Aw, Sweetheart. This Is Adorable.

Traces of coca and nicotine found in Egyptian mummies - WTF fun facts

Humans are awesome

That third option is how I interpret it, particularly given the line ‘It had taken all her strength, to bind his spirit to his body until the healers could do their work.’

The word ‘bind’ certainly has that implication. 

Besides, she wasn’t actually healing him, just holding on to him, so it doesn’t contradict previous world building. The books also assert that magic is life and vice versa, and Sandry has the ability to see and weave pure magic. 

There’s also this bit: 

‘Instead, she sorted through her magic until she found a particular cord. Shaped from her own power, it connected her to Duke Vedris. “Uncle,” she said clearly, feeling her voice roll down that magical tie, “I want to be let in, please.” [.......]  Overhead, on the next story of the building, glass windows swung outward on hinges. The duke [...] leaned out. “My dear, this is not the kind of think a young girl should see,” called Vedris. He could hear Sandry when she used the power she had bound to him, but without magic of his own, he could not reply the same way.’

So we know that Sandry already has bound some of her magic to her uncle, presumably making it easier to attempt such an undertaking as binding his spirit to his body.

Question to other Circle fans:

Something that always puzzled me in Magic Steps was how Sandry kept her uncle alive despite having no healing magic. We know that ambient magic can’t be used like academic healing magic on humans. Is this a “Sandry is just special” thing or a “Toss lots of magic at the problem” thing or could Sandry have used her powers to “tether” Duke Vedris to real life?

Re-reading Briar’s book, I think I like the latter option as it fits more with the world-building.

Thoughts?

When I was four years old, I told my mom I wanted to be a flower scientist when I grew up, and she told me that was called a botanist, and then I went around telling everyone I wanted to be a botanist including all the neighbors and my preschool teachers

Floral triceratops by Vallavica

16th February, 2021. [Video: Pablo Hasél being arrested by policemen and taken inside a police car while he shouts “mai ens aturaran, mai ens callaran, mort a l’estat feixista! mort a l’estat feixista!”, which means “they will never stop us, they will never shut us up, death to the fascist state! death to the fascist state!” in the Catalan language]

The rap singer from Lleida (Catalonia) Pablo Hasél being arrested for the lyrics of his songs and the content of his tweets. He has been sentenced to 2 years, 4 months and 15 days of prison for “glorifying terrorism” and “insulting the [Spanish] monarchy” according to the Spanish judicial system.

He refused to turn himself in, and instead locked himself with comrades who showed up inside the University of Lleida, as they barricaded the doors and people blocked the access of the policemen in solidarity. After 2 hours displacing the protestors, the anti-riot police accessed the third floor, where Hasél was, and took him directly to prison.

Spain is the country in the world with the most artists sentenced to jail (source: The state of artistic freedom 2020, FreeMuse).

More than Turkey, more than Iran, more than China. Spain, and disproportionately national minorities (Catalans and Basques). And the European Union allows it.

In Spain, you can go on TV and openly give support to fascism, you can send death threats to people from national minorities and/or political dissidents, you can do the fascist salute on the streets and shout “viva Franco” and “arriba España” while circling cultural centres of national minorities (mostly Catalans and Basques) and calling for the need to “shed their blood”, the Spanish army can call for the execution of 26 million citizens … but you cannot take a stand against the Spanish monarchy (remember Josep Valtònyc is still on exile for having said “the Bourbons [dynasty of the Spanish monarchy] are thieves”) and wish them the guillotine.

People like Pablo Hasél and Valtònyc were not even famous when they released these “criminal” songs, they were just people like any other, with access to internet and something to say. Spain came for them like it can come for any of us, like it came for our parents and grandparents. Like they came for Adri, for Tamara Carrasco, for the Altsasua boys, for Dani Gallardo, for Jordi Cuixart and Jordi Sànchez, for our democratically-elected government still in jail and exile, for everyone arrested and threatened and beaten by the police in strikes and demonstrations, for the people who tweeted jokes about the death of Carrero Blanco (the fascist admiral who could’ve been Franco’s successor as fascist dictator if he had not been killed by ETA), for the people who posted on Facebook comments against the Spanish police’s brutality on Catalan people… People like you, people like me.

LLIBERTAT PABLO HASÉL

one time I was in new york city and I walked into a random store at 7pm and I saw someone that looked familiar, but I thought, no way. but then we were in the same aisle and he looked at me the same way I looked at him, like, ‘I know you’. it took us a moment to recognize each other since it had been a few years but we were friends in my freshman year of college.

when I was a teenager I made some friends on a cruise and the night before the cruise ended I realized I hadn’t gotten their contact info, so I spent a while scouring the decks for them, and didn’t succeed. two days later I figured I would never see them again, and then we ran into each other in a market in Athens. in a city of more than half a million people, we happened to cross paths.

as a kid I had a friend, and then our moms met and recognized each other - turned out she and I had gone to the same daycare, and had even had little playdates as one-year-olds.

these things never cease to amaze me.

excuse me if this makes very little sense as i have been drinking and it is almost eleven pm on a wednesday but today i walked into my favourite cafe and the frenchman who makes my coffee, didier, told me about how he had just discovered that the woman who had left as I came in happened to live on the same street as his brother, “isn’t the world remarkable?” he said to me. I laughed, “don’t you wonder about how many people you meet on a daily basis that you have something in common with without realising?”

Tonight I had beers with a couple of guys, they were old friends. “How long have you known each other?” I asked. They laughed, “guess!” Turns our they shared a wetnurse, a connection their mothers didn’t discover until they became friends years later.

As I walked to the train I texted my housemate to ask where she was, if she wanted to meet up before we headed home. Suddenly I heard my name called as she ran across the station towards me. “Oh how strange, I just messaged you!”

Sometimes the world feels very large and our differences seem unbridgeable. Other days we run into one another over and over again, and I am glad to recognise friends.

....this sounds weird, but this post kind of invaded one of my dreams last night. So in my dream, I was trying to explain this whole problem with reconstructions to someone. I was trying and failing to describe how a penguin’s skeleton has a very long neck and actually looks a great deal like a plesiosaur’s skeleton and the implications of that, and then I didn’t have to try and explain anymore because a giant plesiosaur-penguin was swimming through the air toward us.

(After that, there was a thing with a restaurant that was inside a glass bubble and then I had to fold a parachute in a specific way so that when I opened it after jumping out of a plane it would be hard to see, so no one would know I was alive and I could fake my death for mission. And then I had to say goodbye to my friend who had just arrived for a performance but I couldn’t tell her it was the last time I would ever see her, and then I wandered off into the woods with other agents and my specially folded parachute in my backpack. There was a bunch more stuff after that, but it’s not very relevant and I’ve probably already shared way too much of my weird dreams.)

I feel kind of bad for the new girl marrying into my family. not because there’s anything wrong with my family, to clarify, but just because there’s so many of us and even we have trouble keeping track of each other.

like, I met her and she was super sweet, and then she asked her fiancé how he was related to me, and he just kinda stared at me and said, “um... I’m not sure, actually. I don’t know. we’re... cousins?”

and then we started trying to remember how we were related. eventually I was like, “his mother and my grandmother - no, I mean, his grandmother and my great-grandmother were sisters. right?” I say to my cousin. he shrugs. “I don’t know,” he says. “You probably know better than me. that makes us, what, third cousins?” and I’m like, “I think it’s second cousins once removed...” (tbh, I’m not actually sure if my understanding of the family labeling system is correct.)

and this girl is just looking at us, a little nonplussed, because I’m at her bridal shower and her to-be husband isn’t even sure how he’s related to me, and there’s dozens of people at the party and not even all of us are there, and her wedding is literally next month and she is never going to remember all of us by then. if ever. (lol I still mix up some of my own cousins)

Something I find incredibly cool is that they’ve found neandertal bone tools made from polished rib bones, and they couldn’t figure out what they were for for the life of them. 

Until, of course, they showed it to a traditional leatherworker and she took one look at it and said “Oh yeah sure that’s a leather burnisher, you use it to close the pores of leather and work oil into the hide to make it waterproof. Mine looks just the same.” 

“Wait you’re still using the exact same fucking thing 50,000 years later???”

“Well, yeah. We’ve tried other things. Metal scratches up and damages the hide. Wood splinters and wears out. Bone lasts forever and gives the best polish. There are new, cheaper plastic ones, but they crack and break after a couple years. A bone polisher is nearly indestructible, and only gets better with age. The more you use a bone polisher the better it works.”

It’s just. 

50,000 years. 50,000. And over that huge arc of time, we’ve been quietly using the exact same thing, unchanged, because we simply haven’t found anything better to do the job.