I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:
On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.
On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?
well, come to think of it, we’re at the top of the food chain but we almost exclusively hunt and kill prey out in the country.
raccoons and possums and foxes and crows all succeed in an urban environment because they’re opportunistic and observant. and almost none of them would have observed us pounce on one of their species and then start eating it, you know? a lot of them would have observed that we scream and chase them out of wherever we don’t want them to be, but other animals are territorial too. but there’s a number of situations where humans feed whoever’s bold enough to take them up on the offer, and we do tend to pull garbage off of other animals as soon as they slow down enough for us to catch. ‘a human got me but nothing bad happened’ is a much more frequent thing than ‘a human got me and tried to eat me’.
anyway like, we’re masters of our environment, we make weird shit happen all the time, we have lots of great food and sometimes we share, and we almost never eat someone. it makes sense for urban animals, over the last century or so, to just keep an eye out for opportunities to use us, and to pass the habit on to their kids.
It really is a weird, funny thing. Like yeah, technically they’re predators, and they get pretty screamy, especially if you try to take any of their stuff… but given the chance it seems like they’d rather help us out and sometimes they’ll just randomly give you food, so???
I mean, I guess in fairytales and myths we’ve got our fair share of stories about dangerous people/creatures who might well kill you or otherwise ruin your life, but to whom people nonetheless turn for help in desperate circumstances. So it’s not like the perspective is exactly a foreign thing to our own mindset, really… It’s just that, y’know, we can’t actually go make a deal with the faeries when there’s something we can’t figure out.
(Which brings me to an interesting thought about the ubiquitous rule about never eating the faery food lest you find yourself forever unsatisfied with anything in the human world - and the potential parallels to the dangers of feeding wildlife human food lest they become addicted and too tame and dependent to be safe for either themselves or us. Hmm.)
Okay, but that last bit with the Fae…makes almost perfect sense.
Of the stories I’ve read, the food of the Fae, its origins and effects, are often strange and/or obscure.- Just like our food to most animals.
The Fae are strange beings that seem to know weird things that give them power or an edge over us.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae work and live by strange rules also often nonsensical or obscure to us.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae can easily obtain vast amounts of things we consider rare/precious/desireable, and have no problem with dishing it out wantonly for no other reason than amusement.- Just like us to animals.
The Fae sometimes are amused by having us around, but only on their terms and IF it amuses/intrigues them.- Just like us to animals.
GUYS, I SENSE A PATTERN….
-they have arcane social conventions and the punishment for not paying the correct respects right is banishment, if you’re lucky, and death if you’re not.
-they have wild and unexpected parties where you’d least expect to find them, but if you’re bold enough to entertain them they’ll feed you and caress you and play with you all night.
-time runs strangely in their realm. their homes are summerlands: warm and bright, no matter the season. there is always fruit on their tables. but not everyone who comes in from the cold is let back out again.
-their games are cruel and complex and unfair, but if you can beat them by their own rules you will access riches beyond imagining.
-sometimes they just fucking fuck with you, the fuckheads.
-they will absolutely steal your children away. when your children return— if they ever do— they will come back strange. they will have magic earrings or necklaces or bracelets. they will know things they shouldn’t. they won’t know things that they should. your strange children might survive, might even prosper, might take wives and husbands and have children of their own. but they will always be marked by their time away from your world.
-the price for pissing them off is always death. sometimes just you. sometimes your whole community.
-if you are very good, and very smart, and very brave, they will grant your wish.
This actually provides a good explanation for why you have such inconsistency about whether their wish granting is benign or perversely twisted. They can’t fully understand you or your attempts to communicate either. They grant wishes the way you would grant a squirrel’s wishes: with lots of guesswork, assumptions, and projection.
And like that trope where they grant a wish perversely and then get mad at you or punish you for being ungrateful? Looks a lot less like utterly asinine unreceptivity to criticism and a lot more like how you might react if you try to help a wild animal and it bites or claws you.
Goncharov was special because not only did we establish canon, we created a whole fanon gay interpretation and proceded to ignore the (not even real) original in favour of it. And thats what tumblr is all about.
the beauty of it is that we *could* have made it gay in the original, being queerbaited was a choice because people of this hellsite are so used to it by this point.
you could honestly do so much media analysis on our improv mockery of media analysis idek where to start with that but the queerness needing to be subtextual so we could dig into the canon hungrily until we had blood and dirt under our nails is certainly one option. like a man digging his own grave and burying his ghost so he could pull it out of the earth on his own terms. wtf queer fandom culture? can you only conceptualize desire and intimacy within the context of a destruction of established form? as a transformation of fate? how queer of you
I had this idea for a looping animation in which a single dot has a pretty long loop, but the animation as a whole is much shorter. Because of the repetition this animation is only 1 second long!
THIS GIF IS ONE SECOND LONG
[ID: a scattered assortment of blue and green dots and blobs darting to different places, splitting, and fusing. One of the circles has a mouth and tail and is eating the dots. /end ID]
i made a character sheet. free to use as you wish, feel free to change whatever you want XD open source ass thing. spent all of ~maybe an hour on it.
Credit: the text in the insert-image box comes from this video, and the text for the top three lines (intense, complex, fruity) comes from this post. The actual image was made with the free NBOS character sheet creator, which is a sort of dated but free and solid text-layout sheet maker intended for ttrpg style character sheet creation.
this is GENUINELY one of the best character development sheets I’ve ever seen. Cuts right to the core of what you and your readers will glom onto, doesn’t waste time on details that don’t directly affect the narrative. Stupendous. Effervescent. Finally, some good fucking food
I cannot put into words how much I Fucking Loathe the fact that when you search something on youtube now it will randomly intersperse blocks of “people also watched” and “for you” into the results. That’s not what I searched for, youtube. I typed in a search query because I wanted to see search results, not random unrelated garbage you have placed in my way apparently to either inconvenience me or force me to scroll further for actual results. I despise your wretched little games and every time I see it I can only instantly close the tab as I am overcome with the urge to burn something down.
“I despise your wretched little games” perfectly conveys how I feel about the entire algorithm/attention economy
They also refuse to actually show the parameters you searched for. If you sort by “upload date,” the first few videos might be more recent ones by upload date, but anything past that you’ll find a video that was uploaded five years ago, then five months ago, then three years ago, etc, which—NO! That’s NOT WHAT I ASKED FOR!! PUT THEM IN ORDER!!!
Also sometimes the “people also watched” bullcrap will not only be entirely unrelated, it will also be videos with violent, sometimes outright triggering thumbnails. I’ve gotten some AWFUL unrelated video thumbnails just when searching for video game music videos.
i want you all to know that there is an artist (carmen papalia) who, after he started using a white cane, assembled a 12 foot long white cane and began using it in downtown vancouver. the length of the cane made it functionally useless as a device and the only purpose it served was making him an obstacle for sighted people. dare i say… 2019 goals
therapist to sighted patient: long cane isnt real and it cant hurt you
carmen papalia:
[id: a dimly lit photo of carmen papalia using his 12 foot “long cane” piece. he walks casually behind it. the cane takes up the majority of both the photograph and the sidewalk.]
Okay I went to a conference where this guy was a keynote and he’s so fucking cool. He’s done a ton of art around disability rights. The twelve-foot cane is really cool, but here are some of my other favourites:
From the series on replacing his cane, this is one where he replaced his cane with a megaphone and would stand at intersections repeating “I can’t see” until somebody would stop and help him cross the street
Another cane replacement, this time replacing it with a high school marching band who would change the music depending on if there was something in the way or not.
A museum intervention where he got people at the MET to go through the museum with their eyes closed and experiencing touching things he’d gotten permission to touch (the floor in this image) and just exploring a visual art museum blind.
The Blind Field Shuffle, in which he has dozens of people form a conga line behind him with their eyes closed and leads them on a blind tour of the city - literally the blind leading the blind.
Wish I could find a better photo, but this is a museum gallery he curated where the works are almost at floor height, making them accessible to children, little people, and people in wheelchairs, but requiring abled people to bend down or sit on the floor in order to see them properly.
In short, this man is amazing and I love his work.
Reblogging again because I just realized that if I had this advice in high school I would’ve never made a tumblr account.
Also works for most of those news sites like WSJ or NYT that only let you read a little bit, or block adblockers. Also some disable the scroll bar but if you go to the right side of the console after hitting F12 and look for the CSS element “overflow” and change it from “hidden” to “visible” then you can continue scrolling for free. Might have to click around on different parts of the page to find it, but it should work.
There’s also a Firefox/Chrome extension called Behind The Overlay that does all that with one mouse click. Used it for years; what a time saver.
And if you encounter a true paywall, use Archive.Today to bypass it. Just paste the paywalled url into the blue “search archived snapshots” box near the bottom:
Imagine being a tuna (Atlantic bluefin, Thunnus thynnus). You are a super predator, over six feet long and almost a ton. You are as beautiful and shiny and mercilessly efficient as a sports car, a true marvel of the sea. But you taste so fucking good
I agree with you and also think this is some kind of philosophical point. Cruel efficiency will not save you when you have soft delicious insides
i have good news for the person who wrote that tag and bad news for sports car drivers
