13-year-old boy must save the world by unraveling an ancient Mayan prophecy
Zane must not only grapple with a family history that connects him to the Mayan gods, but with newly acquired knowledge that his ancestry may have something to do with a leg deformity that requires he use a cane — not the greatest reality for a middle schooler.
Feisty heroes, tricky gods, murderous demons, and spirited giants are just some of the pleasures that await in this fresh and funny take on Mayan mythology, as rich and delicious as a mug of authentic hot chocolate
The Storm Runner comes out on September 18, 2018.
HOLY FUCK IF YOU DONT KNOW ABOUT THE RIORDAN PRESENTS BRAND YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HEAR ABOUT IT
(All of these screenshots are from the official riordan website btw)
THAT IS QUITE POSSIBLY THE GREATEST THING HE POSSIBLY COULD HAVE DONE WITH HIS POWER OMFG HE DIDNT KNOW ENOUGH ABOUT EACH MYTHOLOGY SO HE GOT WRITERS FROM THOSE CULTURES THIS IS THE FIRST TIME IVE HEARD OF ANY WRITER DOING SO
all right. so. this is a Harry Potter AU, in rambly and abbreviated form.
this is a version of events where, on the morning of November 1st, 1981, the police are called to a house in Surrey.
when they arrive, a large man with a red face and a moustache is waiting for them, brandishing a baby.
to be more accurate: he is brandishing a basket. the basket contains a baby.
he tells the police that his wife found the basket on their doorstep that morning. “Gave her the shock of her life,” he says, with a chuckle that does not seem the least bit sincere.
the police officers have a lot of questions about this, but the man does not have any useful answers. his wife, he tells them, is not in any shape to be interviewed. “she’s been poorly,” he says, “and we’ve got a baby of our own to worry about, keeping us up at all hours.”
the baby in the basket seems to be about a year old. he is cheerful, seems healthy aside from a cut on his forehead, with a crooked sticking plaster on it. he has startlingly green eyes.
there is no identifying information in the basket, except for a torn scrap of paper with ‘his name is Harry’ on it in a delicate hand.
there is nothing else to be done, it seems. the officers take baby Harry, and leave.
one of them comes back a few days later for a follow-up interview with the woman who found the baby. she seems a little fragile, and her own baby, in the next room, keeps up a constant shrieking tantrum the whole time the officer is there. “I’m sorry,” the woman says, with a brittle smile. “this has all been a bit much. I recently lost my sister, you see.”
Here’s the thing about people with good hearts. They give you excuses when you don’t explain yourself. They accept apologies you don’t give. They see the best in you when you don’t need them to. At your worst, they lift you up, even if it means putting their priorities aside. The word “busy” does not exist in their dictionary. They make time, even when you don’t. And you wonder why they’re the most sensitive people. You wonder why they’re the most caring people. You wonder why they are willing to give so much of themselves with no expectation in return. You wonder why their existence is not so essential to your well-being. It’s because they don’t make you work hard for the attention they give you. They accept the love they think they’ve earned and you accepted the love you think you’re entitled to. Let me tell you something. Fear the day when a good heart gives up on you. Our skies don’t become grey out of no where. Our sunshine does not allow the darkness to take over for no reason. A heart does not turn cold unless it’s been treated with coldness for a while.
Unsure where this came from, if not the palsied hands of the good Lord himself.
Simple premise: Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” slipped from 45 to 33 rpm. Nothing more; no studio trickery, no trip hop drum breaks. The guitar lopes back in and around itself. The bass becomes elastic, hot rubber. The violin stabs become sustained cello lines. The backing choir’s split harmony rattles around, slinking ghostly into the corner. And most importantly, Parton’s once-frantic vocal is transformed from bubblegum country scrawl into something approximating field holler reverence.
An already perfect song made transcendental..
Who would win in a battle for my immortal soul: the devil on his fiddle or “Jolene” at 33 RPM
So I work at a video game store in a mall and across the hall from us is this really nice suit shop. One day one of the guys came in an asked if they could use our microwave (the store they used to go to closed down) and we bargined for use of their bathroom in return since the mall bathrooms are like a 5 min trek.
So for like three months now we just have these men in really nice suits come in and talk while using our microwave and teach them about nerdy shit? Then I, the goblin king in various shitty tee shirts and paint stained pants, walk into their super expensive store and just get greeted with “Yo dude what’s good?” and talk about the pains of steaming silken dress shirts properly and it’s my favorite business interaction every day
A new jewelry store opened up right next to our store and when I used the bathroom today we were talking about it. I hate it on principle (they flooded our systems closet during building) and immediately both Suit Guys™ working went on mini rants. “Their suits are baggy as hell, I wouldn’t trust them to sell me a $9,000 ring when they can’t get a fitted jacket. They look so unprofessional, ” and “I saw one of the dude’s wearing a teal shirt. It’s fall, and you go with teal? At least get a color to match your store if you’re gonna ignore the seasons like that, Christ, but teal is awful.”
I told the guys (Teal Man is Spencer and Baggy-Suits Guy is Arnold) that this post got this popular and they’re both super excited.
Arnold: “Sweet, we’re internet famous!”
Spencer: “131,000?!”
Arnold: “What are notes? What does that mean, is that good?”
Arnold bargined that if it gets more notes, I can A: post a pic of them crouching with peace signs in front of the Notorious Jewelry Store and B: post the video of him long boarding down to Macy’s and back lmaoooo
So I’m a big fan of the idea that humans are “space orcs”, and today it got me thinking about something else.
Human birth is pretty unique among mammals. Not only are our birth canals narrower than standard due to being bipeds, but we have a larger head to body ratio then any other mammal. As a result of this, the only way to fit a baby’s head through a person’s birth canal is for them to be born very early, and massively underdeveloped.
Other mammals are capable of walking and running within the first day of being born, where as a human baby doesn’t even have strong enough neck muscles to hold up their own head.
They can’t see, they can’t crawl, they don’t have the coordination to grab things, and they have a soft spot on the skull that leaves part of the brain incredibly vulnerable. And while an adult can adapt to a range of temperatures, babies have to be constantly monitored to make sure they aren’t chilled or over heating.
Can you imagine you’re an alien, who knows humans as these highly adaptable endurance machines that can eat almost anything and survive tremendous physical pain and injury, and you learn that their young are so fragile. That they emerge from the womb barely able to function biologically.
And suddenly you remember all those humans on your crew who get attached little creatures. The toughest, burliest people who will coo and coddle over fluffy little cats and call lizards babies. And you realise that their whole species developed to care for these tiny, vulnerable, defenceless babies, and that kind of attachment tends to spill over a little.
And now you understand that old adage, that the most dangerous humans are the ones whose young are in danger. Because if they’re going to stand a chance at surviving until adulthood then human parents have to be willing to defend their children with their lives, and that is exactly what they do.
Holy crap. That means that we’re like pouchless marsupials (though not as extreme in the underdeveloped infant department).
It fits that we’re called Space Australians.
OKay this is my favourite response so far
To be fair, the mammals “born able to run within hours” are the terrestrial ungulate mammals. They are newcomers and parvenus and they die when they step on a bee. They only showed up when grasslands became common, the meme-loving fucks – they’re all matcha lattes and YEET. Like, okay, we get it, hoofed ungulates: you’re vegan, you really like synthpop, you’ve “discovered” a “new” continent, you ran fifteen miles this morning, your baby walked within eight hours of birth, sure. Fine. You’re cute, diversity is important, you can stay. We need something to eat, after all.
But ungulate mammals are REALLY poor representation of Mammalia.The ancestral Mammal, rodentlike, that gave rise to Placentals and Marsupials, would have been more like – well, more like today’s Placentals and Marsupials. More like us. More like badgers and dogs and monkeys and hamsters. Born blind and naked, and hidden discreetly from polite society, until the horrible alien thing looks more like a Real Animal.
Consider the mouse: born completely naked, hairless, blind, deaf, helpless, only able to drag itself to a nipple with terrific effort. Consider the cat: born as a thinly furred sausage with eyes and ears glued shut for weeks. Consider the newborn dog. Big cats. Rats. Bears. Squirrels. Sure, consider the marsupials; also, weasels and rabbits and porcupines and pangolins. All the mammals that aren’t the bloody ungulates.
Rodents are born practically fetal, their limbs mere buds, their skin see-through, their eyes bulging in their transparent skulls. Their bones aren’t even opaque! You can see their dark livers, the white milk in their bellies! Their eyelids are welded shut, their heads too large to raise. They are a lot more alien than a human baby – a liminal animal indeed. Certainly, rodents grow quickly, because they die so young. Their helpless childhood is still proportionately a large chunk of their life – nearly the same proportion as ours, actually. But they are born like uncooked eggs. I would add a picture of a newborn rat pup here, but young and impressionable children read this blog.
And we are not the weakest of the Furry Mammal clan, if we zoom out. It takes about two weeks for a kitten to open their eyes. It takes about four weeks for their hearing to come online. This is because these senses are still developing. They’re born undercooked, too!
By contrast with many mammals, human babies come out with their senses active (unless that specific baby is blind or deaf or has another sensory disability)*. It takes a while for human babies to focus their eyes, because we usually have a lot of apps installed (color vision, facial recognition) that take forever to boot up the first time, and focusing requires muscle control – but human babies are goggling at the world with open eyes, and processing what they see, as soon as they come out. Human babies come out able to hear, if hearing is included with that specific baby. We are born able to record and process sensory information, where our other mammalian cousins can’t.
I mean, I am so guilty of this trope too, I love it to pieces and use it all the time. Even more hypocritically, I personally agree with the “Fourth Trimester” theory, which is that human babies need about three months to adjust themselves to life outside the womb. Thus, the first three months are the “Fourth Trimester,” where you just carry the baby around, and it boggles helplessly at the world and goes “ugh!!” That is the part that makes sense when you look at the birth canal etc, and you go “oh, we’re so undeveloped,” and you mope because you can’t see yourself ever getting your life back. But the first three months is only a small piece of the longer story of human babyhood, and the “weak, helpless” stage is not particularly unusual among our mammalian family. It just seems so terribly long because we compare it to horses and rats, which is unfair on everyone. And at some point we get our lives back, and can’t remember where the time went. And it isn’t as bad as it could be. I mean, we can usually shit on our own. So that’s something!
No, it really is something. Many baby mammals cannot excrete on their own. Cats, for example; the mama cat must lick certain areas of the baby to stimulate it to poo and pee. They can’t do it by themselves. Mama cat must lick them religiously, to make their bowels and bladder work, or the waste will back up and the kitten/cub will die. This is relatively common among the Furry Mammals. Every kitten on Earth had to be forcibly poo’ed for the first three weeks of its life. Every tiger took six weeks (!!) before it could pee by itself. And that’s just the felids. Don’t talk to me about werewolf cubs unless you’re ready to make the decision on whether they need diapers, you cowards.
Humans, though, are born perfectly capable of shitting by ourselves. Which is rather nice, when you consider the alternative.
So if you take us in context of the other baffling and amazing animals on Earth, we are not really particularly “undeveloped,” taken as a whole. Not particularly in comparison to our cousins, whom an alien would find just as strange and foreign. We humans are simply hitting milestones at our own pace – sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always legitimate, always because an ancestor dodged death once by doing something slightly different. Our infants are for carrying in our arms, so it doesn’t matter that they can’t hold their heads up – but they are born shitting, and boggling with their enormous eyes.
Anyway, aliens would probably regard all this nonsense in the same way as the dinosaurs did – “Lord, what fools these mammals be,” at first, and then “OH FUCK THE MAMMALS DID WHAT?”
“Parenting is important,” reply the badgers and the bears and the humans, aggressively cuddling something they call a baby, although they might be taking the piss: “Really, we will bond with and nurture ANYTHING that meets our vague criteria. Isn’t cuteness just the best thing you’ve ever seen? Don’t your hormones just SQUISH when you see something with specific proportions? You know what’s inherently rewarding? HOLDING SMALL THINGS AND MAKING A SOUND ABOUT IT.”
“Erm, I guess?” replies the alien or the dinosaur. “I guess… I guess your baby…. thing…. is very …. important? To you??”
“YES I LOVE IT A LOT”
“I …. see that you do. It’s … cute.”
“Cuteness is a powerful weapon,” the mammal says seriously. “Oh, also? This is our planet now.”
* Many humans are born without the ability to hear, see, see in color, eliminate, socialize, process sensory information, etc. Or they may lose these abilities later. They are valid, human and loved. These “space Australian” posts are about generalising humans, so I generalise here, but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad.
what i do is not up to you 