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dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/28Mi9if:
I just passed out on the floor of the living room (I had to shove the dog over to do it) for like an hour and a half and I am trying to get myself together to finish up chapter 6 but I am pretty sure I am a hack and a disaster and have never had anything worthwhile to say.
However, I am also extremely amused by the fact that the egg hens are pastured right next to the living room window and a loud motorcycle just went by, as happens like, all the time on this street, and they are FLIPPING THEIR COLLECTIVE SHIT loudly and sustainedly, because they are stupid dorks. Oh, farm life.
For real though. Oh also someone in Instagram commented on my photo from earlier today of the dressed chicken carcass in the ice bath asking in apparent seriousness whether the poor animal was dead, so I’d like to clarify here as well: yes, the animal was humanely slaughtered by USDA guidelines, sorry if it was a confusing picture, I’m kind of trying to take non-gory pictures of this process so I don’t upset anyone, so that was the opposite of what I was trying to achieve. I actually made it less clear, there was some visible blood and I desaturated the photo so it wouldn’t look distressing.
Also I am a hack, chapter six opens with an awful As You Know Bob infodump, and the whole thing goes out with a whimper rather than a bang and is a terrible way to end a story and I just don’t know how to fix it all. Bah.
Organa nodded. “Xicul was not all that far from my home planet of Alderaan,” she said. “It was a lovely little planet, and most famous for a majestic valley that was the center of culture on the planet, for the nation of the Oaxctli. In the stone walls of that valley, in ancient times, the people had carved the faces of their kings, or gods. Those carvings were famous, and the images of them have passed into lore. You have seen them, I would wager, but you didn’t know what they were.”
Finn handed over his datapad when she held her hand out, and she keyed in a quick search. “They have been more or less adopted into the heraldry of several organizations by now,” she said, “because of what they meant and what they came to mean after the destruction of Xicul.”
“Destruction,” Finn said.
“Well,” Organa said. She pulled up a holo, a scenery photo of a landscape– an aerial shot of a valley with a stone wall, and giant carved stone faces set into them, in profile– men with strong hooked noses and huge elaborate headdresses. “A mining company bought the mineral rights to the planet, somehow, and the details of the deal are lost to the mists of time and corruption. Several of the homeworlds underwent similar fates. The mining companies destroyed not only much of the surface of the planets, but also their cores. The ecological systems of the planets began to collapse. Crops failed, and the inhabitants were forced to leave, to go out into the galaxy at large to find jobs, to find food, to find homes. The nations began to disperse.”
“That’s sad,” Finn said. “How could the mining companies do that?”
“Because it was profitable,” Organa said. “In the days of the Republic, sometimes corruption won out over everything. If there was money in it, the interests of the people were overruled. But it was even worse once the Empire took power, just about the time when I was born. Under the Empire, the last protections that were keeping the Oaxctli’s last toehold on the planet evaporated. The mining company systematically evicted the last of them, hunted them down like animals, with rifles, and completed the destruction of the planet. Now Xicul is a bare rock sphere with no atmosphere, and the sacred valley was destroyed when the planet’s crust became unstable.”
“That’s awful,” Finn said.
I just passed out on the floor of the living room (I had to shove the dog over to do it) for like an hour and a half and I am trying to get myself together to finish up chapter 6 but I am pretty sure I am a hack and a disaster and have never had anything worthwhile to say.
However, I am also extremely amused by the fact that the egg hens are pastured right next to the living room window and a loud motorcycle just went by, as happens like, all the time on this street, and they are FLIPPING THEIR COLLECTIVE SHIT loudly and sustainedly, because they are stupid dorks. Oh, farm life.
For real though. Oh also someone in Instagram commented on my photo from earlier today of the dressed chicken carcass in the ice bath asking in apparent seriousness whether the poor animal was dead, so I’d like to clarify here as well: yes, the animal was humanely slaughtered by USDA guidelines, sorry if it was a confusing picture, I’m kind of trying to take non-gory pictures of this process so I don’t upset anyone, so that was the opposite of what I was trying to achieve. I actually made it less clear, there was some visible blood and I desaturated the photo so it wouldn’t look distressing.
Also I am a hack, chapter six opens with an awful As You Know Bob infodump, and the whole thing goes out with a whimper rather than a bang and is a terrible way to end a story and I just don’t know how to fix it all. Bah.
Organa nodded. “Xicul was not all that far from my home planet of Alderaan,” she said. “It was a lovely little planet, and most famous for a majestic valley that was the center of culture on the planet, for the nation of the Oaxctli. In the stone walls of that valley, in ancient times, the people had carved the faces of their kings, or gods. Those carvings were famous, and the images of them have passed into lore. You have seen them, I would wager, but you didn’t know what they were.”
Finn handed over his datapad when she held her hand out, and she keyed in a quick search. “They have been more or less adopted into the heraldry of several organizations by now,” she said, “because of what they meant and what they came to mean after the destruction of Xicul.”
“Destruction,” Finn said.
“Well,” Organa said. She pulled up a holo, a scenery photo of a landscape– an aerial shot of a valley with a stone wall, and giant carved stone faces set into them, in profile– men with strong hooked noses and huge elaborate headdresses. “A mining company bought the mineral rights to the planet, somehow, and the details of the deal are lost to the mists of time and corruption. Several of the homeworlds underwent similar fates. The mining companies destroyed not only much of the surface of the planets, but also their cores. The ecological systems of the planets began to collapse. Crops failed, and the inhabitants were forced to leave, to go out into the galaxy at large to find jobs, to find food, to find homes. The nations began to disperse.”
“That’s sad,” Finn said. “How could the mining companies do that?”
“Because it was profitable,” Organa said. “In the days of the Republic, sometimes corruption won out over everything. If there was money in it, the interests of the people were overruled. But it was even worse once the Empire took power, just about the time when I was born. Under the Empire, the last protections that were keeping the Oaxctli’s last toehold on the planet evaporated. The mining company systematically evicted the last of them, hunted them down like animals, with rifles, and completed the destruction of the planet. Now Xicul is a bare rock sphere with no atmosphere, and the sacred valley was destroyed when the planet’s crust became unstable.”
“That’s awful,” Finn said.
