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bradenthompson · 2 years

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Fun Apple Facts for 12:00 am

enjoying a honeycrisp hard cider and thinking about how swell it is to live in Washington State. Did you know people from Washington are called seasonally depressed? Anyway, apple facts!

Apples originate from Kazakhstan

In the 5th grade I did a history report on Johnny Appleseed, who was a real person! I forget everything about the man besides that

6 out of 10 apples consumed in the United States were grown in Washington. Go Mariners! Win the ball game! Please! Do marginally well for just one season, for the love of god!

There exists an apple-based confectionary created in Washington State, called Aplets & Cotlets. I don't like them!

5. There are over 7,500 varieties of apple. Capitalism dictates only thirty are worth a damn

6. The most popular apple variety is the Gala. It originates from New Zealand

7. The Fuji apple is basically a big watery candy bar. Among the sweetest apple varieties grown. It's color bothers me for some reason. It's like, not as red as you would like an apple to be. It's like what an apple would look like as a Brawl render

8. Jonagold apples freak me out. They're huge and vibrant and you take one bite and it explodes everyone. An apple designed by Studio Trigger

9. The famously tart green boy, Granny Smith, is named after its Australian cultivator. Would you not name an apple after yourself? No. You would sooner name yourself after an apple. Look me in the eyes and tell me you got a cooler name than Honeycrisp

10. The Red Delicious sucks ass. It's awful. It's legit one of the worst apples. If someone ever tells you they don't like apples it's because they ate one of these things. Like how someone says they don't like Star Trek because all they ever saw was, like, Into Darkness

11. Half of all deciduous fruit trees on Earth are apple trees

12. Apples are high in malic acid, which aids in preventing gallstones. I eat a lot of apples and I got a fuckload of gallstones. I had my gallbladder removed. This has severely impacted the amount of food I can eat in one sitting and am woefully underweight as a result. Thanks, apples. Really came in clutch for me, there

13. Apples are 25% air

14. It takes anywhere from four to ten years for an apple tree to reach maturity

15. Apple seeds are Heterozygotes. Meaning, planting all the seeds from one apple means planting like five different apples. If one wants a lot of one apple, better plants a lot of seeds

16. The Honeycrisp was created specifically because the Red Delicious sucks. That's how much the Red Delicious sucks.

17. Washington State University's cultivation program spent twenty years building the perfect apple, a hybrid between the Honeycrisp and the Enterprise. They dubbed this apple the Cosmic Crisp, named after both its Dad and its star-like speckling. They succeeded, by the way; pound for pound the Cosmic Crisp is the best apple, and I have eaten, like, all the apples

18. Almost all apples harvested are done so by hand. This is to prevent bruising. Because you're worth it <3

19. Stick your apples in the fridge. At room temperature, apples spoil at ten times the rate of refrigerated apples

20. A bushel of apples weighs 42 pounds!

21. There's a card game called Apples to Apples. In the intervening years since its inception someone thought the game would be funnier with swear words and perversion, so that also happened

22. hard apple cider is a top 5 alcoholic beverage

23. Saying a lot about society, Red Delicious is an aesthetically pleasing apple that is rancid and horrible on the inside. Just like that girl in high school who used to bully you. Did you hear she went into nursing? How could such a vile bitch go into healthcare?

24. I'm very tired

25. You need 2 pounds of apple to make one, nine-inch pie

26. Pomology is the study of apples

27. There is an apple Pokemon and it's very cute

28. Apple seeds contain amygdalin, which releases cyanide into the bloodstream

29. dude fuck Red Delicious

30. Wait, there's a Yellow Delicious? Something about the name bothers me

31. Y'know, I thought about it, and I have in fact had a Yellow Delicious before. Doesn't do much other than fill the quota of there being yellow apples.

32. I once ate an apple at an emotional low point and cried because it tasted really good

33. The largest apple ever picked weighed over three pounds

34. No one has ever actually bobbed for apples, I don't think. Pretty sure movies made that up.

35. Apples are members of the rose family

36. Apples share 103% of human DNA. They're more human than you are, even

37. The average person, I guess, eats 65 apples per year. So we got some crazy outliers

38. one gallon of apple cider contains the product of 36 apples

39. When you bite into an apple it sounds like krrrooooochasssskkkkhhhhhewwwwwsshhhh

40. I've had two of these hard ciders thus far, yummy

41. Perhaps I have been too hard on Red Delicious. I have done personal research and discovered they are perfect for pies, ciders, frying, and salads. I am sorry to the Red Delicious community and will continue to educate myself

42. Applesauce is a popular food item for Chanukah and pairs well with Latkes. Chag Sameach!

43. I am not Jewish

44. I committed to doing 50 facts against my better judgement, perhaps

45. Cider's good

46. When I wrote that earlier fact about Apples to Apples, I looked it up and realized what I was actually remembering was Hi-Ho Cherry-O, a counting game for babies that is not about apples as I had for some reason thought it was

47. Bruised apples are still good to eat. This is a metaphor

48. The forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, as scripture dictates, was an apple

49. Assassin's Creed had a macguffin called the Apple of Eden and afaik it did whatever the fuck any one game needed it to do I've been drinking

50. Apples are fat-free

#apples #pomology #fun facts #nightblogging #sorry for this #haha lol #this got away from me at some point #agriculture

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strawbearisamu · 3 years

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cooking disasters

❀ timeskip! miya osamu, suna rintarō, kita shinsuke, x gn! reader

Hi babes! Can I request one where Osamu, Suna and Kita have a s/o who loves, loves eating but can't cook to save her life? Can't wait for your magnificent hands (mind?) to 'cook' (hehe) smth up <33333

note: requested by @notsochillnerd — here! this was a little rushed but i hope you like it!! <3

miya osamu

samu remembers it all, the smoke, the fire, you. his precious kitchen set ablaze. atsumu was convinced for a while that you were sent by some menace of an organisation to deprive him of onigiri and jeopardise the mbsy black jackals. of course he was only met with samu’s eye roll.

“samu, please,” you begged, voice slightly muffled, arms wrapped around your boyfriend’s waist, face smushed into his chest.

“babe... we’ve been through this, can’t have ya tryna to commit arson at onigiri miya again alright?” grey eyes meeting yours as he reached down, cupping your face.

“you’re so dramatic, i was only trying to reheat them for you, i didn’t know the microwave was capable of that...” you grumbled, pouting. “please?” and since his resolve was practically non-existent when it came to you, he only sighed and nodded.

cooking with you was an….experience. you always seemed to know how to induce the greatest amount of stress and panic in the shortest amount of time, leaving you alone for two seconds meant taking 10 years off of his life. and every time samu looked back to check up on you, he would count one less onigiri.

“samu, why does yours look so different? they were made using the same ingredients….” you whined, “teach me again?” you asked a little too eagerly. “here,” he chuckled, caging you against the counter, arms on either side, his breath tickling your hair a little, his calloused palms on your hands contrasted with his gentle touch as he guided your hands in his, molding the onigiri.

samu only stares at you with a knowing smirk as you scarf down the food-he- you guys made, the purest look of joy on your face as you devoured each bite.

“that good huh?” he asked and you nodded furiously in response. he chuckles squishing your cheeks in his palms, “hold still,” he said, kissing the stray piece of rice off your nose as your eyes widened a little before pouting, your index gesturing at your lips as though saying “here too.” and he happily obliges, smiling as he reaches in for a soft kiss.

suna rintarō

suna had actually been duped by you because you told him you loved food and you had a huge "passion" for cooking, so naturally he assumed you would be good at cooking. the first time he tried your food, bless him, he almost broke up with you because he literally thought you were trying to poison him.

he comes home to hear the clanging of pans and pots in the kitchen and almost instantly whips out his phone to order takeout. just in case you don’t make enough of course <3.

although a few hours later it’s you who’s devouring all of the takeout. shrinking a little under his gaze,, timidly reaching over for more.

“just take it all,” he sighed, pushing the takeout box towards you. “really?” your eyes lighting up as he nodded in response.

his green eyes are trained on you as practically inhale everything, he doesn’t even notice himself smiling along with you as you beamed in utter delight. finally letting a satisfied burp, “oh i’m stuffed,” you huffed only now noticing his green eyes that continued boring into yours, you let out an innocent, “what?”

“you’re so spoiled,” he said, pinching your cheek, “stop grinning like that, it's not a compliment, yn,” he frowned.

“close your eyes,” he ordered. “why?” “just do it,” and suna gets real close, his face inches away from yours, as you kept your eyes shut, swallowing in anticipation., “what are you doing babe? it’s done,” he says smirking at you as he wiped away the little spots of sauce that landed on your eyelids

“you’re so mean rin,” you said glaring at him. “i don’t know what you mean,” he shrugged, a mischievous glint in his eye as he pulled you towards him, stealing a few kisses, “happy now?”

kita shinsuke

this man is so patient. he smiles through it all. somehow convincing himself your food is not all inedible, giving you weak nods as you look at him with expectant eyes.

kita loves you more than anything in the world, but you have to understand, a part of him dies when he sees the unspeakable things you do to the precious rice he so painstakingly cultivated, grown and harvested.

and that’s why kita elected to spend one of the very few rest days he got teaching you how to prepare rice and rice dishes.

“shin, does this go here?” you asked as he placed a calloused palm on your forearm, his warmth guiding you towards the pot. your cooking session goes surprisingly smooth with you only burning one dish.

when it’s time to eat he gives you all the bigger pieces, eating alongside you, watching intently as the look of pure joy on your face blossoms with every bite. mr. rice even carries you back to bed after you get knocked out from your food coma.

sol’s comments ❀ — omg kita’s is so short sry cuties, it was getting repetitive T.T also sorry for the long break, i just couldn't write anything good :(( used to cry about it but now i just take a break so at least there’s progress hehe. im a big girl now HAGHS 🥴 <33

m.list ·˚ ༘ ꒱ | reblops are appreciated ☻ (free hugs ?! :O)

#sweet by sol 💗#i made something — sol ⋆·˚ ༘ *#miya osamu x reader #osamu fluff #osamu x reader #kita fluff #kita x reader #suna fluff #suna x reader #kita shinsuke x reader #suna rintaro x reader #haikyuu x reader #haikyuu fluff #hq x reader #hq fluff #haikyuu x y/n #haikyuu hcs #haikyuu drabbles

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noredinktech · 3 years

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☄️ Pufferfish, please scale the site!

We created Team Pufferfish about a year ago with a specific goal: to avert the MySQL apocalypse! The MySQL apocalypse would occur when so many students would work on quizzes simultaneously that even the largest MySQL database AWS has on offer would not be able to cope with the load, bringing the site to a halt.

A little over a year ago, we forecasted our growth and load-tested MySQL to find out how much wiggle room we had. In the worst case (because we dislike apocalypses), or in the best case (because we like growing), we would have about a year’s time. This meant we needed to get going!

Looking back on our work now, the most important lesson we learned was the importance of timely and precise feedback at every step of the way. At times we built short-lived tooling and process to support a particular step forward. This made us so much faster in the long run.

🏔 Climbing the Legacy Code Mountain

Clear from the start, Team Pufferfish would need to make some pretty fundamental changes to the Quiz Engine, the component responsible for most of the MySQL load. Somehow the Quiz Engine would need to significantly reduce its load on MySQL.

Most of NoRedInk runs on a Rails monolith, including the Quiz Engine. The Quiz Engine is big! It’s got lots of features! It supports our teachers & students to do lots of great work together! Yay!

But the Quiz Engine has some problems, too. A mix of complexity and performance-sensitivity has made engineers afraid to touch it. Previous attempts at big structural change in the Quiz Engine failed and had to be rolled back. If Pufferfish was going make significant structural changes, we would need to ensure our ability to be productive in the Quiz Engine codebase. Thinking we could just do it without a new approach would be foolhardy.

⚡ The Vengeful God of Tests

We have mixed feelings about our test suite. It’s nice that it covers a lot of code. Less nice is that we don’t really know what each test is intended to check. These tests have evolved into complex bits of code by themselves with a lot of supporting logic, and in many cases, tight coupling to the implementation. Diving deep into some of these tests has uncovered tests no longer covering any production logic at all. The test suite is large and we didn’t have time to dive deep into each test, but we were also reluctant to delete test cases without being sure they weren’t adding value.

Our relationship with the Quiz Engine test suite was and still is a bit like one might have with an angry Greek god. We’re continuously investing effort to keep it happy (i.e. green), but we don’t always understand what we’re doing or why. Please don’t spoil our harvest and protect us from (production) fires, oh mighty RSpec!

The ultimate goal wasn’t to change Quiz Engine functionality, but rather to reduce its load on MySQL. This is the perfect scenario for tests to help us! The test suite we want is:

fast

comprehensive, and

not dependent on implementation

includes performance testing

Unfortunately, that’s not the hand we were given:

The suite takes about 30 minutes to run in CI and even longer locally.

Our QA team finds bugs that sneaked past CI in PRs with Quiz Engine changes relatively frequently.

Many tests ensure that specific queries are performed in a specific order. Considering we might replace MySQL wholesale, these tests provide little value.

And because a lot of Quiz Engine code is extremely performance-sensitive, there’s an increased risk of performance regressions only surfacing with real production load.

Fighting with our tests meant that even small changes would take hours to verify in tests, and then, because of unforeseen regressions not covered by the tests, take multiple attempts to fix, resulting in multiple-day roll-outs for small changes.

Our clock is ticking! We needed to iterate faster than that if we were going to avert the apocalypse.

🐶 I have no idea what I’m doing 🧪

Reading complicated legacy Rails code often raises questions that take surprising amounts of effort to answer.

Is this method dead code? If not, who is calling this?

Are we ever entering this conditional? When?

Is this function talking to the database?

Is this function intentionally talking to the database?

Is this function only reading from the database or also writing to it?

It isn’t even clear what code was running. There are a few features of Ruby (and Rails) which optimize for writing code over reading it. We did our best to unwrap this type of code:

Rails provides devs the ability to wrap functionality in hooks. before_ and after_ hooks let devs write setup and tear-down code once, then forget it. However, the existence of these hooks means calling a method might also evaluate code defined in a different file, and you won’t know about it unless you explicitly look for it. Hard to read!

Complicating things further is Ruby’s dynamic dispatch based on subclassing and polymorphic associations. Which load_students am I calling? The one for Quiz or the one for Practice? They each implement the Assignment interface but have pretty different behavior! And: they each have their own set of hooks🤦. Maybe it’s something completely different!

And then there’s ActiveRecord. ActiveRecord makes it easy to write queries — a little too easy. It doesn’t make it easy to know where queries are happening. It’s ergonomic that we can tell ActiveRecord what we need, and let it figure how to fetch the data. It’s less nice when you’re trying to find out where in the code your queries are happening and the answer to that question is, “absolutely anywhere”. We want to know exactly what queries are happening on these code paths. ActiveRecord doesn’t help.

🧵 A rich history

A final factor that makes working in Quiz Engine code daunting is the sheer size of the beast. The Quiz Engine has grown organically over many years, so there’s a lot of functionality to be aware of.

Because the Quiz Engine itself has been hard to change for a while, APIs defined between bits of Quiz Engine code often haven’t evolved to match our latest understanding. This means understanding the Quiz Engine code requires not just understanding what it does today, but also how we thought about it in the past, and what (partial) attempts were made to change it. This increases the sum of Quiz Engine knowledge even further.

For example, we might try to refactor a bit of code, leading to tests failing. But is this conditional branch ever reached in production? 🤷

Enough complaining. What did we do about it?

We knew this was going to be a huge project, and huge projects, in the best case, are shipped late, and in the average case don’t ever ship. The only way we were going to have confidence that our work would ever see the light of day was by doing the riskiest, hardest, scariest stuff first. That way, if one approach wasn’t going to work, we would find out about it sooner and could try something new before we’d over-invested in a direction.

So: where is the risk? What’s the scariest problem we have to solve? History dictates: The more we change the legacy system, the more likely we’re going to cause regressions.

So our first task: cut away the part of the Quiz Engine that performs database queries and port this logic to a separate service. Henceforth when Rails needs to read or change Quiz Engine data, it will talk to the new service instead of going to the database directly.

Once the legacy-code risk has been minimized, we would be able to focus on the (still challenging) task of changing where we store Quiz Engine data from single-database MySQL to something horizontally scalable.

⛏️ Phase 1: Extracting queries from Rails

🔪 Finding out where to cut

Before extracting Quiz Engine MySQL queries from our Rails service, we first needed to know where those queries were being made. As we discussed above this wasn’t obvious from reading the code.

To find the MySQL queries themself, we built some tooling: we monkey-patched ActiveRecord to warn whenever an unknown read or write was made against one of the tables containing Quiz Engine data. We ran our monkey-patched code first in CI and later in production, letting the warnings tell us where those queries were happening. Using this information we decorated our code by marking all the reads and writes. Once code was decorated, it would no longer emit warnings. As soon as all the writes & reads were decorated, we changed our monkey-patch to not just warn but fail when making a query against one of those tables, to ensure we wouldn’t accidentally introduce new queries touching Quiz Engine data.

🚛 Offloading logic: Our first approach

Now we knew where to cut, we decided our place of greatest risk was moving a single MySQL query out of our rails app. If we could move a single query, we could move all of them. There was one rub: if we did move all queries to our new app, we would add a lot of network latency. because of the number of round trips needed for a single request. Now we have a constraint: Move a single query into a new service, but with very little latency.

How did we reduce latency?

Get rid of network latency by getting rid of the network — we hosted the service in the same hardware as our Rails app.

Get rid of protocol latency by using a dead-simple protocol: socket communication.

We ended up building a socket server in Haskell that took data requests from Rails, and transformed them into a series of MySQL queries, which rails would use to fetch the data itself.

🛸 Leaving the Mothership: Fewer Round Trips

Although co-locating our service with rails got us off the ground, it required significant duct tape. We had invested a lot of work building nice deployment systems for HTTP services and we didn’t want to re-invent that tooling for socket-based side-car apps. The thing that was preventing the migration was having too many round-trip requests to the Rails app. How could we reduce the number of round trips?

As we moved MySQL query generation to our new service, we started to see this pattern in our routes:

MySQL Read some data ┐ Ruby Do some processing │ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby More processing MySQL Write some data ┐ Ruby Processing again! │ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

To reduce latency, we’d have to bundle reads and writes: In addition to porting reads & writes to the new service, we’d have to port the ruby logic between reads and writes, which would be a lot of work.

What if instead, we could change the order of operations and make it look like this?

MySQL Read some data ┐ candidate 1 for MySQL Read some more data ┘ extraction Ruby Do some processing Ruby More processing Ruby Processing again! MySQL Write some data ┐ candidate 2 for MySQL Write more data ┘ extraction

Then we’d be able to extract batches of queries to Haskell and leave the logic behind in Rails.

One concern we had with changing the order of operations like this was the possibility of a request handler first writing some data to the database, then reading it back again later. Changing the order of read and write queries would result in such code failing. However, since we now had a complete and accurate picture of all the queries the Rails code was making, we knew (luckily!) we didn’t need to worry about this.

Another concern was the risk of a large refactor like this resulting in regressions causing long feedback cycles and breaking the Quiz Engine. To avoid this we tried to keep our refactors as dumb as possible: Specifically: we mostly did a lot of inlining. We would start with something like this

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end end

These are refactors with a relatively small chance of changing behavior or causing regressions.

Once the query was at the top level of the code it became clear when we needed data, and that understanding allowed us to push those queries to happen first.

e.g. from above, we could easily push the previously obscured QuizForFun query to the beginning:

class QuizzesControllller 9000 :super_saiyan else load_sub_syan_fun_type # TODO: inline me end end end

You might expect our bout of inlining to introduce a ton of duplication in our code, but in practice, it surfaced a lot of dead code and made it clearer what the functions we left behind were doing. That wasn’t what we set out to do, but still, nice!

👛 Phase 2: Changing the Quiz Engine datastore

At this point all interactions with the Quiz Engine datastore were going through this new Quiz Engine service. Excellent! This means for the second part of this project, the part where we were actually going to avert the MySQL apocalypse, we wouldn’t need to worry about our legacy Rails code.

To facilitate easy refactoring, we built this new service in Haskell. The effect was immediately noticeable. Like an embargo had been lifted, from this point forward we saw a constant trickle of small productive refactors get mixed in the work we were doing, slowly reshaping types to reflect our latest understanding. Changes we wouldn’t have made on the Rails side unless we’d have set aside months of dedicated time. Haskell is a great tool to use to manage complexity!

The centerpiece of this phase was the architectural change we were planning to make: switching from MySQL to a horizontally scalable storage solution. But honestly, figuring the architecture details here wasn’t the most interesting or challenging portion of the work, so we’re just putting that aside for now. Maybe we’ll return to it in a future blog post (sneak peek: we ended up using Redis and Kafka). Like in step 1, the biggest question we had to solve was “how are we going to make it safe to move forward quickly?”

One challenge was that we had left most of our test suite behind in Rails in phase one, so we were not doing too well on that front. We added Haskell test coverage of course, including many golden result tests which are worth a post on their own. Together with our QA team we also invested in our Cypress integration test suite which runs tests from the browser, thus integration-testing the combination of our Rails and Haskell code.

Our most useful tool in making safe changes in this phase however was our production traffic. We started building up what was effectively a parallel Haskell service talking to Redis next to the existing one talking to MySQL. Both received production load from the start, but until the very end of the project only the MySQL code paths’ response values were used. When the Redis code path didn’t match the MySQL, we’d log a bug. Using these bug reports, we slowly massaged the Redis code path to return identical data to MySQL.

Because we weren’t relying on the output of the Redis code path in production, we could deploy changes to it many times a day, without fear of breaking the site for students or teachers. These deploys provided frequent and fast feedback. Deploying frequently was made possible by the Haskell Quiz Engine code living in its own service, which meant deploys contained only changes by our team, without work from other teams with a different risk profile.

🥁 So, did it work?

It’s been about a month since we’ve switched entirely to the new architecture and it’s been humming along happily. By the time we did the official switch-over to the new datastore it had been running at full-load (but with bugs) for a couple of months already. Still, we were standing ready with buckets of water in case we overlooked something. Our anxiety was in vain: the roll-out was a non-event.

Architecture, plans, goals, were all important to making this a success. Still, we think the thing most crucial to our success was continuously improving our feedback loops. Fast feedback (lots of deploys), accurate feedback (knowing all the MySQL queries Rails is making), detailed feedback (lots of context in error reports), high signal/noise ratio (removing errors we were not planning to act on), lots of coverage (many students doing quizzes). Getting this feedback required us to constantly tweak and create tooling and new processes. But even if these processes were sometimes short-lived, they've never been an overhead, allowing us to move so much faster.

#engineering

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ravenmyecoaction · 4 years

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Métis Peoples & the Buffalo

For this post I will be discussing Métis people and the significance of the buffalo to us as a culture and as a Nation. I will first give a bit of background on who the Métis people are. Then, I will discuss why the buffalo were historically a central part of Métis culture, identity and way of life in the 1700s to 1800s. A part of this history is the incredible buffalo hunts that the Métis came together for, in a highly chaotic, yet organized fashion, for such freedom loving people, in order to sustain their families, as well as for trade and income. I will also touch on a darker part of history, where the magnificent buffalo herds of Turtle Island were almost driven to extinction in the late 1800s, of which the Métis may have played an unfortunate part in, along with other forces at play during that time. I will then discuss how the buffalo hunt, although a thing of the past, still has relevance to contemporary Métis people, particularly regarding our political tradition, and I will consider how Métis peoples historical relationship with buffalo has implications for the future of the Métis Nation, including Métis wellness and self-determination.

Who are the Métis?

The Métis people are descendants of plains First Nations women and European fur traders who had country marriages and began families (Kodiack, 2020b), in the 16 and 1700s (Métis Nation of Ontario, n.d.) Over several generations a distinct culture emerged from these unions, where the Métis have a unique culture, a distinct ancestral language, Michif, an extensive network of kin, and a shared history, political tradition and way of life (Gaudry, 2019). They had many lifestyles in the 17 & 1800s, including as hunters, trappers, gathers, traders, farmers, translators or clerks. Education opportunities varied, depending on peoples’ access to money and land. A shift from trading to a mixed lifestyle was more common as permanent Métis communities formed across Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta in the 1800s (Kodiak, 2020b). The Métis were known as entrepreneurs, ‘self-made” people, who were independent of clan or kinship obligations to European and First Nations groups. Some Michif traders did very well for themselves and were known as ‘Rich Men’. The Métis valued liberty, equality and democracy (Teillet, 2019). The Cree would call them Otipemisiwak (oh-ti-pi-miss-i-wak), which means the “people who own themselves” or “those who rule and command themselves” (Kodiak, 2020).

(Image: https://www.canadiangeographic.ca/article/toward-metis-homeland)

History of the Métis, Buffalo, and Buffalo Hunt

The buffalo is central to the formation of Métis culture and nationhood, where buffalo herds brought thousands of descendants of the First Nations women and European fur traders together in the 1700s & 1800s, to work towards a common goal, to hunt buffalo for food and the meat was also used as form of currency to be traded for other important things, including trade goods, other food, land and education. Métis buffalo hunters brought in a reliable, steady source of nutritious food, which was an important source of food security in the Red River, where crops often failed. They also made far more money than one could farming (Teillet, 2019).

Many Métis preferred the lifestyle of living “entirely by they chase,” with the wind in their face and with the constant change that following the herds across the plains for 100s of miles brought, rather than by the “monotonous toil of the settlers.” There were summer, fall and winter hunts. Whole families went along on these hunting expeditions, because everyone was needed, where the men were responsible for the hunt and the women played an important role in pemmican making, and later in the production of Buffalo robes (Teillet, 2019).

(Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_buffalo_hunt#/media/File:PaulKane-BuffaloHunt-ROM.jpg)

Here is a poem by Marilyn Dumont about how to make pemmican:

How to Make Pemmican

Kill one 1800lb. Buffalo

Gut it

Skin it

Butcher it

Slice the meat in long strips for drying

Construct drying tripods and racks for 1000lbs. Of wet meat

Dry it while staving of predators for days

Strip from drying racks and lay on tarps for pounding

Round 1000 lbs. of dry meat

Mix with several pounds of dried berries, picked previously

And rendered suet

Cut buffalo hides in quarters

Fill with hot dried meat, berry and suet mixture

Sew quarter-hide portions together with sinew

Bury in a cache for later mmmh.

(Dumont, 2015)

While the buffalo hunt had the very practical purpose of obtaining meat and trade supplies, it was also a time where the Métis were able to sing, laugh, dance, gossip, joke and fight. It was a pretty loud affair, not to mention over the shrieks made by their signature Red River carts (Teillet, 2019).

Cuthbert Grant, the Buffalo Hunt & its Significance for Future Métis Governance

After 1816, Cuthbert Grant brought together the Métis in a way where you could say that “the buffalo hunt began in earnest” and grew into the legendary Métis buffalo hunts. He was able to somewhat tame a freedom loving and wild group of people. He managed to create an environment where their freedom and pride was honoured, while they also learned to work together as a unit. Grant developed democratic rules of the hunt, and a chain of command, from the chief captain of the hunt to ten captains below, as well as to scouts and camp guards (Teillet, 2019). When over a 1000 people could be participating in a single hunt, it required rules to make it work, including things like no stealing, swearing or hunting on Sundays. Once these rules were well established among the Métis, it was possible to apply them to other important matters of survival. This is why this institutional structure of the hunt was an early form of Métis governance (Cram, 2020).

(Image: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/grant_cuthbert_1854_8E.html)

Near Extinction of the Buffalo Herds of Turtle Island

The buffalo hunt as a way of life came to an end in the late 1800s, when the buffalo herd populations were nearly decimated. This near collapse of the population is said to be due to over harvesting, as well as the deliberate and successful attempt to starve Indigenous peoples of plains in the United States by the American government (Bergman, 2013).

Well not the only groups considered to be responsible for the near extinction of buffalo, the Métis have been named to have been part of the problem. They were considered to be wildly successful hunters, where they rode on horseback and killed by the gun. I’ve also read contradictory information about whether they used as much of the buffalo as they could or whether they were wasteful. One source claims that nothing was wasted, where all the “meat and skin was preserved and cured” before any more buffalo were killed (Teillet, 2019). But another source talks about how it was witnessed that the Métis could be quite wasteful, where hunting in the summer risked spoiling a huge amount of meat and fat if the weather suddenly became too hot and they sometimes took the best cuts of meat and best fat and left the rest of the buffalo on the field (Cunfer & Waiser, 2016).

If the latter part is true, it is certainly requires some critical reflection. If it is true, It makes me think maybe many Métis lost their teachings from their First Nations mothers, that animals are sacred and every bit of them should be used to honour them for sacrificing their lives. It’s possible that survival may have been so hard at that time they felt they had no other way to survive but to get pemmican meat and buffalo robes to market.

Relevance of the Buffalo and the Hunt to the Métis Today and in the Future: Political Tradition

First off, I recognize that as Métis people we will never go back to a subsistence life based on the buffalo.

Yet I recognize that Métis peoples’ past relationship with the buffalo and the structures that came about due to the buffalo hunt has current and future implications for the Métis, including opportunities and challenges.

One could argue that out of these buffalo hunts came a sense of unity and from that emerged a new Nation. The Métis had developed a governing system during these hunts that were based on Métis values, including egalitarianism, freedom, democracy, mobility, family and kin (Teillet, 2019). We saw these values and structures of government reflected in the Métis provisional government, of which Louis Riel was the leader, that was concerned with the rights of the Métis and negotiating the terms of entering Confederation (Bumsted, 2019). We now see these values shine through in our current local community and provincial governments, who represent us and advocate for our Métis rights today, as constitutionally enshrined Indigenous peoples in Canada.

I think that one of the opportunities that has arisen from the Métis buffalo hunt and Métis values is our strong political tradition, which our culture should continue to use in governance. I think the continuation of this political tradition is important to carry on into the future in the Métis fight for increased self-determination in a State which has continuously and continues to try to deny many of our rights, as Indigenous peoples in Canada, and more specifically as Métis people.

(Image: https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/arts-and-life/entertainment/books/recasting-riel-568290592.html)

Métis, Buffalo and the Buffalo hunt: Other Implications

I also think that the love of Métis peoples to be out on the land, where they would have rather been hunting buffalo than toiling away at agriculture, points to the fact that connection to land is an important part of Métis wellness. I have noticed that in my Métis community, particularly with youth, there is a strong desire to connect more with the land, including through the gathering of plants for food and medicine, and through hunting. In the future it would be helpful if there was more funding that helps get Métis people out on the land.

Finally, I think that the issue of the near collapse of the buffalo population is both a challenge and opportunity to the Métis peoples, and other peoples, when reflecting on the future. I think it is important for us as Métis people to reflect on the fact that we may have played a significant part in this and to use it as an opportunity to reflect and take action in the future regarding environmental protection and conservation that is done in a decolonized manner, where we take the lead from those First Nations whose traditional territories we are working in.

References

Bergman, B. (2013). Bison back from brink of extinction. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bison-back-from-brink-of-extinction

Bumsted, J, (2019). Red River Rebellion. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/red-river-rebellion

Cram, S. (2020). Muddied water season 2 episode 2: The buffalo hunt [audio file]. CBC Listen. Retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/371-muddied-water

Cunfer, G. & Waiser, W. A. (2016). Bison and people on the North America great plains: A deep environmental history. College Station: Texas A & M University Press.

Dumont, M. (2015). The pemmican eaters: Poems. Toronto, Ontario, Canada: ECW. Retrieved from https://www-deslibris-ca.libsecure.camosun.bc.ca:2443/ID/467925

Gaudry, A. (2019). Métis. The Canadian Encyclopedia. Retrieved from https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/metis

Kodiak, K. (2020). Lii sayzoons Michifs: L’itii (June to August) [PowerPoint presentation]. Archaeological Society of Alberta.

Métis Nation of Ontario. (n.d.). Métis historic timeline: Significant dates in the development of the Métis Nation. Retrieved from http://www.metisnation.org/culture-heritage/m%C3%A9tis-timeline/

Teillet, J. (2019). The north-west is our mother: The story of Louis Riel’s people, the Métis Nation (First ed.). Toronto, Ontario, Canada: Patrick Crean Editions, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

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thefamouswhitewolf · 4 years

Text

Pips

@joker-and-a-bard sent the prompt ‘apples’. Ta, darling!

Toward the end of summer and just before the weather started to turn frosty and could officially be called autumn, the countries mid-Continent fell into what Geralt had long ago termed pip-fruit season. Stone-fruit season was ending as peaches, nectarines, and plums became scarce and no longer grew on their trees, and pears, quince, and apples came into season.

Some fruits were best for certain purposes and some wintered better than others, but Geralt preferred apples over most other pip-fruits. He didn’t feed them to Roach because they gave her gas, but pears and quince didn’t. He figured it had something to do with how juicy pears and quince could be, compared to the rather fibrous texture of the standard apple.

The farmers with orchards made decent coin during apple season and apples were also a tree readily found throughout the mid-Continent along roadways and in the occasional meadow alone, which meant Geralt seldom had to pay for any of the ones he ate. Sometimes they were the small, slightly tart apples he kept in a saddle bag to supplement his road rations, but he, along with Jaskier that season, found an abandoned orchard at least two years ignored.

Almost a dozen trees laden with the mottled red and green apples normally sold at market for a decent price, just waiting to be harvested. They showed their neglect by having spots on some, and the limbs of a few trees were too heavy and almost breaking due to a lack of pruning, but both men had eaten their share of blemished fruit before and neither wasted a moment as they began collecting.

Geralt started a fire away from the orchard and tethered Roach so she wouldn’t be a naughty girl and get into the apples, the fresh, still-green grasses surrounding the orchard offering her plenty of decent food during their stay. Jaskier stowed his lute with Geralt’s gear after it was removed from Roach and he dragged a heavy wolf pelt over to lay on the grass under a tree with low-hanging limbs, whistling to himself as he started picking apples as big as his fist.

“Look at this one, Geralt!” he called out, holding a huge apple aloft for viewing. “Not a spot on it!”

It went into the pile atop the pelt and Jaskier helped himself to one a few minutes later, crunching and giving a light suck to the fruit as it was far juicier than he’d expected.

“Sweet, too! Definitely not pie apples. Would be a shame to cook these beyond a light roast or a bit of a stew.”

Geralt hummed and got to picking the smaller ones for his saddlebag. he reached deep into the canopy for the little, half-grown apples, knowing them to be more tart but they wouldn’t rot as quickly. He ate one whole with a smug smile as Jaskier made a fake gagging noise, hating that Geralt could eat them core and all. It was a texture thing, the bard swore.

“Fire’s going so we can roast some for dinner. Got enough daylight left to start quartering the majority and drying them by the fire, too.”

Jaskier nodded, and gestured to the wolf pelt. “Seems I’ve gathered enough to keep our supply up for at least a fortnight or possibly an entire month but alas, I’m unable to lift the pile and bring it to the fireside.”

“You did that on purpose.”

The bard smiled, trying to look sheepish but failing.

“I didn’t not do it on purpose. Come, Sir Witcher; be the magnificent brute you are and haul this collection of sweet orbs to the fire for your delicate companion, where he can start cutting them up! There’s even a half dozen quince in that pile from the last tree of that first row. Not sure why this landowner thought a single quince tree was necessary, but it means a valuable treat for our dear lady Roach, as well.”

Geralt rolled his eyes and finished gathering the small apples he could see before him, stored them in the saddlebag designated as such, then glanced at Jaskier’s backside and cheerful attitude as he went to pick up the enormous pile of apples Jaskier had collected. He’d done a good job of not picking too many damaged fruits, and Geralt only--silently--tossed a single apple aside as he picked up the corners of the pelt and brought the pile to the fire.

Jaskier already had a knife in-hand as he waited and he immediately dug through the shifted pile to save the six quince from where he’d put them while picking. He kept them in a pile outside of the pelt for later storage and absentmindedly handed one off to Geralt as the Witcher headed over to his side of the fire, a smile creeping up on Jaskier’s face as Geralt bypassed taking a seat and immediately brought Roach her gift.

“No, don’t thank me,” Geralt said quietly, the silence of the orchard making it easy for even human ears to pick up his voice on the light breeze. “Jaskier found them for you. Once a day, because you’ll be spoiled otherwise. Don’t give me that look.”

The bard went right back to cutting the apples into quarters and setting them onto the skin side of the pelt to sun-dry, four of the largest ones waiting on the edge of the fire to be roasted later for their dinner. Geralt would put them directly into the scooped coals with their skins still on, essentially steaming the fruits from the inside out.

The promise of a sweet treat had them all in good spirits and Geralt smiled lightly as he sat down across the fire from Jaskier,not really needing to assist him as the bard had it under control. His hands worked deftly with the short blade and quartered the apples in the blink of an eye, even going so far as to slice off the core sections, too. When dried, they were a little tough to chew through even with a good set of teeth, and the dried pips were like rocks.

He looked up at Geralt and smiled so his eye crinkled, holding a quarter up so the Witcher could see it and tossing it over the flames, where Geralt caught it out of the air and put the whole quarter into his mouth. The crunch was loud and he hummed approvingly, chewing a few more times before smacking his lips and holding his hand up for another.

“I wasn’t lying when I said they were good, was I?” Jaskier asked, throwing over a whole apple from his dwindling intact pile.

Geralt caught the apple and dug into it with a satisfying crunch, slurping as the juice threatened to dribble down his chin.

“No, you weren’t. Must be the early variety because once the frosts set in, the apples get dry.”

“Eat them up while we’re here, then, because these are drying already. It’s still surprisingly warm for being this late in the summer. Sun’s still high in the sky, so I may go pick a few more to add to our collection. Whole ones to keep for munching, this time.”

“Have at it, bard. I’ll roast those big ones later. Only pick what you can carry when we leave, because the amount you’ve already quartered will fill Roach’s last empty saddlebag.”

Jaskier winked and went back into the orchard, leaving Geralt to watch only the bard’s legs and backside from where he sat, the other half of Jaskier’s body blocked by dense foliage.

It wasn’t a bad view, all things considered.

#;prompts #musings #joker and a bard #geraskier #if you squint #just dudes being bros #eating apples in the wild like a pair of dudes being bros #crunching and slurping as if they're not teasing each other

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ichigo-daifuku · 4 years

Text

Promise

❅ In retrospect, she should have expected no less from Ieyasu when he put his mind into things. A man of many talents, he accomplished the conditions set by her father with ease, fulfilling her promise. ❅

This was inspired by Date Masamune's story in Tears Wept Passionately as Love.

Word Count: ~4.4k | AO3 Link

Surreal. That was the only way she could describe the fact that Ieyasu was in her home in Kyoto. His eyes held interest as he wandered around the kitchen, making a side comment here and there about the herbs and spices in the corner and the cooking implements he encountered for the first time. From being appointed as his poison taster to becoming a special person in his life, they had come far. Last night, they brought a few of Ieyasu’s closest retainers with them and arrived in the city, settling in an inn and visiting their family restaurant first thing in the morning. Tadakatsu leaned against a wall and bit into his third onigiri of the morning. Toramatsu, on the other hand, took the initiative to help around and was sweeping the floor. Meanwhile, Yasumasa was nowhere to be seen. As for Tadatsugu, he had stayed in Mikawa in order to manage Ieyasu’s affairs and correspondence in his absence and promised to accompany them on their next visit.

“Hmm… It seems Mother and Yahiko rearranged our stuff. Well, it has been some time since I last cooked around here…” she thought out loud as she rummaged through the cookery in search of a specific pan she liked to use. “Hmm… What’s this?”

Hidden beneath a stack of aprons at the bottom of the cabinet, there was a wooden box she didn’t recognize. Ieyasu peeked over her shoulder, equally curious. “You won’t know unless you open it.”

“Right.” She pulled the box from the shadows, placed it on the counter, and dusted it with a rag. Tadakatsu and Toramatsu stood closer and settled across them as she uncovered it in mild anticipation of its contents.

A scroll rested inside, and Ieyasu picked it up and unfurled it. Its title, written in bold letters, caught all of their attention at once: The Five Traits of My Daughter's Husband.

“Huh…?” Ieyasu blurted out, surprise evident on his face.

“Oh, I see! I can’t believe this is still here.” The title alone brought back memories at once, and she explained, “This was written a long time ago, way before Yahiko was born. I promised my Father I would take care of the restaurant when I grow up, and I would do so with my future husband. He wrote this and said the man I would love should possess all these qualities as a condition for him to give both my hand in marriage and this place.” She chuckled as she remembered her memories with her father with a fond smile. “Of course, the restaurant is now going to be in Yahiko’s capable hands, so…”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Tadakatsu beamed and placed a fist on top of his open palm for emphasis. “This would be the perfect opportunity to show off your prowess in anything and everything, Lord Ieyasu! I can’t wait!”

Toramatsu nodded in agreement, broom still in hand. “True.”

Ieyasu clicked his tongue and was about to give them a scathing retort when her mother peeked inside through the doorway, making all their eyes turn to her direction.

“Good morning, everyone,” her mother greeted. “Dear, would you be so kind as to do the shopping today? We are running a bit low on some ingredients.”

“Sure thing, Mother. Do you have a list with you?” she replied.

“Oh! Hold on for a bit, alright?” Her mother gave them a smile before leaving to get some parchment.

Happiness bubbled inside her. From her father’s penmanship to her mother’s smile, so much has happened in her life, and it was nice to be reminded of the old days, her childhood. She turned to Ieyasu and asked, “Would you like to come with me?”

“Hmph,” Ieyasu replied, his eyes still trained on the scroll. “Toramatsu.”

“One moment, Milord.”

“I don’t understand why I have to come along,” Yasumasa complained for the fifth time in the same hour, a sack of potatoes nestled in his arms. Toramatsu, who knew Ieyasu too well, understood the order he was given right away and fetched Yasumasa from his walk nearby the restaurant, much to Yasumasa’s displeasure.

“Come on, Yasumasa. Your liege lord is getting married! You have to do your part as a loyal retainer.” Tadakatsu laughed as he bounced the two sacks on his shoulders. “Besides, isn’t it great to feel all this strain in your muscles? This is heaven on earth!”

“Ugh, only you would say that…” Yasumasa rolled his eyes. “I better be fed well after this.”

“Why did you take a walk so suddenly, anyway? Seen a woman you like?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

She held the carefully packaged strawberries, quite a small one compared to all they carried. The cart pulled by Ieyasu’s mare was already full, the kitchenware Ieyasu spotted when they entered the marketplace occupying most of its space. According to him, they looked like they were of ‘good quality’, and when she asked him why he was about to purchase them, he had thrown back irritatedly, “Do you really need to ask.”

Ieyasu took one glance at the list her mother gave her, and their trip to the market turned into a shopping spree of fruits and vegetables; enough to last the restaurant for a while, but not too much that the products would end up being spoiled. Soon, the five of them were on the way to their last stop at the rice grocer, an elderly man whom she had known for a long time since she used to run errands for the restaurant.

“Is that you?” the rice grocer asked. “I haven’t seen you in so long. Your mother told me you moved away because of your new job.”

“I did! It has been a while, it’s so nice to see you again. I trust business is still doing well?” She asked, noting the establishment has grown larger since her last visit.

“It definitely is.” The rice grocer laughed and moved to show them in. “Come inside. Bountiful harvest around here recently.”

Workers roamed around the space where huge varieties of rice were piled neatly in rows of sacks, entertaining customers. As they browsed along, Ieyasu pointed to the finest out of all of them. “Give me that one.”

The rice grocer, visibly pleased with Ieyasu’s choice, obliged.

Ieyasu turned to her. “Do you need more?”

“No, it’s enough. Actually, we’ve gotten a lot already...”

At her reply, Toramatsu settled the payment at once while Ieyasu carried the sack of rice on his shoulders. The text on the scroll they had read earlier flashed inside her mind:

One. A husband must be able to carry all the rice his wife would need.

“Why…?” she whispered to no one in particular as he proceeded to exit the shop.

“Your betrothed is the Lord of Mikawa,” Toramatsu stood beside her and stated, his eyes also trained on Ieyasu. “He can carry all the rice you need, and he’s not afraid to utilize what he can to give you the things you deserve.”

“Well, that and more,” Tadakatsu added, referring to all of their purchases. “I never thought I’d live to see Lord Ieyasu like this. It’s quite nice. Isn’t that right, Yasumasa?”

“You’re so noisy,” Yasumasa complained and followed Ieyasu outside.

What they said about Ieyasu was right. As unorthodox as he was, he meant all of these as gifts for the restaurant, her mother, Yahiko, and… her. She had thought the scroll they found earlier didn’t matter much to him, but it seemed that she was mistaken.

Back at the restaurant, she took over the kitchen duties and asked her mother to rest and Yahiko to take a break and hang out with his neighborhood friends. Tadakatsu volunteered to chop wood in the backyard for later use. He placed himself between Yasumasa and Toramatsu, put an arm around each of their shoulders, and happily took them outside with him despite Yasumasa’s protests. She had thought Ieyasu would be tired from carrying the sack of rice, and she suggested that he should rest for a while as well.

The fire burned under the stove as she washed the rice Ieyasu had chosen earlier. The grains were whole and evenly shaped, and she was impressed by their excellent quality. It still hasn’t dawned on her completely, yet she knew it wasn’t her imagination; Ieyasu fulfilled the first tenet her father had written. The unexpected sound of footsteps made her look up from her task, and the man occupying her thoughts strode inside the kitchen himself.

“I’m bored,” Ieyasu stated. He went to the corner where the goods they purchased earlier rested and rummaged inside the sack of onions. “How many do you need?”

She placed the pot of rice over the stove and counted in her head. “I think around ten should be a good amount.”

Ieyasu didn’t reply but proceeded to get ten onions as she said. He placed them over the chopping board on the counter, grabbed a knife, and wordlessly began to peel them. He set the peel aside and began to chop at a continuous, rapid pace. She watched him in silence, and as if he felt her intense gaze on his back, he said out of the blue, “I’m used to it.”

Two. A husband should be so good with a knife that he should be able to chop an onion without it making him cry.

She was aware of Ieyasu’s skill in the kitchen. He may not be at the same level as a restauranteur, but he was not the kitchen disaster a person who did not know him would expect him to be. He was used to cooking. He had a lot of assassination attempts through food poisoning long ago, and he had began to entrust his meals to no one but himself until she came along. It wasn’t only that. In time she found out about what he endured during his childhood; he was also used to holding back his tears. Right now, his eyes had glazed, but not a single teardrop fell from them. He was a great actor. He had mastered this skill back in his childhood and teenage years.

The rice began to boil, and the sound of his rapid chopping came to a halt as she embraced him from behind, her own tears dotting his haori as she cried silently for him. He was here, the man he had become because of what he had gone through, and she loved him for all of it, including his flaws. The minutes spent in quietness were enough for her to be overcome with emotion; she vowed to herself that in all the happy or sad moments, he would not be alone. She was happiest beside him, and so she would be for as long as he wanted her to be. As her sobs turned into even breaths, she loosened her arms around his waist and let go.

“Finally done?” Ieyasu asked, resuming his task and finishing it quickly.

She wiped her cheeks with her sleeve as he turned around to face her. “Sorry about that.”

“Your crying face doesn’t suit you.”

“I know.” She gave him a smile and strode to the direction of the stove to check on the rice and set the pot aside.

“Hey,” Ieyasu called from behind as she placed a pot of soup to boil. “That meal you serve us before battles… Make one of them in front of me. Now.”

Three. Any man who would be my daughter's husband should learn to make our Absolute Victory Bowl.

“Of course,” she replied without hesitation. The third tenet meant so much to her; the Absolute Victory Bowl was her father’s signature dish, the legacy he left behind. He might not be able to pass it on to her future husband himself, but she would do her best to be the one to teach him how to make it. She pulled the main ingredients from the storage: abalone, dried chestnuts, and konbu which signified attack, victory, and celebration. He listened as she went on about the philosophy behind the name and ingredients of the dish, the heart of its existence; a taste so remarkable that anyone who would eat it before going off to war would hope to come back and have another serving. A reason to come back, aside from the dish being well-wishes from the chef at the same time. She showed him how to assemble the respective ingredients once, and that had been enough for him. He proceeded to make a few servings of Absolute Victory Bowl on his own in absolute concentration, opting to keep silent save for the few times he voiced out his thoughts without him being aware that he was doing so.

“You’re really determined, aren’t you?” she commented.

His eyes flickered to her direction, a little surprised. He tried to regain his composure, yet the telltale color of his cheeks as he went back to cooking told her otherwise. “Did we say something?”

She shook her head, unable to stifle a smile. “Nothing, Milord.”

It was past noon when she emerged from the kitchen. Her mother went to check on them and insisted that she has had enough rest and could resume taking care of the other duties. Ieyasu stayed to have a word with her mother. She gathered it was about her father’s scroll, and she couldn’t help but ponder about the fourth trait, undecided whether it would be easy or challenging for Ieyasu:

Four. Any man who would be my daughter's husband should welcome our regular customers with open arms.

Ieyasu wasn’t the greatest admirer of strangers, but he could be genial when he wanted to, even to certain people he didn’t necessarily like. It was a personality trait; his guarded persona appeared whenever he would visit other warlords’ castles and would rarely appear when he was in his own home. Despite being acquainted with the various sides of Ieyasu, when it came to him, she never truly knew what to expect, including in this circumstance. There were more sides of him she looked forward to discovering. This time, she would have to wait and see.

A familiar playful voice called from the entrance of the restaurant, “Yoo-hoo, it’s us!”

She spun around and ran towards the voice’s direction immediately, pleasantly surprised to see her friends waving at her. “Lord Hideyoshi! Inuchiyo!”

“Puppy told me you said you’d be here today, so we decided to drop by. We missed you… Right, Puppy?” A smile lit up Hideyoshi’s face as he nudged Toshiie with an elbow, punctuating each mention of the special pet name.

“What the hell? How many times have I told you not to call me that?!” Toshiie shoved Hideyoshi’s elbow in return and turned her way. He had the same old look on his face, the one which expressed his concern for her well-being, though awkwardly. “Hey, you… You’re doing okay?”

“Yeah, thank you for coming here today, both of you, really.”

“Of course! Ah... I missed this place!” Hideyoshi said as he sauntered inside the establishment.

“We were here with Keiji three days ago,” Toshiie stated, his complaints passing through one of Hideyoshi’s ears to the other.

Hideyoshi craned his head to look around the crowd of customers. “Speaking of which, we heard the news about your betrothal… Where is—”

“Hideyoshi! It’s so nice of you to come here! Not up to any monkey business, I assume?” Ieyasu emerged from the kitchen, finished with the conversation he had with her mother. He spotted them at once and chimed in the conversation.

“Nah, nothing of the sort. I was just about to ask where you were. Perfect timing, huh?”

“How thoughtful of you, as always.”

With their greetings and congratulations in order, Hideyoshi and Toshiie proceeded to choose an unoccupied table where they could have their meal in. As both of them sat down, they wasted no time in reciting their orders, the menu unneeded; each line on the list they had already gone through with their stomachs long ago.

Hideyoshi asked. “We’re not off to battle anytime soon—thankfully—but could we get those Absolute Victory Bowls?”

“And extra servings of the side dishes, please!” Toshiie said.

“Yes, of course.” She nodded and went to the kitchen, loading the tray with two of the best Absolute Victory Bowls made earlier plus the side dishes Toshiie requested.

“That was quick,” Toshiie noted.

She set the bowls in their respective places and poured them some tea. Hideyoshi and Toshiie said their thanks for the food and picked up their chopsticks, both excited to dig in.

“Wow, it’s so delicious. I haven’t had this in a while, and it’s just as I remember it. You’re the best!” Hideyoshi commented after a few bites, picking up another piece of abalone and taking a bite.

She shook her head. “I wasn’t the one who made those.”

Toshiie looked up from his bowl. “Yahiko, then? I knew that kid had it in him.”

“No. Yahiko is out with his friends right now. The one who made those was... Lord Ieyasu,” she said, both nervous and proud at the revelation. It was an impressive feat, especially for his first attempt at making an Absolute Victory Bowl.

Hideyoshi regarded Ieyasu with wide eyes. “What...? What a surprise! I never knew you were such a good cook, Ieyasu.”

“Well, there are a lot of things we don’t know, don’t we,” Ieyasu replied, a familiar smile directed at Hideyoshi gracing his lips which, for once, was genuine. Hideyoshi might not be his favorite person, but his recognition of his prowess in the kitchen pleased Ieyasu.

“Right, right. I gotta say, you’re doing quite well in helping out here… I mean, I’ve seen Puppy try to do that, but he just kept on bumping on the wares!” Hideyoshi snickered.

Toshiie glared at Hideyoshi. “Why don’t we leave the past in the past, huh, you Monkey?!”

“Sure, sure. By the way, can I get some bekko-ame? I have an empty flask right here.” Hideyoshi rummaged inside his bag for the flask he always had with him. “Oh, and some ohagi for Puppy, of course. I almost forgot.”

“Grr… Stop calling me that,” Toshiie barked.

“You don’t want ohagi?”

“That’s not the point...”

She laughed as the two of them bickered like best friends who would never admit they were best friends. It was a sight she missed. With a final glance at Ieyasu, who was dead set on fulfilling the fourth tenet, she strode to the kitchen to prepare her friends’ requests.

The sky had turned dark outside, and she lit the lanterns both inside and outside the restaurant. After bidding the last of the customers goodbye, they began to clean up the establishment, the fifth trait written on her father’s scroll the subject of their conversation while they did so.

Five. If anything should happen to my daughter, the man who would be her husband should defend our business in her place.

“That’s ridiculous.” Ieyasu rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath, “As if anything would happen to you…”

Despite the low volume of his voice, she heard it and was unable to stifle the blush that crept on her cheeks. Of course, she knew there would be dangers to becoming the woman who would stand beside him, but she was prepared for it. Besides, she had faith in him and the whole clan. There was nothing for her to worry about.

“Sis!” Yahiko called from outside and ran through the entrance with a worried expression. “I tried my best to stop that guy but…”

Confused, she patted his back and talked to him, “Calm down, Yahiko. What’s happening?”

All the questions she had were answered when the magistrate strutted through the door flanked by two of his underlings. She only had negative memories associated with that horrible person, she would rather never deal with him again and had thought she had seen the last of him when she left. How wrong she had been about that, to her dismay.

The magistrate’s eyes zeroed on her at once. “So, what I heard was true. I see you have come back to fulfill your promise to me. We must have our wedding ceremony as soon as possible. Hahaha!”

“Hey, watch your mouth—” Tadakatsu began to protest and was about to head for the magistrate when the sound of Ieyasu’s mocking laughter interrupted him.

The poison smile made itself known across Ieyasu’s face in a silent challenge to the magistrate. “Oh, my! What in hell's name is this thing talking about?”

“What’s with that smile? It’s giving me the creeps!” the magistrate, who has never met Ieyasu before, exclaimed.

“Goodness. How rude. It seems no one taught this thing any manners. I guess I have no choice. A lesson or two should be enough.” He let out a dramatic sigh, placed his hand on the hilt of his sword, and took his time in unsheathing it from its scabbard, the metallic sound making the magistrate step back and visibly panic. “Would you like to be introduced to my blade? I just polished it last night.”

The magistrate spoke through gritted teeth, “You… noodle-haired… bastard…!”

Ieyasu took a deep breath and exhaled before speaking, his voice dripping with unmistakable vitriol, “Is it just me or are we smelling the stink of someone’s impending death?”

“Gah!” The magistrate screamed and backed away. His legs trembled in fear and made him fall over his two underlings. However, both of them took one look at Ieyasu’s smile and lost the colors in their faces in an instant, running to the exit and leaving the magistrate to fend for himself. The magistrate, in the crossroads of fight or flight, chose the latter and scrambled towards the door, stumbling over a few tables and chairs on the way.

“How ugly. I hate him,” Ieyasu muttered as the drapes fluttered with the breeze of the magistrate’s cowardly exit. All throughout the scuffle, Toramatsu kept a straight face while Yasumasa had that permanent frown on his face, both of them used to their liege lord’s behavior. Meanwhile, Yahiko looked a little shocked but also impressed. As for Tadakatsu...

“That damned magistrate,” Tadakatsu cried out in passionate anger. “That should’ve been... ME! Me, too, Lord Ieyasu, please! I beg of you!”

“Get out of my sight.”

“Ahhh…! Yes, Lord Ieyasu…! Thank you so much!”

The time to return to the inn they were lodging in arrived, but she didn’t feel like leaving her old home yet and decided she would stay there for the night. While his retainers said their goodnights and left, Ieyasu stayed where he was. She took it as his decision to stay with her, and it made her glad that he would, despite him not saying anything. Her mother was more than happy with their choice, welcoming them inside her childhood bedroom where the contents were kept tidy but were in the same place she remembered they were in. Two sets of beddings were fitted right next to each other as was customary for people who were about to get married. The lanterns had been blown out, and both of them settled in. After a few minutes of tossing and turning, she gave in and let her mind swirl with thoughts of the events that occurred earlier that day.

“Can’t sleep yet?” Ieyasu murmured out of the blue, his voice softer than usual so as not to wake her mother and Yahiko.

“Yeah…” She turned around, her eyes adjusting to the dark while she blinked, and slowly she was able to see that Ieyasu’s eyes were already closed. “Lord Ieyasu?”

“Hm.”

“You accomplished everything...”

“Of course, I did.”

“I’m sure Lord Tadatsugu would be so proud of you. I mean, I am, too, you know?”

“Who says that old cretin is going to find out?”

“I’m sure he will, one way or another, even if you won’t tell him.”

“Tch.”

She chuckled and decided to tell him about something she found out earlier. “A while ago, my mother showed me a letter father wrote before he passed. Apparently, there’s a sixth number on that list…”

“A sixth?” Ieyasu eyes flew open. Whatever it was, he was sure he would be able to accomplish it.

“Yes. ‘Six. Even if the man who would be my daughter's husband can do none of these things... If she chooses him, and he can swear upon his life to make her happy... that is enough for me,’ that was what he had written.”

You accomplished everything, Lord Ieyasu. I choose you, and I’ll choose you every single day.”

The beddings rustled as he pulled her closer, and buried his face in her neck. It had been a long day, he was tired and could barely keep his eyes open. Still, every word she said registered in his brain. He breathed in and whispered slowly, “You... promise?”

“I promise.”

“Me... too...” he drawled as his eyes fluttered closed, the blanket of sleep covering him once again.

“I’m happy. Thank you, Lord Ieyasu.”

“You dummy...”

The scroll they found by accident today brought the two of them closer. Though her father was no longer around, the sight of his familiar writing brought her even closer to him, and not only her but also Ieyasu and everyone, too. Tomorrow, she would ask Ieyasu to come with her to visit her father’s resting place nearby. He would pretend to be disinterested as he did with the scroll, but she knew better that he felt otherwise and would agree. Then, she would introduce him to her father as the man who fulfilled the tenets, as the man she loved, as her future husband. She was sure her father, wherever he might be, was happy for her as well.

She embraced Ieyasu in return and breathed out a contented sigh. In honest moments like these, she kept the memory of today treasured in her heart. Everything was calm and good, and there was nothing else she could ask for. She pressed a gentle kiss against the temple of his head in a silent wish of sweet dreams, closed her eyes, and drifted to sleep.

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this series.

Happy birthday, Ieyasu! ♡◝(⑅•ᴗ•⑅)◜♡

Golden Days | Ieyasu's Birthday Countdown — Masterlist

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#samurai love ballad party #slbp #slbp ieyasu #tokugawa ieyasu #slbp fanfiction #slbp fanfic #slbp fic #golden days #ieyasu's birthday countdown #ichigo bakufu

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danaslewis · 4 years

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BACK STORY with DANA LEWIS

FOOD CHAIN PANDEMIC MAY 27, 2020 DANA LEWIS BACK STORY with DANA LEWIS FOOD CHAIN PANDEMIC

#danalewis #caitlinwelsh #foodsupply. #hunger

TRANSCRIPT

CHAPTER MARKERS

1: 0:00

Dana - At this time of great uncertainty in many of our normal routines and regular patterns of life are being challenged. The food and farming sector is no exception. If we are to harvest British fruit and vegetables this year, we need an army of people to help. Food does not happen by magic.

Speaker 2: 0:21

Hi everyone and welcome to

Speaker 3: 0:23

backstory. I'm your host Dana Lewis. That familiar boys was Prince Charles. It was called for an army of people defined it.

Speaker 2: 0:31

Jobs on the UK is fruit and vegetable farms because they are desperately short of people to pick this year's crops, closed European borders, people sick from COvid 19 that all makes for a dire harvest and it's a similar story from Europe to Canada and America and onto Asia. In this our latest edition of backstory, the delicate international food supply chain is rattled and some might say very near broken

Speaker 4: 1:10

[inaudible].

Speaker 2: 1:11

Caitlin Welsh is the director of the global food security program at the center for strategic and international studies. Hi Kaitlin.

Speaker 5: 1:18

Hi Dana.

Speaker 2: 1:20

As we speak, Prince Charles in the UK is asking people as in war time to go and pick food before it spoils in the fields. What's happening to labor and the flow of workers worldwide in this pandemic. If you could just kind of paint a general picture.

Speaker 5: 1:36

Sure. I think that's a great question. A great place to start. What we're seeing right now is a food crisis on a global scale and it's not due to the fact that there's not enough food available worldwide. It's due to disruptions across different aspects of food systems and that, uh, that, that request by Prince Charles, um, to me pinpoints access to food with, uh, with, with harvesting food. Um, and the, the particular issue there could have to do with availability of labor. Um, w uh, one thing that we're seeing worldwide is disruptions in labor flows. So that could, that could be one of the reasons that Prince Charles made that, um, made that request. Um, and, uh, also I think that he's, he's probably doing that to, uh, to reduce the amount of food loss and waste worldwide. Um, it was already very high before the pandemic. Um, but we're seeing because supply chains that they're very, very efficient. They're not flexible though. Um, and, uh, when for a variety of reasons, farmers are not able to reach markets, what we're seeing is, uh, is huge amounts of, of, of food loss, unfortunately. Um,

Speaker 2: 2:37

I want to talk to you about that. French fishermen say they're throwing back two thirds of their cash. Australia is facing an avocado glut. A farmer in Ontario, Canada now feed some of his milk back to his cows, but there is a limit to what can be recycled. Um, you know, most of what can not be sold will be wasted. Millions of liters of cake is going stale. The EU is expecting to lose $430 million worth of potatoes. So America's food waste ratio, um, where you are, is set to rise 30 to 40% this year. I mean, these are huge problems.

Speaker 5: 3:18

They really are. And again, they were problems before the pandemic and they're there. They're actually worse right now. I'll give you some more examples of what we're seeing in the United States. There was one chicken processing company that killed 2 million chickens in April. We had another that smashed a three quarters of a million of eggs in one week. Um, I think one of the biggest tragedies is with farmers who raise animals having to call their herds. So essentially kill the animals because they can't send them to meat processing plants. Um, and so we, uh, so we're seeing that in the, um, you know, in the tens of thousands per week across the U S um, so what's happening there is a, there's a, a couple of things. One of the main things is that, um, in, in March and into April, orders from restaurants and not just restaurants, but other places where people gathered to eat. So sports arenas, cafeterias at universities, um, public spaces generally, um, those orders fell off of a cliff as people were no longer able to gather. So farmers who are raising animals, um, and growing growing crops for those, um, to, for those establishments no longer had markets for their goods. So they were forced to, um, and they couldn't adjust quickly enough. They couldn't pivot. And so, um, they had no choice but to, but to waste their food, there's destroy their product.

Speaker 2: 4:32

Why do they have to call beef or call chickens or call, uh, pigs? W why is that? Because they cannot get the seed or they cannot afford, uh, to keep those animals longer without sending them to a meat processing plant or what is the problem?

Speaker 5: 4:50

Yeah. Um, a couple of reasons. One of them is that, um, when it comes to the pig supply chains, in particular, farmers who raise pigs don't invest in enough space to, um, to keep, to keep pigs or they're used to large amounts of product flowing through. So they, um, they, they'll raise them until they get to a certain size. Um, and then once they reach a certain size and they'll ship them off to be, um, to the, to the meat packing plants to be, um, to be processed for consumption. Um, but, uh, when the meat processing plants can no longer take them, it means that the pigs continue to grow in size. Um, and farmers simply don't have space to, um, to, to keep them and, um, and, and are forced. And, and again, uh, one thing that's very important is that farmers don't want to be making this decision. They, um, they're invested in their product and, um, and they're doing this only by necessity right now.

Speaker 2: 5:38

And yet you have meat shortages, uh, in some supermarkets in America. Why is that?

Speaker 5: 5:45

You're seeing that because of, because the meat processing plants are being taken offline. And that is because, um, not because of, you know, because of there's a problem inherent to the meat processing plant. It's because of worker. And I think that that's one of the most important things that's been a problem in the youth us meat industry for decades. Um, but the reason that meat processing plants are being taken offline is because of higher rates of, uh, of illness or even seeing death. Because of 19, almost 15,000 meat workers had been infected with coronavirus in meat packing facilities across the United States. And that's across 31 States. So this is a nationwide problem. We've known about this for several weeks. Uh, hundreds of cases, uh, in, in the panhandle in Texas. So it's because meat worker illness at meat packing plants is taking those offline and then, um, just back up one a few steps from there. And farmers who raised animals to send to those facilities are no longer able to send them there.

Speaker 2: 6:41

I mean, obviously you couldn't see this exact situation coming, but could you see the danger, uh, over the last 20 years of increased concentration of farms? I mean, America's poultry market for instance. Uh, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I believe it's controlled by just four companies. Is that a good thing?

Speaker 5: 6:59

Um, yeah. Not only that, but I believe, um, 90% of chickens, uh, uh, raised in the United States are, are part of virtual vertical integration. Meaning that the farmers that raise them don't actually own them. Uh, they don't sell them. They raise them to sell them to other processors. I think that's an example of what you're talking about. Um, what we're seeing in the United States is, is that we have an incredibly efficient food system, but that efficiency has come at the cost of flexibility so that when you have disruptions like the ones we're seeing today, producers are unable to pivot, um, uh, to, to, to shift their products to other markets. So for example, um, you have farmers and ranchers raising their product to sell to a very specific consumer. So that consumer might be a specific restaurant or specific type of restaurant. When that restaurant no longer, um, can, can take in an order, those producers are not able to pivot so they can sell the product to a different, um, to a different consumer like to grocery stores. And that's because, um, you have different packaging needs at different outlets. Um, it's because you have different labeling needs at different outlets. Um, for example, if you are raising a, a particular prime cut of beef, um, that a restaurant can no longer take, the producer is unable to grind that beef to send it to a grocery store. Um, you just simply have very, very specialized supply chains that are unable to, that are again, very, very efficient but unable to, to, um, but that are in an inflexible,

Speaker 2: 8:22

is this a disruption of bump on the road or are we in a spiral of the food supply chain?

Speaker 5: 8:29

I think that we're not out of the woods yet. Um, I think that things will start to get better slowly. We're seeing hunger unprecedented in modern times, the United States alongside images of mass food loss and waste. Um, I think that the public is aware of this crisis in a way that they haven't been recently. Um, and um, and so I, I'd be surprised if we don't take a hard look at our food systems that things don't change after this, particularly regarding worker health.

Speaker 2: 8:56

I mean, a lot of people, when they think of hunger, think of third world, they do not think of America.

Speaker 5: 9:02

Yeah. Um, so we're, we're seeing, um, shocking rates of hunger here. It's not because there's not enough food available. It's because destructions all across the system and it's also because of the economic downturn generally. And that's the one of the main reasons for food insecurity in the United States and worldwide. Well, you have an economic downturn. Um, and our, the fed chair Jerome Powell said that this downturn, um, the scope and speed of this downturn or without modern precedent, and so of course you're going to see food insecurity without precedent. One of the most shocking statistics that came out of a study that was released last week by the Brookings institution found that, um, in one in five households where, um, where their children 12 and under and one in five, um, the children were experiencing food insecurity and the researchers concluded that young children are experiencing food insecurity to an extent, unprecedented in modern times,

Speaker 2: 9:56

uh, around the world. It must be much worse than that depending on where you are

Speaker 5: 10:00

exactly, depending on where you are. Um, before the pandemic, there are a couple indicators. We had 820 million people around 820 million who were chronically undernourished. So that, that, that's a very high baseline to start with before the pandemic. Um, that was a, um, an estimate by the UN food and agricultural organization and some others. Um, the UN world food program had estimated before the pandemic that in addition there were about 130 million people who are at risk of sudden shocks to food to food security. So at risk of just for different reasons being thrown into food insecurity. That was before the pandemic.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Now you and I have another statistic, the UN estimates economic fallout from covert 19 could see the number of people suffering from acute hunger doubled to over 265 million this year. Does that kind of jive with what you've heard?

Speaker 5: 10:49

It does. That's exactly where I was going. So before the pandemic, they, they estimate 130 million and then they, because of the pandemic, they estimate that the number of people that could be thrown into food insecurity could double the two 65 million acute food insecurity just because of sudden shocks. Um, and uh, yeah, related to the pandemic.

Speaker 2: 11:05

And all of this is internationally now tied together, right? It's not that you domestically produce food and sell domestically. Often Ukrainian wheat for instance, milled to flour in Turkey turned to noodles in China. I mean a lot of the food supplies link,

Speaker 5: 11:22

absolutely global trade is, uh, is essential to food security for countries around the world. United States for example, we rely on imports to meet about 15% of our domestic food needs. That that proportion is much higher in developing countries where their agriculture sectors are not as, uh, not, not as advanced. Um, so, uh, so developing countries are much more susceptible to, um, to, to shocks and global trade. What we're seeing right now is about 15 countries have limited exports of their own food so that they can, they can, they can in an effort to meet their own domestic food needs. Um, policy analyses show that those aren't, aren't actually very, are, are not effective measures. Um, but what we're hoping is that that number does not rise and that it actually decreases.

Speaker 2: 12:07

That's, that's becomes a very serious situation. If you have countries saying, we're not going to export food, we're going to keep it for domestic consumption. In a crisis.

Speaker 5: 12:15

It absolutely does. Um, the last time that there was a major global food crisis was about 12 years ago, is 2007 and 2008 and at that time about 33 countries put export restrictions in place. And that, um, the effect of that was that it, um, it increased, it increased food prices such that it through, um, about 40 million more people into food insecurity because of those export restrictions. Uh, at that time, about about 12 years ago, 2007, 2008, there were about 45 countries that experienced riots worldwide. Um, some of which led to, to, um, to political change again, right now in the United States and worldwide, the crisis is not because there's not enough food available, but it's because of shocks across the system for all the things that we're mentioning for food processing, sales, um, economic downturn, reducing individual's ability to purchase food, et cetera.

Speaker 2: 13:02

Caitlin, great to talk to you. Thanks so much. All right. Steve Groff joins me now from South Eastern Pennsylvania. He is a farmer. He has tomatoes and spaghetti squash and other things. But he also, and probably more importantly for us lectures on farming, he's been all over the world. He's written a book called the future proof farm. And Steve, I think you may have to rewrite it after COBIT 19.

Speaker 6: 13:31

Well, you know, it's kinda timely in a way. When I wrote this book, I had no idea that Cobra 19 was coming on, but the Futureproof farm has to do with how we grow our food. And a big component of it is trying to think about things using the nutrient density or the nutrients and vitamins they're actually in our food and that occurs the way we grow it. And uh, so actually the book is very timely, but as you said, Dana, I uh, I am thinking about writing a follow up here at some

Speaker 2: 14:01

farmers were saying it's a bloodbath in terms of food production. I mean, really all over the world people are facing incredible challenges. But in the wake of COBIT 19 America, which has a $100 billion farm economy, it's got some deep trouble.

Speaker 6: 14:16

Well, there's some chinks in the armor. Have been come to light because of COBIT 19, and it's all because of our Justin time food supply system. And uh, because of the workers, it's actually the human component of that. And that's what we heard all about the meat shortages. It's because there are humans, there are people that need to be in the processing factories to be able to do that. So obviously that creates some challenges. Either the people get sick or they're afraid to come to work and you just can't, uh, do your, just the assembly line when you have people missing. And

Speaker 2: 14:52

I going to adjust. What does it mean just in time food supply?

Speaker 6: 14:57

Um, let's just take vegetables for example. You, we grow the vegetables and they're ripe during a certain period of time. Their, their shelf life is very small. And uh, so you harvest them the, the, you know, a few days before they're right. And then they have to be processed and packaged. That takes human effort in almost all cases. And then they get delivered to the stores. So from the time a product is harvested, so it gets to the stores is a matter of days. And then if you have a in the middle of that, if you have a section of that or that doesn't, um, allow for humans who will say in this case to do the processing, but then it's either ceased or stopped and then by that time the tomatoes may rot because they don't stay for three or four weeks. And so then we don't have them. And that's part of it. The other aspect is food service, restaurants, schools, um, businesses even is 50% of the use of food. And the way food is directed for food service is different than it is to grocery stores. It's different packaging, different sizes, even different varieties. I grow specific varieties, a butternut squash for grocery stores and other varieties of butternut squash for restaurant.

Speaker 2: 16:13

Okay, well let's, let's just stop there for a second. Because restaurants, you're saying that's 50%. I mean that market just collapsed.

Speaker 6: 16:21

It did, it did. So you would, you know, you would think, well, okay, people have to eat so you can automatically just switch to food instead of going to a restaurant. It just goes to a grocery store. Well, it's not that simple because as I said, packaging and sizes and a whole host of things, there's a few things that can go to both, uh, end users, but not a lot. And that's,

Speaker 2: 16:44

so that's where, that's why we see, that's why we see in that system a farmer saying that they have to plow these crops under, which, I mean it's horrendous given the fact that there are food shortages.

Speaker 6: 16:58

It is. And, and it's all because of between the farmer and the end user. That's the problem.

Speaker 2: 17:06

So what, how should that change? I mean, is this a wake up call? Is there something positive that comes out of this?

Speaker 6: 17:13

Yes. Um, there certainly is. And I think moving forward we're going to have to consider more of the direct marketing, the farmers to sell more directly to consumers. And I would encourage consumers to seek out farmers who are able to sell directly. And I'm a small farmer myself. So, uh, any time that I can be more direct to consumer, that may even put a bigger share of the dollar will say Hey into, into my pocket and people can get it more, uh, more directly as well. So I think, uh, the uptick in interest of locally grown, for instance, I think we'll continue. That's not going to serve all our food needs and that's not the point. The point is we need to be aware of some of these safeguards and we probably need to put you putting in place here and going more direct to the farmers is definitely one of those safe parts.

Speaker 2: 18:05

Do you think the federal government saying things like they want to stop food at the border, they want to keep it inside the United States is a good thing or is that kind of protectionism a dangerous thing?

Speaker 6: 18:17

I, you know, it's a two way street. Um, as we've always said for a while it's a, it's a small world out there and I guess like it or not, you know, we do need to reply. We needed to do you need to re re um, rely on some other nations that are closed. But that being said, I think this, uh, Cobra 19 has also brought up the fact that we do need a, you know, don't outsource too much. Uh, I guess so. I would be a big proponent of doing as local as possible. And that means even from a national perspective, uh, we can grow plenty of food. It's that it's not a food shortage as far as growing it. It's the system that is not serving us well right now.

Speaker 2: 19:00

My mother originally came from Western Canada, from Saskatchewan and I've been up there where they were huge wheat farming and I know, um, I mean I grew up on a, I grew up on a cow farm, but I know from the wheat farmers that you just don't plant a crop one year in advance. I mean, you were doing rotation crop crops and you were planning far into the future, you know, at least three years anyway. When you're doing farm leases. What does this suddenly do to everyone? How does a farmer plan now for next year? They must put everybody upside down and, and, and, and how does that translate into the food chain?

Speaker 6: 19:37

Yeah, I think, uh, we're all thinking about that. Um, my son and I who farms on my plans, my son farms with me here, we've been discussing that uh, here right now, right now short term and we are actually trying to have focus more on the grocery stores and we're actually changing up some varieties here at the last minute cause we still have time to do that. Our planning system or planting window has not closed yet. So we're trying to adjust like for the near term, which the near term for us is three or four months. Uh, but as we move forward there's still so many all Nunes out there of now. Now it's not so much of how steep is the curve going to be. I think we've flattened the curve, if you will. Now it's how will the reopening work, how is the timeline and what will come out of this? Obviously there's political influences at play right now that we feel like it's hard to have any control over. So it's more of a day to day thing or week to week thing. Now, Dana, as we move forward,

Speaker 2: 20:39

I'm not going to hit the consumer or is it going to hit the consumer? Well, I'm going to see it on the grocery shelves.

Speaker 6: 20:45

I think we will in form or fashion. I just saw this morning that there was some restaurants that opened up, they're putting a Qubit 19 surcharge on the bottom of their bill and it was like, of course the customers aren't too thrilled about that. And I have myself, I'm thinking, wow, that's, I don't think that's gonna fly, but it'll probably, um, I guarantee you the price of food is not going down. Uh,

Speaker 2: 21:09

are we going to have enough? Are we gonna have enough?

Speaker 6: 21:13

I, I think we will. That to me, I'm not afraid of, uh, uh, we can grow the, we can grow the product. Uh, there, there could be some labor shortage is actually, I'm, I'm suffering that a little bit now and getting my, my labor, I think I'll be getting it on time for June, July and August when I'm busiest, but they're not here yet. And, um, it is, it is, it is a somewhat of a challenge and that end of it, but I'm not too concerned about a shortage of food. I'm concerned more about the supply chain and how that's going to work out.

Speaker 2: 21:46

When you say they're not here yet, who are they, where are they coming from and will they come?

Speaker 6: 21:52

Right. So I use the uh, United States H to H program, which is the legal way to bring in, um, foreign workers. I've been doing that for the last 16 years, I guess now. It's worked very well.

Speaker 2: 22:06

Are they coming from outside the U S

Speaker 6: 22:08

yes, the ones I am getting are from the country of Thailand. So, uh, they are right now there's being delayed because the embassy was shut down where they need to get their visas. So we're waiting for that. Um, but it hasn't impacted me dramatically that yet, but it will, uh, if, if there's further delays, so

Speaker 2: 22:27

where are they going to sleep? You, you obviously have housing there for them. How many do you have in a room and it must change all of that.

Speaker 6: 22:34

Yeah. Yeah. We have a, we have housing here and we have gotten some of the updated requirements of that. And um, to this point, it's something I believe we can handle. I guess I'm always aware that things change weekly here and this is more of a political thing. The department of labor sets those standards and so forth. So we're going to kind of have to roll with it. And I would just say if, um, if regulations come on us that are onerous that just force us to increase our costs or whatever that means, you know, it's going to have to be passed on.

Speaker 2: 23:07

And I guess when they talk about people going hungry, even if you have farmers that have product, if prices increase, there are a lot of people that unfortunately will not be able to afford this stuff. And a lot of it doesn't get the food banks.

Speaker 6: 23:21

I have been involved with food banks anyway, so I kind of have that channel already open. I don't really expect, yeah, thank you. But I don't expect a high, I'm just super high, you know, double the price of food. I don't expect that. But I don't expect some prices to come up on the retail side, on the farmer side. You know, we just don't know. I think, like you said, grain farmers right now, it's, it's not good. It's not looking good. The futures are not good. There's so many uncertainties out there that we just don't know. You know what's going to happen until the end of this year. And in the next,

Speaker 2: 23:58

Steve Groff, the author of a book called the future proof farm, uh, which, which is getting to be very difficult to future proof yourself in this situation. Thank you so much.

Speaker 6: 24:10

Yeah, you're welcome, Dana. My pleasure.

Speaker 2: 24:12

The food crisis has already spilled over into kitchens. A recent poll in Britain shows over half the people are valuing food more with 48% say they're throwing away less food of those wasting less people say they're planning meals more carefully and they're getting a lot better at using leftovers. Shopping habits have shifted to a quarter of the people surveyed say they're getting better at buying quality food is they're not going out and spending money on other things. While more than a third of the people are supporting smaller local business more than ever before, and a further 42% say they're not buying takeaways because money is tight. That's another edition of backstory. Please share our Lincoln substance

Speaker 3: 24:55

drive to the podcast feed. I'm Dana Lewis. Thanks for listening to backstory.

Speaker 7: 25:23

[inaudible].

#danalewis backstorypodcast. backstory caitlinwelsh hunger foodchain

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illegiblewords · 5 years

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Recent Shadowbringers story has me speculating a bit on Convocation of the Fourteen relative to mythology and I think I got stuff.

Heads up this spoils like crazy.

IIRC it got confirmed that the Convocation members got Greek names, although I don’t remember if they were all named for the pantheon or not.

But since Hades gets referred to using abilities known as Titanomachy in particular I’m gonna lean hard toward YES.

Who is which god though? What’s even happening? I have a few ideas and in order to explore ‘em a bit will list the names and details that strike me as particularly important. A point of note though, Hades is not an Olympian within mythology. One of the original gods born of Rhea and Cronos yes, but he literally drew the short stick that said “congrats you get to live alone among the dead have fun”.

Zeus: Youngest of six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos. Drew lots with Poseidon and Hades, wound up getting dominion over the sky as king of the gods. Had loads and loads of sex. Strongly affiliated with lightning.

Hera: Hands down has the title of pissiest of the gods, which is fuckin’ saying something. This is like 98% because she’s the goddess of marriage, childbirth, women, family, and fidelity while being married to Zeus the fuckhead. Youngest daughter of the six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos. Associated with the peacock. Commonly transformed her husband’s lovers into animals and IIRC had some ties to storms but I might be misremembering. Also notable for having given birth to Ares with Zeus legitimately (who no one likes except Aphrodite) and Hephaestus alone. She threw Hephaestus down the side of a mountain because he came out ugly iirc.

Poseidon: God of the seas, water, storms, earthquakes, and horses. Middle son of the six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos, when he drew straws with Zeus and Hades he got dominion over the oceans.

Demeter: Goddess of the harvest, fertility, motherhood, agriculture, nature, and the seasons. Middle daughter of the six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos. Hades abducted and married her daughter Persephone and she got next level pissed about it, made the world cold and barren (winter) until Persephone was returned.

Athena: Born from Zeus and Metis, confirmed more powerful than Zeus. Metis had a prophecy where any child she bore would be more powerful than the father, so of course Zeus had to stick his dick in that. Later became filled with regret and fear when it turned out Metis was pregnant, turned her into a fly and ate her. Fast forward a bit and Metis gives birth to Athena inside of Zeus, and Athena explodes fully formed and adult complete with armor out of Zeus’ head. Athena has some duality with Ares as they’re both war gods and both technically born from Zeus. Athena is goddess of wisdom, handicraft (like weaving), and strategic warfare. Virgin goddess.

Apollo: God of the sun/light and the arts, also certain kinds of performance including music, poetry, philosophy. Notable in that his golden arrows were not nearly so painful as the silver ones favored by Artemis. Twins with Artemis. Also majorly known for being associated with both plague and healing as well as prophecy. Prophecy comes up in particular through the Oracle of Delphi. Notably the reason to Dionysus’ madness in some philosophy.

Artemis: Goddess of the hunt, twins with Apollo, uses silver arrows that hurt like a motherfucker compared to the golden ones her brother favors. A virgin goddess associated with the moon, wilderness, childbirth, protection, and plague. Worth noting she could be super super pissy and did in fact turn a man into a deer to be mauled to death and eaten by his own hounds because he accidentally caught her bathing.

Ares: God of war as in slaughter and bloodlust, also of violence and “manly virtues” as in his dick r big. Has weird sibling energy with Athena because they represent dramatically different aspects of war. Only loved by Aphrodite, literally no one else likes him.

Aphrodite: Goddess of love and beauty and fucking, top tier manipulator, also affiliated with pleasure, passion, fertility, and desire. Married to Hephaestus but not at all happy about it, has a pretty open affair with Ares. Sometimes she’s a daughter of Zeus but usually she was born from the universe’s castrated dick being thrown into the ocean and making a ton of sea foam which became her.

Hephaestus: Smith of the gods, master craftsman and god of the forge. Also associated with invention, fire, and volcanos. Didn’t really cheat on Aphrodite despite her cheating on him hard. Was rejected by his mother Hera for being too ugly and was literally crippled by her.

Hermes: Messenger of the gods, a trickster, god of travelers and athletes, guide to the dead, has fucking WILD cults dedicated to him to this day including fucktons of alchemists and just Hermeticism as a whole. In other words also the god of new age and magicK. Not magic, emphasis on the k because that’s what the modern magicians in their funny hats do when they’re feeling edgy.

Hestia: Eldest of six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos. Goddess of the hearth, being fire and the home. Has probably the least amount of drama out of all the gods ever, and while that isn’t necessarily saying a lot she seriously had no drama. Possibly relinquished her seat among the Olympians to Dionysus in some stories. Was notably a virgin and had a major following of priestesses in Rome consisting of the Vestal Virgins.

Dionysus: If there is a god of chaos and insanity besides Eris it is him. God of drunks and performance and opulence/excess/parties, notably has a philosophical contrast with Apollo as the madness to his reason. Top hedonist. Has a group of violently crazy women who worship him called the Bacchantes. Do not understate violently crazy bit they have torn people to shred with their bare hands.

Hades: We know this is Emet-Selch already and have more lore on how he visualizes souls/the Lifestream (interesting term given rivers of the dead in Greek myth, though not exclusive concept to Greek myth)/the Underworld. Eldest son of the six siblings born to Rhea and Cronos, though he is younger than Hestia.

Another point of note--there are, classically, TWELVE Olympian gods and then Hades. Why then one extra and how suspicious is that with our Convocation of 14?

Normally, like I mentioned Hestia is an original member who essentially gives her seat up for Dionysus. But she’s also a much quieter goddess within mythological stories, so while she could be included it’s also possible that another god or goddess is being used to reach fourteen.

First, I’m gonna go on a limb here and say I think Lahabrea is either Apollo or Ares, but leaning heavily toward Apollo. The orator thing fits, his role within being crazy good/productive in creating concepts makes some sense (I mentioned possibly Ares because he has an affinity for certain weapons too which makes me squint), and with how much the Ascians have referenced things being foretold or prophesized at least one of them is required to have ties with that ability. Additionally, Apollo being tied to plague when there the Terminus event going on and people are speculating that creation magics had something to do with the cause has me unbelievably suspicious.

I am also going to say that I think it’s possible Elidibus is Hermes. Emissary-->Messenger as well as having a pattern of being a trickster or liar makes a lot of sense. Also interesting in that one of his other functions is as psychopomp, or escort of the dead. I wouldn’t be shocked if he was the one responsible for raising new sundered Ascians.

I also think that if Lahabrea is Apollo, Igeyorhm might really be Artemis for that twin thing + their Ascian Prime misadventure. The impulsivity makes a bit of sense for her too, as does the fact that she fucked up the entire thirteenth shard while being tied to plague. If I thought Lahabrea was Hermes I’d have pitched Igeyorhm as Aphrodite purely because it’s myth canon they made a hermaphroditic child together one time, but I don’t think that makes as much sense.

I don’t think the game is putting as much emphasis on the three kings setup for Ascians with Zeus/Poseidon/Hades because Lahabrea and Elidibus don’t really fit into the roles of Zeus or Poseidon either of them. FFXIV associates lightning with judgment in a cool way but it gets stressed really hard that Elidibus is just supposed to be an Emissary and Lahabrea has other gods he fits with better. I honestly think the ones who remained unsundered just happened to be the ones who got missed rather than that particular trio.

On WoL, there are plenty of fans having fun speculating that WoL is Persephone in the name of shipping lol. It’s maaaaaaaaybe possible because she’s goddess of spring, renewal, rebirth, nature, and the underworld. And she also goes back and forth between spending time with Hades and spending time with her mother. So that whole MIA thing might work.

Halmarut being all about plants I’ll bet 100% is Demeter. No one else makes sense.

Nabriales if he does use lightning like I remember might be Zeus, which explains his attempted sleaziness a bit and his inferiority complex being one of the sundered. But I’m a bit doubtful because he seems like he has too big of an ego to have potentially been in charge of Amaurot at any point ever. His personality and eagerness to fight remind me more of Ares. Also no one likes him lol. Dionysus strikes me as most likely overall because it would explain him being pissed at being under Lahabrea as well as his whole attitude.

Mitron is Poseidon. Cannot be anyone else, he is all about oceans and fishes. Strongest case for Elidibus and Lahabrea not being tied to the other two kings--Mitron literally cannot be anyone but Poseidon.

Who is WoL though?

Currently my big guesses are Dionysus if Nabriales isn’t (as a foil to Lahabrea-Apollo), Zeus (mightiest of the gods, lightning of judgment and huge badass), Persephone (the creation and underworld thing is neat and who even knows), maaaaaaaaaaybe Hestia because of the primordial light/fire bit, being oldest, and just not being about the drama.

I know basically nothing about Altima besides her being there but would be more inclined to figure her for Athena than any other goddess purely because SE seems to be going with matching gender stuff and with a name like Altima I’m doubtful about other goddesses fitting better. Hera is the only one beside Athena who could maybe own that.

If anyone else has knowledge/notes on Ascians and can chime in on what seems fitting feel free!

#ascians #shadowbringers #final fantasy xiv #final fantasy 14 #ffxiv

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/sugar-slave-trade-slavery.html

The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the 'white gold' that fueled slavery, writes Khalil Gibran Muhammad. "It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything."

The sugar that saturates the American diet has a barbaric history as the ‘white gold’ that fueled slavery.

By Khalil Gibran Muhammad |Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times "1619 Project" | Posted August 24, 2019 9:58 AM ET |

Domino Sugar’s Chalmette Refinery in Arabi, La., sits on the edge of the mighty Mississippi River, about five miles east by way of the river’s bend from the French Quarter, and less than a mile down from the Lower Ninth Ward, where Hurricane Katrina and the failed levees destroyed so many black lives. It is North America’s largest sugar refinery, making nearly two billion pounds of sugar and sugar products annually. Those ubiquitous four-pound yellow paper bags emblazoned with the company logo are produced here at a rate of 120 bags a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during operating season.

The United States makes about nine million tons of sugar annually, ranking it sixth in global production. The United States sugar industry receives as much as $4 billion in annual subsidies in the form of price supports, guaranteed crop loans, tariffs and regulated imports of foreign sugar, which by some estimates is about half the price per pound of domestic sugar. Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, generating an estimated 16,400 jobs.

A vast majority of that domestic sugar stays in this country, with an additional two to three million tons imported each year. Americans consume as much as 77.1 pounds of sugar and related sweeteners per person per year, according to United States Department of Agriculture data. That’s nearly twice the limit the department recommends, based on a 2,000-calorie diet.

Sugar has been linked in the United States to diabetes, obesity and cancer. If it is killing all of us, it is killing black people faster. Over the last 30 years, the rate of Americans who are obese or overweight grew 27 percent among all adults, to 71 percent from 56 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control, with African-Americans overrepresented in the national figures. During the same period, diabetes rates overall nearly tripled. Among black non-Hispanic women, they are nearly double those of white non-Hispanic women, and one and a half times higher for black men than white men.

None of this — the extraordinary mass commodification of sugar, its economic might and outsize impact on the American diet and health — was in any way foreordained, or even predictable, when Christopher Columbus made his second voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1493, bringing sugar-cane stalks with him from the Spanish Canary Islands. In Europe at that time, refined sugar was a luxury product, the backbreaking toil and dangerous labor required in its manufacture an insuperable barrier to production in anything approaching bulk. It seems reasonable to imagine that it might have remained so if it weren’t for the establishment of an enormous market in enslaved laborers who had no way to opt out of the treacherous work.

For thousands of years, cane was a heavy and unwieldy crop that had to be cut by hand and immediately ground to release the juice inside, lest it spoil within a day or two. Even before harvest time, rows had to be dug, stalks planted and plentiful wood chopped as fuel for boiling the liquid and reducing it to crystals and molasses. From the earliest traces of cane domestication on the Pacific island of New Guinea 10,000 years ago to its island-hopping advance to ancient India in 350 B.C., sugar was locally consumed and very labor-intensive. It remained little more than an exotic spice, medicinal glaze or sweetener for elite palates.

It was the introduction of sugar slavery in the New World that changed everything. “The true Age of Sugar had begun — and it was doing more to reshape the world than any ruler, empire or war had ever done,” Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos write in their 2010 book, “Sugar Changed the World.” Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainlands of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies — Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others — countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.

“White gold” drove trade in goods and people, fueled the wealth of European nations and, for the British in particular, shored up the financing of their North American colonies. “There was direct trade among the colonies and between the colonies and Europe, but much of the Atlantic trade was triangular: enslaved people from Africa; sugar from the West Indies and Brazil; money and manufactures from Europe,” writes the Harvard historian Walter Johnson in his 1999 book, “Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market.” “People were traded along the bottom of the triangle; profits would stick at the top.”

Before French Jesuit priests planted the first cane stalk near Baronne Street in New Orleans in 1751, sugar was already a huge moneymaker in British New York. By the 1720s, one of every two ships in the city’s port was either arriving from or heading to the Caribbean, importing sugar and enslaved people and exporting flour, meat and shipbuilding supplies. The trade was so lucrative that Wall Street’s most impressive buildings were Trinity Church at one end, facing the Hudson River, and the five-story sugar warehouses on the other, close to the East River and near the busy slave market. New York’s enslaved population reached 20 percent, prompting the New York General Assembly in 1730 to issue a consolidated slave code, making it “unlawful for above three slaves” to meet on their own, and authorizing “each town” to employ “a common whipper for their slaves.”

In 1795, Étienne de Boré, a New Orleans sugar planter, granulated the first sugar crystals in the Louisiana Territory. With the advent of sugar processing locally, sugar plantations exploded up and down both banks of the Mississippi River. All of this was possible because of the abundantly rich alluvial soil, combined with the technical mastery of seasoned French and Spanish planters from around the cane-growing basin of the Gulf and the Caribbean — and because of the toil of thousands of enslaved people. More French planters and their enslaved expert sugar workers poured into Louisiana as Toussaint L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines led a successful revolution to secure Haiti’s independence from France.

Within five decades, Louisiana planters were producing a quarter of the world’s cane-sugar supply. During her antebellum reign, Queen Sugar bested King Cotton locally, making Louisiana the second-richest state in per capita wealth. According to the historian Richard Follett, the state ranked third in banking capital behind New York and Massachusetts in 1840. The value of enslaved people alone represented tens of millions of dollars in capital that financed investments, loans and businesses. Much of that investment funneled back into the sugar mills, the “most industrialized sector of Southern agriculture,” Follett writes in his 2005 book, “Sugar Masters: Planters and Slaves in Louisiana’s Cane World 1820-1860.” No other agricultural region came close to the amount of capital investment in farming by the eve of the Civil War. In 1853, Representative Miles Taylor of Louisiana bragged that his state’s success was “without parallel in the United States, or indeed in the world in any branch of industry.”

The enslaved population soared, quadrupling over a 20-year period to 125,000 souls in the mid-19th century. New Orleans became the Walmart of people-selling. The number of enslaved labor crews doubled on sugar plantations. And in every sugar parish, black people outnumbered whites. These were some of the most skilled laborers, doing some of the most dangerous agricultural and industrial work in the United States.

In the mill, alongside adults, children toiled like factory workers with assembly-line precision and discipline under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers. “All along the endless carrier are ranged slave children, whose business it is to place the cane upon it, when it is conveyed through the shed into the main building,” wrote Solomon Northup in “Twelve Years a Slave,” his 1853 memoir of being kidnapped and forced into slavery on Louisiana plantations.

To achieve the highest efficiency, as in the round-the-clock Domino refinery today, sugar houses operated night and day. “On cane plantations in sugar time, there is no distinction as to the days of the week,” Northup wrote. Fatigue might mean losing an arm to the grinding rollers or being flayed for failing to keep up. Resistance was often met with sadistic cruelty.

A formerly enslaved black woman named Mrs. Webb described a torture chamber used by her owner, Valsin Marmillion. “One of his cruelties was to place a disobedient slave, standing in a box, in which there were nails placed in such a manner that the poor creature was unable to move,” she told a W.P.A. interviewer in 1940. “He was powerless even to chase the flies, or sometimes ants crawling on some parts of his body.”

Louisiana led the nation in destroying the lives of black people in the name of economic efficiency. The historian Michael Tadman found that Louisiana sugar parishes had a pattern of “deaths exceeding births.” Backbreaking labor and “inadequate net nutrition meant that slaves working on sugar plantations were, compared with other working-age slaves in the United States, far less able to resist the common and life-threatening diseases of dirt and poverty,” wrote Tadman in a 2000 study published in the American Historical Review. Life expectancy was less like that on a cotton plantation and closer to that of a Jamaican cane field, where the most overworked and abused could drop dead after seven years.

Most of these stories of brutality, torture and premature death have never been told in classroom textbooks or historical museums. They have been refined and whitewashed in the mills and factories of Southern folklore: the romantic South, the Lost Cause, the popular “moonlight and magnolias” plantation tours so important to Louisiana’s agritourism today.

When I arrived at the Whitney Plantation Museum on a hot day in June, I mentioned to Ashley Rogers, 36, the museum’s executive director, that I had passed the Nelson Coleman Correctional Center about 15 miles back along the way. “You passed a dump and a prison on your way to a plantation,” she said. “These are not coincidences.”

The Whitney, which opened five years ago as the only sugar-slavery museum in the nation, rests squarely in a geography of human detritus. The museum tells of the everyday struggles and resistance of black people who didn’t lose their dignity even when they lost everything else. It sits on the west bank of the Mississippi at the northern edge of the St. John the Baptist Parish, home to dozens of once-thriving sugar plantations; Marmillion’s plantation and torture box were just a few miles down from Whitney.

The museum also sits across the river from the site of the German Coast uprising in 1811, one of the largest revolts of enslaved people in United States history. As many as 500 sugar rebels joined a liberation army heading toward New Orleans, only to be cut down by federal troops and local militia; no record of their actual plans survives. About a hundred were killed in battle or executed later, many with their heads severed and placed on pikes throughout the region. Based on historians’ estimates, the execution tally was nearly twice as high as the number in Nat Turner’s more famous 1831 rebellion. The revolt has been virtually redacted from the historical record. But not at Whitney. And yet tourists, Rogers said, sometimes admit to her, a white woman, that they are warned by hotel concierges and tour operators that Whitney is the one misrepresenting the past. “You are meant to empathize with the owners as their guests,” Rogers told me in her office. In Louisiana’s plantation tourism, she said, “the currency has been the distortion of the past.”

The landscape bears witness and corroborates Whitney’s version of history. Although the Coleman jail opened in 2001 and is named for an African-American sheriff’s deputy who died in the line of duty, Rogers connects it to a longer history of coerced labor, land theft and racial control after slavery. Sugar cane grows on farms all around the jail, but at the nearby Louisiana State Penitentiary, or Angola, prisoners grow it. Angola is the largest maximum-security prison by land mass in the nation. It opened in its current location in 1901 and took the name of one of the plantations that had occupied the land. Even today, incarcerated men harvest Angola’s cane, which is turned into syrup and sold on-site.

From slavery to freedom, many black Louisianans found that the crushing work of sugar cane remained mostly the same. Even with Reconstruction delivering civil rights for the first time, white planters continued to dominate landownership. Freedmen and freedwomen had little choice but to live in somebody’s old slave quarters. As new wage earners, they negotiated the best terms they could, signed labor contracts for up to a year and moved frequently from one plantation to another in search of a life whose daily rhythms beat differently than before. And yet, even compared with sharecropping on cotton plantations, Rogers said, “sugar plantations did a better job preserving racial hierarchy.” As a rule, the historian John C. Rodrigue writes, “plantation labor overshadowed black people’s lives in the sugar region until well into the 20th century.”

Sometimes black cane workers resisted collectively by striking during planting and harvesting time — threatening to ruin the crop. Wages and working conditions occasionally improved. But other times workers met swift and violent reprisals. After a major labor insurgency in 1887, led by the Knights of Labor, a national union, at least 30 black people — some estimated hundreds — were killed in their homes and on the streets of Thibodaux, La. “I think this will settle the question of who is to rule, the nigger or the white man, for the next 50 years,” a local white planter’s widow, Mary Pugh, wrote, rejoicing, to her son.

Many African-Americans aspired to own or rent their own sugar-cane farms in the late 19th century, but faced deliberate efforts to limit black farm and land owning. The historian Rebecca Scott found that although “black farmers were occasionally able to buy plots of cane land from bankrupt estates, or otherwise establish themselves as suppliers, the trend was for planters to seek to establish relations with white tenants or sharecroppers who could provide cane for the mill.”

By World War II, many black people began to move not simply from one plantation to another, but from a cane field to a car factory in the North. By then, harvesting machines had begun to take over some, but not all, of the work. With fewer and fewer black workers in the industry, and after efforts in the late 1800s to recruit Chinese, Italian, Irish and German immigrant workers had already failed, labor recruiters in Louisiana and Florida sought workers in other states.

In 1942, the Department of Justice began a major investigation into the recruiting practices of one of the largest sugar producers in the nation, the United States Sugar Corporation, a South Florida company. Black men unfamiliar with the brutal nature of the work were promised seasonal sugar jobs at high wages, only to be forced into debt peonage, immediately accruing the cost of their transportation, lodging and equipment — all for $1.80 a day. One man testified that the conditions were so bad, “It wasn’t no freedom; it was worse than the pen.” Federal investigators agreed. When workers tried to escape, the F.B.I. found, they were captured on the highway or “shot at while trying to hitch rides on the sugar trains.” The company was indicted by a federal grand jury in Tampa for “carrying out a conspiracy to commit slavery,” wrote Alec Wilkinson, in his 1989 book, “Big Sugar: Seasons in the Cane Fields of Florida.” (The indictment was ultimately quashed on procedural grounds.) A congressional investigation in the 1980s found that sugar companies had systematically tried to exploit seasonal West Indian workers to maintain absolute control over them with the constant threat of immediately sending them back to where they came from.

At the Whitney plantation, which operated continuously from 1752 to 1975, its museum staff of 12 is nearly all African-American women. A third of them have immediate relatives who either worked there or were born there in the 1960s and ’70s. These black women show tourists the same slave cabins and the same cane fields their own relatives knew all too well.

Farm laborers, mill workers and refinery employees make up the 16,400 jobs of Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry. But it is the owners of the 11 mills and 391 commercial farms who have the most influence and greatest share of the wealth. And the number of black sugar-cane farmers in Louisiana is most likely in the single digits, based on estimates from people who work in the industry. They are the exceedingly rare exceptions to a system designed to codify black loss.

And yet two of these black farmers, Charles Guidry and Eddie Lewis III, have been featured in a number of prominent news items and marketing materials out of proportion to their representation and economic footprint in the industry. Lewis and Guidry have appeared in separate online videos. The American Sugar Cane League has highlighted the same pair separately in its online newsletter, Sugar News.

Lewis has no illusions about why the marketing focuses on him, he told me; sugar cane is a lucrative business, and to keep it that way, the industry has to work with the government. “You need a few minorities in there, because these mills survive off having minorities involved with the mill to get these huge government loans,” he said. A former financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, Lewis, 36, chose to leave a successful career in finance to take his rightful place as a fifth-generation farmer. “My family was farming in the late 1800s” near the same land, he says, that his enslaved ancestors once worked. Much of the 3,000 acres he now farms comes from relationships with white landowners his father, Eddie Lewis Jr., and his grandfather before him, built and maintained.

Lewis is the minority adviser for the federal Farm Service Agency (F.S.A.) in St. Martin and Lafayette Parish, and also participates in lobbying federal legislators. He says he does it because the stakes are so high. If things don’t change, Lewis told me, “I’m probably one of two or three that’s going to be farming in the next 10 to 15 years. They’re trying to basically extinct us.” As control of the industry consolidates in fewer and fewer hands, Lewis believes black sugar-cane farmers will no longer exist, part of a long-term trend nationally, where the total proportion of all African-American farmers has plummeted since the early 1900s, to less than 2 percent from more than 14 percent, with 90 percent of black farmers’ land lost amid decades of racist actions by government agencies, banks and real estate developers.

“There’s still a few good white men around here,” Lewis told me. “It’s not to say it’s all bad. But this is definitely a community where you still have to say, ‘Yes sir,’ ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and accept ‘boy’ and different things like that.”

One of the biggest players in that community is M.A. Patout and Son, the largest sugar-cane mill company in Louisiana. Founded in 1825, Patout has been known to boast that it is “the oldest complete family-owned and operated manufacturer of raw sugar in the United States.” It owns three of the 11 remaining sugar-cane mills in Louisiana, processing roughly a third of the cane in the state.

The company is being sued by a former fourth-generation black farmer. As first reported in The Guardian, Wenceslaus Provost Jr. claims the company breached a harvesting contract in an effort to deliberately sabotage his business. Provost, who goes by the first name June, and his wife, Angie, who is also a farmer, lost their home to foreclosure in 2018, after defaulting on F.S.A.-guaranteed crop loans. June Provost has also filed a federal lawsuit against First Guaranty Bank and a bank senior vice president for claims related to lending discrimination, as well as for mail and wire fraud in reporting false information to federal loan officials. The suit names a whistle-blower, a federal loan officer, who, in April 2015, “informed Mr. Provost that he had been systematically discriminated against by First Guaranty Bank,” the lawsuit reads.

(In court filings, M.A. Patout and Son denied that it breached the contract. Representatives for the company did not respond to requests for comment. In court filings, First Guaranty Bank and the senior vice president also denied Provost’s claims. Their representatives did not respond to requests for comment.)

Lewis is himself a litigant in a separate petition against white landowners. He claims they “unilaterally, arbitrarily and without just cause terminated” a seven-year-old agreement to operate his sugar-cane farm on their land, causing him to lose the value of the crop still growing there. Lewis is seeking damages of more than $200,000, based on an independent appraisal he obtained, court records show. The landowners did not respond to requests for comment.

But the new lessee, Ryan Doré, a white farmer, did confirm with me that he is now leasing the land and has offered to pay Lewis what a county agent assessed as the crop’s worth, about $50,000. Doré does not dispute the amount of Lewis’s sugar cane on the 86.16 acres. What he disputes is Lewis’s ability to make the same crop as profitable as he would. Doré, who credits M.A. Patout and Son for getting him started in sugar-cane farming, also told me he is farming some of the land June Provost had farmed.

Lewis and the Provosts say they believe Doré is using his position as an elected F.S.A. committee member to gain an unfair advantage over black farmers with white landowners. “He’s privileged with a lot of information,” Lewis said.

Doré denied he is abusing his F.S.A. position and countered that “the Lewis boy” is trying to “make this a black-white deal.” Doré insisted that “both those guys simply lost their acreage for one reason and one reason only: They are horrible farmers.”

It’s impossible to listen to the stories that Lewis and the Provosts tell and not hear echoes of the policies and practices that have been used since Reconstruction to maintain the racial caste system that sugar slavery helped create. The crop, land and farm theft that they claim harks back to the New Deal era, when Southern F.S.A. committees denied black farmers government funding.

“June and I hope to create a dent in these oppressive tactics for future generations,” Angie Provost told me on the same day this spring that a congressional subcommittee held hearings on reparations. “To this day we are harassed, retaliated against and denied the true DNA of our past.”

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a Suzanne Young Murray professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and author of “The Condemnation of Blackness.” Tiya Miles is a professor in the history department at Harvard and the author, most recently, of “The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits.”

THE ENSLAVED PECAN PIONEER

By Tiya Miles | Published August 14, 2019 | New York Times "1619 Project" | Posted August 24, 2019 10:30AM ET |

Pecans are the nut of choice when it comes to satisfying America’s sweet tooth, with the Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday season being the pecan’s most popular time, when the nut graces the rich pie named for it. Southerners claim the pecan along with the cornbread and collard greens that distinguish the regional table, and the South looms large in our imaginations as this nut’s mother country.

The presence of pecan pralines in every Southern gift shop from South Carolina to Texas, and our view of the nut as regional fare, masks a crucial chapter in the story of the pecan: It was an enslaved man who made the wide cultivation of this nut possible.

Pecan trees are native to the middle southwestern region of the Mississippi River Valley and the Gulf Coast of Texas and Mexico. While the trees can live for a hundred years or more, they do not produce nuts in the first years of life, and the kinds of nuts they produce are wildly variable in size, shape, flavor and ease of shell removal. Indigenous people worked around this variability, harvesting the nuts for hundreds and probably thousands of years, camping near the groves in season, trading the nuts in a network that stretched across the continent, and lending the food the name we have come to know it by: paccan.

Once white Southerners became fans of the nut, they set about trying to standardize its fruit by engineering the perfect pecan tree. Planters tried to cultivate pecan trees for a commercial market beginning at least as early as the 1820s, when a well-known planter from South Carolina named Abner Landrum published detailed descriptions of his attempt in the American Farmer periodical. In the mid-1840s, a planter in Louisiana sent cuttings of a much-prized pecan tree over to his neighbor J.T. Roman, the owner of Oak Alley Plantation. Roman did what many enslavers were accustomed to in that period: He turned the impossible work over to an enslaved person with vast capabilities, a man whose name we know only as Antoine. Antoine undertook the delicate task of grafting the pecan cuttings onto the limbs of different tree species on the plantation grounds. Many specimens thrived, and Antoine fashioned still more trees, selecting for nuts with favorable qualities. It was Antoine who successfully created what would become the country’s first commercially viable pecan varietal.

Decades later, a new owner of Oak Alley, Hubert Bonzano, exhibited nuts from Antoine’s trees at the Centennial Exposition of 1876, the World’s Fair held in Philadelphia and a major showcase for American innovation. As the horticulturalist Lenny Wells has recorded, the exhibited nuts received a commendation from the Yale botanist William H. Brewer, who praised them for their “remarkably large size, tenderness of shell and very special excellence.” Coined “the Centennial,” Antoine’s pecan varietal was then seized upon for commercial production (other varieties have since become the standard).

Was Antoine aware of his creation’s triumph? No one knows. As the historian James McWilliams writes in “The Pecan: A History of America’s Native Nut” (2013): “History leaves no record as to the former slave gardener’s location — or whether he was even alive — when the nuts from the tree he grafted were praised by the nation’s leading agricultural experts.” The tree never bore the name of the man who had handcrafted it and developed a full-scale orchard on the Oak Alley Plantation before he slipped into the shadow of history.

#american history #african american history #history #1619 #1619project #politics and government #us politics #politics #u.s. news #u.s. economy

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cyanza · 5 years

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Aonu

Forty-eight Forty-seven Forty-six I definitely caught him off guard, but now he’s starting to struggle. Reflexes and quick thinking are something you either have or you don’t. You can teach skills but you can’t teach instincts. Up until this moment I would’ve sworn I didn’t have them. But now when I actually need them, here we are. I guess I’ve never been put to the test like this before. It’s the first time in my life that so much depends on me, so in the moment I acted without thinking. My reaction was quick, but was it the right reaction? I don’t know what came over me. If I can hold him I should be able to keep him down here until he passes out. I figure I can hold my breath for at least a couple of minutes, and we’ve been down here for almost a minute now. I didn’t think to start counting right away, though, and this isn’t exactly water we’re in. I have no idea what happens when someone inhales blue snow. I hope I don’t have to find out the hard way. Forty-five Forty-four Forty-three Blue snow isn’t really snow. It isn’t really blue either. It’s sort of a pale cyan color that becomes translucent when the light hits it right. And its structure is more like a bunch of semi-solid glass spheres all about the size of your fist. It’s like water, but somewhere between liquid and solid state. It’s like bubbles filled with water on the inside and air on the outside, not the other way around. Its true name is Qae, and it’s the sacred element of my people, the Aonu. We’re the only ones who call it blue snow, and we’re named for it. In the ancient language “Ao-Nu” meant “children of elemental water.” Each race has it’s own name for elements based on how it affects them. We call it blue snow because when it touches us our skin turns the same turquoise color, and it feels cool on our skin. That’s not all it does, though. It makes us more alert, quicker and stronger when we’re exposed to it. It helps us hold our breath longer, too, which I guess is why we’ve always been much more amphibious than the other races. The more blue snow we’re exposed to, the quicker our pulses and the faster our metabolisms go. The other races seem to have the opposite reaction. Touching it only creates a mild effect - consuming it multiplies the reaction. If you’re not careful you can overdose and your heart can give out. No one I know has ever been exposed to a huge amount of blue snow, though. They say it would make you chronicly sick and eventually you’d lose your mind. Half an hour exposed to blue snow is about like 5 shots of espresso, and a couple shots of liquor. An hour or so could make your heart beat so fast you’d pass out, or even worse. That’s the other reason I’m counting. We were already wading in the blue snow for about 20 minutes before we heard the Aiju. Forty-two Forty-one Forty The Matriarchs tell stories about ancient zerkers who would expose themselves to Qae before battle. It would make them fierce and almost invulnerable. Some say the zerkers would eat it to metamorphose into hybrid creatures. That seems outlandish, but blue snow is definitely a mysterious and magical substance. Our fishers use tiny amounts to help them stay underwater when hunting. Blue snow in small, controlled doses also helps control the symptoms of a lot of chronic diseases. Healers use it to soothe pain, slow infections, and help patients with vision and hearing problems. It won’t completely restore someone’s sight, but it definitely helped me. When I was young I wasn’t able to see well enough to read or recognize faces from a distance. But now my vision is almost normal. We also use Qae to keep our food cool so it doesn’t spoil, and purify the salt water so we can drink it. Some of our tinkers have been figuring out how to harness its power to make motors and engines and things. Blue snow has other mystical uses that most of us don’t know anything about. And the Matriarchs sometimes drop hints that the ancient Aonu used Qae for a lot more than we do now. Thirty-nine Thirty-eight Thirty-seven This Aiju kid is struggling hard now, but I definitely have the size advantage on him. I was a late bloomer. I went from a scrawny little kid to a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested adult. I wasn’t able to join the military because of my poor vision. It’s a good thing too, because I was so week and skinny I never would’ve survived initiation. My muscles didn’t kick in until several years later. Now I’m almost twice as heavy as I was then. Not actually fat, but heavier than average. And I’m thankful for the extra bulk right now because it’s definitely helping me keep us under. He’s strong, but I’m a lot bigger than him. Why are you here, young Aiju? The Qae mountain has been ours for centuries, and must be very far from your borough. Zaiku must be at least 4 days journey west, and I know that’s the closest Aiju borough to here. I once hiked up Zameru peak, the highest point in the archipelago, to watch the moonrise. I could see light from Zaiku off in the western distance, but I’ve never been there. If the Aiju are harvesting here they must be desperate for pure elements. Could they have depleted their own supplies of elemental Jyo?. When pure Jyo is like a semi-liquid form of light. It flows from streams that come up from beneath the ground. The Aiju have built most of their boroughs nearby a major Jyo stream. They collect it and use it much like we use Qae, and it affects them in similar ways. I’ve heard that the Aiju call it “Pink Juice.” Thirty-six Thirty-five Thirty-four I’ve never even seen anyone else at the Qae mountain before. It’s only been my family members and me before. Each of the 8 islands has their own day to harvest the blue snow. Today is the first day of Neptember, so there shouldn’t be any other Aonu harvesting. Our family and the other three harvesting families on our island keep a strict schedule. No other Aq’omi should be here. When we got to the mountain today my niece, Naia, wanted to climb up to see if she could see Aq’oma from the top. I told her she could try, but not to climb too high. The Qae is much less stable up near the top, and I didn’t want her to start some kind of avalanche. But I figured it couldn’t hurt, since it’s her first time. and we were moving much faster today than usual. Naia walks much faster than her grandma. She got about 10 fathoms up when she said she thought she heard voices. I started climbing up to tell her she was crazy and she needed to come help us harvest instead of making up stories. But then sure enough I thought I heard them too. At first I thought it was some kind of echo, but then I heard a few words in a language that was definitely not Aoni. In a whisper I told Naia to slide back down near her mother and hide in the blue snow. The voices coming from the other side must be from another race, or from one of the nomadic tribes. Either one is a dangerous situation. Thirty-three Thirty-two Thirty-one In the tetraverse the four core elements make up everything. The first element “Xuu” is the densest and most solid. It’s the primary element in soil, rocks, minerals, metals, and our flesh. It symbolizes strength, defense, construction, and growth. The second element “Qae” is fluid. It’s the primary element in water, blood, and other liquids. It symbolizes speed, communication, health, transition, and adaptation. The third element “Zai” is gaseous. It’s the primary element in the sky, space, and in our breath. It symbolizes speech, music, wisdom, vitality, sanctity, and leadership. The fourth element “Jyo” is the most plasmic and energetic. It’s the primary element in light, heat, and fire. It fuels our hearts and symbolizes power and war, love and violence. These four elements compose all things in various proportions. Some things like clouds, lava, mud, and lightning are composed of only two or three elements. Boulders, rivers, wind, sunlight, and a few other things are primarily one element. But the four elements are rare to find in their pure forms and are treasured. Each element is sacred to one of our races and we have fought many wars to protect our rights to their pure elemental forms. Thirty Twenty-nine Twenty-eight It takes three of us to carry enough Qae back to the island each week. We fill up our packs with five and half gallons each, to replace the octave our island uses up every eight days. It’s about an hour hike, a two hour paddle, and another hour hike up to the mountain. Getting here and back usually takes all day. Aq’oma, our island, has a small storage in case of emergencies. But we depend on the weekly journeys to the Qae mountain to keep our island healthy and thriving. My sister, my niece and I are on harvest duty today. Every 16 weeks it’s my family’s turn. Naela and I have been harvesting for our family since we became adolescents, but this is Naia’s first time. When Naia finished the academy last month she became one of our family’s three harvesters. Ceru, my mother, will now get to spend more time teaching. It was a relief to Naela and I, because Ceru was trying to do too many things at her age. I’m glad she'll get to focus on the difficult task of teaching our culture and history to the kids back on Aq’oma. Her specialty is language and traditions. Other teachers focus on botany, engineering, mathematics, and philosophy. I remember my old teacher, Achelon used to bring samples of Qae and the other elements into lessons for use to see. It was too dangerous for us to touch them as kids, though. We have to gradually build up our tolerances to pure elements. And each race can only handle one element safely. We all have drastically different reactions to touching other elements in their pure forms. What will happen to this young Aiju after this much exposure to the blue snow? I hope it doesn't kill him. I only want him to pass out so I can protect our Qae. Twenty-seven Twenty-six Twenty-five This is only the second Aiju I’ve ever seen. When I was a kid there was a meeting of the four races to reconcile our differences and promote peace. Each race elected a representative to negotiate trade, territories, and diplomacy in the Tetrarchy . The Tetrarchy granted exclusive rights to harvest pure elements to each of the specific races. Only Aonu can harvest Qae. Only the Oq’uta can mine for Xuu – elemental glow crystals. Only the Qexaal can gather Zai, element harmonic wind. And only the Aiju can collect Jyo. As a show of solidarity and peace, the four representatives went on a global procession after the Tetrarchal Convergence. My family went to the festival when they visited our island. I remember seeing Aonu Senator Qamaera, her husband Jaenbu, and a girl about my age up on the platform. They were next to a strange rose-skinned man that my mother told me later was Senator Ryuji. His wife and family weren’t part of the visiting party. No other Aiju have ever visited the archipelago since then, and the Aonu and Aiju have preseserved a détente. It’s not exactly peace, but we stay out of each other’s way. Aonu visit Oq’uta and Qexaal territory all the time. I’ve been to Ptaeryx, Qyntaan, and Ytza many times to trade for our Qae for their Zai. I often go to Kiibo, Mawenzi, and Zira to trade for their Xuu. Oq’uta and Qexaal merchants even live on our Aonu islands and in their Aiju boroughs. But no Aonu I know has ever visited a Aiju borough or had direct contact with one before. Trade and business between Aonu and Aiju is always done through a third party in a neutral district. As far as I know this young Aiju is the first one to set foot on the Archipelago in at least a generation. But if he’s here, does that mean there could be others with him? How would an Aiju even get here by himself? Twenty-four Twenty-three Twenty-two We Aonu from Aq’oma have always practiced, safe, sustainable harvesting. After filling our packs we measure the size of the Qae mountain to make sure it hasn’t gotten any smaller. This is Naia’s first time so she’s supposed to do the calculations. I’ve been measuring the blue snow with the octant and qubit for decades. Naela doesn’t like doing it. She never minded the hiking, paddling and harvesting, but she was never interested in math. Math comes easy to me so I’ve always done the calculations when it was her turn. We always get the same answer for the volume of the Qae mountain, within standard deviation. I don’t know how the mountain replenishes itself, but somehow it makes about 16 gallons more each week. If we were to harvest more, it wouldn’t make quite as much, and the next week the mountain would be smaller. Forty years ago my grandfather figured out that the blue snow pile had been getting smaller. Rebels from Ma’ano, the island to the east of ours were harvesting extra blue snow in an attempt to overtake Hae’ea, another Aonu island. After that the Matriarchs started regulating the days each island can harvest, and how much they can take. Since then none of the Aonu islands have fought for dominance, and the Qae mountain has always stayed the same. I wonder what kind of regulations the Aiju have about collecting their sacred element, Jyo? If they’re desperate enough to invade our mountain there must be something wrong with their Jyo streams. Twenty-one Twenty Nineteen The Aiju and Aonu have a long, very complicated, very contentious history. The four races are very different, but Aiju and Aonu are complete opposites in many ways. Aiju have rosey pink skin with magenta eyes and orange hair. They never grow beards and the women never cut their hair. Aonu have skin the color of seafoam and jade green eyes. Our hair is olive, but most men shave their heads and grow long sea-green beards instead. Aiju prefer to live in large boroughs and rarely travel. We Aonu go all over the archipelago and travel to other places often - except to Aiju boroughs. Aiju men are aggressive, loud and belligerent. They always try to have the last word and attempt to sound like experts in whatever they talk about. They’re very short-tempered, especially when someone implies that they are wrong. The Aiju women never speak to anyone but their fathers, husbands, and female relatives. Aonu men and women see each other as equals, but the women take more of the leadership roles. Aonu women are more dominant than Aonu men, and we men honor and cherish our women. All Aonu understand the importance of equality and treating everyone with respect. Aiju believe in strict monogamy and mate for life. Most Aiju have arranged marriages via a contract between the two fathers. Infidelity is punishable by sterilization or banishment. Our Aonu society is structured quite differently. because we live in large families with many partners. Aonu women often have several male consorts and the men usually help raise the children too. Most Aonu nuclear families are part of large clans under a consortium of Matriarchs. My mother’s mother is a member of the Matriarchal Consortium for Aq’oma, just like her mother before her. Eighteen Seventeen Sixteen I am named after of my mother’s father, and like him I am a storyteller. I don’t know much about my father’s family, so I am a lot closer to the grandparents and cousins on my mother’s side. Mindaro, the man who helped raise me, is my father, but not in the way most Aonu think of fathers. Like all Aonu I actually have two fathers. Aonu females develop eggs in their wombs without any genetic material, so we mate in trios. Aonu males have one of two different genes necessary to fertilize eggs and create children in the female’s womb. To get pregnant an Aonu woman has to mate with one of each kind of male within about four days or the egg doesn’t fertilize. Aonu men are either yin or yang depending on what kind of genes they have. Yin Aonu men are more sensitive, compassionate, quiet, intelligent, and creative than others. Other Yang Aonu men are more aggressive, athletic, independent and louder than others. Some folks refer to the Aonu trio as Male, Female, and Threemale, since the yin male is the third most important. Most Aonu females are dominant, but let the yang males feel like they’re actually in charge. Yang males are usually referred to as “father” because they dominate the less-assertive yin males. That’s why Aonu yin fathers are often called “uncle” - their status is less important than a father. My sister and I call Mindaro “father." For many years we’d assumed he was our yang father and that our uncle Nyanza was my yin father. As I grew up, though, we learned that Uncle Nyanza was actually my mother’s brother and Mindaro was my yin father. A few years ago I figured out that my yang father, Khombu, left my mother, the night my sister and I were conceived. He never came back and Mindaro had to help our mother raise us. He struggled in the father role without the help of assertive yang genes, and got very depressed. Eventually he felt he’d failed us all and withdrew from our family socially. He still lives in the house with my mother, but they rarely speak except when my mother sends him to do errands. I’ve never met Khombu. I’ve always longed to have a yang father to teach me how to be more masculine and assertive. I have no idea where it came from today when I dove into the blue snow and grabbed this Aiju. Fifteen Fourteen Thirteen I can feel the young Aiju’s pulse slowing down. He’s either getting weaker or I’m getting stronger. Probably both. I hope he’ll stop struggling and pass out before I need to come up to breathe. Not that I can’t keep holding my breath. Somehow it’s actually getting easier the longer I’ve been down here in the blue snow. I’m worried I'll go crazy, though, or my heart might burst if I’m down here too long. What happens when you’re submerged in blue snow for 10 minutes? What am I going to do with this Aiju once he passes out? Will he pass out? I hope I’m not killing him. I’m not a murderer. I’m defending my home, my family, and my culture, right? Aonu learn from an early age about defending our way of life, especially from Aiju. Maybe that’s what kick-started my attack earlier. But I have no idea what I’m doing, though, or if it’s the right thing. I know this Aiju is not supposed to be here, and I have to do something about it. We can’t let the Aiju steal our blue snow, but is that really what he was doing? I hope this only knocks him out and I can figure out what to do next. I doubt he was here all alone, though. There’s no way he wandered here all by himself, and he was talking to someone else earlier. The other Aiju have probably noticed that he disappeared and are searching for him right now. An Aonu his age would never make a trip like this alone, so I can’t imagine why an Aiju kid would be here with no one else around. Twelve Eleven Ten At the start of adolescence each Aonu takes a small sample of blue snow and swims to the Kermode atoll for a vision quest. We spend the night alone with our thoughts and listen to what the ocean has to tell us. We swim back in the morning and choose our new names and societal roles. That was when I took the name Aavri after my mother’s father. Mindaro wanted me take the name of his fathers, Otari or Zalo, both of whom were warriors. My father always wanted to be a warrior, but was too meek. He also had to spend a lot more time working after Khombu left. I never wanted to be a warrior. I’m not much of a fighter, and I’ve always been much more pacifistic. I’m more creative and communicative than athletic and aggressive. I’m pretty sure I’m threemale – a yin male. I’ve never gotten tested. And none of my past partners have ever gotten pregnant, so I can’t compare myself to their other partners. But I am definitely more on the sensitive side. Being threemale is tough, especially without a strong father figure to raise you. It seems like women tend to be more attracted to males who are assertive and athletic. I’m pretty strong, but awkward and uncoordinated. Some yang male-female couples invite a yin male to mate with them for reproductive purposes. But that has always felt like a shallow reason for an affectionate relationship. Nonetheless I keep ending up as the third wheel in most of my relationships. I make closer friendships with women because we’re both communicative and compassionate. Yang male friendships feel shallow to me so I don’t have many. But I’ve made deeper friendships with a couple other yin male friends who are always single like me. None of us have much luck attracting women. We tend to be most attracted to assertive, dominant women who aren’t afraid to speak their minds. Unfortunately most of those women are attracted to yang males, or to each other. We yin males are much more sensitive, and it often takes me months to recover after a heartbreak. As I’ve gotten older I’ve decided to put less energy and emphasis into sexual relationships. I'm tired of being hurt and disappointed. There's not much chance I'll ever have children at this point, but I’m already a real uncle to Naia. If I were to have my own biological children they would only call me uncle anyway. I hope Naia and Naela are ok over on the other side of the mountain. Nine Eight Seven The Aiju kid has stopped struggling, but he’s still breathing. I hear something strange, though. There's a distant sound that feels like it’s coming from inside my own head. I’ve been concentrating so hard on holding my breath and staying under that I didn’t notice it at first. It’s like a rhythmic wave and a whisper at the same time, but I can’t understand it. There are no words, but the voice feels familiar somehow. Now that I’m paying attention, I can hear other noises outside my head but nearby, like ripples in the river. I hear movement to my left. Yes, it’s definitely coming from that direction. There are long shadows moving around a little ways away. The blue snow is somehow translucent even though we’re on the opposite side from the sun. And I can see now that those are definitely legs wading through the blue snow towards me. But not moving directly at me, so I don’t think they know we’re here yet. That other sound in my head is getting louder, though, and more familiar. Not just familiar… familial. Almost like when my sister and I were in the womb together - no words, only sounds and feelings. Naela must be trying to tell me something. If they’ve been hiding like I told them to, she and Naia are also submerged in the blue snow still. All our senses must be heightened now, and it’s like she’s using some kind of mental sonar to communicate. There’s no time to figure it out now, though, because I have to do something about this Aiju before the other two find me. Six Five Four

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flute-fields · 5 years

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Ooh nooo I did put animal crossing! I feel so dumb now I meant harvest moon. Sorry about that!

that’s fine! considering your mom wants one for her DS, i’m going to list the DS games available for Harvest Moon and offer my two cents on them since the DS games are the ones i have the most experience with lol so you’re in luck

to add another note, keep in mind that Harvest Moon has rebranded as Story of Seasons, so SoS is the same HM we all know and love; Natsume took the Harvest Moon title and released a bunch of horrible games to catch peoples’ interest with the familiar title, so the title shifts in this list. i only used the name Harvest Moon when discussing the games out of familiarity/force of habit; later on down this list, the title changes. i’m also adding the 3DS games.

i’ll link you to the games as well so you can go over them yourself/she can check them out herself to see what she’d prefer. i wrote a lot but not nearly enough to cover the controls/functions/story line/overall goal/townspeople in each game.

1) Harvest Moon DS/Harvest Moon DS Cute. considering one of your mom’s favorite HM games are AnWL, i think she’ll like this the best; the game is set in Forget-Me-Not-Valley with a huge amount of characters from AnWL! in DS, you can only play as Jack/Pete. in DS Cute, you can choose to play as either Claire or Pony/Jill. DS/DS Cute is probably one of my favorite title games because it’s so similar to AWL/AnWL, so i think she’d really enjoy this one. i don’t have much to say on the story/goal of the game since it’s basically AWL/AnWL for a DS. out of all the games i go over here, i think she’ll like this one the best.

2) Harvest Moon: Island of Happiness/Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands. these two are very similar to Tree of Tranquility/Animal Parade because they’re essentially the same game with major differences. in IoH, the player character is washed up on a new island during a horrible shipwreck after a violent storm/lightning strike and sea and never makes whatever their original destination was; those who survived the crash make a new life on the island they washed up on (it sounds bleak but i promise it’s not).

however, in SI, the MC sails to SI for a new life and all of the villagers have an established life there. the two games have different goals and slightly tweaked characters, but are functionally relatively the same, with SI adding in more marriage candidates. this series is also one of my favorites, but one thing to add is that the art is very chibi-fied. not sure if your mom will mind it, but it kind of bugged me at times. i personally prefer SI.

3) Harvest Moon: Grand Bazaar. this was one of my first HM games, and it’s very cute and charming; the art, however, is more cutesy than the previous titles, so at times it kind of feels like everyone is a baby lol. the game is a little different from usual - there’s no shipping bin, because the goal is to sell everything you produce at a bazaar that’s held once a week (or at a shop in town if you don’t want to wait that long). you don’t mine in this game either, since you buy ore in shops or find them in rocks during winter. overall, it’s a cute game, but maybe not the most memorable? i remember enjoying it a lot, but i can’t remember that much about it. >_> it’s one of the more cutesy games as opposed to the little bits of realism/somberness in AWL/AnWL

i’m skipping Puzzle de Harvest Moon/Harvest Moon: Frantic Farming because neither of them are farming simulators, they’re puzzle/matching games

4) Harvest Moon: Tale of Two Towns. one of my favorite games! you play as a farmer starting in one of two towns situated on either side of a mountain, with a blocked tunnel connecting them. your goal is to bring the two towns together again through cooking festivals, which will unblock the tunnel; until then, you travel between the towns by climbing the mountain, which is great for foraging but eats up some time in your day. one town is focused on farming crops, the other is focused on farming livestock; you can do both in either town, but your farm will be devoted more to main export of either town. for example, in Konohana has a lot of fields for crops and a small barn. it’s the opposite in Bluebell.

your residency in one town isn’t permanent, though; i think at the end of every season you can choose if you want to move to the other town and you can keep doing that indefinitely. another addition to the game is dating, where you go on dates with marriage candidates rather than just leveling hearts and proposing! it brings a tiny bit more realism into the romance lol. this game is available for 3DS as well.

5) the Rune Factory games. i haven’t played a lot of RF (only 4 lol ._.) but they’re all titled as fantasy Harvest Moons, meaning you have a farm and farming is a major focus, but there’s also magic and elves and fighting monsters in dungeons to get good loot! RF title games for the DS are Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, Rune Factory 2: A Fantasy Harvest Moon, and Rune Factory 3: A Fantasy Harvest Moon. Rune Factory 4 is a 3DS title and the only one i’ve played but i liked it a lot and intend to play the other titles!

i don’t have too much to say on the series since i haven’t played a lot, but i really enjoyed RF4! the games are much more story driven than Harvest Moon, which i found really fun since it felt like i had more of a goal than just “farm for the town”. i will add though that i loved all of the bachelorettes(minus Amber)/bachelors up until gearing toward proposing, because a lot of their Marriage Events suddenly had like...weird stuff? i won’t spoil anything but suddenly things like possessiveness/jealousy/weird unhealthy relationship stuff came up and i was like WHOA WHAT WHERE IS THIS COMING FROM O_O because it was all SO drastically different from everything else up to that point. i didn’t romance any of the bachelors but it was there for the bachelorettes so idk if it’s the same.

there are more HM games, but these next ones are for 3DS. i’m not sure if your mom has a 3DS (i know u said DS but i call my 3DS a DS all the time so idk if it’s the same thing for you or not >_>), so i’m adding these next titles because i’m on a roll, but keep that in mind! i will also add that, with your mom’s preference in her favorite games, she’d probably enjoy the games i listed above waaaaaay more than these next ones, since that’s how i feel too.

1) Harvest Moon 3D: A New Beginning. this is the title where things feel... very different. i didn’t really enjoy it that much, if i’m being honest, because it brought in a weird focus away from farming where you reorganize the town and build new buildings and stuff. it felt a lot like the sims, minus making characters. this is the first title where you can customize the player character though! which i love! since your mom’s favorite games are AnWL and Animal Parade and MY favorite games are AnWL and Animal Parade and i didn’t enjoy this game much, she probably won’t either. the tutorial stage is also really, REALLY, horrifically long -- it stretches over a week in-game time of just basically doing nothing. most of the characters are REAL charming though imo, and they lose the cutesy chibi art which i was really happy about. the art and characters made me stick through the gameplay since i enjoyed them. they also brought in older characters and renewed their designs; i loooooved Witch Princess and Amir in this game so much i was so stoked to unlock them. but overall yeah one of my least favorite titles in the series since it brought so much focus away from farming to me and while characters/romance are nice, a huge draw TO the HM games is the farming

2) Story of Seasons. first game to be hit with the rebrand from Harvest Moon! any game after this was released (FEB 27 2014 in Japan) with the title of Harvest Moon is NOT Harvest Moon anymore! it’s Natsume up to their dirty tricks of using a great brand and stealing the name to release bad games.

anyway, SoS was... pleasant! i enjoyed it. it didn’t stick with me like the older games, though. but i loooved the art and the town, and the villagers were charming. you compete with other farmers in town for certain fields located in different places, all of which are best suited for certain kinds of crops. i liked the rival aspect, but it is very different from older HM titles. you can also select the difficulty to play in either Veteran mode or Seedling mode; i recommend Seedling mode, both because prices aren’t as high and because HM (to me) is a game to relax and have fun farming, and Veteran mode is just stressful.

3) Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns. i love this one. (well, for the most part). this is the first game that introduces your family! you start off as a young adult still living at home with your mother, father, and younger sister, and decide to move out and become a farmer. your father is furious at this idea but you are eventually set to live in the same town as your Uncle Frank, who is a farmer, to measure your farming ability. if by the end of three years, you haven’t proven to your father than you have what it takes to be a farmer, you’re leaving the town forever. the bleakness reminded me a lot of AnWL, for some reason; i loved the aspect of your father being strict and hard on you since it felt a little bit more somber than the super cute, super peppy titles in the series of recent years.

that’s where the bleakness ends, tho. i will say that, despite loving this game and the characters, i really, REALLY hate the three-town system. you start off on your farm to three crossroads that lead to three different towns that all unlock by summer in your first year. and yes, it’s fun! the different towns yield different crops and resources. but it doesn’t feel at all like Harvest Moon to me. it feels way bigger and with way more things to do. it also makes days a LOT longer, since you run from all of the towns to complete errands in part-time jobs. it needs more of your focus than other games. i haven’t finished the game yet, and while i love it, i love it separately from other HM titles. it doesn’t hook me in the way the older titles did, which i think is because of the modernity of it with three different towns and being bigger and and having such consistently bright colors as opposed to one small town and muted color scheme of, for example, AWL. it feels, like ANB, very different from the vibe Harvest Moon usually gives you. idk how to describe it. i feel like this game exists in a separate niche.

i like how your family feels more real in it, though; they periodically send you letters and visit you. it really feels like you had a life before coming to the town(s), rather than starting off as a blank slate at the beginning of the game.

anyway i hope that helped! lmk if you need any clarification or want to go over other things or want any other recommendations. i hope ur mom finds a game she likes! ^_^

#wat do i tag this as.#recommendations #?#Anonymous

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attackofthefat-blog · 5 years

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Purefit Keto Clearly Choice for Exogenous Ketones

Purefit Keto - Reach Ketosis Rapidly and Start Converting Fat For Energy

Anybody who is even vaguely familiar with the fat burning community most likely have encountered data about the Ketogenic weight loss program. Actually, this highly popular fat loss system has consumed the industry for decades and maintains its growth in popularity since its fat burning effects abound.

The basic design behind this highly acclaimed weight loss diet is to actually rework our bodies into a fat loss system by way of putting our bodies into a ketogenic state. In this physical state your body no longer relies upon carbs to provide power but begins to use fat cells for its energy needs. Needless to say, this efficient manner of shedding weight should come as no surprise since this was our earliest intended food regimen prior to the influx of carbohydrates were incorporated into our modern eating practice.

You see, centuries ago, humanity relied upon the "hunter gatherer" relationship for its essential food needs. In essence, we ate the meat which we hunted and the vegetation that we harvested. Our meals used to be low carb in nature and enabled our bodies to maintain an optimum fat loss state. In addition, it accomplished this highly coveted feat while providing more than sufficient provisions of energy for the body. Have you ever seen the grueling work people performed before the technology we enjoy nowadays? Before the time when breakthroughs injected ease into our modern existence?

Purefit Keto Quickly Gets You Into Ketosis

Unfortunately, as our eating habits have evolved(or rather deteriorated) large amounts of carbs have been injected into our consumption. Because of this changeover, our bodies were forced into generating our energy by means of this newly introduced primary component- carbohydrates. Sadly, this deviation from a low carb to high carb diet regime isn't conducive for building a long-term healthy status of well-being for many individuals.

With regards to the natural process of power production carbohydrates can be modified into energy with less difficulty than fats. Sadly, "carbohydrate energy" is quickly used up and needs to be continuously refilled. This is a huge contributing factor as to why many folks remain hungry and yearning for more food. Not only that, when "carbohydrate energy" is exhausted we're left feeling weak when the sugar high leaves our bodies.

This life of never being satiated pretty well ushers us into a lifestyle of never ending food craings- which in turn results in overeating. It goes without saying, that all those extra consumed calories need to be stored somewhere and that is where our problem starts. We end up being left with large quantities of fat cells but the body is no longer trained to cope with this added fat. In a way, our bodies become "spoiled" and prefer a high carb diet since carbohydrates are so easily transformed into power.

Alternatively, the Ketogenesis permits our bodies to get back into its original enhanced state of using foat stores for energy. This enhanced status is known as Ketosis. As soon as your body has used up the high carb power source it's compelled to get back to relying on its fat stores for power creation. In ketosis you'll begin to encounter countless health advantages since fats are the supreme energy resource for our bodies.

As you enter into a ketogenic state, you’ll no longer encounter that irritating feeling of not being full or satiated seeing that ketogenesis is a natural appetite suppressant. Not like carbohydrates, the energy made out of fats are more enduring and eliminate the requirement to be repeatedly "topped up". In reality, this hunger suppressing outcome makes the ketogenic diet program one of the only weight loss programs that removes the necessity for keeping track of calories or monitoring food intake. This element alone, displays the power of the Keto weight loss plan! One does not have to be a rocket scientist to comprehend what's going to happen if one's body starts using fat stores for energy and is satiated. Fat loss is the only result when overindulgence is eliminated and fat cells are being burnt for the bodies power requirements.

Look at some of the extra rewards which you will encounter while in Ketosis:

Enhanced Energy levels

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Quick Weight Loss

Improves Metabolism

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Protects Cardiovascular Health

As seen, the health rewards of observing a low carb food source are amazing. Once the body is using fat for its power requirements you will experience life anew. You will not solely enjoy noticeable weight loss effects but will start to attain benefits that supply a better way of life - while protecting your future well-being.

Naturally, the rapid fat loss together with each one of these extra health advantages rest on your capacity to enter into ketosis and continue to be within that status. If you existed back in the days where we ate naturally devoid of the various high carb additions added to our diets then this would be an easy task. I am not stating that an individual is powerless to attain and sustain ketosis by themselves because thousands of people successfully accomplish that feat. But, there are ketogenic products which work to induce ketogenesis and maintain this state inside the body.

Without the support of a keto product, such as Purefit Keto, it is most important to make sure that you digest less than fifty grams of carbohydrates every day. Although, for the best success you ought to set sights on less than twenty grams of carbohydrates each day.

If you are thinking about incorporating Purefit Keto to achieve ketogenesis more rapidly and uphold this fat burning status then please go to https://buypurefitketo.online for more info.

#purefit keto website #purefit keto exogenous ketones

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paladin-andric · 6 years

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Nature of the Gods: Part Two, the Dacuni and the Old Gods

Paganism has become rare in the face of monotheism and organized religion. Very few faiths from before the Order of God remain, wherever they are generally practiced by a small minority scattered throughout the lands. There is one place, though, yet untouched by the faith of humanity...the frigid northern lands of the Dacuni. The lands of the wolfmen still follow the gods they’ve been worshiping since the dawn of recorded history. While the Koutu’s religion has been “tainted” as the wolfmen may put it, their gods answer to no masters, answerable to no foreign god.

The wolfmen have a broad range of approaches to their gods. Some loot and pillage in their names, pledging their kill to the gods, or offering the loot to better their tribe in honor of the gods. Some become dedicated holy warriors to defend the temples of the gods, both from invading armies and during states of tribal conflict or civil war. Others simply dedicate their hard work to the gods to show their commitment to the gods’ people. This last approach is often taken by farmers, servants and child-rearing parents who cannot afford to go off on campaigns.

Hafnir

The mightiest of the gods, Hafnir is the God of War. He is typically depicted as a wild wolfman wearing very light armor made of leather and wielding a massive, two handed hammer. The raiders and soldiers look up to and worship him, taking spoils and kills in his name.

The War God is said to be the savior and champion of all wolfmen. At the dawn of time, dragons infested the northern tundra the wolfmen called home, using their vast numbers and magical powers to subdue the wolfmen and warp them into servile and obedient slaves.

One day, Hafnir descended from the sky and killed a dragon elder, freeing the wolfmen slaves from its service. He continued, traveling the land and slaughtering all dragons he came across. He killed so many they fled and went into hiding, leaving the Dacuni tribes free from their tyranny. In a final show of strength, he personally captured and mentally broke a dragon, turning it into his loyal servant, a sign of how the roles of old had been reversed. Even today, his legend influences the wolfmen. Slaying a dragon is seen as one of the greatest feats a warrior could ever accomplish in wolfman society. Many young warriors leave their tribe to find a dragon to slay, eager to prove their worth and glory. Few ever manage to find one, and the ones that do generally don’t come back...

Spuini

The God of merriment. Spuini was said to have been ascended to godhood upon beating Hafnir in a drinking contest. Often described as a wolfman in a permanent state of inebriation, jug of ale always in hand and a huge grin on his face, he is the embodiment of hedonism, and many people tend to look down on such a lifestyle...until they are behind closed doors. Indeed, many wolfmen profess themselves to be simple, modest and self-sacrificing...only to engage in wild parties in the god’s name. The life of the average wolfman is hard, stressful, full of war, death and struggle...few can withstand it without some vices.

The “chosen” of Spuini are laughed at by most other holy orders, thought of as a group of beer-swilling, gluttonous, orgy-having debauchers who have the gall to call their acts divine. While there’s a fair case for this, they also tend to genuinely believe their acts are spreading happiness and joy to the people of the land, as it is Spuini’s wish to give his children something to look forward to in this harsh world. Still, initiates who just want to make merry find their way into the temples anyway.

Spuini himself is said to reward his most zealous followers with a feeling of permanent contentedness. In a ritual of special wine drinking, the god of merriment is said to speak directly to the priests, whispering secrets and expressions of gratitude in their minds...though whether it’s the divine or the drink talking is up for debate.

The god is celebrated for uplifting the spirits of the wolfmen once they were free from the dragons, cheering them up and preparing them to forge their own destiny as Hafnir hunted the dragons down.

Baba

The goddess of the harvest, Baba is depicted as a shaggy wolfwoman with dirt clinging to her tunic, a pitchfork in hand, and a grim look on her face. Once the wife of Spuini, she became enraged as he once drove a tribe of wolfmen into such a state of permanent of ecstasy that everyone stopped working, engaging in an endless festival that ended with a famine that destroyed their tribe. Soon after she left him, traveling the land to warn the wolfmen of the dangers of throwing away diligence. Pleasure is fine...as long as you remember your duties, and temper it with some hard work.

She has since seen worship among farmers of course, along with ranchers and hunters. She is seen as the founder of society and civilization at large, for without agriculture, what are we but hunters and gatherers?

Her history with Spuini and her outlook on life has put her faithful into a bit of a rivalry with Spuini’s devotees. Baba’s priests see the “chosen” as worthless burdens, soaking up resources from those in need and getting the desperate and needy hooked on sex and alcohol, while the latter sees Baba’s faithful as humorless sticks in the mud that just need to loosen up and learn how to have some fun.

Those humble and hard working commoners often find solace in the vindication that their toiling is next to holiness, and Baba would do the same in their place. There can be no prosperity if you just sit back and wait for it.

Asvarnin

The god of sin. A younger god, Asvarnin is tasked with keeping a tally of all wrongdoings perpetrated by all mortals. While the wicked may prosper in life, they will have to answer to Asvarnin when they die. He is typically depicted as a wolfman in black robes covering him completely, long hood casting shadows over his obscured face, only his snout visible.

The god of sin is said to trap souls in the “Chamber of Absolution”, where the spirits of those who have sinned are tortured. They must experience pain proportionate to the amount of sin they have accumulated over the course of their lives. Once they have undergone the required amount of torture, they are freed, and must speak with Asvarnin as to their situation. If they remain cruel and wrathful, they will be put back into the chamber until broken. The kind and good may only face a very brief session, a short whipping to drive out impure thoughts or the like.

Asvarnin is said to be distant. Not cold per-say, but stifling his emotions as to properly dole out punishment. He is known to become sensitive and apologize for his dark and cruel job during the talks he has with his victims after sessions. He also comforts those with broken wills, who are silent and shivering after their absolving sessions. Atoning for sin is a job that must be done, but Ascarnin finds little joy in it.

Those that pass find their way to paradise, an afterlife full of rolling hills, thick forests, and halls where the wolfmen dead spend their time relaxing. Asvarnin is a precaution set to ensure only those pure enough can enter, and anyone who starts trouble there will be sent back to him for another session.

He’s often thought of as a lonely and withdrawn god, struggling to build any relationships with his fellow gods. There are so many souls to process...and it is said to have taken a toll on his happiness. Adherents to Asvarnin tend to build shrines dedicated to his glory, in an effort to show him how much they appreciate his hard work. Perhaps if he knows how grateful the mortals are, it will be enough to keep him going...or maybe even put a smile on his face.

Vilini

The goddess of nature. Vilini spends her time watching the lands and making sure the food chain is kept in harmony and perpetual sustainability. She is often depicted as a wolfwoman with a glowing aura, wearing a dress of golden leaves and followed by all manner of animals. When paintings, statues or any other art of her is made, she is typically interacting with or standing alongside animals.

It is the goddess’ job to ensure the safety of the land. Overeager hunters, land-clearing builders, and even beasts hunting more than the land can sustain are said to be visited by her...and cease their activities without question.

Vilini is said to possess unearthly charm and beauty. It is rumored she can make any mortal fall in love with her at a whim, bending them to her will. Even rampaging dragons will quickly hurry to please her and change their ways after a visit from her. She uses this as leverage to ensure all species are kept safe from extinction and the lands a firm base for life to bloom from.

Adherents to Vilini typically build very small, humble temples, as wastefulness would displease her. They try their best to get in touch with nature, and protect it from undue damage. They are fewer in number than most other cults, though they aren’t too rare.

Kalinka

The god of food and cooking. Ever the unusual one, Kalinka is said to be fanciful wolfman with an affinity for baking. Not much is known about him, though he’s said to be one of the more interactive gods, often visiting the tribes disguised as a mortal.

A good friend of Spuini, Kalinka is said to be the brain-child behind many of the recipes for his friend’s feasts. Aside from this, he is shrouded in mystery, his duties and powers unknown. He’s rumored to secretly be mighty and powerful, his silly and bizarre nature a smokescreen to hide his true identity. Who is this god, truly? He can’t just be a chef, can he?

The god of cooking is said to have introduced formalized recipes and meals to the wolfmen in their early years, while they were still searing meat over open fires and eating off of trees.

His favorite raw ingredient is red berries.

Banidol

Thought of as a wolfman hovering high in the heavens, glowing, divine eyes gazing at all below him, Banidol is the god of the Sun and Moon. He’s depicted weaing long, flowing blue ropes with runes inscribed along drapes on his shoulders.

It is Banidol’s job to ensure every day begins and ends. Few powers can oppose this, but there have been a few powerful sorcerers that have meddled with this cycle before...none have succeeded against the god, though. His duty is of the utmost importance, and he shows little mercy against the few that can interfere with it.

The god is said to be reserved and enigmatic. He cares little for frivolous activities like cavorting with mortals, merriment or other such pleasures. He’s said to enjoy the peace and quiet up in the skies, however, finding it relaxing and enjoyable to have a massive expanse all to himself. Secretly, he is deeply shy and socially inept, which becomes apparent when he’s required to work alongside one of the other gods. Anyone who knows him well would know he isn’t actually a mysterious, brooding overlord...but a quiet introvert who is more than pleased to have eons of alone time.

Adherents to Banidol are always listening in on any magical plots big enough to garner attention. They are anti-magician crusaders, dedicated to hunting down wizards and sorcerers who threaten night and day to ensure they can’t tamper with the natural state of things.

Vajerio

God of music. This god is said be a wolfman with a snow white coat of fur, with a loose-cut tunic and a look of bliss on his face, always carrying a harp. Vajerio’s duties include the spreading of joy and wisdom, along with the ending of disasters.

Vajerio’s performances can instill any emotion he wants as intensely as he wishes upon anyone. Legends state after Hafnir’s destruction of the dragons, the few that struggled to regain their hold over the Dacuni were visited by the god. He would make them weep, feeling deep sorrow and regret for their actions with little more than a few songs. They quickly mended their ways and retreated into the wilds, never to seek vengeance against the wolfmen ever again. While the god of war shattered the dragon’s hold over the tribes, Vajerio dealt with the aftermath.

Vajerio is said to visit the mortal world quite often, disguising himself as a traveling minstrel. He uses his persuasive powers to broker peace between warring factions, many people awaiting destruction by army or beast confused when their foes suddenly withdraw.

Adherents to the god of music build temples that function more like a bard’s school than anything, believing in the power of song. They are not looked very fondly upon by the tribes, so most temples to Vajerio are made in Geralthin, by wolfmen minorities.

???

One fateful day, a mysterious god, robed, hooded and wrapped in shadows, appeared from nowhere and attacked Hafnir with magic. The god of war was eventually defeated by the sorcerer, but when the other gods showed up, the attacker fled.

No one, not even the gods, know who this was, but their powers were obviously divine, able to take down the mightiest of the gods. Who was this sorcerer? It surely must have been one of the other gods...but which one?

That’s the end of the list of gods! The Pona are spiritualistic yet lack gods. In the west influence from the humans bleed in, and some of them follow The Order. I hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about the Old Gods!

Tag list: @thereisnothingwrongwithbeingmad, @lady-redshield-writes, @paper-shield-and-wooden-sword, @sheralynnramsey, @the-true-shadowmaster, @tawnywrites, @writer-on-time, @oceanwriter, @zwergis-spilledink, @fluffpiggy, @elliewritesfantasy, @homesteadhorner, @laurenwastestimewriting

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