flyingtreehousefarm

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Goose eggys!

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Boop!

[flyingtreehousefarm]

‘He created me. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Me. I watch him. Always. You will not force him to murder for you.’ ‘What kind of human creates his own policeman?’ ‘One who fears the dark.’ ‘And so he should,’ said the entity, with satisfaction. ‘Indeed. But I think you misunderstand. I am not here to keep darkness out. I’m here to keep it in.’ There was a clink of metal as the shadowy watchman lifted a dark lantern and opened its little door. Orange light cut through the blackness. ‘Call me… The Guarding Dark. Imagine how strong I must be.’ The Summoning Dark backed desperately into the alley, but the light followed it, burning it. ‘And now,’ said the Watchman, ‘get out of town.’

Terry Pratchett, Thud!

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Presumably, if adult humans are weird, then human kids must be weird as well. But of course, since aliens probably wouldn’t interact with human children too much, there might not be much about them in the human guide.

Imagine a human leaving her kid with an alien friend because her SO is sick and none of her human crewmates are able to act as babysitter and she’s got an important meeting. So she goes to the meeting and the alien takes her kid to one of the rooms in the ship that acts as a sort of play area.

Then, when the human comes out of the meeting, she picks her phone up and sees that she has some missed calls…

1st call: “Hey, Katie, it’s me, Grit. I know you’re probably in the meeting by now and can’t answer your phone, but I was just wondering… Jackie’s been chasing the other kids a lot, is she hunting them? Is that part of the whole predatory instincts thing? They all seem to be having fun— at least I think so, they’re all making that weird noise you guys make— but I just thought I’d let you know. And, um, listen… she’s not going to try and eat the ones she catches, is she?”

2nd call: “Hi, Katie, Grit again— look, I know that you guys are descended from tree climbing mammals and so your offspring need climbing equipment to satisfy those instincts— but there’s no way she’s supposed to be that high, right? None of the other parents are doing anything and I can’t go up and get her down because my hooves can’t get a grip on the frame. She’s right on top and— NO!<incomprehensible noises that sound like a cross between the moo of a cow and the bray of a donkey>— okay, so she’s swinging from the bars. One of the other humans just explained that that’s normal. He’s offered me some coffee, but I said no because I’m pretty sure that stuff’s toxic. I’ll try not to call again unless there is an emergency.”

3rd call: “I’m so sorry, Jackie’s been injured. She tripped over and seems to have lost a layer of skin from her knee. She’s making these noises and there’s liquid coming from her eye sockets and I don’t know what to do! Please pick up! There’s blood and the coffee offering human keeps saying she should suck the blood out or something. Is that a thing? Does your species’ saliva have healing properties? Shoud I call a medic?! Please pick up!”

4th call: “Sorry for that last message. Jackie seems to be doing fine now. I don’t know how— she should be laid out for weeks after an injury like that! Please, for my sanity, can you get a human babysitter next time?”

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Commenting fanfiction is the easiest thing in the world once you start doing it. 

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Captain Marvel and the importance of "holding back."

The scene in Captain Marvel where she says "I've been fighting with one hand tied behind my back" means a lot to me, as a woman and a radical feminist. Because, that's what womankind has been doing for generations now. We've been holding back.

Misogyny and patriarchy calls us weak, thinks of us as lesser because we've been holding back, as we've been taught to do.

As little girls we learn to dumb ourselves down and let boys win because we also learn compassion - we see their feelings get hurt when we beat them, we see their self esteem and ego suffer when we're smarter, so we hold back. We feel compassion, so we spare their feelings- but we diminish ourselves in the process.

And by the time we are adult, we forget that it was a series of choices we made, not some inherent inferiority innate to our biology.

I read a quote once, that "men should be grateful that women want equality, not revenge."

And another quote that connects well with that one; "even if it was true that men are physically stronger than women, in general - how sad to think that's the only important measure of superiority!"

It reminds me that Batman beat Superman, canonically, because though physically much weaker, Batman understood and studied his opponent and prepared for the fight.

How lucky men are, that after mankind as a whole has given womankind every reason to view them as an enemy to our health, success, sanity, and survival, overall, we do not.

How would you fight an enemy who lives side by side with you, knows you intimately, cooks your meals, has access to every inner working of your home, has access to your children.

Fight Club was a movie about disenfranchised working class men, but the quote about... we cook your food, we clean your houses, we guard you while you sleep... that resonated strongly with me as a woman.

Mankind should be glad that womankind is taught to love, forgive, be patient, and have compassion. Like all humans, they have to eat and sleep sometime. If we were truly their enemies (as many of them might deserve) we would have access to them at all their most vulnerable moments.

Don't misunderstand- I'm not saying that women should rise up and kill men, take over the world by force, etc. I am saying that at any point, if the majority of womankind had been willing to sink to the level of wartime atrocity that mankind so often has, we COULD have.

And furthermore, the fact that we haven't, is not a weakness- forbearance, compassion, patience, tolerance, endurance... all these are critical parts of what make us survive as a species.

The average woman isn't stronger than the average man? The average man is by definition, not stronger than 50% of the other men. That's what average means. Nor is he stronger than a bear, or a blizzard, or a famine. He is weaker than a rattlesnake bite, a burst appendix, a drought, a forest fire, a virus.

Only by the knowledge, labor, strength, teamwork, and compassion of all other humans, have we created a society that, as whole is stronger than all of those things.

The guy that imagines himself as a Mad Max survivor? Or a Tarzan type barbarian? Think of all the ways that the traditional "women's work" is keeping him alive! Starting with the mother and midwife who safely delivered him, the herb witch who cured his bronchial pneumonia, the sister who nursed him through post surgical infection after a dirty arrowhead wound, the women who wove and sewed clothing warm & dry enough to survive the snowy wastes, the ladies who know how to grow food, raise chickens and goats, make cheese, and cook and preserve all of these things so that nobody gets botulism or food poisoning...

The truly "lone hero" would be malnourished, filthy, hungry, in patched rags, with infected wounds. No matter their sex. Humans work better in teams where each person is free to slightly specialize in a couple main areas of skill.

And given what we know of modern women... hmm... I wonder which sex was doing most of the emotional labor of keeping morale up with good food and pleasant environments, the diplomatic and social work of smoothing over little disagreements before they blow up into fights and tribal schisms...

Over history, womankind has done much of the important work of keeping humankind together and alive. And overall, mankind has claimed that work isn't important. Has claimed that the jobs, behavioral traits, and social roles they chose for themselves are the actually important ones.

Overall, though history, mankind has tended to discount our contributions and glorify theirs.

But, that's not necessarily true. The ability for physical conflict and violence, is not necessarily virtue or a mark or superiority- and it may not even be what will win in a conflict. The battle is not always to the strong. Strategy, subterfuge, knowing your enemy, planning... those can easily beat simple physicality.

And, having the diplomatic and social skills to negotiate and make the enemy an ally and trading partner- that can be said to "beat" all of those. The ability to transcend a win/lose situation and create a win/win? There's a type of strength that sadly, doesn't make good action movie fight scenes. So it doesn't get glorified. Because womankind over history has done the hard work of keeping the daily life of society together, without demanding praise and glory for it. We've been holding back.

Because, whenever we point these things out, there's always some jerk there to say that because we feel strongly about these things, our emotions somehow invalidate our point. As if the only way to have a valid point is to debate the pros and cons in a robotic, dry monotone. The truth is the truth, the facts are facts. Even if you scream those facts in a frustrated tone of voice with clenched fists and tears streaming down your face, that doesn't invalidate the literal accuracy of your words.

Over and over, I see men wanting to argue with women online about women's issues and women's rights. . And, they want to set the rules of engagement for that interaction. If the woman gets angry or intense or upset, one of their unspoken "rules of engagement" is to claim that emotion, especially anger, is a sign of irrationality and invalidates the point.

That's completely idiotic and irrational. If I scream that 2+2 is 4, or that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell, or that statistics repeatedly show that nearly all rape accusations are real, my anger or frustration does not change the accuracy of my facts.

So, in Captain Marvel, when Carol fights her old teacher, I am so overjoyed to see that she refused to let him limit her. She refused to let him set the rules of engagement for their interaction. She refused to let him guilt her into holding back. She refused to let him frame her emotions as a weakness.

She just did what she needed to do, and moved on.

So that's my challenge to womankind. We don't need to treat mankind overall as an enemy- even though in so many, many cases it would be justifiable.

Instead, let's just stop holding back. Let's not pay the bullshit any attention anymore. Let's not be nice to spare their feelings. Let's not dumb ourselves down or let them win. Let's see what we can do when we stop holding back.

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

Follow me on Webtoons

[flyingtreehousefarm]

When I was nine, possibly ten, an author came to our school to talk about writing. His name was Hugh Scott, and I doubt he’s known outside of Scotland. And even then I haven’t seen him on many shelves in recent years in Scotland either. But he wrote wonderfully creepy children’s stories, where the supernatural was scary, but it was the mundane that was truly terrifying. At least to little ten year old me. It was Scooby Doo meets Paranormal Activity with a bonny braw Scottish-ness to it that I’d never experienced before.

I remember him as a gangling man with a wiry beard that made him look older than he probably was, and he carried a leather bag filled with paper. He had a pen too that was shaped like a carrot, and he used it to scribble down notes between answering our (frankly disinterested) questions. We had no idea who he was you see, no one had made an effort to introduce us to his books. We were simply told one morning, ‘class 1b, there is an author here to talk to you about writing’, and this you see was our introduction to creative writing. We’d surpassed finger painting and macaroni collages. It was time to attempt Words That Were Untrue.

You could tell from the look on Mrs M’s face she thought it was a waste of time. I remember her sitting off to one side marking papers while this tall man sat down on our ridiculously short chairs, and tried to talk to us about what it meant to tell a story. She wasn’t big on telling stories, Mrs M. She was also one of the teachers who used to take my books away from me because they were “too complicated” for me, despite the fact that I was reading them with both interest and ease. When dad found out he hit the roof. It’s the one and only time he ever showed up to the school when it wasn’t parents night or the school play. After that she just left me alone, but she made it clear to my parents that she resented the fact that a ten year old used words like ‘ubiquitous’ in their essays. Presumably because she had to look it up.

Anyway, Mr Scott, was doing his best to talk to us while Mrs M made scoffing noises from her corner every so often, and you could just tell he was deflating faster than a bouncy castle at a knife sharpening party, so when he asked if any of us had any further questions and no one put their hand up I felt awful. I knew this was not only insulting but also humiliating, even if we were only little children. So I did the only thing I could think of, put my hand up and said “Why do you write?”

I’d always read about characters blinking owlishly, but I’d never actually seen it before. But that’s what he did, peering down at me from behind his wire rim spectacles and dragging tired fingers through his curly beard. I don’t think he expected anyone to ask why he wrote stories. What he wrote about, and where he got his ideas from maybe, and certainly why he wrote about ghosts and other creepy things, but probably not why do you write. And I think he thought perhaps he could have got away with “because it’s fun, and learning is fun, right kids?!”, but part of me will always remember the way the world shifted ever so slightly as it does when something important is about to happen, and this tall streak of a man looked down at me, narrowed his eyes in an assessing manner and said, “Because people told me not to, and words are important.”

I nodded, very seriously in the way children do, and knew this to be a truth. In my limited experience at that point, I knew certain people (with a sidelong glance to Mrs M who was in turn looking at me as though she’d just known it’d be me that type of question) didn’t like fiction. At least certain types of fiction. I knew for instance that Mrs M liked to read Pride and Prejudice on her lunch break but only because it was sensible fiction, about people that could conceivably be real. The idea that one could not relate to a character simply because they had pointy ears or a jet pack had never occurred to me, and the fact that it’s now twenty years later and people are still arguing about the validity of genre fiction is beyond me, but right there in that little moment, I knew something important had just transpired, with my teacher glaring at me, and this man who told stories to live beginning to smile. After that the audience turned into a two person conversation, with gradually more and more of my classmates joining in because suddenly it was fun. Mrs M was pissed and this bedraggled looking man who might have been Santa after some serious dieting, was starting to enjoy himself. As it turned out we had all of his books in our tiny corner library, and in the words of my friend Andrew “hey there’s a giant spider fighting a ghost on this cover! neat!” and the presentation devolved into chaos as we all began reading different books at once and asking questions about each one. “Does she live?”— “What about the talking trees” —“is the ghost evil?” —“can I go to the bathroom, Miss?” —“Wow neat, more spiders!”

After that we were supposed to sit down, quietly (glare glare) and write a short story to show what we had learned from listening to Mr Scott. I wont pretend I wrote anything remotely good, I was ten and all I could come up with was a story about a magic carrot that made you see words in the dark, but Mr Scott seemed to like it. In fact he seemed to like all of them, probably because they were done with such vibrant enthusiasm in defiance of the people who didn’t want us to.

The following year, when I’d moved into Mrs H’s class—the kind of woman that didn’t take away books from children who loved to read and let them write nonsense in the back of their journals provided they got all their work done—a letter arrived to the school, carefully wedged between several copies of a book which was unheard of at the time, by a new author known as J.K. Rowling. Mrs H remarked that it was strange that an author would send copies of books that weren’t even his to a school, but I knew why he’d done it. I knew before Mrs H even read the letter.

Because words are important. Words are magical. They’re powerful. And that power ought to be shared. There’s no petty rivalry between story tellers, although there’s plenty who try to insinuate it. There’s plenty who try to say some words are more valuable than others, that somehow their meaning is more important because of when it was written and by whom. Those are the same people who laud Shakespeare from the heavens but refuse to acknowledge that the quote “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them“ is a dick joke.

And although Mr Scott seems to have faded from public literary consumption, I still think about him. I think about his stories, I think about how he recommended another author and sent copies of her books because he knew our school was a puritan shithole that fought against the Wrong Type of Wordes and would never buy them into the library otherwise. But mostly I think about how he looked at a ten year old like an equal and told her words and important, and people will try to keep you from writing them—so write them anyway.

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Steel type also

took pokemon type test and got ground/steel so uh. ehhh

test is here

[flyingtreehousefarm]

show no effort and I’ll show no interest

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Felix the Comrade

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Stop trying to warm all these cold hearts. Save your warmth for those who can match your heat.

[flyingtreehousefarm]

I remember first learning that you can cry from any emotion, that emotions are chemical levels in your brain and your body is constantly trying to maintain equilibrium. so if one emotion sky rockets, that chemical becomes flagged and signals the tear duct to open as an exit to release that emotion packaged neatly within a tear. Everything made sense after learning that. That sudden stability of your emotions after crying. How crying is often accompanied by the inability to feel any other emotion in that precise moment. And it is especially beautiful knowing that it is even possible to experience so much beauty or love or happiness that your body literally can’t hold on to all of it. So what I’ve learned is that crying signifies that you are feeling as much as humanely possible and that is living to the fullest extent. So keep feeling and cry often and as much as needed

[flyingtreehousefarm]

took it personally because I never would’ve done it to you

[flyingtreehousefarm]

I told Miyazaki I love the “gratuitous motion” in his films; instead of every movement being dictated by the story, sometimes people will just sit for a moment, or they will sigh, or look in a running stream, or do something extra, not to advance the story but only to give the sense of time and place and who they are.

“We have a word for that in Japanese,” he said. “It’s called ma. Emptiness. It’s there intentionally.”

Is that like the “pillow words” that separate phrases in Japanese poetry?

“I don’t think it’s like the pillow word.” He clapped his hands three or four times. “The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it’s just busyness, But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb.”

Which helps explain why Miyazaki’s films are more absorbing and involving than the frantic cheerful action in a lot of American animation. I asked him to explain that a little more.

“The people who make the movies are scared of silence, so they want to paper and plaster it over,” he said. “They’re worried that the audience will get bored. They might go up and get some popcorn.

But just because it’s 80 percent intense all the time doesn’t mean the kids are going to bless you with their concentration. What really matters is the underlying emotions–that you never let go of those.

— Roger Ebert in conversation with Hiyao Miyazaki

[flyingtreehousefarm]

Due to personal reasons I’ll be going feral

[flyingtreehousefarm]

me going to the circle tower: i hate this part.

me dealing with connor: i hate this part.

me going to orzammar: i hate this part.

me going to the werewolf woods: i hate this part.

me doing the landsmeet: i hate this part.

some rando: why play the game if you hate literally all of it?

me: how dare you?? this game is a classic??? a piece of art???? how could-