On Saturday, 27 April 2024 Princess Benedikte's grandson Konstantin Johannsmann celebrated his confirmation in Bad Berleburg.
Princess Benedikte with her daughter Princess Nathalie and grandchildren Konstantin and Louisa.
Princess Benedikte with her daughter Princess Alexandra and grandchildren Richard and Ingrid.
Photos by Kaspar Wenstrup/Billed Bladet
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top 9 books!
Tagged by the iconic @oatflatwhite to post a list of my top 9 books!! Not easy!! I ruled out poetry, non-fiction, anthologies, compendia, & reference to make it easier, so this is basically my 9 fave novels lol. TO THE LIST:
"Invisible Cities" ~ Italo Calvino
"The Eyre Affair" ~ Jasper Fforde
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" ~ Douglas Adams
"The Odyssey" ~ Homer
"Cain's Jawbone" ~ Torquemada
"Ella Minnow Pea" ~ Mark Dunn
"Look Who's Morphing" ~ Tom Cho
"The Puzzle Ring" ~ Kate Forsyth
"The Martian Chronicles" ~ Ray Bradbury
HONOURABLE MENTION: The Menelaiad (38pg short story) from the book "Lost in the Funhouse" by John Bath! I know I said no compendia but this story made me BSOD during my very first reading & I have not recovered yet 😊 thank u for yr understanding
Tagging @clareguilty (or is it @clare-guilty?), @swampgirl666, @coldforest, & @gothic-goon 💌
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all the captains and lieutenants accidentally get slipped some of ukitake's fucked up gigaweed edibles, what happens
First of all, it's not an accident, they straight-up plan a Friday-Night-Of-A-Three-Day-Weekend event of this. Everyone is curious, and Ukitake thinks it will be a funny way to celebrate his Birthday. He is correct:
Yamamoto: Veteran of The Dank Arts, gets real high but not unpleasantly so. Would do it again next time he has a long weekend to enjoy it!
Sasakibe: Claims Ludwig Wittgenstein makes PERFECT sense now, attempts to write this philosophical revelation down but is thwarted by the jammed machinations of a clicky pen.
Soi Fon: Gives herself a hernia laughing at one (1) bad pun.
Yoruichi: Used to Urahara's Megaweed Edibles, so approaches the Gigaweed with undue confidence, declares This Edible Ain't Shit five minutes in and eats a second one. She has to be coaxed down from the top of the fridge where she's hiding from The Hatmen by bribing her with a can of Tuna. (Ukitake keeps the $21-a-can Good Shit in the house)
Omaeda: Creates a God-teir marinara Sauce, AND has the good sense to have Nemu pause her Game of Go and come into the kitchen to write down what he did.
Rose: Writes a magnificent new symphony, it's his best work ever, it's life alteringly beautiful, it's effervescent-
When he sobers up, it's half a piccolo solo that barely qualifies as a ringtone.
Izuru: In the kitchen crying while eating an inadvisable amount of Omaeda's Spaghetti Marinara.
Retsu: Category Five Mukbang Incident
Isane: Thinks she's filming the Mukbang Incident, actually has her phone open to the calculator app.
Shinji: refuses to touch the Gigaweed because he "Owes The Hatmen Money" and nobody can tell if he's joking or not (he's not).
Momo: Literally Everything is HILARIOUS
Hiyori: Did not know it was possible to have a bigger, gayer crush on Momo, but she somehow opened up a new level of lesbianics. She calls it Gay 2.
Byakuya: Couchlocked for 24 hours straight.
Renji: Couchlocked right there with him, but able to text Izuru to bring them Spaghetti.
Komamura: Can't. Canine Weed Toxicity. (Relieved, offers to spend the weekend watching Toshiro and Yachiru so he has an excuse to go winter camping over the weekend)
Iba: Got High as FUCK. Found out later that the thing he actually ate was a Little Debbie Cosmic Brownie.
Shunsui: his alcohol tolerance actually makes his weed tolerance terrible so he's on the floor from jokingly licking the wrapper.
Nanao: Challenging people to knife fights (Romantic Intent).
Tousen: Immediately passes out because he managed to get his blood pressure down to normal levels, sleeps for 26 hours straight and wakes up feeling genuinely well-rested and in a good mood for the first time in two centuries.
Kensei: Gets his hand bitten at the Category 5 Mukbang Incident because he thought it would be funny to try to snitch off Retsu's plate.
Shuuhei: Attempting to refinance Shinji's debt with The Hatmen. Possibly succeeding?
Mashiro: Said "This Edible Ain't Shit", took a second, and appears to be unaffected. Playing Go with Nemu and winning.
Matsumoto: Makes the Hernia-inducing Pun. Will not STOP making Puns.
Hitsugaya: Being babysat by Komamura, would be madder about this if he wasn't also having a blast doing wintertime camping.
Kenpachi: Attempts to fight his own shadow, loses.
Yachiru: Also on the Wintertime Mountain Expedition, trying to talk Toshiro into joining her and Komamura on an Elk Hunt.
Ikkaku: Has done weed before, but only smoked it, but has a naturally suspicious nature and waits to see how Yoruichi does on her second edible, and avoids running afoul of The Hatmen.
Yumichika: Stays sober to collect blackmail on everyone. Actually films the Mukbang Incident for Isane
Mayuri: This is NOTHING compared to the Quantum Formaldymeth shit he's been on for the last century.
Urahara: from a prominent weed-growing family and lifetime connoisseur of The Herb. Takes one bite and realizes he's in deep shit, lies down on the floor next to Shuuhei and gives him terrible financial advice.
Nemu: Not chemically effected by The Edible but she loves A Group Social Activity so she's a little crunk on Social Recognition Euphoria and it's interfering with her game.
Ukitake, peeling his lieutenant off the floor: Y'all are wimps.
Rukia: has to be peeled off the floor, is affectionately dumped in the laps of Renji and Byakuya, where she forces them to have an emotionally honest and borderline normal conversation.
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This is a troubling article by UT Austin economist Dan Spears on predictions that world population growth will peak sometime during the 2060s to 2080s, and then will rapidly decline. We all know on some level that human population growth cannot continue at this pace, but the sudden drop that experts predict in the near future is alarming--as are the predicted consequences of a rapid human population decline.
This is a gift 🎁 link that will enable anyone to read the full article, whether or not they subscribe to The New York Times. Here are some excerpts from this interactive article.
The global human population has been climbing for the past two centuries. But what is normal for all of us alive today—growing up while the world is growing rapidly—may be a blip in human history.
Children born today will very likely live to see the end of global population growth.A baby born this year will be 60 in the 2080s, when demographers at the U.N. expect the size of humanity to peak. The Wittgenstein Center for Demography and Global Human Capital in Vienna places the peak in the 2070s. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington puts it in the 2060s. All of the predictions agree on one thing: We peak soon.
And then we shrink. Humanity will not reach a plateau and then stabilize. It will begin an unprecedented decline.
Because most demographers look ahead only to 2100, there is no consensus on exactly how quickly populations will fall after that. Over the past 100 years, the global population quadrupled, from two billion to eight billion. As long as life continues as it has — with people choosing smaller family sizes, as is now common in most of the world — then in the 22nd or 23rd century, our decline could be just as steep as our rise.
The article goes on to say:
[...] What would happen as a consequence [of a rapid decline in human population]? Over the past 200 years, humanity’s population growth has gone hand in hand with profound advances in living standards and health: longer lives, healthier children, better education, shorter workweeks and many more improvements. Our period of progress began recently, bringing the discovery of antibiotics, the invention of electric lightbulbs, video calls with Grandma and the possibility of eradicating Guinea worm disease. In this short period, humanity has been large and growing. Economists who study growth and progress don’t think this is a coincidence. Innovations and discoveries are made by people. In a world with fewer people in it, the loss of so much human potential may threaten humanity’s continued path toward better lives.
I encourage you to read the rest of this article. Whether or not one agrees with Dr. Spears's arguments, they are thought provoking.
[edited]
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Sara Chodosh created the graphics in the article, which were used to create the above gifs.
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