Abysskisser - Thriving Best Hermit Style

For those who needed to hear it today

St Vincent, crooning. "New York isn't New York without you Björk".

Curious Archive’s newest video about the cultural history of unicorns draws a connection between the huge market of selling “unicorn horn” in sixteenth century Europe and the modern presence of the unicorn as a commercialized symbol across unicorn stickers and unicorn toys and unicorn breakfast cereals and comes to the conclusion, “From the moment we first captured the unicorn, we’ve been selling it”

And I had to stare at the wall for a bit

“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

On April 16th 2025 the US federal government has proposed to change the interpretation of the endangered species act so that it no longer protects habitat.

This is open for public comment until the end of May 19th. Please comment and make your voice heard.

Wildlife need their habitat. If the ESA redefines harm so that habitat is no longer protected, the implications for wildlife would be catastrophic.

Barn Owl (Tyto alba), fledgling chick hauling ass across a lawn, as it was learning to fly, family Tytonidae, order Strigiformes, Netherlands

photograph by Hannie Heere

The 10 minute kilometer and 5 minute kilometer thing has been driving me crazy! A 10 minute kilometer is so slow! And a 5 minute kilometer is not very impressive. Considering they are in the cohort, I just find it baffling and haven't been able to decide if those numbers were chosen on purpose to show the effect necromancy has on their bodies like you said or if they're just numbers Tamsyn thought sounded like an impressive difference. Your post makes me think for the first time that it is probably the former, though I would still expect a bit more from Marta than a 5 minute kilometer.

Periodically, I remember how absolutely fucked up the necromancers in TLT are meant to look. Like, necromancy does an absolute number on people physically.

Harrow is "rather small and feeble".

Necromantic Ianthe is "the starved shadow" of her non-necromantic twin.

Our first description of Palamedes is "a rangy, underfed young man" who is "gaunt".

Silas is "knife-faced...He had a necromancer build."

Ianthe parodies make-over scenes in House novels with "if the hero’s a necromancer it’ll be described like, ‘His frailty made his unearthly handsomeness all the more ephemeral'"

Jod acknowledges to Wake that even small children with aptitude would look odd to non-House eyes: "“I have access to any number of cute pictures of necromantic toddlers with their first bone. They don’t make for fat-cheeked roly-poly babies, but they’ve got a certain something."

In As Yet Unsent, Judith brags about her previous physical fitness: "I could run a kilometre in ten minutes, which was among the fastest for my adept group in the junior reserves." Which is about double the time you might expect for a physically fit woman her age.

In non-necromancer-friendly New Rho, Harrow's body is mistaken for a child's and has to be explained as a result of starvation and trauma to seem plausible: "Pyrrha explained without missing a beat that what with everything Nona had gone through she had been ill and still didn’t eat very much, which was why she was so knobbly and undergrown. The nice lady said that yes, many of the children had problems like that, but it was still hard to imagine Nona was anywhere over fourteen, wasn’t it?"

Tamsyn Muir's descriptions of the Canaan House gang on Tumblr back this up: "Judith is somewhat less completely scrawny than other necromancers on the cast, though she should be less built than Marta is", Palamedes is "seriously underfed" and "bony", Harrow is "scrawny".

And that's just what I can think of off the top of my head - I'm sure there's more.

Anyway, necromancers aren't slender in a conventionally attractive way, they're gaunt in a concerning way...and probably the only reason no one instantly clocked that Coronabeth wasn't a necromancer was because they all just thought it was par for the course that a Third House princess would have had a lot of plastic surgery flesh magic.

it's healthy for academics to have professional feuds. enrichment activity

Been talking about this with friends so I present to you, the cursed spectrum of media literacy

just having a normal time drawing normal things (😭)