Packs of Lyca can sometimes be seen appearing to pray to/howl at the moon.
In reality, they’re yelling at the moon, telling it to not fuck up whatever they’re about to do. It’s more superstition than actual belief in any sort of moon deity.
Couples who smoke weed together are
less likely to hurt each other. Studies of
husbands and wives during their first 9
years of marriage found that spouses
who both frequently smoked marijuana
were less likely to engage in domestic
violence than couples with only
one partner who smokes. SourceSource 2Source 3
I don’t know how you’d tell if this is actually causation or just correlation, but it’s interesting.
honestly the harry potter fandom is so wild like we’ve all collectively refused to accept cursed child as canon but some college kids tell us hufflepuffs are particularly good finders and we don’t even question it
I didn’t truly get the whole “death of the author” paradigm until I watched the harry potter fandom collectively divorce JKR
aside from all the shittiness of JKR, I’m very amused that we all are cool with the Starkid stuff and ignore Cursed Child because Starkid’s second Potter musical is a time travel plot, but because it’s a loving parody and actually done well rather than done like a shit fanfic, we’re all cool with it.
Anyone else remember playing the Legend of Zelda as a kid and being seriously spooked by those hand monsters that would drop from the ceiling, Wallmasters I think they were called? I hated them back then, but I kind of love them now, and that’s what I was thinking of when a ‘Disembodied hand monster’ was requested for this Fantasy Biology post.
Most fantasy species are at least superficially similar to a real, living or extinct species from which to draw inspiration and scientific understanding. A ‘hand’ that crawls around on its own, eh, not so much.
Unless we stretch what we know of biology quite a bit.
Viewing our hand monster from the outside, which is really all we have to start with, we find five limbs (fingers and thumb) and a body (the palm and wrist in some cases). Even if you consider the ‘thumb’ to be some sort of tail-like-limb, it doesn’t really resemble the anatomy of any vertebrate species. It’s barely even bilaterally symmetrical, it’s actually closer to radial symmetry.
And the Earth does have a handful of radially symmetrical creatures. The jellyfish and anemone being some.
Yes, I’m going to argue that the Hand Monster is some sort of very distantly evolved land jellyfish.
i dont think american filmmakers realise how huge london is, because sure you have the london eye and houses of parliament but when you say ‘london has fallen’ what??? so the nandos in catford is in flames? the tesco in peckham has descended into chaos? wtf??
And even if Peckham Tesco goes down you’ve still got the Lewisham one open 24 hours, yeah you’re in trouble on a Sunday evening but even in a survival situation you can probably hold out till Monday because all the local takeaways would still deliver, no one can stop those guys and no one should try
yeah and making it a little serious for a second, the city has such a historical/cultural expectation of being (or at least appearing) resilient in response to destruction that these portrayals are not realistic at all.
If you talk to people who were in London on 7/7 I feel that they use very different language about their experience, vs. people who were in New York City for 9/11. The brush with destruction is not portrayed as a life-changing experience, if that makes sense. The expectation is that the city has to keep moving. That obnoxious “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster (now a meme) was actually designed and printed in readiness to be posted everywhere if London actually fell to Nazi occupation. the expectation was that “descent into chaos” would let everyone down.
Like, in the London Blitz people made “not giving a shit as the city is gutted around you” into an art form.
this lady would make a great reaction image for drinking truth tea in the wake of drama:
like look at these guys here
“oh ffs that was my BUS”
I mean this guy is just delivering the milk like
TREVOR I DON’T THINK YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE GONNA CARE IF YOU’RE A LITTLE LATE
or this extremely safe community policing
“remember girls you need TWO policemen to go past the unexploded bomb”
or this
“hey Bridezilla your window fell off” “fuck off Helen this is my SPECIAL DAY”
or
“guys you’re supposed to be – guys pay attention”
or “Hey what should we do we are literally being bombed right now” “idk go hide in the tube??” “but it’s the kids’ bedtime” “yeah, but like… bombs”
“wait I’ve got a plan, we go to the tube and then…”
“ok so … so we’ve literally just tied the children to the train tracks” “shh…. they’re sleeping…. they’re safe now”
Anyway it’s not like Londoners are super brave or anything, it’s just that on the one hand there might be giant alien sea dragon robot tsunamis smashing the recognizable landmarks, but on the other hand they gotta make rent
I mean there’s also the fact that we actually not long ago had a sort of Purge-type ‘London has fallen’ situation irl: the 2011(?) riots happened up and down the country, but London was particularly badly swamped. People were smashing shop fronts, stealing various crap, setting fires, the whole shebang.
And d’you know what, among other things, happened in response? Buncha people took to the streets in the aftermath, armed with brooms and bin bags, and just started clearing away the rioters’ mess. Like the riots caused plenty of upheaval, sure, but on the level of the people whose neighbourhoods were affected, the reaction was largely ‘okay, fuck them, let’s sort this place out again’. And thus were the Riot Wombles born. (I am not kidding, that is genuinely what people called them).
Honestly, I think the typical response in this country when greeted with disaster can be summed up in two words:
“Right, then!”
I can’t help feeling that London’s reaction to a disaster-movie-scale event could be summed up in two additional words:
Apocalypse Wombles.
I’m a Londoner, and I can second this. tbh the entire country’s like this, in different strengths, but London seems to have it condensed. It’s why seeing American films doing the whole Apocalypse thing in England is like…yeah, no, that’s not what would happen, the English would pretty much stare the Apocalypse down and sigh and put the kettle on, because this was going to take a little bit more than the Marigolds and a broom this time.
extremely dumb concept: xenocarcinisation. we discover independently evolved life on an alien planet and most of their lifeforms are bizarre and mostly unfamiliar but there’s one or two ocean-dwelling species that look like pretty good facsimiles of regular ol’ earth crabs. every time. every time we find some uniquely developed source of multicellular life we keep findin crabs. they’re just such a good shape to evolve into. imagine crabs scattered across the universe.
BettSplendens Tumblr Evac 