CrackleTack

CrackleTack on AO3

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[vixvaporub]

The Apothecary Diaries | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto – Chapter 37 ◉ Balsam and the Wood Sorrel (Part 1)         

[vixvaporub]

The Apothecary Diaries | Kusuriya no Hitorigoto – Chapter 71 ◉ Festering Malice, Part 2

[luna-azzurra]

The thing about reading a really good book as a writer is that it does two things at once. it fills you up and it destroys you. you're reading going "yes. yes this is why. this is the whole reason." and also "i will never write a sentence this good. i should give up and become something reasonable like a geologist. geologists don't have to do this. geologists go outside and look at rocks and nobody asks them why the pacing is slow in the middle." i finish every great book both inspired and briefly geologist-curious.

[sungohans]

The Apothecary Diaries (2023-) || 1x12

a garden, and a cage.

[jeniferprince]

we really, really should. 🚬

another piece for my noir series ;)

patreon // buy prints here

[polkadotmotmot]

Elena Wuest - An Afternoon Tea II, 2026 - Oil on canvas

[gardenofafterthoughts]

02/04/24

"I love badly. That is, too little or too much. I throw myself over an unsuitable cliff, only to reel back in horror from a simple view out the window."

- Jeanette Winterson; Gut Symmetries (page 208)

[vorpalfae]

𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔞𝔭𝔬𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔠𝔞𝔯𝔶 𝔡𝔦𝔞𝔯𝔦𝔢𝔰 🌿‧₊˚ ⋅ 𓐐𓎩 ‧₊˚ ⋅

[lux-scriptum]

No, you see, I wish to be an author. Not in marketing. Or an influencer. I wish to tell my stories, be told I did a fantastic job, and then go back to my hovel to scribble some more. I am delicate of constitution and awkward in crowds.

[xanaxfarts]

shibari figurines by constant heaven

[occultbleed]

The komusō (literally “priest of nothingness” or “monk of emptiness”) were a group of Zen Buddhist mendicant monks who wandered the roads of Edo period Japan. They would play elaborate tunes on their bamboo flutes as they begged for alms, their faces (and thus, their ego) completely concealed by a distinctive hood woven from straws or reeds. Unsurprisingly, many were recruited as spies or were actually ninja or ronin in disguise, and eventually their temples and their schools were abolished for meddling in material affairs instead of spiritual ones.

[gardenofthefareast]

Kiyochika Kobayashi / 小林清親　b. 1847～1915 [ Rainy Day at Kudan ] @ashlikesnow8

[pashley-inneskillen-nicks]

Gothic Novel Essentials

[luna-azzurra]

A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.

[greengableslover]

Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it.

ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1985) dir. Kevin Sullivan

[redshift-13]

The River Otter's Remarkable Comeback

In North America’s Great Lakes region, river otters are coming back from the brink thanks to decades of effort on both sides of the border.

River otters (Lontra canadensis) once moved almost everywhere in this basin. They swam with ease, hunted with precision and thrived in backwaters and bays thick with vegetation. But by the mid-20th century, they had vanished from the state of Ohio and become scarce across most of the watershed. The reasons stacked up quickly. Over-trapping for fur. Pollution that loaded fish with PCBs and other toxins. Wetlands drained for farms and cities. Rivers and streams straightened, dammed, stripped bare. By the 1970s, the silence spoke volumes: the otter was gone, and with it an apex predator vital to the food chain.

The comeback In 1986, Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) began reintroducing river otters to streams they had not seen in decades. Over the next seven years, 123 otters from Louisiana and Arkansas were released into rivers selected for their clean water, abundant food and protective cover. They weren’t the only ones bringing otters back. In the late 1990s, New York’s River Otter Project relocated 279 otters – drawn from the Adirondacks, Catskills and Hudson Valley – to 16 sites across western and central New York state. Many of those waterways had been without otter populations longer than most residents could remember. In Ontario, biologists have documented otters recolonizing areas such as Algonquin Provincial Park and the north shore of Lake Superior, where they had been scarce for much of the 20th century. Across western Canada, populations have rebounded more broadly. Aside from rare remnant areas on Prince Edward Island, river otters are now considered stable or expanding in nearly every province and territory.

...

More at the link.

What's not to love about river otters?

This is great news.