It's a Controlled Descent @controlledescent - Tumblr Blog

worry about it kitten daddy fucked up

Me when my answer in a Tumblr poll is in the majority: ahhh clearly a woman who knows what is a la mode... Finger on the pulse of society

Me when my answer on a Tumblr poll is in the minority: an uncommon mind... She stands apart from her peers

lesbian-toddhoward

never forget the elijah wood wigs interview

omtai

there is nothing lemon squeezy about any of this

riverfortune

I just finished listening to a book the other day. It's called Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. It is listed as the first in her Vorkosigan series but the recommended reading order is to start at book 2, so I initially skipped it. The rest of the series is basically a bunch of action/space opera books following a particular family in their adventures in a sci-fi future involving a planet that does feudalism in space and a boy who is born with a fragile body into a warrior-based society. They're really fun and I recommend them.

But.

Falling Free is about a man whose company sends him to a space station to teach a bunch of people with extra arms where their legs should be how to do space welding. When I first read the summary, I thought it was really weird and figured I wouldn't get around to reading it. I'm so glad I read it after all.

It's not just about a bunch of four-armed freaks learning space welding. It's about recognizing the exploitation of those around you. It's about the dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy. It's about the danger of outsourcing your morality to what's legal. It's about how offloading responsibility onto the next guy results in disaster. It's about learning what kind of labor is needed to make a society. It's about how sometimes you can weaponize bureaucracy against itself for good. It's about how others can weaponize it for evil. It's about understanding the value of women's labor. It's about the value of free will. It's about the importance of taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. It's about the dangers of eugenics and it's about the dangers of coorporations and it's about the dangers of personal ambition. It's about standing up for what's right even if it goes against what you always thought was right. It was published in 1988 and it's about four-armed people welding in space.

#vorkosigan saga

sioltach

watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)

loth-catgirl

luna-azzurra

The most interesting question you can ask about any character is not what do they want. it's what do they believe they deserve. because those two things are almost never the same and the gap between them is where your entire story lives. a person can want love completely and believe they don't deserve it and that belief will destroy every good thing that comes toward them in ways they won't even notice they're doing. write the gap. the gap is the character.

flufflecat

almost time

victusinveritas

haunteddollsgeorg

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

This is their logic:

I need a polite way to email multiple people in a business environment that says, "Are you having an AI chat write your email replies? Because these are incoherent sentences and if it's a chatbot, I need you to stop."

cipheramnesia

I'm not trying to accuse anyone of communicating like an angry toddler with zero sense of object permanence, but I have received an awful lot of communications which ask for help with "it" while not specifying what "it" is, or asking me to send something while telling me they have it in the same sentence.

cipheramnesia