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Flying is effortless, landing can be a little bit harder, Cornell Lab / DoC (northern royal albatross) (part 1)

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♯ TV APPRECIATION WEEK 2025 .ᐟ ❛❛Fear is like a companion. A constant companion, always there. But that's okay, because fear can bring us together.❜❜ Day 5: Favourite season(s) of tv ⤑ Doctor Who/Series 8

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In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

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Ozzy Osbourne’s death is like the death of a crusty white 3 legged no toothed dog in it’s mid 20s. It’s shocking and heartbreaking, but the shock mostly comes from the fact that it lived so long and through so much bodily strain that you kind of subconsciously assumed it was immortal.

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every time i open my copy of amulet of samarkand i am forced to remember that uh

as a child i loved this book so much i started EATING THE PAGES

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Mary Herbert To See Through, 2020

Pavel Tatarnikov Princess of the Underworld, 2000

(Павел Татарников "Принцесса в подземном царстве")

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Veni vidi conveni consedi

I came I saw I fits I sits

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Summer sunset sky as seen from the 6 Train in New York City.

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Antique ‘Stork Scissors’ from Italy and Germany

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Sverd i Fjell in Norway — a monument commemorating the Battle of Hafrsfjord (872 AD), where King Harald Fairhair united Norway.

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I should look into how to apply for awards and stuff so I can describe myself as an "award losing author". That would be super fun. I could get a tshirt made.

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-what kind of spy are you? -yeah. hard to tell, really.

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"Palace of Tenderness", Bolesław Biegas, 1928

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highly recommend keeping a small portrait of a historical figure who met a grisly end on your work desk. for perspective.

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speaking of peeing the bed it's been long enough that i can tell this story publicly. in high school i went to a party at some house with no adults, as you sometimes would, and at the end of the night like 10 people all clonked out together in the same bed. fully clothed, one of those teenage moments where you're like wow heehee how rule-breaking, because sure a lot of our parents wouldn't like us sleeping in a bed with a bunch of other teenagers and no adult supervision blah blah. fond memories. anyway.

i'm an extremely light sleeper, so i barely slept, and sometime around 6 am, i woke up to a girl totally panicking, very quietly, because she peed the bed in her sleep. and listen. this wasn't a group of mean kids by any measure. but there's no level of kindness or understanding in the world that will make peeing the bed when you're 17, surrounded by people you only sort of know, a gentle blow.

so i sat up and she was like "oh my god" and I signaled at her to be absolutely silent and I said I'd be right back. And I crawled over everyone and out of the bed like a stupid cat.

and the thing is, by senior year i wasn't getting bullied much anymore. i was generally pretty well liked by my peers, but, if this makes sense, people still didn't always expect very much from me. i was still figuring out how to mask (autistic) and i still often said or did something that made everyone remember i'm weird and they'd just be like "well. that's story for you. i guess." and for the most part i'd become pretty secure in that.

so what i'm saying is i had nothing to lose and this girl had everything to lose.

so i went downstairs and i made tomato soup. and by "made" i mean i put a whole can of tomato soup in a too-small mug and microwaved it until it was lukewarm so as to be convincingly "made" but not so hot to burn someone.

and then i walked back upstairs, and no longer like a cat, i clumsily "attempted" to crawl back into bed, loudly lost my balance, and spilled tomato soup all over the girl and her lap and several other people's laps and heads and the mattress.

everyone woke up confused and anguished and i was like, "oh my god, I'm so sorry. I just got really hungry and it's all i could find."

and everyone immediately accepted with absolutely no further questions that I would go downstairs, make tomato soup at 6 am,and bring it back to bed. everyone just begrudgingly climbed onto the floor and went back to sleep while I put the bedding right into the laundry.

i don't even know this girl's name. i only remembered this story recently because i'm in my hometown for a few months and recently a high school acquaintance said, "hey. do you remember spilling soup on everyone after prom? why did you do that?" and for a moment i genuinely did not and i stared at them completely dumbfounded while the memory loaded and then i started laughing too hard to answer for 2 minutes.

the best part is i can tell this story, and even if it reaches the people who were there, none of them will know which one of them peed the bed. thanks to tomato soup.

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Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!