Hello! This my my first ever fanart of @markiplier it took me 3 full days to finish it, I love it so much I hope you all like it. This is for the charity stream he’s doing on December 1st 10 pst so definitely watch it I definitely will! Original picture on marks Instagram.
Lynne Cox is an accomplished American open water swimmer. Twice, she held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel. Cox was the first woman to swim the Cook Strait and the first to swim the Straits of Magellan and around the Cape of Good Hope. Cox swam the Bering Strait from American soil to Soviet soil in 1987, at the height of the Cold War.
Look at her.
I know open water swimming isn’t really glamorous, but Lynne Cox is arguably one of the greatest overlooked athletes of the 20th century.
And quite possibly a mutant.
She can withstand water temperatures that you or I would die from because of her training and her body’s unique reaction to cold (you know how the blood will leave your fingers and toes when it’s cold, to preserve heat? her whole body does that, pooling her blood in her core and insuring her body temperature stays toasty where it counts).
She funded the Bering Strait swim herself, clearing out her bank account when she couldn’t get corporate sponsors. After she succeeded (to almost everyone’s surprise: if you get in the Bering Sea without serious gear you generally just die) Gorbachev mentioned her during treaty talks with Nixon: “Last summer it took one brave American by the name of Lynne Cox just two hours to swim from one of our countries to the other. We saw on television how sincere and friendly the meeting was between our people and the Americans when she stepped onto the Soviet shore. She proved by her courage how close to each other our peoples live.“
She wasn’t just the first woman to swim the Strait of Magellan. She was the first person to make it across.
On top of setting multiple world records, she swam a mile+ to the coast of Antarctica, in just a bathing suit, and did not die.
She’s swum over 50,000 miles.
And look at her. This is a photo from when she was young, at the peak of her career and setting records all over the world. She is a great athlete. She is a human who can do things most humans would die trying. I’m sitting here at 1 AM getting all teary eyed because this is the first time I’ve looked up a photo of her and I am so surprised, so gratified, so overwhelmed to find out that this world record setter, this literal superhuman, has nearly the same body type as me.
Since they wouldn’t let her be a fantasy creature in a video game, she just did it in real life, I guess.
Anyone who thinks there is just one athletic body type isn’t paying attention during the Olympics opening ceremonies.
Her body type is optimized for her sport. The shape of her body and the presence of fat both provide insulation to keep her core warm while she swims.
A lot of open water swimmers aren’t this chunky, but that’s because most of them are actually triathletes, and their body type is a compromise between the ideals for the different sports.
There really is no one way to be fit and athletic. For some reason, we tend to get ourselves hung up on the body type of track and field athletes, especially that of marathon runners (who tend to carry almost no extra fat) as the ideal.
freud: EVERY dude wants to fuck his mom and and EVERY girl wants to fuck her dad and also wants to be a man secretly
men: WOW!!!!!!!!!
“In the 1890s, when Freud was in the dawn of his career, he was struck by how many of his female patients were revealing childhood incest victimization to him. Freud concluded that child sexual abuse was one of the major causes of emotional disturbances in adult women and wrote a brilliant and humane paper called “The Aetiology of Hysteria.” However, rather than receiving acclaim from his colleagues for his ground-breaking insights, Freud met with scorn. He was ridiculed for believing that men of excellent reputation (most of his patients came from upstanding homes) could be perpetrators of incest. Within a few years, Freud buckled under this heavy pressure and recanted his conclusions. In their place he proposed the “Oedipus complex,” which became the foundation of modern psychology. According to this theory any young girl actually desires sexual contact with her father, because she wants to compete with her mother to be the most special person in his life. Freud used this construct to conclude that the episodes of incestuous abuse his clients had revealed to him had never taken place; they were simply fantasies of events the women had wished for when they were children and that the women had come to believe were real. This construct started a hundred-year history in the mental health field of blaming victims for the abuse perpetrated on them and outright discrediting of women’s and children’s reports of mistreatment by men.”
— Lundy Bancroft, Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
how good would it be if luna, who believes in the crumple-horned snorckack and nargles, thought that dinosaurs were made up by muggles
Okay, but consider:
Someone (probably Hermione) takes Luna to a muggle museum of natural history, in a last ditch effort to convince her that dinosaurs really did exist. They go through all of it: full and partial skeletons on display, fossil imprints of skin textures, a little video about carbon dating, exhibits on the evolution of all life from tiny one-celled sea creatures, bird-hipped vs. lizard-hipped, living giant isopods and coelacanths, the whole spiel about how the dinosaurs aren’t actually completely gone, since some, like the anchiornis and archaeopteryx, were the predecessors from which today’s birds – including every owl in the Wizarding World – evolved.
Luna takes all this in with her usual calm demeanor until the very end, when her eyes seem to grow even more enormous in her face, but doesn’t say anything. After a full minute of Luna’s silent astonishment, her companion prods her for a response. “Of course!” Luna exclaims, “no wonder I’ve never found them. I’ve been going about things the wrong way!” She launches into a lengthy explanation that the records that she and her father have been using for references were copies of copies of copies of absolutely ancient scripts, so in order to find the creatures as described in them, she needed to be looking for fossils.
Luna (with Rolf as her assistant) begins searching through areas of Wizarding Britain, using magical equivalents of the muggle tools she read about at the museum (a variation on Tempus to determine the age of a magical item or creature, Cryptozoam Revelio as a substitute for ground-penetrating radar). She finds the remains of a number of magical creatures from various ages, as well as accidentally uncovering a nest of Knuckers, a relative of the dragon previously thought to be extinct. After this discovery, she and Rolf are given a bit more credence than before, and they gain the support among creature-handlers, especially dragonologists. Because of this, they get access to more regions of the world, and their team grows. Eventually Luna ends up founding the Wizarding Archaeological Society, the first institution to combine both muggle and wizard research methods at a single institution.
On the 50th anniversary of the Society’s founding, they open a museum of their own (”Everything that was, at the WAS!”), to display the various fossils of magical creatures that they’ve managed to locate over the years. Unveiled at the opening ceremonies was what would become the pride of their collection, a diorama of Crumple-Horned Snorkacks in every stage of development, along with details about their habits, average lifespan, and a map of the full range of their habitat at their peak population in the mid-17th century. Their extinction at during the 20th century was attributed to rising global temperatures, as their most flourishing period coincided with the coldest years of the Little Ice Age, and no specimens from any later than the 1976 Heat Wave had thus far been recovered. The disappearance of the Snorkacks, it was said, had been an early warning sign of the global climate change which had troubled the entire world, wizarding and muggle, for the better part of the last half-century. A cooperative partnership had been reached between the WAS and the Royal Society a scant decade after the WAS’s founding , allowing research witches and wizards to pool their resources with muggle scientists, in time to prevent a catastrophe that the wizarding world would otherwise have been unlikely to survive.
In her speech at that evening’s gala, Luna told the story of how it all happened, to reveal the person who had singlehandledly started this series of events, which resulted in not only a golden age of discovery in the field of cryptozoology, but also an era of peace and cooperation between both worlds, allowing restrictions imposed by the Statute of Secrecy to be loosened for the first time in nearly five hundred years, all in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Hermione Granger, who had been grumbling in her chair the entire time, rose when acknowledged. Luna Lovegood beamed at her aging friend, the witch who had gone from being her most skeptical critic to her most dedicated – and most challenging – supporter in a mere half-century.
So I just have to say, we are OVER HALF WAY. PSH- We are over over half way! We really did that!! You really, really did that. Only having started this about a week ago and we are over half way. Can you even believe it?
For newcomers, we’re raising money so I can go to the Yule Ball in Canada on December 8th and Vlog it as Hermione for everyone to see, and holy moly we are over half way. And I will not stop saying it, because you all did this, and deserve to KNOW!! ✨And we are really about to meet the goal. I know it!
If that interests you, and you like the blog, please donate here if you can.
I can’t believe my party put a ‘3 yeets per day’ limit on my bard just because she yeeted an enemy barbarian’s decapitated head across the battlefield, in this essay I will-
I can’t believe in the same session we had both the line “GO ON YOU BIG BEAUTIFUL BLACK THING” and “’GIVE ME THE MEAT” said completely straight-faced.
If you’re reading this: this is your sign that your WIP is worth writing, is worth the effort, and that you are doing great. Keep going, take breaks, reflect. But do not lose sight of how far you’ve come on this project! You can do it!
write write write 