#while the continent is

[ofswordsandpens]

every holiday season I've seen clips of Emma Thompson quietly crying in her room over the revelation that her husband Alan Rickman has been cheating on her and her performance is so heart shattering and moving that for years I've been convinced that Love Actually is this poignant drama so I finally watched it and tell me why this movie is terrible lol

[fatehbaz]

Tallying every single tree in the kingdom. Endangered South Asian sandalwood. British war to control the forests. European companies claim the ecosystem. Failure of the plantation. Until the twentieth century, the Empire couldn't figure out how to cultivate sandalwood because they didn't understand that the plant is actually a partial root parasite, so their plantation monoculture approach of eliminating companion species was self-defeating. French perfumes and the creation of "Sandalwood City".

---

Selling at about $147,000 per metric ton, the aromatic heartwood of Indian sandalwood (S. album) is arguably [among] the most expensive wood in the world. Globally, 90 per cent of the world’s S. album comes from India [...]. And within India, around 70 per cent of S. album comes from the state of Karnataka [...] [and] the erstwhile Kingdom of Mysore. [...] [T]he species came to the brink of extinction. [...] [O]verexploitation led to the sandal tree's critical endangerment in 1974. [...]

---

Francis Buchanan’s 1807 A Journey from Madras through the Countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar is one of the few European sources to offer insight into pre-colonial forest utilisation in the region. [...] Buchanan records [...] [the] tradition of only harvesting sandalwood once every dozen years may have been an effective local pre-colonial conservation measure. [...] Starting in 1786, Tipu Sultan [ruler of Mysore] stopped trading pepper, sandalwood and cardamom with the British. As a result, trade prospects for the company [East India Company] were looking so bleak that by November 1788, Lord Cornwallis suggested abandoning Tellicherry on the Malabar Coast and reducing Bombay’s status from a presidency to a factory. [...] One way to understand these wars is [...] [that] [t]hey were about economic conquest as much as any other kind of expansion, and sandalwood was one of Mysore’s most prized commodities. In 1799, at the Battle of Srirangapatna, Tipu Sultan was defeated. The kingdom of Mysore became a princely state within British India [...]. [T]he East India Company also immediately started paying the [new rulers] for the right to trade sandalwood.

British control over South Asia’s natural resources was reaching its peak and a sophisticated new imperial forest administration was being developed that sought to solidify state control of the sandalwood trade. In 1864, the extraction and disposal of sandalwood came under the jurisdiction of the Forest Department. [...] Colonial anxiety to maximise profits from sandalwood meant that a government agency was established specifically to oversee the sandalwood trade [...] and so began the government sandalwood depot or koti system. [...]

From the 1860s the [British] government briefly experimented with a survey tallying every sandal tree standing in Mysore [...].

Instead, an intricate system of classification was developed in an effort to maximise profits. By 1898, an 18-tiered sandalwood classification system was instituted, up from a 10-tier system a decade earlier; it seems this led to much confusion and was eventually reduced back to 12 tiers [...].

---

Meanwhile, private European companies also made significant inroads into Mysore territory at this time. By convincing the government to classify forests as ‘wastelands’, and arguing that Europeans would improves these tracts from their ‘semi-savage state’, starting in the 1860s vast areas were taken from local inhabitants and converted into private plantations for the ‘production of cardamom, pepper, coffee and sandalwood’.

---

Yet attempts to cultivate sandalwood on both forest department and privately owned plantations proved to be a dismal failure. There were [...] major problems facing sandalwood supply in the period before the twentieth century besides overexploitation and European monopoly. [...] Before the first quarter of the twentieth century European foresters simply could not figure out how to grow sandalwood trees effectively.

The main reason for this is that sandal is what is now known as a semi-parasite or root parasite; besides a main taproot that absorbs nutrients from the earth, the sandal tree grows parasitical roots (or haustoria) that derive sustenance from neighbouring brush and trees. [...] Dietrich Brandis, the man often regaled as the father of Indian forestry, reported being unaware of the [sole significant English-language scientific paper on sandalwood root parasitism] when he worked at Kew Gardens in London on South Asian ‘forest flora’ in 1872–73. Thus it was not until 1902 that the issue started to receive attention in the scientific community, when C.A. Barber, a government botanist in Madras [...] himself pointed out, 'no one seems to be at all sure whether the sandalwood is or is not a true parasite'.

Well into the early decades of twentieth century, silviculture of sandal proved a complete failure. The problem was the typical monoculture approach of tree farming in which all other species were removed and so the tree could not survive. [...]

The long wait time until maturity of the tree must also be considered. Only sandal heartwood and roots develop fragrance, and trees only begin developing fragrance in significant quantities after about thirty years. Not only did traders, who were typically just sailing through, not have the botanical know-how to replant the tree, but they almost certainly would not be there to see a return on their investments if they did. [...]

---

The main problem facing the sustainable harvest and continued survival of sandalwood in India [...] came from the advent of the sandalwood oil industry at the beginning of the twentieth century. During World War I, vast amounts of sandal were stockpiled in Mysore because perfumeries in France had stopped production and it had become illegal to export to German perfumeries. In 1915, a Government Sandalwood Oil Factory was built in Mysore. In 1917, it began distilling. [...] [S]andalwood production now ramped up immensely. It was at this time that Mysore came to be known as ‘the Sandalwood City’.

---

Text above by: Ezra Rashkow. "Perfumed the axe that laid it low: The endangerment of sandalwood in southern India." The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Volume 51 (2014), Issue 1, pages 41-70. First published online 10 March 2014. DOI: 10.1177/0019464613515533 [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Italicized first paragraph/heading in this post added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[nonexistentirl]

"However, he was not too worried as it was still better than fighting and getting bloody." said Cale right before he went to earn the power Water of Judgement (Sky Eating Water). Little did he know he would, in fact, have to fight underwater and cough blood and be in pain afterwards.

[bookdragon-shenanigans]

The character I relate to the most in the empyrean is Mira because I too, like her am the eldest daughter with a chronically ill/ disabled sibling who's 6 years younger than me AND DOESN'T LISTEN TO A SINGLE THING I SAY FOR FUCKS SAKE

[soup-charades]

thinking about how sidney argued gaunt ‘enjoyed’ war, and his reasoning included henry ‘spending time in bed’ with Gideon. truly a dramatic king

[incorrect-green-lantern-quotes]

Americans will measure with anything but the metric system

[bidonica]

wait can you elaborate on "#not to be european on main but it's one of asoiaf's most tellingly american features to me" because I've never really considered this before

Well, if you look at the time frame of Westeros post Targaryen conquest that's roughly the same distance between the foundation of the USA and when GRRM started writing asoiaf, so there might be a (conscious or subconscious I can't tell, but it wouldn't suprise me if it was intentional) correlation with placing "the birth of this country as we know it" at that specific point in time. Which ties back to that feeling of "the beginning of history" while acknowledging that there has been a history before, but it's a lot more nebulous and badly documented and it involves ethnicities that are considered "native" vs more recent migrations (First Men vs Andals).

And it's something you don't really get to perceive from a European perspective because sometimes you might be living in a country that, in its current form as a nation state, is actually younger than the US (like Italy or Germany), but that state and its identity exists in continuity with what was there before, going back to several centuries. There are cultural and material callbacks to that history in your everyday life, be it the language you speak or still using very ancient buildings that sometimes even maintained their original purpose. I don't want to sound blasé but from that vantage point "300 years ago" is "a long time ago, but not that long". This is not a value judgment, and of course the key reason is colonialism -- I just think there are some contextual elements that might lead to a different perception of history. It's all relative in the end

[sesamenom]

day 1 of @tolkiengenweek: fingon & maeglin in mandos.

a little while ago i did this piece and @tanoraqui mentioned maeglin in the tags. anyways i was thinking about which nolofinwion would be best at dealing w maeglin's trauma.

turgon means well, but maeglin probably doesn't want to talk to him. aredhel is a) his mom and b) part of the traumatic backstory so that would also be difficult. argon never even made it past the grinding ice (and frankly i havent figured out his personality enough to do one of these). fingon, however, kept nicely to the theme of eldest son & youngest grandson and made sense trauma-wise.

so anyways here's fingon helping maeglin deal with the aftermath of his time in morgoth's captivity and the trauma of losing aredhel.

[fheythfully]

"I liked Dawntrail a lot" I tell myself as I rewrite parts of the story for my own enjoyment and debate with my friend about the character growth of Wuk Lamat and Koana and realize that no, actually, I did not like Dawntrail's story decisions or Wuk Lamat all that much and I'm tired of pretending to myself that I did 🤡

[thelostgirl21]

An in-depth, illustrated exploration of Radovid's most important strategic goals and motivations throughout season 3, following a solid character introduction.

a.k.a. The Gay Agenda™

[creaturefeaster]

Been working on this for the last little bit. Elevation & listed primary town versions.

Due to be tweaked and updated in the future :3.

[ratatatastic]

congrats to these three fucking idiots! truly! i hope you people are happy with yourselves!

i cant believe we got bogo on cats penalties in fucking preseason you guys are unfuckingbelievable really can you people not handle the scawy penalty box all by yourselves? you have to use the buddy system?

they did not think of the logistics of the bench when they committed those penalties huh

florida panthers @ tampa bay lightning | 10.2.24

[hitmehardnsweet]

[crowd booing] 🥂

[swallowtail-ageha]

Wildest take to me imo is the marika is a good mother who did nothing defense while using as a proof of that the fact that marika tried to contain malenia's rot by how you find in a random abandoned chest in the haligtree a scarseal <-something that is said to be extremely painful physically and mentally once put per messmer's item descriptions

[identityquest]

ummm. world map teehee