Earth is still enjoying an interglacial period of an ice age
…so we’re gonna get HOTTER?
No wait. We’re gonna get colder?
No, we’re almost certainly going to get hotter, we’re only technically interglacial now because we still have large ice caps… but rather than another glacial period, we’re heading towards a greenhouse period.
…has there ever been a greenhouse period on earth….like you got me going down a google spiral of historical temperature graphs….
Oh, yes! The most recent one ended about 33 million years ago. The “Eocene Thermal Maximum” was the hottest portion of that period, and during that time, horses were fucking tiny:
Clearly we need to breed larger horses to prevent earth from warming further.
you’ve done it, you’vs solved the climate crisis
actually Equus gigantus was a species of enormous horse that lived in North America towards the end of the Pleistocene, alongside woolly mammoths and camels and smilodon
it went extinct at the end of the last glacial period along with most of North America’s other megafauna, but it was fucking huge
both horse and camels originally evolved in North America… all native species went extinct and are now known only from relatives that spread to other continents
Don’t we still have horses that big?
You just skipped over the most important bit, the most terrifying bit.
…..“Mega fauna”
Just means animals over about 90-100lbs—roughly the size of a human or bigger. Towards the end of the last glacial period, a large portion of Earth’s megafauna died out. In North America, that included mastodons, woolly mammoths, smilodons, horses, camels, giant sloths, giant beavers, short-faced bears, stag-moose, dire wolves, cave lions, and cheetahs.
Obviously not all mammalian megafauna died off in that window of time—in NA, we still (technically) have bison, bears, wolves, deer, elk, puma, and others.
Camels are from North America??? Never would have expected that.
Yep! The ancestors of both modern camels and South American llamas/alpacas/vicuñas/guanacos evolved here. Some lived as far north as the Yukon and Ellesmere Island and Beringa:
Can we talk about Australia’s apparent invasive camel population???
Camels were brought to Australia in the 1800’s because they were well-suited to the hot climate of the outback, but largely abandoned in favor of cars. They flourished in the wild with no large predators and there are now hundreds of thousands of feral camels roaming wild throughout Australia. They cause so many problems that they are culled by the thousands.
The USA also had some feral camels in the late 1800’s. They were imported by the Army in the 1850’s or so, and after the Civil War there were some small feral populations roaming around—there’s even a wild legend about the Red Ghost, which claims that a feral red-furred camel wandered the desert of Arizona in the 1880’s attacking and killing people, with the dessicated corpse of its rider still strapped to its back.
Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)
Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there.
But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history.
I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing.
Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it??
It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic.
But it’s not dead.
Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy.
Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away.
Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work.
You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me.
Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone
PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)
It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia.
(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)
Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!
authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.
This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture – “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.
If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?
I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.
I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.
And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts! Rock on, fanfic hamsters!
as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS
In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.
I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.
If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.
If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?
Love how a lot of “autistic parenting problems” can get fixed by just using your brain:
“my autistic child doesnt like hugs” so don’t hug them, that will be 150 dollars
“My autistic child had a meltdown in a busy grocery store” so don’t bring them to a busy grocery store
“My autistic child is a picky eater” So give them the food they like but also encourage them to try new food in fun positive ways
“My autistic child only want to wear the same shirt everyday” so let them wear the same shirt everyday
“My autistic child claims loud noises hurt their ears.” So turn the goddamn noise down, Susan!
some of this definitely tracks but a lot of the time it’s not as simple as that. if you’re a single parent with an autistic child, and you can’t afford childcare, you can’t just leave your kid at home alone while you get food. sometimes taking children to places that they don’t like is 100% necessary. however, something that might help in this situation is giving the child clear information beforehand about what is going to happen, letting them know they are heard, and telling them exactly what is expected of them and how long it will last:
we have to go to the grocery store. i know that you don’t like it there because [anything they have said before about why it makes them upset] and i don’t either, but we have to do it. we are leaving at x time, so you have until then to [transition from what they were doing before]. when we are there, you need to walk next to me/hold my hand/(maybe give them a task such as counting how many types of fruit they can see in the store, a small activity to do, or a stim toy. keeping them grounded and entertained is good). it will take y amount of time, and then it will be over and we can come back home and you can do z [special interest related activity or other reward that will recharge their nd batteries after a draining experience]
autistic children grow up to be autistic adults. sooner or later they will have to go into a grocery store, maybe on their own, maybe every week, for their whole adult life. acclimatising them to knowing how grocery stores work from a reasonably young age, helping them learn that grocery stores are not scary, and that if they are scary they are at least endurable and that trips there don’t last forever, is going to be far more effective and helpful in the long run than simply teaching children that if they don’t like something they don’t have to do it. coping strategies are far more useful than avoidance for situations that are necessary.
i am saying this as an autistic adult, who was an autistic child, and who has very specific difficulties with grocery shopping myself, before anyone comes for me calling me neurotypical or whatever.
There’s a TV show on Cbeebies called “Pablo” in which the voice cast and writing team are all autistic. The intention of the show is to make transitions easier. Here is an episode specifically about supermarkets. This may be of interest
can someone tell me what the difference between these two memes are
because I’m pretty certain they convey the exact same sentiment
No! @nintendette explained this to me the other day!
– Caveman Spongebob (SpongeGar) is when your primal instincts kick in – for example, this image has been used with the title “when you get up in the middle of the night to get food and you hear someone coming” KnowYourMeme page here – Mr Krabs conveys realization and panic – for example, this image has been paired with the title “when you turn in an exam and your classmates start talking and none of your answers match” KnowYourMeme page here
ifesbob 