#pauline fossil

[dynoguard]

"And we're back." Linda DuPree smiled into the camera, doing her best to appear natural. "With LaBrea... Uh... Is that your first or last name?"

The camera panned over to Linda's "guest." At first glance she appeared human, though the illusion broke down quickly. The size was the immediate tip-off: nine feet tall, with chalk-white skin and half-feline features.

From her short muzzle a pair of dagger like fangs dipped to just under her jaw. She "wore" an evening gown and opera gloves made of viscous liquid tar, the same material that formed an impossible mane upon her head.

The liquid moved and shifted with a life of its own, and a tendril of her floor-length "tresses" was presently dancing behind Linda like an agitated cobra, dripping rivulets of shimmering black oil that flowed along the ground back into her dress.

"Just LaBrea." Her voice carried an odd mix of valley girl inflection and a Hollywood Count Dracula accent, somehow unimpeded by her tusk-like fangs. "Thank you for asking. And Linda, can I just say that I am so thankful that you had little old me on your show, to get to know all the good people at home?"

"Thank, yes, I would like to-" Linda paused, and gathered herself. "I'd like to thank you, very much, LaBrea, for allowing the paramedics to give Sarah and Pauline transfusions."

"They were deliciously boring, dahling." She smiled. "Not like you. So. What do you want to ask me?"

"Well, what are you?" Linda winced. "Was that rude? I-"

"No, Dahling, you're just timid, frightened, like a little mouse. I like you." LaBrea tapped her chin, the slick mass of tar on her head shifted into a raised secretarial bun, a pair of glasses frames forming on her face, evoking a 'thoughtful' look by way of a fashion photo shoot.

"I'm a sabertooth tigress by death, a vampire professionally, an actress by calling and a Fossil Ghoul in general."

"Lets talk about that last one."

"Oh, acting! I don't have representation yet, but you have seen me on the news! And now here! On the hostage episode of The Squadt with Linda, Sarah, Pauline, and the husk formerly known as Darla!" She made an old fashioned 'call me' gesture into the camera with her tar-dripping claws.

"She'll be fine. I mean... not psychologically, but in a few categories I'm sure."

"I meant lets talk about the Fossil Ghouls. What does that mean?"

"Okay, so, like, I'm sure you've heard all kinds of things from the DynoGuard and their little juicebox pals, no offense."

"None taken."

"Wasn't a request. Like I was saying. You've heard that we're some kind of alien species that feeds on fear that's come here to bring an age of suffering and ultimately extinction upon you all. And I just want to let everyone know that couldn't be further from the truth."

"I, for one am glad to hear tha-"

"Yeah, species implies we reproduce and create life like mortals, which is downright offensive. Also, we feed on all forms of evil that you both commit and suffer, not just fear."

"So what are you then?"

"I'm the bones of a sabertooth cat, a whole lot of tar, a mass of your species superstitions, fears, and desires brought to life with a dark heart."

"A Dark Heart... is that metaphorical-?"

LaBrea plunged a hand into the tar at her hip, digging around in it as it were a pocket, before withdrawing a pulsing crystal the size of a cantaloupe. It was shaped like a human heart, carved crudely out of a sickly amber-yellow crystal. Inside, Linda could see a shadow moving around like a bug in a jar.

"This is a dark heart. Made form the ichor of Apothis herself, and holding a poor little soul that was too wicked to get fully digested after the master's last stop." LaBrea turned to the heart and its tiny shadow. "Who wasn't digested? You weren't, you weren't digested were you? You little atrocity you!"

Linda flinched as the shadow slammed itself against the wall of the heart nearest to her. She couldn't remember what it looked like, only that it had many teeth and claws it ought not to have, and was scrabbling furiously at the crystal in a futile attempt at escape. The camera did not pick up the finer details.

"You need a lot of evil, a lot of entroplasm, to make a little monster like this big and strong enough to be a real Fossil Ghoul." LaBrea said. "So you see, by letting us run roughshod over your world, you're actually helping us thrive. Isn't that fun?"

"You mentioned Apothis... That's the meteor that killed the dinosaurs?"

"Oh sweet little mouse! Apothis comes for everyone eventually. As a civilization gets big, and gets smart, its capacity to both inflict and experience evil swells. And when you're ripe, the monster meteor herself comes to feast, leaving a mass extinction in her wake. Before moving to the next star to do it, and the next, coming back around when your world has a new set of annoying talking matter that knows how to scream and mean it."

LaBrea shook herself from her ravings and regained her perky, if uncanny, posture. "Annoying talking matter and you, Linda. We're besties. Obviously!"

"How, how many times has Apothis done this?"

"To Earth? More than a couple by a few, dahling." LaBrea. "The lizards were the only ones to do something about it, and we'll have them dealt with soon."

"Why are you telling us this?" Linda asked.

"Because, dahling, it won't help. Not knowing, not begging, not even worshiping me." She tilted her head and smiled. Both the tilt and smile went farther than they ought. "Not that you shouldn't do all three anyway. They're fun!"

Linda blinked, unsure of how to respond.

"I mean fun for me." LaBrea grinned into the camera, then took a long, low inhale through her nose. As she did, Linda saw tendrils of smoke roiling from the cameras, the audience, and even herself, rushing into the creature's oddly petite nostrils. The smoke was an impossibly dark and deep purple and it smelled of burning decay.

She could taste the wisps flowing out of her mouth. They tasted like her divorce, her broken leg, her father's funeral-

"Don't turn that dial." LaBrea said in a mocking parody of Darla's voice. "Some of us will be right back after a message from these sponsors."

[fullibooked]

A family is sometimes a mum, dad, and two little chillens. A family is sometimes one parent holding all the kids hands. And sometimes a family is some old fossil hunter, his niece, a nanny, three randomly adopted babies, and the strangers that lodge in their house! If it's the latter, then you're in for some gentle adventures of three girls whose names all start with P. (Not Charmed, this is a different one). The dances, the plays, the plans, and the vows. Noel Streatfield knew what she was about when she wrote these very soft stories. It was a nostalgic trip for me down the lane of a show I once watched. Reminded me of the works of Edith Nesbit and Elizabeth Enright. If you need something just precious, then Pauline, Petrova, and Posy are the posse for you.

[pers-books]

National Theatre announces complete casting for Ballet Shoes – including Pearl Mackie

The much-loved novel by Noel Streatfeild heads to the venue

Pearl Mackie for the National Theatre.

Noel Streatfeild’s best-selling book Ballet Shoes will be adapted for the stage by Kendall Feaver (The Almighty Sometimes) – and complete casting has been revealed.

The show will open on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage from 23 November 2024, with the festive family show directed by Katy Rudd, who returns to the National Theatre following her acclaimed production of The Ocean at the End of the Lane. 

The piece follows three adopted sisters living in a crumbling house, learning to forge a future while keeping their family together.

As already revealed, appearing are Eryck Brahmania (ensemble), Cordelia Braithwaite (ensemble), Michelle Cornelius (ensemble), Sonya Cullingford (Winifred), Jenny Galloway (Nana), Courtney George (ensemble), Georges Hann (ensemble), Nadine Higgin (Theo Dane), Helena Lymbery (Doctor Jakes), Xolisweh Ana Richards (Ballerina), Sid Sagar (Jayan Saravanan), Grace Saif (Pauline Fossil), Justin Salinger (GUM) and Daisy Sequerra (Posy Fossil).

Joining them are Stacy Abalogun (ensemble), Yanexi Enriquez (Petrova Fossil), Philip Labey (ensemble), Katie Lee (on-stage swing), Sharol Mackenzie (ensemble), Pearl Mackie (Sylvia), Nuwan Hugh Perera (ensemble), and Katie Singh (ensemble).

Alongside Rudd’s direction, the show’s creative team includes set designer Frankie Bradshaw, costume designer Samuel Wyer, choreographer Ellen Kane, composer Asaf Zohar, dance arrangements and orchestrations Gavin Sutherland, lighting designer Paule Constable, sound designer Ian Dickinson for Autograph, video designer Ash J Woodward, casting director Bryony Jarvis-Taylor, dialect coach Penny Dyer, voice coaches Cathleen McCarron and Tamsin Newlands, associate choreographer Jonathan Goddard and staff director Aaliyah Mckay.

(Two theatre projects for Who alums in one day! Nice!)

[fixomnia-scribble]

OHHH I would have loved to have known you, Noel.

She was the awkward, plainish middle daughter in between two pretty, happily normal sisters who got all the positive attention - or at least so it seemed to her. Never satisfied with her need to question, always chafing in the confines of the ill-equipped, run-down Victorian vicarages she was raised in, but with a few champions in her life who saw her writing and acting talents early on.

She went on to write her personality and sense of alienation into the character of brainy, difficult* Petrova Fossil, and loosely sketched in her sisters as Pauline and Posy. Petrova was the one I always wanted to chat with, about Meccano sets and flying planes, and how it didn't make sense to be plunked into dance classes when it was clear from age six that you were never going to fit in there.

* And extremely queer-coded - also a slice of real life

Lewis Baumer. Noel Streatfeild. 1926. Oil on canvas. National Portrait Gallery, London.

[bookclub4m]

Episode 211 - Spring Media Update 2025

It’s episode 211 and we’re talking about books and other media we’ve enjoyed recently! We discuss early internet chatrooms, shuttlecocks, haunted dolls, what constitutes a “banger”, and more!

You can download the podcast directly, find it on Libsyn, or get it through Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast delivery system.

In this episode

Anna Ferri | Meghan Whyte | Matthew Murray 🦇 | Jam Edwards

What We’re Into:

Anna

Acid West by Joshua Wheeler

Two Point Museum

Trailer

R.E.P.O. || Crossing the Streams

R.E.P.O. on Stream

Matthew

Never a Sidekick: Exploring the Dynamic History of Batgirl by Tim Hanley

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

7 Weirdest Yakuza: Like a Dragon Quests That Were Bizarre Even by Yakuza Standards

Mantracks: a True Story of Fake Fossils

Jam

WEBFISHING

Trailer

Murdle Volume 1 by G.T. Karber

RuPaul’s Drag Race adjacent media

Runnereye (YouTube)

Drag Her (podcast)

UpUntil Dawn (YouTube)

I Got Dr*nk and Built the Lego Tuxedo Cat (Crashout Included)

Crystal Envy & Lexi Love’s “Alter Ego” Lip Sync

Arrietty & Lydia B Kollins’ “Boogie Wonderland” Lip Sync

Meghan

Hex by Thomas Olde Heuvelt

Badminton

Pilou

Meeting Infinity and Infinity Wars (short story collections)

Other Media We Mentioned

Didi (film)

Doechii - Denial is a River

Links, Articles, and Things

RA in a Day

folio - 019 - immanence 01 - with jam edwards & garbageface aka gnostic front aka karol orzechowski

Spaceport America

15 Fairy Tales, Fables, Legends, Myths, and Folklore books by BIPOC Authors:

Every month Book Club for Masochists: A Readers’ Advisory Podcast chooses a genre at random and we read and discuss books from that genre. We also put together book lists for each episode/genre that feature works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Colour) authors. All of the lists can be found here.

Women Wide Awake: Stories, Sculptures and Poems From Sindhi Folklore by  Nimra Bandukwala and Manahil Bandukwala

Blue Bamboo: Japanese Tales of Fantasy and Romance by Osamu Dazai, translated by Ralph F. McCarthy

The Annotated African American Folktales by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Maria Tatar

Blackberry Blue: And Other Fairy Tales by Jamila Gavin

Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales by Virginia Hamilton, illustrated by Diane Dillon and Leo Dillon

The Dragon Slayer: Folktales From Latin America by Jamie Hernandez

Laughing with the Trickster: On Sex, Death, and Accordions by Tomson Highway

Legends of Vancouver by E. Pauline Johnson

Living Ghosts & Mischievous Monsters: Chilling American Indian Stories by Dan SaSuWeh Jones, illustrated by Weshoyot Alvitre

An Introduction to Yōkai Culture: Monsters, Ghosts, and Outsiders in Japanese History by Komatsu Kazuhiko, translated by Matt Alt and Hiroko Yoda

Rediscovering Turtle Island: a First Peoples' Account of the Sacred Geography of America by Taylor Keen

Night Stories: Folktales From Latin America by Liniers

Mangoes, Mischief, and Tales of Friendship: Stories From India by Chitra Soundar, illustrated by Uma Krishnaswamy

Vietnamese Folktales for Children: Stories of Adventure and Wonder in Vietnamese and English by Phuoc Thi Minh Tran, illustrated by Dong Nguyen and Hop Thi Nguyen

The Little Hummingbird by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Give us feedback!

Fill out the form to ask for a recommendation or suggest a genre or title for us to read!

Check out our Tumblr, join our Discord Server, or send us an email!

Join us again on Tuesday, May 6th when we’ll be discussing the genre/topic of Linguistics and Language!

Then on Tuesday, June 3rd we’ll be discussing “Found Books,” that is books that we’ve found in public little free libraries, book exchanges, and book swaps.

[armydreamerr]

ranking mario odyssey kingdoms

17. dark side. BOOOOO tomato tomato. i don’t like the broodals fights and i certainly don’t like playing them again in moon gravity. also i don’t like the hint art moons. you have to go to OTHER KINGDOMS to get them! pain in my ass

16. cloud kingdom. i mean its allright. the main thing i like here is that the moons are easy to get. the design is boring though.

15. mushroom kingdom. i like the boss battle rematches and how easy it is to get the purple coins. and super mario 64 references. i don’t like playing as yoshi. his controls SUCK

14. ruined kingdom. again it has like 4 moons all of which are easy to get. i actually do really like the design of this one though. should’ve been a full size kingdom

13. cap kingdom. i mean it’s allright. very easy to get every collectible which i like. the scenery is ok.

12 lost kingdom. it’s ok. it’s fine. the moons are fun to get and stuff. the scenery sucks though. i hate the colour palette. why bro why. purple and brown has gotta be the worst colour combo ever

11. bowser’s kingdom. i don’t even enjoy this kingdom bro i don’t like the main capture i don’t like the layout i don’t like anything. i also don’t like how when you’re at this stage in the game they won’t let you leave the kingdom and come back later. that used to make me cry in frustration as a kid

10. darker side. not that much fun as a kingdom… but i have a toxic homoerotic rivalry with it and despite beating odyssey like 3 times, i have actually never beaten the darker side. i also like how the moon is called “long journey’s end.” i will cry

9. moon kingdom. i spent SO much time playing this one in my current play through. i literally don’t even think i completed it yet i think i still need a few purple coins. it’s kind of flipping boring? it’s so fun in the story though. like the whole wedding arc is great

8. snow kingdom. i LOVE shiveria and j love the challenges you have to complete before racing. i hate the stupid race. and the fact that there are like FIVE MOONS centred around that stupid race?? fuck off fuck off fuck off

7. cascade kingdom. breathtaking scenery lowkey. honestly i don’t know why but this kingdom defines odyssey to me like this is what i think of when i think of mario odyssey. the waterfall with the triceratops fossil is just. chefs kiss. wish this kingdom was bigger. also i don’t think the moons are very fun to get.

6. sand kingdom. so big but SUCH a nothing burger. so much open space. it’s not that fun to just roll mario around the desert. it’s this high in the list because a ton of moons are really fun to get and i looove the story arc with the binding band.

5. lake kingdom. SO GORGEOUS!!!! seriously this shit is great. i also actually like that it’s small because it’s like a little palette cleanser between sand and wooded. i always choose lake first when i play. also. the lochladies are totally a lesbian society right like right

4. metro kingdom. i actually find this one kinda underwhelming considering its size and the amount of moons available but its high up on the list because the story arc is SO FUCKING GOOD. let mario go to another festival. and bring back mayor pauline awooooga

3. luncheon kingdom. i love the pink magma the fork guys the lava bubble the fuckass pot of soup the slab of meat i love everything in this kingdom. it’s all so stupid but sooo wonderful. actually every moon in this kingdom is fun to get

2. seaside kingdom. there is so much to explore it feels never ending. i will genuinely be sad when i get all the moons and purple coins in this kingdom. i’ve beaten odyssey multiple times and i still find stuff i had no idea existed in this kingdom. i also fucking love water levels

1. wooded kingdom. what can i really say. first of all the sheer size of this kingdom makes me feel like im constantly discovering new stuff. also i love the steampunk environment the blending of machinery with vegetation and freshwater aughhf i wanna live here

[needlesandnilbogs]

okay but some days I really am like two out of the three fossil sisters (not pauline but the other two lol)

[gorlamiusw]

Dead Planet

 For one of our lectures, guest speaker Pauline Bourdon came in to talk to us about climate change and how we and others can make a difference. The talk started with a video that shows other parts of the world that have had a great negative impact from climate change. The talk continued with Pauline telling us how people help with securing our beautiful world and reduce the amount of fossil fuel and rubbish that causes the world to change. The talk then opened to audiences discussing these issues and how changes could be made with the first unsurprising question being, “how can we help?” this was met with what I thought was quite controversial. “grow your own food” was what we were given and considering most people in that room bar 1 or 2 don’t own a garden but what I thought was just one of many suggestions turned out to be one suggestion which started a debate of how we are told by Pauline “we are responsible for our future” and we “should be doing whatever we can” was hypocritical and a little insulting since climate change has been around for a long time and that everyone else is just as responsible as people who have not been around long. The question I would ask is why is climate change placed and pressured on us when the rest of the world and people before us should be just as responsible? This world is all of our home and should not be placed on the younger generations to be responsible for the world becoming worse.

[just-your-average-aroace-bitch]

Characters that I belive are aroace (I don’t care about what their authors say, they are aroace for me):

Nico di Angelo (PJO)

All of the Hunters of Artemis (PJO)

Reyna Avila Ramirez Arellano (PJO)

Rachel Elizabeth Dare (PJO)

The Ghost (TCP)

Manon Blackbeak(?) (TOG)

Luna Lovegood (Harry Potter)

Johanna Mason (Hunger Games)

Haymitch Abernathy (Hunger Games)

Effie Trinket (Hunger Games)

Lucien Vanserra (ACOTAR)

Elain Archeron (ACOTAR)

Chaol Westfall (TOG)

Dorian Havilliard (TOG)

Newt (TMR)

Brenda (TMR)

Tam Song (KOTLC)

Biana Vacker (KOTLC)

Elysian <- I don’t even know her but I think she gives off a strong aroace vibe (KOTLC)

Lady Gisela <- she’s married but she only married him because he’s the strongest empath (KOTLC)

Pauline Fossil (Ballet Shoes)

Petrova Fossil (Ballet Shoes)

Posy Fossil (Ballet Shoes)

[kammartinez]

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I wanted to write a poem about how the extreme heat of the ocean is breaking my heart, but the whales beat me to it. In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively, they stranded themselves on the shore. As soon as they lost the support of the water, their chest walls crushed their internal organs. They literally broke their hearts. Choreographed under helicopter cameras.

I want to write a poem about how capitalism is a sinking ship and how the extreme wealth-hoarding and extractive polluting systems that benefit a few billionaires are destroying our planet and killing us all. But the orcas beat me to it. Off the Iberian coast of Europe, the orcas collaborated and taught each other how to sink the yachts of the superrich. They literally sank the boats. While Twitter cheered.

The sinking ship is no longer a metaphor. The broken heart is no longer a metaphor. Who needs a metaphor in times as hot and blunt as ours? Let’s make it plain.

Marine mammals have been my poetry teachers for several years now. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, I documented my awe and wonder at how these animals do, with grace, what I flail at every day, breathing in the unbreathable circumstances of global racial capital, racist sexist ableist systemic violence.

Living on a planet with rapidly rising ocean levels, it seems obvious to me that we should pay attention to our closest relatives in the sea. But now sea lions, whales, and other marine mammals are leaving the ocean, confronting beachgoers and boaters, making themselves impossible to ignore.

My theory? With a boost from our faster communication technology and crowdsourced worldwide media to spread the news, marine mammals are coming up out of the ocean, as they have been for decades, to tell us it’s too damn hot. And why do we matter so much? Why should we be so arrogant as to assume marine mammals are telling us anything? The answer is in the question: because it’s our fault.

You know this already. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels, disproportionately burned by corporations and first-world consumers, are drastically heating the planet, causing extreme weather events, raising the temperature of the ocean and the water levels and impacting every species that has adapted to what author Jeff Goodell calls “the Goldilocks zone” of survivable temperatures in his book The Heat Will Kill You First, published last month. Alarmingly, a study this summer estimated a 95 percent chance that the entire system of currents that keep the Atlantic Ocean and every ecosystem it touches in relative balance (i.e., the Gulf Stream and other currents) will collapse as soon as 2025. Drastically. Extreme. Alarmingly. I have to use adverbs and adjectives to emphasize what I am saying here because I haven’t learned yet how to break my Black heart a hundredfold on a beach where everyone can see it. I haven’t taught my friends and family to intentionally sink the most useless ships.

Since what I have to offer are words, I will continue to write in extremes. For example, in Undrowned I suggested that because of the impact of rising temperatures on the Gulf Stream, we are living on a menopausal planet. The whole Earth is going through what my elders cryptically called “the change.” In this midst of this heat wave, which has led to at least one of my cherished Black feminist elders spending a night in the emergency room, I’m even more convinced.

Let me be clear: “Living on a menopausal planet” does not mean the extreme heat we are experiencing is just a natural part of Earth’s life cycle, as climate-change deniers claim. The volatile temperatures we are experiencing are a result of toxic human actions—just like the hot flashes experienced by menopausal people (many women, many gender-expansive people, anyone who has ever had a uterus or ovaries or stewarded the hormone estrogen) may be impacted by the prevalence of hormone-injected animals and processed food in our diets.

Yesterday, my big-sister mentor, the menopause expert and reproductive justice advocate Omisade Burney-Scott, taught me that the heat menopausal people experience can also be impacted by the long-studied relationship between estrogen and cortisol, the stress hormone; and that for oppressed groups of people—who, as a study at Yale recently confirmed, experience higher cortisol levels triggered by systemic violence against themselves and their communities—volatile body temperatures and other menopause systems can be heightened. The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation has confirmed that women of color are experiencing more volatile hot flashes because of these and other factors. I wonder if the “climate anxiety” we are collectively experiencing is increasing cortisol levels, too. Scientific studies will have to work that out. If the heat doesn’t kill us first.

Whereas menopause—in which a body moves beyond a central need for estrogen—is natural, inevitable, volatile symptoms like extreme hot flashes actually are not. Similarly, while change is inevitable for this planet and all life, the heat we are now experiencing is not. It is the result of toxic systems that are putting stress on every one of Earth’s ecosystems at the same time.

I think menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis, and not only because I am a Black woman in my early 40s with menopause in my imminent future. It is also because our most effective poets, the whales, are the other beings on Earth who also experience menopause. Orcas and pilot whales specifically are two of the four species of toothed whales in which the scientific community has identified and studied menopause. (Note that pilot whale studies have focused on the short-finned pilot whales who live in shallow water—and have also performed mass strandings over the past decade—while the long-finned pilot whales who live in deeper water have mostly evaded scientific study. And good for them!)

Orca and pilot whale communities have both also demonstrated that they follow the leadership of what even the scientist poets call “matriarchs,” the elder mothers, past their years of possibly giving birth. Kate Sprogis, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia, theorized that it may have been that the 97 long-finned pilot whales who died on the beach followed a grandmother to shore. What if instead of imagining they died because of her mistake, we imagine they participated in her protest? Biologists keeping track of the orcas who are sinking boats trace the training practice to White Gladis, an orca grandmother. Is it possible these whale leaders learned what they learned, decided what they decided, taught what they taught during menopause? And if so, so what?

Omisade Burney-Scott suggests menopause is a ceremony, a liminal space, a space of possibility. “During liminal periods of transformation,” she writes, “social hierarchies may be reversed or even temporarily dissolved. The constancy of cultural traditions can become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.”

I think about Fannie Lou Hamer, victim of a forced hysterectomy, and Ella Baker in her wise years creating the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and audaciously pushing forward a civil rights agenda in the center of white supremacist violence in the 1960s. I think about Harriet Tubman’s audacity; I think about the upheaval caused by Dominican labor activist Mamá Tingó’s sugar plantation strikes. What did experiencing a drastic change in their bodies teach these community mothers about the possibility of change on the scale of our entire society?

What if we live on a menopausal planet, where underneath this heat, we are supposed to be learning something about change? What if this is where and when we collectively find the wisdom and maturity that comes from letting go of the story about what we are producing, and moving to the eldership vision of what is sustainable for all of us collectively? What if menopause is the greatest undersung gift? The experience that grants us a multigenerational, multi-species consciousness we need. And what are the words that could reach you and get you to join me in trusting the bravest among us, leaders accountable to multiple generations, who have lived long enough to know what is worth risking and when to risk it? Where is my maturity? When will I stop mistaking the excess heat of a toxic system of relations for love? Where else in my life is heat a warning? How can we stop dissociating from what is happening to our largest body, this planet? Is that your chest collapsing or the rainforest burning? What am I sacrificing to try to earn a premium spot on a sinking ship? Is that your breaking heart or an iceberg shattering? And how cool would it be if none of this were a metaphorical? Oh, relief to your furrowed brow, peace to your steaming blowhole. How cool would it be if we followed our teachers and lived what love requires?

[kamreadsandrecs]

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs

I wanted to write a poem about how the extreme heat of the ocean is breaking my heart, but the whales beat me to it. In late July, almost 100 long-finned pilot whales left the deep, usually cold waters where they live—so deep, so cold that scientists have barely been able to study them. Together they came to the coast of western Australia and huddled into a massive heart shape (if your heart were shaped like 100 black whales, like mine is). Then, collectively, they stranded themselves on the shore. As soon as they lost the support of the water, their chest walls crushed their internal organs. They literally broke their hearts. Choreographed under helicopter cameras.

I want to write a poem about how capitalism is a sinking ship and how the extreme wealth-hoarding and extractive polluting systems that benefit a few billionaires are destroying our planet and killing us all. But the orcas beat me to it. Off the Iberian coast of Europe, the orcas collaborated and taught each other how to sink the yachts of the superrich. They literally sank the boats. While Twitter cheered.

The sinking ship is no longer a metaphor. The broken heart is no longer a metaphor. Who needs a metaphor in times as hot and blunt as ours? Let’s make it plain.

Marine mammals have been my poetry teachers for several years now. In Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons From Marine Mammals, I documented my awe and wonder at how these animals do, with grace, what I flail at every day, breathing in the unbreathable circumstances of global racial capital, racist sexist ableist systemic violence.

Living on a planet with rapidly rising ocean levels, it seems obvious to me that we should pay attention to our closest relatives in the sea. But now sea lions, whales, and other marine mammals are leaving the ocean, confronting beachgoers and boaters, making themselves impossible to ignore.

My theory? With a boost from our faster communication technology and crowdsourced worldwide media to spread the news, marine mammals are coming up out of the ocean, as they have been for decades, to tell us it’s too damn hot. And why do we matter so much? Why should we be so arrogant as to assume marine mammals are telling us anything? The answer is in the question: because it’s our fault.

You know this already. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels, disproportionately burned by corporations and first-world consumers, are drastically heating the planet, causing extreme weather events, raising the temperature of the ocean and the water levels and impacting every species that has adapted to what author Jeff Goodell calls “the Goldilocks zone” of survivable temperatures in his book The Heat Will Kill You First, published last month. Alarmingly, a study this summer estimated a 95 percent chance that the entire system of currents that keep the Atlantic Ocean and every ecosystem it touches in relative balance (i.e., the Gulf Stream and other currents) will collapse as soon as 2025. Drastically. Extreme. Alarmingly. I have to use adverbs and adjectives to emphasize what I am saying here because I haven’t learned yet how to break my Black heart a hundredfold on a beach where everyone can see it. I haven’t taught my friends and family to intentionally sink the most useless ships.

Since what I have to offer are words, I will continue to write in extremes. For example, in Undrowned I suggested that because of the impact of rising temperatures on the Gulf Stream, we are living on a menopausal planet. The whole Earth is going through what my elders cryptically called “the change.” In this midst of this heat wave, which has led to at least one of my cherished Black feminist elders spending a night in the emergency room, I’m even more convinced.

Let me be clear: “Living on a menopausal planet” does not mean the extreme heat we are experiencing is just a natural part of Earth’s life cycle, as climate-change deniers claim. The volatile temperatures we are experiencing are a result of toxic human actions—just like the hot flashes experienced by menopausal people (many women, many gender-expansive people, anyone who has ever had a uterus or ovaries or stewarded the hormone estrogen) may be impacted by the prevalence of hormone-injected animals and processed food in our diets.

Yesterday, my big-sister mentor, the menopause expert and reproductive justice advocate Omisade Burney-Scott, taught me that the heat menopausal people experience can also be impacted by the long-studied relationship between estrogen and cortisol, the stress hormone; and that for oppressed groups of people—who, as a study at Yale recently confirmed, experience higher cortisol levels triggered by systemic violence against themselves and their communities—volatile body temperatures and other menopause systems can be heightened. The Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation has confirmed that women of color are experiencing more volatile hot flashes because of these and other factors. I wonder if the “climate anxiety” we are collectively experiencing is increasing cortisol levels, too. Scientific studies will have to work that out. If the heat doesn’t kill us first.

Whereas menopause—in which a body moves beyond a central need for estrogen—is natural, inevitable, volatile symptoms like extreme hot flashes actually are not. Similarly, while change is inevitable for this planet and all life, the heat we are now experiencing is not. It is the result of toxic systems that are putting stress on every one of Earth’s ecosystems at the same time.

I think menopause is a powerful lens through which to look at this hot planetary crisis, and not only because I am a Black woman in my early 40s with menopause in my imminent future. It is also because our most effective poets, the whales, are the other beings on Earth who also experience menopause. Orcas and pilot whales specifically are two of the four species of toothed whales in which the scientific community has identified and studied menopause. (Note that pilot whale studies have focused on the short-finned pilot whales who live in shallow water—and have also performed mass strandings over the past decade—while the long-finned pilot whales who live in deeper water have mostly evaded scientific study. And good for them!)

Orca and pilot whale communities have both also demonstrated that they follow the leadership of what even the scientist poets call “matriarchs,” the elder mothers, past their years of possibly giving birth. Kate Sprogis, a marine biologist at the University of Western Australia, theorized that it may have been that the 97 long-finned pilot whales who died on the beach followed a grandmother to shore. What if instead of imagining they died because of her mistake, we imagine they participated in her protest? Biologists keeping track of the orcas who are sinking boats trace the training practice to White Gladis, an orca grandmother. Is it possible these whale leaders learned what they learned, decided what they decided, taught what they taught during menopause? And if so, so what?

Omisade Burney-Scott suggests menopause is a ceremony, a liminal space, a space of possibility. “During liminal periods of transformation,” she writes, “social hierarchies may be reversed or even temporarily dissolved. The constancy of cultural traditions can become uncertain, and future outcomes once taken for granted may be thrown into doubt.”

I think about Fannie Lou Hamer, victim of a forced hysterectomy, and Ella Baker in her wise years creating the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and audaciously pushing forward a civil rights agenda in the center of white supremacist violence in the 1960s. I think about Harriet Tubman’s audacity; I think about the upheaval caused by Dominican labor activist Mamá Tingó’s sugar plantation strikes. What did experiencing a drastic change in their bodies teach these community mothers about the possibility of change on the scale of our entire society?

What if we live on a menopausal planet, where underneath this heat, we are supposed to be learning something about change? What if this is where and when we collectively find the wisdom and maturity that comes from letting go of the story about what we are producing, and moving to the eldership vision of what is sustainable for all of us collectively? What if menopause is the greatest undersung gift? The experience that grants us a multigenerational, multi-species consciousness we need. And what are the words that could reach you and get you to join me in trusting the bravest among us, leaders accountable to multiple generations, who have lived long enough to know what is worth risking and when to risk it? Where is my maturity? When will I stop mistaking the excess heat of a toxic system of relations for love? Where else in my life is heat a warning? How can we stop dissociating from what is happening to our largest body, this planet? Is that your chest collapsing or the rainforest burning? What am I sacrificing to try to earn a premium spot on a sinking ship? Is that your breaking heart or an iceberg shattering? And how cool would it be if none of this were a metaphorical? Oh, relief to your furrowed brow, peace to your steaming blowhole. How cool would it be if we followed our teachers and lived what love requires?

[entomoblog]

Oligoptilomera luberonensis, nouveau genre, nouvelle espèce, premier représentant fossile d'une sous-famille de punaises d'eau, vient d'être décrit et illustré à partir de l'Oligocène de Murs (Vauc...

The first fossil representative of the water strider subfamily Ptilomerinae (Heteroptera: Gerromorpha: Gerridae) in the Oligocene paleolake of Murs (southern France) with some palaeoecological considerations

André NEL, Bastien MENNECART, Tamara SPASOJEVIC, Alexandra VIERTLER, Olivier MARIDET, Loïc COSTEUR, Romain GARROUSTE & Pauline COSTER en European Journal of Taxonomy 888 (124) - Pages 124-136 Publié le 15 août 2023 Oligoptilomera luberonensis gen. et sp. nov., first fossil representative of the gerrid subfamily Ptilomerinae, is described and figured from the Oligocene of Murs (Vaucluse, Southern France).

  Extant Ptilomerinae live in streams in warm climates, of the Indo-Malaysian, eastern Palaearctic, and Papouan regions. The discovery of this Oligocene French Ptilomerinae is in accordance with the putative age of the subfamily, at least older than the Eocene, and with the Indo-Malaysian affinities previously recorded for some other insects from the Oligocene of France.

  The two insect assemblages of Murs and Céreste are compared and the differences discussed. Although of similar ages, that from Murs was possibly corresponding to a more shallow water paleolake than that of Céreste.

[mockscreens]

hi, can you make lockscreens from the movie ballet shoes, please? thanks! ♡

it was hard for me to find pictures of this movie, but i hope you'll like it!

please like/reblog if you save!

my lockscreens masterlist

[emmaxpics]

[inbeautiful-trauma]

Characters Who Define Me: Part 10

Image: Thomasin (The VVitch), Alyssa (The End of The F**ing Wolrd), Romana (Doctor Who/Galifrey/Doctor Who EU), Rose Tico (Star Was), Pauline Fossil (Ballet Shoes), Kate Messner (Everything Sucks!), Posy Fossil (Ballet Shoes), Diana Barry (Anne WIth An E), & Daenerys Targaryen (Game of Thrones)

[sternennebel2001]

Petrova Fossil from Ballet Shoes

Pictures not mine