Order from Chaos

UnF***ing My Habitat!

[fidelcostco]

WAIT HOLD ON I cannot fucking believe when I was like four years old my parents were cajoling me to walk with the family and trying to get me to keep up even though I kept insisting that I was "tired" until they took me to a doctor and found out my LUNGS DIDN'T WORK. how insane that we live in a world where reasonably loving parents think their FOUR YEAR OLD is trying to be LAZY. like they were mortified to be clear. adults are just so trained to ignore children's complaints as untrustworthy, kids just need discipline, they can't possibly speak for themselves. what the fuuuuck.

[fidelcostco]

YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE BTW you should always be trying to take children seriously, especially very little ones but definitely all of them. the most disempowered class basically legally defined as property and most people are like "yeah that's good actually I hate when they Loiter lol they're stupid and loud and i actually think children should stop existing. restrict their personhood more actually"

[a-mel0n]

reblog if you’ve had an online friendship that’s lasted more than 2 years

[starryhoundbloo]

Shout out to my mom who explains my transition as "Having a daughterpillar turn into a Boyterfly". It doesn't erase the fact I was an adorable little girl, and also affirms my gender now. I love my mother.

[moonlit-dragon-atlas]

@this-is-trans-joy 🥹

[this-is-trans-joy]

This is trans joy!!!

[autiebiographical]

This is another reason why I prefer the support needs autism labels. My autism isn't "mild" to me by any stretch of the word, but my support needs are usually low, although not always.

[dduane]

Escaping

So it's more or less the end of the week now, and time to update people on what's been going on.

The tl:dr; version: Because of the large number of people who rolled up to buy ebooks from the Ebooks Direct store (see the earlier message here), and the very many generous folks who dropped cash into my Ko-Fi (and please bear with me while I get all the thank-you messages sent!), "Project: Escape" is a go.

And thank you all again! You folks are all, absolutely, stars. 🥲

So this is how things will now unfold (and I designed this getaway to be as stress-free as possible, so it mostly runs along lines, and routes, that I've often traveled before). Here, pretty much, is where I'll be.

On Wednesday May 6th I fly from Dublin into Zürich and catch a train to the western Austrian lakeside city of Bregenz. I'll be there for a few days, chilling as much as possible. (Though work will also be happening... as work always seems to wind up happening when I'm over there. It's a good town for that.) ...The image at the top of the post is a summertime shot of the lakeshore, not far from the Bregenzer Festspiele* and the town's Casino.

Bregenz is familiar territory, where I've spent a good bit of time both on my own (on writing trips) and with @petermorwood. We often stayed here overnight on our way in to Munich to see the folks at the production company for whom we wrote Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King / Sword of Xanten / Die Nibelungen / whatever other name you know it by. It's a small, pleasantly walkable city with an artistic bent. Yet you can also sit lunching at a cafe's outdoor table, feel a shadow pass over you, and look up to see a passing golden eagle from the nearby mountains sailing by low and idly scoping out you and your entree...

After a few days in Bregenz, I'll take a ferry up to Konstanz, a town I've been past before but where I've never stayed. (Here’s the ferry’s route…)

…There I'll sit still for a few more days (ideally taking some time to see the archaeological museum there). After that I'll grab a train back down to Züri, crash there for one last night, and then fly back to Dublin earlyish the next morning.

And after that: Back to business as usual... in, I very much hope, a somewhat improved state of mind. I mean: no way I'm going to stop missing Peter any time soon. That, I'm pretty sure, is now a permanent feature of my basic state of being. But having spent a little while in a place where it'll be impossible not to think about all the good times we had together in that neck of the woods, I think that'll make a big difference to me, especially at this difficult time.

Naturally I'll be posting here from there, every now and then, as things come up to be shared. It's a nice town: scenic. (And besides that, sometimes you see unusual things in the shop windows. (Like this...)

...Meanwhile, for the time being I'll leave the original "Seeking escape" post up, in case anyone still wants details about the ebook bundles on offer. (The prices really are low, and I feel no great urge to raise them right now... because honestly, if there was ever a time people might want cheapish distraction from the junk going on in the world, this might be it. Yet a sad reminder: we cannot sell into the UK due to Brexit.) ...And if anyone wants to drop something into the Ko-Fi toward a glass of wine or a chocolate-heavy dessert, well, don't let me stop you. 😅

Once again, everybody: thank you so much for your kindness. It's so much appreciated. ❤️

And now it's time for starting the pre-packing laundry...

ETA: attn @greggs-mistflower: The sculpture in the background, as it turns out, is called “Hommage an Brigantium (Tribute to ancient Brigantium”), and the more pictures of it I view online, the more I’m starting to think there is NO angle from which it can be viewed that isn’t at least potentially rude. And some are REALLY a lot worse than others… Bear with me a sec while I add some. Honestly, I’m starting to wonder what the sculptor was thinking of… 😏

*This, BTW, is the facility where the James-Bond-Shoots-Up-The-Opera-Performance sequence was shot for Quantum of Solace.

[sandmandaddy69]

[genderblunt]

Diva alert ⚠️

[johntherobotwanderer]

Discworld book where the auditors hear about the phrase "it's not over till the fat lady sings" and hire someone to kidnap all the fat ladies in the world to find the One who will end the world when she sings.

Lady Sybil Vimes is one of the ladies, so Sam Vimes is on the warpath until he can find her, while the watch desperately try to keep all infrastructure from falling apart without all the fat ladies who keep it together on a daily basis

It ends when Sybil leads a hoard of fat ladies into battle, which ends up being so glorious an unrelated time traveler who witnesses it goes back to his native time starts the myth of the Valkyries

[thesunshinesanctuary]

Is this anything? This is EVERYTHING.

[justcatposts]

What is dat *aggressively scuttles* 

(via)

[peachybeesplease]

rating the ways my family members have referred to me to other people since coming out as nonbinary

my secondborn (my parents)

7/10

sounds vaguely historical but in the way that I'm going to be sent off to war to prevent a succession crisis

potentially confusing to the listener bc the average conversation has little relation to birth order

my sister's, [name] (my aunt)

9/10

direct and to the point!

still very clear about what our family relationship is. I think we can do away with many nouns if this is any indication

my young adult child (my mom)

4/10

it's giving "20 year old minor"

I promise you can just say my kid. it's ok I don't mind strangers thinking I'm like 5 bc that would make me a prodigy for doing stuff like my laundry and dishes in one day and honestly I could use that kind of support

my liberated one (my grandma)

10/10 THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT

completely unclear what my relationship actually is to her. her personal oracle perhaps?

made immensely funnier by her immediately following it up with referring to my brother as her grandson.

[memories-of-ancients]

Drinking horn with gilded copper mounts, Europe, 15th century

from The Hunt Museum, Limerick

[tarvek-sturmvoraus]

[localxenospores]

i was compelled

[memewhore]

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

This man took so much longer to crack than I would have what a PROFESSIONAL

[peripetyy]

Plotting, scheming, etc.

[whatagrump]

This was filmed at the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which rescues, rehabilitates, and releases orphaned elephants in Kenya (among other conservation efforts). Charity Navigator has given it a 4/4 star rating, and you can make donations here or “adopt” a baby elephant here.

[drawing-prompt-s]

Draw a child who keeps a miniature universe in a lunchbox.

[rubynye]

The Universe didn’t quite come out clearly, so I filled her lunchbox with a galaxy.

[rubynye]

I drew this for @drawing_prompt_s but decided to give it its own post because I have Stuff To Say about it:

This little drawing combines two interests of mine, the Minoans (the civilization of Bronze Age Crete) and recursive art, aka mise en abyme aka the Droste Effect. To quote Wikipedia, this is, “the effect of a picture recursively appearing within itself…” Sometimes the term ‘inception’ is used to refer to this effect in general, because of the movie, but I digress.

One of the first known pieces of such recursive art is the Stefaneschi Altarpiece; which includes a depiction of itself being offered to St. Peter. I’m pretty sure the Minoans had panel paintings (their contemporaries the Egyptians did, IIRC) so I decided to depict a Minoan artist offering a painting to a Goddess. Because women are pretty. Anyway if it’s not a panel painting, she’s offering a fresco (which they definitely had) separate from its wall (which defeats the purpose of fresco but anyway). Now let me stop before I keep overexplaining.

[st-just]

Remember, history was awful. Never trust the romantics.

[booksandchainmail]

#you want to know a sentence that rewrote my brain:#most people have never been 20#more than half of humans ever born never made it to 20#which. is so crushingly sad to me i can't think about it for too long and also weirdly tempering when i'm angry at the state of the world#most people have never been 20! is it any wonder we're bad at being people sometimes! it's so new. we're young to it#anyway#i'm so stupidly grateful to live in the present and for modern medical technology (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[zenosanalytic]

XKCD: Degree Off

Never Forget what Childhood Vaccines and Antibiotics have done.

[burninglights]

The two most powerful words in the English language, owed entirely to the efficacy of vaccines, are thus;

“Smallpox was.”

For most of history, smallpox was (!!!) the scourge that haunted human civilisations. We have evidence of smallpox from mummies c. 1350BCE in Egypt. It’s speculated to be one of causative agents of the Plague of Athens c. 430BCE. There were outbreaks of smallpox in Angola in 1484, in South Africa in 1731 that wiped out entire clans of Khoisan people. There was at least one major smallpox epidemic almost every decade across Europe.

Smallpox was transmitted by droplet/aerosol infection; it tore through even the smallest population centres. Typical smallpox incurred a blistering fever, raised pustules, debilitating joint and back pain; if you lived — and that was a fat fucking if, as typical smallpox had a mortality rate of 30% — you’d have tell-tale pockmark scarring, and face stigma for the rest of your life. Some were left blinded.

The worst form of the disease was haemorrhagic smallpox; all the agony of typical smallpox, with the addition of skin haemorrhage and pinpoint haemorrhage in the spleen, liver, kidneys and gonads. Near-universally fatal, haemorrhagic smallpox made up 5-10% of all cases. Of this number, 72% were children.

The global smallpox vaccination campaigns of 1958 to 1977 were a monumental effort by the World Health Organization and its global associates, backed by incredibly diligent public health work and epidemiological monitoring.

Wherever there were outbreaks, there was herd immunisation. Health bodies campaigned tirelessly for the general population to be immunised. In the ‘70s, a concerted effort was made by the WHO to ensure vaccines were administered in the most remote and vulnerable communities in the Horn of Africa, South Asia and the Pacific.

In 1980, the world was officially, finally free of one of it’s oldest adversaries; universal vaccination had been achieved, and there was no population that could act as a reservoir for smallpox.

If mankind has only one great achievement, it’s the smallpox vaccine; to date, smallpox is the only human disease to be completely eradicated.

After over two millennia of suffering, mass disability and death, humanity finally had the means to give one of it’s biggest threats the biggest possible fuck you, and through scientific and public health collaboration, careful epidemiological monitoring and countless hours of on-the-ground vaccination efforts, managed to blot it from existence entirely.

Where there is vaccine coverage, childhood diseases with high morbidity and mortality rates like whooping cough, diphtheria, influenza B and have dropped.

We have vaccines for TB, another of our greatest and longest adversaries.

With enough effort to counter misinformation, more people fighting for vaccine equality, patent free medication for communicable disease, and universal vaccine coverage, and everyone making sure to keep up to date with their vaccinations, one day, we could be fortunate enough to be able to say;

“Tuberculosis was.”

[orcboxer]

autism tests are so funny. I'm extremely literal most of the time, but people don't tell me that generally, so I'm inclined to answer disagree. because I'm taking the statement too literally

[peopleingishard]

^not my post but same sentiment

[icantbearsedtothinkofone]

One of the reasons I got an autism diagnosis free with my ADHD one was that I emailed the clinic to explain what was wrong with their online pre-appointment test web site and questions and offered to help fix it.

[carys-the-ninth]

Vorkosigan Saga has an 8 foot tall genetically engineered super soldier werewolf babe and the only good art I can find of her is this compendium cover:

Why isn't everybody drawing Sergeant Taura.

[starfishlikestoread]

There is this piece I really like by @yinza !

[theladyeowyn]

‘They cannot conquer for ever!’ said Frodo.