cavedraconem

[cavedraconem]

She wants her cup of stars.

[cavedraconem]

That's one of the reasons they're so dangerous to environments with no natural mammalian predators... If one (1) female stoat turns up to your beautiful predator-free island, it can have a litter immediately and get to work eating all of your birds.

Unrelatedly, one time when I was doing pest control someone came back to the station like, "We trapped a stoat, does anyone want it?" And the ranger was like, "Sure, I'll get it taxidermied for the kids display".

Stoat in his winter coat, Kodiak, Alaska

krisluckphoto

[cavedraconem]

Score: Hit 1 child, 3 teenagers and 1 adult with swords. Discovered the coin is only pretending to be from 19th century Ethiopia (actually from early 20th century Ethiopia)

I have a coin to look at... but I'm running late for my appointment to hit children with swords... but it's from 19th century Ethiopia.........

[cavedraconem]

I have a coin to look at... but I'm running late for my appointment to hit children with swords... but it's from 19th century Ethiopia.........

[cavedraconem]

kris and noelle discuss critically acclaimed fps game half dead 2, their missing siblings, and obscure human musicians like claude debussy

[cavedraconem]

i love that story that makes meta commentary about videogames with the spunky lizard lady and the depressed weirdo who are both in a weird undefinable relationship with each other

[cavedraconem]

I tried to explain causality to my cat and she told me it was an artefact of the human brain principally used to facilitate throwing (which, she added, with a superior look, is only really impressive to dogs).

[cavedraconem]

And anyway, the dates around that century are messed up enough there's no fixing it:

We still use [the Roman] calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months ‘drifted’ over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed, creating a 365 day calendar in 46[BC]; to ‘reset’ the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days. And you might think, “my goodness, that means we’d have to convert every pre-45 BC date to figure out what it actually is, how do we do that?” And the answer is: we don’t. Instead, all of the oddities of the Roman calendar remain baked into our calendar and the year 46 BC is still reckoned as being 445 days long and thus the longest ever year.

sorry to say that the whole "centuries start on the 1" thing is one of the dumbest things i can imagine believing. completely breaking with the near universal usage to do the less intuitive thing in order to serve a standard set by people who did not have 0

[cavedraconem]

i love that we in Sydney have both myna birds and miner birds (pronounced identically in the aussie mouth) and they look basically identical and have very similar behaviours and nearly the exact same niche and they occupy the same territory, but one is an introduced invasive pest. Luckily both seem to be prodigious breeds well suited to urban environments and totally genocidal towards all other native bird species. oh wait thats bad. hm

[cavedraconem]

An incomplete list of the achievements of 20th century American writer Gene Wolfe:

Write and published cult classic gothic science fantasy series The Book of the New Sun and successor series

Developed the machine that rolls and shapes Pringles dough

[cavedraconem]

Hot off the hoop, some flowers and oak leaves in blackwork.

Pattern here (my site) or here (Etsy)

[cavedraconem]

Deltarune chapter 4 spoilers ‼️‼️

I’m so obsessed with the concept of the soul vs Kris

[cavedraconem]

it's over bro we're never getting that audience with the Autarch

[cavedraconem]

I left my cauliflower out on the plant a bit too long so it opened up - but on the plus side, I got a bountiful snail harvest!

[cavedraconem]

Ok, so as not to seem too negative on The Book of New Sun, here's a bit I really liked: the protagonist meets a guy who is a bit weird (ok, that's not unusual), seems to know an awful lot about the universe and claims to be older than he looks. He has a metal hand which seems to be a prosthetic, but the protagonist later discovers that much of the rest of his friend's body is mechanical as well (very surprising in a relatively low-tech setting).

Later in the book, this guy opens up about his past and reveals that he actually left Urth (Earth) on a spaceship long ago, and when they returned there were no ports for them to land in any more so they crashed. He was badly injured in the crash and his companions had to rebuild him. But they didn't have enough parts so they had to substitute- with biological materials.

Turns out he's not a cyborg, he's a reverse cyborg!

[cavedraconem]

Kris Deltarune's whole situation is so funny. Imagine you agree to become host to a terrible demon as part of some sinister plot, but as time goes by it dawns on you that the demon is - to your horror - neurotypical

[cavedraconem]

I've been reading The Book of New Sun while I've been moping around wretchedly with a cold, and it's really compelling but the way it describes women is so tedious. I know Severian is an extremely interested narrator but do we really need to know precisely how attracted he is to every woman he meets?