#population fits

[mapsontheweb]

NYC, LA, & Chicago Metro Populations Visualized

[dredgesnails]

stardew valley au where joel and skizz are new residents to pelican town (hermit town?). joel just inherited a large farm from his late grandfather and skizz is moving in with his old friend after reconnecting with him and wanting a fresh start. and the townspeople are like, kinda weird.

bdubs is fine enough - he’s a sweet man with a fun personality and he’s the local builder, but it’s almost frightening how fast he constructs new buildings when joel needs them. pearl, their resident postmaster, is also pretty normal other than the fact that skizz never seems to be awake early enough to catch her delivering mail. scar is lovely but he’s never available when joel wants another chicken. the mayor, xisuma, is pleasant too, if a little eccentric at times, but he doesn’t really seem to do much in town.

for the most part, skizz is settling in well. he’s moved in with impulse, who runs the local blacksmith in town, and he gets along well with most of the local townspeople. he’s started spending his evenings at the local saloon listening to ren regale the patrons with fantastical tales while he and stress serve up food and drinks, and he finds himself growing close with cleo, the local sculptor. he even gets a new wardrobe from hypno free of charge, and sometimes helps cub out with his totally scientific studies and creations.

skizz also joins forces with beef (who helps to supply the local general store that xb and keralis run) in terrorising the local manager of the corporate chain grocery store that no one likes. doc is a terrible manager but would make a fun supervillain (according to joe hills, the bookseller who appears once in a blue moon but seems to know doc more than anyone in town).

joel, on the other hand, seems to only be interacting with the strangest residents in town. he discovers the adventurer’s guild after only a couple weeks, and is only somewhat irritated by iskall’s refusal to pronounce his name correctly. false promises to give him prizes if he can kill enough monsters, which is not something joel had expected to be doing when he pictured farm life, but here he is. he stumbles upon a travelling cart one day, and the man inside insists he’s a knight from a faraway land, that he risked his life to make it all the way here to sell his wares. it’s all stuff joel can get cheaper elsewhere.

he’s pretty sure the local doctor has no real medical training, but then he passes out while fighting monsters and he wakes up completely fine, so zedaph probably knows what he’s doing. maybe. when joel isn’t passing out he sometimes makes trips to the library-slash-museum, which is probably almost completely empty because mumbo, who begs joel for anything to display, looks like he’s never fought a duggie in his life. eventually mumbo gives joel a key to the sewers, which are way cooler than they have any right to be, and that’s where he finds jevin’s secret sewer shop. jevin lives in town. he just also has a shop hidden underground. joel has stopped asking questions by now.

and then there are the three who live by the beach. etho spends most of his time tinkering around the fishing hut or hovering around bdubs, but sometimes he drives the bus to the desert. only sometimes. there might be something under his mask. no one knows for sure. gem runs the fish shop most days and she claims she’s a sailor, but joel has never seen a single working boat around despite all the ocean. she can also hold her breath underwater for an uncannily long amount of time, like, scarily so, and will sometimes disappear for a few days and return with an abundance of treasures. joel has never seen her leave by boat. grian fishes a lot and runs the shop when gem can’t, and he sometimes talks as though the sea can speak to him. skizz has caught him staring into space for extended periods of time. one time he waded into the water and just stood there, head down, muttering to himself.

apparently there used to be a lighthouse but “it’s gone now”. gem says if they ask bdubs nicely enough maybe they can build another one, but she and grian are banned from build requests after the last incident with their pet snails (joel has never seen the snails, but scar complains about them enough to convince him they’re real).

there also might be some kind of wizard who lives in the creepy tower in the woods. skizz has heard he’s the one who helps maintain the power in the valley, and joel’s convinced he hallucinated seeing him once until he recieves a letter from the wizard himself, and visits him only to find that the strange fire-creature he saw that one time was, in fact, tango, who is human for the most part, he just sets himself on fire sometimes.

[canisalbus]

met the most machete-looking, wet bug eyed, large eared and thoroughly anxious pup tonight. he hid under a chair

.

[maironsbigboobs]

re: elf servants

I think generally there are servants in royal/noble households simply for practical reasons and they generally fall into 2 categories: specialised servants (think, stewards and messengers and scribes, masters of horses or kennels, that kind of thing) and servants who help with the upkeep of the household (cleaning, repairs, cooking and also the apprentices and assistants of specialised servants)

specialised servants are probably quite prestigious roles and fields of industry in their own right, and they are considered full members of a household, and probably are closely linked to the person they serve - it's as much a political and social statement to be Finwe's chief scribe as it is an economic one

but the second category are more associated with the house than the family living in it - for example, Finwe's palace in Tirion would function both as a home and a diplomatic and administrative centre, it would be impossible for him to rule and keep up with chores himself. But Fingolfin's personal home would probably not have any full-time servants - when there more people than usual to feed or house then professionals might be hired, but for the most part I imagine the day to day is done by the family (made possible by the fact elves sleep and eat less than humans)

IRL domestic service (at least in the 18th century) often functioned as a kind of prep stage for adult life (for women in particular, but gender is probably not as big a factor for elves) and I could definitely see this in Valinor - domestic servants being 80% elves between 50-100 who haven't chosen an apprenticeship or similar in another field who are earning extra money to set up their own households, getting experience outside of the family, meeting others in their own ae cohort, learning independence etc. It's a job that comes with the offer of room and board + the wages a king/prince/lord can provide. Not glamorous, but not terrible.

The other 20% is made up of professional servants - experienced elves who are genuinely like the work and are contracted workers as much as a builder or gardener might be. Some of them might be independent and others part of businesses set up by other elves who are really into cooking/cleaning etc.

In Beleriand the situation (for the exiles at least) is probably very different, though I think there would be attempts to adapt the system - but there aren't as many households that need servants and there aren't as many young elves.

[aplpaca]

fun fact that bc of one of their claws being Obnoxiously Fucking Huge, male fiddler crabs literally can't eat with it. Which means they spend like twice as much time eating as females, since females can shovel food into their mouth with both claws but males can only do it with one

This relates to the concept of "honest/costly signaling" in ecology, which contains the idea that traits that attract mates can be an accurate display of an individual's fitness/capability due to said trait actually having disadvantages (ex. long attractive tails in some birds making moving more difficult, large claws making it harder to eat, being brightly colored making you more visible to predators, etc). The idea being that if certain attractive traits are actually disadvantageous, then an organism thriving and being overall healthy despite said traits is evidence that said organism is Good At Surviving, and therefore a good potential mate.

So while bigger claws do have the benefit of giving a male fiddler crab an edge in fights with other males, which play a big role in female mate choice, a male being healthy while having his bigass claw in the first place also serves as indirect proof that he's good at successfully obtaining enough food to survive

but like. look at this dude. he can't eat with that thing. he's got one functional food shovel bc the women think him having a one-purpose bigass muscle arm is Good Baby Material. and they're not even technically wrong

[sunbloomdew]

"Rule #14 - Fiddler's Heart" by Fish in a Birdcage is a Qiu Lin song and don't you dare tell me it's not

look at the lyrics! i think it fits really well <3

[asocial-skye]

hunger games and tbosas didn't imprint themselves on me the way that they did for many people, but it did make me wonder what the population was like for panem. oh god. where do i start with this. all of district 12 can somehow cram themselves into one waiting area so this lady can read names out of a bowl. that bowl was not full. how little people are there in this expanse of country. appalachia today has like millions of people living there. can you imagine cramming the entire of new york city into one waiting area so this one lady can pull names out of a fucking bowl. that's ignoring the other population in new york state. california has like 58 million people. televise or digitize that shit. how horrible were the conditions of panem that they can fucking herd an entire district into one waiting area when today you can barely fit an eighth of a small city into four football stadiums.

[fauvester]

ferengi drip is absolutely insane 1830s menswear and im frothing with rage that we don’t get 1830s ferengi womenswear. like dressing your wife in the most garish silks and lace isn’t the most conspicuous form of consumption

[sunnibits]

you are so fucking right about babies. baby naps are hardcore the most cutest naps ever. i love babies i feel like that’s an unpopular around here but they’re just so cute. anyway real footage of me anytime i see a baby

REALLLL ME TOOOO!!! I’m always just like. holy shit a baby. holy shit ur so small. dude I hate to alarm you but um. did u know ur so small. like. are you aware that you are in fact just a little guy. itty bitty even. and the baby’s just like: 👁👄👁

anyways this is a real image of me at work every Saturday

[tanadrin]

okay so i feel like i sometimes see people critiquing various anti-capitalist complaints by saying “look, you can’t redistribute Musk’s/Bezos’s/Gates’/whoever’s wealth the way you think; investment valuations and total wealth valuations are complicated and situation specific, and if you suddenly tried to give everybody an equal portion of a random rich guy’s wealth, you’d destroy most if not all of it.”

and this is true if your interlocutor thinks wealth is literally a scrooge mcduck-style pool of money. i think most people who engage in politics discourse online don’t think that’s the case though. and i don’t think it’s an incoherent position to be like “look, insofar as it means anything, the wealth whose value we estimate in dollars is capital; capital, whether it’s in the form of abstract investments like stocks or physical stuff like land and factories is a claim on the future productivity of society; and one person having an oversized claim on that future productivity is bad, either because it’s intrinsically immoral or because it has some negative consequence X. therefore, we can and should redistribute that claim, whether it’s in the form of some simpler mechanism like taxes or some more complicated process like reorganizing society completely.”

like you might disagree with that. you can have lots of substantive, vociferous disagreements with people who think that. but acting like the concept of redistribution is meaningless because wealth isn’t a fixed amount of dollars in a bank account is both wrong and probably misapprehends the nature of the disagreement you’re having.

[leroibobo]

during its apartheid years, south africa had one of the strictest media controls in the world. this extended into homes when television was introduced in the country in 1977 (which the government had delayed until that year due to fears of "undue influence"), and when home video came along with it. each videotape that was legally distributed during these years was required to have a notice in the official languages of english and afrikaans that it complied with media censorship laws codified years prior.

(the model for the certificate was likely influenced by the british board of film classification's. by the beginning of the 20th century, the british had brought the template with them to south africa and other former colonies such as india. south africa was probably the only country to use it on home releases.)

this meant that south africans who watched "legal" videotaped movies not only had to sit through commercials and a standard-issue anti-piracy warning, but a federal confirmation that the film didn't feature an interracial couple, among many other things. the total time for the two warnings could reach up to two minutes long - for comparison, the chorus of "oops i did it again" by britney spears is twenty seconds long - but some were rushed through.

this example was taken from a tape of disney's snow white and the seven dwarfs published in 1994, the year apartheid ended. the media censorship laws which required the certificate would be overhauled two years later, though video openings remained similar for a while after.

[mapsontheweb]

World population fitting in Canada

[entropy-sea-system]

India City Battle!!

[undead-potatoes]

I might have uuh severely underestimated just how much more voluminous cheese becomes once grated

ft the biggest bowl I could find and the container I so pitifully thought I could store my cheese in afterwards

[plumbogs]

i need to put more businesses in veronaville... including like a hotel or something. to me it has potential as like a weird pseudo-historical wannabe rural area for the rest of the city. maybe a museum. like when some town suddenly tries to become a tourist trap and puts up a bunch of bed and breakfasts beside a farm and tries to sell some idyllic countryside experience but it's literally barely 20 minutes from downtown

[audliminal]

I think a lot about internalized fatphobia. Like I know that I've been impacted by that sort of thing, and I've been working for ages to combat it, and sometimes I feel like I've made no progress bc I do still want to be thinner. But like whenever I stop and reflect on the why, it's always tied to like. My desire to find clothes. Like I'm not even fat. My body size and shape are pretty average for a fan person in their late 20s, but that means I'm just outside of the range for a lot of mainstream fashion brands. I'm just at that point where a lot of companies stop trying to make things fit you. And it sucks! It's so much less fun shopping for clothes when at least half of the things you think are cool don't fit people like you! And the thing is, I'm just on the cusp! I still can find things that fit me, even if it's harder. Idk man, I'm just really stuck on how much the fashion industry sucks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯