death tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

etirabys:

I googled “how to become a fossil” because I’ve been reading about what archaeology and genetic analysis tells us about ancient humans from their remains, and I feel left out. I, too, wish to be dug up, admired, and analyzed by people unimaginably different from me.  While looking into this I hit the motherlode of good science articles re: informativeness and tone on this topic. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180215-how-does-fossilisation-happen

However, if you want your remains to become a fossil that lasts for millions of years, then you really want minerals to seep through your bones and replace them with harder substances. This process, known as ‘permineralisation’, is what typically creates a fully-fledged fossil. It can take millions of years.

As a result, you might skip the coffin. Bones permineralise most rapidly when mineral-rich water can flow through them, imbuing them with things like iron and calcium. A coffin might keep the skeleton nicely together, but it would interfere with this process.

There is a way a coffin might work, though. Mike Archer, a palaeontologist at the University of New South Wales, suggests burial in a concrete coffin filled with sand and with hundreds of 5mm holes drilled into the sides. This then needs to be buried deep enough that groundwater can pass through.

Archer even suggests getting buried with copper strips and nickel pellets if you fancy fossilised bones and teeth with a nice blue-green colour to them.

I love all the scientists interviewed for this piece.

5. Get discovered

Now you need to think about the potential for rediscovery.

If you want somebody to chance upon your carefully preserved fossil one day, you need to plan for burial in a spot that currently is low enough to accumulate the necessary sediments for deep burial – but that will eventually be pushed up again. In other words, you need a place with uplift where weathering and erosion will eventually scour off the surface layers, exposing you.

One good spot might be the Mediterranean Sea, Syme says; it’s getting shallower as Africa is pushed towards Europe. Other small, inland seas that will fill with sediment are good bets, too.

“Perhaps the Dead Sea,” she says. “The high salt would preserve and pickle you.”

Tags:

#death tw #interesting #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

abbadon-lordofthevoid:

prokopetz:

frogs-in-a-fog:

prokopetz:

Concept: immortal vampire scion of a dying royal line going to increasingly desperate lengths to get their various relations married off in a way that keeps themselves as far from the line of succession as possible, because the peculiar interaction between holy symbols and the vampiric condition means that if they ever actually inherit the divine right of kings, they’ll immediately explode.

So just… A really old guy forcing all of his grandkids to marry each other?

Precisely the opposite. Keeping it all in the family (so to speak) is a strategy for minimising competing claims to the succession; our hypothetical vampire wants there to be as many competing claims as possible, so that if one cadet branch dies out or gets delegitimised, there will be others to take up the slack.

If they’re the scion, they’ll have to go to some lengths to avoid it… depending on where they fall in the lineage. But, if it’s the English monarchy, they can just profess Roman Catholicism. Immediate disqualification.

I was about to propose some complicated metaphysical reason why that option isn’t on the table; upon consideration, however, it’s much funnier if there’s no reason it wouldn’t work, but the vampire would literally rather die than become Catholic.

Tags:

#vampires #story ideas I will never write #incest cw #death tw

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

weaver-z:

If I could summon exactly one person from the dead, it would be Harry Houdini. I just think it would be funny to piss him off that much

 

weaver-z:

The second person I’m going to summon is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Really rub the salt in the wound there

Tags:

#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #high context jokes #(maybe; not sure how widely known the context is) #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

penny-anna:

Bilbo was declared dead while he was away in the Hobbit (and had to do a bunch of paperwork to get declared alive again) but there’s no indication he was formally declared dead after leaving the Shire, even though most people assumed he had died.

Therefore I posit: having a missing person declared dead in the Shire requires the consent of their next of kin. Whoever Bilbo’s next of kin was at the time of the Hobbit (possibly Otho? I’m not sure) had him declared dead at the first opportunity but Frodo refused to ever do it.

Frodo had anxious hobbit bureaucrats knocking on his door every couple of years like ‘Mr Baggins… blease… it’s been 10 years… he was eleventy-one… can we fill out his death certificate yet’ and Frodo was like ‘absolutely not’.

Early on he genuinely couldn’t bring himself too but after a while it was more that he enjoyed irritating the local magistrate’s office than anything else.

 

61below:

I raise you: the hobbitish bureaucracy has no means to re-declare someone dead. They had no precedent to declare someone who was once-dead dead again. They would need the Thain, the Mayor, and the Master of Buckland to agree to changing the statute, and since the Thain and the Master are too amused by the whole henclucking that they haven’t gotten round to it just yet.

 

telltalelily:

I’m upping the stakes with: last time Bilbo was declared dead when he was, in fact, not dead, they removed the law stating that you can have someone declared dead without a body, so when Bilbo left (happily aware of this legal loophole and snickering) he could never become legally dead again.

 

penny-anna:

I am loving the implication here that Bilbo can literally never die in the eyes of the law. He’d love that.

 

apathetic-revenant:

a hobbit parent telling their kids the story of Mad Baggins and being like “thanks to a loophole in hobbit law he’s technically still alive today”

a hobbit child misinterprets this and lies awake at night worrying that Mad Baggins is still out there and will appear in their room without warning

 

cheeseanonioncrisps:

Alternatively: the laws for declaring somebody dead if they’re missing for long enough are still in place, but the magistrates are just refusing to enforce them in this particular case.

After all, last time they declared Bilbo Baggins dead— which involved filling out all the paperwork necessary to declare somebody dead without a body— he had the rudeness to show up again, forcing them to do a lot more paperwork, and this time with an indignant Bilbo having a go at them while they did it.

As a result, the magistrates have decided that they’re not going to declare Bilbo Baggins dead a second time unless they have a body, a coroners reprt explaining the cause of death, and a three day wake to make sure that he doesn’t get up and walk away again.

Centuries later, hobbit parents tell their children that Mad Baggins is forever gone from the shire— at least until the day when somebody is stupid enough to declare him legally dead, at which point legend states that he will immediately come marching back, demanding an explanation.

 

algorizmi:

@rosefulevelyns

 

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

The King Under The Mountain will come back at the hour of his kingdom’s greatest need

The Hobbit Under The Hill will come back when some punk dares to say he’s gone for good

Tags:

#Middle Earth #death tw #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #fun with loopholes

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

glumshoe:

I had a dream that I lived in a town on the edge of reality. There was a map showing the location of the town in spacetime, and it was depicted as teetering on the edge of the event horizon of a funnel-shaped warp in reality. Like light a certain distance away from a black hole, we were unable to escape the influence of the warp, but not drawn in by it completely, either.

Our proximity to Unreality conferred many advantages, and we were able to do things in our town that weren’t actually possible. We could survive fatal accidents and walk away without a scratch. Things that were lost forever were found again, and sometimes, if you didn’t think about it too directly, failures transformed into successes just like that. It was as though thought itself was a physical substance that could bend the shape of the world in our favor. Life was good in the little town of Event Horizon, where things always seemed to work out and Lady Luck lived on our side.

But Event Horizon also experienced “reality-quakes”. Now and then the fabric of spacetime would ripple, and shockwaves would rock our little town violently. Sometimes things would shake loose and get drawn in to the Unreality, and even people could be lost this way. They quakes weren’t common, but they seemed to be occurring with more frequency, leading to fears that we were becoming unmoored in spacetime and might lose the equilibrium that allowed us to survive and take advantage of the flexibility of reality.

Thought could stabilize things, if we projected our minds as physical forces to hold things in place. You could cast your thoughts out as a net and pull against the draw of Unreality. But that only worked if we were prepared and braced ourselves against the quake ahead of time, and people needed to work and eat and sleep and go to school. There was no way that everyone could be on anchoring duty all the time.

That’s why we had a lottery. Every twenty years, one among us would be selected to by the community to be the Achor for the entire town—a full-time psychic resistance against entropy. The Anchor would enter a trance state and project their mind out to touch every structure, every tree, every pebble, every person in Event Horizon, and hold them there. Constantly. For twenty years.

People would come to tend to the Anchor, to feed and bathe them and keep them comfortable, but the Anchor rarely became lucid enough to recognize them. It was a vital, respected, honorable position, but there was no glory in it. If you found out you had been selected to be the next Anchor, your family would grieve for you as though you had died. If you had children, they would be taken care of in a princely fashion as wards of the state, and your family would be honored and want for nothing, because even though your assignment was only twenty years, former Anchors did not tend to live for very long. They’d be made comfortable and lavished with good things, but their life energy would be sapped, and they’d fade away quickly.

My dream was 90% exposition and very little in-the-moment action, but I had just discovered that I would be the new Anchor, and I was not happy about it. The most vivid action scene I remember was standing in my kitchen staring at breakfast cereal boxes on a shelf and touching them with my mind, feeling every grain of cereal within and thinking, “Even this? Even this?”

Anyway, thanks brain, that was cool.

 

sillywafflefries:

acd3d1a22e53ce86ec3031c772f5e7d94fc07b8a

c9360c8ef70c1a7bd014f08a57a09db5533a59f4

 

glumshoe:

Oh shit!!!

Tags:

#dreams #storytime #apocalypse cw #death tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what

These things the Fae would like you to remember

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

listing-to-port:

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
Your world is very big beside our own.
We are ashes crushed from cinders, one last ember
Left to smoulder through the Winter all alone;
The tower in the rowan-grove is leaning;
The tunnels from the blasted oak run under
The new estate, its solemn children dreaming
Of the slow descent of ravens like a wonder:
But we may not yet survive the next December.

These things the fae would like you to remember:
That straying from the path is never wise;
The beasts out there don’t care who they dismember;
Our night, as yours, contains a thousand eyes;
That wisdom is a salve against adventure;
That the knight who rings the bell at set of sun
Knows a whispered spell to save you from indenture;
That dismemberment can sometimes be undone;
That the dragon leaves the tapestry at midnight;
Pull the red thread, not the green, behind her tail;
That the ravelled thread will vanish in the sunlight;
That the witch has only smoke behind her veil:
Tonight the hunt will have another member.

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
The fruit is bittersweet and tastes of freedom
From those things you do not want to set you free;
Some say it is a trap, and you should heed them,
But some find though it a self they need to be;
That there is no riddle here without a catch,
No power so strong you cannot still entreat it;
That the tower’s wicket-gate is on the latch;
And if you do not want the fruit, don’t eat it;
That our time in sparkling runnels and in torrents
And in floods and gyres and mournful doldrums flows;
It will loose you from your hours’ weary warrents;
It will teach you things that every forest knows:
As distant from Midsummer as September.

These things the Fae would like you to remember:
That gold without its glamour is just metal;
That you have bled and burned from iron too;
That beneath the hemlock-umbel and the nettle
Is the earth that claims us all as well as you:
The gentle earth of May knows no November.
These things the Fae would like you to remember.

Tags:

#fae #poetry #death tw

in the shadows

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

whetstonefires:

whetstonefires:

hey guess who has two thumbs and just spent 5 hours straight writing another batman AU?

–

Batman wasn’t a person.

He faked it very well. When the League gathered, the line of his mask against pale skin looked natural and human, a little more perfectly fitted than the Flash’s but not quite as perfect as Green Lantern’s, which was an energy projection and not a real object and thus lay against his face flawlessly, without shift or gap.

His mouth didn’t bend into many expressions and his body language wasn’t voluble, but the emotive gestures that he did make were pretty normal. The rare smile seemed honest. He had a heartbeat, perfectly steady. His shadow (almost) always matched the shape that was blocking the light.

The stories that came out of Gotham, about the Bat—those could be exaggerations, born of terror and manipulated perception. Clark, of all people, knew how much you could convince people to believe things that weren’t real, because they made a better story. Even the scraps of photography and film showing a towering thing of black fog and long fangs could have been some clever trick with projectors.

The fact that Superman couldn’t see through his suit just meant it was well made.

He’d had to pool his observations with Diana and J’onn before he’d been sure he wasn’t imagining things. But Martian Manhunter knew shapeshifting, and said the block against his mind when he tried to touch Batman’s thoughts did not feel quite human. And Superman knew what posing as human looked like. And Wonder Woman knew truth, and its absence.

Batman wasn’t human. Which wasn’t the problem, of course.

The problem was that he was pretending he was. Pretending it rigorously in a situation where there shouldn’t be any need, unless he had something worse to hide. Pretending it in a way that overlaid on a certain inhuman predatory grace began to look very dangerous indeed.

Superman could see both things in him now, watching narrow-eyed through a roof into the room where Batman bent over a child’s bed, cape swirling up larger and darker than he let it get around them. The man and the hungry creature, flipping in and out of focus, neither ever gone but superimposed, like a trick picture that was two things at once.

Knuckles ghosted over the boy’s cheek, claws turned inward, and the child sighed softly, and sunk deeper into sleep. Batman’s heart wasn’t beating, but Clark could monitor the child’s vitals easily from here.

Batman drew his hand back, and tipped his head up—looking back at Superman as though the roof was no more a barrier to his perceptions than to Clark’s. Waited a beat, as if making sure his attention had been noticed, and then passed soundlessly between the other beds to the window, slid it open, and launched himself out through it and up onto the roof.

He didn’t bother to restrain himself to even a plausible approximation of human limits, now. The arm he reached up to the edge of the roof to pivot himself up by was too long, and his shoulder rotated further than it should have been able to, and he landed with impossible soundlessness in a billow of cape that was far, far larger than any cape that only reached to his heels should have managed, and which faded out at the edges into shadow. He knew he was found out.

Superman took the obvious invitation, and sunk down to join him. It was better, sitting like this, facing the same way on the ridgepole of a two-story building. Batman hadn’t hurt that child, that he could tell. There was no need to make this a confrontation.

“I don’t understand why,” he said at last. Out of deference for sleeping children, he kept his voice soft—he would have worried about a human being able to hear it, but now he knew he didn’t have to worry about that with Batman. “Why go to so much trouble to deceive us? We haven’t kept secret what we are. Not from you.”

Alien, alien, user of alien weapon, magical princess…

Batman sighed. He spoke almost as softly as Clark had, and his voice sounded the same as ever, except for the fact that a human voice couldn’t get this quiet without falling into a whisper. “I’m not like you.” He turned.

He’d let some of the details of his human mask fall away—what must have been the exhaustively rendered texture of skin, the flakes of dry skin on chapping lips, a crease at the corner of his mouth that had suggested he scowled or smiled more, outside of his costume. There was no pretense of a jawbone, under the skin, though the jawline externally hadn’t changed. The cowl still looked like something he was wearing, but Clark knew it was not. It flexed like skin when Batman narrowed his blank white eyes and said, “I can see you know that.”

“You’ve visited that kid every day for weeks,” Clark said. “Why?”

Batman stared at him. “How long have you known?”

“Batman…”

“You’re confronting me now because you’re worried about my intentions toward Dick. He changed your mind about something. Ergo, you’ve been sitting on this for a while. How long have you known I wasn’t real?”

Keep reading

second part here!

Tags:

#fanfic #Batman #Superman #death tw #h/t kaylin881; reblogging version with link to part 2