volcano erupting somewhere in the world” trivia question, and all the air quality problems and acid rain you get from that.

SO the first consideration with regard to tdt remnant’s earthlike climate is that the conditions which produce it are very different; i… am That kind of person who back of napkin crunched numbers for all of this (and spent like an hour fiddling to not tidally lock the planet to the star 😭) BUT the numbers don’t matter per se; the salient piece is that the sun is both cooler and a little further away than ours (<- yes this IS me looking into the camera like i’m on the office about the god of light) and the planet is kept habitable by tidal heating, meaning the friction produced by the moons stretching and squeezing the planet as they orbit around it.

the moons stress balling the planet is also what causes The Volcanoes, which release greenhouse gasses (keeping remnant warmer than it would otherwise be) but also semi-regularly you’ll get enough big eruptions in clusters to Deflect The Fucking Sun like it’s 1816 and global temperatures nosedive and climates all over go haywire for a year or two. i think this happens on average about once per century but the current historical period—the seventh era—begins with a quarter century called the forge years when the planet got HAMMERED by four really bad volcanic winters in quick succession. think “14th century black plague” levels of decimation, except it was worldwide famines + just an explosion of conflicts and wars over food sources + grimm, whose populations spike whenever there’s a major volcanic event because the planet’s mantle is a mixture of molten rock and atrum (=grimm juice).

(there are very few true herbivores in this world. there are a lot of animals that eat plants when it’s warm and meat when it’s cold. true herbivores tend to be either animals that store huge food caches or animals that can go a really, really long time without eating. plants mostly either develop super deep root systems, or pump out antifreeze proteins when the temperature drops, or develop cold-mediated serotiny, or a combination.)

BECAUSE OF ALL THAT, remnant’s oceans circulate in a completely different way than ours; tidal heating warms the bottom water at the poles, causing it to rise in strong east-to-west or west-to-east currents, forcing colder surface water downwards and flowing towards the equator. consequently remnant does not have permanent ice caps, although most of solitas is perpetually snowy above its strandline.

(the strandline is where the water is at high tide; as noted in many cases this is several kilometers inland from the low-tide coast. anima, solitas, alukah—that’s the unnamed dragon continent—and sanus are all a single contiguous landmass at low tide, with huge land bridges exposed. it is generally not a good idea to try to walk, with the exception of one specific island chain that is small enough to traverse safely on foot by walking island-to-island over a span of about three days, four if you’re being cautious.)

the upshot of all this is it’s relatively warmer and wetter at the poles and cooler and drier at the equator compared to earth, because the oceans are effectively upside-down, warmest at the bottom near the poles. (if you’re wondering why the tidal heating is distributed this way, the real-world exemplar i’m working from is europa. interesting reading!)

northern anima is a bit of a special case because even though it looks coastal, it isn’t; the sea in between it and solitas is very, very shallow and at low tides is just this for hundreds of kilometers:

so within that curve of the “dragon neck” shape, the whole strandline is functionally landlocked with respect to the warm rising polar currents and during the wintertime can actually get colder than the region of solitas where mantle is located.

and then there’s the impact of dust.

i’ve drifted quite a bit off the basic ‘fantasy elements’ approach taken with dust in canon because the concept of dust as a sort of crystallized energy appeals to me; so there are four basic kinds of dust (thermal, electromagnetic, kinetic, chemical) which can be further divided into subcategories by their specific actions. for example most ‘burn’ and ‘ice’ dusts belong to the thermal family and are distinguished by whether they radiate heat or absorb it. and i say ‘most’ because there are also things like organic-solar/“bog” dust, which forms in peat deposits and produces heat but is classed as an electromagnetic dusts because it’s solar-powered.

large deposits of dust modify the regional climate in often dramatic ways. and this is how we get Refrigerated Vale—the difference between vale and other equatorial regions isn’t as huge as it would be on earth, because remnant’s equatorial band is relatively cool and generally falls more into a ‘warm-to-hot mediterranean climate’ than tropical, but vale is very noticeably cold for its latitude. there are Two Reasons for this.

one is what i’m calling the tarthic koniohaline climate system (TKCS pronounced “ticks”). the tarth sea—that’s the body of water surrounded by alukah, solitas, and sanus—has a huge, several-hundred-kilometer-long seam of variegated dust running along the southern continental shelf, roughly following the curve of the alukite/sanite coastline but further out to sea. (“variegated” meaning it’s a mixture of different types all sort of entangled together.) sort of akin to a barrier reef, but dust.

the tarthic dust formation is mostly a mix of absorptive thermal dusts (colloquially: frost) and kinetic dusts (colloquially: tidal) which together act to cool and desalinate water upwelling against the continental shelf, which is then pushed southward in a clockwise direction along the sanite/alukite coast. that produces a very cool, wet climate along the coastline with frequent thunderstorms as cold fronts coming off the water collide with warmer air rising from the vivax sea to the south (which again: think mediterranean).

vale sits on the southern periphery of the TKCS and is cooled by prevailing winds originating from the tarthic coast. it isn’t as rainy year-round as the vitrine peninsula but it does get quite a lot of precipitation.

the other factor Refrigerating Vale is that there’s absorptive thermal dust in the mountains, too. eastern vale—the counties in the northeast part of the continent, which were contested during the great war and (unlike in canon) not wholly lost to the grimm—has a very pleasant climate, warm summers and mild rainy winters, sometimes snow in the north and at higher altitudes. prevailing winds are fairly dry and warm when they hit the mountains and then rake over peaks that are just covered in frost/ice dusts and act as a giant heat sink, so western vale gets these bitterly cold, super dry winds pouring down the mountains during the summer that collide with warm coastal winds and cause huge storms. in winter the prevailing winds are much weaker, though still freezing, and blow further out to sea so there are fewer storms and infrequent snow but the snow that does fall tends to stick until the spring.

and that’s why the maragda valley is nicknamed the world’s refrigerator and vale’s chief export is various frost/ice dusts :)

OTHER FUN DUST-RELATED THINGS.

the southern part of alukah is called the mordicchiate coast and it’s one of the only regions in the world with a true tropical climate because it’s very, very rich in an assortment of kinetic dusts (mostly different grades of grav) that essentially cook the region by Vibrating Constantly

the other tropical region is in equatorial anima, a big swath of jungle and humid-subtropical grassland in what’s called the palash basin. it’s hot because it’s the caldera of an ancient supervolcano and one of the most volcanically active regions in the world. there are a lot of grimm. there are so many grimm in the palash basin. there’s also a strip of super-fertile land running along the northern rim of the palash region so people keep trying to live there anyway.

along the southwestern coasts of solitas (where those free villages are in arrowfell) there are just enormous underground seams of radiant thermal dusts which heat up the land enough that it’s possible to farm there during the summers; it still snows year-round, but the soil isn’t frozen so all you need is tents with clear panels you can uncover/cover to control sunlight.

the nequam desert—that’s the one surrounding vacuo—is also laced with radiant thermal dusts that bake what would otherwise be a warm arid steppe into a parched, burning-hot desert that wants to kill you. there are hotspots all over the place where the dust veins are so close to the surface that you can cook on the ground; nomadic desert peoples notoriously almost never use cooking fires and were instrumental to vacuo’s success in the great war because radar systems were still very rudimentary and no fires at night meant vacuan guerrillas could maneuver undetected until they appeared seemingly out of fucking nowhere to maul enemy supply convoys.

the wildlife in the menagerian interior are unique on remnant because there is a preponderance of electromagnetic and chemical dust formations on the surface—mostly “shock” dusts, which discharge or generate electricity—and the animals living have been in an evolutionary arms race for millions of years with the result that if it can’t generate electrical shocks on its own, it’s gluing electric rocks to itself decorator-crab style or it’s got specialized structures in its mouth that it can pack dust into and discharge shocks from when it bites you. “how can the wildlife be more dangerous than the grimm,” the rest of the world asks. “we have scorpions whose stings deliver an electric shock at a high enough voltage to kill you before you hit the ground,” says menagerie. “and lightning snakes. and an electrical tortoise. and storm bears–”

there’s a volcano called mount halog on the northwestern dragon-head peninsula of alukah that began to erupt in 332 VE—twenty-five years ago—and has been more or less continuously oozing lava and half-formed grimm ever since.

acid rain (and snow) is a worldwide issue because of the extreme volcanism and in rainy climates settlements exist in a more or less constant state of repair and reconstruction; once a settlement is abandoned it will fall into ruin very, very fast unless the climate is extremely arid. the most volcanically active regions in the world are northern alukah, the palash basin, and the east coast of anima; volcanic smog blows north to kuchinashi from the palash basin fairly regularly.

black rain is a very dangerous weather phenomenon caused by ateric ash—the stuff grimm disintegrate into when they die—floating up into the atmosphere and then precipitating down as liquid atrum. which. coagulates into new grimm. the drippings from the wyvern in canon are the same in principle but much more severe; typically black rains will spawn lots of small grimm—think rat- or cat-sized—and may not leave puddles large enough to form something like a beowolf at all. but a swarm of rat-sized grimm is still no picnic, and black rain is difficult to forecast, so within the vytal league it’s standard practice for huntsmen and grimm extirpation forces to be kept at the ready whenever heavy precipitation is expected, just in case it’s tainted.

the oceans are also quite a bit more acidic than earth’s and tend to be very nutrient-rich near the poles and barren with pockets of life here and there in the equatorial regions—which, as discussed in the Whale Post, in combination with the relative cold creates selective pressure for VERY LARGE akin to the phenomenon of abyssal gigantism but extended higher into the middle pelagic zones. the greatest diversity and density of oceanic life is around the north pole.

(the MONSTER WHALES are called hafgufa, females live in pods around the north pole, males are solitary and range worldwide.)

also,

because atrum does not freeze above absolute zero, and because the planetary mantle is atrum intermixed with magma, every spreading rift in the ocean also constantly pumps out rivers of atrum, which 1. plays an important role in moving and mixing waters to sustain those pockets of nutrient-rich waters where marine life flourishes in the equatorial regions, and 2. slowly but steadily spawns diluvian grimm. the VAST majority of grimm in the world are sea monsters born from these underwater rivers :)

#the guiding philosophy here is keep it in the neighborhood of earthlike but in a way that #only emerges through the interaction of these hellish extremes.#the brothers’ world was a paradise by divine fiat—without them remnant needs constant volcanism to be habitable.#through destruction: life.#the plate tectonics subordinate to the themes or else what’s the point. etc.

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gshina · 1 year

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When I think about the difference between Finland and Sweden in Eurovision, it has always been clearly different for me.

Sweden knows how to be that factory-like perfect machine that creates songs. I myself have never liked Swedish representatives that much, I disliked Måns Zelmerlöw’s as well both Loreen’s songs with the simply reason - its boring. In the last decade I can name only two Swedish songs that I have liked which are Frans’s If I Were Sorry (2016) and Benjamin Ingrosso’s Dance You Off (2018). I've been of the opinion for a long time that swedish songs are the same, it’s the same perfectly sound pop machine song what you can hear every day on radio. it's like playing the same old record over and over and always the jury eat the same old smelly cheese and it's not fair. The problem with that is that it encourages countries to send in non-offensive pop music in order to appeal to the professional jury, most of which will be very mediocre and boring to watch. If the people didn't get a vote, we wouldn't see entries like Finland or Croatia. Those kinds of performances are what people watch Eurovision for! Nobody (should not) wants to see a non-offensive pop music contest. We want originality! We want fun! Eurovision is about the fun, this is not The Voice or Idols.

When I think about Finland, the success has been variable, but what I'm proud of is how at least Finland doesn't send the same old garbage every year. We have taken risks, risks which certainly not every one of them has been my favorite but I think that daring to take risks is one of the most appreciated quality what you can have. The last night Finland had one of the most unique songs ever and now I am not afraid to say how I feel I have been cheated. And before anyone has time to comment that "Finns are just bitter when Sweden took the victory in front of their noses" this is about much bigger than national cheating.

Käärijä's popularity among the international Eurovision nations has been extraordinary. During the five-day week polls, comment fields and reaction videos were filled with green emojis, Finnish flags and Cha Cha Cha shouts. The reactions of the live audience at the finals were also incredible. During Käärijä's performance, the large audience wildly sang along. The greatest moment, however, was when the impatient audience got tired of Sweden's growing neck in the town hall votes and burst into shouts of protest.

Three minutes later, in the midst of all this ecstasy, the rug was pulled from under our feet. The situation was simply awkward that all felt wrong in every blood cell of me. This can't go like this. The public had made Käärijä a phenomenon. The audience cheered Käärijä in a way that has not been seen before in the history of Eurovision but the professional jury made all of that look like nothing.

There are five music professionals in the jury of each country. So 185 councilors have been given the same power as hundreds of millions of viewers at home. council whose task was originally to prevent favoritism from neighbors? Nevertheless, year after year, it is precisely the "professional jury" who, by chance consider their own border neighbors and language partners the best of all. How is this fair?

The audience was just entertained by Käärijä. So much so that viewers wanted to use their own money to show their support for their favourite. Who is the show even made for if the audience doesn't get to choose their winner?

My not-so-unpopular opinion is that jury votes must be abandoned or at least reduced in weight. The Finnish Uuden Musiikin Kilpailu has already taken a great step in this regard, when in the finals of the competition, the public votes had a weight of 75 percent and the international juries only 25 percent. By renewing the voting system, the power would be given to those for whom the program is made to those who listen to Eurovision songs.

Today, Sunday, Finnish flags fly in Finland, of course, in honor of Mother's Day. But in my heart, the blue cross flags have been hoisted equally for Finland's victory.

Because that's who we are. Real winners.

In bitter disappointment I'm hovering right now and I'll be hovering for a very long time my mind also brushes with thoughts like how I would like to deny yesterday's results, abolish the jury vote praying so hard something shady happened with the jury votes and the result will be declared invalid oh and a bit also ban Sweden too, but especially the juries.

unfortunately I have to bring it up as well how we all know that Eurovision voting is also a bit shady..? It's Abba's anniversary next year? Doesn't seem suspicious at all. To win twice and bring back the trophy on an important year? yeah it does seem fishy. A lesser known artist catapulted into stardom? Loreen been internationally known for years. A country getting a chance to host after never/rarely doing so before? Sweden’s had it 6 times already. An underdog taking the crown by being an audience pleaser? She was the bookies’ favourite from the start. Eurovision being one of the biggest, most exciting things they’ve ever done? She’s done it all before.

None of these things are personally Loreen’s fault, and I actually feel bad for her that this win will be remembered as one that the public clearly wanted to give to someone else and being hated by so many people now and most won't even remember that she won. But it does all feel extra slimy and calculated on Sweden’s part, especially given the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s Waterloo just happening to be next year. It all feels very hollow and it will become pointless to argue.

I think that at this point it has become clear to everyone that I am from Finland myself yes and I really love my home country. My intention is not to bash Loreen this was not her fault nor to take away opportunities from any country. Sweden is my dear neighbor despite all this, but I hope that everyone understands the disappointment and even anger that I feel right now. I want to get justice that belongs to my country and was decided by the public and audience. For my country but also justice for every country that gets discriminated just because the jury think they know ”better” than the audience who is supporting, dancing, cheering, breathing and loving Eurovision air more than anyone else. Power belongs to the audience.

#finland #eurovision #käärijä #eurovision song contest #eurovision song contest 2023 #sweden #loreen

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notbecauseofvictories · 1 year

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Books of 2022

In 2022, I read fewer books overall (143, down from last year’s ridiculous 303) but I did manage to cut down on my romance novel reading---a respectable 52% instead of last year’s 78%. The consequence of this is that I did actually read more good books this year, books I could talk about with other people and inspired feelings and thoughts that rattled around my head afterwards. Plus some actual nonfiction!

Going through all of them, what I liked about them, why they made such an impression, would take a while---plus I’ve already talked about most of these in my books tag. So I’m just going to invite everyone to ask about anything that catches their eye!

BEST FICTION (IN THE ORDER I READ THEM) ** indicates a particular favorite

The House of Small Shadows, Adam Nevill

**The Cipher, Kathe Koja

Eartheater, Dolores Reyes

Hadriana in All My Dreams, René Depestre

**Tender is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica

You've Lost a Lot of Blood, Eric LaRocca

The Beautiful Ones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle

War for the Oaks, Emma Bull

Girl A, Abigail Dean

This Might Hurt, Stephanie Wrobel

**Burning Girls and Other Stories, Veronica Schanoes

Eva Ibbotson’s A Countess Below Stairs, A Company of Swans, & Magic Flutes

Deerskin, Robin McKinley

BEST NONFICTION

An Iliad, Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare

**Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher

Urban Folklore in the Paperwork Empire, Alan Dundes & Carl R. Pagter

**Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

**Men, Women & Chainsaws, Carol J. Clover

[romance novels and most disliked books under the cut---I did give these a bit of an explanation, because being asked about romance novels makes me itchy. We shall never speak of these again.]

ROMANCE NOVEL READING

Vivienne Lorret (How to Forget a Duke, Ten Kisses to Scandal, The Rogue to Ruin, When a Marquess Loves a Woman, How to Steal a Scoundrel's Hear) Admittedly, nothing particularly unique about these---however, they are more traditional romance and a pretty decent attempt at actual regency-style manners, so I enjoyed myself reading them.

Olivia Atwater (Half a Soul, Ten Thousand Stitches, Longshadow) I actually sincerely loved these! Supernatural historical romance from a solid writer. Plus, the series has angrier, more class-conscious sensibilities than all the romance novels I've read---and is less hypocritical about it too, since the characters are largely not nobility, and there's no marrying dukes involved.

Alice Coldwater (His Forsaken Bride, An Ill-Made Match, The Unlovely Bride, Wed By Proxy) So admittedly, I don’t recommend reading all four of these together---it becomes increasingly clear that Coldwater can only write one and a half heroines, and both of them are excessively weepy. Nevertheless, I took a total leap of faith on this (historical fantasy romance isn't typically my genre) and was rewarded by a lot of delightful pining, some court politics, and the 1.5 heroines she can write are fun to follow around.

C.L. Wilson (The Winter King, The Sea King) If last year was about reading every romance novel about dukes I could find, this year was about finding all the fantasy romance novels. (Shout out to Stephanie Garber who also helped feed this inexplicable urge!) Anyway, this series was fun, similar to the above in that it’s fake fantasy politics and some romance, and that’s a combination that works for me.

MOST DISLIKED BOOKS

Redshirts, John Scalzi I have never despised a book quite like this one! I still can't tell if it's the smirkingly obvious Star Trek meta of it all, or the hat on a hat that is the last chapter/coda 1. I did like coda 3, but only because it felt like the only quietly, emotionally sincere part of the whole stupid book.

High Times in the Low Parliament, Kelly Robinson Novellas must be tricky to write---I’ve read a fistful or so, and find them to be wildly variable in quality and effectiveness. That said....the author’s attempt to resolve entrenched political problems via dance made me roll my eyes so hard I strained a muscle. It ruined what might have otherwise been a fun time, since I did like the narrator's charmingly disaffected perspective

Always Be My Duchess, Amalie Howard Emotional honesty and vulnerability has no place in romance novels. I read historical romance specifically so people won’t talk about their feelings, and the fact that romancelandia keeps shoehorning therapy-speak into my regency may in fact be my villain origin story. However, even worse than that is this book’s use of “totally” and "patriarchy" in a completely ahistorical way, betraying a nauseating disinterest in the time period being written about. Worse than even that: the total fucking coward's move it is to write a Pretty Woman fic but then have the heroine be a virgin and not a sex worker at all. God knows we can't be interesting.

Death, Laura Thelassa This one is my own fault. I did think "hey isn't that the romance series with the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse? I read one of those a long time ago; I should give it another shot." (I promise, I regretted it instantly.) However, it is another excellent entry in the long list of cowardly books that refuse to actually lean into enemies to lovers as a trope. Also, if you have undying protagonists? they should kill each other more.

#from the bookshelf #long post for ts

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it-may-be-dull-but-im-determined · 1 year

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is Farscape the sort of thing that takes a few episodes to find its groove? should i be patient if we're not besties right away?

(i'm prone to snap judgements and don't want to make a mistake here)

Ahhhh so Farscape can be a WILDLY interesting study in complete contradictions. I agree with everything Cat Valente says is brilliant about it in this thread and this very long and detailed essay about why you should watch Farscape and yet also I will sit there fast-forwarding great chunks of season one especially because the quality control from episode to episode is so wildly variable. When I say variable, I mean some episodes feel embarrassingly amateur at times, especially after twenty something years of higher budget, vaguely more evolved TV SF. Occasionally it doesn't know what show it's trying to be, or what show it was the previous episode. It has a terrible weakness for bad puns in episode titles. It can be trite. It can feel weirdly childish, for a show that is frequently about aliens fucking. It's really really very silly on occasion and I have a particularly very low tolerance for second hand embarrassment. Farscape can be frequently embarrassing, but the fact I'm still flailing about it after twenty something years despite that is kind of significant.

Because when it's good, it's so incredibly fucking high quality excellent. It's got all the chemistry, all the high stakes heists and the high melodrama sacrifice, all the dealing with grief and trauma and how do you deal with a legacy of repeated genocide and fascism. Everyone is a space criminal on a stolen sentient prison ship. What the fuck even is the greater good. How do you deal with being a parent. Most of the cast are emoting through inch thick layers of foam latex and the other half are wearing fetish gear (OR THEY'RE PUPPETS. OR CGI ORGANIC SENTIENT SPACESHIPS), but they're really fucking good at said emoting and it's still heartbreaking. It's been twenty years and I will still start crying if I so much as hear the season three version of the theme tune (oh god the theme song evolution).

The silly episodes throughout season one are even weirder because it does pretty much find its feet straightaway with the pilot ep - it's snappy and emotional and charming and clever, and yes the tropes are there but the tropes didn't have quite the same level of tired significance back in 1999? I watched that first ep and was cackling over how fucking fantastic it was. It was such a refreshing change in 1999 that it sailed me through any of the occasionally dodgy stuff that followed.

It's also very very... Aussie, which to me covers a lot of the humour and the sheer demented glee of what the creators wanted to run with? The cast has chemistry, in spades, and the characters flirt and fuck (and... one of them is a hot blue zen plant priestess who orgasms in bright light. Obviously.) and everything is just a little bit.. extra. It has an episode where everyone is a loony tunes cartoon. It has an episode inspired by A Clockwork Orange. It has small stabby robots. It's squelchy and makes fart jokes ALL THE TIME (mostly because one of the main puppets is a former emperor who farts helium and okay yep it's pretty funny. The other puppet is wise and kind and troubled and possibly complicit in war crimes. This fucking show I can't even).

...I'm just going to apologise for this essay, and say probably go read the Cat Valente thing because it includes much more key whether you should in fact watch Farscape information such as:

“They’re all gonna be Australian or Kiwi! Except for one guy! It’s basically gonna be a tour of Sydney’s underground club scene, even for the smallest parts! And I mean that, everyone is going to be wearing leather BDSM gear 24/7, even the heroes. I’M TELLIN’ YA WE GOT MAGDA SZUBANSKI! THIS THING IS GOLD! Literally, the whole color palette is like really gold. With most of a Crayola box taped on top of it. SPACE IS AUSTRALIAN NOW. ALL OF IT. DEAL WITH IT.”

there will be an almost unbelievable amount of goo involved. Like if there is a Goo Department, and anyone is left over after Nickelodeon’s job fair last week, we need all the goo.”

“Because of all the sex and violence that just barely doesn’t cross the decency lines we’re still kind of feeling out right now?”

“That, too. But mostly because we need all the makeup and then after we’re done turning regular humans a TON of nutbar colors, everything else is going to be just…dripping. All the time. Just drenched in slime. Good slime, bad slime, it will constantly be hard to say. But it’s like Coco Chanel always said, before you leave the house, look in the mirror and upend a bucket of colorful sludge over your head.”

#farscape #space is australian now #i am incapable of writing about this show normally #also i just realised it's no longer streaming ANYWHERE in the uk ffs #I HAVE TO DIG OUT MY DVD BOXSETS #god it's like it's 2007 all over again #i feel like i should stress that my super low tolerance for shows being embarrassing is the biggest issue here #coupled with the wild emotional rollercoaster of farscape quality #i didn't even mention john/aeryn because i'm trying to be normal about this #but i an incapable of being normal about it #also we won't talk about the fact it got cancelled with two seasons worth of plots left and then wrapped up in a four hour miniseries...#...but at least we got the damn miniseries and an ending. small mercies.

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is-the-snake-video-cute · 1 year

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So i have always wanted a boa imperator, but first i need to move out of the house as my parents don’t like snakes ((any other reptile is fine, so i don’t get it))

That means i have to ask, can one take care of a boa imperator on disability benefits? Or should i get a job too?

I'm afraid that disability benefits can be too variable for me to say. I can give you a rough estimate of the cost to help you decide, though!

On a monthly basis, boa constrictor's aren't super expensive snakes. You can probably budget in the realm of $20 for food a month, just depending on how expensive the feeder rodents available to you are. Substrate will be more expensive since BCs need large enclosures - as a baby, a $10 8 quart bag of mulch will be plenty, but as an adult enclosure deep cleans might run up to the $50-100 range depending on where you get your substrate. You only really need to deep clean a snake enclosure every few months as long as you're good with spot-cleaning. The exact expenses of the heat sources you use will vary depending on what you choose - as an example, ceramic heat emitters are about $40 but they'll last a few years.

Your biggest challenege might be enclosure upgrades. As an adult, BCIs average around 5-8 feet, and I recommend a 6 foot enclosure at least for them. The price point for those can vary wildly depending on where you get it (ask around at a reptile expo to see if there are any local sellers, they're often cheaper and great quality), but they're not cheap enclosures. You'll be looking at a $700 price tag at least, but the good news is you will have a few years until the snake is big enough to need it. I know it can be very hard to save money on disability, though.

That also applies to potential veterinary costs. Before getting any pet, I think it's a good idea to make sure you'll be prepared in case of unforseen medical emergencies.

There's no hard-and-fast answer here, really. I'd encourage you to sit down and plan out expenses and consider if a large snake could fit into your budget along with factors like food, rent, etc.

Good luck!

#not a rating #boa constrictors

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cartograffiti · 4 months

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December '23 reading diary

I finished 4 books in December, which is always a month in which I read less. I'm also going to talk a bit about reading challenges!

All the Hidden Paths is the second Tithenai Chronicles book by Foz Meadows. Apparently this is now a finished duology, but I really thought it could have run for many books and I would have inhaled them all happily. Read A Strange and Stubborn Endurance first. They're not light books, but they're remarkably hopeful and uplifting, character arcs of healing from violence and homophobia set in a fantasy/romance/political drama plot. I wanted even more, but that's likely because they were written For Me. I love how Meadows writes culture, the emotional beats knock me flat, and they work in lots of tasty character depth.

I was not wildly impressed with the photography book Accidentally Wes Anderson compiled by Wally Koval. This features photos contributed by a large number of members of an internet group by the same name, and while the pictures are gorgeous, there's not quite enough variety in the subject types. The text is of highly variable quality, never stellar, and sometimes outright tedious.

I love Cat Sebastian's romance series The Cabots, and I thoroughly enjoyed the new novella Luke and Billy Finally Get a Clue, though since no characters from the previous books appear, I'm not sure whether the connection is really justified. Never mind, it's fun and sweet. Luke and Billy are pro baseball players in the 1950s, and when one of them gets hit in the head with a ball, he decides what he really needs for his recovery is to travel to another state, where his crush is house-sitting during a family birth, and they spend the whole time poking at each other until they admit their massive crushes. Cute, and cute in part because they are both a bit annoying and bitchy and find that attractive about each other!

Dubious Documents is a faux-ephemera puzzle book by Nick Bantock which I wanted to buy my mother for a Christmas present, but when I sounded out her interest level I accidentally inspired her to buy it herself. Oh, well! We both solved it very easily, sometimes checking with each other, and had a great time. Every puzzle is a highly illustrated envelope attached to the spine, with a sheet within printed on both sides with collage art. The book has a "clues" page, but many simply cannot be solved without using them (and I don't mean because they're hard, I mean because there's no guidance what you're after just visually), so we both recommend reading them before you get stuck. The hardest one for me had to do with interpreting a sailor's personnel record, and the hardest for Mom required unscrambling letters to make the names of Japanese cities. Unique, pretty, very giftable (if only I'd been allowed to, Mom ;)). We're working on a harder book of his now, which I'll talk about next time.

Reading challenges talk: In the last couple of years, I've really enjoyed using challenges to help me prioritize my tbr (and push me to get off it). Book Riot's annual prompt list is great, I like their variety and difficulty level. Popsugar's is fun, but I have not been as impressed with their prompts, which sometimes feel to me like they were trying to promote a specific book, or do something winky appropriate to the year. StoryGraph's staff-designed annual challenges are very thoughtful, and I'm going to do both their genre challenge and read the world challenge again this year. The last of these has been the hardest to complete each time, by which I mean I haven't completed it, twice, so I'm really hoping this will be the year. It's short (10 books) compared to these others, but it takes more research, as books in translation are less available.

Personal missions for '24: There are quite a few series I'm working my way through, but I'm particularly planning to wrap up The Witcher books, which I stalled out on because another library patron in my area was reading them just ahead of me and kept keeping them out overdue. I'm also intending to get into the Lymond series this year, because I would like to scream and die with certain of my friends. :)

#A case for December: evergreen - frost - wood smoke - cinnamon.#reading diary #bookblr

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sea-salted-wolverine · 1 year

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So I live in the state that drinks the most coffee per capita and invented every funky coffee trend you can think of 10 years before Portland stole it. If you go to Starbucks in this state it is because you are either new or a sucker for branding.

I don't drink coffee.

But there are about a million coffee shops I can choose from and they've all got their own gimick. I can order a London Fog just about anywhere and I will get one. The quality of these London Fogs and coffee in general is wildly variable.

A London Fog is 2 Earl Gray tea bags, hot water, steamed milk, and honey or vanilla, sometime both.

I have found coffee shops that get the real good shit tea, And local honey and make at beverage that tastes like it should be a lot more expensive than it is.

That is not what happened yesterday.

I have been a barista, I generally try to be polite, but this time I was so confused by the cup that was handed to me that I was inadvertently rude. I feel a little bad, because my 1st reaction on being handed whatever that was was to ask "what is this?"

I didn't get an answer. I had to go and I had already paid so I figured whatever, I'll just drink it. I'm not allergic to anything, it won't kill me.

It's important to know that the density of coffee shops is such that there is another coffee shop across the parking lot. I got a London Fog at that coffee shop and it was one of the God Tier, tea imported from Sri Lanka, Wildflower honey from friendly bees, Milk from happy cows, Perfect brew in a personalized cup, kind of London Fogs.

So I might be a little unfair in my critique of the one I got from this coffee shop.

But at the same...

From the top:

Ice

Tea bag?

Cold milk

Another tea bag?

A half inch of congealed vanilla syrup

T'was bad man. Cold wet tea bag. No tea. Accidentally slurped up an entire mouthful of vanilla syrup. Also while I know that the rest of the world has moved on to springtime, it was 27ﾟF. I ordered a hot drink on purpose.

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veliseraptor · 1 year

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What's your favorite you tube channels to watch at the moment?

you have mistaken me for someone who watches youtube channels

no seriously though, I watch youtube videos...every once in a while, but never with any consistency and lately I haven't been watching them at all. it's a format I like but often don't have the patience or focus to sit with; generally speaking I'd rather just read an essay than watch a video essay. nothing against the format as a whole (and certainly not saying no youtubers are worth watching); just not my general wheelhouse.

I have been slowly watching my way through this playlist of horror related videos, though, so I guess maybe that. I have found the quality/how interested I am wildly variable, just as a disclaimer. I feel like horror is one of the main places where I am more down for a video essay than I am otherwise, particularly when it comes to movies/video games where the medium is very visual to begin with.

OH WAIT technically Critical Role is a Youtube channel and I'm watching that pretty regularly! if that counts. I feel like it's not precisely in the spirit of the question but it is an honest answer.

#conversating #anonymous #lise memes

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wanderingnork · 7 months

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V/H/S 85:

I have never liked every single part of a V/H/S movie before. There’s always an inconsistent quality to it: stories that don’t belong in the same anthology, wildly variable style, a frame narrative that doesn’t quite gel. And that’s a risk you run with an anthology, so I’ve never held it against the franchise.

That was NOT a problem here. V/H/S 85 had a unified style and set of themes, with a framework that served as a lovely horror story on its own. There was fluidity to it—I could imagine that this was a cheap homemade VHS tape I picked up at a thrift store. Each story was distinct, but held together in a continuous path. Like beads tied on a string.

As someone raised on 80s media, and as a fan of 80s horror, I can safely say this was a bullseye as far as emulating the decade it was set in. A killer taking out college kids in the woods. Cyberspace monsters. Bad science gone wrong, in a very oozy way. All things that are familiar from 80s horror. But there was a modern spin to it all—unexpected turns, genre conventions of the 2010s and 2020s, upgraded cinematography—that made it feel fresh.

Warning for a gratuitous amount of gore and blood. BUCKETS of the stuff. Organs all over the place! Which is itself very 80s, but still—if you’re used to the tasteful blood and sterility of mainstream modern horror, you’re in for a shocking ride. I was DELIGHTED.

There are flaws I could critique, but I’m choosing not to. I’m perfectly happy with this movie. V/H/S 85 is the kind of horror I like best: shocking and surprising yet comfortingly familiar, full of monsters and magic, drenched in blood, and full of heart. Highly, highly recommended. I’ll certainly be watching it again.

Edited to add: this Polygon article details some of the technical aspects of filming and the thought processes of the directors going into the movie. There’s a real reason that this movie felt like comfort food to me.

#nork rants #the horror tag #only 7 more movies to go to the 200 mark!

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watermelinoe · 1 year

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Hi, it’s fic anon. I’m kinda embarrassed to see how long my message was, but tysm for answering it anyway. I think women are unique among oppressed groups in that I’ve never seen any other group so desperate to reject ownership of their own experiences and give them to their oppressors. Every other group will say: “This shit happened to me and you need to know.” But women say: “Nothing happened to me. Actually, in my stories, all the bad shit happens to men and it’s way worse when it happens to them anyway.” I saw this fic the other day where this canonically jacked, assertive male character is depicted as an abused, waifish, lusted-after prostitute, and it baffles me, because not only is it wildly OOC, it’s also overwhelmingly a female experience. I think this self-denial of female oppression mostly happens because the axis of sex is also the axis of attraction. Straight/bi women WANT to love men, in order to reconcile that sexual attraction they have no choice about. No one wants to be attracted to their oppressors, so women cope by telling themselves a lie that men aren’t oppressors—they’re actually victims like us who need our love because they suffer more than we do. That fic is a female hobby is surely a damning judgment on the quality of this world’s men. Men don’t need to write escapist fiction about women because they don’t have the emotional void in het relationships that women do. But lesbians who write M/M fic rather than F/F intrigue me. For them to be more comfortable writing about men than women suggests that their experiences with misogyny overpower their sexual attraction to women.

As for censorship, there will be always be stories that inspire negative actions, but I don’t hold the author responsible for the ignorance of their audience. Creators refusing to create does not make the world safer. Sure, sharks might be safer if Jaws was never made, but it wouldn’t have cured the world of people who lack critical thinking. Likewise, Lolita did not create pedophiles; it revealed them. Ignorance will always exist, the only variable is who’s the victim. The way people react to stories says more about them than it does about the creator, and I think that’s the point of art. All art that could be called “necessary” is going to generate discourse. There is no way to make all writing “safe”. Stories exist because the world is not safe, and with women being the most vulnerable, it’s women who need stories the most. To me, being unable to express oneself creatively in an unsafe world is far more damaging than so-called “morally irresponsible” art. Censorship harms women more than anyone else, and having unfettered access to the voices of other women is vital to us connecting and finding solidarity with each other, even if it risks us encountering harmful beliefs along the way. There is no perfect solution and I’m not optimistic enough to strive for one, and everyone I’ve seen who’s tried to criticize this has failed to provide a realistic alternative. It’s futile to try to prevent all potential harm, and I think the best we can do is choose the free speech option, which is the only option that allows us to discuss the harm that occurred.

yes, i think this results from the deep social entanglement women have with our oppressors that just doesn't exist with other types of oppression. we may be publicly segregated from our oppressors in order to strip us of social power, but within our homes there are almost no women living in male-free environments. and women want to love and be loved by men, not even necessarily in a romantic way. we start out craving the approval of our male family members, male peers, male celebrities and male "geniuses," to us men represent what it means to be fully human. and the reality that we are not human to them is just too painful and that influences what women write

i was raised by librarians so i'm really inclined to agree with you, i am, i just wish there was some way to mitigate the harm from certain content that could be fairly implemented. i think it's a complex value debate, whether free speech is more important than public safety, and i don't want to devalue either but there's no way to uphold one without sacrificing the other to some extent. and i worry about the consequences of sacrificing free speech. however, some things are called "free speech" that really shouldn't be tolerated, and we already have some idea of what that looks like - inciting violence, dangerous misinformation campaigns, direct personal abuse toward someone else, etc. i would also argue that porn isn't "free speech." i think the problem with blanket statements is that each situation is nuanced, author intent matters, context matters. iirc there was a judge that famously said about CP, "i know it when i see it"

#answered

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al-ghoul · 2 years

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I am a Billy centrist. I am not interested and do not wish to participate in The Discourse.

Duffers did a shitty job writing the character. In result, the character is fucking horrible.

Dacre did an amazing job trying to work with the shitty half-assed script he was given. In result, the character has redeeming qualities to him and looks more like a person.

Billy is, however, an imaginary person imagined by people with two wildly contradicting opinions about what they're imagining. I cannot possibly argue about the contents of his character in the same way I would do so about an IRL dude who has had abused someone. He is not real. He was written one way and played another. Real people don't work like that.

Everyone chooses for themselves what do they wish to perceive in the media they consume. Billy can be seen as an irredeemable abuser if you side with the writers and put their authorial intent first. Billy can be seen as a tragic fucked-up kid if you analyze the acting. I do not understand the ever-burning dumpster fire of a battle that is happening around him. There are things about him to be hated. There are things about him to be appreciated. That's it.

I ship steddie and don't really ship harringrove - but can read fics and look at the pictures of not-my-ship without collapsing. I would rather not put Billy and Eddie in one room together, because the whole thing would malfunction and explode. (I think Eddie as a character is suffering from the same creative contradictions, because Duffers LOVE to step on the same rake again and again and again). Two self-contradicting dudes should not be put together, too many variables. Thing go boom. But I don't understand the ship war. The existence of another ship does not kill yours, it does not wipe it from existence.

The arguments I've seen on both sides of this holy war are sometimes bewildering and sometimes very solid. The behavior I've seen on both sides is mostly bewildering. I guess the subject of the matter, being quite a heavy one, touches different people in different ways, and people react accordingly to their life experiences. Obviously, fucking Duffers should not ever be touching a subject like that with their grubby little hands, for they cannot possibly handle it properly.

I am very sorry for everyone who was genuinely hurt by the whole thing and by their opponents. This is upsetting.

I only wish I would not see The Discourse every time I go the Dacre tag to look at the pictures. For some reason people insist on tagging their war with the actor's name. May the Void have mercy on my soul.

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ithisatanytime · 3 months

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youtube

bladee - DRAIN STORY

“In 2012 Australian psychologist Gina Perry investigated Milgram's data and writings and concluded that Milgram had manipulated the results, and that there was a "troubling mismatch between (published) descriptions of the experiment and evidence of what actually transpired." She wrote that "only half of the people who undertook the experiment fully believed it was real and of those, 66% disobeyed the experimenter".

you know whats funny about this? i wasnt aware of gina perrys findings here and i not only publicly voiced that the milgrim experiments were fucking bullshit but i stated exactly how they were likely bullshit, the main variable that they could not control for was that human beings are VERY good at telling when someone is pretending to be in pain versus actually in pain, when we watch films we SUSPEND our disbelief this process is semi-voluntary, i dont believe a single fucking american back then would believe that the study they signed up for would have them shocking another person to death, that is fucking RETARDED and i dont care how good the actor is that they are pretending to shock, that is an important confounding variable that immediately renders the results of this experiment meaningless, and i only had to think about it for a few minutes, so how did this shoddy half assed (even more so than i had initially surmised) experiment become the darling of academia and the media? think about all the famous psychological experiments that you know of, of the ones you can think of off the top of your head, give yourself a day to come up with more you had forgotten, how many of those experiments could have been used to lend credence to the idea that a whole country of people say germany, suddenly could be whipped into a frenzy of mass murder by some authority, say hitler. and for the remainder of the famous pop psychology experiments you can recall, of the ones that couldnt be used to make the holocaust myth more believable, how many of the remaining pop psych experiments that were made famous could be used to explain away rapidly worsening quality of life? calhouns mouse utopia comes to mind, it wasnt a bad experiment to be honest but its results and its aims WILDLY misrepresented, calhouns rat “utopia” wasnt to see what would happen if a society became so successful as to become decadent and inevitably spiral into the sort of social conditions we see now, but it was to show what would happen to rats and people if while all their other needs were met they were crammed together without any TERRITORY and overpopulated into a small space, and the results are a brutal and unnatural (it is natural but uncommon) social hierarchy where only a very small portion have mating rights, and this makes perfect sense, if these rats found themselves on an island perhaps they floated there from a shipwreck on some flotsam and then bread themselves out of space on the tiny island, if everyone kept breeding they would quickly literally run out of space and start dying en mass, so there is an emergency protocol deep in the primal parts of the rodent brain that start this strick and decidedly miserable and cruel transformation of social behavior. when calhoun recreates these conditions and the mouse society collapses, the takeaway is not that these current jewish impositions and their effects on our quality of life are the result of some natural life cycle of a society, but rather that compulsary “education” in which we send our children to work almost full time desk jobs so that women can play at working instead of being mothers might actually be turning us all into something quite unnatural.

#youtube

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