I’m seeing so much hate going around and it makes my heart ache so here are some adorable pictures that will hopefully make your day a little better even if it’s only for a few minutes.
And along with that, here’s a friendly and gentle reminder for you:
There once was a singer of old, Who then broke away from the fold, He won’t give you up, He won’t let you down, In a word you have been limerick-rolled.
How dare you make me read this with my own two eyes…
my professor (lovely man, married to our TA, 5’2", about as intimidating as a muffin) is a dendrologist by trade, so he studies trees. it was about three hours into our social sciences course, last lecture before exams, everyone was frazzled and exhausted, so he told us about his most exciting/in-depth research to date to cheer us up.
(the few of us who actually showed up were like “ok sir im sure its fascinating” but in our minds we were totally like its trees what. is. exciting. about trees. You might be wondering the same thing – the acorns? the leaves? the roots? BUT NO. IMMA FUCKIN TELL YA.)
ANYWAY we settle in, he had a few pictures loaded up from his field work (we were chuckling at this point…. ‘hehehe field work’ i giggled to my frend. its trees.) and began to tell his tale. it’s long, imma warn you, but……. god. just read it.
theres an species of tree called the cucumber tree (Magnolia acuminata, if ya wanna get all Latin-y). its super endangered, in our region there’s only ~280 that are registered by the government, yadda yadda yadda. my prof thought that was tragic (i know) but also strange, because when he was writing his thesis about local trees years ago, he kept coming across cucumber trees in really random places. we’re talking like backyards, independently-owned nurseries, etc. WHICH IS IMPOSSIBLE because, according to tree law (i know) it is very strictly protected by the government, and thus super “illegal to possess, transport, collect, buy or sell any part of a living or dead member of a listed species if it originates from wild sources.” essentially, the govt takes control over growing the trees and anyone who independently raises them is breaking the law (i know)
so he’d ask people “do you have a permit for these trees?” and they were like “uh no, it’s just a tree someone sold me, i think it looks nice, are you gonna arrest me?” so he’d be like “nah nah nah just tell me who sold it to you”
eventually, months/years later, someone did, and turns out it was like this underground sort-of illegal tree dealing club (i know). so my prof went, got a bit of funding from the government, who were getting pissed at independent cucumber tree numbers, and THIS IS WHERE IT GETS INTO THE GOOD SHIT I STG.
he infiltrates the tree trafficking organization. he buys a cucumber tree from an independent nursery, raises it for months, ensures he gets noticed by the traffickers, and then INFILTRATES it and convinces its leader to LET HIM JOIN. he has to pay like a steep entrance fee, which he does (and it blows my mind that the government of my country paid money to illegal tree dealers), but then he is given full access to records and maps because they think he’s one of them, not a SECRET AGENT.
now this part blows my mind because the tree lords don’t even have to try very hard to find cucumber trees because government agents MARK THE TREES AND DISTINCTLY TAG THEM SAYING THIS IS ENDANGERED DO NOT TOUCH. so, ya know…………. it’s a bit obvious. my prof hangs out with the members so much that he figures out their “hit spots”. these are where the trees are relatively secluded and unguarded. (he writes all this shit and numbers down for his research.)
BUT THATS NOT ENOUGH BECAUSE THE GOVT SAYS HES WASTING THEIR FUNDING IF HE DOESNT HAVE PROOF and they are willing to take LEGAL ACTION for misuse of funding (my prof doesn’t have the money nore time nor power to take them to court, which would also blow his cover). so my prof literally STAKES OUT a copse of cucumber trees at a recognized wildlife reserve for. DAYS. he camps there, and watches the trees, is about to give up, he’s going off an unreliable rumor from the traffickers that a harvester would be going there within the next week. finally, this guy comes and takes the cucumber tree seeds from the CLEARLY MARKED trees by the government, and my prof takes pictures (we are shown these pictures, most of us are speechless at this point). dozens of candid shots of a man my grandpa’s age with a grocery store bag, garden shears, and a ladder, clipping away the illegal seeds and then going on his merry fucking way.
so my prof has the proof, he’s been undercover for months now at this point, he writes up his report, gives it to the government who is like…….. “oh shit”, helps them draft up a new LESS COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS way of marking endangered trees (so that way non-tree-lovers wouldn’t damage them further, etc.), and then never returns to the tree traffickers. he’d given them a fake name, address, everything….. he disappears.
…there was a full minute of stunned silence from us students at this point, during which he grew more and more nervous (again, he’s a muffin) and all of us students are just like……. “whoa.” we asked him what happened to the remaining illegal cucumber trees & if he turned the tree dealers in to the government, and that is when he smiles a little bit and shows us the last few pictures. because here’s the kicker… he never turned the smugglers in. he burned all the data he collected, defied the government pressuring him to turn them in, and the only reason he’s not incarcerated is because his work is so prominent in certain circles now & universities love him, that there would be an uproar if he got arrested. he’s like a fucking anti-hero and then he tells us (i’ll never forget, it’s the most inspirational green-thumb thing in the world) “it may be ‘illegal’, but those who risk their liberty to ~save the world~ should never be reprimanded, no matter what those in power say.”
we are all stunned. some of us are considering dendrology as a field we’d now be interested in pursuing. he clicks his slide one final time, before we leave our last lecture and, since he had an asthma attack (lil muffin) he didn’t attend our exam, so i never see him again…………
and there, on the slides, the last picture? THERE HE IS. in his own backyard. with his equally lovely TA wife. both grinning innocently, standing underneath a……. FUCKING. FULL GROWN. ILLEGAL. CUCUMBER TREE.
Plant people are wild man. I’m considering changing fields.
So, I’ve been thinking, and I have Thoughts About Bran Stark. More specifically, I have thoughts about Bran’s injury. I’m not an expert or anything, but…
In some ways, it seems like Bran Stark might be the luckiest cripple in Westeros. Based purely on what we see, the level of function he gets to keep after being pushed out of a window is really, REALLY high. Abnormally high.
He’s got full and unrestricted control of his upper body (including fine motor stuff with his fingers, which sometimes deteriorates even if it’s not totally lost) and even potentially some of the lower – he can’t feel or control his thighs or anything lower than that, but he seems able to use his hips at least a little bit. Not all paraplegics have that, since the level of control you get to keep depends on exactly where your injury is and exactly what kind of damage was done in that spot.
He’s had no mention of pressure sores or of circulation issues. This is huge. Circulation is an almost universal issue for people with limited mobility, including me and every wheelchair user I’ve ever met, but Bran doesn’t have a hint of it. We’d KNOW if he did, because cold makes circulation issues much worse and he’s been north of the Wall for sodding ages. If there was any character who should have serious issues in those conditions, it’s Bran, but Bran’s fine and somehow it’s Jojen Reed who falls apart.
He SEEMS to have surprisingly good bladder and bowel control. Again, this varies depending on where the injury is and what kind of damage was done…but there’s no mention of it, which sticks out a bit considering how happy GRRM is writing characters (even very young ones) being helplessly and gratuitously biological.
Every flip of the coin after his injury seems to have gone Bran’s way. Every single one. As I said, I’m just a layman…but he seems to have been freakishly lucky.
My own experience with disability doesn’t extend to paraplegia, but after thinking about this a lot recently wrt to Jaime and amputation, I think you have a point here. My guess is that the “luck” has to do with plot requirements – it’s already barely plausible that Bran could make it from Winterfell to Bloodraven’s treefort in the midst of winter, and adding on more realistic side-effect issues only makes that tougher.
I’m glad someone finally posted about this. I’ve had many of the same thoughts about Bran’s lack of mention of his bladder and bowels.
invalidation of the bullying sansa subjected arya to “because they’re sisters! it happens!” displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a ~friendly sibling rivalry~ looks like. the emotions you feel as a child when a sibling bullies you are very real and very hurtful. making fun of their appearance and making them feel like they don’t belong are things that bullies do. as children we may not be compassionate enough or thoughtful enough to dial back insults, but we do know the difference between a friendly interaction and one that’s meant to hurt someone. the bully knows it, and so does the bullied. this is how relationships between siblings are damaged early on, and while they are not impossible to repair later in life, the emotional damage that results from it is real and should not be dismissed.
if you’re curious as to what an actual friendly sibling rivalry looks like, look to jon and robb. jon describes robb as “his rival and best friend and constant companion”; he implies that they were competitive when it came to practicing swordplay, and that they each challenged each other. but this doesn’t sour their relationship because they are good to each other, they love each other, and they have no desire to make the other person feel bad about themselves.
while there is certainly something to be said re: why GRRM chose only the sisters to have a bad relationship, this doesn’t excuse sansa’s behavior towards arya, which was nothing short of unkind.
Keep in mind, also, that as THE first daughter of the Starks and a girl who fit social norms, she was in a position of real, if only relative, power over Arya. Being the first daughter was a big deal in the time periods GRRM references. Power differentials can amplify even mild bullying. It’s the same reason a child saying “Fuck you” to a parent is only disrespectful, but a parent doing the same thing is abusive. Sansa wasn’t an abuser, but she DID bully her sister by hitting the same weak points that adults did, and people who refuse to acknowledge that make me really angry.
Writing is being on the train and mentally seeing your OCs stumble into other people, or flinching away from the germ-ridden handrails, or sleeping on each others’ shoulders.
Writing is hearing a song on the radio and watching one of your scenes play out to the lyrics.
Writing is laying on your floor or sitting by your computer and spending hours collaging newspaper clippings or pictures or people or plants together and making something that is completely, uniquely, your story.
Writing is drawing your characters in your notebooks, and making tea only your one, picky character would drink, and writing an open letter to all your characters just to remind them you love them.
Writing is moodboards, and playlists, and crafts, and asks, and prompts, and pictures, and memories, and you.
So never think that just because you’re not putting words on a page, you’re not a real writer. Writing is something that follows you everywhere, beyond the word document, and beyond the screen.
Because writing isn’t something you do. It’s something you are.
Just tagging a couple of people who might need this
A Christmas Carol is so wild to me because it takes not one, not two, but like four fucking ghosts to convince this dude not to be the biggest douche in the universe. Like, four fucking ghosts came back from the dead, rose from the Goddamn grave to be like, “I came back from the dead because you need to quit your shit.” Fuck. How big of an asshole do you have to be to have four fucking ghosts tell you to stop?
Have you ever met a rich capitalist
Also, one of those ghosts was a rich capitalist douche. He needed to reform Scrooge to work off his own sentence, didn’t he?
Marley’s ghost basically told Scrooge that if he kept being a greedy douchebag he would go to hell and Scrooge still needed convincing and that honestly is 100% believable to me
That an old rich white guy being told “Your going to hell unless you help the poor” would respond by going “I still kind of want to NOT help the poor tho?”
Charlie Dickens knew what was up.
Dickens had to work in a factory hos entire childhood. His father was thrown in a debtor’s prison. Thats why all his stories are about rich fucks getting owned.
The thing I love about A Christmas Carol is that
at the time he wrote it, Christmas, as a holiday, was on par with our Arbor Day. And Scrooge held the Majority Opinion.
Dickens originally set out to write a Very Serious Pamphlet About the Plight of the Poor in Modern Times, with numbers, and statistics, and gruesome details about the state of debtors prisons. And he realized that it would probably not change a single thing, in the end.
So he changed it to fiction, and made it emotional, and focused on the lives in one specific family. And he also self-published it, because he realized that a for-profit publishing house wouldn’t want to touch it. And gave it to friends.
Not only did it help change people’s attitudes toward charity organizations and help reform labor laws, it also (pretty much) revived the whole custom of celebrating Christmas at all.
That, my friends, is the power of a well written ghost story.
I just looked up this to see if this was true and it is!
The pamphlet was going to be called ‘An Appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child’
He decided to write the story because he realised that soap-boxing factory workers and their employers on the importance of educational reform wasn’t going to work on a society-wide scale.
A Christmas Carol is literally a leftist/socialist story about not being a dickwad to your employees because they’re human too, your ‘fellow man’
Death By Catchphrase 