Ok, So, As Most Know Hobbits LOVE Mushrooms, But What If They Love ALL Mushrooms, Even The Poisonous

Happy May Day all. Solidarity and all that jazz.  For your brain, some history on May Day and how it came to be: 1. The Zinn Education Project:  May 4, 1886: Haymarket Tragedy

2. IWW Historical Archives:  The Brief Origins of May Day

3. NPR : What is May Day? For the most part, the opposite of capitalism

Hmmm I've seen a lot of crow and raven people in fantasy settings but sci-fi 'uplift' premises tend to focus on dolphins and chimps and other reasonable targets.

Want a sci-fi story that's set long after some unwise scientist CRISPRed a be-much-smarter tweak into at least two species each of corvids and cephalopods.

so we've got established society of crows, who absolutely picked up human languages fast and use them routinely to interact with human beings, and maybe don't have citizenship in human countries where they reside because they have their own political units that aren't based on terrain, but they are recognized as people by law

(but like, i want to emphasize they are crows that are physically the same as crows have always been)

and the much more mysterious and retiring underwater society of the octopuses.

love stories about monsters are THE BEST because the idea of conceptualizing love in a way that is not human and fundamentally cannot be human and is AN ENTIRELY SEPARATE LEVEL FROM THE HUMAN is so great. 

made better when one half of the relationship is human and suddenly we’re dealing with a) a human learning to love like a monster or b) a monster learning to translate their love into human terms and that’s

the best thing

to me.

which often goes hand in hand with MONSTER TRYING TO HUMANIZE THEMSELVES but that’s.. not necessary, don’t worry monster, you don’t need to do that. your capacity for love does not need to be whittled and softened into a human shape. it’s okay. your heart can be brutal and all consuming. you will learn to cope and you will learn to funnel it, pieces at a time, into something conceivable and measurable to the human mind. 

and i don’t strictly mean monster monsters because there’s room here for divinity (alpha and omega, first and last, holy terror OF THE HEART. apocalypses OF FEELING.) or ghosts, or non-human, non-monster outliers (superheroes, androids, idek), or even human beings who are self-made monsters and whose expression and understanding of love is two steps removed and two shades off. 

but, you know what i mean. 

love stories about monsters.

You, a lover of xenofiction/animal stories who is truly interested in proper research and natural representation, with projects of your own in mind.

Let me tell you, if you read this, that I love you and will be willing to sell my kidney in order to support you.

Any tips on how to design reproductive/family life for long lived species? If they could live for 1000 years, family might be extremely complicated because of the possibility of siblings born 700 years apart, having great great etc... grandchilden before your sibling is born. Vocabulary? How about fertility age? Could 700 years could be considered too old to reproduce? How about dynamics on age differences between partners? Anything else? (No interspecies at this time)

Tex: What’s their perspective of time? Does their environment change more rapidly than they do? It would be a little different for an elf in Middle Earth than, say, a vampire in New York City.

Regardless of a species’ window of child-bearing years and years of childhood itself, how their own biology is perceived is influenced by their environment and experiences. Would someone of your species have children 700 years apart? Would that be a long time between children for them, or a typical span where it’s normal to have one child nearly every thousand years?

A human who has a child at 25 might not have a child at 45, even if they’re physically able to do so. I imagine a similar decision-making process might be involved no matter the species, particularly if your species is capable of doing anything about it - that does bring in another nod to enculturation. Is it even considered appropriate to have children 700 years apart? If so, what would be considered the social advantages?

Do they have a religion that prioritizes reproducing often and whenever possible? Do they not? What would be the rationalization behind either dictation?

What if your species, because it is long-lived, has names for children born at certain stages of life? Would that change family dynamics? If so, how so? What about how timing of birth affecting who they’re socially permitted to become romantically or sexually involved with? What would be the rationale behind those sorts of norms?

man yells at fish

I truly hate the word "unalive." There are so many other euphemisms that fictional Italian mobsters worked so hard to provide you with and you just ignore them.

Nix Reviews: Legends of the Guardians: Owls of Ga’Hoole

Summary: A young barn owl and his brother fall from their nest and are kidnapped and enslaved by Nazi in all but name owls. The barn owl befriends a similarly enslaved young elf owl and the two escape and befriend a young great grey owl and burrowing owl and set off to find a nigh mythical group of owl nights to stop the owl nazis. 

Based on the first three books of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series by Kathryn Lasky.

Rating: 6/10

Sexual Assult Drinking Game: N/A

(+) Holy fucking hell is this beautiful animated and designed. They deserved the award that they won.

-those fight scenes! Pure excellence

-the music fits very well

-Owl City has a song in it and frankly, I like puns

-I generally don’t like high fantasy but I loved this

- War is bad but under certain circumstances, the right thing to do is to fight

- White Tyto supremacists and slavery is bad

- Snakes are good guys

- the visual worldbuilding is just lovely

(-) dear gods the pacing. Way too fast.

- We do not get Twilight or Digger’s backstories and their characters are exaggerated

- Glyfie doesn’t get her time to shine since much of the St. Aggies stuff just isn’t in the movie

-Bats are bad guys

- The movie hits only the most important plot beats of the books outside of the fights and doesn’t linger long enough to let emotion settle in

-The film is set in Australia and not N. America

Overall: It’s a beautiful, absolutely lovely looking film. But you’d probably like it better if you didn’t read the books and don’t pay much attention to ecology stuff. The pacing really does the whole thing dirty and would have made a better mini-series than a film. I recommend it purely on the visuals.

overslept