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DOG SAINT MONDAY

It's time for another

DOG SAINT MONDAY

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im not christian but i do believe in the power of prayer. for this reason i keep a little homonculus in a dog crate under my bed which i have raised as a devout catholic. whenever i want something in my life to change i poke him with a stick and he clasps his grubby little paws together and starts chanting in latin. his prayers always go through because he has never known sin

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wheres seasons greasons

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The shadows of the smallest stones lay like pencil lines across the sand and the shapes of the men and their mounts advanced elongate before them like strands of the night from which they'd ridden, like tentacles to bind them to the darkness yet to come Blood Meridian

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my most adornopilled half serious take is that the classic Dragon Quest plot of plucky teenagers killing an evil god subscribes to great man theory and is therefore fascist.

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Ryohei Matsumoto, The Evolution of Cats.

松本亮平「猫の進化」

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Dragons & Folklore de France

Translation below

The Tarasque dwells in the waters of the Rhone river near the town of Tarascon, where it devours travelers and destroys dikes and dams to flood the Camargue. Saint Martha chained it, and the people of Tarascon killed it.

The ruins of the amphitheaters of Metz were infested by hundreds of snakes. The largest of them, the Graoully, had a venomous breath, a mouth bigger than its body and devoured men. Saint Clement chased it away into the Seille River.

King of serpents, the Basilisk takes many forms throughout history and appears in many tales. One of them takes place at the Gate of Saint-Eloi in Bordeaux, known today for its Big Bell, where a well was occupied by a Basilisk. It petrified with its gaze anyone who went there to fetch water. It was defeated by a man returning from the Egyptian crusade, who petrified the beast with its own gaze using a mirail (mirror).

The Cocatrix is born from a rooster's egg incubated by a toad. The egg has magical properties but must not be broken. People who cross its gaze die immediatly.

Made of wicker and covered in flowers, the Grand Bailla wanders the streets of Reims three days a year and feeds on gold and sweets. It was banished by Archbishop Charles Maurice le Tellier.

The Grand'Goule haunts the marshes of Poitou, the waters of the Clain and the flooded cellars of the abbey of Sainte Croix. It feeds on nuns and casse-museaux (snout-breakers, cakes). Saint Radegonde chased it away with holy water.

In the rivers of the Jura and the Alps there is a group of diverse dragons, the Vouivres. They are generally flying serpents covered in fire and guardians of treasures. Many have for a single eye a gigantic carbuncle with extraordinary powers, desired by those in search of wealth and power.

Hidden in the caves of la Pointe du Roux near La Rochelle, the Rô Beast traps and devours travelers in the coastal marshes. It was impaled by seven heroic pagans from the seas.

Mythical dragon of the Basque Country, Herensuge gave birth to the Sun and the Moon, swallowed all of Creation in ten days then regurgitated it in flames. Now asleep in the mountains, it sucks up flocks and shepherds in his sleep. When it wakes up, it will destroy the world in flames and blood. (illustration)

Durandal is the mythical sword that Charlemagne gave to the knight Roland. Some claim that it was inherited from Hector, the warrior of the Trojan War. At war with the Saracens in the Pyrenées, Roland wanted to break the sword so that it would not fall into the hands of the enemy but Durandal split the mountain. So he threw the sword, which went to stick miles away, in the rock of the town of Rocamadour.

The belief in the Tooth Fairy is widespread in several countries in Europe, and is sometimes amalgamated with La Petite Souris (little mouse). It exchanges baby teeth for money. No one knows what it does with all these teeth.

The Camecruse is a bogeyman that haunts the moors and marshes of Gascony. It is agile, can jump and hide in the night to better devour lost children. No one knows exactly how it feeds.

The caves under the hill of the town of Hastingues are home to Lou Carcolh, a monstrous snail, long, slimy and hairy. Its shell is as big as a house. With the help of its tentacles, it grips people to devour them.

The Questing Beast is hunted by kings and heroes in Arthurian legends. It symbolizes evil, incest, violence and chaos, and takes it name from the loud noises that come out of its stomach, similar to the barking of dozens of dogs.

The fairy Mélusine, cursed princess of Albania, was condemned to change into a snake below the waist every Saturday. She married Raymondin de Lusignan with whom they had 10 prodigious children. But Raymondin broke his promise never to see Mélusine on Saturday : he surprised her in her monstrous form, and she left her family forever.

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People who treat D&D's classes as like being in any way representative of fiction outside of D&D are my nemesis, I just saw a post that was like "remember the difference between a Sorcerer a Warlock and a Wizard is this" and treating like those words as if their very D&D specific meanings were like universally accepted I'm going to start taking hostages

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Museum of witchcraft 74

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movies

Today I went to the movies. I went to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. It was hilarious. The movie was about a guy named Flint and he wanted to be an inventor. He worked very hard. Then he made an invention that made it rain food. The food got way too big.They had a whoa whoa whoa I’m not gonna tell you anymore. You’ll have to find out and see what happens next.

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The Call Of Cthulhu (Salvador Sanz)

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Regarding this post going around:

Recommend checking out an article by Kasey Keeler and Ryan Hellenbrand, published at Edge Effects in 2021.

Aside from addressing the Ojibwe story about the Nanabozho fighting against logging (including an image of the encounter), they also describe Paul Bunyan’s entanglement with the transition from clear-cutting timber logging to the later advent of the US federal government’s “German-style” extraction and “sustained yield” management (an approach, like early twentieth-century “British forestry” style, which still pursues profit-oriented extraction). Basically, they recount/argue: Story-telling makes claims to landscapes. Nostalgia can be a powerful tool. Paul Bunyan stories became more widely known after 1914. A logging company which used Paul Bunyan in promotional marketing owned the land that would become Paul Bunyan State Forest and Chippewa National Forest (the first national forest established by act of Congress rather than presidential proclamation), which functioned as a “laboratory”.

All text (images and captions, too) below is excerpted from their article.

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Across the Northwoods, a geography that spans the U.S.-Canada border, stories are used to make and claim space. […] Throughout northern Minnesota, legends of Paul Bunyan, the fictional giant lumberjack, have been used to claim space. […] Bunyan has been credited with creating Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes, the Mississippi River, and the Grand Canyon, while simultaneously logging millions of acres of forest. […] Together, we juxtapose the history of two forests - the Paul Bunyan State Forest and the Chippewa National Forest - to reveal how German settlement, logging, and forestry have contributed to placemaking narratives, and how […] nostalgia links past and present. Paul Bunyan’s literal and figurative imaginings advance American Indian erasure narratives, leading to the invisibility of these same communities today. […] The Northwoods have been popularized and imagined as America’s version of northern Europe. […] Across Minnesota, towns like New Ulm, New Munich, Heidelberg, and Luxemburg bear witness […]. More recently, Native scholars Michael Dockry and Christopher Caldwell have examined […] “the Menominee people’s profound sense of place and their intimate relationship with place.” […]

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Ojibwe dispossession, well underway by the late nineteenth century, is not told in any Paul Bunyan story. […] The “heroic labor” of logging formed a significant portion of Great Lakes region economies […] on the heels of, and entangled with, Ojibwe dispossession. […] Formally established in 1908, the 1.6-million-acre Chippewa National Forest (CNF) lies nearly contiguous with the Leech Lake Reservation. […] [T]he CNF was the first national forest created “for the benefit of [American] Indian people.” […] In 1902 came the Morris Act. Authored by [a] Duluth congressman […], the act “created the first forest reserve established by congressional action rather than presidential proclamation.” The act established the 225,000-acre Minnesota Forest Reserve as a “compromise,” a way to tackle the “Indian problem” while allowing for timber harvest. Here, Ojibwe homelands became “a laboratory for the first comprehensive forest management plans undertaken by a federal agency.” In 1928, the forest was renamed the Chippewa National Forest, as it remains today.

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While the Chippewa National Forest forces us to consider the many ways logging and forestry has usurped American Indian peoples’ access to land, the nearby Paul Bunyan State Forest encapsulates the material legacy of symbolic myth. […]

Officially recognized in 1935, the Paul Bunyan State Forest evolved from the site of the Red River Lumber Company sawmill. Founded in 1884, the Red River Lumber Company (RRLC) directly participated in and contributed to Ojibwe dispossession. By the end of the nineteenth century, he RRLC had purchased most of the land that comprises the present-day Pual Bunyan State Forest, milling millions of board feet of lumber at the company town of Akeley. […]

The expansion of RRLC to California precipitated another key move: using Paul Bunyan in their marketing. William B. Laughead (pronounced Log-head), advertising manager in 1914 and a logger himself, spun another Paul Bunyan tale for the promotional booklet “Introducing Mr. Paul Bunyan of Westwood, Cal,” which included Bunyan’s first pictorial representation. This marketing campaign relied on the new and growing nostalgia for the grand logging days in the Great Lakes to keep the transcontinental corporation rooted in place.

With logging long established throughout the Great Lakes region, the ecological damage was clear. To remedy this, in the mid-1930s (German) forestry was introduced to manage timber on a sustained yield base. This, then, is the irony of the Paul Bunyan State Forest: named for an American legends who is said to have literally cleared the path for settlement, forest management now proposes to maintain the integrity of the forest. […]

Though Paul Bunyan narratives dominate the landscape of the Northwoods, if we look closely we can see the ways Native people resist the legendary exploits. Indeed, a lesser-known Ojibwe oral story reminds us that the Anishinaabe people, their culture, and their histories will always prevail over dispossession and logging. In the story, Nanabozho, an Ojibwe trickster or cultural figure, confronts Paul Bunyan, who had already logged off most of the northeastern states before making his way to Minnesota. Nanabozho tells Paul to leave, to not log any more timber. A fight ensues, and […] Nanabozho swings a Red Lake walleye at Paul, knocking him off his feet. As Paul stumbles, Nanabozho pulls at Paul’s whiskers, making him promise to leave the area. This is why, today, Paul Bunyan does not have a beard and why he is facing west at the statue on Lake Bemidji, as he prepares to leave the region. This is also why we have the Chippewa National Forest, because Nanabozho and his Ojibwe kinsmen saved it from being logged. It is this contemporary narrative that highlights the complexity of Ojibwe storytelling […].

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Images, captions, and text by: Kasey Keeler and Ryan Hellenbrand. “Paul Bunyan and Settler Nostalgia in the Northwoods.” Edge Effects. 2 December 2021. At: edgeeffects dot net/paul-bunyan-narratives/ [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism. Images and captions are shown unaltered as they originally appear in the article.]