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[Egan_BW]

Perhaps it's time to make some arrests and charge those swans with attempted swanacide.

[scourge728]

A. I wonder what was going on when they decided to just give the queen ownership over all those swans, and B. Why are swans so aggressive to each other, those things are almost on human level of pointless same-species violence

[Frumple]

Like many modern dinosaurs, at the end of the day swans are basically just feathery generally-flight-capable assholes. Perhaps there's some kind of ancestral memory no one has managed to identify that lets them remember the days their kind dominated the landscape. It causes them to lash out against the world and particularly their own species, for having fallen from their previous heights.

At times when your people fail, you blame your neighbor for not overcoming the challenge that caused it more than you do the challenge itself. The swan cannot accept that its ancestors could not stop the sky from falling and blame everyone else among their kind for it. Perhaps they even hate themselves as well... could explain a particular predilection towards being a jackass towards others that look like them.

It all makes sense, you see? All you have to do is assume the existence of an ancestral memory and aeons long history of self-recrimination and loathing.

[Culise]

A. I wonder what was going on when they decided to just give the queen ownership over all those swans

Food, I'd guess. It's a bit similar to the lord of the manor "owning" all the deer in a forest. Swans are a food for the rich, and by golly, you can't have peasants catching and eating them.  So, you give ownership to the reigning queen or king (or to be more precise, they declare their ownership), and they decide who gets to serve swan at their feasts by apportioning that right out. 

EDIT:
Poked around a bit.  The precise reason I gave was flawed, but the comparison was more accurate than I thought.  Swans were a food with a broad base, so it wasn't just a matter of the nobility protecting their own rights.  However, like the lord of the manor "owning" all the deer in their forest, the reigning king or queen's ownership of mute swans seems to have been a natural extension of their then-ownership of the Thames River and thus to all wildlife therein.  Maybe.

[scourge728]

I beat the Genghis Khan Civ 5 Scenario (yesterday, but still)

[SalmonGod]

Frumple's writing makes me happy.

Frumple, do you have a blog or something?  You should have a blog.  Or something.  Something where you just stream of consciousness ramble about whatever so I can read it.

[hops]

You could write interesting musings and offbeat jokes and then derail your blog with two years of depression whining and then drop off the face of Earth when you recover.

[scourge728]

I feel like you're referencing someone specific there, but I don't know who

[hops]

Hyperbole and a Half. To be fair the author probably has always been depressed and just didn't write about it, and decided to write about it when she started to lose interest and couldn't come up with ideas on what to write, and then ultimately just stopped updating the blog altogether and went on with her life.

[Rolan7]

It might be someone specific, but it kinda sounds like the vast majority of personal blogs
Fakedit: ah

[hops]

Update: I looked it up and she's an author now, so that's why.

[Descan]

Hope some of you play Overwatch >_>

[Rolan7]

I don't, but it's always good to see a dedicated healer (in any setting or genre) slaying.
To be support is to be second fiddle, often to be the target - but to score kills despite all that, is a special kind of revenge.

[Descan]

I wonder what was going on when they decided to just give the queen ownership over all those swans

You assume it was given, and not taken by royal decree.

[Frumple]

Frumple's writing makes me happy.

Frumple, do you have a blog or something?  You should have a blog.  Or something.  Something where you just stream of consciousness ramble about whatever so I can read it.

I half heartedly tried... uh. I guess it's fifteen or better years ago? End of the day I had trouble managing anything even remotely consistent and it probably didn't last half a year or a dozen entries, and most of the whatevers that led to that have got more worse than better, heh. More consistency probably lurks in the quote/note files I've actually put stuff in something approaching regularly, but those languish on hard drives and consist more of stuff other folks write, so...

Lot of it seems to boil down to being pretty reactive, though, especially if I'm not living alone and feel free enough to babble to myself or sporadically hash out bits of varyingly depraved doggerel out loud, which I haven't for a good few years and probably won't for a good few more at best, unfortunately. Which is occasionally a bit of vague melancholy. Hopefully I'll finish abusing jingle bells into something about a dildo equipped sled one of these days.