Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
this is going to be difficult -> i am capable of doing difficult things -> i have done everything prior to this moment -> this difficulty will soon be proof of capability
Many young wizards have taken to transmuting swans into humans and marrying them. One day, you are lucky enough to find a swan in the wild, and without hesitating, you turn it into a beautiful lady. Unfortunately, that ‘swan’, was a goose. You have just given a goose a human form.
After I explained the mistake, she laughed uproariously.
“You’re damn lucky I’m not a swan!” she said, wiping tears from her eyes. “They get by on their reputation for being pretty and graceful, but buddy, a swan ain’t nothing but a bigger, meaner goose. What do you all want swan wives for anyway?”
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. Honestly, I hadn’t actually stopped to think about that much. It had become a mark of status, having a demure, graceful woman following on your arm, always dressed in white and gazing soulfully about.
“They all seem very nice,” I said finally.
She pursed her lips thoughtfully as she finished pulling on the robes I’d brought with me. “Then there’s something else going on,” she said. “I’ve met my share of swans and not a one of them would put up with that shit. Are you sure they were swans to begin with?”
“Well, no, now that you mention it. I mean, everyone says that’s what they are, but I’ve never actually seen anyone else do it.”
“Do they talk? Act like humans? Do they seem intelligent?”
“Well, they are humans, so I suppose they must be, right?” This conversation was not going the way I had expected it to.
“Hah! Fat chance. Transmutation is just changing the shape of a thing. You turn a swan into a human and all you’ve done is put a swan mind in a human-shaped box. Wouldn’t do a wizard much good to be able to turn into a wolf or whatever if they suddenly only had a wolf’s brain to work with, would it?”
“So, you’re saying that if those women were swans originally, they’d still act like swans?”
“Hoo boy yeah,” she said. “Absolutely. Hissing, biting people, trying to build nests, shitting everywhere. The works.”
“Wait, but what about you?” I asked, desperately trying to get the conversation back on track. “You seem like a human, but you were a goose ten minutes ago.”
She grinned wickedly at me.
“I was shaped like a goose ten minutes ago,” she said. “And I appreciate the makeover. But I wasn’t a goose to begin with. Now come on. There’s something hella creepy going on around here, and we’re gonna figure out what.”
She started walking back up the path towards town.
“Wait!” I shouted, hurrying after her, “If you weren’t a goose, then what are you? And what’s your name?”
“You can call me Gwydd,” she said. “And as for what I am, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you some day. But first, you’re going to tell me everything you know about these swan ladies.”
oh yeah are we gonna talk about how the basic sand/silt/clay soil diagram is super misleading?
I feel like it’s got to be a relic of like, the 1940’s that has just stuck around in the same way other outdated models have.
Sand, silt and clay aren’t ingredients, they’re particle sizes, and no amount of combining them will make soil if there’s no organic matter.
I’m looking up soil types and finding websites full of the wrongest statements ever.
Could you explain what’s wrong with those statements?
Well, basically, clay, sand and silt refer to sizes of mineral particles.
Clay being the smallest, and sand being the largest. It keeps going—there’s gravels, and cobbles, even. (The definitions of these terms are actually very contentious in geology.)
Chalk is not a particle size at all, it’s a carbonate rock. Soils that form on top of carbonate rocks are generally pretty alkaline. Alkaline is a “type” of soil but it’s got fuck all to do with the previous three.
Peat is what forms when organic matter decays in anoxic conditions in a wetland. It stores carbon. It’s neat.
The crucial problem here is that soil is not minerals. It contains minerals, but no amount of combining sand, clay and silt will create soil, ever. Adding sand to a clayey and silty soil doesn’t make better soil, it makes some kind of evil, useless concrete.
The organic matter is the crucial component. Even that’s understating it. Healthy soil doesn’t just “contain” organic matter, it is Literally Alive, full of microbes, mycelium, roots, and bugs.
Soil isn’t a substance. You can’t create it by stirring up ingredients. It’s a living metropolis, almost an organism. It’s full of order and communication. Soil is the plants that grow in it and the fungi that breaks down the plants when they die. Ants are a type of fully autonomous soil particle
One piece of evidence for my headcanon that Julian and Data keep in good contact and work on projects together long-distance? (Which is heavily used in my fics).
In “DS9: Life Support”, Julian uses positronic brain implants to try to save Bareil. Who does he know as the only person who has a positronic brain? Someone who he stated interest in at least writing a paper on?
So I’m thinking Julian and Data were already working on this long-term project together. Then Bareil’s situation happens, where nothing else is working, so Julian is like “well, guess I’ll try this.”
And I checked Memory Alpha and Beta to see if there were other uses of this idea in the shows and beta canons. This is the only instance.
I could make a 3k-word manifesto on how the word “non-man” is enbyphobic horseshit, and I don’t think it could possibly be as succinct and easy-to-understand as this image. Take notes
Hob and Crowley meeting in some random pub and drunkenly venting about their respective relationship issues not realizing how similar their situations actually are, and then running into each other again 100 some odd years later and them both just being like “Uhhh I can explain”
obviously Ed was obsessed with Stede from day dot but i really think he didn’t realised he liked Stede specifically until the fancy boat party
like up until that point he really thought he was just enamoured with fancy rich person-ness and then he met all those other fancy rich people and was like “hang on i hate all of these people” which means his feelings for Stede aren’t because he’s a fancy rich person it’s because he’s Stede
i think he’s realising that in the moonlight scene and i think that’s when the plan to kill Stede and take his identity goes out the window, because he’s just realised that what’s making him happy isn’t Stede’s (thievable) class identity it’s (irreplaceably) Stede himself
I’ve learnt to take comfort in the arbitrariness of personal identity. There’s no point in cringing; I’m a meat computer trying to negotiate its existence in imperfect, lossy communication with other meat computers whose interior workings are as much of a black box to me as mine are to them; some screw-ups are a mathematical inevitability. Shame is irrelevant.
