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#it was called Old 1812

lectern-fullcauldron · 1 year

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Hermitcraft season nine survival minecraft breakdown moments:

Tango building an enormous and imposing fortress in a single episode as a backdrop to the multilevel dungeon crawler he's building and coding in survival minecraft

Beef building a full tcg with expansion packs and stadiums using hundreds of minecraft maps

Joe building a mechanically accurate pinball machine to the scale of two minecraft maps that rises to build height and below the ocean

Bdubs revolutionising building again and beginning to paint texture with blocks and building That Door in survival minecraft as a minigame

Zed and Etho building the 1812 overture with noteblocks and creepers

Everything that Doc does ngl. Maniac

Cub's various iterations on total chaos

The entirety of soup gulch; beautiful builds, massive scale, incredible

Anything that they called a 'starter house'

Honestly everything that the hermits do is mind-blowing and they deserve their place as old gods of minecraft

#good to reblog #hermitcraft #joe hills #ethoslab #bdouble0

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clove-pinks · 3 months

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Franklinheads, what is your top pet peeve when it comes to perceptions of the [historical] Franklin Expedition?

Mine is 100% the "most advanced technology of their day" concept of HMS Erebus and Terror. I think the origins of this are in the 1980s, when Owen Beattie's ice mummy exhumations propelled the Franklin Expedition into the spotlight. JUST LIKE THE SPACE SHUTTLE CHALLENGER!—this was the pat comparison of the day. You could definitely draw some parallels if you tried hard enough, but no, I don't think the Space Shuttle Challenger is a very good analogy.

There was pretty much nothing unique or particularly new about the technology in Franklin's ships—not the tinned food, not the desalinator, not the heating system, and definitely not the puny steam engines—and Franklin's men knew this! They were aware that Erebus and Terror were beat-up old warships, one of the ships fought in the War of 1812 before most crew members were born! Fitzjames called them "old tubs," and Le Vesconte jokingly compared them to 17th and 18th century fictional vessels (Red Rover and Water-Witch).

Steam frigates with hundreds of horsepower were built even in the 1830s! But they couldn't carry fuel lasting for years; whereas Franklin's men had ~13 days of coal for their 20-horsepower engines, which at most might get them out of a harbour in unfavourable winds. As a child I read books that made such a big deal about the steam engines, I really thought they would be under steam all the time, crashing through the ice with their Advanced Technology just like the space shuttle.

If anything, the Franklin Expedition is part of a tradition of the British using obsolete ships and technology for polar exploration. Compare Terra Nova with the latest technology of the 1910s: she looks like the relic of an earlier age that she was.

#franklin expedition #polar exploration #hms erebus #hms terror #terra nova #polar #age of steam #this post turned out longer than i thought #but i am Annoyed by people repeating this 'most advanced technology of their day' trope #what makes the FE unique is the death toll not the pipsqueak steam engines #john ross brought steam engines to the arctic too (and they sucked)

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ltwilliammowett · 5 months

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Door no. 16 and today a very old lady shows up - but please do not believe that she is harmless. Her name "Old Ironside" is not without reason. I think you know who you have here - of course it's USS Constitution

USS Constitution, photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Skyler Okerman, 2022

A few more infos about her:

Constitution, warship renowned in American history. One of the first frigates built for the U.S. Navy, she was launched in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 21, 1797; she is the world’s oldest commissioned warship afloat. (The HMS Victory is older (1765) but is preserved in a drydock at Portsmouth, England.)

The Constitution’s overall length is 204 feet (62 metres), its displacement is 2,200 tons, and its gun range is 1,200 yards (1,100 metres). The bolts fastening its timbers and copper sheathing on the bottom were made by the silversmith and patriot Paul Revere. Rated as a 44-gun frigate, it ordinarily carried more than 50 guns and a crew of some 450. Original cost of the vessel exceeded $300,000, including guns and equipment. In the successful war against the Tripoli pirates (1801–05), the Constitution was Commodore Edward Preble’s flagship, and the treaty of peace was signed aboard it. During the War of 1812 it achieved an enduring place in American naval tradition. On August 19, 1812, commanded by Captain Isaac Hull, it won a brilliant victory over the British frigate Guerriere. Tradition has it that during this encounter the American sailors, on seeing British shot failing to penetrate the oak sides of their ship, dubbed it “Old Ironsides.” Several other victories added to its fame. When in 1830 the ship was condemned as unseaworthy and recommended for breaking up, public sentiment was aroused by Oliver Wendell Holmes’s poem “Old Ironsides.”

The ship was preserved, its rebuilding was provided for in 1833, and in 1844 it began a circumnavigation of the globe. The Constitution was removed from active service in 1882, and in 1905 it was opened to the public in Boston Harbor. After a restoration (1927–31) the ship was recommissioned; although it did not sail under its own power, it called at 90 American ports on both coasts and was visited by more than 4.5 million people. Since 1934 it has been based at the Charlestown Navy Yard (now part of the Boston National Historic Park).

In celebration of its bicentennial, the newly renovated Constitution sailed again in July 1997. It also sailed in August 2012 to mark the 200th anniversary of its victory over the Guerriere during the War of 1812.

#naval history #naval artifacts #uss constitution #18th century #19th century #age of sail #advent calendar #day 16

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 1 year

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North To The Future [Chapter 15: Drive] [Series Finale]

The year is now 2000. You are just beginning your veterinary practice in Juneau, Alaska. Aegon is a mysterious, troubled newcomer to town. You kind of hate him. You are also kind of obsessed with him. Falling for him might legitimately ruin your life…but can you help it? Oh, and there’s a serial killer on the loose known only as the Ice Fisher.

Chapter warnings: Language, alcoholism, addiction, murder, violence, character deaths.

Word count: 7.3k.

Link to chapter list (and all my writing): HERE.

Taglist: @elsolario @ladylannisterxo @doingfondue @tclegane @quartzs-posts @liathelioness @aemcndtargaryen @thelittleswanao3 @burningcoffeetimetravel @poohxlove @borikenlove @myspotofcraziness @travelingmypassion @graykageyama @skythighs @lauraneedstochill @darlingimafangirl @charenlie @thewew @eddies-bat-tattoos @minttea07 @joliettes @trifoliumviridi @bornbetter @flowerpotmage @thewitch-lives @tempt-ress @padfooteyes @teenagecriminalmastermind @chelsey01 @anditsmywholeheart @heliosscribbles @killerqueen-ofwillowgreen @narwhal-swimmingintheocean @tillyt04 @cicaspair418 @fan-goddess

A/N: This is the fic I almost never wrote because I didn’t think anyone would be interested in some random, angsty, 1990s, Alaskan, crime-thriller AU. Thank you for proving me wrong. I hope you enjoy the ending. 💜

Almost everything about your existence is pure chance; it’s the most freeing and horrifying truth imaginable. There’s the genetic lottery and corporate downsizing, revolutions and hurricanes, plagues, asteroids, famines, faulty airplanes and malignant blooms of cells and drunk drivers. There are 100 billion planets in this galaxy and your atoms ended up on the one called Earth. After all that, do you really think what you want matters? So make all the choices you like, all the nail-biting deliberations and promises and vows, weigh costs and benefits, do research, roll dice, ask astrologers and palm readers, start over every New Year because that’s something we tell ourselves is possible. The fact that you exist at all is one big cosmic coin flip. If you think you’re the one driving, you’re dead fucking wrong. You’re the speck of dust on a windshield, the spin of a roulette wheel. You’re a flash of silver in the universe’s pinball machine.

I spend a lot of my time thinking about chance, okay? My family is one of the wealthiest in the Western Hemisphere, and I didn’t do anything to earn that. I was born first, and I definitely didn’t do anything to earn that, Jesus Christ, what a chromosomal fuckup. I inherited an affliction that others get to live without. I can’t imagine what it feels like to wake up and not be horrified by myself, my shortcomings, my failures: too small, too stupid, too wild, too weak. And the first time someone says something like that to you, you want to apologize, you want to drop to your knees and cling to them and beg for absolution, maybe even the first hundred times, the first thousand. And then it just starts to piss you off. Yeah, I know, I’ve heard it all before, why would you expect anything different? Isn’t this getting old, Mom? Maybe you’re the stupid one, Dad, if you think you could cut me and anything but disappointments would fall out. I’m not horrified by the fact that I’m an addict. The horror came first. The horror is what led to all the rest of it.

One day when I was in 10th Grade—I was slumped way down in my chair and drinking vodka out of an Evian water bottle—my American History teacher, purely by chance, assigned me to make a poster about Juneau, Alaska. Some other kid got Los Angeles (Hollywood! The Whisky a Go Go!) and another got Chicago (the Mob!) and another got Nashville (Johnny Cash!) and some jock moron I hated got Baltimore (um, crabs? the War of 1812…?), but I got fucking Juneau, Alaska. I thought this was so unjust that I never forgot it, the fact that I had to get up in front of the class with my pathetic Crayolas-and-magazine-cutouts poster and pretend that Juneau was a place that mattered, that microscopic cloud-covered relic of a late-1800s gold mining settlement on the shores of the Gastineau Channel. Juneau was never on my list of cities to run to. It just wasn’t. It didn’t have anything I wanted. But when I started thinking about places where I could really disappear, where no one would ever bother looking, where days are short and dark and incurious and irrelevant…well, that sounds like Juneau, right?

Let me tell you something about the night I left. I’ve been more messed up, yeah, and I’ve hurt people worse, and I’ve been closer to death, I’ve been one more powder-white gram on the scale away from oblivion; but I’ve never felt that fucking low. I can’t decide if I wish I’d never gone to Juneau at all. I can’t decide if it was a blessing or a curse.

My flight is a red-eye with a layover in Ketchikan, American Airlines, bound for Seattle. Sunfyre has the window seat. He’s wearing the bright red Service Dog vest that I once stole for him specifically for such occasions. My dog fly with the cargo? My dog?! Bill Clinton will be elected pope first. Sunfyre is chewing contently on Milk-Bones and watching the sun rise over the Pacific Ocean. He knows the drill. We’ll touchdown and deplane, and then…and then…

And then we’ll start over again somewhere new. I’ll find a flight board and pick a destination; Seattle is a hub, with spokes leading everywhere. I could go south, to Galveston, Lafayette, Biloxi, someplace where it gets hot, someplace where I can sweat her out of me, purge every cell that still remembers what she felt like. I could go west, fading into mountains or cornfields, vapid infinitesimal towns in Montana, Iowa, Idaho, Nebraska. I could go to New England or the Great Lakes or freaking Hawaii, sleep in hammocks, swim with sea turtles, drink my rum and Cokes out of coconut shells. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that nowhere really sounds good to me. My legs are suddenly tired of running. There’s an ache that rattles down to the bone.

I don’t have to tell you that I love her, right? It’s not so easy for me to say. But it’s true, and it’s beautiful, and it’s torture, and it’s a dream. It’s pain that flays you alive and then builds you back again, layers of fresh muscle and tendons and veins growing over ribs and vertebrae like a trellis thick with ivy. It’s not a high. It’s just the best life can get down here on earth. It’s the ocean, it’s the Northern Lights.

I’m swimming in a black hoodie that is three sizes too big; I haven’t slept and I’m pale and raccoon-eyed, looking like death, feeling worse. When the stewardess rolls by with her clattering cart just slim enough to fit through the aisle, I order a cup of water for Sunfyre and a double rum and Coke for myself. It arrives with two blood-red cherries bobbing in a caramel-dark carbonated sea. The guy in the next seat over gives me a judgmental little eyebrow raise.

“That doesn’t look like breakfast,” he says.

I bite off both cherries—juice dribbling down my chin, wiped away with a sleeve—and throw the stems over my shoulder. The lady sitting behind me yelps in disgust. “Because it’s dessert.”

The man smiles and shakes his head, one of those I shouldn’t find it funny but I do sort of looks. I inspire a lot of those. He’s maybe mid-thirties, long hair and ripped jeans, very punk rock, cool as hell. There is a constellation of pins on his denim jacket. One of them has a roman numeral 10 on it, a stark X nestled inside a triangle. Unity, Service, Recovery, the gold letters say. To Thine Own Self Be True. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous pin. What are the chances?

He catches me staring, and I ask: “Does it really make you a better man?”

“It doesn’t make you better. It just makes you real.” He smiles again, patient and kind. “It makes your emotions and experiences real, your relationships real. And so you become whatever version of yourself you were always supposed to be. But you have to want it. Not your wife, not your parents or your kids, not your pastor, not your friends, not your parole officer. You.”

I speak without knowing what I’m going to say. “I want it.”

“Yes, I think you do.”

He sees a lot, I think, as the plane descends into the grey fogbank of Seattle. 20/20.

When we land, the man squeezes into a cab with me and Sunfyre—he sniffles into a Kleenex for a while before reluctantly admitting that he’s allergic to dogs—and pays the fare. The cab’s worn brakes squeal to a stop outside a residential treatment center on the banks of the Puget Sound. When we step out onto the sidewalk, I ask the man if he’s going to take me to get one last drink first. He laughs in my face. Fucking jerk.

He pulls out a black Sharpie and rummages through his pockets, his wallet. He can’t find a scrap of paper. He writes his phone number on the underside of my arm instead. “You call me, okay?” he says. “Call me when you get out. Call me before you get out, if you need to. I don’t care if it’s in five minutes, I don’t care if it’s at 2 a.m. You just make sure you call.”

“Why would you do this? I mean, you don’t even know me. You have no idea who I am.”

“Because once, years ago, someone did the same thing for me, and someone did it for her too. Maybe one day you’ll be able to pay it forward. I don’t care who you are or where you’ve been. It doesn’t matter to me. I’d like to think that we’re all more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.”

And then he waits for me to go inside. He doesn’t leave until he watches me check in at reception on the other side of the rain-flecked glass. Outside, a brand new day is beginning. A misty sun rises as pieces of the sky fall.

Sunfyre trots into the lobby alongside me, panting cheerfully, shaking the perpetual Seattle drizzle from his fur. There’s a girl at the front desk, just a girl, and that’s the other thing that’s different now. She’s not a maybe-future-one-of-my-girls. She’s just like anyone else. I already have a girl. I mean, I don’t anymore, not really. But I still do.

I throw my things onto the counter: my single suitcase, my tattered wallet, my bundle of cash held together with rubber bands, my scraped-up electric guitar.

“Checking in?” the girl asks.

“Yeah.”

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, I guess.”

She opens my wallet, reads my license, blinks in bewilderment. “Aegon…?”

I sigh dramatically. “It’s Greek.”

~~~~~~~~~~

You dream of him; and when you do, he’s always smiling. He’s reading your palm in an empty Taco Bell, he’s kissing you under the Northern Lights, he’s regaling your parents with stories—of lobster fishing in Portland, of cattle ranching in Denver—all through Thanksgiving dinner, he’s undressing you in his moonlit apartment, he’s climbing into your bed. He’s not angry, he’s not ruined, he’s not running away. He’s exactly as you remember him in his best moments. He’s all chaotic white-blond hair and weightless light, sharp laughter and bright eyes. And each morning there’s a splinter-thin moment before you remember that he’s gone. That’s the worst part, really. You always knew it would be. You can’t even begin to forget him.

Your friends want to help you, but they don’t know how. Neither do your parents. Your dad gets an atlas from the study, throws it down on the dining room table, and opens it to a map of the world. “Pick anyplace and we’ll go there,” he says. “We’ll close the vet clinic for two weeks and we’ll all go.” But you can’t give him a single name: not Athens, or Paris, or Buenos Ares, or Cairo, or New York City, or Rome, or Tokyo, or anywhere else for that matter. It’s the strangest thing. All your life you’ve been waiting to get out of Juneau, but now nowhere sounds good to you. And maybe that’s a lesson you wish you’d never learned: sometimes freedom is less about places than it is about people.

The blood on the equipment recovered from Trent’s apartment matches DNA from the first three victims. He is charged with eight counts of first-degree murder and held awaiting trial in the Lemon Creek Correctional Center. His family visits him faithfully each week. His lawyer is exasperated that he won’t plead guilty and spare his parents the humiliation and expense of a protracted court battle. But Trent’s story never changes: he’s innocent, he’s never killed anybody, he doesn’t understand how the blood could have been found on his belongings. He wants to know exactly what items the police tested; he and his lawyer are still waiting for the prosecutor to turn over all the details during discovery. In the midst of the scandal, the upheaval, you fade into the backdrop like the stars behind fog. People talk around you and through you. They offer gaps that you don’t care enough to fill in. Drinks clink, whispers fly, conspiracies are exchanged between pool shots. You watch the days grow longer and wait for the future to arrive. You don’t know what it will look like, you can’t even begin to fathom it. But surely there must be a future. Life goes on. It did for your mom after Jesse. It will for you too.

A week after Aegon leaves, there is a knock at your parents’ front door. You open it to find Aemond standing there in the muted amber-pink afternoon light. His hair is long and loose, his Armani suit immaculately tailored, his BlackBerry nestled in his right hand. He glances up from it at you and his jaw falls open. And only then do you realize how awful you must look.

You tell Aemond, your voice hushed and heavy, ankles in quick-drying cement: “I don’t know where he is.”

“No, I can see that,” Aemond replies, dull horror in his blue eye. Then he turns around and strides halfway down the driveway towards the street, where a cab idles as it waits for him, engine exhaust pouring into the air like smoke from a firepit.

“How’s your dad?” you call after him when you get your bearings.

He pauses under the dwindling light. “Alive. For now.” And then Aemond considers you for a while. “I suppose if I ever want to find you again, I know where to look.”

You nod. “I’ll be here.”

I’ll always be here.

A month crawls by like a wounded animal, dead leaves snared in the fur of its belly. The flesh on your thigh knits back together. The things that Aegon ordered show up in Juneau, packages left on the front porch and stuffed into the moose-shaped mailbox like Christmas gifts in a stocking. You pack these remnants of him—Zoobooks and cooking accessories, knives and Chia Pets—into a cardboard box and tuck it away in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of the attic, and you’re aware the entire time that this has happened before, almost exactly twenty years ago. When your dad puts a Third Eye Blind or Red Hot Chili Peppers or Oasis album on his record player, you find some excuse to leave the room. When you tack magazine cutouts of beaches and cityscapes to your bedroom walls, all you can think about is where Aegon might be now. You wonder where he works during the day, a surf shop or a construction site or a farm or a fishing boat; you wonder who he spends his nights with.

I’ll always be here. Even if I leave, I’ll always be here.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twenty years ago to the day, almost to the hour, a man fell into the Gastineau Channel and drowned. They found water in his lungs, though the autopsy was only a formality, an afterthought; Jesse had a reputation in Juneau, and no one was particularly surprised to see how his story ended. There were abrasions on his back and shoulders, contusions on his wrists, but so what? He probably tripped half a dozen times before he tumbled over some guardrail and into the frigid black water. There was a bloody mess of an impact wound on the side of his face, but who cares? The blood alcohol concentration doesn’t lie. The man was wasted, and more than that he was a waste. If his premature demise hadn’t been then, it would have been later, in a week or a month or a year. And when someone like that goes, there’s a sigh of relief that accompanies the misery, isn’t there? There’s the sense of a weight being lifted from a scale.

You’re sitting in Ursa Minor at the usual booth, but the bar is practically empty. It’s Valentine’s Day. Joyce is with Rob, Kimmie is with Brad; Heather’s parents have spirited her away on a short vacation to Sitka to try to take their minds off Trent’s imminent lifelong incarceration. Your mom and dad’s February 14th tradition is cooking a homemade Italian dinner together—pasta, bread with herbs and olive oil, caprese salad, tiramisu—and then settling in for a romantic Blockbuster rental. This year, it’s Runaway Bride. Your mom loves Julia Roberts. They didn’t ask for privacy, but you gave it to them anyway. Kimmie offered to drop you off at Ursa Minor and then drive you home after her date with Brad so you could drink away your sorrows without having to worry about calling a ride. So now Kimmie is getting wined, dined, and plied with boxed chocolates at the Red Dog Saloon while you drain appletinis and flip through one of Jesse’s journals, not knowing what you’re looking for.

Dale is washing pint glasses in the sink behind the bar and humming cheerfully along to a Cake CD. It’s just you and him tonight; evidently, Dale doesn’t have a hot date either. It was nice of him to eschew the usual Shania Twain or Sheryl Crow soundtrack. He’s trying to spare you from any crooning love songs. He must have forgotten that Cake has its own little slice of relevance in your memories of Aegon, those memories that refuse to fade, ink in your skin as dark as night.

Your fingerprints trace Jesse’s scrawling, handwritten letters. It’s his very last journal, the last words he ever wrote. His final entry is unremarkable, a lucid recollection of his latest woodcarving project: it’s a family of tiny bears, three of them. He says he wants the cub to have the same slope of your cheeks, the shape of your eyes. And it’s just like your mom said. It really did seem like he was getting better.

You flip to the next page, blank. The heading reads: Thursday, February 14th, 1980.

You go back a few days. And your gaze catches on words that you’ve read before, months ago, back when the journals were a new discovery like striking oil. The entry is from Saturday the 9th. It ends with an unceremonious bullet point of a reminder: dinner w/ Dale on Thursday.

You leaf forward to Thursday, to the blank page that tells you nothing. Back to the 9th, forward to the 14th, again, again. Valentine’s Day 1980, before Dale had married his wife, after your mom had stopped trying to make plans with Jesse, maybe even rebelled against them; just two unromantic, discarded men with a vacant slot in their calendars and troubles to drink into submission. Except that Jesse never came home.

Dinner with Dale, you think dizzily. Dinner with Dale on the night he died.

The opening notes of The Distance shout from the stereo. Everything suddenly feels very loud.

Reluctantly crouched at the starting line,

Engines pumping and thumping in time…

What had Aegon said about that song before you sang it together, stomping and staggering across the hardwood floor? It’s not about NASCAR, it’s about a journey!

Outside, it’s a rare clear night in Juneau. The Northern Lights are a kaleidoscopic ribbon against indigo night, the sky a mausoleum of stars. And you remember when Aegon sang Everlong, when he grabbed your hand, led you upstairs to the roof, kissed you for the first time under the ethereal, shimmering curtain of green and purple and blue…before Heather had interrupted to tell you that Dale was closing the bar. He was irritable, he was tired; he wanted to go home.

The arena is empty except for one man,

Still driving and striving as fast as he can…

And then they found a body, didn’t they? Yes, you can remember being in Aegon’s apartment and hearing the police cars zoom by. You remember the red-and-blue flashes on his face. You remember thinking they looked like sapphires and rubies, the ocean and blood.

The sun has gone down and the moon has come up

And long ago somebody left with the cup,

But he’s driving and striving and hugging the turns

And thinking of someone for whom he still burns…

Icy claws glide down the length of your spine. Memories play back with a focused clarity that you didn’t have before: Dale groggy and yawning just before they found the fifth victim at Christmas, and again before they found the eighth the same night Trent dragged you—shrieking, bleeding, virtually naked—out of your Jeep. You remember Dale at your parents’ New Year’s Eve party talking about how maybe the killer was an athlete with brain damage from CTE. You remember him offering to give Trent a box of his old equipment from when he was a park ranger. You remember him watching as Trent towered over you here in Ursa Minor with a cue stick clenched in his fist, demanding to know where you had been the night before, Dale’s eyes gleaming with disapproval and fascination and…and…oh god, opportunity.

He’s going the distance,

He’s going for speed,

She’s all alone (all alone)

All alone in her time of need…

And now Aegon’s long gone, but you’re still here. And so is the Ice Fisher.

You’re staring at Dale, eyes huge and glossy with terror. He glances up, gives you a brief casual smile, looks down at the pint glasses again. And then his eyes come back to you. He sees you and you see him, really see him, and it’s the first time in your life that you can recall him being a centerpiece instead of an ornament for gazes to skate over like ice, wallpaper or taxidermy deer heads or a mirror. And you watch as the thing that lives inside Dale stirs awake. It is a shadow with fangs, talons, barbs down its spine, a weblike scribble of a brain loud with the echoes of screams; and it unfurls and fills him completely, all the way to his fingerprints. It possesses him, it eclipses him.

It’s Dale, you realize like a bullet slicing through an aorta, spilling an ocean of hot blood. It was him twenty years ago and it’s him now.

You gasp and fumble for the cannister of bear mace still clipped to your purse. Dale crosses the room with staggering swiftness, like a wolf, like a storm, one pint glass still gripped in his hand. He reaches you just as your thumb presses down on the cannister’s release tab. The rust-colored mist spews not directly into his face but into the room; Dale is hacking and rasping, you both are, but he isn’t in too much pain to haul you out of the booth and onto the floor. You’re screaming, you’re clawing at him, your eyes feel like they’re on fire, tiny pinpoint infernos that drill down to the bone. You can feel the ice-cold juice and schnapps and vodka of your appletini, knocked off the table when you fell, soaking through the back of your sweater. You can feel pebbles of glass as they burrow into your flesh. You are dimly aware of a barstool tumbling over as you struggle with Dale.

“No!” you cry into the monstrous hand that he clamps over your mouth. “No—!”

Dale brings the bottom of the pint glass down on your head. The Distance lyrics—she’s hoping in time that her memories will fade—swirl around inside your fractured skull.

Silence descends like a curtain, shadows in, lights out.

~~~~~~~~~~

I knock, and he opens the door. The house smells like fresh bread and alfredo sauce, rosemary and crushed garlic. My rental—a Toyota 4Runner, I remember what she said about the Nova being a bad idea in Alaska—is parked in the driveway behind her Jeep. Sunfyre is standing beside me, eyes sparkling, smiling with that unburdened-by-intellect innocence that dogs have. There’s a bouquet of blue-dyed roses in my left hand, cool melancholy blooms of life like seawater, like bruises.

“Hi,” I say to her dad as he stands in the doorway. “It’s good to see you again.”

“It’s good to see you too, Aegon.” He’s not just staring at me in the artificial front porch light; he’s gawking, he’s damn near speechless. “Wow. Wow. It’s really good to see you.”

Yeah, I know I look different. The dark rings around my eyes have vanished, my face is less puffy, my hair is trimmed and healthy and mostly out of my face, I stand taller. I’m wearing a white turtleneck sweater and a leather jacket, black skinny jeans, my combat boots. I have a red chip in my pocket that I can’t fucking wait to show her: 1 month sober. On the first day, you think you’re going to die, and on the second day you wish you would. But you don’t. You live, and that starts out as a grisly inconvenience, and then you get a taste for it. “You can probably guess who I’m looking for.”

“Yeah, I reckon I can,” her dad says. “But she’s not here right now. She went to Ursa Minor.”

I grin, a crooked little curl of the lips. “I think I remember how to get there.”

I hop back into the 4Runner with Sunfyre and pull out into the street, snow and ice chomping under the tires. I had missed driving, I realize now. I got so used to almost never being able to do it that I forgot how good it feels to turn the wheel yourself, to watch the speedometer ramp up when you decide you want to fly. Ten minutes later, I swerve into Ursa Minor’s deserted parking lot and screech to a stop across three separate spaces.

“Oh, what the fuck!” I choke out as I step into the bar, coughing into my sleeve. The blue roses tumble out of my hand. Ursa Minor is empty, but there’s something in the air, something invisible that drives scorching, stinging needles into my eyes and my sinuses. Tears stream down my face; my exposed skin prickles and burns. Sunfyre sneezes over and over again and lingers in the doorway, gulping in fresh night wind from outside. There’s shattered glass and green liquid on the hardwood floor. There’s an upturned barstool. The stereo is playing Cake’s cover of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps.

What the hell happened here—?

And then I see it: the cannister of bear mace that had rolled under the booth, the same one she and her friends always sat in.

She used the bear mace. She finally used it. But why?

There’s blood on the floor. There’s blood on the table too. There’s a tattered, olive-green journal opened to a blank page. The pieces slide closer and closer and then link together, an explosion in my mind like fireworks.

I bolt outside and study the snow-covered parking lot. There are fresh tire tracks there under the murky luminescence of the streetlights; they lead out to the main road and then north towards the lakes.

“No,” I whisper to no one but the fierce wind, the sky threaded with the opalescent Northern Lights. “No, no, no…”

I sprint back inside Ursa Minor, get the phone Dale keeps behind the bar, and call the cops. “Stay where you are,” the 911 dispatcher instructs me sternly. “Wait for the police, do not attempt to investigate yourself, do not attempt to intervene—”

“Yeah, fuck that,” I say, and slam the receiver into the cradle. Then I swipe the black 8 ball off the pool table.

I load Sunfyre into the 4Runner and spin out of the parking lot, following the parallel lines of tire tracks like the etching of veins beneath skin.

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s a sound, rough and grating; and then you realize that it’s you being dragged across the ice. When your eyes flutter open, you see the uninterrupted sky: indigo night, distant stars, the Northern Lights. Your clothes are wet with snow; it’s so cold that the fabric is freezing, stiff and crackling when you try to move. Dale is lugging you over the frozen lake by the collar of your sweater. It’s choking you, but of course that doesn’t matter much. He’s about to kill you anyway.

“It’s not right,” Dale mutters, and you’re aware through the disorientation and the fog-like cloud of pain that he’s not really talking to you. “Your mom’s a nice lady. It’s not right that she had to lose two people this way, she doesn’t deserve that. Oh well. It can’t be helped now, can it?”

You whimper something, disjointed helpless words. Please, hurts, don’t, please.

“It’s not me,” Dale says, as if it’s perfectly logical. “I mean, not really. It’s this part of me that I can’t cut out. I can only feed it so it goes away for a while. It quiets down sometimes, it hibernates like a bear in the winter…but it always comes back. And my god, is it hungry.”

You smack clumsily, futilely at his hands as he hauls you over the ice. Dale doesn’t seem to notice.

“You have to make it look like an accident. That’s the ticket, if you don’t want anybody to know. You shove a hiker from a ledge, a drunk into the ocean. I did that for a long time, never raised suspicion. Never pinged on anyone’s radar. Jesse was the hardest, though. Good lord, did he fight. Had to pour a bottle of Everclear down his throat. Had to make it look like he was drinking that night. He wasn’t, which was unusual. Kept saying he wanted to turn things around. I think you had something to do with that. Now this? You were never supposed to be here, ladybug. What a shame. What a goddamn shame.”

Consciousness is a river that you dip in and out of; blackness crumbles around the edges of your vision, collapses in, recedes, swells again like a wave. You moan, you beg, you struggle as much as you can. It’s not much. It might as well be nothing.

“Things were easier after I got married,” Dale continues. He has a large hiking backpack slung over his broad shoulders, you see now. It jostles from side to side as he drags you. You know what’s in there: a chisel to break the ice, fishing line to strangle you. “Having someone else there all the time, it was a distraction. And it kept that thing inside me…not tame, no, I wouldn’t say that. But chained up down in the basement, maybe. Now I’m alone again. And when the chains start rattling, there’s nothing to stop me from hearing them.”

You get your feet under you, twist around, and slam your fists into Dale’s chest as hard as you can. He laughs in a baritone rumble and shoves you back down onto the ice; your head hits the ground, and you can feel yourself fading again, the last wisps of sunlight at dusk.

“Sometimes you want to hide,” Dale says. “And sometimes you don’t. I was ready to stop hiding. I can’t tell you what a high it was every time they found a body. The news, the ceaseless chattering around town, the name they gave me…incredible. Exhilarating. I couldn’t sleep for days after each kill. I’d toss and turn all night imagining what the headlines would be. Let me tell you, ladybug. I’ve never tried heroin, and I never need to. It can’t possibly be better than this.”

What will happen to my parents? you think, heartbreak gutting you, dull knifes rearranging your organs. What will happen to Heather and Kimmie and Joyce? What will happen when Aegon finds out he left too soon?

“I knew I needed someone to pin it on,” Dale informs you calmly. “Didn’t take anyone who went to the bar, didn’t take anyone who could be traced back to me. And still, I knew they’d figure it out eventually if I didn’t give them another suspect. At first, I was thinking I might use Aegon. He was a little small, sure, but he showed up around the right time and he was an outsider. Then I saw the way Trent was with you…aggressive, menacing…and I knew it had to be him. It was almost too easy. I planted the seeds, and good lord did they grow.”

“They’ll know,” you croak. “If you kill me, the police will find my body and they’ll know Trent’s not the Ice Fisher.”

Hideously, horribly, Dale smiles down at you. “Oh, ladybug, I don’t think they’ll ever find you. They found the others because I wanted them to. And no one is looking for victims anymore. Once you sink, I’ll cover up the hole with ice and snow. No blood, no signs. People will assume you’re a runaway. It was just too much, wasn’t it? Trent getting arrested, Aegon leaving town. Maybe you ran off after him. Maybe you threw yourself in the channel. Who could say? No, your bones will become silt, your name will slowly disappear from Juneau. And in ten or twenty years, your parents will have you declared dead in absentia. That’s my best guess. That’s how it will go.”

“No,” you sob, battling against the hands knotted into the collar of your sweater. “No—!”

His knuckles bash the side of your head, and a black silence rolls in like high tide, engulfs you, drowns you. When you swim back up into consciousness again, Dale is a few yards from you and drilling a hole in the ice with his chisel. You try to crawl away and promptly collapse, frail and boneless. He glances over at you, chuckles pleasantly, and then begins using a hatchet to widen the opening.

No, you think, hooking your fingers into the snow and dragging yourself towards the forest. No, no, no…

Dale’s ready for you. He walks over, grabs both of your ankles, tugs you with terrifying ease to the hole in the ice. Then he has a length of fishing line in his hands, and he’s looping it around your throat again and again, and he’s tightening it until the needle-thin nylon wire bites into your flesh, spilling tendrils of blood. You know you don’t have a chance, but you try; you owe it to your parents to try. You claw at the fishing line and you struggle and you cry out in hoarse, useless screams—

And then you hear something that doesn’t make any sense. Through the darkness, through the wind, there are the barks of a dog. Sunfyre rockets into your dimming field of vision and jumps on Dale, snarling and growling and snapping at his hands, his face. Dale flings the dog away, and as he’s distracted, Aegon arrives. He’s holding—ludicrously—a black 8 ball from a pool table, and he smashes it into Dale’s head. A sick, wet, crushing sound ricochets, cracked bone cushioned by flesh, and Dale howls as he rolls onto his side and covers his head with his hands.

He peers up at Aegon, furious and pained and stunned. “You?!”

“Me.” Aegon’s voice is dark and low like thunder, like the iron gale of storms over the ocean. “And I’m a killer.”

He lunges at Dale, still wielding the 8 ball. Dale’s massive hand juts out and closes around Aegon’s wrist, and then he yanks him to the ground. They’re grappling on the snow and ice, they’re striking out with knuckles and elbows, they’re ripping at each other with their bare hands. You’re trying to unravel the fishing line still coiled around your throat, panting in deep, frantic breaths so you can see and think clearly, so you can scramble to your feet, so you can help Aegon. And then Dale gets away from him just long enough to grab you again, to wrap the ends of the fishing line around his fingers. He delivers one last macerating blow to your skull, pulls you by your throat to the gaping hole in the ice, and shoves you through.

The water is so cold it’s paralyzing. There is a thought that seizes you—so overwhelming, so strangely rational—that says all you have to do is stay where you are, to wait a little longer, and then you’ll never hurt again, you’ll never be disappointed or caged, you’ll never be anything. And you think of all the lives you could have lived, all the places you could have gone: cities and beaches and deserts and valleys, gardens and rivers, ruins and glass. You were always so afraid of really going after them. What the hell were you so afraid of? Everything worth fearing is right here in Juneau.

I can still do those things. I can still live. And I can still help Aegon.

You jolt out of your inertia and clamber madly for the surface. But you don’t hit frigid open air; you hit ice, ice too thick to break through, ice too thick for more than a murmur of light to penetrate. Your palms press against the semitransparent wall; bubbles of carbon dioxide spurt from your nose and mouth. You feel for the opening that Dale made, but you don’t know where it is. You are lost beneath the ice, running out of air, fading rapidly. Then you hear Jesse—and you aren’t sure how you know what his voice sounds like, but you do—speaking softly and kindly to you, comforting you, telling you which way to go.

I’m sorry that no one knows the truth, you say without speaking. I’m sorry we thought you destroyed yourself. I’m sorry you never got the chance to truly live.

You were all better off without me anyway, he answers, without any bitterness at all. And that’s true, isn’t it?

There is a great disruption that rocks through the water. New currents stir into existence, fresh waves spring out of the darkness. And then someone takes your hand and draws you towards a noise, muffled through the ice and water: a dog barking, you realize. Then your palms find the opening and you inhale brutally cold air into your aching lungs, the best you’ve ever tasted. Aegon helps pull you through the hole and out of the lake, out of the jaws of oblivion.

You lie together on the ice, breathing in gasps that turn to mist in the night wind. Dale’s body is sprawled several yards away. The hatchet he’d used to break up the ice is buried in his neck, spine severed, eyes slick and vacant. You can see reflections of the Northern Lights flickering in them.

“You came back,” you whisper to Aegon as whirling police sirens approach, the lights dancing on his face: blue like the ocean, red like fire and blood.

“Of course I came back, Appletini,” he says, laughing with frenzied relief, kissing your cheeks and forehead over and over again, lake water dripping from his hair. Sunfyre jumps around you both, yapping ecstatically, his tail wagging. “I couldn’t leave without my Juneau girl.”

~~~~~~~~~~

There’s wind, but it isn’t sharp like a blade. There’s a sky, but it isn’t cloaked in cloud cover or fog. The boats that bob in the surf are sailboats and cruisers, not fishing vessels. Dolphins crest out of the sun-speckled waves like someone coming up from a dream.

It’s June 9th, and you’re soaring down the Pacific Coast Highway in the red Ford Mustang convertible you rented after the plane touched down in Seattle. Aegon is in the driver’s seat, black sunglasses and white T-shirt, his hair whipping in the breeze. He has one hand on the wheel and the other behind your headrest. Sunfyre is in the backseat, grinning like only dogs can. You turn up the song on the radio: Drive by Incubus.

You and Aegon had stayed in Juneau long enough for your skull to heal, and for your parents to find someone else to take over the vet clinic. They settled on a 32-year-old from Detroit: Justin McNair, a former Marine like your dad, and he either has no family or a bad one because he never wants to talk about them. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter which it is; perhaps sometimes they’re just about the same thing. Your parents have already basically adopted him. He eats dinner with them three times a week and calls your dad when he needs help with house maintenance or scaring a moose away from his truck. And just before you went south, Aegon showed him how to make the world’s best hot chocolate.

You send postcards back to Juneau from each town you stop in. Heather’s bon voyage gift to you had been an indecently revealing swimsuit. Joyce appeared with—what else?—a stack of books fit for leisurely beach reading. And Kimmie gave you, however bizarrely, a compass. So you don’t get lost, she had said with an innocuous little smile. You honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking.

During his one month in jail, Trent learned how to meditate and do yoga. He’s still kind of a dumbass, but he’s also a supposedly devout vegan Buddhist, and he had the decency to leave you alone aside from an apology letter that he slid into the moose-shaped mailbox: handwritten, six pages, lots of spelling and grammatical errors. Oh, and he finally got that job with the Forest Service, probably mostly due to his high-profile wrongful detainment. Now hikers get to swoon over his muscles and hair flips.

You’ll go back to Juneau, of course. Maybe just for visits, maybe for more than that someday. But it will never feel like a cage again.

Aegon calls Aemond every two or three days, a habit he started when he was in rehab. At first it was by necessity—he needed someone to pay the $30,000 bill—but now you think he secretly looks forward to it. He updates Aemond about how the road trip is going and reassures him that the plan hasn’t changed: south to San Diego, and then cutting east across the country to Miami. You don’t know what exactly life will look like there, and neither does Aegon. That’s not the important thing about going. Part of AA is making amends, and Aegon has a lot of work to do in that respect. He wants to go back to Miami, he says. He’s ready to go back.

San Diego is exactly like Aegon once told you it would be. You weave through the rust-colored peaks of the Laguna Mountains and there’s the Pacific Ocean, glittering and sapphire-blue, peppered with surfers and sea lions. It’s hot and it’s beautiful beyond words and everything grows there: ivy, cactuses, palm trees, calla lilies, roses. And for the first time that you can remember, the world feels breathtakingly, impossibly big. You get carryout from an unassuming restaurant called The Taco Stand, and then Aegon parks the convertible in La Jolla. You walk down the steps carved into the cliffside, paper bags in your hands full of tacos and churros, Aegon carrying Sunfyre so the dog won’t slip.

You sit together on the golden sand and watch the 8:00 p.m. sun sink into the waves, Aegon’s arm around your waist, your fingers tucking his lock of silvery hair behind his ear. And then he takes your hand, kneads it until it’s sinuous and relaxed, and reads the lines of your palm in the amber dusk like firelight.

“It says you’re happy,” he tells you. “And that you’re free.”

“I am,” you reply, smiling as the ocean stretches out like the arm of a galaxy: the ancient past, the infinite future.

#aegon ii #aegon targaryen x reader #aegon targaryen ii #aegon x reader #aegon targaryen #aegon ii targaryen #aegon x y/n #aegon x you #nttf #north to the future

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brielledoesastrology · 1 year

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asteroid Nobel (6032) in your astrology natal chart

By : Brielledoesastrology (tumblr)

This is the refixed/updated version of my old post about the asteroid nobel (6032) because of how much incorrect information of the old post. In my old post about asteroid nobel (6032) i mentioned that the asteroid represents "being noble or having a noble bloodline", and turns out i was completely wrong.

Asteroid "Nobel" code number : 6032

The asteroid was named on May 14, 1995 after the Swedish chemist and inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896), who invented dynamite , developed a method for safely handling nitroglycerin and donated the Nobel Prize named after him.

Nitroglycerin was first invented by Italian chemist Ascanio Sobrero (1812–1888) in 1846. In its natural liquid state, nitroglycerin is very volatile. Nobel understood this and in 1866 discovered that mixing nitroglycerin with silica would turn the liquid into a malleable paste called dynamite

Alfred Nobel was an inventor, entrepreneur, scientist and businessman who also wrote poetry and drama. His varied interests are reflected in the prize he established and which he lay the foundation for in 1895 when he wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the prize.

Alfred Nobel had a vision of a better world. He believed that people are capable of helping to improve society through knowledge, science and humanism. This is why he created a prize that would reward the discoveries that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind.

It is believed that the Nobel Prize was an attempt by Nobel to leave a better legacy in the world than having improved military weaponry through his ingenuity.

The Nobel Prize is considered the most prestigious award in the world in its field.

In astrology the asteroid Nobel (6032) could represent : where u could win many prestigious awards (if u get a lot of recognition obviously), where u could win many awards, where u could be the first person to discover something, where u could be the first person to create something, where u get a lot of recognition, where u teamed up with a partner or use other people discoveries so u can discover something new, where u could be considered "prestigious".

⚠️ Warning : i consider this asteroid as prominent and brings the most effect if it conjuncts ur personal planets (sun,moon,venus,mercury,mars) and if it conjuncts ur personal points (ac,dc,ic,mc), i use 0 - 2.5 orbs (for conjunctions). For sextile, trine, opposite and square aspects to asteroids i usually use 0 - 2 orbs. Yes tight conjunctions of planet / personal points to asteroids tends to give the most effect, but other aspects (sextile,trine,square,opposite, etc) still exist, even they produce effects. ⚠️

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radioactivemoss · 6 months

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lines from musicals that make me want to scream (affectionate)

“Maybe he'll come today/Maybe he came already/And he's sitting in the drawing room /And I simply forgot” —No One Else, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

“Guys are fightin', bleedin' fallin'/Thanks to good ole' Captain Jack/Captain Jack just wants to close his eyes and go”—Santa Fe, Newsies

“I gets weary/And sick of trying/I’m tired of living/But scared of dying”—Old Man River, Showboat

“You, the one I left behind/If you ever walk this way/Come and find me lying in the bed I made”—Flowers, Hadestown

“Damned if you don’t/Damned if you do/Whole damn nation’s watching you”—Word to the Wise, Hadestown

“Where is the girl called Esmeralda?/The flames grow tall/And sharp as fleurs-de-lis/All Paris burns for Esmeralda/And still it all comes down to her and me”—Esmeralda, the Hunchback of Notre Dame

“Now here is a riddle to guess if you can/Sing the bells of Notre Dame/What makes a monster and what makes a man?”—The Bells of Notre Dame, the Hunchback of Notre Dame

“I see nothing but the candle in the mirror/No visions of the future/So lost and alone”—Letters, Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812

“Can you show me now that I would not be killed in vain?/Show me just a little of your omnipresent brain”—Gethsemane, Jesus Christ Superstar

“Look at all my trials and tribulations/Sinking in a gentle pool of wine/Don't disturb me now; I can see the answers/Till 'this evening' is 'this morning', life is fine”—The Last Supper, Jesus Christ Superstar

“Now that we have the gentleman/What more evidence do we need?/Judas, thank you for the victim/Stay a while and you'll see him bleed!”—The Arrest, Jesus Christ Superstar

“Start by admitting/From cradle to tomb/Isn’t that long a stay”—Cabaret, Cabaret

“Every coward seems courageous in the safety of the crowd/Bravery can be contagious when the band is playing loud/ Nothing makes a man so bold/As a woman's smile and a hand to hold/But all alone, his blood runs thin/And doubt comes... doubt comes in”—His Kiss, The Riot, Hadestown

#Hadestown #cabaret #natasha pierre and the great comet of 1812 #Newsies #showboat #the hunchback of notre dame #jesus christ superstar #musical theater dream roles #musicals #theater things #theater kid

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1americanconservative · 7 months

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Things You Probably Never Knew About The Great Lakes.....

1. Lake Superior is actually not a lake at all, but an inland sea .

2. All of the four other Great Lakes, plus three more the size of Lake Erie, would fit inside of Lake Superior.

3. Isle Royale is a massive island surrounded by Lake Superior. Within this island are several smaller lakes. Yes, that’s a lake on a lake.

4. Despite its massive size, Lake Superior is an extremely young formation by Earth’s standards (only 10,000 years old).

5. There is enough water in Lake Superior to submerge all of North and South America in 1 foot of water.

6. Lake Superior contains 3 quadrillion gallons of water (3,000,000,000,000,000). All five of the Great Lakes combined contain 6 quadrillion gallons.

7. Contained within Lake Superior is a whopping 10% of the world’s fresh surface water.

8. It’s estimated there are about 100 million lake trout in Lake Superior. That’s nearly one-fifth of the human population of North America!

9. There are small outlets through which water leaves Lake Superior. It takes two centuries for all the water in the lake to replace itself.

10. Lake Erie is the fourth-largest Great Lake in surface area, and the smallest in depth. It’s the 11th largest lake on the planet.

11. There is alleged to be a 30- to 40-foot-long “monster” in Lake Erie named Bessie. The earliest recorded sighting goes back as early as 1793.

12. Water in Lake Erie replaces itself in only 2.6 years, which is notable considering the water in Lake Superior takes two centuries.

13. The original publication of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax contained the line, “I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie.”

Fourteen years later, the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss to make the case that conditions had improved. He removed the line.

14. Not only is lake Erie the smallest Great Lake when it comes to volume, but it’s surrounded by the most industry.

Seventeen metropolitan areas, each with populations of more than 50,000, border the Lake Erie basin.

15. During the War of 1812, the U.S. beat the British in a naval battle called

the Battle of Lake Erie, forcing them to abandon Detroit.

16. The shoreline of all the Great Lakes combined equals nearly 44% of the circumference of the planet.

17. If not for the the Straits of Mackinac, Lake Michigan and Lake Huron might be considered one lake.

Hydrologically speaking, they have the same mean water level and are considered one lake.

18. The Keystone State was one of the largest and most luxurious wooden steamships running during the Civil War.

In 1861, it disappeared. In 2013, it was found 30 miles northeast of Harrisville under 175 feet of water.

19. Goderich Mine is the largest salt mine in the world. Part of it runs underneath Lake Huron, more than 500 meters underground.

20. Below Lake Huron, there are 9,000-year-old animal-herding structures used by prehistoric people from when the water levels were significantly lower.

21. There are massive sinkholes in Lake Huron that have high amounts of sulfur and low amounts of oxygen, almost replicating the conditions of Earth’s ancient oceans 3 million years ago. Unique ecosystems are contained within them.

22. Lake Huron is the second largest among the Great Lakes, and the fifth largest in the world.

23. In size, Lake Michigan ranks third among the Great Lakes, and sixth among all freshwater lakes in the world.

24. Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake that is entirely within the borders of the United States.

25. The largest fresh water sand dunes in the world line the shores of Lake Michigan.

26. Because water enters and exits Lake Michigan through the same path, it takes 77 years longer for the water to replace itself than in Huron, despite their similarity in size and depth. (Lake Michigan: 99 years, Lake Huron: 22 years)

27. When the temperature of Lake Michigan is below freezing, this happens.

28. Within Lake Michigan there is a “triangle” with a similar reputation to the Bermuda Triangle, where a large amount of “strange disappearances” have occurred. There have also been alleged UFO sightings.

29. Singapore, Mich., is a ghost town on the shores of Lake Michigan that was buried under sand in 1871. Because of severe weather conditions and a lack of resources due to the need to rebuild after the great Chicago fire, the town was lost completely.

30. In the mid-19th century, Lake Michigan had a pirate problem. Their booty: timber. In fact, the demise of Singapore is due in large part to the rapidly deforested area surrounding the town.

31. Jim Dreyer swam across Lake Michigan in 1998 (65 miles), and then in 2003, he swam the length of Lake Michigan (422 miles).

32. Lake Michigan was the location of the first recorded “Big Great Lakes disaster,” in which a steamer carrying 600 people collided with a schooner delivering timber to Chicago. Four hundred and fifty people died.

33. Lake Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes in surface area, and second smallest in depth. It’s the 14th largest lake on the planet.

34. The province Ontario was named after the lake, and not vice versa.

35. In 1804, a Canadian warship, His Majesty’s Ship Speedy, sank in Lake Ontario. In 1990, wreck hunter Ed Burtt managed to find it.

Only, he isn’t allowed to recover any artifacts until a government-approved site to exhibit them is found. He’s still waiting.

36. Babe Ruth hit his first major league home run at Hanlan’s Point Stadium in Toronto. It landed in Lake Ontario and is believed to still be there.

37. A lake on Saturn’s moon Titan is named after Lake Ontario.

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that1nkyone · 1 year

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Hang on, I gotta talk about the Platypus for a sec

So it's a pretty well-known fact that once colonialists started invading Australia in the 1700s, they came across a lot of fauna that made them go "what the fuck is this." A lot of the default reaction for England back then was 'shoot it and take it back home,' or 'put aboard a ship and hope it's alive when we get there.'

But I wanna talk a little about the details of that, and how I'm a little cheesed off with the Naturalists of Old when they first saw a platypus.

For one, it was dead. And dismissed because there's no way that beak was real. Those cheeky colonists were definitely playing a prank and wasting their time.

And then a few more come in, this time preserved as well as they can be in spirits. And people start saying "okay, well... what is it? Is it a bird? The bill makes me think it's a bird." "These aren't feathers." "It swims? It's an amphibian, which is a Reptile, as we all know (they didn't think these guys Seperate until quite a bit later)." "This thing is also clearly amongst the Lower Beings of God's Creations (Creationism was still a big thing in scientific circles)."

Paper upon paper was written about this new creature, and suddenly nobody could agree on what to classify it as. Their ideas of the natural order started suddenly collapsing and being thrown into disarray.

Because of this little guy.

The Naturalist Science scene was going berserk halfway across the world because their fundamental understanding of nature was being turned on its head by this tiny mammal - who they were still trying to decide whether it was a mammal.

The English were having arguments with the French, but some were collaborating ideas based on what data they'd gained (some French and English naturalists met up in Australia during the war to share a drink and talk about Platypuses). Because this strange duck-billed creature surely had no place in the Chain of Being, their point of classification for species that they'd used for the past hundreds of years. And if it did, where the heck did it belong?

Did it lay eggs? How did it swim? What was the bill for? They didn't know the answer to any of these questions because all the specimens they got from Australia were Very Deceased, either being shot and put in spirits, or dried out. The poor platypus was being done in a lot for the sake of research.

And look, I know methods were Different back then, and it wasn't easy to transport live specimens or have the technology to preserve specimens over half the planet. With that said, I do want to point something out:

While this huge crisis is happening, in January 1812, a man named Patrick Hill gets the bright idea to like... ask the elder of the local Indigenous tribe about them (my source records him as Cookoogong, but not all sources about First Nations from early colonial texts are accurate.)

And Cookoogong's like "Oh, these guys? Yeah, so, they do lay eggs. They have long, deep burrows. We know how to get to them. There's a spur at the back of their feet. We don't really eat them for food. We call it the mullingong.*"(also malangong, depending on what tribe/dialect) Cool. Mystery solved.

Except:

It took over seventy years for this information to become accepted as scientific fact.

Not just because of the inherent biases of the Colonials being backwater people and prisoners in a funny little land far away, not just out of a need to get more data before confirmation, but because almost nobody in Europe took the word of the native population in Australia.

And in between that 72 year gap between 1812 and 1884, there were so many instances of the First Nations people giving vital and essential pieces of information on correctly identifying the features and habits of this land mammal as European Scientists had a massive meltdown and argument over whether an animal they'd Never Seen Alive gave milk or not.

Hell, Charles Darwin made the trip to Australia, and was inspired by animals like the Platypus to start questioning whether all life was truly static and didn't transition or adapt to changing circumstances.

The platypus made Charles Darwin start questioning his beliefs in Creationism, and going on to begin his steps towards the theory of evolution.

And then there's Harry Burrell, who had the bright idea of like, not killing specimens every time someone wanted to see it up close. He was one of the first recorded people to try and keep platypuses in captivity, and thoroughly learn their preferred lifestyle, diet and breeding habits from careful observation. He would learn how to make platypuses Comfortable, and how to transport them safely.

His protege, David Fleay (pictured below), would go on to ensure the first successfully bred platypus in captivity - 'Corrie' (born to parents Jack and Jill).

what I'm saying is, the story of trying to Classify the Platypus ends in "Nature is just fucking weird, we're going to try understanding it as best we can, and maybe we should ask and respect the opinions of the people who have lived alongside something we don't understand for thousands of years."

The platypus is literally referred to by Mervyn Griffiths, an authority on monotremes, "The animal of all time."

Anyway, in summary: - Colonialism fucking sucks and Sovereignty was never ceded.

- The Platypus is an Amazing Creature and sorta Toppled Creationism in the scientific community??

#th1nks #First Nations #Platypus #if anyone wants to fact check any of this please do because I wanna know more

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transgenderer · 7 months

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check (v.1)

ate 15c., in chess, "to attack the king; to put (the opponent's king) in check;" earlier (late 14c.) in a figurative sense, "to stop, arrest; block, barricade;" from check (n.1) or Old French eschequier, from the noun in French. A player in chess limits his opponent's ability to move when he places his opponent's king in check.

The other senses seem all to have developed from the chess sense, or from the noun: "To arrest, stop," then "to hold in restraint" (1620s); "to hold up or control" (an assertion, a person, etc.) by comparison with some authority or record (1690s); of baggage, etc., "to hand over in return for a check that serves as a means of identifying" (1846); "to note with a mark as having been examined, etc., mark off from a list" (1928).

Hence, to check off (1839); to check up (1883); to check in or out (in a hotel, of a library book, etc., 1909). To check out (something) "to look at, investigate" is from 1959

check (n.1)

c. 1300, in chess, "a call noting one's move has placed his opponent's king (or another major piece) in immediate peril," from Old French eschequier "a check at chess" (also "chess board, chess set"), from eschec "the game of chess; chessboard; check; checkmate," from Vulgar Latin *scaccus, from Arabic shah, from Persian shah "king," the principal piece in a chess game (see shah; also compare checkmate (n.)). Also c. 1300 in a generalized sense, "harmful incident or event, hostile environment."

As "an exposure of the king to a direct attack from an opposing piece" early 15c. When his king is in check, a player's choices are severely limited. From that notion come the many extended senses: From the notion of "a sudden stoppage, hindrance, restraint" (1510s) comes that of "act or means of checking or restraining," also "means of detecting or exposing or preventing error; a check against forgery or alteration."

Hence: "a counter-register as a token of ownership used to check against, and prevent, loss or theft" (as in hat check, etc.), 1812. Hence also the financial use for "written order for money drawn on a bank, money draft" (1798, often spelled cheque), which was probably influenced by exchequer. Hence also "mark put against names or items on a list indicating they have been verified or otherwise examined" (by 1856).

think i may have already posted this but its so strange that "check" as in "examine" comes from check in chess

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sea-owl · 3 months

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So I made a part two to this. Hope you all like it!

AO3: Link

Felicity leaned into her sister, purposely laying her head on her shoulder. Her eyes narrowed on the oblivious Marquess Odysseus Rose of Winchester, who sat across from them. The interloper first came two weeks ago and has been here every other day since! Felicity was sick of him. What kind of cad courts a woman who is spoken for? Does he not know or care that Penelope has . . .what was that word that countess used? An understanding? An agreement? Does not matter. What matters is that the interloper is trying to ruin it!

"Have you noticed the similarities between the myth of Eros and Psyche and the story of the Beauty and the Beast?" Penelope asked the interloper as she flipped through the book her true intended gave her.

The interloper's face lit up. "Yes!" Quickly, he flipped through his own book, fairytales collected and published in 1812 by two men who call themselves the Brothers Grimm. Penelope had gushed when the interloper brought it with him today. "So many elements are the same! A beautiful woman whisked off to a magical castle where she learned she would be living with or had been married to a monster. The very same monster they later fell in love with!"

Penelope giggles and Felicity frowns. That interloper better not be getting any ideas. Being kidnapped is not romantic!

"Though I would not want to be Psyche," Penelope winced. "To be with child during those labors. . ."

Felicity looked up. "I agree! Penelope, never be like Psyche, please!"

The interloper chuckeled. "Though it does show great bravery," he added.

Felicity whipped her head around. Is this interloper plan to leave Penelope with child and have do some sort of test?! Will he leave like that George cad did to cousin Marina?!

Felicity stands, ready to throw all of her ten year old weight against the interloper when-

"Felicity!"

Felicity pouted. Drat, she gained the attention of their mama.

"Felicity why don't we give Penelope and Lord Winchester some space," Portia suggested. Though it felt more like an order.

Felicity does not want to give them space. That would only invite ungentlemanly behavior from the interloper.

"Felicity."

The youngest Featherington found her reluctantly walking towards hwr mother.

"We must not interfere less the marquess change his mind and leave your sister with no options," Portia whispered to her youngest.

Felicity's jaw dropped. No options?! Penelope has another option! All the mamas talk about how they don't take Colin Bridgerton seriously as a potential suitor due to his. . .his. . .oh, what was the word several of the mamas used again? Understanding? Yes, understanding! No matchmaking mama saw Colin Bridgerton as a potential suitor due to his understanding with Penelope!

Portia waves Felicity off, her scheming face now in place. Felicity turns towards her father, hoping he would come to defend Felicity's favorite sister and future brother, but of course, Lord Featherington still hides behind his newspaper.

Felicity has to stop herself from stomping to the window, lest her mama acolds her again. Hopefully, her future brother will be here soon. He was almost over as much as the interloper.

Felicity crawled into the window seat and huffed when she saw no sight of her future brother. Was he that secure with his understanding with Penelope that he had no fear of the interloper? Well, Felicity will have to change that.

Thank all that was holy that marquess did not stay long after. But did he have to kiss her sister’s hand?! Felicity felt her hackels raise. No, this man WILL NOT break up her sister and Felicity's favorite future brother! As soon as she watched Marquess Rose drive off in his carriage, Felicity took off sprinting across the street with a quick word she was visiting Hyacinth.

The Bridgerton butler, Humboldt, open the door. "Miss Featherington, Miss Hyacinth isn't here at the moment but I can-"

"I'm here to see Colin!" Felicity blurted out, trying to catch her breath.

Humboldt stared at the ten year old girl for one moment then two.

"Please its important."

Just as she was afraid he was going to deny her the butler let her in and had her wait in one of the drawing rooms.

Felicity found herself pacing. Colin needed to hurry up that marquess could be thinking up ways to ruin her sister at this very moment! Colin needs to go court Penelope more than he ever has before! Should they get flowers? Yes, flowers are always nice!

"Felicity what's wrong-"

"We must make haste to the florist!" Felicity declared, trying to push Colin out the door he just came in.

"Felicity!"

"We must get something beautiful! But no yellow!" Felicity pauses. "AND NO ROSES!" Can't have Penelope associating the flowers with that stupid marquess.

Colin turned around, grabbing hold of Felicity's shoulders he kneeled down so they were eye level. "Felicity what is going on? Why do we need to go to a florist?"

Felicity huffed. Could he not ask on their way to the florist? "Marquess Odysseus Rose," Felicity spat the name, "has called upon Penelope yet again! He will not leave us alone and he is trying to take my sister away! Mama has hinted marriage between him and Penelope and we can not allow that to happen!"

Colin froze before Felicity finished her sentence. "Marquess Rose was at your house today?"

"Yes!" Felicity cried frustrated. "We can not allow him to out court you for Penelope's hand! Now we must make haste to the florist!"

Colin stiffly stood. "Yes, let's. Perhaps we'll also stop at the bookstore and maybe get Penelope a new handkerchief as well."

"Oh yes!" Felicity agreed, taking Colin's offered arm like she would do with one of her sisters. "Something with a pretty lace border! Also may I suggest the Brothers Grimm?"

There is no need for the interloper to bring the book over anymore if Penelope has her own copy, courtesy of her true suitor.

#bridgerton #polin #felicity featherington #odysseus rose #colin bridgerton #penelope featherington

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mysunfreckle · 1 year

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I’m very interested in the presence of the fairies in Neverafter…

Because the way the fairies are is one of the things that has been changed from the fairy tales D20 is working with. And I’m operating on the assumption that if it was worth changing it’s worth paying attention to

Rosamund's fairies:

Oddly enough we have not met any of Rosamun's fairies yet....probably. We've heard all four of them described in Brennan's opening narration, but no one got to interact with them. But Rosamund's story is the one that has been changed:

Grimm’s Briar Rose has twelve good fairies, not three, and the thirteenth is the wrathful one who was purposefully not invited because there were only twelve golden dishes. While she is called a fairy, she is described as clad in black, with a broomstick, so I’d forgive anyone who misidentified her as a witch.

Perrault’s The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods has seven fairies, with the eighth being the old, forgotten fairy who is accidentally not invited.

The change to three (plus one) fairies could just be because three is a more manageable number and also with very good fairy tale pedigree, or it could be because of Disney. But the "four great fairies of the kingdom (of Reverie)" might also be significant in some other way. One for beauty, one for grace, one for...?

Gerard's fairy:

Grimm’s Cinderella (Aschputtel) has no fairies, but Perrault’s Cinderella (Cendrillon) has the famous fairy godmother. Who, interestingly, is only helpful. She does not punish. But here she is also the fairy that transformed the Frog-Prince:

In the Grimm translation D20 shared The Frog-Prince the enchantment was laid by “a spiteful fairy”, but in many English translations it is a “wicked witch” and that is the word used in the 1857 edition of the Grimms’ fairy tales (in the 1812 edition there is no explanation for how the transformation happened).

The fairy tale also does not state that the Prince was transformed as a punishment. This sounds more like the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, where the beast is transformed by a fairy to punish his pride, whereas in the most well known version of that fairy tale (de Beaumont’s), the fairy transforms him simply because she is “wicked”. Of course Gerard’s story would not work without it being a punishment and it makes for a much more interesting narrative, but it does muddle the waters between Good Fairy and Wicked Fairy. It’s suddenly a matter of perspective.

Pinochio's fairies:

We haven’t met Pinocchio’s good Fairy yet (if she is good in Neverafter), but we have seen the evil fairy who turned him back into a puppet when he lied about his fathers name (something that probably saved his father’s life). Now I wonder: is this the same Evil Fairy that cursed Rosamund?

I’ve seen it suggested that this evil fairy and the Stepmother are the same person, but that seems odd, considering the Stepmother claims she cares for Pinocchio and his father. Sure she’s probably lying, but if she was that fairy Pinocchio wouldn’t be fooled and it seems he is, even if he’s also afraid of her. I still think his Stepmother is also Cinderella and Snow White’s Stepmother, so in that case she might be a Wicked Witch. She is also Pinocchio's patron, which might make her a fairy, but she calls the Fairy Godmother a "little fairy", which sounds like she's at least not the same type of fairy as she is.

If this Pinocchio’s good Fairy is like the one in his book, she is the Fairy with the Azure Hair (I struggle with her, because Pinocchio is not a folk- or fairy tale, but she is famous). She is described first adopting Pinocchio as her little brother, but later as she grows up (she was already) becomes his mother. She protects him, seems to be the reason his nose starts growing when he lies, and turns him human in the end when he has learned to be kind and obedient. So whether she's seen as good or bad in this universe is anyone's guess.

So, we've met two fairies in game and both of them seem to be bad, but perhaps weren't always intended to be so.

Because right now it sounds like Cinderella rebelled against the narrative her Fairy Godmother tried to force her into, but… maybe there’s something more afoot. The Fairy Godmother did insist “we are trying to help”, so maybe we’ll meet the other fairies after all...

#more of my ranting about fairy tale sources #neverafter #d20 neverafter #d20 meta #dimension 20 #dimension20 #sunfreckle's scribbles #long post #freckle folklore fretting

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adarkrainbow · 2 days

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Some scholarly notes about the Grimm fairytales (1)

Recently in France (well... for the last two dozen years), the publishing house José Corti has been specializing itself in scientific fairytales collections. While for the study of literary fairytales one would go towards Honoré Champion, when it comes to folktales and fairytales it is José Corti one must check. In their "Merveilleux" collection they have been publishing for the very first time in France or republishing out-of-prints collections of various European fairytales (from Denmark, Spain, Romania, and more) - with a few classics of the "literary" fairytales that marked deeply the evolution of the genre (such as Straparola's Facetious Nights or Ludwig Bechstein's fairytales).

All of that to say, José Corti has in 2009 published the most recent scientific (but for an all-public) edition of the brothers Grimm fairytales. The full collection of their fairytales, translated accurately in French, with annotations about their type/classification, their evolution throughout editions and their predecessors. I can't share all of these annotations with you, of course, but I can share a handful of them, about the most famous stories of the Grimm. They all come from the same person who translated the story in this edition: Natacha Rimasson-Fertin. (Of course my notes might be incomplete but hey, you'll have to buy the books to see the whole thing :p Or check them out at your local library)

The devil with three golden hairs (Der Teufel mit den dre goldenen Haaren)

This story is at the crossroa between the Aa-Th 461 "Three hair from the devil's beard" ; the AT 460B "The quest for fortune" and the AT 93à "Urie's letter/The prophecy".

In the 1812 edition, there were two different versions of this tale. Story number 29 "The story of the devil with three golden hair", told by Amalia Hassenpflug, and number 75, "The phenix", told by her sister Mary. In the second version the devil was replaced by a phoenix, and the hero had to get three feathers. In the 1819 edition the two stories disappeared and were replaced by the version we know today, told by Dorothea Viehmann. Another version that the Grimms had collected in 1812 had a princess falling in love with the woodsman that cuts a tree below her window.

The final episode, where the hero asks three questions to the devil through the old woman, echoes the Pentamerone's "The Seven Doves". Other versions of this story include Asbjörnsen-Moe's "The wealthy Peter Krämer", and Afanassiev's "Marco the Wealthy and Vassili the Unfortunate". The story of the brothers Grimm gathers several references to the Bible: the child throw in the water echoes Moses' abandonment, the letter meant to kill the hero is similar to the one David uses to kill Urie, finally the hair as holders of a being's wisdom and strength is linked to the legend of Samson and Dalila. But many other elements of the story evoke older faiths. The idea of a body of water as the frontier with the Otherworld can be found in the Classical Antiquity with the Greek Charon, and is found in other stories of the volume, such as "Frau Holle" and "The Iron Stove" - it as believed that water formed an obstacle spirits could not cross. The hero's mission recalls a tale of Saxo Grammaticus where Thorkill enters Utgard (the realm of supernatural beings) to steal a hair from the beard of Utgard-loki. The brothers Grimm had noted that the belief in the exceptional fate of a child born with a "hood" was also found in Iceland, where the "caul", called Glückshaut (skin of luck) was the home of a genie that would follow the child all of his life. And indeed, modern research has proven that the name given to this caul, the "fyljia" was also the name of a spiritual double, a tutlar spirit tied to a person or a family. This is why the tradition was to preserve and hide this "pileus naturalis" - in Belgium, it was called a "hem" and its color allowed for divination rituals about the child's future.

The girl without hands (Das Mädchen ohne Hände)

This fairytale is actually a cross between the AT type 706 "The maiden without hands" and the AT 930 "Urie's letter/The prophecy". The story was created by the brothers mixing two versions from Hesse, one told by Mary Hassenpflug, the other by Dorothea Viehmann. The second version lacks this story's introduction and begins with a father trying to marry his own daughter - when she refuses, he cuts off her hands and breasts, and chases her out of his house. It then follows the story. Meanwhile, the first version differs when the heroine is with her child in the forest: an old man tells her to hug three time a tree with her arms, which makes her hands grow again. He also tells her to only open the door of her house to one who will ask to enter "for the love of God" three times in a row - the king will be forced to do this before entering.

Outside of these two main versions, the brothers Grimm collected three additional ones. In the first, the angel that guides the girl is replaced by a small light that descends from the sky ; and the hands of the girl grow back when she plunges her arms in a stream after seeing a blind mouse enter its water to regain its sight. In the second version, a man is upset at his little girl praying for him day and night, but since she refuses to stop despite his demands, he cuts off her tongue. But she prays in thought and makes the sign of the cross, so he cuts off her right hand, then her arm all the way to the elbow, before banishing her. She is saved by a hunter that hides her in his master's domain and feeds her in secret with his master's dogs. When the master discovers this, he decides to raise the girl as his own child. One day she gives money to a poor man, who tells her she will regain her arm and tongue if she goes to drink of a certain stream, and he gives her a magical staff to protect her. When she returns at the lord's house, he marries her. The third version is about a queen banished by her husband with her two children, and is identical to the legend of saint Helen.

Other international versions of the tale include Zingerle's "The pretty daughter of the innkeeper", Basile's "Penta the one-armed girl" and Afanassiev's "The young girl without hands". There are some versions where it is a man that is mutlated, such as Afanassiev's "The brave without legs and the blind brave". The roots of this story date back to the end of the 12th century, and are located in southern England - this tale was the subject of numerous literary adaptations, the most famous being the verse romance of the 13th century "The Beautiful Helen of Constantinople".

The motif of the child sold to the devil is recurring among the Grimm fairytales - even though the character of the devil can be replaced by another supernatural being, such as in "Rapunzel" or "The Nixie of the Mill-Pond". The idea of offering the first thing one sees upon returning home is as old as the Ancient Testament (Judges). This story bears the signs of a heavy Christianiation, and was clearly inspired by the legend of Saint Genevieve of Brabant, falsefely accused of being unfaithful and condemned to death with her newborn child. The executioners take pity on her and she lives alone in the woods for seven years. As with other tales from the Grimm collection, this story mixes the Christian fantasy (the hands that regrow are treated as a Christian miracle) with pagan fantasy (there are several elements of folk-magic, such as the circle the girl draws around her to be protected from the devil, or the accusations of the queen giving birth to a changeling - a changeling also appears in the third story of "The Elves", KHM 39).

The Robber Bridegroom (Der Räuberbräutigam)

This story belongs to the fairytale type Aa-Th 955, named after it: "The robber bridegroom".

The tale was told to Jacob Grimm by Mary Hassenpflug, and was present as early as the 1810 manuscript. However this first version, that the brothers deemed "incomplete" was replaced from the 1812 edition onward by a new version which mixed two versions from Lower-Hesse. The brothers noted the existence of another version where the robber indicated the road to his house to a princess, by tying ribbons around the trees.

Ludwig Bechstein took inspiration from the brothers Grimm's tale to create his own "The Robber Bridegroom". This fairytale, like "Fichter's Bird", belongs to the "Bluebeard cycle" (several tales that the brothers removed from their first edition also belonged to this cycle).

Fitcher's Bird (Fitchers Vogel)

This tale is a variation of the Aa-Th 311 "The heroine rescues herself and her sisters", usually classified under the "Bluebeard" category.

The final text of the Grimms is actually a mix of two different versions of the same story that was told to the brothers by both Friedrike Mannel and Dortchen Wild. The Grimms noted the existence of a version from Hanovre which goes as follow: a poor woodcutter asks his daughter to bring him his meal in the forest, and to show them the way he places peas on the floor. However dwarves notice this, and change the emplacement of the pea so that their path leads to their grotto. The older girl follows the peas, and become the dwarves' slave. Then we have the Bluebeard "forbidden room" motif, and the story goes as the "Fitcher's Bird" goes, as the dwarves lure the two other sisters to their cave. The last sister sticks the feathers on her body by rolling herself in blood (presumably the blood of the dwarves' victims), and there is no resurrection of the sisters. Everybody that meets her on the way call her "geputzter Vogel". The dwarves hunt the girl down and almost catch her just as she reaches her father's house - she is so fast in closing the door that it cuts a piece of her heel. The Grimms also knew of a Dutch version of the story, translated in German, and that was identical to one of their first-editions tales, "The Murder-Castle".

The translation of the name of the "bird" always caused many problems, due to the difficulty of understanding the expression. The brothers Grimm themselves explained the name of the bird by the Icelandic "Fitfuglar", meaning "birds that swim" - as such, the girl would be called "Fitchers-Vogel" because she looks like a swan". However, other people do not agree with this etymology, some linking Fitcher with "Fitze", the thread. Rimasson-Fertin highlights that the expression "Fitchers Fitze", outside of a simple sonority game, might be two variations of the male name Fritz (the diminutive of Friedrich) - other usual diminutives were Fitze, Fitz and Fiete. The brothers Grimm noted that the motif of the blood that cannot be erased was much older than Perrault's Bluebeard - it could be found as early as the "Gesta Romanorum", where a mother who had murdered her child couldn't erase three blood-drops from her hand, forcing her to wear a glove. This story must be compared to the KHM 40, "The Robber Bridegroom".

The Juniper Tree (Von dem Machandelboom)

It is the AaTh 720 "My mother killed me, my father ate me".

Just like the tale of "The Fisherman and his wife", this story was written by the painter P. O. Runge, and the brothers Grimm used it as a model for how they should present their own fairy tales. In fact, we can note sentences almost identical between the two tales.

The brothers noted a variation of the story where the stepmother places her daughter near the pot where her brother cooks, and she forbids her from looking inside. But since the pot boils too much, the girl lifts the lid - then her brother's hand reaches out to her from the cauldron. There is yet another version noted by the Grimm where there are three children, not two, and the stepmother sends them pick up strawberries in the wood, promising an apple to whoever comes back first.

The cruelty of this fairytale earned the brothers a serious criticism from Achim von Arnim - who only tolerated such violence because it echoed the one present in Goethe's Faust. The description "red as blood, white as snow" of course echoes the tale of "Snow-White". The brothers Grimm mentionned in their notes that the juniper tree was a plant believed to have the power to bring back youth - and Rölleke noted that the juniper-tree's red berries were used in folk-magic. It seems to be a very ancient tale due to several very old motifs such as the soul returning in the shape of a bird, a resurrection out of bones, and cannibalism. This tale must be compared to "Brother Lustig", "The Singing Bone" and, of course, "The Fisherman and his wife".

Briar Rose (Dornröschen)

Of course, it is the AaTh 410 "Sleeping Beauty".

This fairytale was present as early as the 1810 manuscript, written by Jacob Grimm from a tale told by Marie Hassenpflug. Research has proven that this story is derived from Charles Perrault's own Sleeping Beauty. We also find back in the German story a motif coming from another famous French literary fairytale, madame d'Aulnoy's "The Hind in the Woods/The Doe in the Woods" (also known as the White Doe). In this story a Crayfish/Lobster fairy announces to the queen she will have a child, and later the same fairy curses the princess as she is born - and what a coincidence! In the first edition of "Briar Rose", the animal that announces the princess' birth is not a frog... but a crayfish. Proving that there is a direct link. As for the name of the princess n German, "Dornröschen", "small briar rose", it actually first appeared in the German translation of a 1730 fairytale by Anthony Hamilton (an Irish man who however spoke and wrote French), "Fleur d'épine" (Thorn flower/Briar flower) - it had been translated in 1790. Bolte and Polivka have also noted a comedy by Gryphius from 1660 whch was named "Die geliebte Dornrose", "The beloved briar rose".

In their notes about the fairytale, the Grimm brothers explicitely compare Briar Rose to the legend of Brunhild asleep behind a wall of fire, cursed into a magical slumber by Odin's "sleep-thorn" and woken up by Sigurd, the only one able to cross the wall of flames. The brothers Grimm were also aware of Basile's version of the story, "Thalia, Sun and Moon", which they compared to their own Briar Rose in their notes. The brothers were very fascinated by the consistant naming of the princess' children from Perrault (Dawn, Day) to Basile (Sun, Moon) and compared it to the occurences of "Day, Sun and Moon" as names within the Eddas. However we know that Perrault was heavily inspired by Basile's story when writing his own Sleeping Beauty, and only modified some parts so as to erase the more shocking and "unpleasant" parts (such as the married prince having sex with the sleeping girl). Of course, this story is also to be compared with the 14th century medieval tale of the Roman de Perceforest.

The wise women that appear in this story are the Germanic equivalent of the fairies. In fact, we know that the brothers Grimm carefully avoided (or erased) any mention of "Fee" (the German word for the English "fairy" and French "fée") from their tales, so as to better differentiate them from the French "fairy tales", "contes de fées". By turning the fairies into wise women making predictions at the child's birth, the Grimms notably opened an entire set of symbolism and interpretations linking them to the mythological figures of the Norns, Parcae and Moirai.

Snow White (Schneewittchen)

Of course, it is the AaTh 709 "Snow-White".

The full editing history of this tale was only "recently" recreated (the book was published in 2009, it was recent back then) in its entirety. We know that it begins in 1808 with a version collected by Ferdinand Grimm, brother of Jacob and Wilhelm, called "Schneeweibchen". It seems Ferdinand might have invented the story on his own. Wilhelm and Jacob then slowly modified it, by adding details from other collected versions, before publishing it in their first edition in 1810 (they did note at the time that it was a Lower-Germany story, and that in Upper-Germany the tale did exist but with the deformed name of "Schliwitchen". When the Grimms did their second edition, the main change they performed onto this story was the modification of the wicked mother into a wicked stepmother - something they also did for "Hansel and Gretel". In fact, from edition to edition the Grimms kept adding adjectives and expressons highlighting the opposition between the girl and the vain queen.

Th Grimms had collected several variations of the tale. One was much closer to the tale of "The Juniper Tree" and in it the queen, as she was with the king on a hunting sled, cut her finger while peeling an apple. In another variation the king and queen were walking by three mounts of snow, than went by three pools of blood, and finally saw three ravens in the sky, and each time the king wishes for a girl with the corresponding colors - soon afterward the couple encountered a little girl fitting this description. The king, immediately attached to her, takes her with him in their royal carriage, but the queen immediately hates her and tries to get rid of her - so she asks the girl to go seek a glove she threw out of the window, and while she is out of the carriage she asks the driver to leave as fast as he can. Then the little girl takes refuge at the seven dwarves' house.

The fairytale existed in German literature before the brothers Grimm published it. Indeed J. A. Musaüs had published in 1782 a fairytale called "Richilde" - and the Grimm were influenced by this tale, since in the margins of their first edition, they noted about Snow-White "It is Musaüs' Richilde". There was also a Snow-White story that had been published in 1809 in a fairytale book by A. L. Grimm (no relationship to the brothers Grimm). The Brothers Grimm did note the striking similarity between this story and the Norse pseudo-historical legend of Snäsridr, the beautiful wife of "Harald with fair hair", a wife that, when she died, stayed in her prime state so that it seemed she was still alive.

This fairy-tale has a very wide area of spreading, as it can be found from Ireland to Turkey passing by central Africa. It is especially present in the literary Italian compilations of fairytales. Basile has three variations of the story in his Pentamerone: "The raven", "Nennillo and Nennella" as well as "The she-cook".

The various virtues that Snow-White shows in this tale made her one of the big role models within the education of bourgeoisie girls in the 19th century - alongside Cinderella, of course. In fact, according to H-J Uther's analysis of the story, it is because of all her virtues that Snow-White's beauty does not fade away and stays undamaged even in death, unlike her wicked stepmother whose vices causes the fading of her charms. Finally, this fairytale is actually the proof that the brothers Grimm did not simply listed their fairytales one after the other in a random order, but deliberately created "bridges" and internal references to create a cohesive world within their book. Indeed, the mention of the snowflakes looking like feathers references "Frau Holle", while the glass coffin can be found back in, of course, "The Glass Coffin", and the blood-drops on the snow evokes "The Juniper Tree".

Rumpelstilzchen

Yes this story is the famous "Rumpelstilskin" (or Rumpelstiltskin? I never know how to write it in English). But why keep the German spelling? Because Rimasson-Fertin has some stuff to say about it: this name is the diminutive form of "Rumpelstilz", a term that Jacob Grimm defined in his "German Dictionary" as being synonymous with "poltergeist" (he noted a similarity between Poltergeist and Rumpelgeist, both designated a very loud spirit). While today "poltergeist" is mostly associated with ghosts, in a much broader way it designate a dwarf, a dead or a devil - or just any kind of phenomenon caused by witchcraft.

This story corresponds to the AaTh 500 "The name of the supernatural being". This fairytale has an interesting evolution history... Jacob Grimm had a version of it as early as 1808, named "Rumpenstünzchen", which was then slightly modified for the 1810 manuscript. This tale was actually the mix of two different versions - and one of these versions had a different ending. The queen didn't sent messengers searching for the dwarf's name, rather the king spotted the little man while returning from hunting on the third day. The Grimm also noted a variation where the initial situation was reversed: a young girl who had to spin hemp but could only manage to spin gold much to everybody's despair, and a small man appeared to promise her a wedding to a king's son in exchange for her firstborn child. It ended in such a way: the queen herself spotted the small man singing his name, jumping around a fire while riding a ladle like a horse. When she guessed his name, he flew out of the window and into the sky, riding the ladle like a witch's broom. We know that the episode of the spinning of the straw was only added by the Grimm in 1812 (it is not in the 1810 version), and that the final scene of the dwarf self-mutilating comes from a story of Lisette Wild and was added in 1819.

The first literary record of this story is a French fairytale published in 1705 and written by Mlle Marie-Jeanne L'Héritier de Villandon. It was "L'Histoire de Ricdin-Ricdon" (The Tale of Ricdin-Ricdon), published in her "La Tour ténébreuse et les jours lumineux" (The Shadowy tower and the luminous days). It had been translated in German by Johann Gottwert Müller in 1790, under the title "Straubfedern", "Ostrich feathers". As for the name "Rumpelstilzchen", it actually originates from Johann Fischart's Grman adaptation of the French "Gargantua", "Geschichtklitterung" (1584) - in it, Fischart lists various children game by name, and mentions a "Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart".

This fairytale type is very present in Western, Central and Northern Europe (British Isles and Ireland included), with also a few spottings in the Baltic countries, China and Japan. The name of the supernatural being always changes from one region or country to the next (in Swiss it is Hans-Öfeli, in Dutch Trillevip, in Swedish Titteliture, in Finnish Tuttirituli, in the Suffolk it is Tom Tit Tot, in Welsh Gnarwynathrot, in Irish it is Eve-Trot or Trit-a-Trot...). It is part of the enormous success of this tale-type: every country has to invent its own brand of nonsensical, un-guessable name. As for the rhymed song through which the dwarf betrays its name, it is found in England as "Nimmy nimmy not / My name is Tom Tit Tot", and in an Afro-American version of North Carolina "I'm so glad that she do not know / That my name is Tabutoe Tambutoe".

The brothers Grimm noted that in Germanic mythology it was typical for underground beings (aka dwarfs) to have names that are not usual among humankind, which is why, again according to them, the dwarf of this story would feel in perfect safety proposing the queen such a game. The rule according to which obtaining the name of a supernatural being means gaining a form of power over them is very common, and is even reused in another one of the Grimm stories: KHM 136, "Iron John". H. Rölleke did an analysis of the names the queen proposes at first: we have the three names of the Magi, aka the Three Wise Men, or King-Magi, which gives a Christian setting to the story, and could also serve as a metonymy for all the saint names found in the Christian calendar. As for "Heinz" and "Kunz", Rölleke sees in them the diminutives of the names of the medieval emperors Heinrich and Konrad, which used to be some of the most popular male names among German-speaking countries.

All-Kinds-of-Fur (Allerleirauh)

It corresponds to the AaTh 510B "The dresses of gold, silver and stars", also known as "Donkey Skin", after the famous Charles Perrault fairytales.

The story we read today was the one told to the Grimm by Dortchen Wild, but there was a variation of it told to the brothers by Jeannette Hassenpflug, "Princess Mouse-Skin", which was present in the 1812's edition of the volume (n°71) but was then moves to the annotations as a mere mention. The version of the story from the first draft (the 1810 manuscript) was called "Allerlei Rauch", "All Kinds of Smoke", and was heavily inspired by one of the tales present within the novel "Schilly" by Carl Nehrlich.

The line "God forbade a father from marrying his daughter. Nothing good can come from this sin which will cause the kingdom's decadence" was added in the 1819 edition, and references a tale of Albert Ludwig Grimm called "Brunnenhold und Brunnenstark". The brothers Grimm insisted even more on the condamnation of the sin of incest when rewriting the story for their "small collection" for kids, and also insisted heavily upon a political extension of such a decision, which would damage the state itself. It is actually an allussion to the failure of the Frankfort Parliament, which had been gathered in 1848 at the Paulskirche in an attempt to create a constitution for all of Germany - to which Jacob Grimm had taken part.

A variation of the story collected in Paderborn has the last coat made of all the furs of the kingdom, plus moss and various forest-related material. In this version, the heroine puts the cloak on top of her three beautiful dresses before fleeing, and she hides in an empty tree where she is discovered, not during a hunting party, but by woodsman that cut off the tree she was sleeping into, to bring wood to the king. All-Kinds-of-Fur works in the castle's kitchen but one day as she is preparing the soup, the king has her sit on his chair so she can delouse him (a motif also present in "The Devil with Three Golden Hair). As she does, the king glimpses the beautiful shining dress under the cloak's sleeve, and this is how he discovers the girl's true appearance. Another variation of the story yet, also collected in Paderborn, has the heroine pretending to be mute. One day the king hits her with a whip, it rips apart the coat, revealing the golden dress underneath.

Not all the German versions of the story include the incest motif. In Musaüs' take on the story, "Die Nymphe des Brunnens", "The Nymph of the Well", the heroine leaves her father's castle because it has been destroyed. Her godmother, an undine, gifts her a small magical box and when she leaves the ball she says "Night behind me and day before me / Might nobody see me!". As for the version of Hassenpflug, "Princess Mouse-Skin", it begins as the KHM 179, "The Goose-Girl at the Well": a king wants to know which of his three daughters love him the most, the first says she loves him more than the whole kingdom, the second more than pearls and precious stones, the third more than salt. The furious father has the last princess be sent into the woods to be killed, but the servant tasked with the execution spares her out of pity, and gives her, by her request, a coat made of mice skin. The rest of the story goes like within "All-Kinds-of-Fur", except for the final wedding, to which the father-king is invited. All the dishes served to him are without salt, and he ends up saying he prefers to die rather than continue eating without salt. The princess-daughter reveals herself and points out how he tried to had her killed for loving him more than salt. Her father begs her for forgiveness, and the tale ends with her accepting.

The motif of the incest can, however, be found back in a variation of the KHM 31 (The Girl Without Hands) that the Grimms collected, and where the father mutilates the daughter for refusing to marry him. The motif of the king trying to marry his own daughter has been attested in many, many European stories ever since the 12th century. As for the boots that are thrown in the heroine's face in the Grimm story, while in the final edition it has no follow-up, in the 1812 edition it was a recurring element forming a motif within the tale. Another German version of the story that preserved this structure that the Grimms erased is the story collected by Vernaleken, "Throw-Broom, Throw-Brush and Throw-Comb". In it the king throws out of anger at the face of the heroine (Adelaide) a broom, a brush and a comb. Every time she goes to the ball, she changes her pseudonym to fit which item hit her (one night she is "Throw-Broom", another she is "Throw-Brush", etc...). There are many, many variations of the story containing such a "name play".

Other famous examples of this variation, outside of Charles Perrault's Donkeyskin, include Straparola's "The maiden in the chest", Basile's "The She-Bear", Afanassiev's "Pig-Skin".

Jorinde and Joringel (Jorinde und Joringel)

It corresponds to the AaTH 405, named and created after this story, "Jorinde and Joringel".

The interesting thing with this story is that the brothers Grimm did not collect it from a direct source. Rather they lifted it, to the exact word, from the autobiography of Johann Heinrich Jung, "Jugend/Youth", published in 1779. The brothers deemed that the way Jung-Stilling had written the tale was the "perfect" way to tell the story, according to their definition of a fairytale. Though they did note the existence of a version of the story told in Schwalm - but which differs very little from the story of Jung-Stilling.

The brothers Grimm themselves noted a similarity between this story, and the KHM 123, "The Old Woman in the Wood". Rimasson-Fertin notes that the witch in this story is to be compared to the ones appearing in "Hansel and Gretel" and in "Little Brother and Little Sister". As for the name of the demon the witch invokes, "Zachiel", H. Rölleke identified it as a form of "Zachariel", a demon name coming from the very popular 17th century demonology grimoire "Clavicula Salomonis", "The Clavicles of Salomon".

#brothers grimm #grimm fairytales #brothers grimm fairytales #german fairytales #sleeping beauty #briar rose #snow-white #snow white #jorinde and joringel #all kinds of fur #the juniper tree #the devil with three golden hair #the three golden hair of the devil #the robber bridegroom #the maiden without hands #the girl without hands

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clove-pinks · 22 days

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Is there anything about your new location (the terrain, the local culture, the physical sites, etc) that has given you a new perspective on regional events of the War of 1812?

This a wonderful ask, thank you! I have been mulling over how to answer it all day! This ended up getting so long I put it behind a cut (I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT THIS).

The Maumee River, as seen from Fort Meigs Historic Site.

One thing new in my life is a heightened awareness of important rivers facilitating the movement of trade, supplies, and settlement. Particularly in the Old Northwest/current Midwest of the USA: regions that I grew up perceiving as a land-locked "flyover country."

Like, to give one example, I had a vague idea that there was a city called Fort Wayne, Indiana, but I thought it was just in the middle of a cornfield for no reason(?). But actually it's at the confluence of the St. Joseph, St. Marys, and Maumee Rivers, leading to the Great Lakes! The strategically important location is why General Anthony Wayne—that guy again—built the original fortification in 1794. I am downriver of all of this, connected to many inland waterways.

I also have a keen sense of living in the Great Black Swamp, despite how dramatically the land has been transformed by deforestation and drainage. There are the terrifying drainage ditches everywhere (the locals seem less perturbed by them), and many other signs of the natural state of the terrain—the swamp is just barely at bay. My coworkers have said "Black Swamp" unprompted in our conversations; I've seen it mentioned in local Facebook groups talking about the need for back-up sump pumps. The idea that people of northwest Ohio have no sense of history and are unaware of the Great Black Swamp isn't true at all.

I look at the pools of water that form in every hollow and think of the words of Alfred Lorrain, marching to Fort Meigs:

We had frequently to pass through what was called, in the provincialism of the frontiers, "swales"—standing ponds—through which the troops and packhorses which had preceded us had made a trail of shattered ice. Those swales were often a quarter of a mile long. They were, moreover, very unequal in their soundings. In common they were not more than half-leg deep; but sometimes, at a moment when we were not expecting it, we suddenly sank down to our cartridge-boxes.

Swale is a new word in my vocabulary, and now I see them everywhere!

Culturally, I think there is a great appreciation of history here: a very positive difference from the Chicagoland area. Even if the average local is probably not deeply into it, they have a consciousness of major historical events that have shaped their region and take pride in it. It's a lot more like New England that way.

Because of my focus on the War of 1812, I notice the absence of Indigenous people and voices—absent from historical accounts and from the demographics of Perrysburg and its environs today. I can't single out Ohio as being a uniquely violent settler-colonial state when this is ALL of the United States; but it hits different when I have this much greater familiarity with who was forcibly removed from this land, and how. The same US military leaders who fought in the War of 1812 were behind the (very much related) campaign for the removal of Native Americans from newly acquired territories, including the infamous Trail of Tears.

Once again, it's probably hypocritical for me to notice this so much, when I literally grew up on Wampanoag land where King Philip's War was fought, but here I am. Suddenly aware of General Wayne's name on everything, etc.

General Wayne's spurs in the Fort Meigs Museum. Not pictured: the can of Maumee Bay Brewing Co. Fallen Timbers Ale that I am currently drinking.

I haven't had the chance to explore physical sites with historical significance beyond Fort Meigs and Fallen Timbers. I know I will get to the ruins of Fort Miamis soon, and I really want to explore a lot of wetlands in local parks and nature preserves (that will double as birdwatching excursions). I am always thinking about what this place looked like 200 years ago, and what I can see today that might still look familiar to a person from that time.

I had a great trip to the National Museum of the Great Lakes today, which is closer than I thought! Local maritime museums are also on my agenda, even if they're not specifically War of 1812-related.

#asks #shaun talks #ohio posting #i could add three or four more paragraphs to any given paragraph here #you activated my trap card

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myhauntedsalem · 30 days

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Castle House

Brumley, Missouri

In 1812, with various buildings on the property, the current home wasn’t built until around 1850 by Dr. Walter Dixon. This was when it was called the Castle House due to its unusual style.

One Saturday, Mrs. Dixon was preparing for her a large party but passed away before her guests arrived. Her husband found her body at the head of the stairs. In 1862, Union troops camped near the house. After Confederate troops attacked, a truce was called, and injured soldiers from both sides were brought to the Castle House for treatment. Later it was sold to Dr. Myron D. Jones in 1912. He also had his office in the house. In 1918, when the flu pandemic hit Brumley, he put tents in the yard to house the hundreds of sick patients.

Multiple reports of a woman in an old fashioned party dress lingering at the top of the stair have been reported. There have been reports of disembodied screams on the second floor as well. There was a field hospital set up on the south side of the house. It is said that there are at least 20 known graves on the property, which are thought to be casualties from this skirmish. The rest could be the victims of the flu epidemic. Most are unmarked, found by cadaver dogs.

Beginning in 2013, Castle House was restored with the intent to run it as a bed and breakfast until the paranormal activity began. The Castle House is for sale, Can be yours for $119,900 dubbed the most haunted house in the midwest.

#Castle House #haunted house #ghost and hauntings #paranormal #ghost and spirits #haunted locations #haunted salem #myhauntedsalem #paranormal phenomena #supernatural #ghosts #spirits #hauntings

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dross-the-fish · 5 months

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Meeting other people who were considered "gifted" is wild.

I have no idea how I got put in a class with people like them back in the day, they seem to have had a wholly different childhood experience from e. They started talking about literature and all of them were claiming that their favorite classic lit books were like "War and peace" or "Les Miserables" at the age of 11 and I can't imagine 11 year old me having been interested in either of those. I'm not even sure I'm up to enjoying "War and Peace" now and I'm almost 34.... Although I do like Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.

Idk maybe I'm not the most intellectual person, the classic literature books I read for fun were things like Treasure Island or Peter Pan. I found them interesting, easy to read and the protagonists were close to my age. Idk at 11 I cared more about pirates and magical places than I did about French revolutions and the impact of the Napoleonic wars on Russian culture.

What I'm saying is that at 11 I would not have been able to grasp half of the concepts that make books Like Les Miserables enjoyable.

Assuming these people aren't lying to make themselves look smarter it just kind of proves that I was way out of my depth back in the day and didn't actually belong in a class for gifted children. When they talked about how hard they worked at their homework I didn't have much to say because thanks to my dyslexia I almost never actually read anything unless I was super interested, if we had a book report due I would skim the book just enough to get an idea of what it was about and then go find people who had read it and ask them what they thought if of the story. Then I'd just cobble all the information I had together and bullshit up an essay, especially after I caught on that if I seemed to have a wide vocabulary teachers were likely to overlook the fact that my thoughts weren't that well organized.

I wasn't actually good at anything, I just faked it.

It worked every time, I almost always aced my homework, (call it beneficiary of low-standards in the US education system) but the fact of the matter is that I only got the same grades as the people who worked for it because I was cheating.

Today, talking to people who actually studied and worked their asses off to get top grades was humbling and I just sat in quiet embarrassment the whole time feeling like fraud who didn't belong there.

Kind of a shame because as an adult I actually learned to enjoy doing research and I love having discussions about literature and I feel like I missed out on building crucial reading/writing skills when I was younger.

But tbh I don't know how else I would have gotten by, if I visibly struggled to read anything I got treated like I was slow which was humiliating.

In summary, I didn't realize how much school sucked and how much I actually resented it and my teachers until I talked to someone today who didn't.

#personal #ok to rb #still might delete later

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