in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.
 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.
 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.
 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.
 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.
 One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.
"people show their true colours in life threatening situations" no, they show you what they act like when they're mortally terrified, an emotion notorious for literally turning your entire brain off to the point where people who go into those situations as a profession need to be literally trained on how to not have that happen
(context: the person in the video is in the midst of making pilgrimage to Lhasa. The tradition is called kechangtou/磕长头 (ཕྱག་འཚལ/chak tsal; "head ceremony") Tibetan Buddhists will travel on foot from wherever they live to Lhasa, prostrating every three steps along the way. To aid in this, people making the pilgrimage will wear wooden blocks on their hands and (often leather) aprons over their clothes, which they will change or mend when the items get worn out. The person in the video is traveling with a friend. According to his account, he started his journey near the end of November 2023 and is nearly 90 days in.)
I purchased 4 more solo rpgs and I think my brain is just amazed like “did you know you can imagine things for fun?? It doesn’t need to be about future plans or giving yourself more to do??”
It just occured to me that Stan technically canonically liked to draw, so here's my take of what Stanley's sketchbook would have looked like had he never gave up on art :]
Stanley first found this sketchbook left behind in a dumpster next to a library. The rings that once held the pages together were broken and warped, so he instead fashioned himself a jury rigged binder by weaveing one of his shoelaces through the holes in the side. In the end, it was essentially just a stack of barely held together paper, but he was still satisfied with it.
Pencils were easy enough to snag from the store since they fit so easily inside his pockets; but he had to settle for the shitty stubby pink erasers that barely did its job on the end of the pencils if he made any mistakes.
Stanley wasn't much of a poetic guy, and he didn't do the kind of art that had deep symbolism or meaning behind them. He was more the kind of artist that just drew what was in front of him, plain and simple. Had he been younger, he might have been able to fill in this cobbled together sketchbook in a matter of days, page after page filled to the brim with creatures and adventures of the wildest dreams.
Well, Stanley wasn't exactly a sprightly young child anymore with a boundless imagination to take inspiration from, but 10 years was a long time to be on the road and moving around, so there was plenty for him to draw.
(My primary goal was just to make these pages look as realistic as possible, but I did add in mini backstories in each of the pages' image description, if you feel like reading that :])
My dream is to live next to the great lakes in a little house full of sea decor. Whenever people visit they'll ask me what the harpoon is for and I'll day just in case.
1 note ·
View note
Statistics
We looked inside some of the posts by
mildly-salted
and here's what we found interesting.
Average Info
Notes Per Post
786K
Likes Per Post
421K
Reblog Per Post
364K
Reply Per Post
526
Time Between Posts
2 hours
Number of Posts By Type
Text
16
Photo
1
Explore Tagged Posts
Fun Fact
Average visit duration of Tumblr.com is 10 mins and 25 secs.