#hike and fly

[wildterrain]

Bornes to Fly 2025

Ο Damien Lacaze θριαμβευτής στον αέρα και στο έδαφος Η φετινή διοργάνωση του Bornes to Fly, του φημισμένου hike-and-fly αγώνα στην περιοχή της Annecy, ολοκληρώθηκε με εντυπωσιακή συμμετοχή και ανατροπές μέχρι το τέλος. Ο Damien Lacaze ήταν ο μεγάλος νικητής του Bornes to Fly 2025, επικρατώντας με ελάχιστη διαφορά του Charles de Beaufort, σε μια συναρπαστική αναμέτρηση μέχρι το τελευταίο βήμα.…

[dakotaleek]

Green

[kristo-flowers]

Cabbage white butterflies over the dunes of Knokke, Belgium

[mothmanactual]

[yourdadsbasement]

two white guys in the Australian outback is the beginning to so many terrible stories

aka Moloch horridus (my favorite creature Latin name)

i’ll drink lemonade off your back all day boyyyy

zach must be a Goo Goo Dolls fan

in case you need to cover up your junk in the desert

you guys did NOT bring enough water, i’ve only hiked in one desert and i know that (shout out Death Valley, you were real hot)

all your life 😈

when the sun madness hits

[orofeaiel]

Fly Agaric

[scarecrowbutch]

you can't do anything without spending money anymore everything is all money moneymonrymoney im gonna turn into a rabid chimp

[aaandbackstabbed]

Something y’all need to understand abt Goldie is she absolutely got on the bar; to sing, to dance, just to make a point! She lived climbing on to that bar and looking down at patrons

It pleases her like nothing else

[bandeebugs]

LOS ANGELES > PORTLAND

[sheepdogsandsidesaddle]

After almost a week of pretty strict crate rest, 2x daily gabapentin, and a few hours a day in her back on track jacket, she is feeling very, very good and very bored. Her sore spot is still tense, but more diffuse than it was, so I think that's a good sign. Will check in with my vet in the morning. One more week to go. Hopefully I can add laser therapy this week after I get this schooling show over with.

[hetaliakinfessions]

I want to go home. I want to be important again; I want to feel a million lives and see a million years again. I want to go back to when I was small, running barefoot through the grass. I want to love and hate and fight and die and always come back. I want to go back to that house, out in the field before the forest.

.

[glazedsnail]

I can't identify mushrooms but I can tell you they're all edible at least once.

I got so excited when I saw the fly agaric, it was my very first time seeing one right there off the ground.

[macrowitchphotography]

Imagine going gliding and you look down and the fields are on fire! Made for a very dramatic photo at least...

[mothmanactual]

I hope one day she understands all of my pain comes from making sure her dreams come true.

[katoska]

If Conrad hadn't been lying in Lucky Day and had just been mentally unstable, how do you explain his treatment of Ruby during his "reveal"? How do you explain the "ha, gotcha" at UNIT? Conrad and his friends sure acted like it had all been a big prank to use Ruby to get at UNIT, and I doubt they are all insane, so what was that? Though, tbh, I don't really understand what the rubbersuits were supposed to prove, anyway. UNIT very obviously did not fake these aliens.

I'll agree that Conrad seems a bit erratic, but that could just be bad writing because DW likes dramatic villains. It doesn't follow that he's just misguided.

Thank you for your ask. I'm gonna assume you've caught up with my previous posts about Conrad being a real conspiracy nutter, not a grifter (I ought to tag those). Not sure if this is going to make sense if you haven't.

I actually had some thoughts about that scene because the rubber suits tripped me up, too. I think I found an interpretation that works, but let's first get to Ruby:

tldr: The rubber suits were meant to cause doubt about UNIT/aliens in Ruby because Ruby seemed brainwashed, and then when it became clear that Ruby had a direct line to Kate and was on first-name basis with her, Conrad flipped.

I think Conrad's sudden cruelty to Ruby actually makes more sense under the reading that he genuinely believed UNIT was an evil organisation who faked aliens to scare people so the people in power remain in power, than if you believe that he was a grifter who faked a weeks-long relationship for his podcast, got his friends in on that plan, sort of admitted this live on camera and then was mean to his fake girlfriend still live on cam, while his ThinkTank friends are in the background wearing rubber suits.

As long as you don't believe that plan had really been about exposing UNIT to the world, that is.

Grifter or genuine conspiracy theorist, this plan wouldn't make him - or Think Tank - look good, has some massive holes, and is too morally shitty even as ends-justifying-means for me to believe that he'd get a whole friend group in on it. Which is why I think that that - it being a big, planned stunt - was a spontaneous lie to save face after a prank went wrong. It worked as accidental PR because Kate made the huge mistake of arresting them, and that arrest got backlash and got more people thinking that aliens could be faked, but I don't think it was planned that way, because the plan, frankly, would be dumb. If they thought UNIT was faking aliens bc aliens aren't real, they'd have assumed UNIT wouldn't show up for other people's fake aliens. If they thought UNIT was legit - which assumes that whole friend group is grifters - they all chose to mess with the Men in Black for a stunt with uncertain payoff and very real risk of getting hurt, so that'd be a terrible grift.

What I think happened is, Conrad and his friends did play that prank on Ruby, but it was to disprove aliens to Ruby by showing her how easy it is to convincingly fake those. Same as when Harry Houdini went around showing people the mechanics of doing a "seance", except Houdini afaik didn't pretend to be a medium and went "sike! Do you see now how fake this is?" to vulnerable people who believed they were going to talk to their dead spouse, cause that would be a bit fucked up.

I assume Conrad was supposed to play innocent to the end since the goal was to make Ruby doubt in aliens/UNIT without breaking up the relationship. Which, again, still fucked up, esp the "I can be the Doctor for you" part (which again does not fit the Big Planned Stunt narrative), but what can you do to deprogram someone if you can't trust The System? Fuck knows what "the Doctor" gave her, or what normal doctors would do if she went in for therapy now that most people seem to believe UNIT's narrative.

Cause, look, going by conspiracist!Conrad's POV, Ruby would've seemed extremely brainwashed. Conrad came into contact with a substance, next thing he sees a monster, then sees Ruby complaining about getting the same goo on her and hears her talking about monsters (and having visited the Beatles). He sees "the Doctor" give her some other substance to keep the monster away. Conrad spent alot of time researching UNIT, going as far back as the Yetis at least (1967, different "Doctor", different "friends" of the Doctor; we know some of his friends are never seen again), and then weeks listening to Ruby about her Season 1 adventures, about Goblins and Space Babies and getting trapped in a bass and about Gods, and how the Doctor is wonderful but she feels traumatised by her experiences, and he nods along while looking disturbed, because she sounds delusional. Like, even by Doctor Who standards, Ruby's adventures were bonkers. Conrad then literally stops his friend from interrogating Ruby about UNIT because Ruby was so upset in that scene, which doesn't fit at all with the mean dickhead - whether grifter or deeply unethical "journalist" - he later seemed to be.

The dickhead only came out after it became clear to him that poor, apparently brainwashed Ruby had a direct line to UNIT, could get them to ride in guns blazing, and was on a first name basis with Kate Stuart. This, to a paranoid alien-disbeliever, would not have looked good. It would have looked like she'd been In On It with UNIT all along, and had been dating and lying to the leader of anti-UNIT ThinkTank to throw him off their scent. Was Conrad or ThinkTank actually so important that UNIT would try to honey trap them? Ofc not, but try telling a conspiracy theorist that. I mean, a part of him knows that he's not important enough for them to take notice ("You don't even remember me, do you?"), but little logical inconsistencies like that would get in the way of his delusions of grandeur. So I think his evil monologue was basically a "Aha, you think you were tricking me by lying to me, pretending to like me to spy on me, but I was actually tricking you to spy on you! I never liked you anyway!" But I think him telling his friend in the pub to leave Ruby alone shows that he had cared about her, I don't see another explanation for that scene, cause it fits neither the "fake dating as unethical journalism for a good cause" nor "lying grifter" theories. It looks like he saw Ruby's pain as genuine - albeit misinformed - and didn't want to add to it.

If we go with the grifter interpretation, otoh, I'm supposed to believe he faked a weeks-long relationship (even the early clumsiness and the awkward moment after "if you have time for a quick one"??? Masterful manipulation, that one /s) for more subs and that he assumed that admitting on cam to faking the relationship wouldn't lose him fans. I'm supposed to ignore that he didn't take a medicine that he allegedly believed would work as advertised (anti-vaxx grifters still get their shots), and that he stormed UNIT HQ by himself even though grifters wouldn't do that. I'd have to take the obviously forced confession as true, and hand-wave multiple signs that the guy is not quite right in the head ("Did I imagine that?" re: being in the Tardis). Oh, also, I'm supposed to side with his abusive Mum and take her view that her son keeps making shit up as proof that he was always a pathological liar, even though we saw that little Conrad was being truthful and we saw him bring proof because he was clearly used to not being believed. Which is not surprising, because he was a kid, growing up in the Whoniverse, before aliens were acknowledged to exist.

And don't even get me started on what else people see in him based on the "grifter" interpretation. (Well, tbf, Wish World is repressive and conservative, but that's bc it's meant to invoke doubt in the Doctor specifically, so he gets shoved in the closet and has a boring office job and has to listen as Conrad taunts him on his way to work that UNIT employee Jo Grant the Doctor's companions leave him and his adventures behind to get married and have babies. And yet, when the Doctor himself said "you'd be saving [Kate by marrying] her", it did not cause a slip for him, cause yeah, he does consider a domestic life safer, at least compared to some jobs).

[mountainmasc]