Irish Giants and Galactic Adventures
Welcome to another edition of Size Fantasy news, as it drifts down the stream of public consciousness and eddies around my bank, like so many fallen leaves or plastic bags.
There literally wasn’t any news last week, none that I could find. I thought about digging into world mythology about giantesses, but I’ve been dealing with real-life stuff (see the end of this newsletter) and didn’t have the focus or energy for it. OTOH, there’s a lot of material this time around, so let’s get to it.
And as a side note, I notice that Buttondown has changed its interface again, so bear with me as I relearn the commands and try to make this layout coherent, if not beautiful.
(Update: It’s actually really handy, once you get the hang of it. Well done, Buttondown.)
Irish Giants
I don’t know this “science” website, Live Science. They claim to be “one of the biggest and most trusted popular science websites operating today,” and the fact that I’ve never, ever heard of them doesn’t necessarily refute this claim. It’s a nice-looking website, could be professional, who knows.
Anyway, they recently put out this article, “Have giant humans ever existed?” They talk about the tall fellow made famous by Ripley’s Believe It or Not, attributing Robert Wadlow’s height (8’11” or 2.72 m) to gigantism caused by an overactive pituitary gland. Charmingly, they tie him to Biblical references, pointing out he was taller than some interpretations of Goliath’s height. They mention Marfan syndrome, in which bones grow longer than they should.
Then they bring up Bao Xishun of Inner Mongolia, who was the tallest living person (7’9” or 2.36 m), until Sultan Kösen of Türkiye rose to the challenge in 2009, cresting at 8’1” or 2.46 m. Live Science said that none of the above applied to Bao, that he merely had a genetic disposition to greater height. Huh.
Live Science then brought up the 6’5” giants of the Gravettian culture, ice-age mammoth hunters, around 30,000 years ago. They suggest that these people may have inspired legends and stories of giants in the surrounding communities. The article linked to the Queen Mary University of London website, basically a review of a dozen very tall Irish men throughout history, plus a lovely seven-foot-tall giantess from the Isle of Portrush by the name of Mary Murphy. (I’m unable to find this island, only a resort town of the same name, about eight miles west of the Giants Causeway.) The gent who reported seeing her described bumping into her again as she toured France in 1701, profiting from exhibitions of her great height. Perhaps this event, or many others like it, inspired Thomas A. Janvier’s “A Consolate Giantess” (1912), which I have transcribed on my blog. Please enjoy it.
Giantesses in Captain Firehawk
I have a significant history with video games, though I’m far from an aficionado. My first home video game was Pong on the Odyssey 2000; my first coin-op/upright game was Space War, a vector-plotted game where two ships floated around and tried to shoot each other. Its aesthetic carried on to the much more successful Asteroids. Later, my family got the Atari 2600, and my neighbors picked up the Atari 5200 and the Intellivision. The graphics couldn’t compare to the uprights in the arcade at the local strip mall, but you could junk out on these free games at home and scratch the itch.
Other than that, I didn’t dive deep into pursuing the seminal Japanese consoles, like the Famicom, or in this case the NEC PC-9800. The website 8Bit/Digi is dedicated to exploring the furthest reaches and every last tangent regarding video games, and they reviewed one called Captain Firehawk and the Laser Love Situation which … is not for the PC-98 but it feels like it is. 8Bit/Digi specifically called out that platform for their article, but it’s an adult-rated bullet-hell shooter you can purchase for eight bucks on Steam. It has a great vintage anime aesthetic, and it labors to recreate the vintage video game feel, but what makes it pertinent to us is the premise: giantesses are invading the galaxy. To defeat them, you have to shoot off their clothes. Yup. Anyway, read the article, it’s very well-informed and interesting.
What Was This Doing Here?
Google Alerts pointed me in a really strange direction. It looks like Owlift is intended to be an LLM to help school-age students understand complex concepts. You type in a question (I don’t know where, I don’t have an account) and you get a response that covers the main points. You can set parameters to have the program respond like you’re an idiot or fairly well-educated.
I couldn’t really tell if the entire site was actually an AI fever-dream, with fake images of the staff and everything. But I thought one of the programmers was really cute, and then I found her on LinkedIn and Instagram: a lovely woman who went from modeling clothes and false lashes to full-stack web development. Wonder what inspired such a transition.
Anyway, researching the Owlift website was secondary and then tertiary to what called me there. It seems that someone who did have an account typed in this question: “Why do I have macrophilia?” I really hope this came from an earnest, if confused, youth who is trying to understand themself. Another equally plausible answer is that a young adult thought they’d stir up some trouble and embarrassment for Owlift, because people.
The parameter for response was set to speak to someone who feels “really dumb.” Owlift has a blog with other questions and answers, but the macrophilia question is notably absent from this archive.
Personal
So here’s why I’ve been really low-energy lately. We have two cats, Bella and Toki. Toki is attracted to my wife, and Bella is my girl. We estimate they’re 17 years old, in August. Bella was a feral rescue, and Toki helped domesticate her. Toki’s been struggling with diabetes and kidney failure, but we’ve been taking great care of him and managing these in healthy parameters.
Unfortunately, in early April, after recovering from a second round of tooth resorption, Bella’s x-rays revealed spongy bone with dark spots along her right jaw: cancer. Her lovely face swelled painfully, infection turned her saliva rancid, and eventually her jaw malformed until her own teeth lacerated her mouth when she tried to eat. So, naturally, she stopped eating.
There was no surgery for this, only months of blending her food for her and dosing her with opiates and NSAIDs to try to curb the pain. We had a euthanist come to our home yesterday and put her out of her misery. Toki stood by and witnessed the event, so we think he understands. Well, for that matter, he’d known about her cancer for the last couple months, so he’s not wandering around, confused, wondering where his companion went.
Bella was a smart, funny, affectionate girl. I taught her to play fetch: I’d throw her toy mouse under the couch, and she’d charge at it full-tilt, flattening herself at the last second to slide on the hardwood floor beneath the furniture, then come around the corner with the toy in her mouth. I work from home, editing for the university and writing Size porn on my own, and she was always curled up in my lap, resting her chin in my elbow or patting my tummy with her paw, her way of asking to be pet.
Seventeen years is pretty good. I still feel her with me. Grief comes and goes in waves. I’m just glad she’s no longer suffering.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
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