Completely different part of the world, but some of the birds in the top panel remind me of figures on the Sutton Hoo purse lid: https://goo.gl/images/jXHuNU
I’ve had snakes tossed at me twice myself. Once during an animal demonstration at the zoo when the keeper holding a corn snake had a sudden and very intense hiccup, and once on an extraordinaily ill-fated middle school backpacking trip when one of the other girls thought she was picking up a necklace in the bushes and instead picked up a garter snake and panicked.
I’ve also had spiders, birds, cats, lizards and on one particularly memorable occasion, a small shark lobbed at me on acident. It happens, and cake is an appropriate way to apologize.
A shark?!
So when I was a kid, my ADHD was… much more visible to others than it is now- lots of physical stimming, climbing on stuff, starting a sentence on one topic and ending on another while leaving out the middle, poor impulse control and emotions at roughly 5000%. I didn’t get into trouble per se- I did well in school and didn’t get into fights but I was an extremely ODD child and probably very difficult for the more neurotypical kids to get along with.
This wasn’t an excuse for Anna to constantly tease and bully me, calling me things like “Retard” and “Freak” and organizing my social ostricization, and it DEFINITELY wasn’t an excuse for her mom, leader of the local girl scout troop to tell my mother, in front of me, that “She needs to get that condition treated so I know she isn’t a danger to the other girls before we can let her join.”
So my mom did what any reasonably pissed off woman would do for her extremely odd child and enrolled me in every Science and Outdoor summer camp she could, which is how I got to go to Marine Science Camp, which is hands down the best fucking thing I ever went to.
It was run out of a university research outpost to fund and get free labor a bunch of marine research in the San Francisco Bay, which means instead of being in a disused daycare with a bunch of bored highschoolers, I was hanging out at a combination marine science museum and spceimen zoo with a bunch of hyperinvested grad students. There was a gray whale skeleton, an above ground pool full of leopard sharks, the fiberglass dummy from Free Willy that one of the professors had stolen off the studio lot, and a semi-functional robot submarine we could drive around the part of the bay the camp was on. There were animal dissections, mucking about in tidepools, and lessons on the higher ed aspacts of marine bio, whcih was fantastic for my hyperfixating ass and the other 20-odd kids, pretty much none of whom could reasonably be called “neurotypical”
The BEST part was every week we’d go out on the university research boat and do the grad student’s transects for them. (A transect, for those of you that aren’t huge nerds, is when you pick out a designated swath of enviornment, AND COUNT EVER SINGLE SPECIES IN IT. fun time!) I didnlt KNOW thats what we were doing until years later when we went to do transects for AP Bio, but when you’re eight and the camp grad students say “Wanna run a net through this section of bay then identify every single animal in this bucket?” which means you get to handle the fish and Do A Real Science, YEAH THAT SOUNDS FUN BRIAN. HIT ME WITH THAT DICHTOTOMUS GUIDE AND A BUCKET OF PERCH.
So we’re out on the boat, hauling in the net and it’s… unusually heavy. this usually means we picked up a bunch of seaweed but whatever. Grad student Brian is getting us all hype about the net becuase he and his slipped disc are real glad he’s got a dosen kids to pull this in. He grabs the bag at the end with all the fish and whatnot in it the dump it into the sorting tank before the job of identifying everything is farmed out to us, and the bag is THRASHING.
“Looks like we got a shark!” says Brian, wildly excited by this. You never grow out of your love of sharks. Sure enough when the bag was opened, out spilled a multitude of anchovies, perch, small midwater fish and a four-and-a-half-foot-long Sevengill Shark.
It looked pretty much like this one (image source)
“HOLY SHIT.” Said Brian, swearing in front of the children becuase during the 80′s the sevengill had nearly gone extinct in The Bay, and this was the mid-ninties, so seeing them again was very exciting. “WE GOTTA TAG THIS THING.” He said, grappling the shark as it tried to make the best of the situation and hork down as much perch as possible. He got ahold of it, and started to jog up the boat to get it to the Big Tank but since he was ingoring Boat safety by not holding onto the rail AND running, he slipped on the stairs, probably cracked his patella, and accidentally lobbed the shark into the air.
Sharks are, strictly speakling, hydrodynamic and not areodynamic, but thier sleek bodies and fine tooth-like scale also do an excellent job letting them sail through the air on the rare occasions they are accentally lobbed at crowds of children by overexcited grad students, and the sevengill arced gracefully though the air, tail flapping in a vain attempt to steer, and landed nose-first, directly into my right eye socket.
A Sevengill is not an insubstantial animal and I was a pathetic waif of a child so the impact knocked me clean off my feet, but I had exactly enough presence of mind to think that I didn’t want the poor shark hitting the rough deck surface or flopping overboard before we could tag it for Science, so I managed to wrap my little arms around the thing, cradling it against my chest as I slammed into the deck, the open mouth of the extremely confused fish cutting a very dramatic slice into my cheek.
The next few minutes were a blur of screaming children, screaming adults and flailing shark but it got into the big tank safely and I managed to convince the grad students it hadn’t bit me that badly as I stood there, blood gushing down my cheek and onto my shirt.
Eventually things calmed down and Brian hobbled over to me and, after apologizing roughly twenty times for throwing a shark at me, asked if I would like to help the adults tag it, since I’d been so Brave?
WOULD I?
It was to my immense glee that I’d be going right after Anna in out baby’s-first-powerpoint-presentations about What We Did That Summer, so once she finished boring everyone with her trip to see a cousin get married in tenesee or something, I got to go up and show everyone the picture of me, surrounded by half a dozen grad students, holding up a shark almost as big as me, with the radio tracker I’d personally gotten to secure to it’s extremely bewildered head, still bleeding, and tell everyone about CATCHING AND TAGGING SHARKS FOR SCIENCE, AND SOMETIMES GETTING BITTEN, A LITTLE.
I never did get an apolgy cake from Brian but that vengence was so much sweeter.
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Took me a moment to realize ODD was “odd” in all-caps for emphasis; I read it out loud as O.D.D. and spouse and I then spent thirty seconds trying to figure out what NNT state it was an acronym for.
no but galaxy quest is legitimately the best movie ever
it’s a love letter to fandom — it totally subverts the “gross man-child in the basement” perception of a fanboy and it’s the fans’ dedication to the show that saves the day
i repeat: the fandom saves everyone’s lives
the omega-13 is such a cool idea like it tosses out the paradoxes involved in time travel by so sharply limiting the amount of time you can go back: it only gives you enough time to undo one terrible mistake, and only if it’s so bad and so huge that you realize immediately how bad it is
like no this is a parody movie but it has a smarter plot and more interesting characters and more genuine emotion than like ninety percent of serious sci-fi movies
tony shaloub spends the whole movie high as balls
the aliens are actually, you know, aliens and the reason they look human and speak english is actually addressed and justified
the hero that comes in at the last second to save the ship and the thermians and the whole crew is a teenage fanboy who succeeds because he’s a fan do you understand how amazing that is like patrick stewart initially refused to watch the movie because it looked like it would be cruel to the fans but then he was almost in tears when he actually saw it because it got fandom right and it’s all about the fans
no but the whole plot is centered around people (and aliens) being inspired by fictional heroes and believing in them and using that belief to give them strength and hope and going to great lengths to create amazing things or work up beautiful, accurate theories out of nothing more than love that’s amazing
Essentially the premise of this movie is “storytelling is humanity’s greatest and most useful invention.” Also, Enrico Colantoni’s performance as Mathesar, the Thermian leader, is brilliant — he never once uses the facial expression or tone of voice that a human would use under the circumstances, and yet you recognize and believe every emotion he shows.
hey remember in 2016 when clown attack panic was a thing? and 2 years later it’s managed to leave no lasting indent in the American psyche, how does that work
bruh theres some guy who keeps track of all the mass clown incidents in the united states and it happens like every 20 years its fuckin weird
are you fucking telling me It is based on true events
I want to see an animated cartoon in this style (they’d probably have to simplify the folds in the clothing a bit, although if Sunbow could handle the Transformers’ character designs in the mid-1980s, today’s animators can probably make those drapes and ruffles work.)
I was just talking to someone on another platform about how people/genres tend to get associated in the imagination with certain decades, but the reality is more complex (they posted WWI poetry by a young Bertold Brecht, I found some early twentieth-century footage of Monet still alive and still painting lily ponds.)
Mooncustafer 