#animals that have recently gone extinct really get to me very often

[dogin8]

Honestly. nothing gets to me more than the perpetual "we"-ing of the terrible effects of "humanity" on the planet

Like talk abt species going extinct due to climate change or poaching or similar "We're killing the planet" Who's We?

I didn't pick up a rifle, I didn't dump my fishing net, I don't own a single factory.

Humans are PART of the planet, part of nature, WE are not some sort of scourge or the one thing that is removed from everything else.

And it's like. All intentional too, like some PR exec for BP or similar has made these decisions. The blame for climate change has been divided 8 billion ways and split equally onto all of us when our contributions are Certainly not equal.

It's part of the capitalism machine, to make people believe capitalism and humanity are inextricably tied to one another. "Humanity is a disease" as a phrase highlights this pretty well, shifting the issue from sets of behaviours to just inherent properties of People.

Cause as long as we believe humanity's existence is just inherently problematic for the planet, we won't go dismantling any systems that the people in charge of polluting the entire planet happen to rely upon for their fortunes.

Humanity is fucking great. All of my probably top 50 favourite things in the world are people. We are part of this planet and I'm a big fan of both us and the planet we're on.

blegh idk, it's important to deconstruct how commonly people think capitalism is just part of the human experience because it's not, and there's a lot of propaganda to make you think it is, and a lot of corporations relying on the fact that you believe it

[jurassicsunsets]

Foraminifera: Introduction and anatomy

There’s a lot more to palaeontology than just dinosaurs. I’m sure you’re familiar with fossil mammals like mammoths and sabre-tooths. Everyone loves fossil fish like Dunkleosteus and Megalodon. Fossil invertebrates, like trilobites or ammonites, are some of the most famous fossils of all time. And fossil plants are all over the place, from petrified wood to leaf impressions in coal. But have you ever thought about fossil microorganisms?

(Image: Single-celled organisms like this foraminifera are among the most common organisms today, but the vast majority are microscopically small. [Source])

Microbes are everywhere on Earth today, and they have been everywhere on Earth for seemingly as long as life has existed. They live in practically every environment—but their small size and soft bodies have meant that fossils of them are very rare.

Well, almost all of them, that is. One particular group of single-celled organisms is among the best-studied groups in the entire fossil record, having a highly detailed fossil record stretching back for over 540 million years. These are the hard-shelled foraminifera.

I’ve become enamoured with this neat little group of protists lately. But I’ve been really disappointed with a lot that’s been written about them. For despite being some of the most interesting and geologically famous protists, there has been very little written about them that is accessible to anyone who doesn’t already know a lot about them. I’d like to change that.

What are foraminifera?

(Image: An assortment of foraminifera shells, with a huge variety of shapes and sizes. More on that later... [Source])

Foraminifera (literally meaning “opening bearers”), or “forams” as they are commonly called, are a group of single-celled eukaryotes. In other words, they have a nucleus (or often multiple of them), and they have mitochondria that act as (say it with me) the powerhouse of the cell. Most forams consume smaller microorganisms as food; however, some are capable of utilising dissolved organic carbon, and many groups have convergently evolved endosymbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae, including rhodophytes, chlorophytes, and dinoflagellates. In fact, certain foraminifera can extract the chloroplasts from algae they consume and incorporate them into their own cells to do photosynthesis! These don’t last forever, though, and the forams eventually digest the chloroplasts. Some other foraminifera actually actively predate on and kill small animals—an amazing feat for a single-celled organism!

Some of the most famous foraminifera are the planktonic forms that float within the water column; however, the vast majority of forams are benthic organisms. These include forms from shallow water to forms found at the very deepest point of the ocean. Though some benthic species live only above the sediment-water interface and others live only interstitially, most benthic forams are not confined to one mode of life and may move between layers of the community in order to seek out food. Some of these forms can even survive without oxygen for extended periods! This allows them to live in conditions that would kill many other organisms.

A few species of forams have been identified from freshwater environments, and one study presented molecular evidence suggesting foraminifera may be widespread in soils, although no actual forams have been found from soils yet. It seems that there might be a lot of diversity even among living forams that we still have yet to uncover.

Anatomy

Of all single-celled organisms, why is it that foraminifera have such a good fossil record? The answer lies in the hard shell of many species, known as a test.

(Image: A variety of test shapes in different foraminifera groups, viewed with a scanning electron microscope. They include may shapes—coiled, glob-shaped, linear, egglike, and more. There are many other shapes of tests that aren’t shown here—like spiralled, branched, disc-like, and more. All of these tests are calcareous. [Source])

These tests are not simply external structures within which foraminifera live; rather, the test is actually within the cell membrane. Although the soft parts of the foraminiferal cell are almost never preserved in the fossil record, modern species of forams have helped us learn a lot about their anatomy. Extending from the opening(s) of the test are pseudopodia, fingerlike extensions of the cell membrane. As the most prominent extensions of the cell outside of the test, they serve a multitude of functions, including locomotion, feeding, agglutinating the test, reproduction, respiration, and excretion. In many forms these pseudopodia extend in all directions through numerous tiny holes in the shell of the test. In other ways the foraminifera anatomically resemble typical single-celled eukaryotes, with nuclei and mitochondria. Some species have multiple nuclei within a single cell). During reproduction, some species of forams can even leave their shell behind entirely to undergo cell division.

(Image: The anatomy of a foraminiferan. Note that the test is actually inside of the cell wall, but most of the cell materials are inside the test. The pseudopodia are the main thing that extend out of the aperture, or hole. This drawing is a unilocular, or single-chambered, foram.)

The most famous and diverse of these are foraminifera with calcareous tests. Calcareous means that they are made of calcium carbonate, and calcium carbonate takes two main forms: Calcite and aragonite. Calcite is a very common mineral in nature; it’s the stuff that makes up limestone, marble, antacids, coral skeletons, and more. And aragonite is a mineral with the same chemical composition as calcite, but with a different crystal structure. It’s found in the shells of many organisms, like snails. Both calcite and aragonite tests are found in foraminifera, and many species have their own particular composition and crystal structure.

Other forams have agglutinated tests: that is, tests that are made by collecting bits of sand and cementing them together, using either organic proteins or calcite to hold them together. 

(Image: An agglutinated textulariid foram. Its test is made from sediment grains connected together. It looks a bit like an ice cream cone in shape, but rather than conical, it’s flat. And the top is sealed off. So really, it looks nothing like an ice cream cone. [Source])

Fewer still forams secrete tests of silica—the material that quartz and glass are made of. Others have softer tests made completely from proteins and other organic material. Even rarer are foraminifera which entirely lack tests and were until recently considered to be amoebae; these species likely secondarily lost the test.

Test composition appears to be pretty fluid in foram evolution. In the family tree of foraminifera, it seems that calcite tests evolved multiple times, and so did agglutinated tests. In some cases it looks like they might have even gone from calcite tests to agglutinated tests.

Test shape is also highly diverse within foraminifera. The simplest shape of test are the unilocular, or single-chambered, forms; however, unilocular forms may also have more complex chamber shapes, including spiraled tubes outwardly resembling snail shells. Unilocular forms are found in several groups of forams. The earliest foraminifera were probably all unilocular, and modern unilocular forams probably form a paraphyletic “grade” rather than a true branch of the tree of life. Single-chambered foraminifera probably make up the bulk of forams alive today, but many of these species remained undiscovered and unnamed.

Although unilocular forams are frequently considered the “simplest” forams, they also include some of the most bizarre protists, the xenophyophores. These are my favourite group of foraminifera, and the reason is, I think, pretty clear—they’re enormous. Like, I mean, the largest ones can get up to 20cm/8in across! These are the largest known single-celled organisms on the planet. All of the known species live on the floor of the deep ocean, where they filter-feed.

(Image: A xenophyophore, a giant, single-celled foraminifera. It looks a bit like a sponge, which is what it was once mistaken for. [Source])

Most named species of forams, however, are multilocular, having multiple chambers within their tests. The tests of the most well-known forms superficially resemble the shells of ammonites or nautili. In fact, the earliest scientific descriptions of foraminifera described them as being tiny cephalopods! The septa (internal dividing walls) of foraminiferal tests have holes that allow for the cytoplasm to flow between compartments, so that the cell can make use of all of the available space within the test. These openings—or foramina���also provided the name for the group: When initially thought to be cephalopods, they could be distinguished from all other coiled forms by the foramina between compartments. 

(Image: Cross-sectional diagram of a coiled, multichambered foraminifera. It does look a lot like a nautilus, and even has multiple chambers in its shell. However, unlike nautili, these chambers are connected by holes. [Source])

Not all multilocular foraminifera are coiled, however; many form more linear or globular shapes. Some are even star-shaped! Giants in their own right are found among the multilocular forms: the rotaliid genus Nummulites, though now smaller, has extinct representatives that could reach 15cm across, with up to 4300 distinct compartments. These lens-shaped forams make up the limestone that was used to build the Great Pyramids in Giza.

(Image: Fossil Nummulites shells being held by a human. They kind of look like pancakes, and are about 15cm/6in in diametre. Though you can’t see it here, they are actually coiled shells. [Source])

This post is the first in a multi-part series covering foraminifera—their anatomy, reproduction, evolutionary history, major groups, and geological applications. Later parts will be linked here, or check the “Foraminifera” tag on my blog!

[clarste]

Sorry if you've been asked this explicitly before, but what are your thoughts on Penguin Logistics, specifically in comparison to the other organisations/factions in Arknights? I recently started and managed to grab everyone within a few pulls, except Sora (and I guess Mostima, unfortunately.) and I think they're easily my favourites. Would love to hear your thoughts. Cheers.

No one's ever asked me that, but they probably should have since I've gone all-in on Penguin Logistics ever since I pulled Exusiai and Croissant early on. I then proceeded to never pull any of the others, forcing me to buy Texas and Sora in the shop and much later dump all of my accumulated gacha currency getting Mostima. Anyway, my goal in life is to use the entire team and also max them all out. PL4life!

Anyway, my initial impression of them was that they were the cast of a 90s anime like Cowboy Bebop or Bubblegum Crisis (...Tokyo 2040). Like, they're an eclectic band of hyper-competent misfits working for a small company operating at the edge of the law. “Penguin Logistics” itself sounds like a euphemism for being, like, smugglers or something. "We'll get your package where it needs to go, no questions asked." Then Code of Brawl came out and I was totally right except they are also very dumb in a funny way. Like, they accidentally got into a turf war with the mafia, but apparently that's just business as usual.

Anyway I want to talk about each of them individually now so apologies if this starts rambling.

Texas is pretty clearly the main character of Penguin Logistics, and you can tell because she's the hub of their whole relationship wheel on the in-game chart.

She's also kinda Spike from Cowboy Bebop, although less laid-back I guess. She's a former mafia assassin on the run from her past, but her past won't leave her alone. Incidentally, "mafia" in this case refers to the various wolf families from the fantasy Italy equivalent in this setting, although they make some interesting comparisons to wolf packs in the profiles. However, Texas's family is dead, which should make her a "lone wolf" that will supposedly never have another place to belong. Except PL itself is proof that that's wrong.

Theoretically she’s just the team’s driver, but because PL is always getting into ridiculous anime fights she’s also good at that part too, using dozens of little... lightsabers(?) that she throws around willy nilly. It would probably look super-cool to see in action, except this is not that kind of game so we’ll just have to wait for the anime or whatever. It’s noted in her profile that her fighting style shows that she unconsciously sees as the only purpose of a weapon as being to kill, and heck, she’s right.

She's cool-headed, adaptable, and the serious one you can always count on, but she's not above getting into friendly(?) brawls just to take out her frustrations out.

Her name comes from the extinct subspecies of Texas Wolf.

Next up is Exusiai, the angel who loves nothing more than guns, god, rock and roll, and apple pie. In that order. In other words, a stereotypical American. Even though she's from the fantasy-Vatican. Basically she's a cheerful, friendly, laid-back person who never really fit in back home where people are expected to be more serious and orderly. Not enough to be, like, shunned or anything but she's always been a weirdo. All angels have guns though, that’s like standard issue. She wishes she could have more though.

She's also super religious, but interestingly never brings it upon her own. I feel like she probably realizes how uncomfortable it can make people who don't share that religion to suddenly bring up Jesus all the time in casual conversation. Like, she's not ashamed of it or anything, but she won't shove it in your face either. Personally, I find that a pretty cool characterization for a fictional religious person.

Which is also sort of a hint that beneath her goofy exterior she's a thoughtful, deliberate person who doesn’t let anyone in by accident. Texas notes that they're exact opposites in this respect. She also has an extremely interesting relationship with the next person.

Her name comes from the Greek word for the order of angels in Christianity often translated as "Powers."

Mostima... where to start...? I guess first of all she’s a fallen angel, apparently because she pointed her gun at her own kind under MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES. Probably related to the whole war in Kazdel thing, where many of the other MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES in this game took place. Long story short, stuff happened in the war, she pointed her gun at another angel, Exusiai’s sister is dead under mysterious circumstances, and Mostima gave up her gun and now wanders the world delivering long-distance packages for PL. But that’s mostly an excuse for to be alone as much as humanly possible. She can also use time magic because I dunno why not. MYSTERIOUS.

She’s friendly enough, talkative even, and has a hobby of visiting new places and trying out the local food, etc, but her real defining trait is that she just doesn’t need other people. She’s explicitly aromantic, saying she has no interest in love, but she also has no need for friends or family or apparently coworkers either. Because of the way the world is, she spends most of her time driving through the endless wastelands between cities, with nothing but a truck, some packages, and her thoughts. There’s something... romantic about that (in the other sense of the word), but even she admits that the romance of watching the sun set in a desert with no one else around for hundreds of kilometers gets old after a while.

I feel like I should note that she has a very “best friend of her big sister” relationship with Exusiai, by which I mean she’s known Exusiai since Exusiai was a kid and to her Exusiai will always be that kid. Also Exusiai only joined PL in the first place to hunt her down and get answers about her sister’s death, but Mostima just laughs it off and leaves town for another year or five. 

Her name is probably a corruption of Mastema, a rather infamous fallen angel in mythology.

Croissant is... well, to be honest everyone past this point is more of a minor character. Which is actually a weird thing to say since none of these people are actually major characters in Arknights, but I guess these are less important people even within the group?

Croissant’s gimmick is that she’s always trying to make money by selling stuff. I guess she’s a merchant? But not, like, a formal one who runs a shop, she just gets her hands on stuff through her connections and sells it. But in like, a friendly down-to-earth way, it’s even said that she lives paycheck to paycheck. She’s a girl trying to get by with a second job, I guess is what I’m saying.

Team-wise, she’s the muscle of the group, being a minotaur and all. She lifts the heavy packages and also smashes things with her MAGNETIC HAMMER which I don’t know why I find that name so amusing. Gameplay-wise her special move can knock all the enemies around her halfway across the map and I smile every time she does it.

Her profile notes that she’s really just living her best life as a normal-ish person, and that helps make everyone around her feel normal, and that’s important in a setting where half the people around you are dying of magical cancer (no one in PL is Infected though).

Her name comes from the French word for Crescent and also a type of Pastry. Leaning more towards Pastries in my opinion.

Sora is an idol singer. Because, to be perfectly honest, what ragtag band of misfits is complete without an idol singer? She can’t really fight, but I guess Texas must have saved her life at some point or something because she bullied both her agency and PL into letting her work there part time. And also she is obsessed with Texas. I guess saying it like that makes her sound kind of annoying, but she really isn’t, she’s just an earnest girl chasing her dreams.

There’s also this interesting thing where a lot of her basic information is censored by her agency in order to protect her privacy (”do not dox the idol”). Even including her race. She presents as a wolf, but her promoted E2 art has her as a rabbit, which raises some interesting questions that don’t really get answered.

Her name comes from the Japanese word for Sky.

Lappland is not really part of PL, but she’s PL-adjacent enough to be worth mentioning here. Basically she’s an old acquaintance of Texas from back in their mafia days, and she’s obsessed with hunting her down and... fighting her? Killing her? But in, like, a sexual way? She’s kind of a crazy psychopathic killer. Maybe. She can also be very calm and polite when she wants to be, although with a taste for gallows humor. That just makes her scarier because you don’t know when/if she’ll snap.

There are two kind-of explanations for her being like that: A) her family is dead and she has no “pack”. As a wolf, the stress of living without a pack is supposed to be maddening. B) She’s infected with Oripathy (magic cancer) and there are crystals growing in her nervous system. Which... can’t be good. The answer is probably a combination of both.

But the most important thing about Lappland is her base skill and how it interacts with Texas. Basically, in your base there are various jobs you can assign people to and different characters get different bonuses for them. Most people in Penguin Logistics get bonuses for working the Trading Depot, for obvious reasons. Lappland gets a “bonus” where if she’s in the depot at the same time as Texas, she loses morale slower but doesn’t actually get any bonus to productivity. Meanwhile, Texas gets a bonus to productivity when Lappland is around, but loses morale way faster. In other words, Lappland is slacking off and making Texas so uncomfortable that she works twice as hard just to get the job over with so she can leave. This is their relationship as defined by game mechanics.

Texas also has another bonus where she loses morale slower if Exusiai is there, which completely cancels out the penalty she gets from Lappland. In other worlds, Exusiai being there too calms her nerves enough that she doesn’t feel the need to immediately escape.

Oh yeah, I forgot to talk about Emperor, who’s the owner of Penguin Logistics. He’s a world-famous rapper wearing a Tupac shirt and also literally immortal.

[oumaheroes]

Earthbound 1/?

Summary:

Centuries after humanity fled a dying Earth and found sanctuary in the stars, the planet has healed enough to support mankind once more. For some, there is something more than curiosity; memories from another life whisper history in familiar voices, calling them home.

 'He closes his eyes and thinks about blue flowers and large statues of stone, of ships and red coats flapping over a green meadow.'

Part 2 Part 3

……………………………………………………………………  

 Chapter 1: Scattered Amongst The Stars

Alfred is six. It was his birthday last Tuesday and he got to have a really big party and it was really really cool, but the coolest thing ever was that he got an e-tab from his Ma. Everyone at school already has an e-tab -as a July baby he's one of the youngest- so now he can finally join in with the special classes that they have and play all of those games at lunch time.

Alfred doesn't like feeling left out. It's not nice, Ma says, when you don't include people, so that means that the people who play games on their e-tabs when they know he doesn't have one are being mean on purpose and that really hurts. Except now, now he can join in and be their friend again and won't have to sit alone at his table when it's interactive e-tab time.

It's not real learning, Pa says. He didn't want Alfred to have one, says that it rots your brains and makes you lazy, and says that the e-tab time is just 'enrichment', it's not part of the curriculum because they're not learning anything, just downloading and watching stuff. Still, Ma must have talked him around because on Tuesday Alfred opened the box and there it was, all for him. There's some games on it, from Grandpa, and Ma had uploaded some of his favourite movies for him to watch as soon as he'd synced his mind up. Pa got there too, he must have done, because there's also some files on 'Earth History', 'The Fall', and one about extinct animals which Alfred really doesn't wanna read but Pa's been mentioning at least one of them every dinner since so he probably should.

He goes into school and begins to chatter happily to his friend Ben as soon as he sees him about 'Zip Blast', the current school-yard fad, and about how he can't wait to sync up and play because he'd been practising over the weekend and he thinks he's kinda good now.

Ben looks uncomfortable. 'Oh, I don't think we're playing that one any more.'

'Huh? But...' Alfred stops and looks at Ben in disbelief, 'but Friday you said it was the best ever!'

'Well it was,' Ben concedes, reluctantly, 'but now there's the new 'Rock-ite' out so we played that over the weekend.'

Alfred's heart sinks. 'We?'

His friend has the grace to look as apologetic as a six year old can look about these matters but nothing more than that and at recess Alfred is alone once more. He tells himself it's okay, he doesn't care anyway but it's a half-hearted lie at best and he doesn't try to kid himself for too long. Instead, he decides he may as well sync up one of those stuffy files Pa put on the e-tab to pass the time and nibbles a cookie to keep himself entertained.

His teacher finds him gormless, ten minutes later. His eyes are glazed as he stares unblinkingly at the wall and his cookie, one chunk missing, lies forlorn on the table next to his slack left hand but his brain is more full and awake than it's ever been. Information about a long dead planet far far away pound and crash in his head and as soon as the data file has been properly synced he reaches out for his tab and loads up another.

At eight, Alfred has become that kid. No matter what conversation he gets into or who he talks to, if there is an opening or an opportunity he will bring up Earth and once that's accomplished he can go on and on for hours. He's downloaded every possible data file he can find about the entire subject: life before the Fall, the Fall itself, and the human race's desperate escape across the stars and for him it's still never enough. There's always another e-file to sync: about ancient nations, about old sciences and religions, about old wars and songs and dances and food; every second he can spare he gives over to tales of the past woven from the binary of today.

They are a scattered people, he likes to tell his listeners, there are hundreds of us, strewn across galaxies and planets and ships and no one knows how many of us there are any more because the Fall ripped apart alliances and histories so we don't even know who else is out there to find. Everything was lost, everything; the history, the stories, the places, the-

At this point, someone usually either changes the topic of conversation or he realises that they've walked away and left him babbling to himself, his eyes shut as he imagines the flight to freedom that happened too long before he was born. Adults are usually nicer and listen for longer, but they don't mean it either and by pretending to be interested in what he has to say they only serve to hurt him more.

He just can't understand, why does no one else find this interesting? Why does no one else dream of where they as a species came from and long to see it for themselves? Alfred would do anything to feel the wind on his face, to have breeze in his hair and the sun touch his skin because although he could play in a holo-room or go on a special holo-holiday it's not real and Alfred longs to just feel it. The sun on his planet is strong but the dense material of the domes blocks it from actually reaching him; he can't feel the warmth. At school he's learnt that it's too hot out there anyway and he'd die, but according to his data files the sun should be warm and gentle and fill up summer days and spring afternoons, so he can't quite feel the danger as much as he probably should. There's no air outside the domes either and what's the point of feeling the sun without a breeze, so he's not as sad as he could have been. It wouldn't ever compare to mankind's old sun, the sun in the stories he's growing up on.

He sometimes spends his recess and lunch at school rushing about as fast as his legs can carry him. Trying to get his own wind in such space is hard, but not impossible and if he focuses hard enough on his self-made breeze he can imagine that he's running over rocks and cliffs and weaving in and out of long gone animals that only the sky can remember. If this doesn't work, he syncs with his e-files to learn about something else, he's started to get into the people recently and likes the stories about normal stuff the most. Food, clothes, toys. Relatable things that he can see in his own home and use to imagine that he's been transported back through time and space.

There are often pictures of houses and Alfred marvels as how big they are and how much stuff those people must have had, collected form all the many places they must have seen. You can't get wood any more, but maybe if he asks Pa nicely he can get him some of that building material they use for making the new domes and he can practise making his own, just to see if he can.

He spends his weekends tinkering in his room with old bits of plastic, metal and cables and every now and again he plugs in a new circuit board to the plug sockets in his room and sees if he can make the lights turn on or off from somewhere else. Last weekend he built a fan and managed to make it blow. He can sync up a sound file from Earth and imagine that he's in a town somewhere way back when and there's a breeze on his face and there's someone who wants to talk to him.

Alfred is fifteen and is the best engineer in his school. He specialised early -he'd always had a knack for building things and he's good with numbers- and now this is what he's known for. Alfred can look at a electrical hub or a circuit board and immediately he can see either what's wrong or how to improve it and this makes him valuable. He's been building and fiddling with this sort of stuff in his room for ages but now it's finally cool, people actually want him to do that now. He sees it as a lucky thing, that he was bullied so much for it previously, because now he can see how much bullshit people like to throw when they want you to do something, how much an opinion of someone can change depending on their age and talent. Too good too young: weird and a nerd, you're wasting your time. Then you hit the right age and suddenly you're very experimental, very mature, it's good to know what you want in life. But ah, still young enough not to know your worth, you'll fix this for me for free, yes? If he wasn't as good as he is, he thinks, how valuable would they think I am? The answer scares him because he knows what it is and knows how thin the line he treads is; there are others like him, don't forget.

What even is he, without the skills of his hands?

He is seventeen. Alfred hates it, but Ma could use the help and Pa's not getting any younger, so he accepted an offer not too long ago for a entry level job in the government engineering department. It is an amazing offer for someone so young and fresh out of school, he knows that, but as much as he enjoys what he does the days wear him out and he spends less time listening to his e-files and more time building the dreams of others far more affluent than he.

He thinks he's doing okay for a while. The days whittle by easily and he starts to build up a nice savings pile that he uses to help out his parents every now and again. But he's nothing special. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of kids just like him on this planet who have been fed on a diet of strict, specialised schooling meant to produce only the best and Alfred knows that the only thing which sets him apart from the many many many others is his ability to just keep going. There is no safety in what he does at his age, no net to catch him if he slips up, so he begins to take on private jobs at the weekend to build up his CV further and get his name out there, making the chance of falling just that bit smaller. Before he realises it it's been a month since he last had the time set aside to listen to an e-file and that hits him, hard. He'd never had to set aside time before. Hell, he can't remember when he'd last done anything other than go to work, come home to sleep, and repeat.

He's struck by the monotony of it all. He can't see a difference between his life and that of his dad's, or his dad's friends, or anyone he knows, for that matter. Is this all there is? Is this all anyone does? When is there ever a break? Then, he gets it. There won't be a break. As soon as you can't keep up in this crazy race he's in, you're worthless. He's kind of been kidding himself, almost, that there'd be an end to it all, like a video game where you complete the level and then suddenly it's free play. You work hard to get a reward of, of something, or at least you can stop worrying and panicking about being left behind. There is no free play, he realises, it just keeps on going until you can't play any more because life has ground out your energy and sucked the vitality from your bones.

He goes running; pounding his feet on the treadmill he sucks in the humid air around him and imagines than he's running through an old Earthen jungle, dodging trees and leaping over crags in the forest floor. But there's no wind, and Earth refuses to come alive.

Alfred is eighteen. A message came through from Earth, old true Earth, that a new colony there is doing well and he hasn't been able to stop thinking about it since, thinking and dreaming about what he'd do if he ever went there, if he ever set up his life there instead of here. He could...no. There is no safety in history, he knows. There is no definite chance that anyone would want him to do that. Besides, there's no potential for definite growth, no stable career plan because you can't guarantee a career on digging up the scanty past of a long dead planet. But no matter how big of a safety net he could make for himself in engineering he feels no passion about any of it and the idea of spending his days encapsulated in this metal world of domes and tunnels makes him feel cold.

There's something that calls him in his dreams and whispers over the wind in his mind and this builds and builds in his feet until he can't keep them still any longer. One more look out of the window and up at the stars and he's gonna blow, he needs to get out and go go go because if he doesn't then he's gonna sink in this place.

Before he can stop himself he's bought a ticket and finds himself packing hurriedly late at night when his parents are asleep, stuffing clothes into the only bag he only which is far too small for this sort of thing but who the fuck travels anywhere these days? He hasn't got time to be better at this so he crouches under his bed and reaches in, all the way back until his hand scrapes the wall and he finds his old fan that he built when he was eight. He puts it on his bed, places his e-tab next to it with a message of what he's done and that's that.

He slips out without waking his parents, because saying goodbye would only be too hard and he knows that he'd end up changing his mind if they spoke even one word to him, so he says his farewells in silence and disappears.

................................................................................................................................

Peter is five and he sits upon his mother's knee, playing with the buttons on her shirt. She's with other adults and they're all talking about something that he doesn't really understand but they all sound sad and the air feels heavy so he keeps quiet like a good boy should and thinks about other things to keep himself busy. He thinks about the e-book his nanny got him last Christmas, the one with the pretty pictures, and thinks that it would be nice to live inside that book, with the greens of grass that he's never touched before. He wonders if grass is hard or soft and he spends so long thinking of this that that night, when he is sleeping, he dreams that he is running on grass and it is prickly, tickling his feet.

There is a voice in the dream, singing him the story but it is not Nanny's voice, nor Mummy's or Daddy's, but another man's and the lilt of his voice sings a language Peter doesn't know but it is a good voice for story telling and so the dream is vivid and touchable. He flies through the grass, feet pounding at earth instead of metal and the voice chuckles, deep and throaty. It makes him feel safe.

He wakes up because his Mummy is stroking his hair and forgets; school teaches him about how the air system in his dome works. Grass isn't as important as breathing.

He is eight and they are learning about the old Earthen languages. There used to be many, his teachers says, and each language held a culture, a history and a soul of a people and there used to be hundreds of them on Earth before it Fell. The teacher is old; his words are flat and there is no passion in his tone, but a thrill runs up Peter's arms as he imagines so much more. From the nothing he is given his brain decides to give those dead languages life and all of a sudden there are bursts of sound echoing inside his head. The teacher moves on, the class sits bored, but Peter can hear consonants clash against teeth and tongue and fricatives slip between breathy vowels. There are phonemes which glide between dipthongs and tripthongs to bound and fall out of the hundreds of mouths of hundreds of people; whispers of a past no one can hear tell stories long forgotten.

There is a clap very close to his head which scares all of the sounds away. His teacher looms over him, frowning in exasperation.

'Again, Peter?' he says, 'Stop daydreaming, boy. I asked you a question.'

'Er...' his classmates snicker and he feels his ears go red. 'I'm sorry, sir, I wasn't listening.'

'That much was obvious.'

Peter's cheeks burn hotter and he stares at his e-tab, focusing on the light of the screen to stop him from crying.

Before too long the lesson changes, then the day ends and he's allowed to go home. He walks alone through the corridors and exits the school dome, coming into the shuttle bus bay. He's a big boy now, he can take the shuttle bus all by himself and he has a special card to prove it. Weaving in and out of the other children, he hurries to where his bus is docked and scrambles inside to rush to his favourite seat, hopping up and placing his bag on the seat beside him. He likes to sit alone, because then he can stare out of the window and dream for as long as the journey will let him without worrying about talking to someone. Not that anyone wants to anyway, the other children say he's not got a brain because he would rather focus on the story in his head than on their silly games.

Nanny doesn't mind, she says it's good for people to dream and says that he goes off to somewhere called 'Neverland' whilst she pinches his cheeks and calls him her little Peter Pan. But when he gets home Nanny isn't there, Mummy and Daddy are and they're huddled in front of the large e-screen in the sitting room, faces pinched in worry.

He drops his bag by the kitchen table and goes to join them. There is a man on the screen speaking about their air ventilation system and a 'catastrophic degradation' and about some big numbers with a scientist nodding seriously to his left.

'What do we do now?' His mother's voice is hushed, fragile.

His father raises his eyes to her and shakes his head slowly. 'Debbie... you heard what he said. The planet's no longer viable.' His eyes flick towards Peter, suddenly aware that he's there too, and he smiles although it doesn't reach his eyes. 'Hey Pete. Do you mind doing your homework in your room today?'

Peter could ask why, but he sees that his Daddy doesn't want him to and Mummy looks like she's going to cry, so he glances once more at the screen and nods. He leaves them with the scary looking numbers and tips his books onto his bed. That night he dreams of waves crashing against his legs and he tastes the salt on his lip when he wakes.

At nine, there's some breaking news. Earth, of all things Earth, is habitable once more and it can't come at a better time. Peter sits on his favourite sofa at Nan's house, with his father having lunch, when the planet-wide intercom coughs its way to life and briefly deafens them all before the sound adjusts ever so slightly.

'ATTENTION ALL. PRIMARY SUPPORT SYSTEMS FOR THE SOUTH SIDE HAVE SUFFERED AN IRREPERABLE MALFUNCTION. BACKUP SYSTEMS WILL HOLD FOR APPROXIMATLY 3 HOURS AND 45 MINUTES. THIS IS NOT A DRILL; MAKE YOUR WAY TO YOUR EVACUATION POINTS.'

Then, it falls silent once more.

South side, that's them. Peter immediately feels as though he's going to be sick and by the look on his dad's face he's not alone. Once one half of the planet goes the other will surely follow. It's something they've all been expecting and planning for for years, but it's far, far too soon, they should have more time than this; they're not ready to go and the government's not even started the evacuation programme yet. His Nan shoots a look at his father from where she's sat in her armchair. It's a look Peter can't really read because there's something there that he subconsciously doesn't want to acknowledge.

'Earth?' Her voice is a thin whisper.

His father nods gravely. 'We got them Mum, the tickets came yesterday.' Peter's heart briefly lifts at the prospect, a longing that's deep and euphoric but then it crashes quickly. 'But...'

His Nan smiles but it doesn't reach her eyes. 'I know.'

Slowly, with growing horror, Peter understands. 'Wait,' he whips his head back and forth between the two of them, 'Nanny, where-'

'Don't worry, Peter,' she gets up and goes to kneel in front of where he's frozen in his chair, hands digging nails into the old material, 'I'll get on one of the other evacuation ships.'

'But you're not-,' his eyes burn and his voice is breaking but he doesn't look away, 'but you're not with us, why aren't you coming with us.'

'Oh Peter, my little Peter Pan,' she hugs him tight, pulling him in to her chest and he grips his hands in her shirt and tries to take in as much of her as he can.

'Mum we- we have to go.' Dad doesn't sound much better and before Peter can register much his Dad is hugging his Nan with a funny tight look on his face, then he's being pulled by the arm and out of the door, stumbling over his feet as he tries to keep up.

A terse shuttle bus later they get home to his mother already throwing their things into cases and boxes, haphazardly grabbing at e-frames and e-tabs to squash them and their memories safe under piles of their clothes. Peter could help, should help, but all he can do it sit numbly on the floor and cry whilst his life is collected and contained into a few measly bags. The rest will be left.

It doesn't take too long, thankfully, as Peter doesn't know what's worse, wanting to get this over with as fast as possible or wanting to stay and cling to the remnants of the only life he's ever known. As they make their way to the loading bays for the Earth-bound travellers he blearily finds himself thinking about what classes he'll miss in school tomorrow, but then he remembers Nanny and the ordeal starts anew as reality sets back in.

His parents are focused on more practical things.

They stand in line, their few pieces on luggage already being loaded on, and wait to board the ship they were assigned to only yesterday. His mother speaks under her breath, as if she is afraid to talk too loudly for fear of jinxing something. 'The Earth ships aren't even ready. They won't have enough food let alone rooms.'

His father shakes his head and slips his hand down to intertwine with hers. 'They must have known something like this could happen at any time, they've been predicting it for years. If anything, the rooms may not be ready but the agricultural sections will be.' He looks determinedly at the back of the head of the man in front of them and swallows. 'They only give out tickets if there's room. We'll be fine.'

Peter's mother glances his way meaningfully, and then back to his father.

'Jo, there're not enough ships; no one was ready in time. They can't have planned for everyone.' She bites the inside of her cheek, one hand on Peter's shoulder. Her fingers dig in, hard, but he doesn't try to shrug her off. He can barely feel it.

His father understands. 'She'll call us when she can.' Then, the line moves and they lurch forward together, huddled close.

Just before the door, where the tickets are being checked and where the din of the engines roaring into life starts to become uncomfortable, his father takes one last desperate look at out of the window at the distant domes of their colony, nestled in the dust. He taps an impatient rhythm against the tiled floor. 'She'll call.'

She never does.

................................................................................................................................

Francis is three and his daddy has just left Mummy.

'He went to fight,' she says as she strokes his hair. This confuses him because fighting is bad and you're only allowed to fight if someone tries to fight you first and no one has been nasty to Daddy that he's seen.

Mummy doesn't answer but continues to stroke his hair, humming softly a tune she sings to him every night before bed that sounds old and sad and sleepy, so he just nods and rests his head heavily against her chest.

He doesn't see his Daddy again.

He is ten when he realises that there never was any war. The notion strikes him dumb one day in the kitchen as he distantly listens to the news playing through the announcer when he helps wash up after dinner. The announcer is speaking about something banal, a fashion show maybe, but Francis is staring out of the window and up at the sky, up at the stars that push through the daytime's thin atmosphere. He doesn't know what caused him to start this train of thought, but once it's started his brain quickly pieces together the puzzle that it has ignored all of this time.

At school they were taught about wars, about age old battles with guns and swords and metal where blood was spilt over land and the wealth it contained. But, there hasn't been any fighting here. He scrubs a glass, sponge squeaking against the side. And even if there was fighting somewhere far away, his dad would surely still be able to write or visit, or come back after all this time. And more importantly, if there was a war going on now then surely he would have learnt about it at school, rather than learning about age old political struggles on the human-ruined home world.

His mother takes the glass from his slack grip. 'Daydreaming?'

He shakes himself to and looks at her. Turned away and out of the window her face is suddenly older and oddly clearer than he remembers it being, she looks like a person rather than just his mother and that's a scary thought. It's as though the wash of childhood has momentarily slipped away and he's now aware of both it and the harsh brushstrokes of reality. She's a person and feels things, just like he does. So it hurts, that she lied, and it will hurt him for a long time because he doesn't know why but cannot for the life of him bring himself to ask her. Francis is good at reading people and he knows that this isn't something he should ask about, so turns back to the dirty dishes and doesn't.

When Francis is fifteen there is a war, of sorts. The planet nearest to them, the one they rely on the most for trade, switches governmental policies and refuses to continue their current agreements. This results in a breakdown of communication and heightened tension between the two colonies, each bristling angrily at the offence yet unwilling to be the first to initiate anything rash. There is minor rationing imposed upon Francis' planet until trade is re-established as well as a draft of specialisation training implemented, just in case. He's unaffected by the rationing; the draft is a different story. Just in case this trade block becomes permanent, his planet needs to be prepared to become fully self sufficient in everything from science, to food, to art, to the army.

The block stays in place and tensions rise. Against his wishes, Francis is assigned a scientific draft. He is now seventeen and knows he needs to be given something but he'd prefer agriculture or education to research, if he could have the choice, or the arts if he's allowed to dream. He isn't. He brain is good, his grades are high and thus he is far more useful to the cause working on the advancement of his planet than working to help feed it.

A few days after his birthday and a month after his posting letter arrives, his mother rides with him on a shuttle to his boarding station. He will try out four different areas: mechanics, medicine, biology, and physics, then he will be assigned to what he works with best, where he can produce the best work possible. But Francis can't think of anything worse than being stuck in a lab all day, shutters drawn and devoid of all personality. Even worse, he's heard the rumours that have managed to float back from those who have graduated and knows that once he boards this ship there's no escaping the life he'll be moulded into. The programme is four years long and then he will be placed into a job where he will stay until he dies. At twenty one he will have no other skills for work other than what he will acquire at the science facility, there is no swapping careers afterwards. He wants to do so much, there is so much that he loves to do, and with each passing shuttle stop his heart grows more frantic, fighting his brain which has accepted the inevitable.

He gets physics. He calls his mother to howl down the phone once, just once, before he realises the futility of doing so; nothing can or will change. Accept it.

At twenty, a year before his training would end, there is finally a truce. Trade resumes and Francis finally tastes sugar after five years but now, after so long, the taste is too much. Not fully qualified yet too old to be automatically accepted into another programme, Francis is in limbo. There isn't much point in him continuing his training, there are more than enough specialists now and not enough jobs to give them, so there isn't anything for him to do. It's odd, now that there is nothing to work towards he feels empty but at the same time everything is just too much. He returns home and his mother fusses and tries to talk to him, tries to get him to come out of his room and sit with her and he did, at first, but the longer he's home the shorter his resistance is and the longer the 'breaks' are in his room.

Emotions seem to be harder to process without a goal, that or he never had many to begin with and without something to distract him from that notion he's finally noticing how few he has. Either way, other people are small insignificant creatures who worry about such useless, banal things. Who did what, with who and where. Did you know, her son the doctor? Well, he's a you know what now and- ugh. Francis can no longer take it.

He doesn't really see this as a problem. He feels as though he's risen above other people and finally understands that such things are not worth his time; why worry, after all, about what job to get. Why worry about whether or not someone likes you. Every day, regardless of what they do, the planet will spin and the domes will reflect the same bleak, churning sky and Francis realises that he's trapped here, by this life and that his life means nothing. None of their lives do, it's all the same; nowhere new to go, nothing new to do. Pick a job, do the job. Come home, go back. Retire. Die.

So he sits in his room, because if he talks to his mother or to anyone else he is reminded that somehow he's supposed to care about it, that life here is supposed to matter to him just as it matters to everyone else. His mother will mention this or that and he'll have to either fake the responses she wants, or not and upset her and neither option sounds pleasing to him.

After years of monotony and training suddenly he is permitted to express again and it's like he's forgotten how, the parts rusty after all the disuse. There are too many emotions and he finds himself forgetting to use them or using the wrong ones because he can't do them automatically any more, for some reason, and reactions that call for an understanding of nuance are just lost to him. Very quickly everything is too much. Food, heat, depth, people, concepts, everything.

He hides away but then they stop becoming too much and they shrink and shrivel up and become nothing at all he can feel how empty he is. Nothing can fill the void he's got because he doesn't even know why it's there and he can scarcely tell that there's a problem in the first place. He does knows he's got a problem though, really, knows how serious it is by the way his mother watches him with fearful eyes and baleful glances. She tiptoes tentatively around the house, carefully softening her words and her gentleness feels like a pressure cooker slowly but surely building something that's going to get bigger and hotter and harder to make go away. She avoids talking about it, about how Francis feels or doesn't, and by doing so the problem is allowed to grow, unchecked. Francis doesn't have to act any more, doesn't have to pretend, and so the feelings of apathy grow and grow until they swallow him whole and all he can bring himself to do is sit and stare and the sky, a dark choking yellow.

It feels heavy to look at, like a lid covering everything in his life, all potential, all future, all growth. It just festers and sinks lower and lower still and he sits and watches it for days before he's realised he's done so.

When Francis is twenty-two, his mother breaks. Not that she herself breaks, but her patience does.

'I can't do this any more.' she says. There are tears on her face and Francis watches one slide off and fall onto her collar. 'You need to go.'

Francis appraises her properly, meeting her eyes. She flinches at his gaze but remains resolute in her decision, though her bottom lip quivers. 'There's nothing for you here, we both know that. You don't want to be here, so you need to go.'

'I don't want to be anywhere.' he replies.

She gives him a watery smile. 'I know. That's why, you might as well see if you can want to be somewhere else.' She lifts up her arm and shows him her e-tab, the translucent screen showing a brightly coloured ticket. 'I've bought you a flight. It's Earth, it was declared habitable a few weeks ago.'

Francis knows he should feel something, this is one of those instances when he knows that he should be feeling something but he can't quite imagine what emotion he should give her.

She doesn't seem to expect one. 'It's one way. And this, this is all of my savings, Francis.' Her eyes are wide and her face is suddenly so very very old. 'If you don't want to be any more, at least make that decision once you've seen this. You can't go without seeing this, after all. See this, see it for me and then you can decide, okay?'

Suddenly she looks shocked and runs forward to embrace him, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck and knocking her e-tab into his face. The garish purple of the ticket burns his eyes. 'Oh Francis.' She sobs into his shoulder and clutches tightly into his shirt. 'Oh Francis it's okay, you can cry if you want to.'

Oh.

He's crying.

................................................................................................................................

Ludwig is six, and is sick again. The doctors don't know what's wrong with him; they know what's causing it at least but they have no idea why. He can't keep food down and every time he tries to stand the world pitches and swims and he can't keep his balance so he never manages to stay up for long before he bonelessly falls to the floor, where he feels no better.

It's the gravity, the doctors say, for some reason he's affected by the gravity. The artificial gravity that he's known all his life; it's as if he's just climbed aboard and his body suffers from relapses where it just can't acclimatise. Where it suddenly realises that something's not quite right and rebels against him for a week or so. This his family already knows, but his mother isn't satisfied with such a lacklustre answer so she takes him to a different doctor every time he suffers another attack just in case one of them is even marginally more competent than the last. These 'episodes', as his mother likes to call them, don't happen all that often, but he seems to have one every ten months or so and they are regular enough to annoy his mother to no end. Ludwig doesn't really know if she's annoyed that no one can fix him or with him himself, Gilbert won't say and normally his big brother talks to pretend that he knows something so his silence worries Ludwig the most.

Mother is a very important person with a very important job: she's a governor of the space station upon which they live and it is very important that Ludwig remembers this. So, when he's laying in bed clutching at his belly and desperately clenching his eyes shut to minimise the swaying, his friends at school think that he is away for a special training academy. Because can you just imagine, the governor of a space station's son being space sick?

His father doesn't like to call it that because he thinks it's degrading so his mother doesn't, when she thinks Ludwig can't hear, anyway, but Ludwig knows that's what the kids at school would say so he happily keeps mum because it's easier than lying. They don't talk to him much besides, they find him too cold and distant but that's because he's so scared of disgracing his mother further that he can't quite relax fully.

When Ludwig is thirteen his mother, after exhausting all doctors aboard their large floating colony, finally accepts that it's unlikely that this small problem of his is going to go away. Her way of dealing with it is to pretend that it just doesn't happen; during an attack Ludwig is sent to his room where he stays painfully alone with only his books for company whilst she busies herself with her new campaigns. She's running for director now, aiming as high as she can go and there's no room for weak, feeble Ludwig all the way up there.

His brother tries his best to keep him entertained and happy during these times, but Gilbert is healthy, strong, smart; he's everything that Ludwig should also be able to grow up to be and their parents have sent him off to expensive schools which means that he's more often away from home than not. Sometimes Ludwig wonders if they've sent him away because they want Gilbert to be the all around best he can be, or if it's to distance him as much as they can from Ludwig. It's almost as if they're worried that Ludwig will taint him, or that maybe Gilbert will grow too attached to him and distract himself from what's really important. That Ludwig will anchor him down.

At five years older it's highly unlikely that Ludwig will be the one doing the influencing, but his brother, despite hardly seeing each other and such a large age difference, does seem to genuinely care for him. During one particular attack, when Ludwig is eighteen, Gilbert is home from university; it is almost Christmas and his family are preparing to travel to where his grandparents live on the other side of the space station, where they'll spend the holiday. Of course, it is now that his body decides to betray him.

He, his parents, and his brother are gathered around the large dining room table finishing off dinner. It is tense. Mostly it is Gilbert who talks because despite their mother's cool demeanour and their father's lack of interest he seems to always have something to say to fill the silence and speaks easily. Even with the response he gets, or lack of it, he seems honestly unperturbed and remains cheerful, somehow managing to both eat and speak without seeming impolite. As much as he loves his brother, Ludwig is also supremely jealous.

He stares at his fork, contemplating which point in the evening would be best to ask if he could slip away, when his body decides for him. His stomach swoops, his ears pop and the table tilts alarmingly. He clenches the edge in panic to remain upright and the noise alerts his mother, who looks up from her dessert in irritation.

'Ludwig, we are going away tomorrow.'

'M- mother-'

His mother sighs and looks at his father, who sharply stares back. 'Dear?'

His father grunts and spears another forkful of fruit pie. 'They're expecting him to come.'

'But the photographers-'

'What do you want me to do, Hilda?'

Meanwhile, Ludwig has still not been dismissed and cannot now seem to find the words to ask for permission himself without spewing all over the fancy silverware. He doubts that that will make the situation better, somehow. Gilbert notices and stands, attracting his parents' attention.

'I'll take Luddy to his room.'

'Darling...' their mother tries to say something, but it's what she's trying not to say that comes across the loudest.

Gilbert ignores her and walks around the table, slowly helping Ludwig to his feet, then away from the table and swiftly towards a bathroom. They make it just in time. Gilbert pats him comfortingly on the back and rubs soothing circles into his shoulders until he's finished, then hands him a glass of water.

'So, they're still arseholes, huh?'

Ludwig snaps his head up in horror, but this is a bad idea because the image of Gilbert swims before him and he has to shut his eyes.

'Don't call them that.' He finally manages, weakly.

Gilbert tuts. 'What the fuck did they feed you with in order to churn your personality out.'

Ludwig lays his head on the cool tiles of the floor and groans inwardly at how nice the feeling is. 'They're not arseholes.'

'Yeah, and my name's Shirley.'

Ludwig cracks open an eye, but Gilbert's not joking. He is, for once, deadly serious. 'How'd you put up with them Lud?'

Ludwig shrugs and gives a small shake of his head. 'They're our parents, Gil. They still care for me. Besides, I'm not exactly making it easy for them.'

Gilbert looks disgusted. 'You're their fucking son, arsehole. They're supposed to take care of you. They ain't even doing that right are they?' Gilbert runs a hand through his shock of white hair and bits his bottom lip whilst he shakes his head. 'Look at how they treat you versus me.'

'Yes, but I'm not exactly-'

'But nothing!' Gilbert raises his voice slightly and swallows. When he speaks again, he's much quieter, back under control. 'Have they got you in a university programme yet?'

Ludwig's silence is answer enough and Gilbert sighs deeply before brushing back Ludwig's sweaty fringe. 'There's nothing wrong with you Lud.' His brother sounds so very sad. 'Fuck, there's nothing wrong with you at all. They know full well that if they put you on a planet rather than this floating heap of rust that you'll probably be alright. And have they? Have they fuck.'

Ludwig wants to argue against him, wants to say something to stand up for himself if not for their parents but his eyes are suddenly burning and his throat is choked up. He knew a long time ago that his parents had given up on him, but to hear it from someone else hurts more sharply than anything he tells himself.

There's an odd companionable silence for a while; Ludwig lays still with his face against the floor and his brother's hand carding through his hair so he almost misses what Gilbert says next.

'I was gonna wait till Boxing Day, but I've got us tickets for Earth.'

Ludwig tenses and holds his breath. Gilbert continues. 'I was gonna wake you up on the 26th and take you away with me, but I want to tell you now instead, cause you look like shit. We're gonna get out of here Luddy; I've always wanted to take you to a planet and what better one is there than the original, huh?'

'You, I- you can't- what about your studies? The internship you've got?' Ludwig manages to stammer out, opening his eyes.

Gilbert brushes his concerns aside. 'I never liked medicine, really. I've always wanted to go to a planet, so I'm mega up for it.'

Ludwig knows he should say no, knows that he shouldn't take up the offer. He'd be denying his brother so much, he'd be exactly what their parents worried he'd be because he'll only drag Gilbert down and down and down like a heavy lead weight and ruin all of his chances at a good life.

But Ludwig wants to be selfish. He reaches out and clasps onto Gilbert's hand, squeezing it tightly. 'Gil...'

Gilbert flashes him a grin and winks. 'I know, right? How awesome am I?'

[royalreef]

Anonymous inquired:  🦈 Random Merfolk Species Information - Accepting

Name for Themselves: Jrh’yhwa’t, Jrr’hywt, Hry’ywt, Rr’wthe, and other variations. Name Meaning: Small, in the shadows/in the cracks. Alternatively: dappled/speckled. (General) Mer Name for the Species: Crr’ione (General) Mer Name Meaning: Searing, like how a cut or venom will burn. Ragged. Languages: Rb’ttyi, Ypt’olie, S’er’gg, Enth’k, etc. Many smaller, regional languages, some only spoken in isolated communities. OOC Shorthand Names/My Nickname(s) for Them: Vampires, Cookiecutters, Lampreys

(( These are one of my favorite species of merfolk that I’ve had, developed and waiting, for a WHILE now! They’re one of the most unique of the merfolk species, which in this case, refers to how specialized they are! 

When I make merfolk, I’m typically creature-creating in the same way that actual evolution works. Which is, namely, that I have certain traits that I keep in mind for their ancestor, and I think about the environment which they are endemic to, and I then use both of those to extrapolate and figure out both what niche they would occupy and what adaptations they would have to fulfill that niche.

Which means that I’m usually working with the existing environments and ecosystems that are in the world, which usually means that merfolk fall into fairly typical roles in their ecosystem. This happens all of the time in nature, and largely I consider it good for that reason. Having a small, canine predator to eat generalist small mammals and birds is a common thing irl for good reason, since that’s both how ecosystems and evolution works. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken. And, typically, similar designs work similarly well, which is why in places without canines, mammals might still evolve canine-like body plans in a method of convergent evolution. Taking advantage of similar resources and living similar lifestyles typically leads to similar solutions.

So that’s why a lot of my merfolk feel like they’re taking notes from everything from sharks to dolphins to mosasaurs - because they are! Their branch on the tetrapod family tree is closer to amphibians than anything else living today, but all of those animals evolve to look very similar for good reason! There’s only so many solutions to being marine megafauna and swimming efficiently, which is why everything kind of decides to get big and blobby in the ocean!

Which is why this species is SUCH A TREAT to me!

Because, every so often, I end up in a solution where my worldbuilding creates its own niche in an ecosystem. There’s a lot of different merfolk species, they’re pretty successful in what they do, and when you get one successful species, there’s only so much time you have before other species change to take advantage of that resource.

Which is all to say - the jrh’yhwa’t are specialist predators of other merfolk.

This is why I’ve taken to calling them ‘ cookiecutters ’ - after the cookiecutter shark! They are tiny, unassuming little sharks, about the size of a pencil, who have GIANT teeth and have evolved to sneak up on much larger animals, cut perfectly circular chunks of meat out of them, and dart away with their easy meal!

The jrh’yhwa’t are among the smallest species of merfolk. Miranda herself is actually closer to being in their range for a fully grown healthy adult at just under five feet tall, though they have shorter tails than abyssals and longer torsos, both proportionally. They’re usually pretty dull colored - dark browns are common, with lighter tan underbellies or black markings, which are usually minimal and largely take the form of barring or dappling, but melanism is semi-uncommon among them. Their eyes are large with slitted pupils and usually blue, with some uncommon or rare colors that have the chance to pop up. They, like most merfolk species, lack bioluminescence. Unlike most merfolk, however, they’re heterodonts - with larger piercing fangs in the front of their mouth and larger shearing “molars” in the back of their mouth which come together like scissors.

They’re a part of the one genus of merfolk that I actually haven’t shown on this blog yet. For now I’ve just taken to calling the genus the “Atlantic Genus”, because they’re the main genus that’s adapted for life in the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, alongside the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, but I’m probably going to find a better term for them and the other two genus as well. There’s plenty of the “Pacific Genus” in the Atlantic Ocean, and plenty of the “Atlantic Genus” in the Pacific Ocean, and the “Basal Genus” is just a misnomer because they’ve definitely been evolving along their own paths as well!

However, for this discussion, know that the “Atlantic Genus” is unified through the fact that they had their origins in adapting to life in the Arctic Circle first, and for that, they typically have reduced scale coverage in favor of thicker skin, a more “evenly balanced” tail ( looking closer to a fish’s tail than the massive lower lobe that the abyssals, some others in the “Basal Genus”, and the leviathans - this is a similar thing to what happened to marine reptile tails in their evolutionary history ), some steps towards true warmbloodedness, adaptations for colder weather, and more-fused ( and less-useful at extracting oxygen ) earfins than the “Basal Genus”.

Typically, jrh’yhwa’t are less social than other merfolk. They’ll form smaller, but very close-knit, groups with each other, and will usually skirt around and shy away from other, larger, merfolk social groups - but merfolk are a lot like whales, in that they’ll sing to each other to communicate and bond over long distances. Jrh’yhwa’t absolutely will join in this, and that’s where they’ll usually shine, in terms of being included in other species of merfolk’s social groups! In terms of merfolk, they’re usually considered as having some of the overall prettiest or best-sounding voices, with there being some specific refinements in their vocal chords to allow them to produce sharper notes at higher pitches, which ends up in them sounding unusually “clear” to other mer. 

Of course, evolutionarily, this was so that other merfolk would come closer to them - where they could dart in, quickly shear off pieces of the other’s fins, tail, sides, or even limbs, and then dart away while the other mer was still trying to understand what was happening. The same can be said for their attunement to higher pitches of sounds, since they work better for shorter distances, and thus are more useful in communicating to each other without other mer possibly listening in.

But this is the modern day, and it’s been modern history for them for well over 27,000 years. Well before the Modern Merkingdom was founded, they had stopped this pattern of predation, with the rise of things like domesticated animals and the shifts in diet and lifestyle that come along with agriculture, much less forming established groups and civilizations all to their own. Life changes. For humans, it was adapting into being reliant on cooked food and developing the dietary infrastructure to handle dairy, and for the jrh’yhwa’t, that meant starting to rely on food sources that weren’t other merfolk.

Unfortunately... Well, other merfolk tend to view the jrh’yhwa’t as sly or devious or dangerous. When I talk about when the jrh’yhwa’t were true specialist predators, that really was in their evolutionary history, and well lost by the time any merfolk was building their first cities ( a rare few still inhabited to this day, but most fallen or lost to time ), and it’s not in recent memory nor even ancient history, truly closer to something like the stone age for merfolk, but when other mer dislike them, it’s not really rational. They’re small. They keep to themselves. They prefer staying out of everyone’s business and only joining in from afar. 

Really, it’s more about them being counted as outsiders first and foremost for why other merfolk are biased against them, and their history as specialist predators is used for justification for that, even when no one could possibly even remember when that was a larger part of their lives, or even when other merfolk themselves aren’t immune from the same issue. The Merkingdom has an existing method of which merfolk meat can be bought to be eaten, and Merkingdom royalty and those in power will even show it off as a gesture of their authority. It’s not about their history, it’s just about the fact that they’ve been deemed an other. It’s all hypocrisy for the sake of a different goal.

They’re very much a minority in most places in the Merkingdom - with exception for a few of their own enclaves where they’ve lived for generations. Typically their cultures are very specific to which family or village they’re from, with stories passed down verbally that can differ greatly from even other jrh’yhwa’t. They can be private, so a lot of their history and stories and culture is kept very strictly within their own communities and can be hard to document otherwise, with entire collections of their knowledge going extinct in one fell swoop with the destruction of one community or family line. They have a lot of languages for this reason, and would have even more if you count their languages that have gone extinct. 

They’re actually known cultivators of various sturgeon, and have their own techniques to handle their anadromous life cycles - though, not every community keeps sturgeon either. Most of their villages are closer to shore than other merfolk, typically favoring the North American or European shores of the Atlantic Ocean, but there are definitely those in deeper waters as well, and they’re one of the species of merfolk who stay in place instead of living more nomadic lifestyles. 

Most other merfolk communities only really know where those villages are because of their songs, as I mentioned, as merfolk behave like whales and will “sing” for long-distance communication. Unfortunately, there is a nasty history of then finding those villages and destroying them completely, even though most of the time other merfolk will mentally note to keep away from those areas. Sometimes those villages will then respond by entirely closing off and not even “sing” at all - but due to how merfolk psychology works, that’s super stressful, even for them. Especially for them, even.

[pi-creates]

So I’ve been happily watching @stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale stream through games recently, and she has decided to try one of my favourite Telltale games - Tales From the Borderlands. But since CJ isn’t familiar with the Borderlands games (and from the sounds of things, neither are some people in the chat) I’ve put together a very basic bit of background information from what I know (I also haven’t played everything from after TFTB’s release). 

It isn’t necessary to know any of this to enjoy TFTB as it gives a brief, ‘bare-bones’ introduction, but I figured it might help some people who like having that extra bit of depth going in without having to play through the other games. 

There won’t be spoilers for the TFTB plot, obviously, but the bottom section under the ‘read more’ will list characters from the main series who are mentioned/appear in the game and relevant information that someone familiar with the series should already know about them. But if you are familiar with the series and don’t want to know who may or may not show up (or would just rather go in blind to who is a ‘returning’ character) - stop reading at the Notable characters segment. 

[Spoilers for the Borderlands series below here]

For starters, Borderlands is set in the distant future – there are ways to ‘digistruct’ weapons and vehicles at the press of a button, you can walk up to a vending machine and instantly change your appearance, there are advanced cybernetics, robots are normal, you can have personal shields, teleportation is technically possible for both weaponry (notably grenades) and people, and there are guns that shoot electricity/fire/corrosive ammunition.

The goal of every Borderlands game revolves around the idea of opening a Vault – an ancient archway of Eridian origins (just think of long-extinct aliens) that is filled with treasures, hostile guardian entities, and also a very big, pissed off vault monster who will attempt to destroy anyone/anything that tries to get inside. The people who take the risk of searching for a vault and the treasures inside are labelled as Vault Hunters. In the core games, this would be you.

The problem is that finding a vault is hard since they are hidden, and they are often locked with artefact keys that trigger them to unlock. This means that the location of a vault, a vault key, or any signs of Eridian tech is VERY highly valued. Most of the games therefore revolve around the planet of Pandora since it has a high concentration of Eridian ruins which leads prospecting vault hunters to assume there must be more vaults to find on the planet.

Pandora, though, is more than a little inhospitable. The environment is mostly barren or wildly extreme, the wildlife is often very aggressive and deadly, and the people tend to be very rough since they have to deal with all of that. The planet itself doesn’t offer many prospects beyond weapon manufacturing, research, resource mining, and banditry. It has, however, previously been home to large corporations who tried to exploit said resources and attempted to ‘civilise’ the locals who would rather tell those corporations to piss off with the booming end of a shotgun. There is also a significant portion of the population who teeter really close to insanity on a daily basis. That is normal for them.

All of the attempts to settle and gather resources from Pandora has led to literal rubbish heaps, abandoned colonisation attempts, manufacturing/research zones that are often not friendly, bandit shanty towns, toxic chemical zones (from corporations running unethical experimentation) and SO many roaming bandits. Naturally, the locals don’t take kindly to anyone who works for the bigger corporations as they expect to be screwed over or exploited in some way.

For people familiar with the series, the timeline for Tales from the Borderlands is set after Borderlands 2 and before the Fight For Sanctuary DLC.

For people unfamiliar, you need to know that Pandora has recently dealt with the Handsome Jack problem. Basically, the handsome Hyperion CEO was set on wiping out all bandits and dangerous wildlife from Pandora. The problem was that Jack had a very low opinion of vault hunters, bandits, and pretty much everyone on Pandora as he believed they all fell in to those categories. 

The player’s introduction to Jack literally comes from him inviting vault hunters to Pandora, only for him to then blow up the transport in transit. You are lucky enough to survive where most others died. Jack himself then contacts you to say that you aren’t following his plan to kill all the vault hunters and “if you could just do me a favour and off yourself, that’d be great. Thanks, pumpkin.“

At the start of Borderlands 2 you will hear of Jack’s rather unethical and violent methods of dealing with people who aren’t on board with his plan – all while having a rather cheerful manner of speaking, almost as if he was enjoying playing the game with you as his opponent. He actually keeps in contact with the vault hunters throughout the game to casually chat with them, and occasionally yell at them if they aren’t playing along with him.

He plotted to open a vault on Pandora that held a very powerful monster called the Warrior. He was going to harness the Warrior’s powers to enact his wide-scale extermination plans. On the journey to stop his plans the vault hunters end up killing Jack’s daughter, Angel, as she was being used to ‘charge’ the vault key. Angel herself led the vault hunters to her location in the hopes that they would stop her father’s plans, much to Jack’s disapproval. He stops being cheerful at this point and doubles-down on wanting to raze all of Pandora to the ground.

He does successfully open the vault and the vault hunters have to defeat the Warrior before Jack can use it. The vault hunters win and Jack is killed for his crimes against Pandora. His final speech before dying in Borderlands 2 was very cool – including it here as it sums up his thought process really well. It has also lead to some interesting interpretations of Jack’s overall character.

"No, no, no... I can't die like this... Not when I'm so close... And not at the hands of a filthy bandit! I could have saved this planet! I could have actually restored order! And I wasn't supposed to die by the hands... of a CHILD KILLING PSYCHOPATH!! You're a savage! You're a maniac, you are a bandit, AND I AM THE GODDAMN HERO!!

"The Warrior was practically a god! How- How in the HELL have you killed my Warrior?!

"You idiots! The Warrior could have brought peace to this planet! No more dangerous creatures, no more bandits, Pandora-it would have been a PARADISE!!"

Naturally, since all of this drama happened not long ago, the citizens of Pandora are very much still on edge in regards to anyone who works for the bigger corporations – Hyperion especially.

Definitions to some things you are likely to see/hear about in TFTB –

Eridium – An ore-like resource associated with the vaults. It glows purple and is supposedly exceptionally rare in most of the universe – but not Pandora. This is what most of the manufacturing companies want since it can be harnessed to create highly effective tech/weapons.

Catch-A-Ride – The service that Scooter (a mechanic on Pandora) uses to digistruct vehicles out of Catch-A-Ride stations.  

ECHOs / ECHOnet – Essentially your mobile phone with internet and an app that lets you check everything in your backpack with a holographic display.

The Crimson Raiders – More or less the resistance fighters of Pandora who kept the citizens protected during the fighting of the main games. Run by the original vault hunters and still active in keeping Pandora free of outside threats.

Atlas – A technology and weapon corporation that was the first to make an earnest attempt to colonise Pandora after they suspected it would hold a vault. Was known as one of the best in terms of quality. They have since gone out of business.

Hyperion – The main corporation you will be dealing with. Has a particularly bad reputation on Pandora due to their former CEO, Handsome Jack, attempting to wipe out every bandit community on Pandora. Under Jack’s rule a lot of experiments were also run testing Eridium and Eridium by-products on people and animals – resulting in death, mutation, and insanity to most subjects.

Helios – Hyperion’s orbital station that can constantly be seen orbiting between Pandora and its moon. The station itself is shaped like a giant ‘H’ and houses a concentrated weapon that can shoot massive ammunition at targeted areas on Pandora. The weapon can also be used to shoot transport containers from the orbital station down to Pandora’s surface.

Elpis – Pandora’s moon. Visibly cracked open due to excessive mining. Everyone from here is VERY Aussie and it’s a little weird...

Notable characters you may meet/need to know about –

Marcus – Your narrator – he also narrated the intros and endings to the other games. You won’t see him, but it’s a nice tie in to the format of the main series.

Sirens – Essentially these ladies are magic. They are all born normal, but they will suddenly change and inherit their siren powers when another siren dies. They stand out by their glowing, tattoo-like markings that mysteriously appear on them when they awaken their siren abilities. Not much is known about them other than they can interact with Eridian based materials, and that they are excessively powerful since they have magic abilities.

Claptrap (CL4P-TP) – A class of unicycle robot that is very annoying. Doesn’t shut up, but is technically a vault hunter. You may or may not run in to him.

Angel / (Guardian Angel) – A siren who had the ability to interface with technology. She is the daughter of Handsome Jack and spent most of her life hidden in a secured bunker that only her father could enter via a DNA lock and voice password (her father saying “I love you”). This is due to Jack becoming extremely protective after bandits tried to abduct Angel upon realising she was a siren, and after Angel unintentionally killed her own mother with her powers. Due to her siren powers, she had the ability to stay in constant communication with anyone outside of the bunker, and to help her father with any tasks he required. Was killed by the vault hunters in Borderlands 2.

Handsome Jack – Antagonist from Borderlands 2 and previously the CEO of Hyperion. Has a mask of his face fastened over his actual face which was scarred by an Eridian artefact on Elpis. Starting out as a programmer, he worked his way up the ladder in Hyperion with Angel’s help through a mix of (initially) well intentioned plans to help the people of Elpis, and a growing obsession with power and hatred for Pandora and its bandits. He eventually strangled his boss and named himself President and CEO of the company.

Professor Nakayama – Had a massive crush on Handsome Jack in Borderlands 2. Smart guy who was devastated by Handsome Jack’s death and was working on a way to find the best successor to Jack to run Hyperion. He was attempting to clone Jack from old medical data (taken somewhere before the start of Borderlands 2′s plot) before the vault hunter’s confronted him and he literally dies from falling down a flight of stairs. Easiest boss battle ever.

Shade – DEFINITELY NOT INSANE. Somehow lived alone in a town in the middle of a desert with no water - and this definitely didn’t effect him mentally at all. He just wants a friend.

Scooter – Pandora’s best mechanic. Nice guy and actually a little more normal than a lot of other Pandorans. Has girl troubles, not that he’d ever admit it.

Ellie – Scooter’s sister. Also a mechanic, much to her mother’s displeasure.

Moxxi – Mother of Scooter and Ellie – runs a bar, slot machines, and previously a battle arena (The Underdome). Pretty much seen as Pandora’s Pin-Up, which she seems happy about since it has garnered her significant influence and power on Pandora. She speaks in pure innuendo.

Janey – Elpis’ best mechanic, focusing more on vehicles that work in low (or no) gravity. Runs an equivalent of Catch-A-Ride on Elpis. Girlfriend of Athena.

Athena – Vault hunter who was hired by Jack to help with the Vault on Elpis. Had a falling out with Jack after dealing with the Elpis situation, as this is where Jack was clearly starting to lose his stability. She notably fights with a shield that she can throw and return to her hand. Previously an Atlas employed assassin who turned against the company after Atlas tricked her into assassinating a target that was very important to her. Girlfriend of Janey.

Zer0 – Vault hunter who found a Pandoran vault and was involved in killing Handsome Jack. Another assassin who fights with a sword and is capable of making hologram decoys of himself. He likes to display holograms in front of his helmet to communicate since you cannot see his facial expressions. He’s an alien / who always speaks in haiku / with some exceptions.

Brick – Vault hunter from the first game. He is a berserker who punches VERY hard, but is a softy at heart.

Mordecai – Vault hunter from the first game. Sniper and sharpshooter, doesn’t need a scope to get a good headshot.

Lilith – Vault hunter from the first game. Siren who leads The Crimson raiders along with Brick and Mordecai.

Loader Bots – Hyperion made bots that are used for security and manual labour. They are big, they can speak, and they are very sturdy. Weirdly enough, they have the capacity to become self-aware (though self-aware models are often destroyed by Hyperion if discovered).

Psychos – A particular class of bandit that is always shirtless, dressed in orange pants, masked, and they all speak complete gibberish. They have some consistencies to their gibberish including an obsession with meat and salt.

Butt Stallion – Handsome Jack’s diamond Pony – Jack lovingly named her after the vault hunters at the start of Borderlands 2. She eats Eridium and poops guns... I wish I was kidding.

[the-desolated-quill]

‘But They’re Covered In Nipples’: The Story Of Destroy All Humans - Quill’s Scribbles

Another E3 has come and gone. There was some good announcements. Square Enix unveiled their Avengers game, Keanu Reeves came on stage to give us the release date of Cyberpunk 2077, Ubisoft are making another Watch Dogs set in London, and... um... what else happened?

Oh yeah!

DESTROY ALL HUMANS IS BACK!!!!!!

Yes, the cult classic Destroy All Humans is returning next year, developed by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games. This was quite possibly the nicest surprise I’ve ever had. When the teaser trailer came up on my YouTube recommendations, I practically screamed the house down. It’s a level of excitement I felt when 20th Century Fox announced they were finally making a Deadpool movie. 

Yeah. That excited.

Destroy All Humans was my favourite video game series growing up. I played the first two games non-stop on my PS2 and I even bought a Nintendo Wii and PS3 just so I could play Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon (yeah, we’ll get to them). Unfortunately, while the series was reasonably successful, it never quite broke through into the mainstream, and it ended up having a very short lifespan, making it one of the most underrated franchises of all time.

So, to mark the return of Crypto and Pox, I thought I’d take a retrospective look at the series as a whole. Analysing each game in the franchise and talking about what made them so good, whilst also looking at how it faded into obscurity and how THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games can hopefully avoid this fate with their remake.

Radioactive, Exploding, Zombie Cows

The first Destroy All Humans was developed by THQ and Pandemic Studios (the latter probably most famous for making the original Star Wars Battlefront games. You know? The good ones that weren’t overloaded with loot boxes and microtransactions) and was released in 2005 on the PS2 and Xbox. You play as a Furon warrior called Cryptosporidium 137, or Crypto for short, who is tasked with harvesting the brains of humans in order to extract pure Furon DNA from them. His leader Orthopox 13, or Pox, explains that the Furons are at risk of cloning themselves into extinction as they are unable to reproduce naturally due to a lack of genitalia and the DNA in their cloning banks are starting to degrade. Fortunately the Furons visited prehistoric Earth on their way back from destroying the Martians and took the opportunity to ‘let off some steam’ with the natives. As a result, humans possess a strand of Furon DNA that can hopefully restore the Furons’ reproductive organs. Unfortunately a secret government organisation called Majestic (a sort of cross between Project Blue Book and the Men in Black) have caught wind of the Furon invasion due to Crypto 136 crash landing in Roswell 10 years earlier. So Crypto 137 will have to be extra cautious in his quest to take over Earth.

The game was released four years after Grand Theft Auto III, which had completely revolutionised gaming with its open world sandbox. As a result, other companies were attempting their own open worlds and putting their own spin on them. While Destroy All Humans didn’t quite have the same scale as GTA, it made up for it with quality over quantity. The game offered six small open world areas for players to have fun in and its central premise was utterly captivating. After countless games where you had to fight alien invaders, Destroy All Humans allowed you to play as the alien invader.

Pandemic Studios completely embraced the alien invasion premise, giving the player a vast number of weapons and abilities to wreak havoc on planet Earth. You had access to weapons like the Zap O Matic, Disintegrator Ray and Anal Probe (no, really, there’s actually a gun called the Anal Probe and it’s as funny as it sounds) as well as mental abilities such as Psychokinesis, Hypnotism and the Cortex Scan, which allowed you to read the thoughts of humans and was also used to help maintain your Holoblob disguise in stealth missions. And if that isn’t cool enough, you also get your own flying saucer, which you can use to destroy buildings and landmarks. The game gave you a lot of freedom, essentially dropping you in a small destructible playground and telling you to go and enjoy yourself.

But the thing I loved most about the first game was the writing. The plot itself is actually pretty good with plenty of twists and turns as the military and Majestic become more and more desperate to stop you. And the humour, my God the humour! Honestly Destroy All Humans remains to this day one of the funniest games I’ve ever played. It’s use of satirical humour and 50s pop culture references never failed to make me chuckle. There was one moment that I’ll always remember where I scanned the mind of a police officer and it revealed that he was thinking about forming the Village People. If only he could find a cowboy, an Indian and a construction worker. 

The game’s main source of comedy mostly came from poking fun at the culture and attitudes of the time period. 1950s America was of course gripped by ‘the Red Scare,’ which the game mocks frequently as we see Majestic and the US government try desperately to cover up alien activity by blaming the death and destruction on communists, to the point where it just gets more and more absurd. At the end of each mission, a newspaper headline is shown, often blaming recent events on freak weather or communist propaganda. Yes, that should explain perfectly why people’s heads are exploding and why the cows are glowing green. It’s all perfectly normal. No aliens here. What’s that? A little green man in a flying saucer is blowing up ice cream trucks? Damn you commies!

The game also pokes fun at 50s sci-fi B movies, often parodying and lampshading the tropes and gimmicks one would expect in a low budget sci-fi flick. For example, the game ends with you fighting a giant robot that houses the President’s brain. It’s fully aware of how ridiculous and stupid it all is and clearly revels in it. Killer robots, mind control, radioactive animals, mad scientists and secret government conspiracies galore. Destroy All Humans is very much a love letter to cheesy sci-fi.

But by far the biggest draw was the main characters. Crypto and Pox. They’re both such funny, wonderfully realised and likeable characters. Pox is voiced by Richard Steven Horvitz, who you may remember from Invader Zim, and he gives the character a maniacal glee. I honestly could listen to his rants all day. He’s the quintessential evil genius. Crypto meanwhile is voiced by J. Grant Albrecht, who gives the character a Jack Nicholson-esque voice. Unlike Pox, Crypto is crass, crude and craves destruction, which often puts him at odds with Pox, who favours more subtle styles of invasion such as mind control. The two characters often bicker and squabble, which never fails to be entertaining, and yet there is an underlying respect and fondness for each other that helps ground the relationship. It’s the perfect double act.

Destroy All Humans was a good game, but does it still hold up? Well there are a few issues. Controls can be a bit clunky at times and missions can often get repetitive. Destroy x number of farmers. Collect x amount of DNA. That kind of thing. Also, annoyingly, there’s no checkpoints, which means if you die or fail the mission, you’re automatically sent back to the Furon Mothership and you have to start the mission all over again. But the writing, humour and entertainment value more than make up for it.

Hot Monkey Love

While the first game wasn’t what you’d call a hit, it was successful enough for THQ to commission a sequel. Destroy All Humans 2 was released in 2006 on PS2 and Xbox, just one year after the first game, and this time Crypto was going international.

Set in the 1960s, ten years after the events of the first game, the KGB in Russia learn about the Furon’s takeover of America and plan a counterattack. They nuke the Furon Mothership, killing Pox, and try to assassinate Crypto 138, who is posing as the President of the United States. The assassination fails and Pox’s mind is able to survive in hologram form. The two then embark on a global adventure, seeking revenge against the KGB and uncovering a massive conspiracy that puts the entire Furon invasion at risk.

Destroy All Humans 2 is an ambitious sequel that increases its scope from the first game. No longer confined to America, we see Crypto terrorise San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Russia and even the Moon. Our arsenal of weapons are also expanded. The original weapons from the first game return as well as some all new ones such as the Disclocator, which fires a purple disc at a human or vehicle and sends them flying around the map, the Burrow Beast, which summons a Tremors-esque space worm to cause carnage, and Meteor Strike, which I think speaks for itself. We also get a few new mental abilities such as Transmogrify, which allows you to turn objects into ammo, and Free Love, which causes everyone in the general vicinity to start dancing, allowing you to make a quick getaway while they’re distracted. The saucer too has some extra features, including a cloaking device and the ability to drain vehicles of health using your Abducto Beam.

This sequel pretty much takes everything that worked from the first game whilst tweaking the things that didn’t. The GTA style Alert system got a complete overhaul. If you want to raise or lower the Alert level, all you have to do is bodysnatch a cop or a soldier and make a call using a police box (you can also make prank calls from them, which is good for a giggle). Holoblobbing has been replaced with Bodysnatching, which works so much better and it does away with the annoying Concentration meter, so you can PK cars and humans to your heart’s content. There’s also a lot more stuff to do now. There are numerous collectables such as Alien Artefacts, which unlocks the Burrow Beast weapon, and FuroTech Cells, which are your main currency that can be used to upgrade your health and weapons. Missions have greater variety than in the first game. There’s a lot more side missions, including Odd Jobs and my personal favourites the Cult of Arkvoodle missions, where Crypto brainwashes humans to worship the Furon God Arkvoodle of the Sacred Crotch.

As you can tell, the humour is still just as wacky and ridiculous as ever. Destroy All Humans 2 lampoons and ridicules the 60s mercilessly, taking aim at the Cold War and the hippie counterculture movement. It also pokes fun at 60s sci-fi films, spy films and Japanese movies like Godzilla. In fact there’s a boss fight that involves you fighting a Godzilla-esque monster and it’s honestly the best boss fight in the series. It regains health by destroying buildings, so you have to destroy them first before you can kill the monster. It’s a great premise.

Story-wise, Destroy All Humans 2 is a worthy successor, raising the stakes and expanding the lore. We’re introduced to the Blisk, the Martians that were presumed extinct by the Furons millions of years ago. It’s a brilliant conflict and ostensibly allows the developers to make commentaries on America and Russia at the time using the Furons and the Blisk respectively as stand-ins. Crypto and Pox are well written, funny and likeable as ever and we’re also introduced to an assortment of new characters, including the Russian spy Natalya and MI6 agent Ponsomby (voiced by none other than Anthony Head from Buffy). The game is engaging and rewarding, but it crucially never takes itself too seriously. For example there’s one instance in Tokyo where Crypto learns about the battle between the White and Black Ninjas and he guesses that the conflict started because of the cliche student betraying his master type origin, but it turns out that both groups of ninjas were originally Grey, but then they ran out of grey fabric and disagreed over which colour they should be instead. There’s so many great comedic moments like that and they pretty much hit bullseyes every time.

That being said, there was one aspect of the game I didn’t like and that was the crude sex jokes. Crypto 138 is the first clone to have pure Furon DNA, which means he now has genitalia. As a result, this new incarnation of Crypto is far more randy than 137 was in the first game.  This mostly takes the form of Crypto constantly trying to hit on Natalya, despite her showing no sexual interest, which I personally found pretty gross. Worse still, the game ends with Crypto cloning Natalya and ‘making a few adjustments’ so she will consent to have sex with him. The word ‘creepy’ doesn’t begin to cover how I felt about this. If THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games ever decide to remake the second game, I really hope they consider rethinking that ending because... Jesus!

On the whole, Destroy All Humans 2 was a brilliant sequel. It was also sadly the last Destroy All Humans game to be developed by Pandemic Studios before they were bought by EA and eventually shut down in 2009. Unfortunately this would have a severe impact on the future of the series going forward.

Limp Willy

The next game in the series was a spinoff for the Nintendo Wii, released in early 2008 and developed by Locomotive Games. A PS2 version was also planned, but was scrapped due to budget cuts (remember this. It’ll become relevant later).

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed was... underwhelming, to say the least. Set in the 1970s, six years after the second game, Crypto and Pox have opened a fast food restaurant called Big Willy as a way of disposing of the corpses left behind during Crypto’s missions. However a rival fast food chain, run by Colonel Kluckin’, is stealing their business and socialite Patty Wurst is threatening to expose Big Willy (smirk). So it’s up to Crypto to protect Pox’s Big Willy (haha) and maintain their cover on Earth.

Now you’re probably thinking this sounds quite tame compared to the previous two games, and yeah, it is. But it’s a spinoff, so I can understand to a certain extent. However there are a few narrative discrepancies. The big one being Crypto has retired from being the President. No explanation given as to why and we have no idea what Crypto is doing instead. When we first see him, he’s watching TV. He doesn’t even know Big Willy exists until Pox brings it up. So what’s going on exactly? Are they still trying to invade Earth or have they gone native? Also, compared to the grand conspiracy stories of the previous games, Crypto protecting a fast food restaurant sounds a little beneath him.

Gameplay is virtually unchanged from the previous game. There’s some new guns such as Ball Lightning and the Zombie Gun, but nothing special. The biggest addition is Big Willy, the restaurant mascot that’s actually a Furon battle mech in disguise. It’s... fine. Not that much different from the Saucer really. We also get some new locations. Harbor City, Fairfield in Kentucky, Fantasy Atoll (a weak parody of Fantasy Island) and Vietmahl (a painfully obvious homage to Vietnam). None of these locations are particularly interesting however. There’s also a multiplayer mode, which... exists.

Honestly the game as a whole is just lacklustre. The story just isn’t as good as the first two games and the humour doesn’t have the same wit or intelligence. Most of the comedy surrounds the fact that Pox has called his restaurant Big Willy and isn’t entirely aware of the double entendre, which admittedly is funny for the first few missions, but by the time you’ve finished Harbor City and move on to Fairfield, the joke gets old real fast. There’s less of an effort to actually satirise the culture or films of the time, instead merely making 70s pop culture references without ever actually doing anything with it. It’s like the Family Guy school of comedy. Take Fantasy Atoll for instance. A pisstake of Fantasy Island, but instead of Mr. Roarke and Tatoo, we get Mr. Pork and Ratpoo. That’s the level of humour we’re talking about here.

What’s worse is that J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz don’t return as Crypto and Pox. Sean Donnellan and Darryl Kurylo voice the characters instead and it’s just not the same. It doesn’t feel like Crypto and Pox. So from the very first cutscene, we’re already off on the wrong foot.

And then there’s a bunch of other stuff that I find really questionable. The most obvious being the revelation that Colonel Kluckin’ makes his chicken wings from the corpses of the Vietmahl (Vietnam) war, which just seems in very bad taste to me. If there is a satirical point being made here, I can’t find it for the life of me. There’s also some side missions where Crypto finds out that he and Natalya have a son, which goes absolutely nowhere and doesn’t feel like something that should be in a Destroy All Humans game.

Overall, Big Willy Unleashed was a massive dud meant to tide us over until Destroy All Humans 3 came out later in the year. Honestly the one aspect of it I thought had potential was the side missions involving Crypto and Pox being assessed by a Furon Efficiency Expert called Toxoplasma Gondii. Considering what happened in the second game, including the destruction of the Furon Mothership, the return of the Blisk and the Furon operation on Earth being jeoprodised, this could have been a great premise for a sequel.

Instead what we got was... 

Disco Inferno

Oh boy. Where do I begin?

Path Of The Furon was developed by THQ and Sandblast Games and released in December 2008 on the Xbox 360 in North America. The PS3 version was cancelled because Sandblast (and Locomotive Games) was closed down before development was finished due to THQ’s financial problems at the time. However the PS3 version was released in Europe and Australia, so either THQ got another studio to complete it or, more likely, they just released it in a broken, buggy state.

Fans really didn’t like this game, myself included, but before we go tearing it a new one, lets look at the few positives the game has. First off, J. Grant Albrecht and Richard Steven Horwitz return to voice Crypto and Pox, which is great. As a result, the original chemistry is back and they help salvage the game when the writing fails to deliver. There are a few cool new weapons, like the Black Hole Gun and the Venus Human Trap, which creates a giant man eating plant. The Saucer’s weapons have been tweaked, so now they affect the environment as well as destroy buildings. So if you fire your Death Ray at the ground, for example, you can create scorch marks. PK now has its own dedicated button, which means you can pick up and throw objects whilst using your guns simultaneously. There’s also the titular ‘Path Of Enlightenment,’ which upgrades your mental abilities significantly as well as allowing you to freeze time.

That’s the good stuff. The bad stuff is... pretty much everything else.

The humour is, again, quite poor. Rather than satirising 70s culture, the game continues to make references to 70s films like The Godfather and Star Wars, but not actually doing anything with them. Just making the reference. The writing as a whole is quite substandard as the plot pretty much recycles the plots of Destroy All Humans 2 and Big Willy Unleashed, except instead of the Big Willy restaurant, it’s the Space Dust casino and instead of the Blisk, it’s Nexosporidium warriors, who are basically Furon cyborgs. Things do threaten to get a bit interesting when Crypto and Pox discover someone has been manufacturing synthetic Furon DNA, but nothing ever really comes of it. Instead the game focuses mainly on the Master.

Ah yes. The Master.

In an attempt to recapture the magic of the second game, Path Of The Furon tries to spoof kung-fu movies just like how DAH 2 spoofed spy films. Unfortunately this leads us to a slew of unfunny gags, cultural appropriation and some of the worst racial stereotyping I think I’ve ever seen. The Master is a Furon who crashed on Earth a hundred years ago and embroiled himself in Eastern culture, enhancing his PK abilities. This is what he looks like:

YYYYeah.

Oh and if that’s not awkward enough, he also speaks in an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. It’s incredibly cringeworthy and made me want to crawl out of my body and hide in the darkest corner I could possibly find. How anyone involved in this game’s development could look at this deeply racist and downright embarrassing excuse for a character and think this was okay, I don’t know.

And before anyone tries to excuse it by saying that he has been living in China for a hundred years, so he’s bound to pick a few things up, please note that Nolan North is in this game playing the Furon Emperor Meningitis, who also has an over the top ‘ah so’ accent. Now I suppose some could argue that the game is satirising how Asian people were portrayed at the time, but if that’s what the game is going for, they’ve failed miserably. See, the problem with that argument is that replicating something doesn’t count as satire. By recreating over the top racist caricatures, you’re not making fun of them. If anything you’re just reinforcing them. The first game’s satire of the Red Scare worked so much better than this because there was an actual point behind it. It comments on how paranoid the people of the 50s were at the time by using Majestic to exploit the threat of communism in order to cover up alien activity, and everyone willingly buys into it because of that sheer paranoia. Now yes, admittedly the humour in Destroy All Humans isn’t the most sophisticated in the world, but it used to be a LOT better than this. Not only do I find the racial stereotyping in this game deeply offensive, it’s also frankly beneath this franchise. And it’s not just limited to the Chinese either. The final act takes us to the Furon homeworld (which was pretty underwhelming after four games worth of buildup) and we meet another Furon called Endometriosis whose only characteristics are that he has an Italian accent and wears a beret. It’s these broad strokes and general laziness that makes this game such a disappointing experience.

Path Of The Furon is subpar in every way imaginable. The writing, the humour, the gameplay and even the graphics. The first two games looked so much better than this and they were on older consoles from the previous generation. It’s shocking.

It’s hard to blame Sandblast Games for this considering they were shut down before development was finished. It was THQ’s mismanagement and financial woes that killed off this franchise and indeed themselves. The company went bankrupt in 2012 and their various IPs were sold off to other studios, with Nordic Games buying the lions’ share, including Destroy All Humans, which briefly reignited hopes that we might get another game, but that seemed unlikely considering the franchise has never exactly been a mainstream success. There was even talks of doing an animated sitcom based on the games for Fox, to be written by the same guy who did King Of The Hill, but that never went anywhere.

No. It seemed like Destroy All Humans was gone for good and fans reluctantly made peace with that. It was fun while it lasted, but perhaps it was time to move on.

Oh The Furonity!

I’m not going to lie. I was pretty sure we were never going to see Destroy All Humans return. Not just because of its lack of mainstream appeal, but also because game development studios and publishers in recent years have become more and more reluctant to make single player, mid-tier games. Instead pivoting toward massive triple A releases and ‘live services’. So it came as a rather pleasant surprise when Nordic Games, now named THQ Nordic, released Darksiders III in 2018, a sequel to a series of games that were also not very mainstream but still had a significant cult following. This briefly reignited a small flicker of hope within me that maybe, just maybe, we might see our favourite Furon return.

And as you already know, I got my wish. A new Destroy All Humans game will be released next year by THQ Nordic and Black Forest Games.

So what can this remake learn from the franchise’s past? Well thankfully the writing and voice acting is going to remain the same, so story, characterisation and humour won’t be an issue. They’re also incorporating elements from the sequels such as Transmogrify from Destroy All Humans 2 and giving PK its own button like in Path Of The Furon. There’s also a few new additions that I’m excited about such as the ability to dodge and strafe using the jetpack. That should make combat much more exciting and dynamic. I know a few people have a problem with the new cartoony designs of the humans and the world, but I honestly don’t mind. In fact I think it suits the tone and setting quite well. Hopefully people will eventually get used to it. The big question mark hovering over all this is whether they’re planning to remake the other games in the series. I for one would love to see a remake of the second game. As for Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon, I think it’s best to leave them firmly in the past. The big dream would be to see Crypto and Pox have further adventures together beyond the first two games. Hopefully even have enough sequels to get the characters to the present day. We’ll just have to wait and see what the future brings. My only word of advice for them would be to never forget what made the first two games so good and so beloved. Big Willy Unleashed and Path Of The Furon lost their way, as its writing and humour grew lazier and lazier. If we are fortunate enough to get more games, the developers will need to remember what it was about the first game that made it so special and build off of it.

This is a second chance. Not a lot of franchises get this. Don’t waste it. Here’s hoping the remake will provide the definitive Destroy All Humans experience and that it will gain the success it deserves.

[pasttorn]

AT THIS POINT PRISON JUST WANTS TO KILL ME ⟡ ALWAYS ACCEPTING !

where did vulcan find that animal skull ? how does he feel about stumbling upon the skeletons of dead animals ? what made him want to bring nature back to the world ? what was his first encounter with an infernal like ? does he keep any plants around ? has he even been fishing ? does he ever leave food out for any animals other than cats and dogs , like raccoons or birds ? does he know there's other breeds of animals out there ? how does he feel about insects ? ( 1/2 )

( 2/2 ) before lisa and yuu , how did he spend his time ? how did he feel being alone w/o his family ? did he ever break down and can you..., drabble about it ? you made a headcanon about how he keeps a self-destruct mechanism in his crafts to remind himself of his goal , that he wants the opposite of self-destruction for animals , but what prompted him to think of this ? during giovanni's apprenticeship, what did vulcan think of him ? is he a glass half-full or half-empty kind of person?

     – HC. god there are so many questions, but let’s be real i will never turn down a chance to ramble about vulcan. under read more it goes !

ON THE SKULL.

        -- HE found it somewhere pretty far from his place when he was trying to explore, scavenge old materials from junkyards & the streets in order to reduce costs ( especially since he was on his living own when he found it, & had a finite amount of money ). it wasn’t a desert, not really-- but it was a pretty empty, isolated, with few vegetations; a place that looked like had gone through a drought recently. he found the skeleton of the animal, abandoned & forgotten & in the process of decomposing.

       -- IT was mostly a whim, really, on an on the moment sense of pity. the idea of the animal dying, without anyone knowing it’d existed made him sad-- only helped remind him even further of his own losses, how his family’d died, & would eventually be forgotten, like the deer ( & in their case, not even bones remained behind for him to bury, but rather just a burnt carcass that smelled of roasted human skin ). he just... couldn’t sit with that idea, it made him restless, uncomfortable. so decided to take it, repurpose it instead of simply letting it disappear. he paid his proper respects to the animal who’d passed away, of course, promising he wouldn’t take their death / remains lightly, & is constantly taking care of it so it doesn’t break.

ON SKELETONS / DEATH.

        -- DEAD animals make him feel... somber. he’s not especially sad-- he knows that death is part of the cycle of life, the natural course of things. that feeling goes to anything, be it animals or humans, knowing that one has passed away makes him feel bad, if only temporarily. since he accepts it, the process of life, & it’s one of the main reasons he was able to get over his family’s passing without much grieving ( he still grieves, of course. he hasn’t forgotten that day, hasn’t completely gotten over the immense grudge he has due to it-- but internalises it, knowing that there’s no way to bring back the dead & one shouldn’t get hung up over it so much it completely consumes them ). 

        -- IF he has the time, he prefers to give them a proper burial; be it a bird, dog, cat, or any other animal-- they don’t deserve to rot on the street any more than humans do. depending on the time, he might leave a stick or a stone on top of where he buries them, if only to have a way to mark where they have been laid to rest.

ON HIS AMBITIONS.

        -- HIS ambitions first started to bloom from the stories he’d hear from his grandfather. he’d sit in his lap, & listened to the old / forgotten tales of the animals & how the planet used to be so green & filled with life, only to turn into what it is now. those stories only helped plant the seeds that would later become his dream, but at that point, it was only mild curiosity-- as any child would have when they listen to their elders speak.

        -- THEY become full on dreams & aspirations for the future when his father showed him the machine for the first time-- the one that was built by his ancestors to hide the key to the amaterasu. seeing the images of the animals, having them be so close & look so real-- it fuelled him. often did he beg his father to show him the machine time & time again, if only to see & memorise how the animals & the world had looked like. it was when he was watching it one time, that he decided he was going to bring them back. he was going to show the world it’s lost potential, & he was going to bring them back, no matter how long it took or how hard that road was going to be.

ON HIS FIRST ENCOUNTER.

        -- HIS first encounter with infernals were actually with his father & grandfather. up until that point, he’d only heard of the stories, & had seen the destruction caused first hand when he passed by the scenes. up until that point, he’d seen the irreparable damages caused to families, sometimes even offering a helping hand while not exactly understanding how truly abominating fingernals could be.

        -- WHEN his family went up in flames one after the other, even without having seen an infernal before in his life, he’d heard more than enough stories to know that it wasn’t normal. their turning wasn’t like the others & it’s on that basis that his grudge against haijima grew, since they turned infernals right after refusing to work for them.

        -- NEEDLESS to say... it was TERRIFYING. it had occurred in the middle of the night, & he’d awoken to the smell of flesh burning & to the infernal screams of the damned. when they first started catching on fire, he’d initially thought something’d gone wrong with whatever they were building-- a stray spark that could’ve caught onto their clothing. he very quickly realised he was wrong, though, & could do nothing but watch as they bursted into flames-- since as much as he tried to extinguish the fire, they just grew stronger & stronger every second. of course, he tried doing whatever he could to stop them from catching on fire, but was dragged & forcibly taken outside the moment the firemen started to arrive, & had to be held back from being allowed to go back inside after them.

ON PLANTS / FISHING.

        -- HE does keep some around ! ! admittedly, he doesn’t have many-- mostly a couple cacti & other local plants that could last days without much water. it’s mostly due to both, the lack of space, & his lack of responsibility. while he does care for them, there are times when he’s too preoccupied with working on a certain project, that he forgets to water them. he also simply can’t keep more high-maintenance plants, since they take up too many resources & time that he just doesn’t have.

        -- AS for fishing-- he’ll do it if he needs to. he doesn’t actually like the activity all that much, especially when it’s done just for sport, since the hook still harms whatever fish it catches. but he does see the importance of the cycle of life, & the need to kill / eat when one is hungry-- which he had to do often, especially after the deaths of  his family, since he didn’t have the enough resources to buy food for himself sometimes.

ON FEEDING OTHER ANIMALS.

        -- HE does ! ! ! whenever he can, at least. he tries feeding stray dogs, as well as a couple other animals make their way to his junkyard. but sometimes there’s not enough money to provide food for everyone, & some animals don’t trust him enough to accept his food, so he tries to keep the animals he feeds at a minimum. not that it’s very effective, since he’s quick to change his mind whenever they’re visibly hungry and / or whine for food-- unable to turn them down for a chance at a free meal.

        -- THERE are also a couple birdhouses set up around the place that he regularly puts seeds into, hoping that wild birds that are in need of a meal make their way inside. it’s something he still does, even after moving to company 8-- sometimes during his days off, he goes back to the junkyard, if only to do some maintenance on the bird houses & put in enough food to last until his next visit.

ON OTHER ANIMALS + INSECTS.

        -- THOUGH he’s aware of them, he only knows a couple ! while he’s seen some of the breeds himself, & he’s heard from other people about them witnessing some animals-- he still wants to learn more. it’s not enough to hear it second hand, & there might be some species that are thought to be extinct out there, hidden from humanity’s ever so watchful eye. most of the world has gone unexplored, after all, with all the infernals & the amaterasu that lay scattered throughout the geographical map. 

       -- AS for insects. he doesn’t mind them ! while they can freak him out when they suddenly land on him or randomly start crawling on his skin without him knowing-- they’re fine in his book ! ! even while they’re small & crawly, they are still alive, & can feel pain, so in the end he still considers them to be the same as animals ( albeit a bit lower, since he doesn’t mind stepping on an ant or two, compared to stepping on a cat. but he will take a spider outside when he sees one in his workshop ).

ON HIS TIME ALONE.

        -- IT was... heartbreaking. when he looks back at it now, that time was more like a blur, a foggy memory that he’d rather not remember. the one thing he remembers in detail about it, however, is the HOPELESSNESS, despair & absolute ANGER he felt during that time. he spent a lot of time both grieving, & wanting-- needing-- to get back at haijima for what they’d taken from him. at first, he couldn’t bring himself to grieve too much, because there was so much he had to do & he had no time to be showing weakness; especially when the companies started scouting him the very next day.

        -- BECAUSE that time, he spent it cleaning up after the messed that had been caused. as infernals, they had burnt up a lot of their belongings. he also had to organised the items they’d left behind, & decide what to throw away & what not to throw away. he couldn’t bring himself to do it immediately, of course-- he’d try to get a head start on the clean up, only to sit down in front of an empty cardboard with a book or a tool in his hand as the memories came flooding back. he spent most of his days just sitting there, staring blankly at walls as he tried to gather his life together again, sometimes forcing himself to work because he knew he had to keep going & he had to stay strong. he’d start projects, but would lose motivation to work on it halfway. 

ON HIS MOURNING.

        -- LIKE mentioned earlier, he’d been able to holding up pretty well; seeing no other choice but the need to move forward & prove himself unmovable, no matter what he was feeling. he’d keep their family business going & he’d continue to refuse anything the fire brigade tried to get him into. 

         -- THAT is, though, until he’d accidentally started up the machine ( the one with the animal images ) when he knocked it over-- & that’s when he lost it. because it was there that he was surrounded by everything he’d cherished, a scene he’d only watch alongside those two. it’s only when he saw it, that it finally dawned on him that he was alone & they were gone, & that this was all they had left behind. he’d broken down in the midst of the security of the fog & the illusions, where no one else could see or hear him apart from himself.

ON THE SELF-DESTRUCTION MECHANISM.

        -- HE doesn’t want to get attached to them, is the simple answer. 

         -- IT came to him during his period of mourning. creating mechanical animals were his go to creations, especially when he was as spaced out as he was during that time. but when finally saw a new invention through to the end, instead of leaving it unfisnihed, he didn’t feel anything. not a sense of accomplishment, not a satisfaction over it’s outcome, nothing. he’d stare at the mechanical dog he’d made, watch it bark & wag it’s tail inconsistently, & think that it wasn’t real.

        -- BECAUSE no matter how realistic they might be, or how animated they might act, it couldn’t fill in the empty void he felt in his heart over the loss of his family. they couldn’t be replaced, not by something so fake & without life. & it’s then that he decided to add the self-destruction feature-- because he didn’t want to find comfort in something he’d made, vaguely hoping it’d fill up the gaping hole that grief had caused. it felt WRONG to rely on machines as a coping mechanism, & he wanted to remind himself that he could never use them as a way to escape reality & his feelings.

ON GIOVANNI.

        -- VULCAN didn’t think much of him, actually. he considered him part of their family-- anyone who worked along with them was a part of their family, blood related or not. heck, while they might not have been on par wit his, vulcan kind of admired his skills & giovanni’s new, innovative ideas that even he couldn’t even dream of doing. he’d enjoy watching him make things, even if he wasn’t the most talkative of people, & enjoyed the thought of having an apprentice that was older than him that wasn’t his father or grandfather.

        -- IT’S why his betrayal caused such a deep sort of hatred. because he’d not only used his family to obtain their skills, but he’d taken them away from him too-- like a toy he’d disposed off as soon as he was done. he HATED the way he’d grown so close to them, had trampled over their futures & their dreams, & STILL had the gall to come up to him & coax vulcan into joining him. in vulcan’s opinion, he didn’t have honour, he didn’t have loyalty-- as soon as he was offered a better deal, he’d abandoned them in the drop of a hat. that mentality of doing ANYTHING, even murder & the need to destroy the competition, just to realise their ideals disgusts him in ways he can’t even describe.

HALF-EMPTY OR HALF-FULL DILEMMA.

       -- HE’S cup is half-full type of person ! 

        -- HE prefers to see the optimistic outcome of all situations he arrives at, as well as the potential in every idea & minuscule thought. after all, he needs that positivity when he comes up with something new. he needs to go at it thinking that it’ll work, & if it doesn’t, he takes it as a learning experience to see what he needs to change in order to make it work. he’s the type that believes that even the smallest of steps matter in the long run. it doesn’t matter if it the process to get to his goal is slow & tedious & sometimes aggravating-- he’ll do it, no matter how many years it takes. 

        -- AFTER all, going at something expecting it to fail or expecting a bad outcome, only helps destroy all moral one could have built up until that point, further reinforcing their uselessness & their despair about a certain situation. & that is something he can’t afford to do, if he wants to realise a seemingly impossible dream.

[galacticbugman]

Colorado Trip Part 3: Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge

In the Denver area there is a cool National Wildlife Refuge that I really like. Here you can find Black-tailed Prairie Dogs such as these guys. They are quite common here. You might also find Black-footed Ferrets which are an endangered species. You can find a plethora of wonderful creatures here more than just the ones listed. Let us check out some of these that I got on this part of my Colorado adventure. ROLL IT! 

Here is a shot I got at one of the intersections of the park close to the front. Here we have a female Mule Deer grazing in the grass. It was kind of fun to watch this creature feeding. She was kind of thin as you can see. You can almost count the ribs on this thing. She seemed to be pretty hungry. We took our leave of her after a few minutes of photographing but when we came back from taking the whole Auto tour we saw that she was still there at this same spot still feeding. If the feeding is good an animal will not leave that spot. Still a pretty deer. This is one of the coolest deer. They have very large ears and are much darker than White-tailed deer. These are just as common as the Elk but these guys live in the prairies and the foot hills of the Rockies. 

Here is a cool shot of a Red Fox that was located at the pond. This guy came up very quietly and was trying to hunt a mallard. He saw me and didn’t chance it and ran away back the way he came. This guy is not a native species to the Americas but is a European species that has since been introduced. Still this was a pretty animal. Again on the thin side of life. He was not at all what I expected. I was expecting kind of a “Fox and the Hound” kind of fox like Todd all bushy and thicker in the coat. Stands to reason it was summer so it wouldn’t want all that thick fur on its body. Still a pretty cool photo and one of my favorites that I got on the trip to Colorado. These guys are super quiet and don’t make much noise. Ever here the term “Sly as a Fox”? well it is not just a metaphor. These guys are pretty sneaky and very quiet. 

A nice little duck I found on the other side of the pond away from the Red Fox. This is the male Ruddy Duck. This guy is one of my favorite ducks. It has a blue bill and a real bristly looking tail (not visible). these guys have a tail that sticks straight up normally. These guys are in the family of ducks known as “Stiff Tails”. These guys are so cool and will not easily fly off. I know a birder that has tired to get these to fly but all attempts failed. These guys are the most chillest ducks you can photograph. They just sit there and don’t seem to move from their little selection of pond space. These are a pretty nice looking duck. They are a pretty good sized duck but are a little big. This guy was in full breeding plumage which is something I don’t get to see down here. In Texas these guys are never seen in breeding plumage. In the winter they are much duller and have a gray colored bill. These guys are so cute either way but I love to see the blue bill. I find it kind of funny in a way. 

Here is another bird I saw on the Auto Trail. This is the Western Meadowlark. The only way that is easy to tell the Eastern from the Western is by the song. They may look the same but their songs are very different from each other. The Western has a very pretty song and so does the Easter but the Western Song is a favorite among birders. This guy was just sitting on his little perch in the prairie. Both species prefer open areas and grasslands. Meadowlarks are just another one of my favorite species. I have a lot of favorites when it comes to my interests and likes. I don’t just have a few but there are many levels when it comes to favorites. This one was a very nice capture on my trip. 

Here is one I have dubbed Squint Eastwood. It was kind of funny when I took this. Sometimes I give my photos nicknames and this one was kind of a fun one to play around with. This one is of a cute Desert Cottontail. These guys were all over the place out there. There were many of them and were as numerous as the Black-tailed Prairie Dogs. A very interesting day at the Nature Preserve. This was the first time I have seen this kind of rabbit. 

Going back to the opening picture. These Black-tailed Prairie Dogs were pretty cool to see. In Texas most have all been moved or destroyed in headway for agriculture. However there are some sustainable groups that have been regulated in recent years. Going around the park you can see a bunch of these guys feeding and scurrying about. When on a auto tour I like to roll the window down and listen to the sounds of nature. Often times we heard these guys do their little jump yip. When something scary passes like a hawk or something like a huge car they will celebrate and give a little bark and lift the fronts of their bodies in the air giving everyone in the prairie dog town the all clear that danger has passed. It is their way of saying “The danger is gone, come on out!” These guys dig a lot of tunnels and each one is connected. This whole area could be two or three dog towns strong if they are all not connected. A town is what their nesting site is called. It is filled with a maze of tunnel systems each one with a specific purpose. They have nurseries for their young, a place where they can relive themselves when nature calls, and sleeping chambers. 

 Another animal that is home there is the iconic symbol of the Wild West. This is the American Bison or American Buffalo. This is one of the coolest animals that has its own range at this place. Their range is fenced to prevent any unpleasant confrontation with auto tour attendance. I saw a lot of mammals on this trip more than I have in years. A lot of them were new to me but this guy is an old favorite. It is hard to believe that these guys back in the olden days used to roam North America in the thousands. It is quite hard to imagine what it must have been like. They were driven on the brink of extinction but in recent years they have begun to reclaim some of their old roaming ground. These guys are so majestic and are the very symbol of the western frontier. A marvelous creature and one of my favorites. 

And there you have just a little fraction of what you might see at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National wildlife Refuge. Next time you are thinking about Colorado you should look this place up. It may look flat but there is a lot out there. It is a pretty cool place. Remember to bring you camera and take plenty of photos. It is also a real good idea to keep a life list of all the wildlife you see and to download the iNaturalist app to keep track of all of what you see. Take care and I will see you next time. 

[brydeswhale]

One of the major failings with “The Way” is that, like much of the rest of the world-building in Elfquest, it’s poorly defined and unexplored.

There are a few things we do know about it.

It’s a form of mental discipline that relates to life and lifestyle.

It emphasizes being present in the moment, being based on the “Now” of Wolf-thought.

It’s not as ancient to Wolfrider customs as some are. Huntress Skyfire devised it as a form of cultural myth and a way to bind her society(severely fractured after breaking with her brother’s faction) into a cohesive whole.

It’s very important to Wolfrider elders.

For all it’s supposed importance to the plot, we don’t actually hear about “The Way” until book three, Captives Of Blue Mountain, when Strongbow(who’s just come off three days of torture by Winnowill) points out that they don’t follow “The Way” anymore, and that he’s seriously upset by that and all the trauma from BEING TORTURED FOR THREE DAYS.

He defines “The Way” as hunting and howling and living freely, less than as a form of mental and spiritual discipline. Everyone is sort of bummed out that they’ve lost “The Way” to a certain extent, but they also have a feeling that “The Way” might be gone or changed forever, given the way that their world has actually changed for good.

(Note: Strongbow’s problems with “The Way” don’t seem to have been that big a deal in the desert, which indicates to me that he still considered them to be living by “The Way” while there.)

But all that aside, and despite certain claims about wolfriders “celebrating ignorance”, the idea that Strongbow has about “The Way” precluding innovation and new discoveries seems to be a purely a fandom perception of “The Way”. Certainly no one seriously worried about “The Way” when Tanner was finding new ways to make leather, and it never came into play when everyone was wandering around with Freefoot, and it’s not a big deal to Strongbow even when Cutter chops open a cactus for them to get water from. Even Strongbow seems to base his concerns over new things on whether or not they fit into the Wolfrider lifestyle.

It’s actually not ever really stated that “the Now of Wolf-thought” is literally part of “The Way” for a few books after that, and only then as a method of:

Dealing with trauma.

Keeping a healthy mindset.

It’s never seen as an excuse not to plan(Strongbow, the greatest proponent of “The Way”, after all, is often included as part of planning), or to avoid unpleasant consequences. It’s literally seen to be a form of mental discipline that keeps an elf focused on the task at hand until that can be completed.

For example, let’s say Firebright needs new mittens. Winter is coming and Easy-heart is worried about the cub losing fingers to frostbite.

Using “The Way” and “The now of wolf-thought”, Easy-heart doesn’t even look at the potential fear of Firebright losing fingers. He goes out and catches a rabbit instead. Then, rather than consider how many other animals he could have, would have, should have caught, he skins the rabbit and processes the hide. Then he makes the mittens, which he gives to Firebright, who immediately takes them off because her hands “aren’t even cold, father!”

Ahem.

Now, all of that could have been accomplished if Easy-heart hadn’t used “The Way” to discipline his mind, but it might have been delayed or taken longer.

The Sunfolk seem to have developed a philosophical lifestyle based on the cycle of the sun. From what we can tell, it emphasizes acceptance of nature and taking things day by day, which is similar to the Wolfrider “Way”, but with more concerns of time passage because of their agrarian lifestyle. They seem to balance out with the Wolfriders in terms of philosophy , which might explain why the two groups meshed so easily. They’re often portrayed as mostly balanced, slightly softer than Wolfriders, but just as adaptable to new circumstances. In a way, they’re intended to sort of serve as an equal to Wolfriders(although not quite, which is a topic for another essay).

Go Backs have a hyper-focused sense of the present, which probably relates to them living in a war zone. This is actually shown to be detrimental to their well-being and the wellbeing of those around them(although it’s worth noting that the first appearances of the Go Backs included a more temperate society and rituals that were interesting and cool, WENDY, not just sex and dancing). On the other hand, their(until recently) capacity to spread themselves throughout the world shows an adaptability in their philosophy that is sometimes overlooked.

Gliders, on the other hand, were portrayed as being mired in their obsession with the past. This is part of what paralyzes them to the point that over ninety percent of them are killed off when Winnowill’s dumbass space travel plans are put into action. However, they’re the only elves whose philosophy leads to a literal death.

The Wavedancers seem held captive by fear of the future. The idea of “what if” holds them hostage to the point of fleeing meeting even new elves, and leads them close to extinction in that one time when Brill and Sunstream needed to fuck or die. On the other hand, once they’re shown how friendly the new elves are, they begin to show a unique form of optimism that holds for a friendly future life.

The most healthy elves in the abode seem to be elves with a cultural philosophy of staying present in the moment. This would indicate that perhaps “The Now” isn’t so much related to the wolf-blood sported by wolfriders but to healthy elfin psychology. The Wolfriders do seem to be able to reach it more easily than other elves, and do seem to have difficulty accessing long term memories, but that’s probably as far as the Wolf-blood affects the mind.

The importance of “The Way” and “The Now” are basically cultural. So is its importance in terms of Wolfrider psychology, which relates back to Skyfire’s inception of the idea.

(Note: I will not be discussing fucking Dreamsinger here. I don’t even think that story is canon, and also it’s an obvious wangsty self-insert that I do not have time for.)

Skyfire and Two Spear’s schism is one of the great tragedies of Wolfrider history. The basis behind the split was that Two Spear was a charismatic asshole who didn’t make any attempt to heal from his trauma and stop trying to kill humans and Skyfire was SICK of being attacked by humans and having to fight them off.

(Also Two Spear had this inferiority complex because Skyfire was actually Prey-pacer’s cub, but Prey-pacer never acknowledged her for stupid reasons and so Two Spear was never confident that she wouldn’t rise up or be risen up by other people, which is dumb but whatevs.)

Skyfire actually LOST her challenge to Two Spear in the fight, but she won the popular vote and Two Spear left anyhow.

Skyfire was left with a splintered fragment and had to find a way to bind everyone together in a single, cohesive lifestyle. She chose one that kept everyone in the present(probably because they were freaking out and traumatized), one the move(hunter gatherers can pick up and leave anytime, farmers have to wait for the end of harvest), and not constantly at war.

And it worked! Mostly.

The Wolfriders actually managed to survive and, until Bearclaw ruined everything, they mostly thrived. Skyfire made a quick and dirty philosophy, probably out of fear of losing people, and it wound up helping people actually heal and move on.

Some fans might argue that it made Wolfriders devolve, but really, their cultural amnesia was no worse than anyone else’s, and unlike a lot of elves, they maintained lots of magical abilities.

“The Way” seems to become very important to wolfriders as they age. This isn’t really a thing that I would consider related to it as a philosophy or some such. It’s just that as people age they become more firmly attached to things that comfort them, including conservative viewpoints. And not all Wolfrider elders seem to hold conservative views. Treestump takes advantage of his old age to learn a new skill, and Nightfall and Redlance don’t seem too much more conservative about “The Way” than they were in book 1(although they are very, very into “The Way”. Just quietly.)

The two most conservative Wolfriders, who hold “The Way” in the highest esteem, seem to actually be the two who are least able to adhere to it.

Both Moonshade and Strongbow hold very strongly onto the past. They’re both extremely traumatized by the loss of their first born, their home, and by subsequent losses. Strongbow, in particular, has serious PTSD from being tortured and tormented by Winnowill, and from his own participation in violent acts afterwards. In fact, he nearly commits passive suicide by blood loss in the aftermath of the first Palace war.

They cling to “The Way” because it gives them a sense of control, to the old ways for the same reason, and yet they seem unable to actually reach the mental and philosophical wellness state offered by it.

This is particularly evident in Wild Hunt, when Moonshade uses Ember as a target for her fear and anger over being separated from Strongbow so he can go and fight in another war. It’s not until she’s able to change her view of “The Way”, from immutable and unchanging to adaptable and evolvable, that she’s able to be a better teammate to Ember and everyone else.

Incidentally, this is where the schism between her and Strongbow begins. Moonshade even comments on how Strongbow might not be able to adapt the same way she and the others have. Then it was dropped and never brought up again and no one cared until recently.

Strongbow never experiences this same epiphany. He’s never able to truly heal from his trauma over losing his child to violence, his father figure to his own stupidity, his home, he’s unable to move past Winnowill’s abuse, and therefore he cannot offer Moonshade any understanding when “The Way” ceases to offer her any solace.

It’s not that Wolfrider elders cling to “The Way” because it’s so important to them and they hate all new things. Wolfrider elders, for the most part, LIVE by the way. Except for Ember, Pool, Freetouch, Sust, and Cutter’s youngest cub, every living Wolfrider is older than Strongbow was when the quest began. They’re, for the most part, healthy and happy, living in “The Now” but not blind to the past or future.

STRONGBOW clings to what he sees as “The Way” because he’s so damned traumatized.

And because he’s pretty much the only viewpoint character who talks about “The Way”, we get this extremely biased view of what it is and what it means, which means that WaRP’s failure to adequately world-build has resulted in a failure to get their point about “The Way” across in any meaningful way and therefore this is all just fanning speculation anyhow.

[happyhealthycats]

Letting the cats out of the bag...er...house.

So the first little piece of opinion I wanted to delve into is the age old dilemma of allowing your cat out of the house. I know that there are not only a lot of personal opinions on this matter, but also a huge amount of cultural differences. I’m from the United States, where feral cats are common, though not as common as in some other countries. Before I continue, I want to assure everyone that I’m not calling out anyone as a “bad cat guardian” if you do not adhere to the same beliefs that I lay out. By no means am I pointing fingers, I’m simply sharing my experience and things that I’ve learned.

Cats are hunters. The lengths of domestication that cats have gone through are debated, but we do know that they have not had the amount of selective breeding that dogs have had until very recently. Cats still function as the predators that they were in the times of the Fertile Crescent. Felis silvestris, the undisputed sole ancestor of the domestic cat, came into contact with humans in such a positive way, that humans didn’t feel the need to breed out certain qualities until much later into the domestication of felines.

The relationship between cat and human was a beneficial friendship. Humans began storing spare grain in silos, but of course, grain eating rodents began to eat these stores. Cats found a plethora of food choices in those rodents and began to frequently live near these silos and humans. Humans found the unspoken partnership beneficial, since the cats didn’t eat the grain, just the rodents. And thus, the relationships we have now with cats began to slowly develop.

Since our relationships with cats are so different than that of dogs, cats are treated almost as house guests as opposed to pets. Cats are still used to keep rats and mice out of grain stores (even in breweries), but we’ve found that the companionship we have with felines has evolved them from needing to work in order to become pets. However, cats still have that prey drive. You can see it any time a cat plays with its toy or sibling. Cats still exhibit that fantastic hunting behavior that makes them still so capable in the same way that their ancestors were.

So why not let your cat out into the yard to allow them to feel that ancestral connection to the hunt?

The basic answer? Because it’s no longer safe.

There are thousands of dangers outside that a cat is not suited to handle in any way, shape, or form. Human construction being one of the many things. Roads, cars, trains, buses, the list goes on. Cats have absolutely no way of protecting themselves from these huge dangers. You cannot teach a cat to look both ways before crossing the street.

The health problems that a cat will face the moment they are allowed outside are a list so long I may not have time to write them all down. From fleas, ticks, worms, other parasites, to countless other animals that the cat may fight with (be it another cat, a dog, a skunk, or even a bear, depending on where you live).

Yes, cats get into these fights in the wild, but the truth is, there’s no real “natural” in a cat’s life anymore since domestication. Yes, feral colonies exist and may even thrive, but the truth is, they are only there due to human breeding and intervention. 

Another problem? Cats are threatened even by the prey they hunt. Cats will go after birds, reptiles, insects, but especially rodents. Not all cuts and scrapes a cat may walk home with will be from a simple scrap with another cat. These prey animals can cause serious and severe damage if the cat is unable to kill them during its hunt.

I always start out with the safety of your own cat. That’s usually the thing that people can relate to. But cats remain to be opportunistic hunters. They will hunt even after just finishing a meal. This can be due to a desire in different forms of diet, finding easier prey, finding prey that they may like better, or just being in the right place at the right time. 

Because of this almost constant desire to hunt, cats have hunted certain species to dangerous levels, and have even been the cause of the extinction of some rodents, birds, insects, or reptiles. Some figures suggest that the number could be as high as 14% of all extinctions are caused by feral cats, but there is some debate over that number. The argument is that since cats are killing “pests”, that the number isn’t really terribly important, but it means that cats are causing an unnatural balance of killing off their prey. They may not even be eating the prey they catch, so the animal is dead not for food, but because a cat may have a higher prey drive.

An unattended cat can both cause a lot of harm, but also has a huge possibility of receiving harm. This doesn’t mean that cats should never enjoy the wonder that is the outside world, oh no. I understand the necessity of having barn cats to keep rodents out of important areas. I understand that many people still have cats for that fantastic original purpose of pest control. Cats are superb hunters, and while outdoor cats tend to have shorter lives, there is still a need that a cat can fulfill that honestly may not be filled by any other man made means.

So what can you do?

First thing is first, have your cat spayed or neutered if you plan on letting them outside as a working cat. The problem with cats overhunting comes from a cat’s incredible ability to reproduce at an astonishing rate. 

Have your cat microchipped if you can, or have some form of identification on them in case your cat leaves your property. 

Bring your cat inside when it is not working. This will lessen the amount of downtime they’ll have outdoors to hunt.

However, ideally, if you can, keep your cat inside for its own safety, and the safety for the wildlife around you. Depending on your cat’s personality, training a cat to walk on a leash can be an incredible experience for both yourself and your cat. Allowing the cat time outside is fantastic, and it can help bolster their confidence and strengthen their territory. Or, if you have the option, consider an outdoor space specifically for the cat (such as a catio, or even a small tent with windows for the cat to enjoy the smells and sounds of the outside without roaming free).

But when you keep your cat inside, you need to play with them. Allow them to put that hunting energy into something productive. Play with them two or three times a day. Keep them entertained. Hide toys with treats for them to find and figure out. 

And if you’ve allowed your cat outside all of its life, it may be impossible to get them to transition to being an indoor only cat. That’s okay, too. Just do what you can to cut down on the dangers your cat may face by making sure they’re medicated against parasites, take them to the vet often, and try to keep them inside as much as you can. Reward them for time spent inside. 

Like I said, this is my opinion. My cats do not go outside. When I adopted them, both of the shelters I used made me sign an agreement that any and all time spent outside would be supervised, either with a leash, or in a designated outdoor catio. Some shelters will only adopt out certain cats as barn cats if you make them aware of the cat’s future expectations, and many times those spots are only for cats who may have difficulties finding a home due to a more feral nature. 

[xtruss]

Small Farms Vanish Every Day in America’s Dairyland: ‘There Ain’t No Future in Dairy’

Farming families are facing a choice: compete with high-production outfits, if they can, or abandon generations of dairy farming

— By Summer Sewell in Monroe, Wisconsin | The Guardian USA | Supported by Scmidt Family Foundation, 11th Hour Project | Wednesday July 21, 2021

Ron and Lori Wellenhorst in their empty barn in Cuba City, Wisconsin. ‘It’s quiet, eerily quiet, for the first time in 50-some years. It’s pretty strange,’ Ron said. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Look at that sweet heifer, high, tight udder, in her first lactation, idn’t she sweet?” auctioneer Tom Bidlingmaier shouts as his son Cory plods and slips and pushes the cow around a pen.

Watching it all are about 65 people, mostly men, mostly other small farmers in rubber boots, standing in mud and manure as they murmur their bids. Ron Wallenhorst, the farmer auctioning off his herd of 64 milking cows, is pacing and tapping an empty water bottle against his thigh. He has milked cows in his barn twice a day, every day, after taking over the farm from his father 32 years ago. By the afternoon, all the cows will be gone.

“This is our 401k,” said Ron, 55 years old, his tall frame still hearty though he’s 15 pounds lighter from stress.

The omens before the auction had not been great for Ron and his wife Lori. A couple of weeks before, a few towns over from their own farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin, which is about 70 miles south-west of Madison, they’d watched another complete dairy dispersal of a better herd. That means it produced more milk – 96 pounds (44kg) per cow a day to the Wallenhorsts’ 78 (35kg). The other farmer didn’t make out well financially. “We stood there with tears in our eyes,” Ron said. “Our whole life has been a risk. Deciding to sell was very, very difficult.”

An hour before auctioneer Bidlingmaier started the bidding on the Wallenhorst herd, Lori was crying in a corner of the milk house. She wiped her eyes and stepped out into the morning. “That’s a good sign,” she said, motioning to the trucks rolling up with empty cow trailers attached – they came to buy.

Four hours later, after the last cow is sold, the Wallenhorsts learn the herd went for $1,800 (£1,290) each, on average – relatively high for the region, and more than Ron expected. He smiles for the first time that day, cracking open a beer, finally part of the circle of relatives and neighbors who came not to buy but to support. Then, as a team of determined men coerced a cow up on to its new owner’s trailer, he teared up and walked away.

With the Wallenhorst dairy farm gone, there’s only one left on the seven-mile stretch from one side of town to the other; there were 22 when Ron was growing up there. “We worried no one would show up because dairy farms are just disappearing in our area, so there were fewer and fewer small farmers to buy from us,” Ron said.

A farming landscape with green rolling hills and blue sky. Cows roam the field in the foreground. In the distance is a gray farmhouse, red barn, a scattering of farm sheds and a grain silo. Red barns, symbolic of small family dairy farms, still dot the landscape in Monroe, Wisconsin, but many are no longer in operation. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

The license plates for Wisconsin say “America’s Dairyland” beneath a picture of a red barn. The state has the most dairy farms in the country. But it lost 826 dairy farms in 2019, or 10% of its dairy herds – the most dramatic loss in the state’s history, and part of a downward trend which saw the state lose 44% of its dairy farms over the last decade. Last year, for the first time in state history, the number of dairy farms dipped below 7,000.

At the same time, milk production in the state has increased every year since 2004, and has set a new annual record each year since 2009, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In the last decade alone, Wisconsin has increased milk production by 25%. The number of operations declines, just as the number of cows per operation goes up – 3% of Wisconsin farms now produce roughly 40% of the state’s milk. Milk produced on concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFO), or farms with more than about 700 cows but often housing thousands, is increasingly making up the state’s overall milk production.

“The kids don’t go into it, why would they? Get cow shit all over you, and not have a paycheck.” — Cory Bidlingmaier, Auctioneer.

The number of large farms like this in Wisconsin has increased by 55% in less than a decade. A family-owned CAFO called Pinnacle moved into Green county in 2018, causing an uproar from local farmers and other residents.

Pinnacle milks 5,000 cows. It is owned by Todd Tuls and his son, TJ, who oversees its 55 employees and the daily operations. Instead of collecting from 30 small farmers across Green county, milk trucks can make just one stop – at Pinnacle – and they do, nine times a day.

Todd said he understood local misgivings. “I can see their anxiety, it’s like a Walmart coming into a small-town area and the local store is like how is this going to impact me?” he said. “The one thing that bothers me the most is that people look at us as if we’re a corporation and not a family business. Deep down inside we are a family business,” added Todd, who said he grew up on a California dairy farm with 4,400 cows at its peak in the mid-1980s. His grandfather owned three dairy farms milking more than 3,000 cows in total in 1969, the year Todd was born.

He said the way he relates to his cows despite their size is part of their success, describing himself as “kinda like a cow whisperer”. He argues that other farms missed opportunities to grow. “A lot of these farms that go out of business fail to adapt to the techniques and technology. It’s kinda like if Ford or Chevy woulda just kept building the 1972 truck and not kept improving it.”

‘There Ain’t No Future in Dairy, None at All’

The Wallenhorsts bought a small beef herd; like many former dairy farmers, they’ll transition to raising steer for slaughter now. But their barn is empty, dairy is done. “It’s quiet, eerily quiet, for the first time in 50-some years. It’s pretty strange,” Ron said. “First couple days was difficult to walk in there.”

Cory Bidlingmaier is a third-generation auctioneer. “He was a nervous wreck, we really had to walk him through all of it,” Cory said of Ron’s state in the weeks leading up to the auction. But Cory has had plenty of experience with anxious farmers. There have been weeks in recent years that Cory has done four to five complete dairy dispersals like the Wallenhorsts’.

Left: Ron Wallenhorst sits in his office attached to the dairy barn. He and his wife Lori will shift their focus to growing corn and soybeans and raising steer for slaughter. Right: Idle milkers hang on a window sill next to a milk tank at the Wallenhorst farm in Cuba City, Wisconsin.

Cory grew up in Green county: an expanse of silos and sky in southern Wisconsin that can be driven across east to west in a half hour. Few vehicles are seen other than the semi trucks that cut through the low hills hauling milk. Despite having five farms with 500 or more cows, Green county still has many of Wisconsin’s small dairy farms, about 200, with between 50 and 100 cows, milked by the family.

The county went from being a highly competitive marketplace for generations to an area like so many others in the state where too much milk is being produced. When the price of milk is down, farmers milk more cows to compensate; if the milk price is up, they milk more to capitalize. The excess of milk matches up with a plummet in consumption as milk alternatives and water are chosen over milk. And the glut is worldwide, driving down prices for farmers to the point they are barely breaking even or are losing money to produce it. On top of that, a Green county co-op of 25 local farms that accepts 3.5m pounds (1.6mkg) of milk to create 400,000 pounds (182,000 kg) of cheese a month unexpectedly shut down last fall after 110 years due to pandemic-specific industry volatility. A shutdown like this is very rare, and left farmers scrambling for new processors to offload their milk.

Dan Truttmann’s farm in Blanchardville in Green County has 425 milking cows. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Milk prices were at a record high in 2014, then from 2015 on, went down. When prices are good, small dairy farmers, able to finally turn a profit, make longstanding crucial repairs on the smaller scale, and do some significant expansions on the large level. In early 2015 in Green county farmers were so confident in expanding that if you wanted to put up a building, you were lucky if you could find an available contractor. But the good times never last.

“The milk price only comes up a few times a year, just enough to tease ’em. Then it drops again,” Cory said. “When the farmers call us to auction their herd, they’re saying ‘Screw this, we’re going to go work in town or off the farm.’ It affects so many people. When a dairy goes out, the local feed store, the local hardware store, the whole local economy is affected.” Larger farmers can look across the country to find the best price for anything they need.

Cory didn’t grow up on a dairy farm, but like most everyone in Green county, being involved in the industry somehow was a given. He’s seeing that change. “It sucks for my 10- and 12-year-old. When my uncle sold out a month ago, I made a point to get my boys over there to milk a cow so they can grow up and at least say they have done it,” he said.

His job requires him to witness the final day of countless dairy farms; his outlook on the future of the industry reflects that. “There will be no family farm. The kids don’t go into it, why would they? Get cow shit all over you, work 19-hour days, and not have a paycheck. Unless the family has old money, there ain’t no future in dairy, none at all.”

Mark Stephenson, the director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the industry definitely has a lot of challenges but is nowhere near extinction.

“We’ve produced record amounts of milk in the last year or two. It’s being consumed. Most of it domestically, but increasingly with exports,” said Stephenson.

Like many former dairy farmers, Ron Wallenhorst will shift to raising cattle for slaughter. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

Last year, tankers were loading up milk and driving it straight to the farm’s manure pit, opening the valve, and letting it go – milk dumping like this is quite extreme. Yet even in a year that started with unprecedented dumping, cows being culled, and milk sold at very distressed prices, then continuing with a milk price of $13 per 100 pounds (£9.32 per 45kg) of milk in the spring and summer – which is less than the cost of production for most farmers – 2020 ended with a high demand for cheese. This was thanks in part to the government’s pandemic food assistance programs. By the end of the year the state’s dairy farms again increased total production to 30.7bn pounds (13.9bn kg) of milk. And on it goes.

Stephenson said farmers used to be able to make a living with 15 or 20 cows just a generation or two ago.

“You could hardly find a farm like that now. That does not exist. Now we would look at a 100-cow farm and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that quaint?’” he said. The attrition rate in Wisconsin for dairy farming is about 3–5% annually (in 2019 it was 10%), and as with farming across the country and specialties, it’s hard to find new farmers to hand a family farm off to. Stephenson said, “Now we’ve got, at least, a couple generations that have gotten to the point that they’ve never been on a farm and if they get there, they would just probably go, ‘Oh boy. That smells bad.’”

The industry may have staying power, but as one made up of fewer, larger operations. Stephenson thinks large farms, those with more than 500 cows, are the way of the future.

“Those quaint red barns that you are used to seeing on green hillsides with black and white cows in the fields, that just doesn’t exist any more. Those barns over time will begin to rot and fall down,” he said. “That image that people have of what dairy farming is has to evolve into what is much more the reality now and those are large barns that house thousands of cows.”

Two women, one in a short-sleeved yellow button-down shirt and black jeans, the other in a pink T-shirt and gray jeans, lean against the outside wall of a red barn. Emily, left, and Brandi Harris, sold their dairy herd in 2019. Emily now works as an excavator and Brandi works in administration at a local college. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

‘Hope Sustains the Farmer’

“I drive by Pinnacle a lot. It’s disgusting. There’s potholes everywhere because there’s a semi in and out of there every hour,” said Emily Harris, a fourth-generation farmer, of the CAFO that has moved into the county. “It kinda makes you sick. It’s just a huge building, you don’t even see one cow.”

Emily and her wife Brandi, both 39, live in Monroe, a small city in Green county about 40 miles south of Madison. After 10 years, they stopped dairy farming on a Monday. “May 6 of 2019, the cows left,” Emily said. Forty cows left on a double-decker trailer headed for farms in New York and Indiana. That Tuesday, Emily started her job at a nearby excavating company as an equipment operator. Emily cried for a week prior. Brandi held out until the day they left, then lost it. “They are your life, seven days a week,” she said.

They’d used farm equipment that looked like antiques and went without making crucial repairs. They did everything they could to keep milking, pushing hay into holes in the barn to stop the wind in especially cold years. They’d taken turns working off-farm jobs, as many farm families do.

Left: The Harrises kept one cow, Lay-T, on their farm in Monroe, Wisconsin. They just couldn’t face selling her. Right: Sunlight stripes the hay in the Harrises’ barn. “May 6 of 2019, the cows left,” said Emily Harris.

“I think we made money two of the years?” Emily asked looking over to Brandi, who shrugs. They’d had a decent organic contract, which generally pay more than conventional milk, but the new contract was suddenly going to be $20 (£14) less per 100 pounds of milk, down from $37 (£26). Emily said, “We were just watching the milk price go down, down, down.”

Emily’s advice for dairy farmers is blunt: “If they’re under 300 cows, just quit. It’s not worth it. You can’t turn a profit any more. I think the small dairy farmer is gone. It’s a sad deal.”

Just 20 minutes down the road, around the same time the Harrises were starting their farm, Dan Truttmann, a fifth-generation farmer, was expanding his. “I wanted to get myself and my dad out of the milking parlor. We were at risk of wearing out, emotionally and physically,” he said. He unceremoniously lifts one of about 20 barn cats out of an office chair next to desks near the milking parlor and the calf pen to check one of the dusty laptops keeping track of weight, feeding habits, temperatures, milk production and other vitals for every one of his 425 milking cows.

Before milk prices hit the downward trajectory they’ve remained on the last six years, dairy farmers commonly doubled their herds, as Truttmann did, and just let their processor know they’d be shipping out more milk. Truttmann said, “Now some of them are saying, ‘Don’t you dare send us an extra load without our permission.’”

Truttmann, who is 53, has nine employees helping himself, his brother, and his dad on the farm, which has been in his family since 1899. “It’s just not really likely that somebody with minimal education in the area could just buy a farm. You used to kind of think about that, like, well, if you can’t do anything else, you can always farm. Boy, that is not true at all today,” he said.

A man is surrounded by calves in a cow shed with a layer of hay on the floor. One of the calves is suckling his finger. Dan Truttmann, a fifth-generation farmer, expanded to more than 400 milking cows to keep his dairy farm alive. Photograph: Greg Kahn/The Guardian

He works up to 80 hours a week, getting up at five in the morning, an hour after 3,500 gallons (13,200 litres) of milk is picked up from his farm every day and taken to a local processor to be made into cheese for retail (which cushioned him from pandemic-specific blows to dairy farmers who sell to cheese processors for restaurants and schools). Green county’s dairy farmers sell directly to cheese makers or co-ops, no one sells fluid milk.

Truttmann’s three kids aren’t interested in farming, but he’s hopeful that a nephew may be. He knows it’s a hard sell – in good times, profit margins are about 10%. “When feed costs are high or hauling costs are shifted, all of a sudden there’s nothing left,” he said.

His favorite job on the farm is getting hours-old calves to bottle feed. He marches into a pen cradles the calf and patiently gets her to suckle – the trick is putting her nose on his wrist, which makes her mouth open automatically. He wants her to get used to him, to understand this is her caregiver from day one.

Back in his house, out of his rubber boots with his ankles crossed, he said, “I don’t think we’re different from any other industry where as times change, you either change with them or get left behind. And that’s the sad, hard reality of it. And even those that modernize are still at some risk of being washed out. It’s always a gamble.” He paused. “Hope sustains the farmer. That’s what the sign says on my back door.”

This is part one of a two-part series on America’s changing dairyland. Part two will be published on Sunday July 25, 2021.

[moodboardinthecloud]

We Are In The Underworld And We Haven’t Figured It Out Yet

https://medium.com/@schoolofmyth/we-are-in-the-underworld-and-we-havent-figured-it-out-yet-5d48d2c988aa 

As both a mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide I am frequently asked to comment on climate change, collapsing stories, and what on earth to say to our kids about the future. I am no kind of pundit, so choose my words sparingly and carefully. What follows is a few thoughts.

***

The real horn being blown at this moment is one some of us simply cannot hear. Oh, we see — the endless television clips of crashing icebergs, emaciated polar bears, and a hand-wringing David Attenborough — but I don’t think we necessarily hear.

Climate change isn’t a case to be made, it’s a sound to be heard.

It’s really hearing something that brings the consequence with it — “I hear you.” We know that sensation, when it happens the whole world deepens. If we really heard what is happening around us it’s possible some of it may stop. From a mythic perspective, seeing is often a form of identifying, but hearing is the locating of a much more personal message. Hearing creates growing, uncomfortable discernment. Things get accountable.

I worry I have been looking but not hearing.

When I hear, I detect what is being disclosed specifically to me at this moment of shudderation and loss. What is being called forth? Whatever it is, I won’t likely appreciate it.

We remember that the greatest seers, the great storytellers, the greatest visionaries are so often blind. Listening is the thing.

In ancient Greece, if you needed wisdom greater than human you went to the market square of Pharae in Achaea and created libation for Hermes, god of communication, messages, storytelling. There stood a statue of the bearded god. After burning incense, lighting the oil lamp, and leaving coin on the right of the deity, you whispered your question in its ear. Once complete, you swiftly turned and left the sacred area with your hands over your ears. Once out, you removed your hands, and the very first words you heard were Hermes speaking back to you. You curated these insights into your heart, pondered and then acted on them.

You didn’t see Hermes, you heard Hermes. You listened.

It’s said that in ancient Greece the deaf were shunned through their supposed lack of capacity to hear the gods. That was considered dangerous.

Isn’t it interesting that the enquirer to Hermes kept their ears blocked till they were out of the market square, so as not to be assailed by idle, above-world chatter and think it divine? I wonder if we may be asking the question to Hermes but removing our hands too early.

As a storyteller I have noticed when an audience is profoundly absorbing the import of a story, they close their eyes to do so. It deepens the encounter. Anyway, onto my main thought:

I think we are in the Underworld and haven’t figured it out yet. Both inside and outside us.

The strange thing about the Underworld is that it can look an awful lot like this one. It’s not situated in those esoteric graphs and spiritual maps we study, it’s situated as a lived experience.

I recently saw a mist suddenly descend on my garden, it just rolled in out of nowhere. Everything changed, just like that. Very quickly all appeared different: no shrubs, no apple trees, it was a foreign landscape. The dead felt usefully closer, the silence deeper. In just a moment, the Underworld seemed present, as an atmosphere rather than concept, a tangible, seasonal shift not a distant idea.

This world can be Otherworld, Underworld, heavenly, hellish and all points in between. It can still be Arcadia, Camelot, Eden almost. That’s why it’s confusing. We still get to go on holiday, drink wine, watch beautiful sunsets. We still pay insurance and kids still go to college. But there is something happening. An unravelling. A collapsing, both tacit and immense in scale.

We are frightened and we do not know what will happen next.

And into that fraught zone drifts quite naturally the Underworld. This is not the dayworld, this is the nightworld we are entering. It’s not a mistake or aberration, it is fitting with the times.

But we are still using dayworld words. This is why so little works.

When we move into Underworld time, mythically the first thing to go is often the lights. This is a shadowed or even pitch-black zone of encounter. Nothing is how it seems on the surface of things. We have to get good with our ears. So to repeat, our eyes alert us to the wider situation, but it’s our ears that alert us to the personal, the particular, the micro in the macro. This tends to be when the heart is alerted.

And there’s just more of the Underworld about. Its tactile, tangible attributes. We have Penthos (Grief),Curae (Anxiety) and Phobus (Fear), those gatekeepers of the place roving ever more readily amongst us. Either chronic or acute, acknowledged or not, they are present at our table. So what happens when the underneath, the chthonic, the shadowed material starts to become more and more visible in our lives?

We start to fess up.

The Underworld is a place where we admit our red right hand. We give up the apotropaic.

An apotropaic act is when you ritually ward off evil. When you claim innocence unduly you are attempting a similar, unseemly act. Keeping your hands clean. So we could entertain our own hypocrisies for a while. That would be suitably sobering. When we start to remove the scaffold of smoke and mirrors propping up our lives, what is left? That is part of an Underworld etiquette.

I also have to say something deeply unfashionable: it is not relentless self-absorption that makes us realise our interior mess is directly mirrored outside ourselves. That’s not vanity, that’s attention. It’s not hubris, it’s horrifying clarity. If you don’t attend to your soul’s vitality with intent, then suppressed it’ll run you ragged. They are not above catastrophe to get your attention.

Soul seems more dangerous to talk about than sex, violence, death or money these days.

As many nerve endings as there are in a body, are the messages attempting to issue forth between place, animal and person in regards to climate change. I think we should forget the rest and attend to ours. Staggering spiritual repair is called for. It is not just those bad white men in power that did this. We all did.

I believe something will crawl back out of the Underworld. It will. It always does. But it may not be us.

The Underworld chews up soundbites, gnaws on the feeble marrow of platitude, pummels certainty or sweeping predictions into the greasy darkness of the cave to gobble later.

The Underworld speaks out of both sides of its mouth.

So being that’s where I think we are, I suggest we should develop a little etiquette. Hold a little paradox, to speak out of both sides of our mouths.

In the Underworld, even a spirit takes on more than one form.

In Roman such spirits were called — di manes, or in Greek — theoi cthonioi. One being can have several bodies, all communicating things a little different. The one fixed position erupts into the polyphonic many. A stuck position, a one sided position, is child’s play where we’re headed.

So with those standpoints vivid in mind, I’m going to ask us to hold two, seemingly contrary positions at the same time. That we could deepen into both.

1. Stop Saying That The Earth Is Doomed

You may be doomed, I may be doomed, the earth not so much.

And anyway, do you have any idea how offensive that is to the gods? To any amount of offended magics? Especially to your children? To the perpetual and ongoing miraculous? In the Underworld, such grand protestations reveal a lack of subtlety. Even hubris.

And who are we, with our unique divinatory access, that we seem to have information withheld from everything else in all time and space. And now, now we are suddenly cleaving to the “facts” of the matter? Facts don’t have the story. They have no grease to the wheel, they are often moribund, awkward clumps of information that can actually conceal truth, not promote it.

I’m not even asking for hope or despair, I’m suggesting responsiveness to wonder. To entertain possibility. And to deepen.

Cut out the titillation of extinction unless we are really are prepared to be appropriately stupefied with loss. To stop trafficking in it just to mainline a little temporary deep feeling into our veins as we post the latest Ted Talk on social media. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, doesn’t mean that rivers, deserts and ice floes don’t daily communicate their flogged and exhausted missive, but there’s an odd twisted eroticism, a Western Thanatos that always comes with excessive privilege. And let’s be clear, most of us reading this are excessively privileged. I think some of us are getting off on this. That it-all-will-end assists some poignancy to a life deprived of useful hardships. Not ever knowing appropriate sacrifice is not a victory, it’s a sedative.

But when we prematurely claim doom we have walked out of the movie fifteen minutes early, and we posit dominion over the miraculous. We could weave our grief to something more powerful than that. Possibility.

Let the buck stop with you. Where is your self-esteem if you claim the world is doomed with you still kicking in it? How can that be? What are you, chopped liver? Is that really your last word on that matter? I’m not suggesting a Hercules complex land on your shoulders, but if ever you longed for a call to action this is the moment. And, at the very same time:

2. Approaching The Truth That Things End

Dancing on the very same spear tip, we accept our very human response to things ending. We don’t like it. We loathe it. The good stuff at least. Though it is a historical inevitability, a biological place-holder, could we start to explore the thought that earth may appropriately proceed without us? Without our frantically curated shape? Could our footprints become pollen that swirl up for a moment and then are gone? I’m not suggesting we are anything but pulverised with sorrow with the realisation, and our part in its hastening, but I persist.

I’m offering no spiritual platitudes, no lofty overview, but for once we stop our wrestle with god and feel deeply into the wreckage of appropriate endings.

That even, or especially such catastrophic loss requires the most exquisite display for the love we did not know how deeply we loved till we knew it was leaving.

I think even to operate for a second in the Underworld without being annihilated we have to operate from both wonder and grief, at absolutely the same time. One does not cancel the other out, it is the very tension of the love-tangle that makes us, possibly, a true human being.

Notice I said approaching, not accepting the truth that things end. That’s to swift a move, too fraudulent, too counterfeit, too plastic. Approaching is devastation enough.

This terrible, noble counterweight is what we are getting taught. But it doesn’t end there.

There in that very contrariness something gets forged: something that is neither-this-nor-that, a deepening, the blue feather in the magpie’s tale, the Hermian move to excruciating brilliance through the torment of paradox, the leap of dark consciousness that we, in the name of culture, are being asked to make. The thunderbolt that simultaneously destroys and creates.

These are grand turns of phrase I’m using but I don’t apologise. You’ve been in love once or twice, you know what I’m banging on about.

I once heard that to become a sovereign of Ireland you had to attach a chariot to two wild horses. One would lurch one way, one the other. You revealed your spiritual maturity and general readiness for the task by so harnessing the tension of both that a third way forward revealed itself. The holy strain of both impulses created the royal road to Tara. A road that a culture could process down. I’m talking about something like that. That’s Underworld character.

And such sovereigns were not defined by what they ransacked, what they conquered, but how they regulated their desire, how they attended to the woes and ambitions of their steeds for a third way to reveal itself. Under great pressure and with immense skill.

The nightworld is where we are. I say it. I say it till we may hear it.

And in that darkness, we remember what we love the most.

That itself is the candle.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2019

Martin Shaw is a writer, mythologist and teacher. Having led the Oral Tradition and Living Myth courses at Stanford University, Dr Shaw leads the Westcountry school of myth in the UK. An award winning author, recent books include The Night Wages, Wolf Milk, Courting the Dawn:Poems of Lorca, and a conversation and essay on Ai WeiWei, Myth in Real Time.

www.drmartinshaw.com

www.cistamystica.com

www.schoolofmyth.com

[lupinepariah]

Why I’m Otherkin

This is going to be very trigger-y so... to be forewarned is to have four arms, yeah? Wonderful. So, let’s rap.

My mother died last week.

Amongst most of my family I’m the “know-it-all ass-burgers r-word.” I object to this as I really don’t know a lot and I don’t know how I’d weigh my intelligence. If pressed, I’d likely say that I’m not very smart as admitting to intellect makes me feel guilty. I don’t know why. Why do they do it, then? It’s because I have a strong propensity for being right.

You see, I have a strong propensity for doing something they never do. Thinking.

My mother is the only one in my family I’ve ever cared about. I admit, we’re a little distant but I did love her and I cared for her, I never wanted her to suffer. A friend of the family had a mother die not long before my mother died and they wouldn’t listen to me for the aforementioned reason, I wanted to tell their mother about an experimental treatment that was at least worth trying. No no, I’m just talking out of my arse.

That’s how it often is. I don’t think it’s especially difficult to not be stupid? You just have to think first. Is there really so much difficulty in that? I mean... I recall not so long ago when I was screaming at “medical professionals” to stop faecal transplant tests. There’s so much stuff we can’t screen for well and all you’d need is the combination of a superbug and a compromised immune system for people to start dying. It had to happen for them to stop, of course. They did it until people died for exactly that reason.

No one wants to listen to an r-word with ass-burgers.

What frustrates me with my mother though is that the solution to keeping her alive was so simple.

She started new medication recently. It turns out everyone in my family was told about this except for myself, which is dandy. The first thing I advise anyone to do is to check the side effects to make sure that there aren’t any co-morbid effects with any other drugs they might be on, or any instigators of underlying health problems they might have. Fat chance. My family got my mother popping meds without even bothering to read the documentation that came with them.

The first thing I do with anyone is tell them to check the side effects. Always check the side effects. Always check the side effects.

The truth is? I have loads of life experiences like this. I’ve been abused in every way you can imagine. I’ve been through the ringer. Physical, mental, sexual, emotional, and everything else. No matter what could happen to me these days, I’ve felt worse. That’s why the situation with my mother just leaves me feeling cold and angry, and little else.

The truth is is that my experiences with human beings that actually want to be human beings is that they can be monsters. I admit that this isn’t all of them, I’m sure it can’t be, but it is true for the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast, vast... you get the point, the vast majority. They’re monsters.

I was raised by dogs due to parents that were either neglectful or abusive. The dogs died because of abuse, missed vaccines, or other reasons... they were replaced with other dogs because it was the only thing that kept me sane. After all, you have to keep up appearances and make it look like it’s the problmeatic child’s fault rather than the alcoholic, violent, dysfunctional parents. Isn’t that always the way of it? Very relateable, yes?

The truth is is that I’ve had so many bad experiences that I... I don’t feel like I’m a good fit with this species. I’m too kind. I’m too considerate. I think before I act. I actually care. I help people even if they’ve hurt me so, so badly that all I feel for them is hatred. All I want for anyone is to not have to suffer as I do. So while most humans look like monsters to me, I don’t want them to suffer.

This gives one a... unique outlook on life.

As a coping mechanism I started thinking of myself as, well, not human. It helped. It helped so much. And over time I became mentally healthy, even well-adjusted, I’m certainly a lot less angry these days. I even have a partner! They’re non-binary and they’re absolutely lovely, I couldn’t ask for a better partner, so very supportive, creative, and clever. And then my mother died.

It’s hard not to feel set back by it. I feel like I’m teetering on a razor’s edge. I feel that the only way I can cling to my sanity is by more deeply embracing these very strong feelings I have of not being human. The human species—so overly obsessed with itself—brings me great shame. I feel shame and pain that I’m to share this species until the day I die, in body if not in heart and mind.

There’s an autistic community called Wrong Planet because it’s not unusual for autistic people to feel this way. It’s just that for some of us the alienation is so much more profound and extreme than it is for others. We feel it so deeply that we could never be “human,” not in the sense that most would understand that word. I mean, we could certainly never be normal and we’d never want to. It’s a horrible word, isn’t it? Normal. It suggests a binary state where one is the innate default and correct, whereas the other isn’t. How could that be anything other than pathological by design?

Being Otherkin is my coping mechanism.

It isn’t spiritual. I’m not an animal. I don’t have an animal living inside of me. I don’t have an animal spirit. I just really want to be something other than human, thanks.

So I think of myself as a lycanthrope. I’ve an imaginary support dragon who’s there when I’m alone and I have to handle things myself. It’s only by the merit of these two factors that I stay sane. If I had to think of myself as human, if I lost my support dragon, I’d be bouncing off the walls and chewing the furniture to pieces because I’d have no means to handle all of the unimaginably awful things that had been done to me, all of the suffering I’d endured.

No matter how bad something makes me feel, I’ve felt worse. I could only really go up and Otherkin was my way up. It’s a comfort, a small one in a world so bent on destroying itself as this one is. I mean, depletion of the rainforests and a huge hole in the ozone layer and people are still breeding like bunny rabbits. This is what scientists refer to as The Great Filter. Frankly, if not for SARS-CoV-2, humanity likely would’ve gone extinct within the next century.

I feel that SARS-CoV-2 has given the human species a chance to pull back from the brink.

It’s funny because I’ll never know anything other than hatred. I know that. It’s almost impossible for an Otherkin like myself to find any allies other than fellow Otherkin. I mean, I tried to reach out to trans people and they thought I was a meme created to hurt them because that’s what the Alt-Right very successfully brainwashed them into believing. So much for that, right?

I don’t hate trans people for this. That’d be stupid. They’re suffering too. No, I get that they were hacked and it’s not their fault. If you aren’t acting with full agency then you can’t really be blamed.

Every time something happens though that keys into my personal support mechanism I can’t help but latch onto it. I feel included, for once. It’s actually really nice to feel included. This is why I’ve been fixated upon Guild Wars 2 and why it’s been so important to me. I’ve been getting very clingy with it since my mother died because I love being charr and there may just be a good therapy dragon in the latest content. I’d love that.

If ArenaNet wants to do something for one person who’s suffered way too much? Don’t make Jormag evil. I’d really appreciate that. It’s going to hurt like hell if they are. I hate it when dragons always have to be evil because I’m Otherkin. I love dragons.

It’s a perspective thing, yeah?

I don’t really know how to explain it. I don’t think you’d really be able to understand without having gone through decades of torture and abuse. It just shifts your perspective. If I were to show you a picture of five scantily clad humans facing off against a dragon, you’d know for certain that it’s a depiction of heroes versus an evil draconic beast. What I see, however, is a bunch of thieves, burglars, and freebooters looking to slaughter an innocent dragon so they can steal the poor thing’s belongings. The dragon? They’re a mother protecting a clutch of newborn children.

Dragons don’t look like monsters to me. Humans do, though.

That’s unlikely to ever change. I hurt too much for it to.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I hate humans or anything. I don’t really have it in me to hate anyone as that would mean I’d have to want someone to suffer and enjoy it, which I couldn’t. I’d vomit. I’m as diametrically opposed to suffering as anyone could be. I’m really sick of how forced to suffer so many of us are already. It’s just that I can’t look at a human now and not at first see a monster because I have so much trauma to deal with and work through.

So, yeah. I’m Otherkin. It helps. It helps a lot. I love werewolves, dragons, robots, aliens, sapient fungi, and lots of other non-human stuff. It’s great. Sadly, humans being innately narcissistic tend to demonise anything unfamiliar to them, the human species has been doing that since the dawn of time with factors as trivial as skin colour or the shape of one’s nose. It’s tiresome. That’s why whenever something is special enough to have truly non-human entities as forces of genuine kindness opposed to suffering? It wins my heart.

I feel in love with Aurene in Guild Wars 2 for that reason. I feel that that game has been part of my ongoing therapy. I... do worry about being hurt by how they handle Jormag but I do hope. I really do.

So, yeah. That’s why I’m Otherkin. That’s the long and short of it. if you aren’t? I don’t hate you. It’s just that if we met, you’d probably want to hurt me. That tends to be how it goes. I don’t find comfort in the presence of humans. I do find much comfort though in the dreams of being a werewolf protected within a dragon’s shadow. That’s about the only way I can be healthy.

[adamandbrittanyinhawaii]

Australia: Day 3

Today, we finally slept in! Well, kind of.  It has been a long first few days of a vacation to say the least and we really haven’t slept normally since last Wednesday.  And it is now Tuesday.  But it is Monday in Hawaii.  Aaah!  I think my mind is slipping.  

 We stayed in a port town called Devonport which is central part of the northern coast.  Nothing really to see or do here, though if we had an extra day here it is a decent spot to start for driving around the northern coast like we did yesterday.

 Today we are headed south though into the mountains.  The scenery is gorgeous.  It is a lot like New Zealand with long sloping mountains and beautiful countryside. One notable difference: a lot less sheep.  That’s baaaaaaaaaaaad!  The livestock is more cows.  It does make you wonder what happened to all the bulls though.  The drive was also notable because every house had a custom mail box. I’m not talking fun arts and crafts, I’m talking one was made from an old car engine, another was a 6 foot angel, another one was made to look like a life size cat and there was even one built like a tractor.  It was as if there was a county-wide mailbox creation contest and nobody opted out.  I didn’t get any pictures snapped because my wife gets car sick and apparently felt it wasn’t safe for me to take pictures while doing hairpin turns through the mountains.  You know sometimes I sense a bit of an Uncle Brian and Aunt Pati dynamic between the two of us!

Cradle Mountain is a national park, but is sort of unique in that they encourage you to park outside the entrance and then take the shuttle bus in.  To our knowledge, there isn’t much to do here except hike so a lot of people there were doing more or less the same thing as us.  

Our path we chose started where the 6 day overland track hike starts.  That journey is much more rugged than the one we embarked on later in our travels as the cabins are quite a bit more rugged, and it is 50% longer! This region is well known for spotting wombats and as seen in my video I posted a few weeks ago, we got pushed off a bridge 10 minutes into our hike by a wombat.  I didn’t even know what it was!  We found out later that it only eats plants which is a good thing because it looks like it has the strength and claws to rip a man’s face off.  

The path we took was a longer walk up to the popular Marion’s lookout which meant all the old people snowcaps got off the bus closer to the end point and left us to hike by ourselves.  It was a gorgeous and peaceful hike although, much like New Zealand, felt like we went through 4 seasons in a day.  We started with winter gear on and completely bundled up and finished up in shorts and a t shirt with excess heat.  

Cradle mountain as you can see from Marion’s lookout gets its name because you just feel like you can curl up inside that little dip in the mountains.  While we ate lunch on top of the lookout this crow looking bird (black currawong) came up nearby which made for a great photo.  I thought it was a fascinating looking bird with the creepy yellow eyes but by the end of our trip I was totally over them.  They show up all the time and apparently are a bit of a nuisance to hikers as they are very smart and for people on the Overland track have even learned how to unzip bags with their beaks to get at the food.

We hiked a bit further up the mountain just to explore and came across snow for the first time since our hike on Routeburn Track 2 years ago in New Zealand!  It was a treat, mostly because I didn’t have to drive in it or shovel it!  Eventually the path got covered in so much snow that it wasn’t clear where the path was and we weren’t equipped to trudge through snow so we headed back down.  

As we descended we were graced with lots of wonderful views and Britt was even met by a snake along the trail.  Now personally I find this hard to believe, but she says that is the first time she has ever come across a snake in the wild!  Who knew she just needed to travel across the world to find one.  I had one slither up to me in my parent’s basement while I was playing video games once and Grant covered it with a blanket to confuse it and smashed it to death with a mallet.  I don’t remember what blanket it was but hopefully we got that cleaned up!

We finished up at Dove Lake (above) and then headed to the bus stop to be picked up.  While waiting we met Kristen from California (sort of rare to meet an American here in Tassie) who was spending a year traveling the globe and was almost 2 months into her journey.  She started in Central America and was now headed west.  I picked her brain about long term travel since that is something Britt and I aspire to do and she also showed us a cool app she uses to show all the places she’s been while also comforting her mom back home that she is safe and sound.  An interesting thing I learned from her since she was a solar energy engineer is that the biggest constriction right now that people are trying to solve is how to manage the volume of power being added to the grid by solar because cities with high adoption are cutting off new additional flow onto the grid.  Hopefully someone smarter than me can figure out the answer because Hawaii can benefit from that solution.

We stayed at a hotel in Cradle mountain which was gorgeous.  It had a Jacuzzi in the room, a hot tub, steam room and even a fireplace and lounge in the middle of the hallway to complete the cabin feel.  And there were a ton of wallabies just bounding around the hotel constantly.  We returned to cradle mountain for our evening of viewing the Tasmanian devil sanctuary, or as they are called here, devils.  

We were reminded ~100 times during the 2 hours there that the population is fighting extinction due to a facial disease that is spread when these devils bite each other, something they do quite often.  These little guys live up to their name (earned by Europeans who came over and coined the term because they thought they were pure evil) because they are carnivorous, nocturnal and basically only make sounds when they are snarling at each other or chomping on the corpse of an animal.  They rarely kill, rather let smaller creatures like a quoll (below) kill then swoop in for the body after the kill has been made.  They also eat an entire animal: bones, fur, the whole nine yards! These things are savages and that is a shame because they look pretty darn cute.  

The exhibit also had quolls which are facing extinction threats but just due to predatory/prey imbalances due to humans.

While devils have lost 85% of their population in the past 20 years there is hope.  They recently introduced a healthy devil population on an island within Tassie where they had gone extinct which means the disease isn’t able to spread there and the population can at the very least have one place where the population can grow naturally and safely.  That is also your best chance at seeing one in the wild.

The guide of our tour, which you can hear in some videos, clearly spent a liiiiiiiitle too much time with the devils and not enough with people.  He seemed bothered by people’s questions and it was clear that he loved the animals like his own offspring.  Of course he had the long unkempt hair and clothes to match the stereotype.

On our way out we saw a very rare light skinned wallaby which was pretty neat.  That night we chilled in the hot tub, steam room and Jacuzzi before eating dinner by the fire place.  What a rough life!

[bentonpena]

The number of species on Earth is uncountable

The number of species on Earth is uncountable http://bit.ly/2MGkpLm

Some scientists estimate around 2 million animal and plant species inhabit Earth. Others approximate around 8 million. Bug experts note there are probably some 5.5 million insects species alone. One recent analysis estimates tens of millions of animal species (this number is dominated by insects and tiny arthropods).

For centuries, biologists, ecologists, and taxonomists have documented critters around the globe. But, in a world teeming with biodiversity and remote ecosystems, they acknowledge there are plenty more species out there. The broad assumption is that humanity has named around 1.5 to 1.7 million plant and animal species, so far. Everything else is an educated guess.

"It's hard to even know quite how many species have been described — never mind the difficult challenge of knowing how many haven’t been described," said Andy Purvis, a biodiversity researcher at the National History Museum of London. 

"It is embarrassing," he added, noting that after some 260 years of scientific work, the number of known species is still uncertain — and woefully incomplete. 

"We’re muddling along with a fractional knowledge of species diversity."

"We’re muddling along with a fractional knowledge of species diversity," agreed Quentin Wheeler, an insect taxonomist and founding director of the International Institute for Species Exploration. 

On a planet with a 24,901-mile circumference and little-explored pockets of extreme biodiversity, our species knowledge may forever be incomplete. "The debate about how many species there are is perpetual," said Seabird McKeon, an ecologist at the University of Central Florida.

But the healthy scientific debate continues. Purvis recently led an exhaustive UN assessment of the planet's biodiversity, compiled by 145 scientists, which concluded that 1 million plant and animal species on Earth are threatened with extinction — a number much larger than the some 27,000 species known to be threatened. In a letter entitled "No inflation of threatened species" published last week in the journal Science, Purvis and other scientists defended their estimates, based upon the evaluation that some 8 million species likely inhabit Earth. Eight million species, he noted is "not the high end or low estimate," but a moderate approximation.

Yet Mark Costello, a biodiversity expert at the University of Auckland, disagrees. He argued, via an earlier letter published in Science, that 8 million species is inflated, and instead estimates some 2 to 2.7 million animal and plant species inhabit the planet, of which about 27,000 are threatened ("Conservationists do not need to exaggerate the crisis facing the world’s biodiversity" — as there's problem enough, Costello wrote online).

"There is not really consensus on how many species because many people do not study the evidence in detail and perpetuate meaningless 'up to' statement estimates for the sake of dramatic effect," Costello said over email. There is just not enough evidence to support larger estimates of potential species, he emphasized. In the face of so much environmental gloom, he argued such a high number (1 million threatened species) could cause people to feel emotionally fatigued about an overwhelming problem.

Though Purvis appreciates the genuine scientific dialogue and acknowledges the uncertainty in estimating undiscovered life, he said the known number of 27,000 threatened species doesn't capture the looming potential for extinction. "We know [27,000 species] is a big underestimate of the true extent of the problem," he explained. 

The UN report — undoubtedly grim — sought to estimate the likely state of nature, which is different than the current state of knowledge, Purvis underscored. He summed this up in his Science letter with a quote from the statistician John Tukey: "Far better an approximate answer to the right question, which is often vague, than an exact answer to the wrong question, which can always be made precise."

Species estimations aside, biologists can all agree on this: We need to look harder. 

"Instead of going to the moon and Mars — which are ostensibly lifeless places — what a worthwhile endeavor it would be to figure out how many species there are on Earth and to describe them all," said John Wiens, an ecologist at the University of Arizona. 

"The bottom line is we have to do a lot more species exploration," said the insect taxonomist Wheeler.

A worm salamander in Honduras.

Image: trond larsen / Conservation international

As an undergraduate student, Wiens described nine new species of amphibians "living in muddy holes" in South America. Lots of people had visited the area before, but no one had really scrutinized what might lie hidden in the mud. "People are finding new things in places where people have been before," he said. "There's lots of stuff like that out there."

"There are things around us every day that people just haven’t taken a good look at yet," said the University of Central Florida's McKeon. 

"Mites are insane."

Even many "known" species are little-known, McKeon emphasized. He recently ran the "National Biodiversity Championship" in the greater Louisville, Kentucky area. Over the course of four days about 200 people found 760 species, many of which were barely documented. Some had never been seen before in Kentucky.

"In the center of the U.S. we are surrounded by a depth and richness of biodiversity that humbles the best of our scientists," said McKeon. "Go to a rainforest or a coral reef, or any of the wild places left on the planet, and we are simply over our heads."

Some species estimates are hard to wrap your head around. Wiens' research estimates that perhaps some 100 million (or more) animal species inhabit the planet. That's because for every insect species (around 5.5 or 6 million), each bug is likely walking around with at least one mite species, he said.

"Mites are insane," said Wiens.

Mites are small arthropods that live in the nooks and crannies on insects. There are mites that live specifically on an army ant's antennas, noted Wiens. What's more, insects also carry little worms, called nematodes, in their stomachs. So when one accounts for the unique mite and nematode species that live on unique insect species, the number of potential species explodes. 

"What we’re understanding now is that many species are structural species," said McKeon, referring to a species that provides a habitat for other species. "That ramps up our [species] estimations tremendously." (McKeon doesn't accept any one estimate, but advises folks to recognize that there is both a middle ground and wide spectrum of possibilities).

Costello, though, is not too keen on higher, or highly extreme estimates, specifically from mite and nematode species. "Sounds like more of a wild extrapolation from very little data," he said.

Fortunately, the key to much of the planet's unknown biodiversity may be somewhat hard to reach, but it's no secret. "It's not like we don’t know where [unknown species] are going be," said the National History Museum's Purvis. 

In remote archipelagos and mountain slopes there are bounties of life to reveal. Take the Andes Mountains, the longest continental mountain range on Earth. It's filled with valleys. "Every one of those valleys has a different species of frog," said McKeon. Imagine what else lives there, he mused. 

The most critical question of all, however, isn't how many species there might be on Earth. "It's a distraction from the real topic: How many of those species are threatened or endangered because of human activity," asked McKeon. 

"Saying a million species are threatened strikes me as extremely conservative."

The number accepted in the UN report by Purvis, 1 million, is a fair estimate, if not an underestimate, noted Wheeler. "Saying a million species are threatened strikes me as extremely conservative," he said. 

"It's at least a million that are threatened," agreed Wiens. "It's not less than a million."

The primary culprits endangering animals and plants globally are destroyed wilderness, critters exploited for their horns and furs, accelerated climate change, and widespread pollution. About 70 percent of the ice-free land on Earth is now affected by humans, which inevitably means far less wild habitat. The modern extinction rate is the highest it's been in human history, and is "tens to hundreds of times" higher than the normal rate of extinction over the last 10 million years, the UN report concluded.

Drone footage of the Amazon rainforest.

Image: Shutterstock / PARALAXIS

It's not just little-known species that have been hit with extinction in modern history. The report emphasized that larger, spined creatures have been impacted, at the rate of well over 100 species per century since the 1500s: "At least 680 vertebrate species have been driven to extinction by human actions since the 16th century," the report reads.

Elevated extinction levels are all the reason to look for new species — before they're gone for good. 

"There's every reason to ramp up species exploration," said Wheeler. "Very few fossils are left behind, so it's a now-or-never proposition."

Better get moving, said McKeon, who is presently identifying a new species of florescent crustacean. "There's a huge amount of work to do."

Tech via Mashable! http://bit.ly/2KzLn52 August 28, 2019 at 05:33AM