dragkingandreweldritch - Tumblr blog

[dragkingandreweldritch]

Here's a tip kids:

Neil stepping back or making concessions to try to keep any of his shows afloat isn't him being a good person or taking responsibility. It's him taking a knee to prevent everything he's invested time and money into, everything he's been expecting a MASSIVE return on, from going belly up.

Neil will never be a good person. He is an abuser and a manipulator. He's sixty years old and has been demonstrating this pattern of behavior his whole professional life, alongside an obvious awareness that it's wrong or at least socially unacceptable.

Do not give him the benefit of the doubt, do not give him credit where it's due. Because he deserves neither of those things. He deserves to die in infamy while his works slowly fall out of circulation and are forgotten.

Your shows may die, and that's unfortunate, but you will find other shows and other communities if you look for them. I promise you're spoiled for choice.

[dragkingandreweldritch]

i know someone who works in conservation, who on the side has a large outdoor aviary and roughly 20 rainbow lorikeets they’ve taken in as they’ve been dumped/unwanted gifts or long-term pets/pets that have been released/etc, and she’s very knowledgeable and keeps them in great condition

i love seeing them though because we have a terrible and hilarious game. in the aviary i will be leaving out fruit skewers and things for them, and then i’ll dramatically lie on my side and pretend i died. it takes about 5 minutes, and then there’s an entire flock of lorikeets climbing on me, squeaking, nibbling and investigating.

the next part of the game is popping up my head and going “boo!” which is where the real fun begins, because the little rainbow nightmares jump, and then get delighted and start happy squealing and bouncing around (and chewing because they truly never stop)

while we all love this game, ive been cheerfully informed from the outside it looks even funnier, because it looks like I’ve been jumped by a group of lorikeets and they won

[dragkingandreweldritch]

Lovecraft wrote down all the ideas that came to him to do something with later and there are some real bangers in there

[dragkingandreweldritch]

HIGH ON STANDARDS LOW ON SKILL. CREATIVE PROCESS MAKE YOU ILL

[dragkingandreweldritch]

In the name of scientific advancement, clinical education and fiscal expediency, the bodies of the destitute in the Dallas-Fort Worth region have been routinely collected from hospital beds, nursing homes and homeless encampments and used for training or research without their consent — and often without the approval of any survivors, an NBC News investigation found.

…

Last year, NBC News revealed in its “Lost Rites” investigation that coroners and medical examiners in Mississippi and nationally had repeatedly failed to notify families of their loved ones’ deaths before burying them in pauper’s graveyards. That investigation led reporters to North Texas, where officials had come to view the unclaimed dead not as a costly burden, but as a free resource.

Before its sudden shuttering last week, the Health Science Center’s body business flourished. 

On paper, the arrangements with Dallas and Tarrant counties offered a pragmatic solution to an expensive problem: Local medical examiners and coroners nationwide bear the considerable costs of burying or cremating tens of thousands of unclaimed bodies each year. Disproportionately Black, male, mentally ill and homeless, these are individuals whose family members often cannot be easily reached, or whose relatives cannot or will not pay for cremation or burial.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center used some of these bodies to teach medical students. Others, like Honey’s, were parceled out to for-profit medical training and technology companies — including industry giants like Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific and Medtronic — that rely on human remains to develop products and teach doctors how to use them. The Health Science Center advertised the bodies as being of “the highest quality found anywhere in the U.S.”

…

A half-century ago, it was common for U.S. medical schools to use unclaimed bodies, and doing so remains legal in most of the country, including Texas. Many programs have halted the practice in recent years, though, and some states, including Hawaii, Minnesota and Vermont, have flatly prohibited it — part of an evolution of medical ethics that has called on anatomists to treat human specimens with the same dignity shown to living patients.

The University of North Texas Health Science Center charged in the opposite direction.

Through public records requests, NBC News obtained thousands of pages of government records and data documenting the acquisition, dissection and distribution of unclaimed bodies by the center over a five-year period.

An analysis of the material reveals repeated failures by death investigators in Dallas and Tarrant counties — and by the center — to contact family members who were reachable before declaring a body unclaimed. Reporters examined dozens of cases and identified 12 in which families learned weeks, months or years later that a relative had been provided to the medical school, leaving many survivors angry and traumatized.

Five of those families found out what happened from NBC News. Reporters used public records databases, ancestry websites and social media searches to locate and reach them within just a few days, even though county and center officials said they had been unable to find any survivors.

In one case, a man learned of his stepmother’s death and transfer to the center after a real estate agent called about selling her house. In another, Dallas County marked a man’s body as unclaimed and gave it to the Health Science Center, even as his loved ones filed a missing person report and actively searched for him.

…

“What they’re doing is uncomfortably close to grave-robbing,” [Bioethicist Eli Shupe] said.

Shupe was alluding to the dark history, long before voluntary body-donation programs, when U.S. medical schools turned to “resurrectionists,” or “body snatchers,” who dug up the graves of poor and formerly enslaved people. To curb this ghastly 19th-century practice, states adopted laws giving schools authority to use unclaimed bodies for student training and experiments.

Many of those laws remain on the books, but the medical community has largely moved beyond them. Last year, the American Association for Anatomy released guidelines for human body donation stating that “programs should not accept unclaimed or unidentified individuals into their programs as a matter of justice.”

…

After publishing a newspaper essay criticizing the practice, she brought her concerns directly to the Tarrant County Commissioners Court at a meeting last year, asking officials to consider the message being sent to marginalized residents and people of color. 

“How does it look,” she said, “when a Black body is dissected with nobody’s permission at all, simply because they died poor?”

[dragkingandreweldritch]

[dragkingandreweldritch]

the sexless lesbians who say every horny thought makes them "no better than a man" might kill me for this but regarding chappell roan's ass in the tight chainmail and thigh-high plate armor forming a pseudo-garterbelt situation, it needs to be said: AWOOGAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA HUBBA HUBBA WOWEEEEEEEEEEEEE HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[dragkingandreweldritch]

Fucked up to me that Kazakhstan and Mongolia don't share a border anymore

[dragkingandreweldritch]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[dragkingandreweldritch]

This is what hieroglyphs and figures in ancient Egyptian temples looked like before their colors faded. They were recreated using a polychromatic light display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, following thorough research.

[dragkingandreweldritch]

lil baby hippo

[dragkingandreweldritch]

the very rare phenomenon of a volcano producing vapor rings/volcanic vortex rings. Mount Etna today (April 5, 2024) by Boris Behncke

[dragkingandreweldritch]

Girl wtf

[dragkingandreweldritch]

bandaids on ur fingers can be a kind of lingerie. if youre enlightened.

[dragkingandreweldritch]

[dragkingandreweldritch]

[dragkingandreweldritch]

new fledgling daniel constantly alternating between "i'm 70 years old fuck off" and "i was literally born last week give me a break" depending on what the situation calls for