Foxfire - Blog Posts

Things I've always wondered about in Keeper of the Lost Cities

Foxfire's school hours. It's well established that elves live across the globe, and with light leaping it's not hard to travel, but like, if they live all around the world, they all live in different time zones. So some kids would go to school when it's dark at home. How do they decide when? It's not talked about at all in the books and this annoys me a lot. Is there Elvin Standard Time?

I know that they make a big point in the books that they have no Human prejudices but I think that clearly they do. Everyone's a little weirded out by the fact that Sophie wears pAnTs and doesn't like dresses or glitter (which is scandalous and totally not common for millions of girls around the world) and clearly they don't have any boys who wear dresses or girls who shave their heads. All the girls and boys conform to stereotypically gendered forms of beauty. No muscular girls. No fat characters. No short boys. No feminine girls. No trans or gender neutral characters. What's up with that?

On that note it really feels like Shannon Messenger is becoming J K Rowling just a little. There are no openly gay or queer characters after eight and a half books so something smells a little funky there.

The crystal palaces. Where do they get all that crap from? There's a reason these are precious stones.

The nobility. Everyone acts like it's super exclusive but like, there has to be one mentor for each kid at Foxfire, because classes are individual, and there has to be hundreds of kids. So there's hundreds of nobility whose only job is to teach kids. Not even go on missions or emissary work or whatever.

This is just edition one everyone strap yourselves in.

I feel very mushroom biased some of these funguary posts I have spent hours compiling research and formatting it nicely, I've even used paper sources and cited studies on a some of them, then for some like the Crepidotus I can't find anything interesting, spend five minutes on it, and give up.

I'm sorry T-T

I promise I'm trying my best, some of these fungi are just basic

Not oyster mushroom though, love that one <3

Funguary Day 16: Mycena Chlorophos

Mycena Chlorophos is what's known as a foxfire fungus- a fungus that glows at night. The mushroom regulates its glow through a circadian rhythm, at night the levels of the chemical compound and enzymes that react to produce the bioluminescence peak. 

It is theorized that the light it emits at night is to attract beetles and other insects that might help spread the spores similar to how flowers use scents and colors to attract pollinators

Once an experiment was ran by Olson in which two cultures of the biter oyster, another foxfire fungi, were grown and placed on a completely dark box under constant conditions. He left them alone for a week with a camera sensitive enough to pick up their bioluminescence. What the camera showed was that the mycelium grew in an irregular circle, with the glow more intense at the center than at the edges. After a couple days there was a sudden shift, in one of the cultures a wave of bioluminescence passed over the network from one edge to the other. A day later a similar wave passed over the second culture. Though the fungi were kept in the dark for several more weeks, the flare up never occurred again. Years later, Olson still did not know what had caused the sudden flare.

See the rest of my posts for funguary here!

Mythic Mail Letters From Japan book secrets: 👺Today’s Easter egg (super top secret hidden gem) is this illustrated postcard featuring the Bura-Bura, or haunted paper lantern. The characters that make his eyes and nose are called “henohenomoheji” using Japanese hiragana. It’s a little joke that these characters look like a face when arranged on paper. The eyes are “no”, the nose is “mo”. Not pictured are “he” for the eyebrows and mouth and “ji” for the outline of the face. ✨Link to the book in my bio✨ . #burabura #haunted #hauntedattraction #foxfire #kitsune #indiebooks #indiebook #mythicmail #mythicalcreatures #yokai #yokaiwatch #yokaiart #japan #traveljapan #japantravel #japanesefolklore #japanesemonster #snailmaillove #indiebookstore #indieauthors #indieauthorsofinstagram #supportindieauthors #mythology #japanesemythology #japaneseculture #mythical (at Calaveras County, California) https://www.instagram.com/p/CTfRhasJ8or/?utm_medium=tumblr