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citrineghost · 4 years ago

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100 Humans on Netflix

So there’s this neat Netflix Original show called 100 Humans. I immediately got interested in it because they take this group of various humans from different backgrounds, age groups, and so on, and they use them to conduct experiments to get answers to interesting questions.

So, right away I had concerns about this show because

If you know anything about data and statistical research, you know 100 people is a very small sample size and does not breed accurate results

However, I’m very curious and wanted to see what they came up with anyway. I watched all 8 episodes and, honestly, I enjoyed watching it for the most part. However, I have a LOT of issues with the show and how it was conducted and I want to list them out here.

If you’re interested in watching 100 Humans or have already watched it, please consider the following before taking any of the show’s data as fact.

100 people is a very small sample size. This is because, the more people you have, the more weight each increment in your percentages has. With 100 people, each person represents 1 entire percent. That’s a lot. That means even a few people giving incorrect answers, having off-days, or giving ridiculous results (such as you can see in the spiders georg meme), can sway the entire result of an experiment into unreasonable territory. This is why most scientific studies attempt to get data from many hundreds or even thousands of people. The bigger the sample size, the more accurate it is to the entirety of the world.

I’ll put the rest under the cut because it gets long

The 3 hosts, who I’ll refer to as the scientists (regardless of if they actually are, because I’m not sure and don’t feel like googling it) repeatedly make false statements. For example, in one episode, they told their humans to “raise your hand if you believe you’re less bigoted than the average person here,” to which 94 people raised their hands. One of the scientists then made the statement, “If that were true, it would mean only 6% of Americans are bigoted.” This statement is entirely false. The only way to actually determine a true meaning to that would be to determine at what percentage of bigotry you are considered a real bigot. You also must consider that believing you’re more bigoted than other people in a small group, who you already have an impression of, is not necessarily indicative of how you feel you measure up to America as a whole. Anyway, I could go on and on. The only way to accurately summarize the results of that question would be to say that 44% of the humans had an inflated sense of righteousness or something of the sort.

The 3 scientists, both in person and in narration, for the sake of entertainment (if that’s what you call it) continually made “jokes” that poked fun at different groups, implied men are shit, etc. Maybe that’s fun for some people, but the kind of jokes they were making to amp up the hilarity of their host personas was genuinely just uncomfortable and made me feel even more like they couldn’t be trusted to go about unbiased research.

The scientists continually drew conclusions where the results should have been labeled inconclusive

The scientists made blanket statements about certain groups based on 1 element of research that would not stand up to further evaluation. For example, when explaining that ~93% (i think it was about that number) of Americans have access to clean, drinkable, tap water and yet some large number of single use bottled waters are sold every year, one scientist said it was because people believe bottled water is safer and cleaner than tap water. I am going to do my next survey on this to see if my own perception is flawed, but I simply don’t believe that all of the people who buy bottled water do so because they think its cleaner than “tap” (as if all tap is the same.) I know there have been studies about people drinking unlabeled bottled water and tap water and not being able to tell the difference, but this neglects to account for the fact that different houses pipes can affect the taste of the tap water running through them, people can use disposable bottles of water for certain activities or events too far away from tap for people to refill their reusable bottles easily, and so so so much more. Anyway, it just really bothers me to see “scientists” making these kinds of generalizations when they’re the ones whose results we’re supposed to trust.

The show was incredibly cisnormative. There was an entire episode based on comparing men and women that made me extremely uncomfortable with its division of people by men and women. There was the implication that all men have penises and all women have vaginas. There were implications that reproduction is a necessity in picking a partner. It was just a shitshow. There was one comment by one subject who asked, when being told to separate by men and women, “What if I’m transgender?” Obviously I can’t say for sure, but this person didn’t appear to be transgender and the sort of tone it was asked in makes me think it was literally something they asked him to say in order to get inclusivity points with the viewers and to “prove” that they’re not transphobic by having them divide up, because they said to go to the side you identify with. This whole thing is a) harmful to nb folks who would not have had a side to go to and b) completely negating the fact that the way we were socialized can have an effect on our social responses. That means that for a social experiment, a trans person could sway the results of one side due to their upbringing and the pressures society put on them before/if they don’t pass. This is all assuming they had any trans people there, which is potentially debatable. I also take issue with this entire fucking episode because just, the amount of toxicity in proving one sex is better than the others is really gross and actually counterproductive to everything feminist and progressive. Not to mention, them implying that they’re trying to support trans people only to reinforce the notion that a trans man is inherently lesser for being a man when even prior to hatching, he would have also been force fed propaganda and societal pressure implying he’s less than for supposedly being a woman is really gross and makes me angry. The point of what I’m saying is that it’s actually not woke to hate men as a way of bringing women up because there are men who are minorities who are being hurt by the rise of aggression being directed at them for their gender. Anyway enough about that.

The tests drew false conclusions because they did not account for how minorities adapt to a world that’s not made for them. This is specifically directed at the episode where subjects were asked to match up 6 people into couples. There were 3 women and 3 men and the humans were asked to put them together into pairs. they could ask the people 1 question each but then had to match them up with only that information. The truth is, the people brought in were 3 real life couples already, which the humans didn’t know until after they matched them. The couples were m/f, m/m, and f/f. I think that’s great, but the problem is, literally none of the humans asked any of them their sexuality as their question and most people didn’t even consider they could match up same-sex people. One girl even thought that they had told her to make m/f pairings, even though they didn’t. The scientists concluded from the experiment that the humans have a societal bias toward people, and assume they’re all straight, even if they, themselves, are not straight. I personally believe that was the wrong conclusion to draw. You could see some of the queer humans were shocked that they hadn’t considered some of the pairings might be gay. But, I don’t think it’s because they believe everyone they meet is straight, I believe this says more about what they expected from the scientists themselves. If someone is in a minority and they go to do something organized, like a set of experiments, they are going to be judging the quality and setup of the experiments by those designing them. I feel that the lack of consideration that the couples might be gay has a lot more to do with queer people having adapted to a world where queers are rarely involved or included in equal volume to the cishets. The queer humans taking part in the experiment and failing to guess gay couples shows that they have adapted to a world where they are excluded rather than a belief that every random person that they meet is straight. My point is further supported by an expert they had on the show who explained that, statistically, it was entirely likely that they were all straight and that even queers will account for being minorities by going with what’s most likely. The truth is, we are surrounded by a whole lot of straight people. It makes sense to assume only 6 people are all straight and that, if any aren’t, they may be bi.

The scientists frequently broke an already small sample size into even smaller groups. The group was very frequently broken in half, in thirds, or into sets of 10 people. These sample sizes tell us almost nothing actually conclusive.

The experiments/tests frequently were affected by peoples abilities, unrelated to what was being tested. For example, one test that was broken down into 6 people and 6 control people competing at jenga was meant to show whether needing to pee helps or hurts your focus. first of all, sample sizes of 6 are a fucking joke. Second, this completely ignores these 6 people’s actual ability to play Jenga. If someone sucks at jenga with or without needing to pee, them losing Jenga when they need to pee says exactly fuck all about whether needing to pee affected their focus. They should have tested people’s Jenga skills beforehand, counted the amount of moves they made before the tower fell, and then did it again after hours of not peeing to compare their results. This test made no logical sense at all.

The scientists ignored the social effect of subjects knowing each other as well as duration of events during their last experiment. They were testing to see if people with last names near the end of the alphabet get a shittier deal because they go last in everything where things are done by name order. They tested this by doing a fake awards ceremony where they gave out some 30 awards to people, gauging the applause to see whether the people at the end got less hype and therefore felt worse about themselves than those in the beginning who got the fresh enthusiasm of the audience. the results showed that the applause remained fairly consistent throughout the awards. The issues with this test are numerous, but here are the three I take most issue with. 1) the people here all got to know each other very well over the week it took to make the show. People who know each other and have become friends are much more likely to cheer for each other with enthusiasm, regardless of how long it’s been. On the other hand, polite applause from a crowd at, say, a graduation, where you are applauding people you don’t know, WILL start off more raucous and grow very quiet except for individual families near the end. 2) the duration of the test was a half hour, which is not very long at all and doesn’t say much to test the limits of enthusiasm. Try testing the audience at a graduation with a couple hundred graduates that also involves the time it takes to walk all the way up to a stage a hundred feet away, accept a diploma, and then wait for the next person. These kinds of events take hours and nobody keeps up their enthusiasm that long unless they’re rooting for someone in particular. 3) this study tested only one of many many ways name order affects a person. Cheering and applause is only one factor. It does not take into account people having their resumes looked at in alphabetical order and therefore people at the beginning of the alphabet being picked before anyone ever looks at a W name’s resume. It doesn’t take into account a small child’s show and tell day being at the very end of the school year, after 6 other people have brought in the same thing they planned to. No one cares about their really cool trinket because they’ve seen a bunch like it already. This test doesn’t take into account how many end-of-the-alphabet people just get straight up told, “we ran out of time. maybe next time,” when next time doesn’t really exist. I feel genuinely bad for the girl who suggested this experiment because the scientists straight up said something akin to, “lmao her theory was bs ig /shrug” even though it was their own shitty research abilities that led to their results.

They did one experiment intending to see how many people have what it takes to be a “hero.” The request for this test was made by someone curious about the effect of adrenaline and if it really works how some people say. The scientists thought it an adequate method to determine an answer by testing their reflexes with a weird crying baby sound and then dropping a doll from above while they were distracted with answering questions. The scientists looked up before the doll dropped to indicate a direction of attention. While this does give some answers about peoples intuition, reflexes, and ability to use context clues, its entirely an unusual situation, makes no sense in reality, fails to take adrenaline into consideration literally at all, and has a lot more to do with chance. The person dropping the doll literally couldn’t even drop it in the same place from person to person. Some got it dropped into their lap and others almost out of arm’s reach. This, like a few of the other mentioned experiments, was during the last episode, which felt lazy and thrown together last minute, with very little scientific basis to any of the results. The last episode was weak and disappointing overall.

One of the big issues I have with this show is actually their repeated use of the same group. They said at the end that they had done over 40 tests. Part of doing studies is getting varied samples of people in order to get more widespread results. Using the same 100 or less people (already a tiny sample) repeatedly is a terrible research method. You’re no longer studying humans at large. You’re studying these specific humans. You can’t take the same group with the same set of inadequacies, the same set of skills, and the same set of biases and then study them extensively and in many different ways like this. Your results are inherently skewed toward these specific people and their abilities. I expected them to at least get a new group each episode - every 5 or so studies - but no. They keep the same group all week, which makes the entire season. This is inexcusable in research imo.

The next issue is contestant familiarity. The humans all getting to know each other is great, socially, but it also destroys the legitimacy of many of the studies that involve working together or comparing yourselves and your beliefs

Many tests had issues with subject dependency. One study, meant to compare age groups and their ability to work together to complete the task of putting together a piece of ready to assemble furniture had each group with members they relied on entirely. A few people built the furniture while one person sat across the room, looking at instructions with their back to the others. They had to relay the instructions through a walkie talkie to another contestant and that other contestant had to relay it to the people they’re watching build the chair. You cannot study a group’s ability to build something with instructions by the ability of one single person to communicate. You’re testing that individual and the rest of them on two completely different capabilities. One person fails at being able to communicate and everyone else becomes unable to build the furniture. Even if everyone else in the group is more effective than all the other groups at building ready to assemble furniture, they might end up falling in last because of their shitty communicator who is literally not able to convey simple instructions. (yes, this actually happened in the test)

One test judged the subjects at their speed of getting ready, to see if men or women are faster at getting ready. While most elements of this test were just fine, the part I took issue with was that they did this test without regard to social convention. They told the subjects they were going on a field trip and to get ready by a certain time. Then, they gave them many things to get distracted by, like refreshments to pack with them, a menu to preorder lunch from, and so on. The part that upsets me about this test is that they ignored social convention entirely, to the point that subjects were judged based on their conventional actions and expectations more than their actual speed at getting ready. The buses promptly shut their doors and left at the time they were supposed to but there was no final call to get on the buses. In general, when a group is to be taken somewhere by bus, there will be an announcement to load up and leave. You could clearly see many of the subjects were ready to go and were just standing around talking while they waited for fellow subjects to finish getting ready. I have no doubt that, if given a final call, most of them would have loaded up within a couple minutes. However, they were relying on the social convention of announcing departure and were therefore, left behind entirely (for a nonexistent field trip). These people who were left behind were counted as being late and not making the time cutoff. If one were to look at the social element of this situation, if everyone there believed there would be a warning before departure, the fact that 24 to 14 women to men were loaded onto the buses at departure doesn’t necessarily indicate the women were faster to get ready. It seems to me that it’s more likely to indicate anxiety at being late and a belief that they need not impede on anything lest they be reprimanded or have social consequences for taking too long - something women are frequently bullied for. There’s also the chance that many who boarded without final call are more introverted or antisocial. Plus, we can’t forget to include the people who have anxiety about seating. If someone is overweight, has joint pain, or has social anxiety, they will be more likely to board early to get a seat they feel comfortable in. If they had counted up all of the people socializing and waiting on the sidewalks nearby, they may have found that there were more men who were ready to board up at a moment’s notice. I’m not saying I think men are faster to get ready, I’m just saying that we can’t know based on who boarded without a final call. If people believe they will have a last minute chance to board, a large number of them will take the last few minutes to socialize with their new friends until they’re told they have to board. Therefore, this test cannot be considered conclusive without counting and including the people who were ready and not boarded as a third subset.

Honestly, I could go on and on about how sensationalist and unscientific this show is, but I just don’t have 6 more hours to contribute to digging up every single flaw with it. There’s A Lot.

My point is, if you feel like watching this show, which I don’t necessarily discourage inherently, I just beg you to go into it with a critical eye. Enjoy the fun of it and the social aspects, but please don’t rely on the information provided and please don’t spread it as fact, because it’s not.

It’s entertainment, not science.

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intjmd · 5 years ago

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Types of INTP

As many of you may have noticed, INTPs come in different flavors. Some of my closest friends are INTPs, and I have noticed some differences between them that I have not spotted in other types (ENFPs seem more homogeneous to me, I know a bunch and they have basically the same values, outlooks on life and even similar (or the same) interests). In consequence, I have decided to classify my beloved INTP to see if we can understand this better (or even arrive to the conclusion that some of my friends are mistyped). After thinking for a while, I have decided to keep it simple and describe only two different types or INTPs. I know it’s not enough, but I don’t have all the information that I would need to make an accurate description of other subtypes of INTPs (I think there might be at least another one). Feel free to comment, add or correct anything you may find here. Let’s go.

INTP 1 - AKA Chill INTP :

Looks/vibes:

This INTP looks like the most carefree person alive. Seriously. They are often cute and definitely have their style. Why do they say that INTP have a horrible fashion sense, then? Well, it’s just that their style is not the conventional style. They can be obsessed with certain parts of their bodies (e.g. perfect nails) and completely neglect others. Or they can aspire to look in a certain way (kawaii, really kawaii) that could look inappropriate in someone their age. They don’t care. They dress as they want, ignoring other wishes and advice. And sometimes it works out.

In general, they look rather sociable and happy. Try approaching them and you may be surprised. Sometimes, Chill looks even dreamy and you can tell they are fantasizing about having a dragon pet or whatever.

Habitat:

They dwell in their rooms and when they go out, they wish they were on their room. This type of INTP has watched more than 50 TV shows this last year, and probably reads a lot of fanfic. Their room is their sanctuary and is often filled with the interests of the owner, packed with action figures, tech, their clothes or maybe some painting that they did years ago and didn’t want to throw out.

Personality and interests:

Chill INTP is curious. He/She/That thing over there is an INTP after all. They remind me of an ENFP (Ne here) because the way they talk about about their passions and dreams. To put it bluntly: they can’t talk about a single topic for more than five minutes before changing the subject to something different. They do this with a bubbly/excited look and act like everything is possible for them (but then they are “too lazy” for achieving said dreams) (this has literally been said by two of them so it’s not an insult).

This Chill INTP loves series, fanfics, memes and the Internet as a concept. They have mastered every single shortcut of their computer and act like it’s part of their bodies.

Although Chill INTP looks approachable, they hate small talk and are very shy and private. Above all, they have trouble initiating conversations. If you befriend them, though, they will open up and flood you with an unending stream of ideas.

Academics: Chill is smarter than the average person, but also lazier than the average person. What’s worse, they know that they are smart and sometimes (only with their closest friends) can brag about it. While it’s true that they are bright and have no trouble understanding complex topics (actually the more abstract, the better), they lack motivation and often procrastinate. Sometimes, usually in hight school exams, they are able to successfully wing it and get good grades with almost zero effort. They will still whine a bit after getting an 8 in some subject that they didn’t even read, though. However, this “luck” (talent, actually, it’s raw intelligence plus a little bit of rhetorics and an innocent look) doesn’t last forever.

In the end, no matter how academically talented Chill may be, after missing a thousand classes and studying for maybe ten seconds, Chill fails. Hard. Usually for the first time in University. But it’s not that they can’t do it, it’s just that they don’t want to put in the effort right now. Maybe later.

Personal opinion:

This INTP is reaaaally fun to hang out with (I’m an INTJ, maybe we click because of that). They are witty, punny and can cheer you up with their innocence or random remarks. In addition, they get sarcasm (THANK YOU) and are not afraid of saying something regarded as “insensitive” if it’s true. This Chill INTP can be a bit stubborn, and will not change their behavior even if they admit it’s damaging them.

Overall, they are nice and don’t ask for much attention.

P.S: Chill INTP is NOT chill all the time. They can have breakdowns where all of their frustration gets out and they can cry in disappointment because the are not living up to their own standards. The agony disappears after a while, and they come back to their laptop and keep scrolling with a smile on their faces.

INTP 2 - AKA NERDY INTP:

Looks/vibes:

Nerdy INTP does not care at all about how they look. It’s a practical question, not a fashion contest, and they are going to pick anything as long as it covers the parts of their body that can’t be publicly shown. The plainer, the better, this way they can combine anything in their wardrobes.

Also, this INTP does not look “chill” at all. It’s more like a quiet fragile serenity that could explode anytime. There is a difference there. Chill INTP is very comfortable anywhere, even in the midst of a crowd, they just do their own thing and ignore everyone. Nerdy INTP is watching over you, analyzing your patterns and thinking, always thinking. This INTP is full of anxiety and is shyer than chill INTP. And when they are looking at a wall they are either thinking hard about the wall itself (colour, texture, design) or totally lost inside some theory inside their mind. The thing is that you know that they are questioning things.

Habitat:

Their rooms, but with zero clutter. It’s not minimalism, it’s a prison cell with the occasional coffee machine. They have a laptop, books and a bed, but that’s all. This INTP lives in his head, not on Earth. That’s why they don’t mind going outside, but they do this to think elsewhere, not to be elsewhere. Their heads are a mystery, I would describe them if I could.

Personality and interests:

Nerdy is not merely curious, Nerdy is utterly obsessed with knowledge and the truth. This means that they can research a single topic for like 40 hours nonstop and speak about it too, getting deeper and deeper and finding internal contradictions between the different sources until you (random listener) can no longer know anything. But they really understand it, and it just comes easy for them. They can keep their concentration forever and ever until their body stops working and they get into a random nap. Then they jump to the topic again.

Nerdy likes talking about different subjects. Unlike Chill, once Nerdy chooses ONE topic, he will remain in that area until nothing more can be said (which is approximately never) or until the other person changes the topic. Nerdy also strongly prefers one to one conversations, while Chill can manage up to four/five people at the same time.

In short, Nerdy seems much more focused and driven than Chill, but they are not natural achievers (#goalz #checklists) like an INTJ. Instead, they seek pure knowledge for the sake of it, to deepen their understanding of the world. They don’t need to change it, they just think that it’s interesting to dive into the most obscure and complex topics and master them. Their thirst is not for power but for wisdom.

Nerdy is as Internet addicted as Chill but it’s easier to find them looking for papers than watching Netflix on their own. They have three or four series that they love but they are usually complex (picture high fantasy) and the things they read are not the cliché YA novels in which Chill tends to indulge more.

Academics:

If Nerdy has chosen a career that sparks his interests, he will do great in his knowledge field. At least, Nerdy will spend hours and hours reading about this topic and becoming an expert. They will understand EVERYTHING and create a sort of “mind map” in their minds (just a map, then) with concepts and their connections. Nerdy is a bit lazy too, but their curiosity and intellect alone if directed towards the adequate career can take them to the top (or at least they are not whining at the bottom as sometimes Chill does).

Even if both Chill and Nerdy feel incompetent, Chill actually puts 3/10 effort and ends up getting a 5. Nerdy studies a lot (maybe not the most important things, they will probably get lost in the interesting bits) and try to do their best. Even if their results are great, they will feel as if they had failed because they are too perfectionistic.

To sum up, they work harder and get more results than Chill, but also set higher standards for themselves, which leads them to often overexert themselves and have higher levels of anxiety. This is why they do nOT look so chill.

Personal opinion:

For me, Nerdy feels like a caffeinated, stronger, sharper version of Chill. Maybe a little more hopeless and cynic, maybe more concerned with astrophysics than the newest One Piece episode. If Chill was fun, Nerdy is a hundred times funnier. However, Nerdy is also incapable of small talk (Chill knows how to, he just doesn’t want to do it and tries to avoid it) and has more trouble meeting new people. This INTP is only capable of speaking logically, and will destroy you incoherent arguments in seconds (yeah, every conversation feels like a debate). If you show any weakness, they will show no mercy. This side of them can bore or get tiresome for the more dictatorial (Nerdy will call out your bullshit, authority means nothing), harmony loving (debates are just debates, no feelings involved) (however, if you think that disagreeing equals hating each other, you are so fucked here) or happy-go-lucky (”Don’t think and be happy”) types.

If you are not ready to do some mental exercise, then leave alone Nerdy and go back to Instagram. If you go, try to chatter with Nerdy and then disregard all his ideas/hypothesis/arguments and it gets upset, you are a mere asshole. I actually love Nerdy INTP and think that his brain should be protected as World Heritage.

Things both (I think all INTP) subtypes have in common:

Curiosity about the most random things.

They hate small talk and initiating conversations.

They are so much fun for an INTJ.

They can be very insensitive when talking to other people (not a big bother for an NT)

All energy is redirected to their heads, their bodies are nOT fully operative.

They are always up for: COFFEEE, films or going to a new restaurant.

People love them and they don’t want to admit it.

They feel different but never complain about it (and never flaunt it as a virtue).

They have meltdowns and they saw them coming.

They love the Internet.

Kinky. Very specific kinks and you can’t kinkshame them. It’s better to join them.

They look innocent, like sweet cinnamon rolls but they are not.

P.S:

Maybe these two types are not well described and some of you think that Chill is just more well, relaxed Nerdy. Or that Nerdy has more willpower than Chill. I don’t know. I honestly think that both have different manifestations of the INTP functions and they are true INTP regardless of their differences. I also think that both are fun, smart and can become great friends.

P.S2:

@intp-the-thinker @intpmd this is for both of you, feel free to abort this unborn theory/hypothesis.

#intp #intptypes #intj

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keatsblue · 5 years ago

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Want a Piece of Me?! - a Kiribaku Baking AU fic, pre-slash.

***

It was something he’d picked up from his mother, before she’d gotten too sick.

She’d let him roll out flour-dusted dough into thinned sheets, let him taste a batter mix or two on the tip of her spoon. Whenever he was tasked with packing the buttercream, he’d unerringly return to her with a dollop of icing on the end of his nose. She’d let out a laugh like windchimes as she wiped his face off with a multi-stained washcloth, would murmur, warm against the skin of his cheek as she kissed it—did my little dragon get greedy for some sugar again? Well, here’s some sugar!

Kirishima was her little dragon, and she’d made sure his early life was filled with candied nights and warm bellies, gingerbread castles with marshmallow spires.

After she passed, he kept it up to feel close to her.

He was far from an expert baker, but he knew his way around an oven. His hands were large and not the most suited to handling delicate fondant, but he managed. His arms were strong, good for hefting bags of fresh ingredients.

Pineapple upside-down. Triple-tiered, Italian wedding crème. Chocolate lavender truffles, topping his signature cherry cordial mousse. Delicate macaroons and finicky meringues, mirror glazes so seamless he could see his reflection. Kirishima baked his way through the entire grieving process, inviting his closest friends over for tastings, and he won.

I’m okay, mom.

He wasn’t certain when it had really started, this online business. Mina had actually made the first post, snapped the first photo. He hadn’t expected it to get a single comment.

It got hundreds. Then thousands.

People contacted him, wanting to know how they could make their own cakes look like that.

Kirishima obliged, of course. How could he not? He was going to bake anyway. Might as well help a few other amateur chefs while he was at it!

Mina helped him film. “I discovered you, so I’m your manager for life,” she’d say, with a wink. “Don’t forget about me when you make it big and become a world-famous baker, somewhere.”

World-famous, my ass, he always thought, whenever she’d suggest such a thing. He still made far too many mistakes, for that.

It was okay, most of the time. Many of the people who followed his little baking ‘show’ were more than understanding, and incredibly supportive. When he read their kind comments, it gave him a warm, fluttery kind of feeling—almost like one of his mother’s secure hugs.

There were always those few, though.

He was just getting off the rickety bus that stopped near his neighborhood when he saw it. He almost missed the last step on his way down, stumbling for a few paces as the telltale sound of a screen door sliding shut behind him signaled the bus’s departure.

However, Kirishima wasn’t paying attention to any of that. Instead, his eyes were glued to the screen of his phone, where he’d just called up his latest baking stream.

xxxx: ur cakes suck a**

He frowned down at the comment, checking the timestamp. So, it was just posted a few minutes ago.

Huh.

It was obviously a troll, no doubt about it. They didn’t even have a profile picture to go with the nondescript name. And usually, usually, Kirishima would just let comments like that slide right off his shoulders.

But he’d had a bad day. And it was funny, how something so small could pierce his heart sometimes, a sharp spear to the mighty dragon’s soft underbelly.

It was safe to say, making his way up the rusted-out stairwell to his college-budget apartment took a little more energy than usual. He jammed his key into the lock with punishing force, twisted.

The door swung upon under his palms, and the familiar scent of his home wafted toward him, riding along the sudden gust of warm air escaping. Kirishima was careful to shut the door quickly, before too much of the heat was let out. Breathed in the fruit-sweet smell from his kitchen, so if nothing else, the familiarity of it could ease his scattered mind.

His phone chimed, before he could get too relaxed. When he checked the message ID, though, he couldn’t help but smile.

alienqueen: ughhhhh I hate this asshole already

alienqueen: obviously, he’s never tasted 1 of kiri’s cakes

ducktapes: kiri’s cakes <3 ahhhh my heart

sparksmcgee: dude same, want me 2 get sweet vengeance?

As soon as Kirishima’s smile had appeared, it vanished. He frantically opened the chat, his thumbs too large to type with the speed he needed.

There was no way to tell if Denki was serious. And his friend could do it, too—every day, Kirishima thanked his lucky stars he was on the excitable hacker’s good side.

kiricakes: no need!! it’s just a troll, guys

kiricakes: super manly of you to think of me, though

sparksmcgee: ur too nice, fams

sparkmcgee: guess the troll lives… for now

ducktapes: TROLL IN THE DUNGEON! THERE’S A-

alienqueen: aksnfkasnof

kiricakes: lolllllll

Before long, he was able to lose himself in mindless chatter. The antics of his friends never failed to bring his spirits up. He plugged his phone into one of the few outlets in his crummy apartment, embedded into the wall just over the kitchen counter, so he could continue the conversation even as his battery started to wane.

The hours grew long, though, and time was scarce mid-week for exhausted, assignment-laden college kids. It wasn’t a surprise when Denki soon begged off on some coding or another that he had to re-run, or when Sero and Mina similarly slipped away (they were researching something together for Comparative Physiology, it was all very much over Kirishima’s head). In the end, he was left with only his thoughts, and an empty kitchen.

He locked his phone, and the screen went dark. He could see his reflection in it, baggy eyes and downturned lips. A shock of red hair, which had once been midnight-black.

Like his mother’s.

Kirishima turned his head. In the low light, his appliances gleamed from their shelves. Almost mocking, in a way.

“My cakes don’t suck,” he said, to no one. His grin stretched wide, and he could tell from the burn of it that he was showing far too many of his sharpened teeth. “I’ll prove it to you.”

He set his phone to record, and made another cake. It was triple-tiered, funfetti, because that was the batter mix he had on-hand. He watched the batter rise within his dented iron pans with all the patience of a general considering the battlements—or perhaps, a dragon considering its’ hoard.

Any spare buttercream was packed into a dispensary, silken and primed to hold his creation together. He spliced it evenly between his cakes with a practiced ease, layer after layer.

Then, the whipped frosting. It was a simple recipe, one of the first he’d learned. He worked the whipping cream within a chilled bowl, adding scoop upon scoop of powdered sugar until the mixture obediently began to rise, forming soft peaks.

He made several batches, and then added some orange food coloring to each.

Fuck it. I’m in an orange sort of mood.

His second favorite color, after red.

All that remained was assembly.

… throughout the process, he talked.

Kirishima didn’t typically make a habit of speaking while he baked. He certainly didn’t speak while he recorded, but this—this was a special occasion. Soon, he found himself opening up in front of the camera like never before. He spoke of his mother, briefly. Of his love of baking, and how much he didn’t want to lose that little piece of her he had left.

It was all he had left.

The whipped frosting went on like a dream for him, a smooth and even ombre that when he finished, reminded Kirishima just a bit of an orange sunset. It was soothing, and right, and exactly what he needed.

He didn’t think much of posting the video, largely unedited, to his public account. His was still a small corner of the internet, after all—a solitary baking channel in a sea of thousands. Maybe even millions. How many people would even see it, really?

“Oh, and by the way, can you guys stop saying my cakes look like shit?”

It was only one cake.

With great effort, Kirishima stumbled his way to his bedroom. He hadn’t realized how tired he was, how much all that time in the kitchen had taken out of him.

Before his head even hit the pillow, he was out.

He dreamed of his mother’s sweets, and orange.

***

sparksmcgee: dude wake up

sparksmcgee: wake uppppp

sparksmcgee: KIRI

sparksmcgee: KIRI U GOTTA SEE THIS

sparksmcgee: KIRIIIII

sparksmcgee: fine, ignore me, Mr. Internet Sensation

sparksmcgee: wait I was joking, I was joking!

sparksmcgee: I’ll call u! I’ll do it!!

sparksmcgee: damn it kiri

sparksmcgee: just watch the fuckin’ video

sparksmcgee: https://twitter.com/Simplemachines_/status/1297739774795509761

***

Kirishima groaned, slamming a fist down on top of the source of that incessant beeping. It was too early in the morning for such ear-splitting noise.

But what was done couldn’t be undone. He was awake now, for better or worse.

He cracked one eye open, squinting against the bright blue light of his phone screen. Still bleary-eyed, he scrolled through all of Denki’s messages (seriously, man?) and pressed a thumb over the hyperlink his friend sent. It was probably just some dumb meme—

Wait. Wait.

That was his cake video from last night. And… that wasn’t all.

Some blond guy with an angry face took up the other half of the split screen, but he wasn’t doing anything. He seemed to be waiting for something.

Kirishima blinked. A… reaction video…?

He heard himself begin to speak, to layer the buttercream. Internally, he cringed.

Well. In his defense, he had been having one of those days—

He almost dropped his phone when the blond guy yelled at the top of his lungs.

“WHO WAS MEAN TO YOU?!”

Huh? Was this guy speaking… in Kirishima’s defense?

“WHO SAID YOUR CAKES LOOK LIKE SHIT?! POINT ‘EM OUT!”

Slathering on his nice, ombre whipped frosting, now. The blond guy (who was kinda cute, actually, even with his angry face) continued to watch and listen with rapt attention, occasionally letting out another unholy screech.

The video progressed to the part where Kirishima had begun describing his day, and really, he could’ve kicked himself. It’d just been a math test. He’d been excited at the time, because he’d gotten his grade back and hadn’t completely failed it, but now, he wondered. Who would want to listen to such inane, boring—

“YES! I’M SO FUCKING PROUD OF YOU, SHITTY HAIR!”

Shitty hair? Inadvertently, he felt the hand that wasn’t currently occupied supporting his phone drift up toward his hairline. He knew he applied a lot of gel, spiked it up on purpose. Surely it didn’t look that bad.

But even with that last comment, the guy had said a lot of nice things. And how manly, to post such a wholesome reaction video, where all the world could see?

His phone beeped again as a message banner flashed across the top of the screen. He opened it with a flick of his finger.

It seemed this time, Denki had messaged in the group chat. He didn’t have long to wonder whether his other friends had seen the video, either, messages were fired at rapid speed.

sparksmcgee: did you see it?!?? I found the guy! Your dream man!

sparksmcgee: his name is **drumroll**

kiricakes: denki, no

ducktapes: denki, YES

sparksmcgee: BAKUGOU KATSUKI, HE’S FROM JAPAN

alienqueen: Kiri go get your mans!!

sparksmcgee: if you want I can also get his credit card

kiricakes: DENKI NO

Bakugou Katsuki. Huh.

As his friends continued to bicker amongst themselves, Kirishima stretched out his limbs. He let out a soft sigh when his shoulders popped, already considering what he would bake himself for breakfast.

Maybe he’d have a slice of orange funfetti. And perhaps as he did, his mind would drift to an angry fan.

One he hoped to meet, someday.

#bnha #mha #kiribaku #baking au #bnha fanfiction #oneshot

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smarterincomesystem · 5 years ago

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10 Legit Ways To Make Money And Passive Income Online – How To Make Money Online

youtube

Did you know that you can actually make money online? Yes, that’s right, and all you need is Computer or phone with Internet access. So in this video, I’m going to show you 10 sites where you can actually get started Some side cash or if you are really serious, some good money! This is not amazing! On some of these sites you can actually make up to $ 100 a day or so More, the best part is, you don’t do that. You have to quit your job 9-5, you can do it Money, work at your spare time.

On the Internet, there are two distinct ways to make money. The first method is active income. With active income, such as normal 9-5 jobs. You only pay for the work you do. If you don’t work, you don’t make money, as simple as that. The second way is through passive income. This is his preferred method because, with active income, all you have to do is put it to work once, Theoretical money must continue to roll in, without having to do anything more Other than that, maybe reinforcing what you have done, or in some cases what others have done. Let’s go to the video. 1. upworks.com Upworks is a freelance website. With upworks you are making income. Companies and individuals publish services on upworks They want to outsource articles like writing articles, editing videos, developing an app, For coding, there are tons of jobs and outsourcing services in upworks … The beauty of all this is her low entry barrier, you just have to be good at something. If there is something you are good at maybe graphic design or coding or about Any skill, head over to the upworks and start making some money.

Here’s a tip if you’re considering working on upworks, you have a solid profile that looks like Hassan. This will greatly increase the likelihood of ever receiving job offers, from prospective Client. Showcase your best or showcase a specific experience that can and will help you stand out. 2. YouTube. Not many people know this, but you can Actually earn money with YouTube. If you’re thinking of logging into YouTube to earn money, make sure you understand The thing clearly. Thanks to the new rules, if you plan to start an entirely new channel from the start, You must first reach the YouTube Minimum Monetization Minimum. That is, you will need 4000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers in the last 12 months. Once you get there, you can make money, how much can you make on YouTube? Be honest as much as you want! As long as you continue to download good content that people are willing to watch your golden, and The longest video for the more money you can expect to make …

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You can make up to $ 20 or $ 30 an hour, by working on some different tasks. This is probably legitimate from making money, and they pay. This is an active income though. The second way is to publish the Amazon Kindle. Convert your ideas into an e-book and earn money Today. Every time you buy an e-book from Amazon, Amazon and the publisher earn money, and you can very. The thing with publishing the Kindle is … You first need a book to sell it. You can either write this book yourself or you can hire someone to write it for you. You don’t have to be a founding author, or find a publishing company to do this. You can do this from the comfort of your own home and start earning some downside Revenues.

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Amazon will pay you 60 days after purchase and you can choose to pay through Amazon gift cards, bank transfer to the bank account – despite this only currently Available in the USA but if you live abroad America you can pay by check or you It can be transfer money to your amazon account and start buying stuff with it. 4. clickbank. Clickbank is a marketplace for product creators Affiliates will make money online buying selling their courses or services to the world. Clickbank only sells digital products, but the beauty about Clickbank is that the commission Pay much higher than that of amazon. Some affiliates pay you up to 75%, to sell their services, while others pay As low as 5%, so keep this in mind.

But nevertheless, you can really make some really good money on clickbank, hundreds or even Thousands of dollars. Simply head over to Clickbank, choose something to sell and start making money. 5. flippa.com flippa is the number one marketplace to buy And sell companies online. It attracts a huge audience, and it offers great tools for increasing visibility An auction site is very similar to eBay those buying and selling digital assets, such as Such as websites, apps, domains, store stores, and Amazon FBA accounts. If you are good at creating apps or even websites … you can actually sell them online and make some Capital. Or better yet, if you have some money lying around and you’re interested in buying either Websites, applications or e-commerce stores … make money already, you can do it with flippa. What happens is that you place a bid very similar to eBay and if your bid is higher then Congratulations on purchasing your own online business. You can also make money by selling online business.

So this is flippa for you. 6. Stock shutter. Basically a stock shutter is a platform where You can buy or sell digital media. Like photos, music, and videos. Created mainly by freelancers and external actors, even if you might be particularly good at photography Take great photos and videos. Or really good at making sick beats, you can even monetize your talent on shutter arrows. The way you make money with stocks shutter every time you buy some pictures is one of your photos, You get a commission, usually a couple of cents to a few dollars, if you’re lucky. The trick in making a lot of money with stock shutter is to keep loading high High quality pictures. 7. Rover. Do you like pets? The dog in particular? If so, then Land Rover is best to check. Rover is dog seat service, but this is currently only available in the United States and Canada. So if you live in either of these two countries then you can register as a dog sitter, and Get paid for babysitting dogs. You can make between $ 80 – $ 100 a night, just by watching someone’s dog! You can literally make hundreds of dollars a week just by babysitting someone.

Now how about that for a deal? 8. Takelessons.com Taking Lessons is a website where you can teach Any skill. Everyone has a skill, he can teach it, be it, teach someone Language, how to cook, how to play instrument music, how to solve complex math equations … Any more than that. Anything you think someone else might not know, you can teach people on takelessons, And start making money. 9. Fiver. You probably heard of the mentioned fivver Often times, it’s simple and an easy site to start making money. But if not, it is basically an independent site where you can literally outsource Anything and I mean anything … as long as it is legal, for less than $ 5 There are many different ways to make money on fiverr, just to name a few. You can do animation, logo design, packaging design, web and mobile design, social media Design, Photoshop editing, Geometry and flooring planning, 3D models, Product design, T-shirt Promotion, SEO and much more. If there is anything to be outsourced, you can probably find it on fiver. Head over and check the fiverr guys, it’s a legit out of making money.

10. Drop shipping. With drop shipping, what you’re essentially He is selling someone else’s stuff for a small or big profit without having to deal with shipping. So you basically act like a mediator or an average guy. You can do this by opening the shopify store and then connecting it with oberlo. Oberlo is basically an app that integrates with shopify, and that is what a lot of people do Use a source of the things they want to sell in their store. The basic principle of drop shipping is, you are setting up a store or any channel where people are Things can be bought from you. Then once you buy something from you, you are paying the manufacturer, usually much less Then what you got, and then you have the manufacturer ship to the customer. All without seeing or touching the product. The best part of drop shipping is that you set your price for the product you want To sell, then take profits and pay the manufacturer the rest. So yes this drop shipping in short. If you are interested in drop shipping, there are tons of tutorial here on YouTube, that You will be shown a step-by-step guide to creating your store, finding products, ads, Find influencers, finally shipping and get paid.

It’s a bit complicated to start, especially at first, but you can make tons of Money … with drop shipping. With that, thank you for watching guys, please subscribe, and enable the notification I will see you in the next one.

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#email marketing tool #all-in-one video creator #earn money from home #legit way to make money from home

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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Ancient Toes and Soles of Fossilized Footprints Now 3-D Digitized for the Ages

https://sciencespies.com/nature/ancient-toes-and-soles-of-fossilized-footprints-now-3-d-digitized-for-the-ages/

Ancient Toes and Soles of Fossilized Footprints Now 3-D Digitized for the Ages

While walking in the shadow of their people’s sacred volcano, Maasai villagers in 2006 stumbled across a set of curious footprints. Clearly made by human feet, but set in stone, they appeared to be the enigmatic traces of some long-forgotten journey.

Now scientists have teased out some of story behind those ancient prints and the people who, with some help from the volcano, left them behind. It begins while they were walking through the same area as the Maasai—separated by a span of perhaps 10,000 years.

“It’s kind of amazing to walk alongside these footprints and say, ‘Wow, thousands of years ago somebody walked here. What were they doing? What were they looking for? Where were they going?’” says Briana Pobiner, a paleoanthropologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History with the Human Origins Program. Pobiner is one of the scientists who has studied the prints at Engare Sero in Tanzania during the 14 years since their initial discovery.

An in-depth footprint analysis has now produced an intriguing theory to explain what the walkers were doing on the day when impressions of their toes and soles were preserved on a mudflat. Pobiner and her colleagues, in a study recently published in Scientific Reports, suggest that a large collection of the tracks, moving in the same direction at the same pace, were made by a primarily female group that was foraging around what was then on or near a lakeshore. This practice of sexually-divided gathering behavior is still seen among living hunter-gather peoples, but no bone or tool would ever be able to reveal whether it was practiced by their predecessors so long ago.

Footprints, however, allow us to quite literally retrace their steps.

When Kevin Hatala, the lead author of the study, and his colleagues began working the site in 2009 they found 56 visible footprints that had been exposed by the forces of erosion over the centuries. But they soon realized that the bulk of the site remained hidden from view. Between 2009 and 2012 the researchers excavated what has turned out to be the largest array of modern human fossil footprints yet found in Africa, 408 definitively human prints in total. It’s most likely that the prints were made between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, but the study’s conservative dating range stretches from as early as 19,000 to as recently as 5,760 years ago.

A previous analysis, involving some of the same authors, determined that as these people walked, their feet squished into an ashy mudflat produced by an eruption of Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano, which even today is still active and looms over the site of the footprints.

“It’s kind of amazing,” says Briana Pobiner, “to walk alongside these footprints and say, ‘Wow, thousands of years ago somebody walked here. What were they doing? What were they looking for?”

(William Harcourt-Smith)

Deposits from the volcano were washed down into the mudflat. After the human group walked across and over the area, creating so many prints that scientists have nicknamed one heavily-trod area “the dance floor,” the ashy mud hardened in a matter of days or even hours. Then it was buried by a subsequent sediment flow which preserved it until the actions of erosion brought dozens of prints to light—and the excavations of the team unearthed hundreds more.

Fossil footprints capture behavior in a way that bones and stones cannot. The process of preservation happens over a short period of time. So while bones around a hearth don’t necessarily mean that their owners circled the fire at exactly the same time, fossilized footprints can reveal those kinds of immediate interactions.

“It’s a snapshot of life at a moment in time, the interaction of individuals, the interaction of humans with animals that’s preserved in no other way. So it’s a real boon to behavioral ecology.” says Matthew Bennett an expert on ancient footprints at Bournemouth University. Bennett, who wasn’t involved in the study, has visited the Engare Sero site.

Fossil footprints are analyzed by size and shape, by the orientation of the foot as it created the print, and by the distances between the prints which, combined with other aspects, can be used to estimate how fast the individual walked or ran. One of the ancient travelers who left a trackway heading in a different direction than the larger group appears to have been passing through the area in a hurry, running at better than six miles per hour.

As these people walked, their feet squished into an ashy mudflat produced by an eruption of Ol Doinyo Lengai volcano, which even today (above) is still active and looms over the site of the footprints.

(Cynthia Liutkus-Pierce)

The main group, heading to the southwest, moved at a more leisurely pace. The team’s footprint analysis suggests it most likely consisted of 14 adult females accompanied, intermittently at least, by two adult males and a juvenile male.

“I think it looks like it’s a good reflection of what we see in some modern hunter-gatherers with groups of women foraging together,” says Pobiner. Tanzania’s Hadza and Paraguay’s Aché peoples still tackle these tasks in a similar manner. “Oftentimes there is basically gender foraging, where women will forage together and men will forage together. There are sometimes mixed groups, but we often see this kind of sexual division of labor in terms of food gathering,” Pobiner says. “It doesn’t mean that these 14 women always foraged together,” she adds. “But at least on this one day or this one instance, this is what we see in this group.”

While no animals appear to have been traveling with the group, there are prints nearby of zebra and buffalo. The humans and the animals were apparently sharing a landscape that even today isn’t far from the southern shoreline of Lake Natron. Depending on exactly when the prints are made the water may have been much closer to the current site.

“We’re able to give a level of accessibility to everyone,” says Vince Rossi whose team (above on location) has made the 3D footprints available online, and the data from a selection of prints can even be downloaded to a 3D printer.

(Adam Metallo, Smithsonian Digitization Program Office)

“It’s possible that these were just people and animals kind of wandering along the lakeshore all looking for something to eat,” Pobiner says. Other sets of footprints, like those made in northwestern Kenya, capture just this sort of behavior among ancient hominins like Homo erectus.

“They did a very nice study on a very nice set of footprints. It’s well executed and they have come up with some really interesting conclusions,” Matthew Bennett says of the research, adding that it’s a welcome addition to a rapidly growing body of scientific literature on the subject of ancient trackways.

Fossilized footprints were once thought to be extremely rare, “freaks of geological preservation,” Bennett notes. An explosion of fossil footprint discoveries over the past decade suggests they aren’t so rare after all, but surprisingly common wherever our ancient relatives put one foot in front of the other, from Africa to New Mexico.

“If you think about it there’s something like 206 bones in the body, so maybe 206 chances that a body fossil will be preserved,” Bennett says. “But in an average modern lifetime you’ll make millions and millions of footprints, a colossal number. Most won’t be preserved, but we shouldn’t be surprised that they aren’t actually so rare in the geological record.”

A famous set of prints from nearby Laetoli, Tanzania dates to some 3.6 million years ago and was likely made by Australopithecus afarensis. At New Mexico’s White Sands National Monument, ancient footprints of human and beast may be evidence of an ancient sloth hunt.

Study co-author Vince Rossi, supervisor of the 3D program at the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office, aims to give these particular fossil footprints even wider distribution. His team created 3D images of the site that initially supported scientific research and analysis efforts. Today they are extending the footprints’ journey from a Tanzanian mudflat to the farthest corners of the globe.

“How many people can travel to this part of Tanzania to actually see these footprints? We’re able to give a level of accessibility to everyone,” he says. Rossi’s team has made the 3D footprints available online, and the data from a selection of prints can even be downloaded to a 3D printer so that users can replicate their favorite Engare Sero footprints.

Because 3D images capture the footprints as they appeared at a specific moment in time they’ve also become a valuable tool for preservation. The study employed two sets of images, Rossi’s 2010 array and a suite of 3D images taken by an Appalachian State University team in 2017. Comparing those images reveals visible degradation of the exposed prints during that relatively short time, and highlights the urgency of protecting them now that they’ve been stripped of the overlying layers that protected them for thousands of years.

Finding ways to preserve the footprints is a key prerequisite for uncovering more, which seems likely because the tracks heading northward lead directly under sediment layers that haven’t been excavated. Future finds would add to a paleoanthropological line of investigation that is delivering different kinds of results than traditional digs of tools or fossils.

“Footprints give us information about anatomy and group dynamics that you just can’t get from bones,” Pobiner says. “And I love the idea that there are different and creative ways for us to interpret behaviors of the past.”

#Nature

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danbensen · 5 years ago

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…or how tracking my life told me I was abusing coffee and social media

So there I was, my nails digging into my palms, my right molars pressed into each other. The air hissed in through my nose as my vision narrowed to a point. It was like hurtling down a roller-coaster. It was was terrifying, and I had no idea why it was happening.

I’d be doing nothing especially ominous – sitting down on the couch, carrying my younger daughter, thinking about bread – and suddenly I’d be gripped by this intense sensation of danger. BREAD! The image of a whole-grain loaf gained the mass of a church bell. DOOM! It rang. Toll the yeasty knell, oh brazen fate, for all men shall one day die. Die, oh, mortal flesh. Die and meet thy baker. (whoo! I am so sorry about that pun. Deep breaths now…)

Tiny drops of steam Ebb and flow before the light With each of my breaths.

It was ridiculous, but of course knowing that it was ridiculous didn’t help. I was like a cat, freaking out for no reason. Or was there no reason? Aren’t I supposed to listen to my body, now that I’m meditating and whatnot? But what exactly was my body supposed to be telling me? Avoid carbs? Run from the couch? Something about my daughter…? Yeah, If I searched hard enough for a reason to be terrified, I’d surely find one. Now there’s a reason for fear.

So I meditated more. I stopped using social media. I took my daughters to the park and watched the sky as it changed from brass to rose and the street lights blinked on. I talked to Pavlina. And I realized that over the course of the past month, I’d gone from drinking two cups of coffee a day to four.

The trees turn black and The sky, indescribable. Look up and it’s changed.

Scheduling is hard. My older daughter’s in first grade now, and school starts at 8:10 in the Center. The younger one’s in kindergarten, which starts at 8:30 in Levski G. At some point, it would be nice if Pavlina and I could go to work, which is back in the Center. If we want to have breakfast and drink our coffee in peace, we need to wake up at 6:15. Three hours later, I’m finally in the office and I’m tired. That scares me because I associate being tired with being sick. Fatigue=death.

I’m supposed to listen to my body, but my body is a stupid animal. It’s not going to say, “you’re drinking too much coffee.” It says “coffee reminds me of being happy!” and “not being productive scares me!” It says “I’m tired! I must have cancer again!” It’s up to me to keep track of what I’m doing, cut out the distractions, and give myself enough mental room to notice the patterns.

Right. So that’s why I’m not doing social media any more. Because part of the reason I was too distracted to notice I was drinking too much coffee was the last newsletter I wrote. I posted it on facebook, which made me want to check facebook for likes and comments. And once I was on facebook, why not see what other people are posting? Oh. Oh. That’s what they’re posting. Oh no.

I debated writing this explanation. Why not just stop using social media? Why talk about it on social media? But my litmus test for whether I should write something is “will this help people?” Maybe this is helpful: social media is distracting and depressing. It fills my head with noise. Maybe you have the same problem and this is the solution.

The sky at seven The color of hope that hurts And the crying swifts

I’ll continue to post my work on my website (including these newsletters) and mirror or link to those posts on Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook. Readers are welcome to like and comment, but I’ll only read those comments once a week (Friday seems like a good day). Comments on my website, PMs, and emails to me will get my attention earlier. I won’t read any content that isn’t sent personally to me or that I didn’t sign up for. Hopefully that means I’ll still get news from people I care about, but not about tragedies that I have no power to solve. That way, I can continue to function from hour to hour.

What do you think? Is this going to work? Can I stay connected without sacrificing my mental health? Let me know in the comments. Or even better, email me.

In other news, I had some good writing stuff happen this month. Interchange has hit its 2/3 mark and, more importantly, its rhythm. I’ve managed to block off a fairly reliable 90-minute chunk of time in the mornings, which I use to meditate and then “speedwrite,” which means writing without thinking about what I’m doing. I generally end up with a single element of a scene, such as the conversation the characters are having, how they feel, what’s going on in the environment, or what actions the characters are taking.

Then I usually have some time after lunch (and my second and final coffee), and I can layer those scene-pieces onto each other and smooth the edges. If I have more time, I do research, which usually involves shooting messages to generous experts. In this way, the inestimable and inspiring Thomas Duffy helped me tie a ribbon around the center of my book, in which a biologist’s subconscious belief that she owns the environment she’s studying leads her to destroy it. As the forest crumbles around her, she blames herself…then makes exactly the wrong decision about what to do next. Yeah! Fiction! Thomas, I’m going to send you roses or cacti or something.

Another new tradition I’ve instituted is spending my Friday mornings not working on Interchange. It’s a little release of pressure, a chance to play and remind myself that writing isn’t just another chore I have to do. The first week, it was a short story. That one turned out so well, I’m going to try to publish it. It’s called “The Sales Event” and it’s about smart phones and general relativity. Do you want to beta-reader it?

I got another couple of “no”s from publishers about The Sultan’s Enchanter, but one of them was that very gratifying “no” that comes at the head of a long list of things I could do to fix the story. Making those fixes will be educational, even if that particular publisher still passes. Wealthgiver is rather like The Sultan’s Enchanter, after all, and the lessons I learn from one will be important for the other. The world needs more books about amoral Balkan people!

Yeah, I’m still working on Wealthgiver’s neo-Thracian language. I even posted a little of it on Tumblr. But don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten my little goats!

Kapt kapēnon ainē kesa / byźai darsai ypo dēsâ. Ēbron, aiźi, byźâs kâ / skalmon, bleptē, bystâs kâ, As tae yper iatśikan / kapâ pe ta ve abbrinkan.

There were at one time / brave goats under heaven. A kid, a nanny, and a billy goat / clever, loyal, and tough, Who would dance up / a hill for to make themselves fat.

Dâ ispilsen opē rinkon strymē / parân ân, śân târâ dymâ. Iśē iserpa źēryntē / źymlē mērē urdēnē. Byźulâs ada pyrân źilmân / dâ bolvarâs pia rhobton saimân.

But a quick-flowing river blocked / the path with an evil guard. There coiled a beast / a great water-dragon. A goat will eat green grains / but a serpent will slurp blood

Peskēnon ērga ēbron do. / Pliskon ērga śân negō. Źymlē zē semân iglytsa. / “Kis ēs tu?” Neston iglâtsa. “Semâs manon ēm ēźo.” / “San ar ēsti? Abadam so!”

First comes the kid. / It splashes with its hooves. The dragon heard this. / “Who are you?” she roared. “This only am I.” / “Is it so? I will eat you up!”

Things are heating up! I’m still not entirely comfortable with the articles and deitics, but I do like that last line. And the orthography is shaping up nicely. I love googly things over letters.

Another potential conlanging project for that other hundred years I plan to live: Western Hellenism. What if the Greeks had conquered Iberia?

And finally, PROTECTOR! This is the comic project I’ve been working on for literally six years. Words by me and Simon Roy, inks by Atryom Trakhanov, colors by Jason Wordie, and lettering by Hassan Otsmane-Elhadu. What a crazy, fun, glorious process this collaboration was!

Protector is a post-apocalyptic scifi story about a slave who stumbles across “a demon of the Profligate Age,” a military cyborg who’s been in hibernation for the past thousand years. The post-human robots who are terraforming the Earth are not amused, and send in some sweaty future-vikings to put a stop to these shenanigans.

There will be five issues, and issue one comes out in January. If you’re interested, please order a copy, or better yet, tell your local comic or book store to order lots of copies! Give us some numbers that will convince Image to ask for a sequel

And finally, some books and stuff

Daring Greatly by Brené Brown – this book wasn’t as transformative for me as it could have been because I’ve read Brown before and I already agree with her. Shame is bad. Vulnerability is the cure. Bam. What I like about Brown is that she collects good data, lets it prove her wrong, and suggests how the lessons from the data can be usefully applied. It’s not just science, it’s engineering.

Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold – I think this was the third read. What happens when GM humans become obsolete? What happens when an engineer has a spiritual epiphany? It wasn’t quite as much fun as some of Bujold’s other science fiction, but it has a lot of heart.

Spooky Action at a Distance by George Musser – an excellent physics book, examining the concept of space, which lies at the center of the contradictions of relativity and quantum physics. If space didn’t exist, the universe would be chaos, but a lot of experiments only make sense if space _doesn’t_ exist. Great stuff, and it inspired that short story I’m so proud of.

Death by Water by Kerry Greenwood – a refreshing splash of chilly New Zealand sea spray. Phryne pursues a jewel thief and has a little bit of sex, but a lot of good food, drink, and dancing. There’s also a hakka.

Wicked Prey by John Sandford – it was actually a little boring. The police’s side of the story didn’t hold up as well as the criminals’. But this is a relatively early book in the series, which means Sandford is improving.

The Upright Go Pro – it’s a little device that you glue to your upper back so it will buzz at you when you slouch. Immediately after I put it on, I realized I have little tiny tyrannosaurus arms that don’t reach any table or counter-top. It ran out of batteries one day and man did my back hurt that night. So I guess it’s working.

Gravity by Against the Current and Brighter by Patent Pending – Good Interchange music.

Be Kind to Yourself by Andrew Peterson – It makes me feel better.

Song of Durin by Clamavi De Profundis – I haven’t gotten goosebumps from a song in a long time. It’s about dwarves.

The Twits by Roald Dahl – I read it to my older daughter and boy howdy did Roald Dahl know how to write for children. Everything seems utterly ridiculous but it all somehow satisfies. Like eating dirt cake.

Steven Universe – My younger daughter found me rewatching it on my phone and made me cast it on the big TV. Now it’s all “I wanna watch Steeben dabout a Giant Woman. I’m Pearl.” No, younger daughter, you are not Pearl. Pearl is my older daughter. My younger daughter is Amethyst. Nobody is more Amethyst than my younger daughter. (I’m Peridot)

#mystuff #newsletter #simon roy #thomas duffy #Artyom Trakhanov #writing #mental health #science fiction #thracian

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tysonrunningfox · 6 years ago

Text

Ripped: Part 14

Sorry this took forever, I was super blocked and had to go hike so much and then it just kind of all burst forth in the last couple days...but you’re all going to hate me...sorry (I’m not but...)

AO3

“That guy over there,” Heather appears over Hiccup’s shoulder at the Ripped Tavern bar, sliding a frothy glass of something his direction, “ordered an IPA and then upon delivery, told me he was really glad we had something that wasn’t hoppy. Do you want it?”

“What do you want Heather?” Hiccup doesn’t look at her or the glass, tipping the brim of his top hat forward to block the glare of the street light through the bar’s front window.

“I’m trying to offer you something free—“

“I’m good.” Hiccup is glad to be honest, after the last week of the largest tours he’s ever given. The seven o’clock is averaging over thirty, nine isn’t much slower at twenty-seven, and there was that landmark eleven o’clock with fifteen people hanging onto his every whisper, miraculously leaving more fulfilled from the truth instead of wild extrapolation.

It doesn’t hurt that sometimes Astrid leaves the curtains open and shouts down help, a glovebox flashlight pointing at the Al. I safe message in a blurry way that means he should buy her a laser pointer with the reassuring stack of cash in his pocket.

“How have things been?” Heather presses onward, elbows on the bar, her pale, stressed face appearing at the edge of his vision. He remembers that expression from the weeks after their Johann discovery, her expression pulled tight like keeping a secret and potentially losing status because of it was physically poisonous to her.

“Since you started expertly advising the police and I took even more of your business?” Hiccup snorts and takes the beer, trying to keep a straight face through a gulp of the bitter fizz, “pretty good, you?”

“I’m glad business is booming,” she manages half a wan smile and Hiccup finally turns to her, face hard.

“What do you want?” He gestures at the promotions board advertising a ‘six-victim’ value pack of sliders to-go to take on tours, “obviously being nice to me isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“I wasn’t being nice,” she hisses, purely tired now, worry creeping in at the edges, “I was trying to bribe you.”

“That won’t work either.” It’s not profiteering if he’s toning down the sensationalism. He repeats the sentiment like a mantra and turns in his stool to face her. “If you’re trying to ask a favor, admit it and say please.”

“We both know it’s not a favor for you to overanalyze something,” she rolls her eyes, fragile and more dangerous for it, and he can’t help but remember when that danger was fun. When it meant discovery instead of police involvement.

He doesn’t think she gained much from sharing secrets, but they aren’t close enough anymore for him to say it.

“It’s kind of my ground state of existence, but you know the saying, never give away your talents for free.” He takes another gulp of the skunky beer and waits.

It doesn’t take long.

“Did you read the note on the package that was shipped to Snotlout?” Her voice is quiet enough that he’d have to lean in to hear her clearly, but he doesn’t, shrugging a shoulder she can obviously tell his tense.

“Did you know that being deeply disturbed by someone opening a package to find a disembodied foot from a recent murder victim can actually affect your reading comprehension?”

“Hiccup—“

“No, really, I’m eagerly awaiting the results of the study, I’m hoping they can explain some other things. Like a bonus diagnostic evaluation of whatever’s going on up there—“

“Do you want to see it?”

It takes Hiccup a moment to compose his face.

He knows how he does feel, how he should feel, and what he should show and they all fight with facial muscles that haven’t quite learned not to trust her yet.

He’s spent hours on that note. He’s used to missing part of the story, but usually the lacking bits are a hundred plus years old, and not likely possessed by his ex-best friend, the supposed expert on them. He’s frustrated and close and part of him wants to ask Heather as much as she obviously wants to ask him.

If he hadn’t seen it or had the presence of mind to take a picture of it, he’d be near frothing at the mouth for a chance. She doesn’t even have to convince him of the Grimborn connection, it’s in the open now, not only on the police radar but contributing to the bearing of the investigation. Plus, his connection to the victims would—does—make him thrilled for a chance to exonerate himself.

But he’d have to keep that secret from her, to make her pry it out of him, even though if she succeeded he’d only look guiltier. As it stands, it’s best not to let her try.

“I think it looks better for my case if I haven’t, don’t you?” He sips the beer again, practicing his straight face around a mouthful he can’t quite taste through the soured friendship in the air. “Plus, you’re the police expert.”

“Come on, you can’t tell me you’re hung up on the expert thing, are you?” She laughs and it’s fake, the way she used to laugh at Snotlout’s stories he’s told a thousand times when she wanted him to move on. “It’s not like they could hire you, it’d look like nepotism.”

She avoids the conflict of interest when it suits her.

“Snotlout isn’t actually my domestic partner, you know that.”

Heather purses her lips and sighs, scratching her head and taking too long to tuck hair behind her ear. Classic Berserker pre-politeness behavior.

“Ok, I’m…stumped. Is there any way you could look at it with me.” She reads his unflinching face and gets even smaller, “for me.”

Hiccup purposefully slurps the beer as loud as he can and the woman sitting next to him shifts one bar stool down.

“Please,” Heather grits between her teeth and Hiccup stands up.

“I’ve actually got a nine o’clock tour to amass right now, and I’m pretty booked up for the next…forever ensuring that nothing impacts the way I perceive un-sensationalized truths,” he talks at her like she’s a stubborn tourist asking again and again about murders a century too recent to be ready for curiosity to be welcome amidst their tragedy. “But maybe after that sometime. Have Dagur put this on my tab,” he slides the half a beer back towards her.

“You don’t have a tab,” Heather sighs, miserably at the same time as Dagur calls out from the other end of the bar.

“Got it, Brother!”

Hiccup waves in thanks and turns away from the bar, adjusting his messenger bag over his shoulder. There’s a small group starting to mill around his usual table and he can’t help but note their glove-less hands and lament clammy fingers on his still un-laminated copy of the Al. I safe picture. He hasn’t had time to go back by the archives, what with trying to analyze the foot-note and three frankly exhausting tours a night.

When he first spots blonde out of the corner of his eye, he assumes it’s the fact that thinking about the archives and the picture naturally makes him think of Astrid, but a double take finds Ruffnut leaning on her elbows across the table. He only has a few minutes before gathering his next tour group, but he heads that way anyway, not so subtly hoping that Heather is watching.

Snotlout’s wrong, Heather was never anything more than his friend and research partner, but that doesn’t mean he can’t not so quietly announce that he can make more friends whenever he feels like it.

“Hey guys,” he slides into the chair between them at the table for four, folding his hands in front of him, “what’s up?”

They’re both absolutely silent for a moment until Ruffnut waves, eyebrows raised.

“Hi,” Astrid’s voice is uncharacteristically quiet, “I thought—I mean, don’t you have a tour?”

He checks the time, “in a couple minutes, I’ve got time to say hi though.”

Astrid’s smile is tight lipped and embarrassed, but earnest, and he frowns.

“Is everything ok?”

“Not really,” Ruffnut cuts in, leaning her pointy chin on her palm and narrowing dangerous eyes.

“Oh?” Hiccup’s hand itches to reach for Astrid’s knee under the table but he’s utterly unsure whether that’s allowed and he keeps his fingers folded tight together.

“My toilet’s leaking,” Ruffnut’s grin spreads slowly, “I heard if you fix it for me though, there’s a bonus ass show.”

Hiccup’s face freezes, undoubtedly turning blue as his blood runs cold.

“You guys are talking about the other night,” he swallows, glancing wide-eyed at Astrid, whose blush is extending under her bangs. “And I interrupted.”

“It’s fine—“ Astrid puts her nervous hand on his and he feels stupid all over again.

He doesn’t know how to explain that she’s not something that happens to him often. How he doesn’t even want to hope because this all seems so impossible, in flux with so much awful and so outside his luck and circumstance that he doesn’t know what to do about it. And how he wants to do everything about it but not in the same shirt he had on when he was at the police station to explain his involvement with a murder victim’s severed foot.

“Yeah, it’s just that Astrid isn’t really used to rejection,” Ruffnut waves casually, “I mean look at her.”

Hiccup swallows hard, “I have.”

“It’s fine—” Astrid placates, glaring at Ruffnut, who’s still grinning like she just set off a firework she’s been looking forward to for months.

“No, it’s not—It wasn’t a rejection, I just smelled like police station and probably dead foot—”

“It was a rough day, I get it—”

“And I meant it when I said I’d be kicking myself, I have been, with both feet—”

“You really don’t have to,” she glares at Ruffnut, but it has little to no impact, “I’m sorry you had to witness me learning my lesson about telling Ruffnut anything at all, ever.”

“Don’t apologize—” Hiccup holds his hands up in surrender or to hide his bright red face. There’s no way it looks as cute as the flush across the bridge of Astrid’s nose. He’s definitely sweating under the hat and lamenting Berk’s Victorian Era Craftsmen’s obsession with wool.

“Like you’ll ever stop telling me things,” Ruffnut shakes her head, “who else can you go to for excellent advice?”

“Literally anyone else,” Astrid snaps, eyes darting back and forth between Hiccup and the person she until recently called her friend.

“Do you want to know the advice?” Ruffnut raises an eyebrow, evil grin widening.

“Ruffnut,” Astrid growls and there’s something cornered about it that piques Hiccup’s curiosity even through his deep and abiding embarrassment. “Do not—”

“I’m talking to Hiccup.” She rolls her eyes, “so do you want to hear the advice?”

“Excuse me,” someone taps on Hiccup’s shoulder and he whirls around to see a woman wearing a freshly bought, still wrinkled Grimborn shirt like the ones hanging from the rafters, “are you in charge of the walk-on nine o’clock Viggo Grimborn tour?”

“Yes, I’ll be over there in just a minute—”

“The website said the tour meets at nine o’clock and it’s three minutes after,” the woman taps her watch and Hiccup sighs.

“Just give me a minute—”

“You know I was so disappointed when I saw Berserker tours booked out two months, they have all the best reviews, but I found your tour rated almost as well on Trip Advisor and thought I’d take a shot,” she purses her lips like the kind of person who reads tabloids to judge the caliber of the journalism, “no one said anything about tardiness—”

“It’s fine, Hiccup,” Astrid pats his knee under the table, fingers light and fleeting but present enough to send a thrill up his spine, even through the embarrassment and irritation at the interruption.

“Are you giving The Real Viggo Grimborn tour?” An older teenage boy appears on Hiccup’s other side, pointing at Hiccup’s website on his phone. “It said on the website you’d be in ‘period wear’, is that what the hat is? Is the tour just about the old murders or are you going to talk about the new ones too?”

“Go,” Astrid sighs, “your audience awaits.”

“They can await another minute,” Hiccup glares at the first woman who starts reading aloud as she types an unflattering review.

“I know Berserker tours is talking about the new murders,” a second boy nudges his friend and looks at Heather admiringly, “we could still see if we could get on their tour tomorrow.”

“They’re booked out for months,” the first boy shoves his phone closer to Hiccup’s face, “this is you, right?”

“Fine!” Hiccup stands up and Astrid’s hand falling away from his leg leaving a cold spot even through the too thick material of his old coat, “the nine o’clock Grimborn tour is leaving now, if you want to be on it, come give me money on the way out the side door.”

“Review update pending tour conclusion,” the woman says imperiously as she puts her phone away and Hiccup allows himself one last glance at Astrid as he puts his tour guide persona into place.

She’s not looking at him and it serves as a timely reminder that even deserved rejection stings.

It’s Hiccup’s biggest tour group ever and he talks faster because of it, dodging questions about recent murder victims and trying to lure the group back in time with his most scandalous Grimborn era stories.

Sometimes reversing a bad review on Trip Advisor means staring someone his mother’s age in the face and explaining an example pay scale of a Victorian Berkian prostitute by sex act, and at some point, he became ok with that.

“And now, if you aren’t already glad for The Real Grimborn Tour’s full dark, nine o’clock tour option that is not offered by Berserker tours,” he whispers reverently in front of the wall outside of Astrid’s apartment, “you will be now, as I have the only picture of a message accepted by experts to have been written by the one and only Viggo Grimborn, on this very well.”

“Are you talking about the ‘All Safe’ message?” A man in the back asks too loud and Hiccup waits a beat for Astrid to announce herself and correct him.

She doesn’t.

Hiccup knows she’s probably still out with Ruffnut, likely discussing one of the most spastically regrettable moments of his life, but her pulled shut curtains still tug crooked at his chest, like a possibility falling off of a ledge in slow motion.

“Wasn’t that erased by rain?” Another man asks, thankfully on topic, and Hiccup digs through his bag for the picture.

“Not before a lucky photographer with the Berk Enquirer got a shot of it,” he hands it to the front row, who mostly pass it on without looking, whispering to each other about future murders in excited voices Hiccup pretends not to hear, “it was recently found by a friend who was generous enough to make me a copy of it. I’ll let you look at it on the way to site two, if you’ll follow me…”

Her windows are closed for the eleven o’clock too. They usually are, but Hiccup reads more into it than he should, pausing a little too long and explaining the layout of the building a hundred years ago to a crowd more scared of shadows flickering in real time than ghosts.

Hiccup used to come home from tours energized, ready to do his own research or explore the city without a following, but the last week has been beyond draining. Almost desk job level, he’d guess, and he deflates as soon as he makes it through the front door, tossing his hat at its hook and missing.

He could leave it on the floor. It’s not like there’s anything inherently damaging to a hat about being on the floor and bending over to pick it up sounds like a lot of work.

The pull chain of the lamp startles him and he jumps at the light flashing on to reveal Snotlout, shirtless in his dad’s chair, features thrown into ominous shadow by the angled light.

“Fuck,” Hiccup claps his hand over his heart, “I get that you’re saving power by leaving the overhead light off, but the dramatic lamp pull is a little over the top, don’t you think?”

“I talked to Ruffnut,” Snotlout says calmly, a few shades off of his cop voice, and Hiccup frowns as he hangs up his jacket.

“Oh yeah? How’s that going?” He doesn’t mention that he also talked to Ruffnut, as he’s had a long enough day as is, even without being reminded that he didn’t get a chance to hear her advice.

“Can you tell me about the events of last Saturday?” Snotlout leans forward, elbows on his knees, and Hiccup recognizes his interrogation stance number three from the time he had Hiccup asses which out of five interrogation stances was the most intimidating.

Three won.

“You mean the time you had a foot mailed to you?” Hiccup bites his tongue against adding the whole part about his suspicions that some crazy is trying to frame Snotlout. It’s like the note, the less they know, the safer they are. “What part do you need a refresher on?”

“The part where after you borrowed money from me, you went and bought curtains, which you then installed at Astrid’s apartment,” Snotlout smacks his hands on his knees in a less threatening rendition of Detective Eretson’s display of strength. Although maybe the lack of threat can be attributed to his Batman pajama pants. “Where my sources tell me that you made out with her and she invited you to her bedroom, but you declined the offer. Does any of that sound familiar to you?”

Hiccup judges the distance to his bedroom door. Usually, he can make it before Snotlout tackles him, but the abrupt restarting of tours along with avoiding his usual shortcuts has left his back creaky and vulnerable. A tackle isn’t worth risking.

“By your source, you mean Ruffnut?”

“I’m asking the questions here, Hiccup,” Snotlout points at the couch, “why don’t you have a seat?”

“Have you been working on your Eretson impression?” Hiccup perches on the edge of the couch, avoiding eye contact. “It’s not bad—”

“First of all, he’s been working on his me impression, and it’s awful. Second, what the fuck are you doing trying to mess it up with Astrid on purpose?”

“I’m not,” Hiccup shakes his head, “that’s—”

“You know you’ve hung out with some real duds, right? There was the girl you met at the homeless shelter who kept on arguing with me about police brutality at like seven in the morning. There was Heather, there was that month you kept bringing home girls from tours until—”

“Let’s not talk about that right now,” Hiccup runs his hand through his hair and swears he can smell the anxiety pouring off of him, “and stop with the Heather thing. And Olivia worked at a homeless shelter, she saw a different side of the force than you do—”

“No, you aren’t derailing this conversation. You know I got Raymond fired for that shit last year, and Astrid is really fucking hot. Like I don’t know why she’s talking to you hot. Plus she’s a fucking nerd, but I can still talk to her, and she’s Ruffnut’s friend. You aren’t just messing this up for yourself, you’re messing it up for both of us.” Snotlout points a stern finger at him, “so before you fuck it up entirely, tell me honestly what the hell was going through your head when you decided not to sleep with her.”

“Well,” Hiccup tugs at his collar, staring down at his shoes, “I’m sure you’ll understand this, we woke up a little after four that day and I was at her house around eleven, so if I’d gone to sleep then it would have been equivalent to someone with a daytime schedule going to sleep at around four or five. And given I was on the cusp of restarting tours, that would have really messed with my sleep schedule—ouch!”

Snotlout’s phone bounces off of Hiccup’s forehead and lands on the floor.

“Cut the shit, Haddock.”

“I can’t remember my thought process,” Hiccup glares, rubbing his head, “not since some officer brutally knocked it out of me—”

“You had a date with her, which means you obviously like her and how could you not because I swear dude, the hottest nerd I’ve ever—”

“Yes, she’s really hot, I get it,” he stands up and starts pacing, hands folded behind his back where it pangs with every step, “I know, I rejected the hot—but it’s more than that, she’s so—she’s determined and adorable and smart—so fucking smart, I can’t slip anything by her and—”

“You’re practically puking heart emojis right now,” Snotlout shakes his head, “And you know what? She sounded really fucking worried about you when Grisly came by her work and she went on your creepy private tour when she barely even knew you—”

“I know!” Hiccup yanks at his hair, “I know all of that, I don’t—”

“And then after the creepiest fucking day, she made out with you and invited you back to her bedroom and you said no,” Snotlout folds his hands over his knee, poised to put the clues together in a neat package and deliver his final verdict, “which means that you chose to keep thinking about a murder victim’s feet instead of seeing Astrid naked.”

“I don’t think I’d summarize it quite like that,” Hiccup stares hard at Snotlout to avoid thinking of either in the same moment.

“Well, I would, because it leads pretty neatly to two possible solutions,” he numbers on his fingers, “one, you’re a creepier fucker than I ever imagined—”

“Hey!”

“Or two, you’re out of your league here and need my help. And if it’s two, and I hope it’s two because I hate apartment shopping—”

“You’ve never lived anywhere but your parents’ house or here—”

“Because I hate apartment shopping so much,” Snotlout rolls his eyes, “duh. Anyway, I think you should give me your phone so I can text her and fix this.”

“No,” Hiccup checks his pocket to make sure his phone is still there and that it hasn’t magically poofed into Snotlout’s pocket. “I know those odds.”

“Yes, you know that four out of the five times you let me text girls for you, you got laid.” Snotlout holds his hand out, “and she already wanted to bang you, so this one will be easy.”

“And the fifth time I got punched in the face,” Hiccup rubs his cheek at the memory, “I’m not letting you—it’s too important, ok? She’s too important. I already like her too much, that’s—it’s not just some girl I swiped right on or met at Gruff’s, it’s…she’s too important for police station grime and—”

“I’m sure she has a shower,” he scoffs.

“Yeah, I’m sure that’s the way to Astrid’s heart,” Hiccup gesticulates, “I should have just asked to take a shower to wash off the eau de dead guy foot—”

“Oh my god!” Snotlout jumps up, jabbing a finger too hard into Hiccup’s chest and refusing to remove it even when Hiccup smacks his hand. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what again?”

“That thing where one bad thing happens so no good things can happen ever,” he shouts, throwing his arms up, and Hiccup rubs his chest, checking for a permanent indent.

“I don’t do that.”

“You do, you so do.” Snotlout picks his phone up and starts typing something, “any normal person gets mailed a dead foot and they make a booty call to clear their mind. Not you, though, you turn down Astrid, the hottest girl who’s ever talked to you, in order to make your life all about creepy tours again—”

“You aren’t texting her, are you?” He tries to grab Snotlout’s phone but gets a shoulder to the chest for his effort.

“No, I’m not, not that it’s any of your business,” he puts his phone in his pocket and shoves Hiccup’s shoulder a little harder than is probably explicitly necessary, “stop it, ok? Talk to her, apologize for being a spaz, tell her all that mushy shit you just told me and invite her to sit on your f—”

“Gah!” Hiccup claps his hands over his ears and Snotlout pries them off again, smushing Hiccup’s cheeks so that he can’t talk.

“When I let go, you’re going to say ‘yes, Snotlout, thanks for the genius advice, I’ll do exactly that’, ok?”

Hiccup nods to get his face back and rubs his jaw when Snotlout lets go, “you know I can’t take a lecture seriously when you’re shirtless.”

“Too bad, my tan is setting,” he looks down at his chest, “now what were you going to say?”

He has gotten too far without being tackled to give up that streak now.

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Genius advice.”

“Advice,” Hiccup pats him on the head, narrowly dodging having his arm twisted behind his back as he races to his dad’s old office and locks the door behind him. Snotlout pounds on it a couple of times before giving up and the familiar sounds of setting up a video game drift through the thick wood.

00000

Hiccup never used to drink before work. It was a point of pride, a testament to taking tours and correct dispersal of Viggo Grimborn knowledge seriously.

Well, that and he couldn’t afford Ripped Tavern prices for a while when he first went out on his own, but that’s neither here nor there because it became a principle thing.

And like all principles, it had its crumbling point, which was apparently the day after Snotlout’s lecture when he woke up to fifteen questions about the copycat killer and one bland apology text from Astrid with a period at the end.

Snotlout suggested breakfast happy hour at Gruff’s, given that it’s his day off, and Hiccup was stunned enough at the invitation in the wake of his head-patting that he went along without much fuss. The bar is packed when they get there and Gruffnut makes sure to flip off Snotlout before disappearing into the back room.

“Remember how good the service used to be before he knew what your job was?” Hiccup starts to sit at a barstool but Snotlout grabs his elbow, pulling him over to a dirty table by the wall and swiping balled-up napkins onto the floor. “Why the table?”

“I want wings.”

“Last time you got wings I had to use the bathroom at the sandwich shop across the street because you wouldn’t leave the toilet,” Hiccup snorts, ignoring Snotlout’s glare.

“That was one time.”

“Well, it was twice because it happened over a period of like five hours but—”

Snotlout kicks him hard under the table at the same time as he waves at the door, “over here!”

“Who?” Hiccup’s question dies in his throat when he looks over his shoulder and sees Astrid, reluctant and stumbling after Ruffnut, who has an irrefutable grip on her arm. “You invited them?”

“I invited Ruffnut, who said she was already hanging out with Astrid today, so I said it’d just have to be your lucky day,” Snotlout scoots further into the booth to make room for Ruffnut to plop next to him. “We haven’t ordered yet, Gruff is taking forever.”

“Sounds like him,” Ruffnut scoffs.

Astrid hesitates a second before sitting down, but when she does she turns towards him halfway, her knee bumping his, “for the record, I was not in on this setup.”

“I couldn’t tell from the way you were enthusiastically kicking and screaming to get away from Ruffnut.” Hiccup tries to let himself smile, shoving Snotlout’s advice far to the back of his mind. They were doing fine, he was doing fine. She likes him.

Or liked. Maybe he messed that up.

No, not the time to think about that. He’s never been good at playing dumb but he’s getting enough practice lately that maybe he’s due for some forward strides.

“That’s why I made sure to verbally confirm,” she scoots a little closer when someone walking by jostles her shoulder and her leg is warm against his, “not in on the plan. I was personally waiting for frozen yogurt.”

“Shit, I meant to text you to reschedule that,” Hiccup scratches the back of his neck, “I’ve just—”

“Been busy,” she flushes slightly, “I could see that yesterday.”

Yesterday, at the Ripped Tavern, where she was telling Ruffnut all about how he rejected her. That yesterday. Of course.

“Tours are booming,” he laughs, gesturing in the vague direction of the second murder site and trying not to think of the fact he gets more and more nervous every time he approaches it. “But that shouldn’t get in the way of getting some vaguely sour and crappy excuse for ice cream with you.”

“Where the hell is Gruff?” Snotlout huffs.

“I’ll go look for him,” Ruffnut stands up, “he’s probably smoking out back or something else useless.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” Astrid offers but Snotlout stands up first.

“I’ve got it, you two just…talk,” he looks significantly at Hiccup like the exact opposite of an anxious father chaperoning prom before following Ruffnut towards the back door.

“Subtle,” Hiccup grumbles, wishing he had something to do with his hands as Astrid fidgets, biting her lip in the growing awkward silence.

“I’ve been thinking,” she says in a low voice, a cautious voice, and Hiccup nods, waiting for the bomb to drop. “That note you showed me, there’s something—”

“Wait, you mean…” He leans in a little closer, dropping his voice, “you’re talking about the um…murder foot note, right?”

“The ‘all right’ at the beginning, I think it’s about D—the second victim,” she tries to stay neutral, but her voice wavers and Hiccup sets an arm over her shoulders, comfortable like it’s more than just the start of a habit, “he was missing his left leg, right? Like you?”

She brings his foot up casually, curious but not in the way that makes him cringe and he nods slowly.

“Yeah, that’s why I could give him my old one.”

“That’s why it’s misspelled, or it’s not misspelled, it’s a description. Which makes me wonder if a hint about the next victim is in the message,” she’s not excited at the prospect, it’s quieter than that, like she knows she’s brilliant and is hoping he’ll keep up with her. “What do you think?”

“I think that I can’t believe you want to talk about that morbid note with me.” He doesn’t have anything smarter to say as his hand curls easily around her upper arm.

“Well, I don’t know who else I’d talk about it with,” she backhands him on the stomach, obviously meaning to be gentle but thudding hard anyway, “plus, I told you, I like talking about…this stuff with you.”

She avoids Grimborn because it isn’t, it’s modern and ongoing and in the way of all the ways he wants to appreciate her right now.

“You’re…impossible,” he shakes his head, exhaling carefully like too much breeze could blur the lines of her improbable perfection.

“Impossible,” she doesn’t quite ask and her expression falls, her back going rigid against his arm. “You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“No, no, I—the good kind of impossible,” he nods, sincere, “I’m just not used to anyone taking an interest in this kind of thing, I guess, especially not after I was such a spaz the other night.”

“You didn’t really give me a choice not to take an interest,” she softens slightly, “you’re pretty convincing when you put your mind to it.”

“Convincing, huh?” He laughs, “Snotlout’s word for it is usually creepy. Or obsessive or annoying, depends on the day.”

“Those too,” she teases, elbow against his side, “any luck?”

“Hmm?” He doesn’t realize he’s leaning closer until his nose is almost against her cheek and she’s clearly talking to Snotlout and Ruffnut, who are standing at the edge of the table.

“No sign of him,” Ruffnut shrugs, “you guys want to go somewhere else?”

“With you two?” Astrid raises an eyebrow and Hiccup still struggles to fathom the idea that she might want to be alone with him. Again. Even if it’s to look at the note more, that’s…amazing.

No, impossible. He used the right word to begin with.

“Sure,” Snotlout points at the door, “let’s leave though, if I’m here any longer I’m going to have to start telling people that taking bottles over the bar is stealing, and I don’t want to help Gruff out like that.”

“How long do you have before your tour?” Astrid asks as she climbs out of the booth and Hiccup’s heart drops when he checks the time.

“An hour.”

“That’s enough time for frozen yogurt,” her nose wrinkles when she squints at the too bright street light when she follows Ruffnut outside and down the sidewalk. “And we could talk…” The note is implied and Hiccup shrugs too hard, nodding at the same time and enthusiastically risking the muscles in his neck because of it.

“Yeah, sure, that’s—cool.”

“Looks like you guys are planning something mushy,” Snotlout says pointedly, reminding Hiccup of his excellent advice at absolutely the wrong time. “We’ll just go back to the apartment.”

Ruffnut seems to agree to that, grinning and whispering something Hiccup doesn’t try to hear into Snotlout’s ear. He laughs and the sound echoes, the density of the alleys carrying it between old bricks like a secret, low tech game of telephone that turns happy sounds to groans that haunt empty corners.

“There’s a shortcut up ahead,” Hiccup gestures at the sign-less gate just ahead, remembering her moonlit suspicious face when she decided to trust him for the first time. “You might recognize it.”

“Recognize what?” Ruffnut turns back to tell Astrid something and pauses, staring down the alley, her mouth slowly falling open.

“What is it?” Astrid asks, looking the same direction with a squint that gives way to wide eyes as she grabs Hiccup’s arm, grip tight like she’s holding herself up on him.

It takes Hiccup a second to recognize what he sees. A second more than it should, given that the sight should be triply familiar by now, not counting the photographs etched in his memory.

Behind the condo, right where Catherine Whittaker’s body was found on a cold morning in eighteen eighty-three, there’s a mostly shadowed shape. It’s a sprawling, nebulous shape, parts of it struggling to escape its gravitational field, strewn across the alley floor like satellite debris from a hundred failed launches.

At the edge of it, the circle of the streetlight catches a handful of blonde dreadlocks, stained with red.

“No!” Ruffnut wails, tears flash flooding her cheeks as she launches herself at the gate. “No! No, no, no!”

“Shit,” Snotlout catches her, barely, struggling once again to keep his grip through her flailing, this time sobbing instead of yelling. “Another fucking—who’s calling it in?”

“I’ve got it,” Astrid says in a small voice, muttering under her breath as she dials three digits. “It has to be Gruffnut, it has to be Gruffnut.”

#ripped #hiccstrid #modern au #httyd fic #hiccstrid fic #serial killer tour guide au #tw blood #kind of #more gore without gore

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mysticandskepticmuses · 5 years ago

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june’s general mental state, from the time that she first begins having visions / dreams / hallucinations about six months prior to the actual moment of possession by enchantress through the events of the movie and especially beyond is, as a whole, not good. breaking this into parts because it got longer than i expected // PRE-POSSESSION TO THE ACTUAL MOMENT OF POSSESSION.

TW: all kinds of things involving emotional and psychological distress including depression, anxiety, self-isolation, self-harm, missing time, misdiagnosis, suicidal thoughts, more.

initially, june begins experiencing dreams / nightmares about the ruins / temples / civilization that she has spent the last six+ years of her life studying and exploring and at first, she’s willing to mark it up as just her imagination and subconscious finally just kicking into extreme overdrives when she starts dreaming about the places not as ruins but as an active civilization with people milling about, the places not destroyed but being built or already built / new / whole – it starts to get a little extreme when things start turning more towards rituals and sacrifices and war and magic, and when she starts seeing more and more of this woman that looks like her but doesn’t look like her / is her / isn’t her. she starts seeing things, parts of these dreams, in her waking life like hallucinations, flickers out of the corner of her eye, things moving in the shadows, voices that aren’t real, people talking to her / bowing down to ‘her’ etc. / seeing this woman in the room / in the shadows / standing next to her, touching her face or shoulder, whispering in her ear, in her head so on and so forth.

she has trouble sleeping, has trouble focusing, she forgets appointments, responsibilities, she forgets to eat or drink, she will go almost catatonic for minutes, hours on end, lost in this hazed day dream / hallucinations that she can’t shake. she goes to a mental health professional at the university, they diagnose her with anxiety and say she’s overworked, they suggest a brief sabbatical. she gets on meds. things just get worse. she continues therapy, she’s afraid she’s developing late onset schizophrenia. she begins to retreat from family and friends more and more. she begins losing chunks of time, and she’ll wake up to find her rooms / townhouse / study in a tizzy, that she’s made notes and marks on maps and research papers and photographs and things from the dig sites / ruins that she doesn’t remember making.

she struggles still to maintain some facade of normalcy, but what she ends up doing is just isolating a lot; she’ll tell people from work that she has stuff at home or with friends, she’ll tell friend she has stuff at work, she outright lies and tells family she’s traveling overseas / off to a dig to avoid visits and phone calls and things because she doesn’t know what’s happening, doesn’t want them to worry, doesn’t want them to see her falling apart / going crazy. somewhere around the midway point, maybe out of sheer desperation and self preservation, and because things continue to escalate and she’s becoming more and more caught up in these ‘visions’, the nightmares becoming more vivid and compelling, as she falls more and more under the sway of enchantress’ lure, her mentality shifts from the ‘i’m going crazy’ to the ‘this is real and i have to find a way to stop it’.

she becomes convinced that she’s being haunted or that she’s been possessed and she switched to a manic / overdrive research mode which - only means she’s sleeping and eating less than before, she’s driving all over the country, she’s digging into museum archives and church records and talking to professors of religious and different religious leaders / teachers, without a lot of tangible leeway, and with a lot of them voicing the modern day line of, it’s not a demon, it’s not possession, ‘your friend’ needs to seek psychiatric care etc. eventually, the call of enchantress becomes so insistent and so all powerful that she comes to the realization and understanding / belief that if she does not find enchantress, if she does not find this woman / goddess / entity / other part of herself by a certain point in time, she’s going to literally die.

when she finally comes to and accepts this realization, everything seems to sort of fall into place, make sense, settle into this ‘oh this is what it’s all been for’ kind of mindset. she’s calm, resolved, maybe a little on the frantic side out of continued self preservation, and she still has nightmares, night terrors, every night, but she has reached a point of acceptance, and she spend the last couple of weeks pre-possession pooling resources, calling in favors, finalizing research, etc. to make the trek back to the region that she’s spent the last few years unearthing ( to the point that she’s considered the renowned expert for this area, has had at least two different national geographic specials featuring her discoveries of this civilization, these ruins etc. ) and she hires two of the men from the local crews that she’s worked with over the last few years to help her find this particular cave system. even the night before she sets out on the last leg of the trip, she has night terrors, wakes up the people with her with her screams etc. and she just shrugs it off, because she’s just gotten so used to it being part of her day to day routine.

a few excerpts from the novelization:

june believed with absolute certainty that unless she successfully completed her mission by midnight the next day, her dreams were going to kill her.

june had already accepted the sad fact that the nightly dreams that forced her to this desert, and to this one particular mountain, wouldn’t end until she found whatever was waiting for her inside. yeah. whatever is waiting.

yet if she wanted to live – and she did – june had no choice but to do as she was told. told by a voice in a dream.

about the caves / mountain / the spirits within:

to this day our people continue to make offerings here, lest evil spirits rise again.

it is not that we do not want to go inside with you. we cannot. but we will take you there tomorrow, wait for your return, and pray the spirits keep you safe.

did you see the mountain gods? were they warning you to stay away? we did try to tell you.

about the dreams:

it always started the same way. ancient temples sprouted from jungle vines. elaborately carved marble columns inlaid with jade, silver, and gold rose more than a hundred yards tall and glistened in inti’s harsh sunlight. as always, she was surrounded by thousands of servants, bowing subserviently – which, embarrassingly, even in her dreams, she greatly enjoyed.

we’ve both been waiting our entire lives for this, haven’t we june? do you remember me?

yes, from my dreams.

i am more than a dream, june. i am your destiny – and you are mine.

let go of me!

stop fighting us, june. this has been your destiny since before you were born. it is so exciting. worlds are going to open up for both of us, and now that i have brought you here, you must let me in. i must be whole again.

june moone inhaled, and the two were one.

#HEADCANON.#HEADCANON. ( june moone. )#DO NOT REBLOG.

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csnews · 6 years ago

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Cambodia’s endangered river dolphins at highest population in 20 years

Stefan Lovgren - April 5, 2019

It’s 5:30 p.m., and several tourist boats linger in the middle of the Mekong River. A blood-orange sun casts a warm glow across the milky brown water, making it the ideal time to photograph the rare Irrawaddy river dolphins that congregate in deep, swirling pools. Not that these dolphins are particularly willing photo subjects, as the tourists on this day are finding out.

While marine dolphins often jump fully out of the water while swimming on a continuous path, the snub-nosed—and indisputably adorable—Irrawaddy dolphins, which grow to be up to eight feet long, will only partially breach the surface before diving back below. They may briefly pop up in one place only to reappear the next time in a random spot a few hundred feet away. The clicking of tourist cameras following each glimpse inevitably comes too late.

It’s an impressive disappearing act. Yet the most remarkable feat these dolphins have pulled off may be that they have not disappeared.

For decades, Cambodia’s Mekong River population of Irawaddy dolphins has verged on extinction. Once believed to have numbered in the thousands, the population began to plummet in the 1970s. During the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge and the years of war that followed, the dolphins were hunted for food. Indiscriminate net fishing, in which the dolphins sometimes end up as bycatch, took a further toll, and by the turn of the millennium, there were maybe fewer than 100 left.

Some conservation measures were finally implemented in the mid-2000s when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) partnered with the Cambodian government to support law enforcement efforts combating unsustainable fishing practices, which include using poisons and dynamite. Around this time, the Cambodian government also began promoting the dolphins as a flagship species and tourist attraction. Yet it takes time to crack down on illegal activity, and in 2015, a population census showed only 80 individuals remaining.

Then, last year, came some good news. A new survey found 92 dolphins in the Mekong River, the highest number in more than 20 years. Researchers identified nine newborn calves. This year, three more have already been found. Eng Chea San, the director general of the Cambodian Fisheries Administration, says there may be a dozen or more previously unidentified dolphins living in the river.

No one is celebrating just yet, though. The dolphin population remains well below what is considered safe to ensure its future survival. A wide array of threats persists, most notably the planned construction of a new 2,600-megawatt dam in Sambor, Cambodia, which would eat into core dolphin habitat. High mortality among young dolphins also continues to mystify scientists. (Read why Southeast Asia may be building too many dams too fast.)

But, says Mark Drew, a WWF program director in Cambodia, which has spearheaded the dolphin campaign, “We may have been able to bend the curve.” The WWF’s country director Teak Seng calls it “fabulous news,” but adds that there is no time for complacency. “As threats to their survival persist, we need to redouble our efforts to protect the dolphins both for their future and that of the river and communities that live alongside it,” he says.

Ecotourism Stars

Less famous than their ocean-dwelling cousins, river dolphins are among the most endangered creatures on Earth. In 2007, the Yangtze River dolphin, or bajji, became the first mammal to go extinct in more than 50 years and the first cetacean species ever driven to extinction by human activity, according to a Royal Society study.

The Irrawaddy dolphins, which, with their bulging foreheads resemble small beluga whales, live in brackish water near coasts, river mouths, and in estuaries in southern Asia. But three freshwater subpopulations have been established in three rivers, including the Mahakam River in Indonesia, the Ayeyarwady (or Irrawaddy) River in Myanmar, and the Mekong, which originates in the Tibetan highlands and runs through six Asian countries before emptying into the South China Sea. (Read about how “electro-fishing” in Myanmar puts river dolphins at risk.)

The Mekong population, believed to be the largest of the three, occurs here in northern Cambodia. It’s an area that, like most of Cambodia, has experienced intense fishing pressure for decades. The biggest problem for the dolphins has been entanglement in gill nets, causing them to drown.

In 2012, the Cambodian government declared the entire stretch of the river a protected zone, with fishing prohibited at all times in core dolphin habitat. Today, the rules are enforced by a contingent of 32 river guards, and officials say overall dolphin mortality has gone down significantly. “It is no doubt because of the conservation efforts that we are seeing more dolphins,” says Eam Sam Un, a biodiversity and monitoring manager for the WWF. (Read more: Can the Mekong river basin be saved?)

Greater involvement from local communities has also helped, conservationists say. Revered in both Cambodia and Laos, where many people believe the animals are reincarnations of their ancestors, the Irrawaddy dolphins have become a focus of Cambodia’s burgeoning ecotourism sector, which supports the conservation work.

The attention given to the dolphins also has positive spillover benefits for other wildlife in the ecologically troubled Mekong region, says Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada in Reno, who leads a USAID research project called Wonders of the Mekong. “The dolphin is a flagship species, it’s well known in the area, highly visible and attracts national and international conservation interest and funding,” he says. “The protection of dolphins helps to protect the habitat of other wildlife in the area, including endangered turtles and large-bodied fish.”

Dolphin Catalogue

Researchers still have much to learn about the behavior and ecology of the Irrawaddy dolphins, says Lindsay Porter, a dolphin expert who traveled to Cambodia and works with the Hong Kong-based Sea Mammal Research Unit connected to the UK’s University of St. Andrews.

“We don’t really know why the dolphins congregate in these pools, some of which can be 150 feet deep,” says Porter. “It could be because of the availability of food there or possibly because there is less disturbance.”

Researchers are trying to keep track of all individuals in the population, which is no easy task. The only way to differentiate between individuals is by their small dorsal fins, which have slightly different shapes. The fact that the animals only pop up for very short moments and don’t bring their bodies out of the water make them incredibly difficult to photograph for identification purposes.

“It means you’re going to spend a lot of hours on the water,” says Porter, who is involved in a project to update the detailed catalogue of individual dolphins that officials maintain. Porter and other researchers are also planning to study the dolphins’ sophisticated use of whistling as a means of communication.

Teak, the WWF director, is optimistic about the animals’ future. “The Irrawaddy dolphin is Cambodia’s living national treasures and key indicators of the health of the Mekong River,” he says. “Their recovery is a hopeful sign for the river and the millions of people who depend on it. After years of hard work, we finally have reason to believe that these iconic dolphins can be protected against extinction.”

#news #research #wild #dolphin #river dolphin #conservation #irrawaddy dolphin #cetacean

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simon-newman · 6 years ago

Text

Ants

So...

In my previous post about my new Praying Mantis Athena I mentioned that I’d love to try keeping a few other Arthropods.

Ants in particular.

I am going to try and do so this year.

There are total of six species in my country that I’d love to keep at some point and I’m going to outline my plans for them in here.

So, here they are:

1. Manica Rubida

Common name - Wścieklica Dorodna (Literally - Greater Fury Ant)

This is my favorite native ant and one I grew up familiar with as I had a nest of those in my backyard.

As a kid I used to feed them regularly as they were the biggest, baddest ants I knew.

Indeed - the workers can be up to 9mm long. Those ants are BIG.

They’re also hated by most people because they will defend their nest and do have a potent sting some compare to the wasp’s.

Personally - I’ve been stung by those ants before and while painful it’s far from being as painful as the wasp’s sting.

Anyway - the species is not recommended for beginners due to the sting and the fact that the queen requires some special care (she requires feeding during the founding stages).

Still. I am familiar with them and willing to try keeping them. They are my choice species and seeing as they have their nuptial flight in May I’ll try to get a hold of the queen or two.

I’ve also managed to confirm that those are still present in my area. So far I’ve discovered two sites with nests of this species.

Another interesting note - while those ants don’t have a proper soldier caste there ARE some noticeable differences between workers.

Some of them do have a sturdier build and larger mandibles. I’ll try to provide some pictures when I get the chance to compare a regular and large worker.

This coupled with the fact that there’s surprisingly little information available about this species makes me want to do some research myself.

Document their behavior, preserve different specimen to compare the large and small workers and finally...

When the colony grows to 200-300 workers I’ll try attaching them to a classic ant-farm unit and observe the architecture of their nest construction.

FYI - this is the only Manica species in Europe. There are four species in the US and one in Japan. I am curious if all of them have similar nest architecture.

However - comparing those would require me to cooperate with someone in those countries...

2. Camponotus Ligniperda

Common Name - Gmachówka Drzewotoczna (Literally - Mansion Treecarrier? Ant)

A carpenter ant.

The largest in my country.

The largest ant in general present in my country.

You’d think Manica Rubida above was big with their 9mm worker.

Camponotus workers are just as big in general.

That is... Regular ones.

This species produces actual soldier ants that can be up to 16mm long!

Those are huge. And the queen could be even bigger than that!

Those ants are just enormous and I’d love to keep them.

They’re also good for beginners and have their nuptial flight in late May and June - I’ll try to get one of those if I fail to get Manica Queen first.

The downside is that those ants take a long time to build their numbers.

They take their time to grow and the famous soldiers don’t appear earlier than on year 3 of the colony.

Still - I am a patient man. I can wait.

I also have an interesting setup in mind already.

You see - those ants like to travel far from their nest while foraging.

I’d just love to set up a tubing pass from one room to another so that I could feed the ants in another room (or the kitchen) and watch them bring the food back to the nest all the way from there.

3. Formica Cinerea

Common Name - Pierwomrówka Żwirowa (Literally - Gravel Feral Ant)

A common species and one I think is very, very common in the area I live in.

I am currently waiting for some equipment to arrive so I can proceed to properly identify the species but there’s AT LEAST 7 colonies of ants that look like this species in the area.

Unlike the above species this one has several similar species living in the same areas.

I still think it’s this one in particular as the ants I’ve observed are a bit grey and not black.

Why would I want an ant this common then?

Well. Because they’re crazy.

Those ants have two modes - stationary and TURBO.

Much like their sister species they’re just constantly running around as if it was an emergency.

So they’re very, very active ants and they don’t even sting!

They prefer to run away when disturbed.

They’re also of comparable size to Manica species - easier to prevent escapes.

This species is not a priority for me but I am 90% sure they are in the area and I WILL NEED THOSE if I ever am to keep the next species which is...

4. Formica Sanguinea

English Common Name - Blood-Red Ant

Polish Common Name - Zbójnica Krwista (Literally - Bloody Bandit Ant)

This is an interesting species of a slave-maker ant that requires some other Formica workers to start it’s own colony.

In nature a young queen would attempt to take over a young nest of another Formica species (Like Formica Cinerea above) and do so by killing their queen.

In captivity you just need to extract some pupae from the other ant colony and provide the queen with soon-to-be workers.

This already means the species is not suitable for beginners but this isn’t all.

The colony can easily reach several thousand in numbers. Possibly over 10,000 ants if they’re kept well.

They are aggressive and can spray Formic Acid so a good ventilation is required so they don’t poison themselves.

Luckily this is not such a problem as with Formica Rufa and the colony remains manageable even at the peak of it’s development (F.Rufa can reach few hundred thousand workers and requires A LOT of space so they can’t really be kept in captivity outside of a specialized insectarium or a zoo - not even mentioning they’re a protected species).

Still - I find the ant interesting and absolutely beautiful with their coloration.

They come in varying shapes and shades within the colony itself and can be given other formica pupae to include in their numbers (forming a kind of a mixed colony if one so desires).

I have no “dream setup” in mind for them as of yet and they are not the species I will try to find in the near future. On top of this I have no idea where to find them in my area (they should be present here but I never saw them or maybe mistook them for other forest ants).

5. Lasius Flavus

English Common Name - Yellow Meadow Ant

Polish Common Name - Podziemnica Zwyczajna (Literally - Common Underground Ant)

This is one of the smaller species in my country with the workers reaching the size of 2-4mm only.

The queen is much bigger than her daughters however.

This is both a species easy to handle and not considered “that interesting” due to staying mostly underground all the time.

In nature they don’t forage much and feed on insects and honeydew from root aphids - something which might be difficult to supplement.

I also don’t intend to keep them anytime soon due to the small size - I am quite afraid they’ll find a way out of the setup I make myself for them.

Pros: They don’t need much space as the short foraging range limits the distance you could setup the outworld.

They’re also beautiful with their yellow or even amber colors.

It’s also repeated everywhere that those ants are extremely common despite not being seen often.

Personally i have to admit to destroying a huge nest of those last year when I was rearranging the stones in my garden (I’ve uncovered an absurdly huge colony which moved out within few hours) - I know however those are definitely around.

Maybe one day a small compact setup for those, eh?

And by small I mean... Yes - their numbers can reach tens of thousands...

6. Dolichoderus Quadripunctatus

Common Name - Nadrzewnica czteroplamka (Literally - Four-dot Tree Ant)

This would be the apex of ant-keeping ability for me because this ant is often described as very difficult to keep and known to just die when slightly mishandled.

It’s a tree-dwelling species with characteristic dots on the gaster, it also has a beautiful shine.

TBH some people claim the ant is pretty much impossible to keep in captivity... Easily proven wrong as quick google search reveals people abroad manage to keep them long enough for the colony to grow into a thousand workers.

I blame my countrymen’s inability/unwillingness to do proper research using the Internet that’s not in our language (and I find Polish Internet to be lacking and misleading in a lot of cases).

Still - the species is definitely demanding and not suited for beginners.

They are very sensitive to temperature and humidity, live on trees and tend to simply dump their garbage down + they’re expert climbers that effortlessly pass fluon barriers which makes them the escape artists on top of all the other problems they cause.

Also - did I mention that their Queen requires the same treatment as Manica Rubida above (as in feeding during initial stages)? Because she totally does!

There’s also the detail about the queens being rarely found on the ground and looking almost identical to the workers... Yeah. So many difficulties with just one ant species.

My dream setup is thus a very farfetched project of a vertical formicarium that imitates the tree trunk the ants live in naturally.

The nest could be connected behind the artificial wall shaped in the likeness of a tree - with some small shelves to deposit food on.

I’d also make sure to include a temperature and humidity regulation to make sure they don’t die on me...

Now - I’d love to have the means to build something like this one day... One day...

Picture sources:

http://www.antwiki.org

https://en.wikipedia.org

https://pl.wikipedia.org

https://insektarium.net

https://ru.wikipedia.org/

#Ants #Manica Rubida #Camponotus Ligniperda #Formica Cinerea #Formica Sanguinea #Lasius Flavus #Dolichoderus Quadripunctatus #Yeah - I watched too much AntsCanada for my own good #Am I getting obsessive?

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silly-jellyghoty · 6 years ago

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As some of you following this mess of a blog may have noticed, I'm getting myself a puppy. Actualy, it's more of a late birthday present from my parents, but the point stays the same - soon, there's going to be a small furry creature by my side and since it will be my responsibility to raise and care about it, instead of surprising me with an actual fluff ball out of the blue, mom and dad let me chose the pup on my own.

Naturally, at some point it became a topic between my coleagues and me during work break yesterday, which is a reason why I am writing this long post right now (sorry but not sorry). I want to talk about this, because some of things about dog raising said people mentioned made me stare at them in disbelief while other made me hopelessly sad and angry. Me. A normal person. Someone who never studied dog psychology or kynology or training methods in any serious way other than reading a few books and stuff on net out of curiosity. I probably can't even imagine what an expert would think about all that nasty stuff I heard from them!

So let me tell you one thing - common people (the ones I talked to at least), even those who currently own a dog or owned one in past, have prety much ZERO IDEA and also ZERO WILL TO LEARN about how to chose the right dog and how to rise it properly! Their whole thinking process when it comes to dogs can be sumarised into - wild puppy appears. Puppy uses cute eyes. It's supereffective. Puppy is now theirs. They put it on a leash or chain. They feed it once a day and get angry when it barks and destroys things. The end.

Like... excuse me?!

In this essay I will...

But seriously. If you think about getting yourself a dog but have no idea how to go around it or you know of someone in such situation who needs a bit of an advice, in this post I will give you all a few tips about chosing process I learned both from getting our previous family dogs and by googling around for hours (not kidding, I've been excessively searching for informations ever since that birthday gift puppy talk I had with my parents).

I hope that this post may help you with chosing just the right dog for you. Or at least it may give you some ideas about which questions to ask yourself and what to look for and think about before you bring a new puppy to your home.

And no, I don't mean questions such as "how big of a dog do I want" or "what and how much does it eat" or "do I have time to take it for a walk everyday" or "should I get a female or male, neutered or not" etc. I believe that you already asked yourself those and you know your answers or have at least some vague idea about what your future dog should or shouldn't be like.

What you probably DIDN'T think to ask yourself or your family members (those guys I talked to before definitely didn't from what I understood) can be put into following categories:

- possible genetic defects and predispositions to hereditary deseases associated with specific dog breeds

- common or seasonal illnesses and health risks associated with dogs body type

- comfortable temperature range for the dog

- intelligence, trainability, temperament etc

- hair and skin care, shedding, grooming difficulty

- background and personal history of specific dog

So let's start with the least funny topic of those and that is INBORN DEFECTS AND HEREDITARY DESEASES

To understand why they are such an issue, especialy in relatively young or modern, recently fixed breeds which origins can be tracked down to just a small number of dogs, you have to realize that the natural form of a dog is a wolf. Size may differ and so can fur lenght, quality and colour, but the shape stays more or less the same - long slim legs with well defined fingers, long wrinkless nose, long slim neck, relatively small standing ears, solid muscular body fully covered in fur. Examples of dog breeds with similar traits include but are not limited to german or belgian shepperds, russian laika and all basic schpitz types of dogs starting with tiny pomeranian and ending with eskimo dog. The less of those traits you find in a dog the more prone to hereditary deseases the said dog breed is for one simple reason - selective breeding.

Older breeds have somewhat of an advantage. They developed over longer time from possibly hundreds maybe thousands of original dogs with different atributes. Mountain breeds turned to be thick coated because short haired dogs simply died during winter. People in areas with a lot of rodents and weasles preffered dogs of smaller sizes to hunt them down. Whether they were terrier, pinch or dachshund shaped, people didn't care as long as rats were gone.

As such, old breeds draw from richer starting genetic pool with less strict breeding oversight in early breed forming stage (this may have changed later and turn towards inbreeding tendencies but it's not a rule) which makes expression of hereditary deseases less likely (this still doesn't mean they have zero, mind you). For the same reason, dog mixes comming from different backgrounds such as half breeds or multiple breeds bastards are, generally speaking, healthier than pure breeds. More genes to draw from means lesser chance of two faulty alellas of same gene meeting in the same animal and expressing itself as a physical flaw or degeneration.

Compared to that, as an example, after a serie of genetic tests on modern pug population in UK, whole breed was tracked back to only aproximately 50 original ancestors. Basicaly, this means that if you compare two dogs whose closest common relative was their grangrangranmother 5 generations ago, chances are that, geneticaly speaking, they are still an equivalent to first cousins because the whole population is just so much inbred.

By this I don't mean to say that you shouldn't get a pug puppy and that pugs are the root of all evil just because of their past of inbreeding. What I'm saying is that before you bring your new pug home, you should do some research about breed's hereditary health issues and predispositions for such and ask yourself - are you prepared for an option that at some point your beloved pet may need an expensive eye surgery? Are you sure you have enough money to pay vet for threating dogs breathing difficulties, allergies and infections connected to its deformed snout (because let's speak openly, dog breeding, especialy when it comes to decorative and companion breeds, is all about active propagations of deformations for the sake of aesthetics, health issues be damned), possibly for a bigger part of their life? Are you prepared to take care of them in case they become partialy paralized due to hip joints deformation in older age?

If your answers are yes, then sure, get yourself a pug. Or bullterrier. Or cavalier king charles spaniel or any similarly inbred dog. If not, then chose a different breed with less potential for inborn defects. Keep in mind that just because the dog meets its breeds standards it doesn't mean those standards are 100% healthy to begin with. Even if the dog is fine right now, it doesn't have to stay that way forever. Use google. Do the math. And take your time chosing.

Next set of questions you should ask and find answers to is about health too, but this time they have less to do with genetics and more to do with BODY TYPE, SIZE AND SHAPE.

A quick overview:

Gigantic breeds tend to have problems with joints and bones, they also have shorter lifespans (french mastif, great dane and irish wolfhund live for only about 7 years. For a comparission, the oldest documented dog is lhasa apso. It lived fir 29 years).

Wrinkled breeds and breeds with excesive skin on head and around mouth or neck have higher risk of getting exema, yeast infection or mites in their skin folds. Combine it with long fur and you can count on antibiotics and/or antiseptic shampoo or powder prety much every rainy season. To add to this, shar-pei are also prone to skin overgrowth where folds may reach such a size that they obscure dogs sight and have to be removed by basicaly dog face lifting surgery. Accidental lip bites and mouth infections are also a thing when it comes to breeds with a lot of skin. Oh, and if such infection lasts for a long time or repeats often there's a high chance of dogs teeth getting infected and falling out as a result. So yeah.

Dogs with long or floppy ears can have a huge problems too. If combined with long fur of spaniel breeds for example, be prepared for seasonal ear infections and exema due to high temperature and humidity which has nowhere to go because of all that hair (we had american cockerspaniel and when she turned 8 she became fully deaf because of this despite my family treating her ears with cleaning drops and antibiotic solutions daily). And don't even get me started about grass seeds stuck in auditory canal. We had to see veterinarian to take those out at least once a week every summer. Also, there will be pieces of food stuck to hair and prepare for puddles of water around the bowl every time they drink too. Fun stuff.

Combine long ears with short legs of basset hounds for example and you get a lot of scratched and accidentaly pierced earlobes by their own claws when they run around and trip over them. It happens more often than you think.

Also about grass seeds and those hard thistle hooks, stabbed between fingers or paw pads, it's prety much impossible to spot them by eye on long haired breeds and you have to search for them by masaging between fingers and pads with your fingers daily during grass and thistle season. If you see a dog biting and licking it's paw, it's either stuck rock, long fur tangled into hard dirty fur ball that needs to be cut off from between its fingers or grass seed.

The list continues. Consider yourself warned.

Another set of questions you should ask is about TEMPERATURE RANGE in your area and is basicaly just about using your common sense.

No matter how charming you find them, for the sake of the dog's well being, please, don't get yourself an alaskan malamute if you live in Florida. And don't expect hungarian vizsla to survive winter in Rocky mountains sleeping outside in dog house either. Use that brain of yours a bit, I'm begging you! (One of my coworkers doesn't understand that dalmatian is NOT a dog suited for living outside whole year around, especialy in those -23°C night drops we get in february. Like excuse me? Poor creature doesn't have the undercoat for that kind of weather!)

INTELLIGENCE AND TEMPERAMENT

This part is easy. Ask yourself what kind of dog you want to own. Flegmatic feet warmer? The one you can take for a jog with you every morning? Agile fast learner for active fun such as freesbee or dog dancing? Childs nanny with a lot of patience around toddlers? A house guardian?

Some breeds are good for more than one thing, some are bred with specific personality in mind. For example - you can't turn border collie into your slow granma's lap warmer she can brush every day for hours, there's shih tzu for that, among other. But what you CAN do with a collie is to have it trained to pick said grandma's fallen walking stick, to bring her ringing phone or to bark if she forgets to turn off gas in kitchen. Remember - there's many many breeds with many different personalities and talents to chose from. Take your time picking.

Also, the saying that dog copies its owner is true. Even one of the calmest breeds - labrador retriever - can turn into a vicious biting beast if raised in disfunctional household. And with a patience and kind treatment, czechoslovakian wolfdogs can be as sweet as sugar.

However, one can't go against dogs predominant behavioral patterns, only along them. Jack russell terriers will be fast and easily excited whether you like it or not. Just because they are trained it doesn't mean they also magicaly lose their natural temperament. Remember that if you chose to get yourself a rat hunter you get yourself a rat speed, agility and seemingly endless energy. And since having a bored dog means having a destructive dog, imagine multiplying that destructive potencial with dogs activity and intelligence level. You don't like where this is going? Your dog, your problem. Chose the breed wisely.

If you still don't have any idea where to start, there's a cheat sheet in form of Stanley Coren's Dog intelligence chart. Naturally, higher on scale - easier to train. Check it out, guys. It may give you some interesting breed choices to consider.

Another category of questions you should answer to yourself before getting a dog is HAIR AND GROOMING related.

Dogs shed. Some all the time, some only once or twice per year. Some hair, despite being short and supposedly easy to care for while on dog in question, is a bitch to get out of clothes and carpets. Meanwhile other hair is so light and silky it floats around if you only as much as think about it, but if let untreatef there's a small dog worth of it everywhere all the time.

There are also exotic fur type options such as komondor or puli dog with natural dreadlocks or hairless xolo from Mexico.

Depending on your choice be prepared to spend anything from one week of seasonal blowout for akita inu or malamut to daily brush of lhasa apso. Either you make the time for grooming it yourself or you pay for it in dog saloon but one way or another, the hair is there and something has to be done about it. Again - your dog, your choice. Just be sure you know what you are getting into. Use that damned google or ask other dog owners about their grooming routine.

Another thing to keep in mind when it comes to fur is whether or not you can get your dog wet. Some breeds with thick fur may take too long to dry on their own which may result in pneumonia in cold weather or yeast infection, mites and exemas in hot temperatures. Don't bath those kinds of dogs unless it's realy necessary and be prepared to invest into dog rain coat and right grooming tools. Or, have them buzzed regularly.

But then again, WHY in the hell would you get yourself a long haired breed if you cut its beautiful mane to 5mm nonsense every month?! I've seen this done to ALL yorkshire and west white terriers in my town without exception. Like... what the hell? If you guys want a small terrier but you are too lazy to brush that long fur regularly then just get yourself border or jack russel terriers to begin with! I mean, the whole point of having a yorkie or westie is the trademark long fur goddamnit!

Oh and about cool fur (I almost forgot to mention this) there's rhodesian ridgeback whose back hair grows the other way! Check it out!

The last of important things you should consider before bringing a new dog home is its BACKGROUND AND PERSONAL HISTORY of the dog

This is especialy important if you are getting an adult dog or a dog from shelter.

Just as humans have their habits and past traumas, dogs have their own too. Aside from obvious problems connected to initial changes of dogs environment and/or lifestyle after transfer, dogs with the past of abuse may pull you into a whole lot of difficult situations.

They may be unusualy agresive or shy or scaredy or whatever compared to other dogs of the same breed (or multiple breeds if they are mixed) or they may act perfectly normal until triggered by something specific and behave in unexpected way when distressed.

We had such a problem with our retriever x boxer x german shepperd mix when she first came to us. She was all nice and friendly untill anyone, be it a family member or stranger, picked up a stick or rod. She had an abusive first owner who used to beat her using those, we think, and so sticks and other long slim items held in one hand turned into her stress trigger. My family was lucky that her first reaction was to flee and hide and as she grew to trust us the issue faded accordingly till it fully disappeared, but different dogs may act differently. Keep that in mind if you get yourself a rescuee.

Dogs which struggled with hunger in past tend to turn into glutons and may develop obesity and associated deseases if you don't keep their food intake in check. Those which came from households of alcoholics may react agresively to smell of alcoholic drinks. If the dog was tortured by nasty brats, it may attack children on sight. Et cetera et cetera.

So if you decided to get yourself a "second hand" pet, find out as much about that dogs past as possible. Hope for the best but be prepared for the worst advice has never been more true than when it comes to dogs comming from shelters.

Thank you for comming to my TED talk and feel free to add your own experiences and opinions

#dog #dogs #love dogs #dog breeds #how to chose #lhasa apso #shar pei #malamute #german sheperd dog #golden retriever #pug #king charles spaniel #yorkshire terrier #westie #boxerdog #jack russell terrier #purebreed #mixed breed #and everything else

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putthison · 7 years ago

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Five Wardrobe Essentials You’ll Research for Eighteen Months, Then Wear for One

It’s time to refresh your wardrobe! Unfortunately, with so many styles to choose from, and such expensive prices, it’s important to do your research before plopping down what’ll amount to thousands of dollars for new duds. Are those shoes actually well-made? Should you build a wardrobe around palewave or workwear? The good news is that there are hundreds of forums, magazines, and blogs nowadays to help you answer those questions. But act fast! With trends moving so quickly, you’ll likely spend more time learning about an item than actually wearing it. So, to help you get started on your quest to become fashionable, here are five wardrobe essentials you’ll research for eighteen months, then wear for one.

A Proper Suit Cause You’re a Big Boy Now

This is the one wardrobe essential for serious occasions, such as weddings, funerals, and job interviews in industries you’re not remotely qualified for. A suit is something you’ll wear as often as once or twice every few years, eventually adding up to 30 days of wear before you die, so spend an inordinate amount of time learning about good tailoring. And be sure to think through the details -- canvassed vs. fused construction, soft vs. structured shoulders, English vs. Italian style. That way, when the barista asks why you’re so dressed up, you can correct him by saying how these patch pockets actually make you look casual.

The Best Possible Cashmere Sweater Ever

Cashmere is a thing of dreams. The slippery, fine fiber makes up into the softest, warmest sweaters on the planet -- something you can bury your face into as you cry over how beautiful these knits feel. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of bad cashmere out there, so spend eighteen months researching every goat herder, spinning company, and knitting mill in the world. A top-end, luxury class sweater is something you can wear for as long as a month before replacing it, after you realize dry cleaning is kind of annoying and you’re too lazy to hand wash.

Boots as Tough as Nails, Like You

You need boots tough enough to keep up your lifestyle, a pair that’ll take you from your front door to car, then back again. Don’t be afraid to really dig in here. Join online forums and read about shoe construction for eighty weeks, so you can become an expert on footwear quality. Goodyear welting vs. stitched down construction, stacked leather heels vs. fiberboard, cork footbeds vs. PU foam -- these are things a normal person needs to know before buying shoes. Remember, a pair of high-quality boots can be resoled many times over, which means they’ll last the lifetime of your interest in this trend. So, about the same amount of time as two laundry cycles.

Fuller Fitting Pants for That Next Lvl Lewk

It’s finally happening! Men’s silhouettes are loosening up again, moving away from the monolithic and oppressive slim-fitting clothes that have dominated fashion for fifteen years. Of course, you can’t go out and just buy any ol’ pair of baggy pants. The right ones are all about nuances in the cut and style, pushing you closer to Vogue’s idea of hip skaters and away frumpy, copy center employees who are actually skaters. Spend the next year-and-a-half of your life reading about how to wear fuller cut trousers (tip: pair them with being a professional model and looking angry, but also maybe orgasming. Also, never stop moving your legs, so the fabric is constantly swishing). Once you get the right pair, you can cold rock ‘em for all of thirty days before slinking back into those slim jeans you never wash.

Versatile All-White Sneakers You’ll Surely Wear Forever

Some things never go out of style. Simple, minimalistic, all-white sneakers a la Common Projects are tasteful enough to go with anything in your wardrobe. They are, however, dearly expensive. So spend the equivalent of a million employable hours figuring out which are the best affordable alternatives -- is the leather as good on this other model? Are the insoles comfortable? It’s important to figure all these things out because you’ll wear them for an entire month before realizing everyone in your city is wearing the same looking shoes. Then you’ll have to research some new thing.

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zydrateacademy · 7 years ago

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Review: Conan Exiles

Quick disclaimer; I’ve only played single player with some interest in coop. I’ve yet to attempt open servers. As a result, I probably haven’t run into the more annoying stock of communities like purges and raids. I’ve played alone, modded, and at my own speed; that may color how I see this game. I’m okay with this. Let’s talk about Skyrim for a moment. Yes, it’s relevant. Do you all remember the first five to ten hours you played it? You were still weak, dealing with iron and steel swords and slashing your way through new caverns and dungeons while scrounging every bit of material you could for your smithing skill. Everything was new and different, and every new playthrough with a different race or weapon type. Then something happens. Several hours in, your smithing and sneak is 75+, you’re level 40 on Expert Difficulty one-shotting every bandit in every dungeon because you took a couple of very specific perks that make the entire game a cakewalk. Or you used alchemy to hilariously boost your stats in the several hundreds or thousands and now your armor rating is at a complete maximum and you’re doing sixty times melee damage on sneak attacks. At a certain point, Skyrim gameplay becomes less about mechanics and just about exploration. However, Exiles basically takes those first few hours and expands them across the entire experience. I get a bit of a Skyrim meets ARK and a lesser used comparison is that I’m honestly getting an Assassin’s Creed: Origins vibe, if nothing else certainly the aesthetics. Large sandy dunes and mountains with spotty greenery and oases, and I’m pretty sure I have an identical screenshot of climbing up a red mountain. My exile and Bayek would probably get along.

For whatever reason, I find Exiles to be a bit more accessible than ARK ever was. I think it’s perhaps the single player admin menu which if ARK has I have never found. Through it you’re able to manipulate things to an insane degree, like ten times the amount of experience and resource gain, as well as modifying how much damage you do and enemies take. I went through a largely unaffected run (though I did bump my experience up to 2X) the first time around and that sucked me in for several hours. In future games, I made it a little easier on myself with quality of life workshop mods including upping armor durability and reducing boss health pools. That last one might sound like a cheat, but when they have up to 30,000 health and I’m alone in the world, lowering it down to 10,000 or something makes the experience a LOT more bearable. I’m not saying ARK does not have these features (it does have workshop support) but it just wasn’t nearly as compelling as Exiles, which does in fact have a story contrary to what some reviews claim.

You start the game creating your character and get a randomized set of “crimes” which can include anything from punching a camel to lewd acts with corpses. It ranged wildly and there’s quite a list that can be quite comical, though the game itself is largely void of humor. Conan himself shows up to remove you from the cross and the game dumps you in a desert road, entirely naked and scrounging for fibers, rocks, and branches; all the things you’ll need to quickly craft a set of clothes and basic tools. The story doesn’t really hold your hand, nor does it tell you what to do. There are runestones dotted around the land that give you snippets and clues. The idea is that you have a magical slave bracelet that’s holding you in what is literally called “The Exiled Lands”, which is the whole area of the map you’re in. Go too far, and you’ll find a green shield that will automatically kill you. What’s involved in this is finding a large variety of bosses and McGuffins that will eventually remove the curse of the bracelet and allow your exile to leave.

That’s the basis of your presence in this strange world. What happens after that point is really up to you. Since you can hardly take on an undead dragon right out of the gate, you pretty much engage in the usual ARK/Minecraft flare. Build a house, hunt animals for hide, and generally spend a lot of time working your way up.

Eventually I found that I had the most fun when I had a decent set of medium armor and a good stock of weapons that I could repair on the fly and that allowed me to make various expeditions outside the comfort zone of what people call the “newbie river”, the southern-most landscape that offer you the most resources within a reasonable travel time. I eventually made it to the Hinterlands where I was able to harvest heavier leathers for better armors, which in turn allowed me to travel farther and take on more intimidating enemies. As you’d expect, you have to manage some resources including hunger, thirst, heat and weight. Thirst can be fairly easy to manage if you’re hanging around the southern portions of the map. Hunger isn’t too bad, and weight I’ve modded out entirely, which I’ll justify shortly. Beyond that there’s a full listing of RPG elements with various perks and stats you can acquire as you level up. In an unmodded game you can only max out a couple so in multiplayer or co-op games you may want to split roles between survivors, gatherers, and combatants. The most fun I’ve had in this game is just the unrestrained exploring, which for me has only been with the help of some workshop mods. I got an insane encumbrance mod early in my career because once I acquired a legit “decent” set of armor, my weight was at 70% regardless of how much stuff I tried to store away. Even in my most purist playthroughs, that mod will always remain. I am less irritated with weight in the likes of Skyrim because I typically have fast travel and stores to sell my crap to, but here I do not have that convenience. Fast travel in Exiles is possible but more of a mid- to end-game perk once you explore enough of the map. There’s a bunch of obelisks you can purify and then travel to through a map room, of which I haven’t done a lot of research and I’m not sure where to find that. As it stands, everything you need you have to get on foot. No horses, no mounts, just hauling all the ass.

The lack of fast travel is indeed a late-game annoyance. Alongside that are a variety of bugs that you’ll come across for a post Early-Access game. I’ve found that engaging in combat within certain variables will have me and the NPC I’m fighting just... sorta flail at each other for a bit. Neither of us take damage, and I noticed that it is because we had some buildings and terrain above us. I lured them out and now we both took damage again. Speaking of, the combat leaves a lot to be desired. It gives me Origins vibes again with some blocking, dodging and health bars. However there’s absolutely no lock-on and hit detection is very wonky when I try to do some light attacks right next to a crocodile only for them to miss entirely. I had to back up and try again and it would work. This happens about twenty percent of the time, depending on my attack. Conversely, a heavy spear attack always hits my enemy.

Some enemies also have knockback effects. I’d be fighting basic bird type enemies and they’d reel in, walk towards me and I’d be knocked over. Apparently they’re “charging” but they don’t go faster than walk speed and thus are difficult to detect. Maybe that’s my fault but it’s just a bit annoying. I also find base building to be vaguely irritating and I find myself doing the ol’ Fallout 4 thing of turning on god mode (in this game, admin mode), getting unlimited resources and at least starting with the basic shape of the building that I want. I’ve only resorted to that once in my ~5 playthroughs and my next semi-purist play will try to be a little more conservative and patient. Patience is really the key here if you want to get the most out of the game. I’ve tried rushing towards the revered “Star Metal” for the endgame gear but found myself perfectly content with some normally crafted heavy stuff, or light armor if I want to dodge enemies more often. Exiles is kind of a slow burn at first but once you find an established area with decent walking distance to most forms of resource, you’re probably in good shape. My experience shined when I was in expedition mode, treating every corner as a new experience. Maybe in a few hundred hours nothing in this game will be new to me, but for now all I can do is stare wide-eyed at the world before me.

#Conan Exiles #Conan the Barbarian #Conan #Gaming #PC Gaming #Survival RPg

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