I'm not sure of the timing -- the Welsh were arriving in 1700 or so and I'm not sure of the timeline for coal mining in specific, although of course there has been mining in Wales since prehistory. (Though probably not oggies.)
But there's been a strong relationship between Wales and Askazer-Shivadlakia since Welsh soldiers first settled there, as evidenced by the Shivadh-to-Cardiff-University pipeline. I would imagine there's been a steady trickle of immigration back and forth that has cross-pollinated quite a bit.
Looking at the recipe, I think it would be fairly easy to make kosher -- just sub in olive oil for the butter and lard in the crust -- and onions-and-potatoes are a staple of some branches of Jewish cuisine to start with, not to mention lamb.
Makes me want to do a story about some restaurant in Fons-Askaz like Lito's Empanadas here in Chicago -- a small storefront that does oggies stuffed with all kinds of different fillings, traditional and seafood and pizza and sweet dates. Great drunk food I bet.
It’s a caricature of Glasgow from the 80s - the joke was that Glasgow was deemed the knife capital of Europe and voted Europe’s friendliest city in the same week.
You need to speak with people who aren’t terrified of the outside world.
When you see a possibly terrifying mythical creature, is your first thought, I’m totally gonna pet that? If so, then Sara Omer, author of The Gryphon King, might have something in common with you.
SARA OMER:
At its core, The Gryphon King is about a horse girl on a quest for vengeance versus a man with cat-related PTSD. But before I can get into the infernal horse and lion biology at play, I have to gush about the monster-riding story more generally.
Just as children wish for puppies, children reading fantasy books wish for dragons. The unbreakable bonds between fire-breathing beasts and reluctant heroes populate epic fantasy stories, but if giant flying lizards aren’t your style, there’s any number of mythic monsters that might be mountable (monster romance implications of that statement aside). I love a dragonrider story as much as the next person, probably more than most people, but there’s a whole ecosystem of underutilized fantastic monsters out there that deserve some time in the spotlight. In the empire of Dumakra in The Gryphon King, there is at least one stable full of flying horses that didn’t ask to be ridden into battle or form lifelong bonds with power-hungry morally gray disaster princesses, but we can’t always fight the fate we’re dealt.
Growing up, having my own horse was as much a fantasy as having my own dragon, but I like to think I lived a tangential horse girl experience. I wasn’t yet in kindergarten when I learned to ride horses, taught by the grandfatherly carriage driver Mr. “Grandpa” Clint, who drove his carriage around the town square. After learning how to drive a carriage at an age that was definitely not road legal (to the chagrin of many other children), Grandpa Clint taught me how to ride a horse at his stable. The horse for the job was an ancient old white gelding living a life of comfort in retirement, and who I enthusiastically urged to a flying gallop my first time on the trail. I had a wonderful time as my mom and Mr. Clint raced after, concerned I would be terrified or die, probably. Surprise, I lived. I think everyone should experience that exhilaration, and a few hundred feet off the ground while you’re at it.
I had a formidable collection (army) of Breyer horses, although unlike Nohra in The Gryphon King, I didn’t grow up with an imperial stable. But some family friends had their own horses and boarded them nearby. Sometimes I would get to go ride or hang out at the stable and in the pastures. Rambo, their stubborn paint gelding, was barely tall enough to even be considered a horse rather than a pony, and I vividly remember a time he got kicked, presumably for being an asshole, and the bloody branding of the hoof that slowly healed. For this and other reasons, I’m convinced every horse is a little like a dragon.
There are multiple breeds of mythic horses I added to the bestiary that is The Gryphon King. Because why stop at sky horse when you can have water horse? And when I really got to thinking about the biology of pegasuses, I wanted to explore their avian side. What better way to celebrate the incredible Eurasian horses and the birds of prey in the region than combine them into one omnivorous monster that has an appetite for blood? As if horses weren’t already dangerous enough, now they really, really want to eat your fingers and the barn cats. And—oh, look—the battlefield became good grazing once the fighting’s quieted down. Really, pegasuses are a little terrifying, and they’re not even the most threatening strain of horse in Dumakra.
The moral is that if you make a bird big enough, humans begin to look like the small animals scurrying through the tall grass, evading tooth and talon. And what’s more terrifying than horse-eagle? Lion eagle.
I have utmost respect for anyone who can make a big cat with a massive wingspan seem docile and friendly; I just think, considering the injuries a falconer could incur and compounding those with what might befall your average lion tamer, you should have to sign a few release waivers to approach a gryphon.
Maybe I made all my animals ferocious because nature is ferocious and dangerous, and when people play at power, they don’t come close to the might of beasts. But their actions have often irreparable impacts on nature nonetheless.
Fear and respect can coexist. Add a little human curiosity, and I would never fault anyone who decided to ride a murder horse. The Gryphon King is for the readers who would go out of their way to pet a man-eating monster, who would risk it all to bond with a creature that could kill them a few different ways on purpose or by accident—I’m a little scared for your wellbeing, but I respect the drive and share the dream.
Thank you to everyone who reached out over my post regarding my brother.
Surprising no one, my immune system is responding to the stress by worsening my chronic symptoms, so I apologize if I can’t answer all of your comments and messages. I’m preserving my energy as best I can, which many of you have urged me to, and thank you for the love and concern <3
I want to stress that I’m not endangering myself for my family. That is something I refuse to do, and if I am not well enough to get on a plane, I will not get on a plane. I’m also under no illusions that I have to fix things on my own, which was why I was asking about facilities and possibly charities that could help.
Thanks to all of your input, I have a few avenues I can pursue from over here, though not without resistance from my parents.
There’s a very frustrating amount of learned helplessness from my family. Every time you present them with a solution, they shut it down with excuses about how nothing will come of it and how no one actually wants to help them, so why bother?
And honestly, I get it; they burned out decades ago. But they were the same when I was a child performing emotional labor for all of them, so my patience for it is very thin.
Every time I presented something actionable this morning, it was met with, “We did that before, and nothing happened.”
And I had to counter it with, “You mean you didn’t follow through on what you were told to do?”
Which led to a lot of defensiveness and “it’s easy for you, you’re not here.” Blah blah blah, etc, etc.
I set a firm boundary in response, which is no doubt getting me cursed out as ungrateful and cruel, but that’s their problem, not mine. I’m four thousand miles away for a reason, lol.
Anyway. I just wanted to say thank you and do my best to assure everyone who is worried that I’m not about to kill myself by doing too much.
I didn’t scrape myself back together again to sacrifice my peace on the altar of someone else’s wilful chaos.
i’m reading emma thompson’s diaries from the filming of sense and sensibility and there are some really great bits
danny de vito sent good-luck flowers on their first day of shooting
in the published draft of the script, colonel brandon and willoughby fight a duel offscreen after brandon confronts him about impregnating beth, brandon’s ward
“kissing hugh [grant] was very lovely. glad i invented it. can’t rely on austen for a snog, that’s for sure. we shoot the scene on a hump-backed bridge. two swans float into shot as if on cue. everyone coos. ‘get rid of them,’ says ang [lee]. ‘too romantic.’
for a number of outdoor scenes, they would fire a shotgun in the air just before the cameras started rolling to get the local crow population to shut the fuck up for a few minutes
there was a dedicated line item in the budget for hiring flocks of sheep for exterior shots, ang lee was determined to use them as often as he could
“later found ang looking at the estuary with a mournful expression. i went and stood beside him. after a moment he said, waving towards the water, ‘tide goes in, tide goes out, tide goes in, tide goes out — and still no sex.’ ‘do you miss it?’ i enquired, after i’d stopped laughing. he nodded sadly. his family won’t be back for weeks.”
while filming the scenes at the palmers’ house with the screaming baby, it turns out that “we’ve hired the calmest babies in the world to play the hysterical thomas. one did finally start to cry but stopped every time chris yelled ‘action’. later: babies smiled all afternoon. buddhist babies. they didn’t cry once. we, however, were all in tears by 5 p.m.”
“very nice lady served us drinks in hotel and was followed in by a cat. we all crooned at it. alan [rickman] to cat (very low and meaning it): ‘fuck off’. the nice lady didn’t turn a hair. the cat looked slightly embarrassed but stayed.”
during the london ballroom scene hugh laurie kept treading on the train of imelda staunton’s gown, “which pulled it down so far it exposed her boobs. keep it in, i said, but she wouldn’t.”
“sunday, 11 june: drank far too much last night and woke at 5:30 a.m. could’ve gone on drinking all night. quite grateful for a hangover, it provides a bit of peace. walked on to my balcony completely naked last night and took the couple that have moved into the suite next door slightly by surprise. walked back in calmly affecting insouciance and then bit all my pillows, one after the other.”
while resetting a scene involving a carriage, “ang rode off on a bicycle and didn’t return. found him locked in the loo at trafalgar, having broken the key. he’s being rescued at present.”
“noon. finish scene with alan. me: ‘oh! i’ve just ovulated.’ alan (long pause): ‘thank you for that.’”
“hugh g. in a spot of bother up la, apparently. something to do with a blow job. it’s all right for some, i thought.”
Reblog if you, too have calmly affected insouciance and then bit all your pillows, one after the other
A reminder that Emma Thompson’s response to winning a Golden Globe for the screenplay of this film is the finest acceptance speech ever to be given.
It’s about the stolen IP rights to a prosthetic hand design and it’s played completely deadpan right up until the last five minutes when Elliot looks at Parker, who has been acting completely normal (for her) the whole time, and says, “Okay, just say it, the suspense is killing me,” and she yells joyfully, “They gave us such a fun hand job!”
laughing helplessly in the theatre
thank fuck it’s intermission or i’d be getting run out of town on a rail
Krissy is off visiting friends for a couple of days, and so it falls to me to take the dog for her daily walk through the local nature preserve. I mean, I could not do it, but then I would disappoint Charlie, and, look, you just do not want to disappoint a dog. She will look at you all mopey and sad for the whole rest of the day. No thank you. A walk is vastly preferable. Plus, you know. I need the exercise too.
I'm so sorry that I'm replying to this much later than intended, after the heat wave has passed, but *looks out window* I doubt it will be the last. And I did read this when it came through and it was in fact helpful. Last weekend I was walking home, a distance of less than half a mile, when I started to feel unwell -- overheated, fuzzy, nauseated -- and would have been much more confused about why the relatively mild heat was impacting me so heavily if I hadn't remembered your ask. I'm a decent judge of my staying power so I knew I'd get home fine as long as I kept in the shade, but you saved me a fright :) Hopefully I can now pass that on to others.
Remember kids, check that big page of fine print that shows up with your meds (or attached to the online prescription record, for some), and make sure you're taking it when you should, eating when and what you should, and that you know about the potential side effects.
They are well, thank you! And would be lightly amused to be considered East Texas :D (They're in what's known as the Central Texas Hill Country -- which I say not to make fun at all, only so people won't yell about it in the notes.)
For those looking to help, I know my folks are supporting Mercy Chefs and the Uvalde Foundation for Kids, and their neighbors have mentioned giving to the Flood Relief Fund, which will pass on pooled funds to vetted support for a number of affected counties and communities.
In all seriousness, I haven't worked with tofu much; I don't mind it, but it has a slightly bitter taste to me that means I don't think about it as a first option when grocery shopping. Thus I don't have many tricks or trained skills to deal with it. I don't love the texture of uncooked or baked tofu, but mine either sticks to the pan or doesn't fry properly on nonstick. It's clearly a skills issue rather than any innate criticism of the mighty curd, but it means I don't have much to offer you.
That said, Readership, you're up! Impart your collective knowledge unto this aspirant.
I know the rest of my extended family back home are currently gossiping about how I ran away to America and never came back, and how awful that was because look at what’s happened. I should have been there to help my family and prevent all of this from happening, but they’re are also the same fucks who knew I was eight years old and managing my father’s constant threats of suicide and my mother’s neglect and breakdowns because no one was helping her with my brother so like, where the fuck were you when that was happening to me?
Why didn’t you do anything?
Why didn’t you stop any of this?
Or was I just supposed to stay the family indigo child starseed punching bag forever?
idk i think what is interesting about astarion to me is the fact that you have a guy who started out an asshole (normal type) and then spent two hundred years in a very carefully and specifically crafted (by the writers of the game) Become A Terrible Person Or Die nexus. like it wasn’t just a Torment Nexus, he wasn’t just in hell, i feel like this is very important not to forget, he was in hell but it was specifically a hell designed to, over time, kill the empathy of anyone trapped in it, kill their brain’s ability to prioritize other peoples’ survival, to numb one’s conscience.
and then he gets yanked directly out of that nexus and despite that the fact that he spent, again, two hundred years in a situation that was sort of a rock tumbler for the human soul, there’s still a pebble left in there. and it’s a pebble that can be grown if placed in the right environment and provided with a support network.
so i think it becomes interesting because it really does i think force you to start thinking about the limits of free will even on as basic a level as the human personality. i think the fact that he becomes such a different character based on player choice, that his end morality is so hugely dependent on player choice, is uhhh. a big part of what the devs were going for probably.
it makes a lot of people really uncomfortable to acknowledge some bad people would be good people if literally nothing changed except they had a good support network and different circumstances. especially because it means the opposite is also true. which is even more uncomfortable.
you know that part in the beginning of fellowship of the ring where gandalf is talking about how gollum is ultimately only like that because of the ring and gandalf thinks his story is sad? astarion is kinda like if they sexualized gollum.
Tw: mental health, drug abuse and seeking localized help.
***
Hey, friends back home in the UK, specifically Glasgow: does anyone have any experience with mental health facilities and or seeking psychiatric care either on or off of the NHS?
My brother has been experiencing what I can only define as a severe mental health crisis for the last five years but over the last six months it has progressed significantly.
He’s now running the gamut of sensory hallucinations, addiction (his GP prescribed him a massive dose of diazepam for his anxiety five years ago and my parents had no idea it’s meant for short term use and now he gets violent when he misses a dose) abusive and controlling behavior on his part, serious paranoia and what appears to be compulsive lying.
He’s called the police several times on my parents claiming they are drunk and abusing him, only for the police to show up and find my very sober, very clueless parents who were watching Top Gear reruns in the living room utterly baffled that anything was wrong.
He’s even called me and told me he’s being ‘attacked’ and when I called the house I find out from Mum that she trimmed his beard for him, at his request, and he screamed abuse at her the whole time and even injured her.
My parents have tried to get help for him—they even got a referral to the Priory from his GP, but the Priory have never returned any of their calls and I believe my mother has tried calling weekly for the last month.
It’s been destroying my elderly parents trying to care for him, on top of his already severe physical disabilities, but they’re at a breaking point. I’m at the point where I’m expecting to get a phone call from my godmother mother informing me there’s been a murder-suicide.
My mother even got social work to agree to a week of respite care for him in a facility just so she and my dad could rest and deal with my dad’s ongoing cancer testing, but my brother’s consent is required to go into one of those facilities and he is refusing, stating it’s part of a plan to kill him.
I’m already planning to go home to see my father due to his lung cancer diagnosis, but I need help. I need to handle my brother but I haven’t been home in almost a decade and I’m out of the loop on where to go and who to contact.
Here I’d have my pick of facilities I could try and send him to, but in the UK, I’m lost.
What do I do? Help? Please?
I’m not well enough for this but I need to try.
In the US an emergency room would be able to get him an involuntary commitment; certain places have cops trained on mental health crises and they can get him one too, but you have to be careful. I don’t know what the UK is like, but there should be an equivalent for someone having a dangerous break with reality.
Anybody that can add to this?
He’s been taken into the A&E department multiple times for this, fully in the grip of paranoid delusions—words the medical providers have used, they have called him delusional—but they always send him home because they deem he’s not a risk.
I don’t know if it’s his inability to move unaided or what but they just say he’s not a risk. I’ve been on FaceTime when it’s happened.
I’ve tried telling my mother she needs to refuse discharge into her care but she always caves because the doctors tell her she’s “wasting their time.”
I suspect I’m going to have to be there in the room to get results because I’m not afraid to make myself annoying as fuck. But it’s desperate in the meantime and I’m just… trying to find places that aren’t the ER…
Tw: mental health, drug abuse and seeking localized help.
***
Hey, friends back home in the UK, specifically Glasgow: does anyone have any experience with mental health facilities and or seeking psychiatric care either on or off of the NHS?
My brother has been experiencing what I can only define as a severe mental health crisis for the last five years but over the last six months it has progressed significantly.
He’s now running the gamut of sensory hallucinations, addiction (his GP prescribed him a massive dose of diazepam for his anxiety five years ago and my parents had no idea it’s meant for short term use and now he gets violent when he misses a dose) abusive and controlling behavior on his part, serious paranoia and what appears to be compulsive lying.
He’s called the police several times on my parents claiming they are drunk and abusing him, only for the police to show up and find my very sober, very clueless parents who were watching Top Gear reruns in the living room utterly baffled that anything was wrong.
He’s even called me and told me he’s being ‘attacked’ and when I called the house I find out from Mum that she trimmed his beard for him, at his request, and he screamed abuse at her the whole time and even injured her.
My parents have tried to get help for him—they even got a referral to the Priory from his GP, but the Priory have never returned any of their calls and I believe my mother has tried calling weekly for the last month.
It’s been destroying my elderly parents trying to care for him, on top of his already severe physical disabilities, but they’re at a breaking point. I’m at the point where I’m expecting to get a phone call from my godmother mother informing me there’s been a murder-suicide.
My mother even got social work to agree to a week of respite care for him in a facility just so she and my dad could rest and deal with my dad’s ongoing cancer testing, but my brother’s consent is required to go into one of those facilities and he is refusing, stating it’s part of a plan to kill him.
I’m already planning to go home to see my father due to his lung cancer diagnosis, but I need help. I need to handle my brother but I haven’t been home in almost a decade and I’m out of the loop on where to go and who to contact.
Here I’d have my pick of facilities I could try and send him to, but in the UK, I’m lost.
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