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Title: The Ice Prince
Fandom: Lord of the Rings
Pairing/Characters: Aragorn/Boromir
Rating: Teen
Summary: One man’s quest to save his best friend who has fallen under a spell.
Warnings: None
Notes: This was originally written in 2004 and posted to Livejournal. This is for ribby, my fairy tale soul sister, for a promise made a while back. This story has elements picked from many fairy tales, so it is not original, but not like any other.

On AO3: The Ice Prince

On raselgethi: The Ice Prince

I stumbled across this today, while researching hormone use on livestock:

Causing trauma to the reproductive tract can induce bleeding, and since blood is toxic to sperm, this may result in reduced conception rates, permanently infertile animals, or animal death.

It makes me wonder if that's a cause undermining conception from rape, which often features internal injuries from microabrasions up to serious tears. If so, an interesting example of self-sabotage.

And then, what about the handful of species where rough sex is normal or even required? A tomcat's barbed penis, for example. Is their sperm different somehow? Or is there some other protective mechanism in play?

How much damage are ultraprocessed foods really doing to your health?

New American Heart Association Science Advisory reviews current evidence about UPFs and their impact on adverse health outcomes and outlines opportunities for research, policy and regulatory reform to improve dietary intake and overall health.
Many foods we consume today are ultraprocessed, packed with unhealthy ingredients, and linked to major health risks. As consumption of these foods rises, so do chronic health issues, especially among lower-income groups. Experts are calling for clearer guidelines, better research, and systemic changes to reduce the impact of ultraprocessed foods on public health.

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Today is mostly sunny and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/9/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/9/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.












.
 

One of the things that we’d been planning to do once work had finished on the house, was to provide a home for some cats again. But since we were going on holiday in July, we didn’t want to be halfway through a cat adoption process or not have cats that were settled before we disappeared for a week. So we agreed we’d start looking once we got back from holiday.

The day before we went, I saw a FB post from a friend reposting a post from an old workmate of theirs who was looking for a new home for a beloved black cat. I didn’t do anything about it because it sounded fairly urgent and I was sure that the cat would have found somewhere by the time we got back.

We got back from Portmeirion on a Friday and battlehamster collapsed on the sofa after the five hour drive, while I started sorting laundry out. I was still sorting laundry and honestly expecting to hear some snoring when he bounced up the stairs to announce that he’d found a cat on FB. Same chain of humans, different cat. This cat had nearly had a new home but that had fallen through. Then it turned out that the other cat still needed a home too and could we take both of them. Of course we could.

So on the Tuesday we drove over to Cardiff to meet the cats and make sure that their current human was happy with us as prospective cat carers. She was moving to live with her new partner and the new landlord wouldn’t allow pets and that’s the only reason that she was trying to rehome the pair of them. And on the following Sunday she drove over to Bristol and delivered Fluffball and Chelsea and their small collection of belongings to us.

It’s been a chaotic fortnight since then. They’re both around 13-14 years, so we’re basically providing a retirement home for them. They haven’t been vaccinated for a while, so they’re booked in for that later this month. Fluffball is a very big floof of a cat, whose main motivation in life seems to be how many scruffles he can get. I’ve never had a cat that’s been so trusting so quickly. He spent about 36 hours being very, very sad and then he discovered that scruffles were on offer and crept out of his safe place for those and last night I was sitting reading on the bed and he turned up, demanded scruffles and then settled down with his head on my leg and had a snooze.



Chelsea is small black ninja. She’s probably not that small but next to Fluffball she is kind of tiny. And she’s deeply suspicious of us. It’s only in the last couple of days that she’s become comfortable snoozing anywhere other than under a sofa and she still won’t let us touch her yet. She’s apparently a mouser and she clearly wants to be outside. Alas for Chelsea, she doesn’t get to do that until she’s been here for four weeks because we want to make sure that she knows that this is where the food happens and that she won’t just run off. On the plus side, she gets to have a cat flap for the first time in her life, so she can come and go as she pleases. (Give or take us locking them in on fireworks night). She gets a little braver about people every day, so I think we’ll win her over eventually.

When I say "random," I mean it: My thoughts wandered from one thing to another.

I learned from one of the language bloggers who I follow on Instagram that the Chinese people have come up with a nickname for Trump: 川建国 (chuān jiàn guó), which means "Trump builds country." I'm sure if Trump is aware of this he's flattered by it, but only because he's not aware that the "country" being referenced here is China, the idea being that by making America look so bad, he's making China look much better by comparison.

Which got me to thinking that no matter what one thought about Biden, at least when he president, I didn't worry about him stumbling us into a war.

And thinking about the possibility of us ending up in a war made me think about my maternal grandfather. Like most men of his generation, he served in the military during World War II. Unlike most men of his generation, he talked about his experience, specifically to complain about what a miserable experience it was. Out of a strong desire not to get shot at, he joined the Seabees (naval construction battalions) before the army had a chance to draft him. Once he had gone through boot camp, the US Navy, in its infinite wisdom, thought it was a good idea to take a young man who had never been more than 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico and send him to Alaska to help build an airfield. And all of this was to be done:

• while wearing boots that hurt his feet (my grandfather had super-narrow feet, and the navy only issued boots in medium),
• without proper medical treatment for his migraines, and
• while being fed food that constantly upset his stomach.

Obviously it was better than getting shot, but the experience was miserable enough that he would still complain about it 40 years later. One day, my grandmother had had enough of his complaining about his military experience, and she asked him "But aren't you proud of getting to do something for your country? Wouldn't you do it again?" He thought about it for a moment, and then, in all seriousness, said "If they were coming from the west, and they made it as far as [a small river about 5 miles west of their house], I might think about it." And thinking about it now, I'm like "Same, Granddad. Same."

I waffled for weeks on whether to get the Humble Bundle of James Tynion IV's stuff (as of posting, there's five days of the offer left), before finally getting it and forgetting how weird my brain gets when I binge on creepy media.

BASICALLY, I should not have read The Department of Truth before bedtime. Even when I got Nice House on the Lake, I don't read a whole volume in one go! There's such a thing as pacing things out! Plus I made the other mistake of reading Deviant first without processing the consequences of it only being volume 1, i.e. the story is not done.😢

People have expressed interest in deep topics, so this list focuses on philosophical questions.

If everyone said what they were actually thinking, what would happen to society?

KERPLOWIE

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Helsinki just went a full year without traffic fatalities — here's their secret

In the United States, traffic incidents are a leading cause of death, with an average of 120 people dying every day due to motor vehicle collisions.

On a global scale, a person dies from a road-related accident every 24 seconds.

But Finland’s capital city of Helsinki has pulled off something astonishing — the last recorded traffic-related death was over a year ago, in July 2024.

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Astronaut Jim Lovell has passed away. He flew four missions, including the famous Apollo 13 in which the crew narrowly averted disaster.

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

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Suspension of disbelief = I will not start verbally poking holes in the physics of this action movie until we are out of the movie theater

Suspension in disbelief = a frozen state of constant WTF

Today is sunny, humid, and hot.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a few sparrows and house finches.

I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the patio plants and the new picnic table garden.

I picked a red cherry tomato.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the savanna seedlings.

EDIT 8/8/25 -- I watered the telephone pole garden and the septic garden.

I found a baby preying mantis on the burn barrel and moved it to the barrel garden.

Cicadas and crickets are singing.  I've seen a few fireflies.
 
As it is now dark, I am done for the night.

Today's theme is Icons, a very popular topic on Dreamwidth with several high-traffic communities.

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We went out thrift shopping today.

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This student's life-changing injury made him realize how 'outdated' traditional casts are. So he 3D-printed a better one
AUG 7, 2025 12:34 PMPT

It’s an injection-molded lattice forearm cast, made with durable Nylon material that is lightweight, fully breathable, and a lot more comfortable than traditional fiberglass casts.

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