here is an idea: normalise the idea that adopting kids is a valid option even for parents who could conceive a child themselves, and not just an inferior backup option for parents who can’t
Just coming from an adopted kid, the benefits of adoption: -When your kid asks where they come from you can literally say you pre-ordered them and waited for them to come in. My dad always equated picking me up from the hospital to ordering a sofa at k-mart and it always made me laugh. No need to explain pregnancy till they’re older. -Your child will always know it was wanted and on purpose. My parents waited 5 years for me. They waited. For me to be born. I was wanted, from the moment I came into this world, by the people who raised me. -You don’t have to pay for pregnancy or birth. Just adoption fees. No thirty thousand dollar hospital bill. -You don’t have to give birth, or be pregnant, both of which objectively suck. -The biological parents of that baby will be so happy that there is someone in the world who is willing to watch over their child. The relief that comes with that is overwhelming. -You’re saving a child’s life that would otherwise potentially be stuck in the adoption and foster system for their entire childhood.
I’ve always heard arguments about wanting the baby to be ‘yours’ but really. My parents are my parents. Just because I don’t share their DNA doesn’t mean I’m not theirs. When it comes right down to it, blood of the bond is thicker than water of the womb.
I invite my closest friends and family to a gender reveal party, but when I open the box with maniacal flourish instead of pink or blue balloons, a television screen is revealed.
I dim the lights remotely as we hear Cate Blanchett say, “The world is changed. I feel it in the water.”
Too late, they realise.
The pregnancy? A scam.
The Lord of the Rings editions? Extended.
The doors? Locked.
Is popcorn and pepsi provided?
Bold of you to assume that I would count anyone with a preference for Pepsi amongst my closest friends and family
so a traveling shakespeare troupe came to my school today and performed romeo and juliet and it was just so good and
-the actor playing romeo was hella short and the actor playing benvolio was hella tall. at several points he just picked romeo up and moved him around the stage/out of his way.
-when the nurse delivered juliet’s letter they played it up like she was flirting with mercutio but mercutio just looked at her, wrapped his arm around benvolio, and more or less gave her an expression that said “i’m gay”
-when mercutio and benvolio were making fun of romeo for being Heterosexual™ (aka for loving juliet), benvolio picked him up and mercutio gave him a purple nurple
-juliet wore no shoes throughout the entire show except during the wedding when she wore these giant sparkly pink pumps with platform heels
-when mercutio gave the queen mab speech they had benvolio stand behind him and click castanets and go “ooooooooh” every time he dropped a dramatic line
-they had friar lawerance and the nurse say the prologue and the end lines and like…..that changed the impact of the lines and their character significantly. i’ve made a post or two about this before but i personally interpret romeo and juliet as a story about two kids too afraid to come to their parents with a problem because they’re afraid of repercussions. but what about the adults in their life that DID try to help with them with their problems, but still ended up failing them? let’s just say it hit hard and was very telling when the friar and the nurse choked out the last lines of the play while sobbing.
-whenever there was a fight scene, mercutio and benvolio were constantly trying to keep romeo away from the action, as if he was their younger brother who they didn’t want to get hurt in a brawl. during mercutio’s fight with tybalt, benvolio was shielding romeo with his body and physically picked him up and held him back at times. that really changed the dynamic of the three of them and made it even funnier when ben and merc were teasing romeo about his crush on juliet.
-romeo killed paris by hitting him on the head with a flashlight
-the apothecary that sold romeo poison was dressed up as your typical TV drug dealer and he acted like one as well
-while benvolio more or less disappears from the written play after romeo is banished, they kept him around this time and he followed romeo around to make sure he was okay but didn’t say anything. it was implied he didn’t talk because he was still grieving mercutio. (he also wasn’t there when romeo killed himself)
-i was watching it with a bunch of freshmen who hadn’t read the play before but when juliet killed herself nearly half the room started screaming because they were so shocked
honestly this cast was just so good. i’ve also seen them perform julius caesar set in a modern politician’s world and m*cbeth in a post-apocalyptic setting. i absolutely loved this production and i hope i can see more of their work soon
Dr Malcolm perfectly captured the problem with too much moralizing sci-fi when he whined “your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.”Because of course they should! “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs*?” The answer is obviously yes, utterly yes, that’s the positive control case to test absolute YESness. You don’t ask people that question to find the answer, you already know the answer, you ask people that question to find out if they’re worth talking to.
*a scaled pseudospecies distinct from feathered “actual dinosaurs”.
The real problem is the wrong people asking the wrong questions, then blaming science for delivering overwhelming experimental evidence of their mistakes. Jurassic Park’s key question wasn’t “Should we recreate awesome dinosaurs?”, it was “Should we unleash those awesome dinosaurs on a safari with worse security and fewer staff than the average Apple store?” No, you shouldn’t have done that. The science spectacularly succeeded in delivering a dinosaur miracle, and then specifically didn’t knock them out of the Park because that tourism screw-up’s entirely on capitalism. No scientist was collecting data for “Quantifying how much money we can make from tourism” or “Material testing the flimsiest fences imaginable with a goddamn Tyrannosaurus Rex”.
That’s the Malcolm Fallacy: blaming science for everyone else’s mistakes. You’ll see it in almost every techno-horror.
Should we invent AI? Yes! Should we connect it to military mainframes with nuclear launch authority? No!
Should we research viruses? Yes! Should we override the security computer and physically crack open sealed airtight doors when viral labs go into lockdown? No!
Should we research teleportation? Yes! Should we experiment on ourselves, alone, without even the most elementary laboratory (or even pizza parlor) standards of cleanliness? No!
Almost every sci-fi horror plot is driven by money-grubbing corporations but it’s the researchers who can’t even afford a change of clothes from their “I’m a scientist!” lab coats who take the blame. And now we have hordes of idiots destroying cropfields and resurrecting defeated diseases while CEOs gold-plate profit reports on basic medicine.
So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Some of my favorite tags so far:
@asleepinawell “Natural Curiousities” is on netflix and I think the PBS streaming app. BBC streaming keeps crashing on me but probably there too. It’s very much like his usual work, but with 500% more “Look at these funky specimens and the frantic scribbles of early scientific illustrators confronted with a fucking kangaroo” and “I’m Sir David Fucking Attenborough And I’m Going To Snuggle This Cheetah”
@heedra You are correct! According to Wikipedia: “The name “flamingo” comes from Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, “flame-colored”, in turn coming from Provençal flamenc from flama “flame” and Germanic-like suffix -ing, with a possible influence of words like “Fleming” THEY WERE TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG!
@melifair You’re in good company- I used to call them “Pimentos” until I was three and finally got the hang of the Letter “F”
Also, Apologies about the spelling. I have a reading disorder and it causes me to mis-read and by turn misspell certain words, especially ones with two nonidentical vowels in the middle of the word like Their and Becuase. Good thing we all know what I’m talking about anyway!
But how could you not tell us WHAT THE FLAMINGOS ARE DOING IN A VOLCANO?????
So Flamingoes are pretty badass.
They’re hyperspecialized filter-feeders, not unlike krill-feeding whales, and thier heads are shaped Like That, so they can dangle thier heads in the water, suck up water full of algae and brine shrimp and other goodies, and filter them out with thier Spiny Tongues.
(Image Source Apparently, according to the Ancient Romans, Flamingo Tounge has a “Superb” flavor. You Wacky Roman Bastards)
But the lakes with the tastiest and most dense algae and arthropods are not Normal lakes. African Lesser Flamingoes (lesser becuase they have a smaller range, but probably our phoenix given how people were travelling at the time) like to hang out in extremely Alkaline Lakes where thier favorite algae grow, and those lakes are mostly in the volcanic Great Rift Valley. Where the lava and occasional venting of hot toxic gasses happen.
In addition to the wierd diet, and caustic water, Flamingoes can also cope with some pretty intense climate. The Alkaline Lakes Lesser Flamigoes like are also VERY HIGH in the mountains, where they cope with low oxygen, Intense UV radiation, and rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations- below freezing at night and heatstroke hot in the day.
You can tell how well a Flamigo is Flamingoing by it’s color! The lovely red-pink color comes from the algae and arthopods they eat: the better-fed and healthier a flamingo is, the more intense thier colors will be! Zoo famingoes can thrive on a wide variety of diets, but thier colors will fade, and it will cause everyone to lose romantic interest, so they have to be fed a special color-intensive diet to keep breeding programs going.
So while Flamingoes probably weren’t the bird you were picturing when you thought of a Phoenix , they’re Pretty Badass and worthy of the mythic lore.
Oh yeah that’s another thing they do, the doofy little badasses.
BTW, It’s not that Flamingoes are born with normal propprtions and get Like That later- they’re born as bizzare as the adults, but smol, so until they get large enough to actually stand above the 6-12 inches of water that’s usually around the nests, they run the risk of drowning or alkaline burns that become infected. Fortunately, Flamingo parents are extremely attentive and do a good Job of making sure their babies stay safe and dry until they’re leggy enough to wander around with the flock.
All this really is a way to show pictures of baby flamingoes.
Idk Clarice, maybe we’re just tired, and life is uncertain, and we like the idea of a stable husband with a steady job and a big dog and his own place away from all the loud, shapeshifting-kink party gods.
I’ll have the Steven Universe fandom get the Crystal Gems to form Alexandrite so they can crush anyone who questions the SuperWhoLocks, Potterheads, and Fannibals…
myblog 