Sometimes it’s possible to have too much determination.
A crazy little “today in history” fact for September 22nd.
Not Age of Sail, but too gloriously bizarre a piece of maritime-related history not to share.
Look it’s not our fault when divination is right.
Speaking of, I had somebody tell me that they shy away from divination because they tried it at a party once, a death was predicted, and soon enough did happen. Goodness, it is not a fault of the prediction.
Honestly. Don’t fault the messenger.
Helen Duncan is a fantastically interesting bullshit merchant from the past and this is but one chapter in her weird, weird life.
Helen began her career as a psychic while she was still in high school, making spooky predictions about the future and generally being a drama queen. This would be like her whole theme throughout her life. But it wasn’t until she got married to her husband, who was 100% supportive of the whole psychic thing, that mediumship became her main gig. Helen’s thing - like her big fancy showstopper that she’d pull out at her seances - was the ability to produce ectoplasm, as well as fully-formed spirits. And fortunately, we have photos of those spirits!
Pictured: some definitely real ghosts.
These pictures were taken by a suspicious photographer who promptly called bullshit and passed his work on to some Legitimate Spiritualists, who theorized that Helen’s ectoplasm was made of a mix of cheesecloth, egg white, and toilet paper, which she would swallow and then regurgitate dramatically. Sometimes she would stick faces cut out from magazines into her ecto-puke, to create bonus ghosts. Samples obtained with Helen’s begrudging permission by the National Laboratory of Psychical Research confirmed their suspicions.
Other very hilarious episodes from the career of Helen Duncan:
- the time she produced a little girl ghost named Peggy and somebody grabbed Peggy and Peggy turned out to be made out of an undershirt
- the time a white-shrouded apparition showed up and an undercover cop was like “wot’s all this then” and the white-shrouded figure turned out to be Helen under a sheet and then she tried to hide the sheet
- the time her maid and husband straight up admitted she was faking
Oh, Helen.
The H.M.S. Barham is one of the more interesting episodes in Helen’s career because it almost seems legitimate. Almost.
i’m pretty sure “cats and humans can never have a bond as strong as a dog and a human” is just code for “i’ve never even tried to treat a cat correctly in my life”
Also dogs are man-made to be loving towards us. We didn’t selectively breed cats the same as we did dogs. I’m 100% a dog person but with them it’s more of, “this tool that I use is also very cute and I’ve removed 96% of its ability to not love me” whereas with cats it’s more, “Ah yes, this is my roommate Craig. He’s very nice to me unless I ignore his wants and treat him like an asshole.”
Cats are the only animal that domesticated itself. The bond between cats and humans are on the cats’ terms, not ours.
BLESS THIS POST
Anyway all fae are autistic
They rigidly adhere to rules!!
They can only lie by twisting the truth!!
They have strange habits!!
They are known for their beauty!! (Apparently autistic people are prettier??)
They like nature!! (I, an autistic person, like nature. It doesn’t have people in it.)
They can sometimes appear as different from who they are!! (An important skill for any autistic person in an ableist society, unfortunately.)
The entire idea of changelings?? They’re good with fiber arts, get distracted by counting things, and aren’t good with people!!
Autistic people are othered by society and we’re awesome and amazing just like fae!!
Just got back from seeing Deadpool 2, really enjoyed it and glad I stayed to the very end unlike some people in the cinema.
In Prince Caspian Susan literally throws an arrow fast and hard enough to pierce through a man’s armor and kill him. Savage.
What’s even more savage is the way she stabs the first guy in the crotch before using the same arrow to kill the second guy. Susan’s not messing around.
Turn on
“Susan the Gentle” was some kind of irony, or a placating turn, the way people used to call a the scary goddess “Good” and “Sweet”.
Please be good to me, please, just for today, be sweet.
Diplomats would come to Narnia and see her pretty face and sidle up to her, avoiding the High King, or the Wise Brother and think, this one they could manipulate.
They were wrong.
Her sweet smile hid the sharpest mind in the kingdom, and she had a sniper’s eye for weakness, and the absolute ruthlessness to take the shot.
They’d stumble away in a daze. Maybe some of them would be convinced she had been kind, too deep in shock to realize how thoroughly she unwound their plots and blunted their aims, yet to realize how they were metaphorically or literally bleeding out.
And Susan may have grown out of Narnia, may have become too much for it to contain. She left the bow and armor behind, she took up different weapons. But if you think for one moment that she used them less effectively, that she some how became less…
Well, you deserve what such ignorance will buy you.
This was always one of the only things that ever bothered me about Narnia, is that Susan “grew out of it” but you know what—I guarantee that was just what the others saw it as. I bet Susan never grew out of Narnia—she just knew that Narnia could survive with three kings and queens next time instead of four. She remembered it better than all the rest of them and made the conscious decision to apply her queenly skills to the world at hand—to the war at hand.
Susan grew into makeup and dresses because it was her way into the ballrooms where the important people made decisions and she could whisper in their ears. Susan didn’t go back to Narnia because she could see the world she was from going to ruin and knew she could help. Susan chose this world the second time around, and that makes her the bigger hero, bigger than Lucy this time around.
Because Susan chose to make the reality into something more like fantasy than the fantasy like the reality. We need more Lucy’s, but we need more Susan’s, too.