Here's the whole thing, not just the chopped part.

Episode 11 at long last. We've got Rose and Sophodra, we've got ants, we've got human lore, and we've got lots and lots of beetles (including a very weird one). Thank you for sticking with me patiently. Enjoy!!!

If you'd like to support future episodes, you can get pins, stickers, CG models, bonus comics and more in the store!

For bonus behind-the-scenes stuff and early content (as well as access to the official Discord), you can also join the Patreon!

Soundtrack, sound design and foley were by @theelectricdreamsofddx, with Gregorsa’s theme by @zestychille, plus additional background art and CG assets by sinclairedelune !

This is also the first episode to have voice actors other than myself. Clef is played by @spidermanifested, the bombardier is @marshmallowturnip, the unsure hiver is @snagerdraws, and the cashier is doodlesnstuffe They’re all extremely talented, so be sure to give their stuff a look!

You can also listen to the OST for the episode here:

https://ddxexe.bandcamp.com/album/humans-b-gone-11-not-gone-yet-ost

(102 points possible. How many did you get?)

if i took a women's scholarship and then transitioned during college would that count as swindling

WOULD THEY TAKE THE MONEY BACK

plan of action:

> take womens scholarship

> go to law school

> transition during law school

> get sued about it

> take it to the supreme court

> defend myself

> trans rights?

stop being funnier than me

@HardSciFiMovies

Sighs

Wankenstien's monster.

Is this anything?

xx / xx

excitement

this is the only time i recorded myself playing a VR game and it still holds up as one of my best game videos

i really like how you miss every shot

ty for stealing this one much appreciated

people in the notes suggesting it was "improper" for the juror to do this or that it "introduced bias" to the court proceeding 🙄 the ice agent in question accused a moc of assaulting him / resisting arrest. how is the agent being a white supremacist not relevant. what universe are you living in

As a member of the world’s SECOND oldest profession, I assure you this is just one of many ways the justice system is systematically fucked up.

For anyone who wants to know how to fact check something you are told while on jury duty without getting fined:

First, you need to understand that the rule that jurors can’t just google things is coming from a good place. Like imagine that you are on a jury that’s considering, say, a medical malpractice lawsuit and one of your fellow jurors comes into the jury room and says to you, “I think the victim’s expert was lying because WebMD totally contradicts everything they said.”

And you might be like, “But WebMD is notoriously unreliable website and the expert you’re talking about is a researcher from Mayo Clinic.” But this person cannot be swayed.

Like, we can all agree that would be bad.

So even though these rules can contribute to unjust outcomes as in the case above (and seriously, the fact that the defense attorney didn’t fact check that is probably grounds for legal malpractice), they also prevent jurors from just looking up bullshit online and taking it more seriously than the actual experts the court has put on. And I think in the era of anti-vaxxers/QAnon/COVID denial/etc., we can all understand why it’s a bad idea to trust that people can tell fact from bullshit online.

So in light of this, how do you as a juror fact check something?

The key here is that you have to ask the court for information. Jurors can ask questions of the court during deliberations, so if something you said sounds off to you, you can ask for more information.

The key term you want to use here is “credibility.”

The job of a jury is to decide what are called “questions of fact.” Long before the trial even starts, lawyers will have hashed out all the “questions of law” --- like, what the statute of limitations is; what laws, exactly, were allegedly broken; whether the court you’re in even has jurisdiction; stuff like that. Jurors are responsible for deciding which side’s version of the facts has more credibility.

For instance, if the prosecution’s witness says X and the defense’s witness says Y, the jury is responsible for deciding which is true, X or Y. And you do this by weighing which one is more credible.

So in this case, if the juror had known to, he could have told the judge, “In order to properly assess the ICE agent’s credibility, I need more information about his tattoo. I have doubts about whether he was telling the truth about it, which would impact how credible I would find his testimony. Can the agent please provide evidence that it really is what he says it is?”

There are a lot of problems with our legal system, and I think one of the biggest is that jurors aren’t educated about what they can and can’t do. Juries have a lot of power, if (and only if) they know how to use it.

Reblogging for that last post, because frankly, “what to do as a juror” is one of those things the schools should really be teaching us. Serving on a jury is one of the most powerful rights of citizenship and everyone should be educated in how to exercise it correctly.

hmmm

?

?

May you have the confidence of a medieval bestiary artist drawing an animal he has never seen, never will see, and hasn’t got the slightest idea of what it looks like

May you have the confidence of a medieval bestiary blogger posting animals from renaissance paintings they've never looked into, never will look into, and haven’t got the slightest idea of what a medieval bestiary even is

“marginalia”

hey @feminist-mina-harker please elaborate on the chameleon bestiary rant

Okay, since you asked for it, here is the chameleon bestiary rant.

This is a chameleon from a lavish thirteenth-century bestiary, Bodley MS 764, produced in England c. 1240.

'Haha', you say, 'look at those idiot scribes! They drew a rainbow horse instead of a lizard!'

That's when I hit you over the head with a baseball bat and tell you to shut your fucking mouth.

Because of course this illuminator had never seen a chameleon--the vast majority of chameleon species live in sub-Saharan Africa, with a few in Asia and one in the southernmost part of Europe. Only a very few people had the ability to travel extensively during this time, and it was extremely risky to do so even if you were one of the tiny percentage who had the means.

Instead, they relied on descriptions--written, not verbal--from the few people who had traveled, such as this one:

'The chameleon is not all of one colour, but is multi-coloured, like the pard. It is able to vary the colours of its body very easily, whereas the bodies of other animals cannot readily be changed in this way. The chameleon-pard is so called because while it is like the pard in having white spots, its neck is like that of a horse, its feet like those of an ox, but its head is like that of a camel.' (Richard Barber, 1992, pp. 67-68)

'But Lucy,' you would say, had you not been thoroughly concussed with the baseball bat, 'chameleons don't look like leopard-horse-ox-camel hybrids! That's crazy!' And if you had said this, I would beat you over the head again, and say yes they do, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds.

Let's start with the first part of the description: 'it is like the pard in having white spots.' You see those little white spots around that central stripe? Check.

Second: 'its neck is like that of a horse.' That dorsal ridge is pretty reminiscent of a mane, and when they stretch their necks, you can see the resemblance to the musculature of a horse:

Check.

Third: 'its feet like those of an ox.' You see those bifurcated toes, and the tiny claws at the end of them? That's an extremely distinctive feature of chameleons, and well worth describing. You know what other animal has bifurcated feet and would be very familiar to the medieval people back home in England? An ox, with cloven hooves:

Look at the claws at the end of chameleon toes and tell me you don't see the resemblance. Check.

Fourth: 'its head is like that of a camel.' This one's a little confusing until you remember that some camels have heads with prominent ridges/bumps, like this:

Looks like a smaller version of the crest on our second lil chameleon, no? Check.

'But Lucy,' you'd interrupt again if you still had all your teeth, 'that might explain the description, but not the drawing--they got it all wrong!' To which I would reply that the description was all these illuminators had. They couldn't have conversations with the travelers directly to gather what exactly they meant by 'feet of an ox' (bifurcated) or 'head of a camel' (crested)--they only had the words themselves.

So you end up with this image, which very much does have the white spots of a leopard, the neck of a horse, the feet of an ox, and the head of a camel.

And since they didn't have any other guidance as to size, body shape, tail, etc., they improvise those based on the animals the description said it resembles--the body shape of a horse, the tail of an ox, etc.

In conclusion, don't be mean to medieval illuminators. They were not stupid, they were not overconfident; they were simply doing the best they could with the information that was given to them.

And if you have a problem with that, my baseball bat is always ready.

Okay, I really feel I should step in and say something. Much as I appreciate this defense of the artist, I must address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the giraffe. foreshadowing

First off, as I've discussed before on this very weblog, bestiaries were not based on traveler's tales. They copied and paraphrased previous authoritative Classical works, with additions, omissions, and alterations creeping in as copies were made of copies. In the case of MS Bodley 764, the primary sources were an earlier bestiary and On the Nature of Things by Rabanus Maurus, along with Gerald of Wales, Hugh of Fouilloy, and Peter of Cornwall as other sources. Meanwhile, the bestiary's obsession with finding the etymology of names is a holdover from Isidore of Seville, another major source. And ultimately all bestiaries owe their existence to the Physiologus (Barber, 1993).

And things got confusing! Because as mentioned, the process of copying and rewriting previous authors led to all sorts of confusion. I've already talked about how a sea monster evolved from Aristotle's account of the elephant filtered through a Latin translation from an Arabic translation from the Greek.

Classical authors were well aware of what chameleons look like. Aristotle talks about the chameleon having a lizard's body, with descending ribs and a backbone that sticks up like a fish. He describes its face as apelike, its tail as long, its feet as divided into two parts - in fact, he goes into detail about how the feet have five toes, with the ones in front having three in and two out, the ones in the back having three out and two in. He even describes the chameleon's bizarre turreted eyes (Aristotle, 1862). Hm, I should look into a newer translation of Aristotle, come to think of it.

But that's not the point. The point is that at least as far back as Aristotle, people knew what a chameleon looked like. Above is the chameleon Aristotle would have been familiar with, the common chameleon (the chameleon posted further above is from Madagascar). I guess you could say the spots look leopardy? Either way, the description still seems... wrong.

Let's take a look at it then. There's something fishy about it. Don't worry, I'll highlight it.

What gives? What animal are we talking about here, a chameleon or a chameleon-pard? And why does it live in Ethiopia? We just said chameleons are found in Europe!

And this is where it starts to make sense. These are two separate accounts, one about a color-changing animal called a chameleon and one about an Ethiopian animal called a chameleon-pard. You probably know it by another name.

That's right, the giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis). See, the name's right there! Because it was seen as having spots like a pard/leopard (that's another thing to discuss) and otherwise camel features! These are two different animals!

The last piece of the puzzle comes from the source of this information. In this case, Bodley 764 copies almost verbatim from Isidore of Seville.

And there you have it. Isidore of Seville describes the chameleon and the giraffe in sequence. Our bestiarist followed his lead, but took "camelopard" to be "chameleon-pard". And, as far as I can tell, the artist either treated them both as the same animal, or just illustrated one of them (the chameleon-pard).

Either way, this confusion of the chameleon with the camelopard/chameleon-pard led to, for instance, this depiction of the chameleon in the Ortus Sanitatis, accessed here.

On the other hand, other sources give us a more reptilian chameleon, such as Valenciennes 0320 (Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum, accessed here).

References

Aristotle, Cresswell, R. trans. (1862) Aristotle’s History of Animals. Henry G. Bohn, London.

Barber, R. (1993) Bestiary. The Boydell Press, Woodbridge.

Isidore of Seville, trans. Barney, S. A.; Lewis, W. J.; Beach, J. A.; and Berghof, O. (2006) The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Not a manuscript, but relevant to our interests (alas we do not have an illustrated bestiary in our collection, but perhaps someday)

Literally nobody I know knows Gayle Waters-Waters despite how much she has contributed to society and meme culture. Get rid of the couches. We can’t let people know we sit. Was anyone gonna tell me x or was I supposed to read it in x myself. That gif of her in the kitchen breaking a board with her head. Her mad dash from the house that ends with her jump kicking her mailbox off

Literally nobody I know knows Gayle Waters-Waters despite how much she has contributed to society and meme culture. Get rid of the couches. We can’t let people know we sit. Was anyone gonna tell me x or was I supposed to read it in x myself. That gif of her in the kitchen breaking a board with her head. Her mad dash from the house that ends with her jump kicking her mailbox off

my mom’s trans allyship is on another level

she once called my friend’s deadname “that stupid thing his mom calls him”

I was once talking to my 75 year old Chinese dad in passing about a trans friend of mine not getting along with her family and he asked why and I said err, because she's trans, dad.

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

Later on: "Anyway, even if she WAS the only son, that's not her problem, that's THEIR problem. They should have had more sons if they were going to be bothered about it."

Knowing what I know about chinese culture there’s something so beautifully simple about his logic of “no son to carry on family name/look after them in old age/all the other stuff? Skill issue! Should’ve had more sons! Should’ve kept the family unit strong yourself! Blaming your daughter for your own failure of family planning is W E A K!” and then he learns there are more sons and it completely breaks his train of logic because if yes to more sons then why issue?? You have two others and you’re mad you don’t have three?? Whack. Greedy.

I can already envision him as an ancient lord of a powerful house looking down his nose at the latest messenger bringing gossip from the house of his offspring’s friend and going “now they have a daughter to marry into another family for powerful alliances and two sons to take over her former duties and somehow they’re still complaining about their good fortune? They shall not survive the winter.” and then sipping his tea with all the grim satisfaction of someone about to watch an unnecessary soap opera of drama unfold from a safe distance or something

That's a funny image for sure, though I think if there's a typology of Chinese philosophical mentality, there would likely be a spectrum from "Confucian patriarchal lord" to "Buddhist monk / Taoist hermit" and my dad renounced at 18, was a monk for a time, before coming back to work for his family since they were poor 🤷 it was what 3 years after we gained independence from the British so the economy was probs a mess.

When he found and married my mom, he was nearly 45 and they had so much trouble conceiving that he went to a Guanyin temple supposedly "magical" for praying for children. When I was born (not a son, also an only child until now), my mom said, "when you prayed at the temple did you ask for a son?" He said, "Aiya, everyone is asking for sons, so I said any gender is okay. If I asked for a son, maybe we wouldn't have gotten a child because Guanyin's son quota is already used up. Do you want that to happen?" My mom laughed for days about "son quota" and continues to tell people about it today, but her honest answer was: "Any child is okay."

Jokes on them. They didn't specify a gender, so Guanyin Ma gave them a non-binary child!

More seriously: my dad doesn't care about sons. When I told my parents that I wouldn't marry or have children, I thought he might be disappointed, but he wasn't. Then again, maybe I should have expected that, given he tried to become a monk at 18 🤪 I think he said the thing about sons to poke fun at people who care too much about sons because he frankly thinks it's all a bit ridiculous. In his eyes, a child is a child, so what's the point in caring about gender? If the child "changes" gender, does it make a difference?

When I first spoke to my mom about trans issues, still closeted at the time, she said, "I don't understand why they feel the way they do, but they aren't hurting anyone so don't bother them. They are normal people just minding their own business." I said, "I agree, but on the topic of not understanding: Mom, do you think that when we reincarnate, we are always born into a body of the same gender?" In Buddhist stories, there was a lifetime in which Guanyin was reincarnated as a cow or ox, and in repayment for my birth, my dad does not eat beef till this day. Gender or species isn't constant in the cycle of rebirth. My mom said, "No, you're right. Whatever thing that carries on has no gender. I was probably male, human or animal, in one of my past lives." And she has supported trans rights even more ever since.

Cosmic Queen

Dave Brandt was so much more than a meme. He partnered with universities to experiment with and expand soil conservation and cover crop techniques, worked to educate other farmers through worldwide conventions and direct mentorship, founded the Soil Health Academy, and was called the "Obi-Wan Kenobi of soil health" by the chief of the USDA's conservation department.

There is no healthy planet without healthy ag practices, and this guy was a legend.

The A-horizon on his farm was 4 feet deep

You do not understand

Most modern Ag operations don’t even have a proper A-Horizon. They’re too busy turning the earth every time they replant. The A-horizon is the Black Gold that makes Soil Soil. It’s a structurally complex soil horizon that must be built in place by the interactions of Plants and Fungi and Insects. It is The Thing that soaks up rain and holds onto it for plants. The A-Horizon is The Thing that builds up when you let a field sit fallow. The act of tilling creates fecundity by breaking up the A-horizon. On a really good Organic no-till farm you might find an A-horizon between 3-6 inches.

His A-horizon was 4 feet deep. 50 inches.

I-

I have no context. His farm was covered in a living skin thick enough for a child to stand in.

Gives me hope for what we could accomplish if we got our collective heads on straight, you know? Like. This was one guy. A brilliant man, who knew what he was up to, but. The thing about brilliant ideas is they can be shared.

50 inches. The mind reels.

This is so much more impressive than I can understand and comprehend and I would love to know more about A horizon

Do you love the color of the Soil?

Humus, or Humic Compounds, are a cryptic and poorly understood set of organic substances. As the final metabolic result of once-living things being digested first by macroscopic organisms, and then by microorganisms, they resist most forms of analysis, and have cryptic structures. A few that we have managed to isolate and study are the Humic & Fulvic Acids.

Humus has a number of remarkable tendencies. It is capable of retaining water far better than any raw mineral clay; it also retains electrically charged clay granules, which themselves retain mineral ions, all of which is essential to make a soil a high-quality resource for Plants to grow in.

A composter is a box that contains an environment that is conducive to the production of Humus, but the best way to produce it is in-place, by laying layers of organic material down over an unbroken earth and growing things out of that. The interaction of the plants rooting, the fungus weaving itself through everything, the bacteria and archaea metabolizing as they do, and inorganic weathering forces all combine to gradually build up the microscopic equivalent of a complex megastructure capable of retaining far more water, and containing far more nutrients, than any inorganic substrate.

This stuff is black gold. This is the stuff that determines whether or not a plot of land is going to be “productive.” The knowledge of how to make it, how to care for it, is an essential piece of wisdom that our civilization needs to remember.

Fortunately, folks seem to have the right response:

Farmers are more important to the continuity of civilization than administrators, no matter what the elitists say. This knowledge is important.

Exactly

This work is so important and underappreciated AND if you're interested in the lives of the women as wives and secretaries who did research and publication "with" their husbands in history, you should know that this kind of work in sustainable agriculture right now also has a LOT of invisible women doing critical scientific work in soil development, seed saving and starting, etc, often without formal training or recognition.