#creatures of the flood

[skulkingwriter]

Apropos of nothing other than I'm procrastinating from writing book 10, have the first four Bamboo Kingdom covers in their full wraparound glory. All credit and praise to artist Johanna Tarkela who is a genius with a well organised website

[eternalergo]

SOUTH OF MIDNIGHT ˗ˏˋ 4 / ∞ ´ˎ˗

[unita-n]

A cover art I made for the music track

https://autodafeprod.bandcamp.com/album/inside-the-flooded-tomb https://kareliantomb.bandcamp.com/album/inside-the-flooded-tomb https://www.discogs.com/release/32374782-Karelian-Tomb-Inside-The-Flooded-Tomb

[mwagneto]

questions we haven't answered yet that make me super hyped for the next season:

what did the toymaker mean when he said he made a jigsaw out of the doctor's history?

↑ is that related to the strange way the doctor's memories keep changing and the random weird stuff that keeps coming up? or is that something else

was sutekh "the one who waits"? he was never actually referred to as that

multiple characters have referenced "the boss" and that cannot be sutekh, so who on earth is the boss?

this one's kinda meta but ruby left but we know she filmed stuff for s15, is that just a single episode? and is the new companion mundy or just a classic case of repeating actors?

what's rogue's whole deal? do we think his story is done? coz imo him being tied to the above mentioned boss + "find me" + the ring (that 15 is still wearing in eps 7 and 8 btw) definitely seems to imply there's something more there

frankly insane amount of Susan mentions this season - is she actually coming back?

and of course. who the hell is mrs flood!!!!

[rhythmmortis]

flood rotation post

[kayvalencourt]

Snippets from a phosphorous/gi doodle page

Do they have a ship name yet? I haven't seen much

[fatehbaz]

hi i love your blog and the stuff you've shared has been really invaluable for me writing my dissertation right now! i was wondering if you've ever read anything interesting about police horses, or perhaps horses working for the state more generally? apologies if you've already made a post about this and i've missed it.

Nice. Don't know if your dissertation is specifically about horse histories; if so, then I'd imagine you already know much more than I do. So I don't know how much help I can be.

I've posted about the history of police horses in Australia before, which is just excerpts from Stephen Gapps and Mina Murray, in their "From colonial cavalry to mounted police: a short history of the Australian police horse" (The Conversation, 28 July 2021; "Horse Patrol" aka "Mounted Police" formally established 1825 after Wiradjuri war, used to round-up escaped laborers and attack Aboriginal communities as crucial force in colonial admin in 1830s culminating in Waterloo Creek Massacre.)

I've made some references to US participation in British campaigns of Boer War. (Apparently there was a micro-industry of the New Orleans port shipping 110,000 horses and 81,000 mules on 166 voyages via 65 British steamships for a cost of like hundreds of thousands USD per month for three years to help Britain.)

Similarly, Steve Hewitt and others write about Canadian mounted police and their role in national power in the Great Plains; twentieth-century counter-subversion; monitoring labor strikes and Indigenous/student dissent, etc.

"The Masculine Mountie: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police as a Male Institution, 1914-1939" (Hewitt, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, 1996)

Riding to the Rescue: The Transformation of the RCMP in Alberta and Saskatchewan, 1914-1939 (Hewitt, 2006)

"Fashioning farmers: ideology, agricultural knowledge and the Manitoba farm movement, 1890-1925" (Hewitt, Journal of Canadian Studies, 1997)

"Canadianizing the West: The North-West Mounted Police as Agents of the National Policy, 1873-1905" (Mcleod, The Prairie West: Historical Readings, edited by Francis and Palmer, 1992)

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Guessing you've already considered this, but a relevant thing I've read might be Breeds of Empire: The 'Invention' of the Horse in Southeast Asia and Southern Africa 1500-1950 (Greg Bankoff and Sandra Swart, 2007), about "the 'invention' of specific breeds of horse in the context of imperial design and colonial trade routes" and "the historiographical and methodological problems with writing a more species or horse-centric history." There was an earlier influential paper about imperial use of horses by Swart, ""The World the Horses Made": A South African Case Study of Writing Animals into Social History" (International Review of Social History 55:2, 2010).

Last year I read Bellweather Histories: Animals, Humans, and US Environments in Crisis (edited by Susan Nance and Jennifer Marks, 2023), and there was an interesting chapter on horses by Marks: "Chicago's 1872 Equine Influenza Epizootic and the Evolution of Urban Transit Technology."

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Have you seen Jagjeet Lally's "Empires and Equines: The Horse in Art and Exchange in South Asia, ca. 1600-1850" (Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 35:1, 2015)? It covers Mughal state power and aristocratic prestige as tied to horses, but also refers to the later utility of horseback mobility in East India Company and British power consolidation.

I used to be in a Central Asia-specific program-type thing and there was a long list of academic writing, most if it not in English, about horses as essential for statecraft in Mongol, Persian, Mughal, Chinese, and Ottoman contexts. So I know that there's a huge amount of writing on the subject, but I did not retain much of it. Jagjeet Lally's bibliography here is helpful. This also brings to mind Alan Mikhail's work The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (2013) and Under Osman's Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (2017). Though horses aren't the main focus, they're essentially about "animal labor/capital."

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I think I've seen that you've interacted with my old posts about Sujit Sivasundaram, Rohan Deb Roy, and Jonathan Saha on "interspecies empire"? Saha's most recent stuff includes writing in:

Biocultural Empire: New Histories of Imperial Lifeworlds (2024); Colonial Dimensions of the Global Wildlife Trade (2024); "A Historiography of Great Animal Massacres" (2024); "whiteness, masculinity, and ambivalent British Justice"; imperial use of elephants and "animal agency, undead capital, and imperial science" (2017); Subverting Empire: Deviance and Disorder in the British Colonial World (2015); imperial use of cattle and other livestock in "animals and the politics of colonial sensitibilites" (2015). Sivasundaram covers a lot of that (animality, criminality, imperial imaginaries) but also oceanic thinking.

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Also thinking of:

The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, 2011)

And The Herds Shot Round the World: Native Breeds and the British Empire, 1800-1900 (Rebecca JH Woods, 2017). Though its not really about horses (mostly about sheep and cattle for dairy/meat).

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But I know there are little niches:

(1) British frontier policing in Australia ("mounted patrols" in campaigns against Aboriginal peoples and keeping them on rangeland labor sites). (2) British metropolitan and urban settings (police horses in industrializing London, patrolling rural periphery during enclosure law era). (3) The settlement of the Great Plains of the US (especially origins of Rangers, the Fence Wars, and policing West Texas). (4) The Spanish colonization of Mexico and especially the Rio Grande Valley (horses in maintaining state power on the northern/desert frontiers; Spanish/Mexican states and Comanche/Apache mobility in southern Great Plains). (5) Argentina's state-building in the Chaco. (6) And then all of that material about Mughal, Mongol, Ottoman horses.

(Also, most recently, I did that annoying silly satirical retelling of horse-drawn sleighs as progenitor of vehicle and pedestrian laws in industrializing Amsterdam, and it alludes to how horse-drawn carriages were important affordances to wealthy aristocrats which shaped industrial urban space in Europe; I don't know much about it, but I know there's a fair amount of lit about both horses-as-vehicles and mounted police in early nineteenth-century Europe.)

Though I'm not really familiar with most of that. In trying to formulate thoughts about "carceral archipelagoes" and "frontiers," I've previously seen titles about the utility of telegraphs, railyards, and police for US power consolidation. But when horses/cattle get involved, I've been scared/disturbed by just how much of that literature seems to be directly produced by "police department museums," "police science" journals, or former police-superintendents-turned-pseudo-historians in their retirement years who study their own noble profession as a novel curiosity.

But I imagine you know better than me if this is true. So please put me back in my place if I've got the wrong impression!

It's my impression that, more recently, the advent of critical animal studies, multispecies ethnography, and critical geography has meant there's a lot of new stuff to check out.

[hers-underwraps]

It’s world meteorological day!! 🌦️

Shout out to our favourite meteorologist!! An absolute pro at tracking weather and navigating it!

[loveasachoice]

Inspired by a comment by @komorybatz 🧍‍♂️

[magentasnail]

Creatures Stickers - Common Asks

I've been getting a bunch of asks about the creatures stickers and where can you use them so I think it's about time I organize it in one place to save both of us the struggle

Existing stickers: Autism/TBH creature reactions Autism/TBH creature emojis ADHD/BTW creature reactions/stickers Anxiety/IDK creature + Depression/wtf creature

(all designs are currently available on my Redbubble shop !)

Can I use the stickers for reactions/emojis? yeah of course! you can use them on whatever app you'd like. you can also make packs of them if you'd like (as long as they remain free of course)

Can I use any for a pfp? yes, just make sure to @ me in your bio if you can!

Can I use them for my YouTube/Twitch channels? because these are more brand focused and can be monetized, I'd rather you don't

Can I use them for a tattoo? go ahead! I'd love to see the results too if you feel comfortable sharing!

Can I edit the stickers (for example, to resemble a character)? no problem, I'd love to see the results!

Can I print them as stickers myself? if you can, I'd rather you get them from my Redbubble so I can get a few cents !

Thank you so much for the support !!!

[robotsafari]

vanitas my awesome bastard child.

[alienfailboy]

season 8 makes me SICK

[draconicdeityarts]

Your Phosbat Charlie makes me now think of a Plasm Wraith Olimar and I need more monster aus of everyone now 😭

ITS VERY FUNNY YOU SAY THAT I actually have some sketches of a plasm wraith Olimar! I haven’t shared all my creature/monster aus cause I feel like I’ve been doing an insane amount of them LOL but the concept of an Olimar wraith has sloooowly been evolving into its own thing in my own head :)

[branches-in-a-flood]

Working on Duolingo and making a grocery list, as a group.

[st4rsinthenight]

★I am feeling quite energetic or something. I need to burn that energy off by running away from a giant and music is blasting on my headphones. Well, their thunderous footsteps could just be enough to drown out most of the music— but in theory, it sounds quite fun. And adrenaline inducing. And terrifying.★

[trashcantasch]

I have orange pens I like again :]