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people who don’t wear glasses will never understand the absolute humiliation of dropping your glasses under your bed or in a dark area and feeling around on all fours muttering “my glasses…. where are my glasses” like fucking Velma Dinkley and thinking to yourself BOY WOULD THIS BE A LOT EASIER IF I COUKD FUCKING SEE

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People who don't re-read books are so funny to me. "I know what happens"..?? Gurl I know what pizza tastes like, still gonna eat another one. I know what a rainbow looks like, you think that'll stop me running outside, camera in hand, to see the next one?

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Rice is so based. I love rice. Mother nature and the people who cultivated and domesticated rice really fucken popped the hell off with rice.

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We've seen lots of polls around authors saying it's not at all weird to get comments on old fic (it is in fact a delight!), but I'm curious about the other direction.

Life happens, writers can be shy or just get busy or simply not have the spoons to always reply right away even if they want to, and eventually it starts to feel like it might be weird to reply after a certain point. So:

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In Defence of Buttercup

Buttercup’s supposed passiveness is the crux of most critiques of The Princess Bride. But I’d argue that Buttercup acts in her own interests throughout the movie, making moves to secure her own future from her position of powerlessness. For the entirety of the movie barring the first and last scenes, Buttercup is a captive. She has to marry Humperdink in accordance with the law- she has no choice. In this moment we see her at her most passive. She’s accepted that he will marry her regardless of her feelings and she seeks her happiness in other places. Then she gets kidnapped. From that moment to the end of the movie Buttercup gets passed back and forth as the trophy everyone fights over. However, she doesn’t sit idly by. She attempts to escape Vizzini by jumping overboard into eel infested waters. That’s a brave move. She doesn’t know who is on the other ship she swims towards. She only hopes they won’t kill her like Vizzini plans to. Her failure doesn’t negate the bravery of her actions. Then she defies Wesley before she knows his identity. She tries to kill him by pushing him down the hill. He turns his back for one second and she makes a move against a man who she thinks will likely kill her. She saves Wesley when they exit the forest. Yes, it backfires, but she doesn’t know that. From that point on, Buttercup makes deals and argues with Humperdink in an attempt to get out of her betrothal. She uses any argument in her arsenal. It doesn’t work because she doesn’t know what he has planned for her.

Do you notice a theme? Because as I wrote this I noticed that Buttercup makes moves without context, which is why her escapes never work. She is a character acting without the information to succeed. That’s not her fault. That’s not passivity. That’s plot. The plot actively works against Buttercup freeing herself. So maybe we cut her some slack.

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You know what makes me feral? Robb Stark making Jon Snow his heir. From every single possible angle, it's just too good.

Robb's unfailing trust in his brother. His willingness to fight his mother for Jon, even after the Theon fiasco, and insist that Jon is different. Robb's love for his bastard brother is one of my favorite things about him, and the moment where he decides to make Jon his heir is truly Robb at his best.

And Jon never finds out. He turns down Stannis's offer of legitimization and Winterfell, not knowing that everything he ever wanted is already his. It drives me crazy, because it would mean so much to Jon. Even if he wouldn't abandon the Wall for it, he would want to know that Robb loved him enough to make him a Stark.

And Sansa! The way her ghost lingers over both boys. The way Robb and Jon think about their sisters is one of the major differences between them. Robb wouldn't give up his honorable war or his prisoner the Kingslayer to save two little girls. He disinherited Sansa when she was married to Tyrion, which is good military strategy to keep Winterfell out of Lannister hands, but would hurt her immensely if she knew.

And Jon is the opposite. Jon dies trying to get to Arya, because he will give up his honor and prioritize one little girl over a war against a literal army of the dead intent on annihilating all the living. (Not good military strategy, but Jon and Arya's bond is so important). And Jon won't take Winterfell when there's a chance Sansa will claim it. Even when Stannis calls her Lady Lannister, Jon does not dream of usurping Sansa's claim. I truly believe that Jon would sooner have Lady Sansa Lannister rule from Winterfell than claim it while she lives to keep it in "Stark" hands.

The politics of which Stark sibling holds the North is endlessly fascinating to me and I wish they could know what their siblings are doing for them. Jon should know that Robb made him a king. Sansa should know that Jon refused to take her home.

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if you try to buy shoes or a belt these days the product description on the website will be like "a new Premium Vegan Leather made from recycled water bottles and discarded apple skins from the apple juice industry!!!" well i would like it to be made out of discarded cow skins from the cow industry. is that an option.

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who let biologists play dnd

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This Black History Month, reflect for a moment on the fact that George Washington Carver, famously "the inventor of peanut butter and more than 100 industrial uses for peanuts" wasn't, like, Doc Brown fucking around in his garage because he really liked peanuts but was specifically trying to introduce larger use of a nitrogen fixing legume into crop rotations against cotton monoculture which was destroying yields, livelihoods and the biosphere, and how most agribusiness farming now just destroys that topsoil on purpose and continues to grow a cotton monoculture (or soy or corn or whichever local monoculture is profitable) using petrochemical derived fertilizer, which is one element driving climate change

Daniel Hale Williams performed the first successful heart surgery. He also founded the first nonsegregated hospital in America because he was keenly aware of disparate health outcomes by race which is still a problem today.

WEB Dubois was a part of the delegations for the birth of the UN. His proposal to include in the charter that "the colonial system of government … is undemocratic, socially dangerous and a main cause of wars" was not adapted for the final draft. We might see inaction against colonial violence to this day as part of the failure of others to heed his warnings there.

I feel like so often when we look at Black History Month so much of it is driven by factoids but when taken as history in context its about a direct line from decades and centuries to what is happening right now.

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On this day in 1925, the Great Race of Mercy concluded with the arrival of the first doses of diphtheria serum in Nome, Alaska.

If you're not familiar with the Nome serum run, here's my brief amateur summarization of what happened...

Diphtheria was a highly contagious and deadly disease in the early 20th century, especially for children. (Look up the symptoms – it's truly terrifying.) After several cases were diagnosed in the town of Nome, Dr. Curtis Welch – the only doctor in a town of ~1400 people – discovered that his only supply of antitoxin was expired, which meant that the possibility of an epidemic was very real. A quarantine was declared and officials started figuring out how to get the lifesaving serum from Anchorage up to Nome.

The ports were frozen over, and the weather was too poor for 1920s planes to fly safely. The serum was sent by rail to Nenana, and from there twenty mushers – many of whom were contracted mail carriers – and about 150 dogs carried it to Nome in five and a half days, a distance of 674 miles. Mushing 25 miles in a day was generally considered to be pretty extreme, but some teams traveled more than twice that distance in a day, pushing hard through high winds, near-blizzards, and temperatures below -60 degrees Fahrenheit to get the medicine where it needed to be. It was terribly urgent because the serum had to be kept from freezing, and was not expected to last more than a week under the rough conditions on the trail.

A musher named Gunnar Kaasen and his team, led by Balto, were the ones to actually arrive with the serum and thus got a lot of attention from the media (including the 1995 movie starring Kevin Bacon) – although there's some controversy about the accuracy of the reporting, and some historians believe Balto never led the team at all.

But the true heroes of the relay were Leonhard Seppala and his lead dog Togo, who was 12 years old at the time of the serum run. They had a remarkable career together and Togo saved Seppala's life on several occasions.

Seppala and Togo traveled 170 miles just to pick up the serum, which they carried for 91 miles over the most dangerous stretch of the journey – often through whiteout conditions, when Togo's sense of smell was their only navigation. Seppala, an award-winning musher, was himself a resident of Nome, and his daughter was among the children who had already been infected. He was specifically assigned to the hardest part of the relay due to his experience and the skill of his team.

The serum run is one of my favorite historical events (I recommend the book The Cruelest Miles by Gay and Laney Salisbury if you want to learn more), and I find the story even more poignant in a time when vaccines of all kinds have become political talking points instead of a simple matter of public health. A diphtheria vaccine had been developed in 1923, and the publicity surrounding the events in Alaska helped along the inoculation campaign in the United States.

Also, it's very much worth mentioning that the majority of mushers who participated in the run were Alaskan Athabaskans, who received much less credit and praise than their white colleagues, and that the Native population of Nome and the surrounding area had a much higher risk of contracting diphtheria because they had no natural resistance to the disease. Less than a decade before, the influenza epidemic had wiped out 8% of the Native population of Alaska and nearly 50% of the Natives in Nome.

A story of brave people willing to risk their lives for the sake of public health just hits a little different in the 2020s. I cry when I think too much about it.

And by the way, Seppala also owned Balto, but had left him off his main team and leased him to Kaasen. Seppala was ultimately bitter about the attention Balto (and to a lesser extent, Kaasen) got from the press after the conclusion of the relay, feeling that Togo never got his fair share of the credit. But Togo lived another four years and enjoyed a relaxing retirement in Maine, and his offspring laid the foundation for the modern Siberian Husky breed. In 2011, Time magazine named him the most heroic animal of all time.

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Resisting tyranny takes a lot of forms.

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Reminder:

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New dog unlocked.

Meet Artemis, big, wild, playful, too energetic for her own good and sometimes forgets her own strength.

Grew up with the other Jackals in Elona but once she met Aahrtur she decided to follow him until he caved in and took her in.

Achilles gets to have a little sister and Artemis gets to have a big brother, the two being there to keep Aahrtur’s life interesting.