lizardywizard

[lizardywizard]

fun

[lizardywizard]

I started listening to the cree radio station because its the only one left in my range that doesnt play alberta separatist ads now and those make me see red like some sort of bull, which is not safe while im behind the wheel of a vehicle going 110

Why haven't they told me about the cree all-purpose radio station sooner. They play everything from the 50s to today. Half of their ads and one of their shows is in cree which I do not speak a lick of but thats fine, they play banger music. They give me local news updates that arent dripping with UCP cocksucking. They tell me about things that affect a demographic I otherwise hear very little about by virtue of being a white guy in alberta.

We are holding hands. We are learning about other cultures. We are listening to 60s rock and roll and then an elder will tell us stories about his youth. I am enamored. I am in love.

[lizardywizard]

More people need to learn that its okay to be hurt and pissed at something someone said while knowing that intent still matters.

We act like if you're upset and express it you believe that it was done with malice when you may not. That if ignorance caused the situation then there's nothing to blame or be upset by.

It pretends that we don't learn things from our broader society and puts all emphasis on the individual. ACAB not because every cop joins the police to specifically harm BIPOC but because that's what their occupation requires of them whether they realize it or not. It's heteronormativity not because everyone made an active choice to see straight as the default but the many ways society communicates that it is.

When a specific person feeds into that loop when it harms you and the people you love, you shouldn't have to put your feelings aside from that. You can be upset at the more obscure, the pattern of it all. You can do that and still simply share why its harmful to say something.

I've gone on tangents like this before but right now this idea that you either have to ignore your pain or act like an asshole feeds into the issue leftists have regarding criticism. Callout culture went from a small correction on the side to a harassment campaign to the point where you get nothing or a tidal wave for your mistakes. We think that doing something bigoted makes you a bigot when we all have acted bigoted at one point in our lives. That to point something out as harmful inherently means that we want to incite harassment.

It's hard to keep from black and white thinking for these things, but for the best of everyone we need to avoid it.

[lizardywizard]

We were watching the glass blowing competition show on netflix because it's really cool to see those talented artists do their thing...

But I will NEVER forgive the judges for eliminating an amazing artist who's concept was that plastic hamster tubes are actually dangerous for hamsters yet they are normalized in our society so they made a beautiful glass rendition of an endless loop of colorful hamster tubes as an expression of how we can be trapped by society in a loop of behavior that is normalized but actually killing us

And the judges were like "this isnt DEEP ENOUGH" because they dont care enough about hamsters to learn and interpret the artist's statement at the level it was meant for.

They literally saw the glass renditions of colorful tubes that represent suffering and being trapped in a glossy predesigned hell and went "this is too normal and isnt saying anything important actually" Fuck them!!!!

Anyways Gemma should have won and I'm so happy to see that she didn't let it stop her amazing concept and she continued with it outside of the time constraints of the show. Fuck yes Gemma

[lizardywizard]

wtf is lemuria/lemurians

does it have anything to do with lemurs

is that a question for pissvortex

Yk how over here in the west we have the lost continent of Atlantis? In India they have the lost continent of Kumari Kandam.

In the 1850s, there was an archeologist who found lemur skeletons in india, australia, Africa. He posited that there might have been a lost land mass which contained these lemurs. He called this hypothetical landmass Lemuria.

Mme. Helena Blavatsky loved lost continents. She wanted to include Kumari Kandam in her mythology, but she called it Lemuria, and pointed to this archeological theory to make it sound more legitimate.

[lizardywizard]

They recorded tinnitus? It's a physical thing?????

[lizardywizard]

repressed little girls are taught to fear dragons because they’d be too powerful together. probably.

idk, just an idea that grabbed me. i thought about scheduling this for “Appreciate A Dragon Day”, but didn’t want to wait until January. we appreciate dragons every day in this house anyway.

[lizardywizard]

Mundane days are special too you know… Happy August….

[lizardywizard]

I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished. Consternation. Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice. (The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.) The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood. Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue. (In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.) Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water. The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain. So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.") So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards. (Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

[lizardywizard]

[lizardywizard]

electroreception in monotremes is extremely old, 130 mya, and may have evolved to deal with hunting in the 3-6 month darks of the south pole forest.

echidnas may have evolved from a platypus like organism that became fully terrestrial, as evidenced by their flatter bill as embryos (and lack of echidna-like organisms in the fossil record past 2mya)

there was a 60 lb tree-climbing echidna in the pleistocene

[lizardywizard]

made a drampa and dragonair fusion and oh my gosh

[lizardywizard]

[lizardywizard]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[lizardywizard]

Important to note among the itch drama: you gotta pressure payment processors to undo the same bans applied to Patreon, Gumroad, OF, and the many adult sites they already hit in the years leading up to this, too.

It CANNOT stop with itch.

Like y'all please don't abandon this if banned games come back— sex workers and adult artists have been under fire by this shit for the past couple years already.

Don't leave folk to dry if you get itch and steam fixed.

[lizardywizard]

Back in my early twenties when I was hanging out a lot with Brendan and Charlie, I got introduced to possibly the most grueling board game in existence.

It was called War of the Ring. It was essentially the entirety of Lord of the Rings in a board game. You had all the troops and armies, and you tried to succeed in destroying the one ring while the other player(s) tried to stop you.

Have you ever wondered how long it would take to set up all the individual troops of Mordor and Middle Earth? Two hundred and forty game pieces all had to be placed. Just to start playing the game? It took. Forever.

An age of men passed in the time it took to set that game up. It took even longer to play obviously, sometimes spanning multiple sessions across the week because the boys took it seriously.

I did not particularly ever want to play War of the Ring because setup was such a grind all by itself. But I did love one thing about the ordeal. And that was that the boys had a house rule that was utterly whimsical and delighted me to no end.

Once all two hundred and forty pieces were standing at attention, the Nazgûl hunkered upon Mount Doom, the hobbits cozy in the Shire, Rohirrim galloping their fields, once every meticulous tiny figure was painstakingly placed. They rolled the dice. All four d6’s required for gameplay.

It was for Isildur.

To see if he cast the ring into the fire.

If it was all sixes Isildur succeeded and destroyed the ring and the game would then be packed away unplayed.

So before playing the chosen one would assume the role of Elrond and call “Isildurrrrrrr!!!” (and it was very important to roll the R as much as possible for maximum drama).

They would cast the dice, and Isildur inevitably claimed the ring, and the game commenced. This was a well established tradition before the first time I played. So the first time I joined I got to be Elrond and roll the Isildur dice.

I rolled. Three sixes. And one. Five.

The room erupted into screams. Chaos. We were all losing our minds.

“This is like Isildur got all way in and held it out, and tipped his hand 95% of the way before deciding to keep it!”

“This is like Isildur actually dropped it but then caught it at the last second!”

The moment lived in infamy for years afterward and sometimes we’d just throw back our heads and cry, “Isildurrrr!” in memory of that moment when Isildur got so close to casting away the ring.

[lizardywizard]