wreched-moth

[wreched-moth]

Spent tonight at a local short film festival. One of the shorts was made by two 12 year olds in their backyard and it was the best short of the entire night

[wreched-moth]

[wreched-moth]

the AV-8B Harrier flight manual got leaked this time

[wreched-moth]

Stop pussy footing around it. Are you coming to my Chinese giant salamander's bar mitzvah or not

[wreched-moth]

I went to this Northwest Passage museum once where they had the white explorers' journals on one side of the exhibit and the native people's accounts on the other side of the exhibit and the explorer journals were like "our canoe had almost sunk when we encountered some kindly Indians" and the native histories were like "we watched a bunch of strangers come down the river in the shittiest canoe you'd ever seen. Also, they had no rain gear"

[wreched-moth]

when I was a kid I wished I had nosebleeds. I had some friends who had them and I was like. that looks so fucking cool. you're just sitting there and suddenly you're covered in blood. it looks so dramatic. it looks so... and here my language failed me. at such a humble age I did not have the vocabulary to describe the sublime. I just sat in incomprehensible jealousy. I turned out totally normal by the way

[wreched-moth]

at the fishing tournament yesterday btw there were age categories bc it was all-inclusive and we didn't want like 60 year old anglers competing against 4 years olds obviously.

so anyway this 14 year old boy entered in the 11-15 age bracket and he saw a huge fish in the water he became absolutely determined to catch. i don't think he even wanted to win anymore. he just wanted that fish specifically. but his line wasn't strong enough for such a big fish and didn't have the ideal bait.

enter: two 15 year old boys who didn't know him. they saw what he was trying to do, and they were clearly experienced anglers, and they got involved in the chase. they got the right bait and the three of them spent hours with their lines in the water, until the first boy finally hooked the fish. they talked him through the slow challenge of endurance. he couldn't reel in all at once because the fish was too heavy for his line and it'd break.

he finally reeled it in, but they didn't have a net. it took all three of them, lying on their bellies, six hands on the fish, to pull it out of the water. they put it in a big bucket of water for the weigh-in (we just subtracted the bucket+water weight after), gave their new friend careful instruction on how to handle the fish so he could pose for a hasty photo without injuring its spine, and then carefully placed the fish back in the water.

in the end, he won first place in his age bracket. one of the other boys who helped him tied for second with a 12-year-old competitor, and he gave her the trophy.

then during the drawing, where participants won prizes randomly if I pulled their name from a box, I happened to pull his name and he got a great prize so it all came around.

Idk. the teamwork. the serendipity of friendship. the graciousness. the consideration for the fish. Just some things that made me happy.

[wreched-moth]

[wreched-moth]

Park signage evolution.

Following its accidental discovery, the Mystery Flesh Pit and the unique phenomena surrounding it were targets of a headfirst and furiously paced campaign of commercial exploitation. Once architects, engineers, geobiologists and clerical members of the development team had done their work to make the park safe and viable, marketing teams faced the daunting task of selling the public on the intriguing and miraculous phenomena of the Mystery Flesh Pit while downplaying the visceral cosmic horror of the pit itself.

Families were a particularly difficult sell, as children often displayed an overwhelming fear and aversion to descending into the throat of the pit. One strategy early in the park’s history was the creation of friendly cartoon mascot Caver Coop. A brief animated film starring Caver Coop was shown at the park’s visitor center, where the character would attempt to assuage worries about being “eaten alive” or “swallowed”, reassuring children (and often parents) that the pit was perfectly safe and reinforced.

When the attraction was absorbed into the National Park System in the early 1980s, signage and other graphic materials were updated to the NPS Graphic Identity. The architecture of the park’s surface facilities was also expanded and renovated during this time to better fit with the “Natural Resort” image of the Mystery Flesh Pit brand, drawing inspiration from the local Santa Fe style integrated with unique bone formations discovered within the pit itself.

-Excerpt from New York Times Bestseller Unearthing the Unholy: Exploring the tragedy of the Mystery Flesh Pit, written by Dr. Rachel Frost, published 2011.

[wreched-moth]

Another fantasy trope story:

A story where a prominent prophesy very clearly states that this specific important thing Must Be Done by the firstborn of one specific guy. So three young heroes head out to fix this: This Guy's official firstborn heir, his bastard he didn't even know about before getting married, and his unofficially adopted orphan kid who just started living with him at some point, who is the oldest of the three so technically speaking is still the one who was born first. And all three must go because while the meaning of the prophesy itself is very clear, it's an utter mystery to everyone which one of them counts as their father's firstborn.

[wreched-moth]

I think sometimes people think eugenics is bad but its still true, like thinking that if people with certain traits have children it will change society for better or worse based upon what traits are promoted. I think its important to emphasize that eugenics is not only wrong morally it's also fake and stupid bullshit

Like eugenics was supposed to be based on the idea that "If it works with animals to select only the best ones to breed, why wouldn't it work with humans?"

well it doesn't work with animals, that's the thing. applying the eugenics ideas to domestic breeds of animals hasn't made better animals it's just made animals with more extreme expression of certain traits. turns out that when you decide which traits are the "best" and become obsessed with the genetic purity of the animals that have the "best" traits, you might well end up with some sad suffering creature like a Pug, or the Persian cats with the smashed faces that are in constant pain because their teeth and airways and brains are getting crushed by their skulls, or those meat chickens that grow so fast they can hardly even stand up after a few weeks old, or inbred race horses with tiny feet and fragile toothpick legs

like almost all traits are neither "good" or "bad" they're way more complex than that. a long tail or a long snout or a stubborn, independent personality can be good or bad depending on the situation. Who gets to decide what is a "good" trait or a "bad" trait? It's arbitrary and selecting for traits that are "good" in your opinion will often have both "good" and "bad" outcomes because the "good" and "bad" are part of each other and not separate its just part of being alive

Obviously oversimplifying everything but you get it. we did eugenics with dogs and how did that go? not very well

[wreched-moth]

did some math based on adventurer's bible stuff about average sizes of tallmen & half-foots & the canon heights of the characters and. chilchuck is the half-foot equivalent of 6'5

[wreched-moth]

[wreched-moth]

Reductress really taking no prisoners today

[wreched-moth]

"The nonbinary afab who goes by she/her, dresses femininely, and uses a push-up bra when I—" when you what? What's wrong with her?

Is she not nonbinary enough for you? Is the way she experiences her queerness and how she presents not perfect enough for you? Nonbinary people don't owe you androgyny, right? So why is she the exception? Why does she have to hate herself to appeal to your standards? Why is she any less trans—any less worthy of respect—cause it's "not visible"? Queer solidarity my ass. Don't spout this bullshit on Pride, man.

[wreched-moth]

banging my head on the wall BEGGING people on the internet to learn what an Inside Thought is. like you do not need to express every nasty opinion you have, and if you do so publicly, you gotta accept that people are gonna get mad at you for saying shit like "i find gay men repulsive". social media is not your private diary, it is public. there are consequences for saying terrible things, such as thousands of people thinking you're an asshole.

PLEASE learn what an inside thought is. you do not need to share everything that goes through your head. you shouldn't.

[wreched-moth]

the purpose of friends is to have people who unconditionally hate your shitty exes & relatives. like maybe YOU have a complex relationship with your father but i sure don't. i'm outside his house with a gun. he's not the unforgivable asshole who raised me he's just an unforgivable asshole