The thing with the stuff
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Just because one of your chicken eggs hatched a fire breathing dragon people think you’re evil. But you’re still just a regular farmer trying to make a living while dealing with an overprotective dragon, heroes that want to kill you and fanatics who want to worship you as the new Demon Lord.
The thing you need to know about all of this, the thing that got me into all this trouble in the first place, is that chickens will sit on anything when they get broody enough. Anything. Duck eggs, goose eggs, turkey eggs, lizard eggs, egg shaped rocks, anything. Chickens aren’t smart. If it looks vaguely like an egg, they’ll plant their feathery arses on it and wait.
I noticed that there was a bigger egg under one of the broody chickens, when I checked. Of course I noticed, it was twice the size of the others. But I have geese. I figured it was a goose egg she’d found and stolen. It was about the right size, and I didn’t take it out to check the colour because that particular chicken gets very protective of her eggs. I’ve already got a scar on one hand from trying to get eggs away from her. I didn’t want a matched set.
That was a decision I regretted the moment I went out to feed the chickens and found a little blue-and-silver dragonet’s head poking out from under a very confused-looking chicken. The poor thing kept shifting around and looking under herself in a bewildered way, like she didn’t know what to do next. This particular chicken is a good mother, and she’s raised clutches of ducks and geese without any trouble – she’s even resigned to some of her children swimming – but this was too much. She didn’t object when I carefully reached in and fished out the little dragon.
It was so tiny, then. It fitted in my hand, with its little head peeking out one side and its tail looping around my wrist. Cute, too, with its big eyes and little snout turned up towards me.
That was when I made my second mistake. I decided to feed it before releasing it. Dragons are innately wild creatures, everyone knows that. They can’t be tamed. People have tried. The eggs are abandoned as soon as they are laid, and the dragonets hatch able to hunt, so they don’t even bond with their mothers. So just feeding it a little shouldn’t have been a big deal. It should have gobbled the meat and fled as soon as I loosened my grip on it and it saw the open sky.
It didn’t. As soon as I’d fed it, it fluttered up to a sunny window ledge and went to sleep. I went about my work, figuring that it’d leave in its own time.
By noon, it was sitting on my boot, squeaking pathetically. I wondered if maybe it was confused by the farmyard – they usually hatch in mountains, if the stories are right – so I took it back to the farmhouse with me and fed it again when I ate, then took some time away from the fences I should have been mending to walk it up to the hills. I found it some nice rocks, with plenty of lizards and beetles and suitable prey for something that size. It pounced on a beetle almost as soon as I put it down, and when I left it was crunching happily.
I hadn’t walked a quarter of the way back before something hit the back of my boot. The little dragon was holding on with all four claws, and when I looked down it squeaked pathetically. If possible, its eyes got even rounder.
Listen, you don’t make it as a farmer if you just let orphaned baby animals die. We hand-raise calves and lambs and ponies, set chickens to sit on abandoned eggs, or put them under the kitchen stove or by a fireplace. You don’t make a success of farming if you don’t value every animal. A good shepherd will spend all night looking for one lost sheep. So despite what was said later, it wasn’t just sentiment that made me sigh and pick up the little thing and carry it back to the farm. I am a good farmer. I don’t let orphaned babies die just because they’re a little work.
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Me: Okay guys remember that it’s important in improv to establish your characters at the beginning of the scene.
Students: ok
Student 1: Hello. I am the president of the United States.
Student 2: Hello madame president. I’m William Shakespeare and I’m here to assassinate you.
This is the best opening to a scene I’ve ever heard of
Here’s how the scene actually went as nearly as I can remember.
Student 1: I’m the president of the United States. How can I help you?
Student 2: I’d like to make a complaint about the Vice President.
Student 1: Okay let me just get out my chalkboard where I tally complaints about the Vice President. Let’s see, that makes five… hundred! What’s your complaint?
Student 2: Well you see, I’m here to assassinate you, but I don’t think that guy should take over when you’re dead.
Student 1: Okay let me make some calls. Beep boop beep boop beep beep beep. Hello? I’m here with— What’s your name?
Student 2: I’m William Shakespeare.
Student 1: I’m here with William Shakespeare and he convinced me we need to replace the Vice President. When? Let me ask. — When were you planning to assassinate me?
Student 2: I mean I was thinking like, as soon as I was done talking to you.
Student 1: Okay sounds good. Yes we need to replace him right now, one moment. Beep beep boop beep. Hello? You’re fired. Bye. Ring, ring. Oh, it’s my assistant again. Hello? What’s that? Oh, they want to know if you’re the same William Shakespeare who wrote Romeo and Juliet.
Student 2: Yes, that’s me.
Student 1: What’s that? He’s been dead for four hundred years? Okay thank you goodbye. Sorry they said you’ve been dead for four hundred years so you can’t assassinate me.
(via kaybirdie)
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ALTLindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé together raked in nearly $4 billion in profits from chocolate sales in 2023. Hershey’s confectionary profits totaled $2 billion last year.
The four corporations paid out on average 97 percent of their total net profits to shareholders in 2023.
The collective fortunes of the Ferrero and Mars families, who own the two biggest private chocolate corporations, surged to $160.9 billion during the same period. This is more than the combined GDPs of Ghana and Ivory Coast, which supply most cocoa beans.
Decades of low prices have made farmers poorer and hampered their ability to hire workers or invest in their farms, limiting bean yield. Old cocoa trees are particularly vulnerable to disease and extreme weather. Many farmers are abandoning cocoa for other crops, or selling their land to illegal miners.(via turtlesandfrogs)
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People are so stupid about snakes. If there’s a little black racer chilling outside just leave it alone, you don’t have to kill it, it’s probably dealing with all your pests for you, jesus christ
If you kill a non venomous snake that’s just silly and cruel and betrays a disgusting worldview of blind hatred and fear of other beings,
and if you kill a venomous snake that’s VERY STUPID because trying to kill a venomous snake is the best way to get bitten by a venomous snake.
(via roberts-island)
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my 8 year old has some emotional regulation difficulties, and I’ve done my best to help him with those.
unrelated, I gave him a shovel a couple of days ago and told him to go have fun in the field because I was tired.
He suddenly seemed happier, having less trouble breathing through disappointment and just being generally all around more cheerful and able to focus in school better. Sure, my partner had to pull him out of a six foot by three foot hole today, but he was stoked about it!
Marked places in the yard where I needed holes and he happily dug them and helped me plant trees, then helped me turn the compost pile and dig the garden beds. He is happy, my back isn’t killing me, and we have discussed erosion and soil quality with the gravitas of an 8 year old discovering something they enjoy
Congrats on your future landscaper. Make sure he catches you reading books that will take him up a good path to a rewarding career.
Or gravedigger. Boy might just be in it for the holes.
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nobuddy feels like they have a sharp attention span these days, right? and we all just click “agree on terms of service” because its hard to love yourself sometimes, well
enter Terms of Service, Didn’t Read: a website and a browser addon that streamlines the terms of service of many popular web services to be read by the tech sunday drivers.
It’s graded from A (great) to E (awful) and if you have the addon you have access to the info about the website on your bar
this post came back to me like a dear son from war, hello ol boy
(via beatcroc)
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idk who needs to hear this rn but suffering is not noble. take the tylenol
One time when I was younger I was refusing to take headache medicine and my mom said “the person who invented that medicine is probably so sad you won’t let them help you” and now every time I find myself denying medicine I just imagine the saddest scientist making those big wet eyes like “why won’t you let me help” and whoop then I take the medicine
(via hermitbug-reblog)
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I’m so emotional about dinosaur stuffed animals,,, there are these creatures, extinct long before any of us were alive, but we found their bones and their eggs and their footprints. And we made drawings and models of what they could’ve looked like. And we made them into stuffed animals so we could hold them. We made them soft so we could love them. I’m sobbing
Yeah, we’re the animal so preoccupied with petting other animals we’re sort of collectively upset there are animals we never get to pet, so we make proxies to snuggle and tell their ghosts we’d have loved them if they were here.
…and tell their ghosts we’d have loved them if they were here.
Hang on i just have to cry for a minute
(via hermitbug-reblog)
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I saw this book entitled “Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do is Ask” by Mary Siisip Genuisz and i thought oh I HAVE to read that. The author is Anishinaabe and the book is all about Anishinaabe teachings of the ways of the plants.
Going from the idiotic, Eurocentric, doomerist colonialism apologia of that “Cambridge companion to the anthropocene” book, to the clarity and reasonableness of THIS book, is giving me whiplash just about.
I read like 130 pages without even realizing, I couldn’t stop! What a treasure trove of knowledge of the ways of the plants!
Most of them are not my plants, since it is a different ecosystem entirely (which gives me a really strikingly lonely feeling? I didn’t know I had developed such a kinship with my plants!) but the knowledge of symbiosis as permeating all things including humans—similar to what Weeds, Guardians of the Soil called “Nature’s Togetherness Law"—is exactly what we need more of, exactly what we need to teach and promote to others, exactly what we need to heal our planet.
She has a lot of really interesting information on how knowledge is created and passed down in cultures that use oral tradition. The stories and teachings she includes are a mix of those directly passed down by her teacher through a very old heritage of knowledge holders, stories with a newer origin, and a couple that have an unknown origin and (I think?) may not even be "authentically” Native American at all, but that she found to be truthful or useful in some way. She likes many “introduced” plants and is fascinated by their stories and how they came here. (She even says that Kudzu would not be invasive if we understood its virtues and used it the way the Chinese always have, which is exactly what I’ve been saying!!!)
She seems a bit on the chaotic end of the spectrum in regards to tradition, even though she takes tradition very seriously—she says the way the knowledge of medicinal and otherwise useful plants has been built, is that a medicine person’s responsibility is not simply to pass along teachings, but to test and elaborate upon the existing ones. It is a lot similar to the scientific method, I would call it a scientific method. Her way of seeing it really made me understand the aliveness of tradition and how there is opportunity, even necessity, for new traditions based upon new ecological relationships and new cultural connections to the land.
I was gut punched on page 15 when she says that we have to be careful to take care of the Earth and all its creatures, because if human civilization destroys the biosphere the rocks and winds will be left all alone to grieve for us.
What a striking contrast to the sad, cruel ideas in the Cambridge companion of the Anthropocene, where humans are some kind of disease upon the Earth that oppresses and “colonizes” everything else…!…The Earth would GRIEVE for us!
We are not separate from every other thing. We have to learn this. If I can pass along these ideas to y'all through my silly little posts, I will have lived well.
“a medicine person’s responsibility is not simply to pass along teachings, but to test and elaborate upon the existing ones”
i feel this so much as a cultural practitioner/artist working with plant material ! there’s so many times when i teach things to my students and i say “i’m showing you this way because this is how my teachers show me” and then in the next breath “this isn’t what i was taught but it’s what i like and prefer, so i’m going to show that to you too, and you can choose what works”
cultural traditions need to evolve and adapt over time. i think the less they are updated to reflect today’s world/generation, the less of a chance they have of meaningful survival. keeping things up to date means keeping them alive. “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire” etc etc
(via alexseanchai)