spiralicious | Stolen from Kiramaru7

If you want to play, let's do it. How is works is you reply here and I'll give you 3 subjects I don't think you know or care much about. Then you talk about those subjects in your journal. It's interesting to see who knows what about what.

Here's what she gave me: dragons, photosynthesis, and drift wood

*cracks knuckles* Let's see what I know.

Dragons: Dragons are different all over the world. Most have scales and almost all resemble large reptiles or snakes. They may or may not breathe fire and they may or not fly. There are many kinds of dragons, though I tend to not be careful with the differences between dragons, drakes, wyverns, and wyrms, though somewhere in my brain its in there. It drives my nephew nuts. Hydras are multi-headed dragons. Quetzalcoatls are some sort of feathered, snake dragons from Mexico (I think). But mostly I deal with western dragons and Asian dragons. I personally prefer western dragons, especially little fat ones with little wings. When I was a kid, my mom told me that three toed Asian dragons are earth dragons and five toed Asian dragons were celestial dragons. I have no clue where she got that from. Then again, when I was really small she told me a dragon takes bites out of the moon until its all gone and then it grows back until its full and he starts eating it again each month. I've always thought it was really cool that pretty much every culture has some sort of dragon and the various explanations people have come up with for this. My favorite has always been people finding dinosaur fossils before they knew what they were or coming across dinosaurs/prehistoric giant lizards in pockets where they lived longer than when the rest died out. Washed up carcasses of large sea creatures is another theory. Of course, there are also other large reptiles and snakes that contribute to dragon lore. There is this other popular theory I was watching on this show once that I just can't remember beyond thinking it was extraordinarily stupid. They are often blamed for stealing princesses and virgins so that princes and kings can go slay them, but I prefer the stories where the princess chooses the dragon instead. OMG, the donkey-dragon babies from Shrek are the cutest things ever animated. All the best things have dragons. Think about it. What awesome stories/movies/books/games/etc don't have dragons? I'll wait. Appreciate a dragon day is January 16th. This year I celebrated with Nick. We watched Miss Kobyashi's Dragon Maid and ate dragon themed foods such as fire roasted chicken and deviled dragon eggs. I started coming up with a list of my top ten favorite dragons for the occasion, but when I realized I wasn't going to be able to do anything with it in time, I stopped. It was really hard. Coming up with enough dragons was easy, but my FAVORITE dragons was difficult to narrow down. What I had was 1. Spike from the original My Little Pony, 2. Sorrowful from the original She-Ra, 3. Kilgharrah from Merlin (BBC), 4. Maleficent (She turns in to one at the end of the original Disney's Sleeping Beauty and why it was my favorite Disney movie as a child. I always got so upset when the prince killed her.) 5. The dragon from Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming. He was there so briefly, yet left such a lasting impact. 6. The Pancake Dragon. I don't think this dragon has a name, but one of the books I had on record as a child was about this dragon a little boy found that loved pancakes. He kept feeding him more and more pancakes and the dragon just kept getting bigger and bigger until he was larger than the house. The boy stopped feeding him pancakes and he shrank. Sometimes I feel like I was the only child that ever read or listened to that book. No one ever seems to have heard of it and it's hard as hell to Google the name of (or at least it was the last few times I tried). 7. Marcovicci. He is my battle pet on Subeta. In the Dear Bob universe, he is called Boris. He is a Mahar, which is one of the many kinds of dragons in Subeta. They come from the Sacred Lands in Subeta. They are most similar to Asian dragons in body type and they are sort of the mid-range sized dragons on Subeta, weighing on average about 200 pounds. He is specifically a Graveyard Mahar, which is basically the undead or zombie version. For some reason those types hoard eyeballs instead of gems. No clue why, its not in any of the Subeta lore. That is all the farther I got with my list. To back track a little, isn't there some sort of Arthurian legend about him having a vision and leading them to unbury a red dragon and a white dragon and they were fighting or something and the red dragon won (I think?) and that's why there is a red dragon on the Welsh flag? Oh and dragons hoard things! Usually shiny things. There is this art series where the artist drew dragons with different kinds of hoards. It's one of my most favorite things ever, my personal favorite being the breakfast hoard dragon. There are a lot of dragon themed things in our house, most notably the hanging doorway dragons, Mom's giant paper dragon on her bedroom altar, my Puff the Magic Dragon plushie I have had since I was two, and my crackhead dragon. It is the weirdest dragon toy I think I have every seen. I have no clue what it is from, its nearly impossible to describe, and I tried Googling it for someone a few weeks ago and found nothing. On that note, what was that weird trend in the 80s of giving dragons in children's cartoons manes and tails of hair like horses? They were everywhere. Why? Was everyone on the same bad drugs? I should probably add Ah Un from Inuyasha to my favorite dragons list and the Drag-on from Slayers. Are we counting sea serpents with this? What about the dragon eating the tree of life in Norse mythology? Or the dragon that helps bring about the end of the world in Norse mythology, the one that is one of Loki's kids. Those are two different dragons right? Am I remembering that wrong? And what about the whole Christian symbolism of using dragons to represent the devil? Do I need to go into that? Oh and how dragons were the original fire benders in AtLA and the whole allegory that goes with that arc. I was going to do this whole thing comparing cats and dragons and pondering why we give them such feline qualities when they are clearly based on reptiles, but I have been rambling for 1076 words now and I should stop. I could keep doing this for days.

Photosynthesis: Okay, I don't remember all the fancy terms from 7th grade science, but its how plants collect energy from light. It involved chlorophyll and produces oxygen as a by-product. Green light isn't absorbed and is reflected back or something like that, which is why plants look green. Look up the purple earth theory. PBS Eons has a cool video on it on YouTube. As nothing to do with photosynthesis really, but talks about a similar process that did absorb the green light and reflected back purple instead, that was predominate before photosynthesis.

Driftwood: I am surrounded by the stuff. I live on the coast. It's everywhere ranging from tiny twigs to massive logs. Some of them even still have part of the roots visible from where it was uprooted in a storm. Basically, its wood that has been tumbling around in the saltwater and smoothed and changed by it until it washed back up on the beach. We used to play on the big logs when we were kids until the adults would make us get down because it was unsafe and in preschool we made “friends” with driftwood we found on the beach by attaching googlie eyes and seashells. My friend Manuel used to carve sculptures out of the big pieces of it. They were beautiful.