I'm an adult. I'm a lawyer. I spend way too much time writing time travel fics. The author of The Dark Path Lit by Sun and Stars and Grey Dawn Breaking
Telling an adult who has never read Island of the Blue Dolphins about the plot of Island of the Blue Dolphins, a book we read in 2nd grade, is an interesting experience.
Turns out lots of people never read Old Yeller in 3rd grade either.
Was my school sadistic or were the 80s just pretty fucked up?
I was in elemantary school in the early 00's while it was never required reading, my 4th grade teacher had a copy and I read it. If I'm remembering correctly, Where the Red Fern Grows was required reading.
We didn’t read old yeller, but Where the Red Fern Grows was second grade, Island of Blue Dolphins was third grade, and The Quay was sixth grade. Anne of Green Gables was the fourth grade book, but it seems Matthew’s death doesn’t quite qualify it for traumatizing childhood novel. Also, Bridge to Terebithia was supposed to be the fifth grade heartbreaker novel, but we had a revolving door of teachers that year and wound up being way behind on every lesson we were supposed to cover and just ended up not reading it.
Anyway, I think mildly traumatizing children through literature is necessary to our ability to grow up capable of handling heavy topics and valuable enrichment.
ETA: it wasn’t Anne of Green Gables. Fourth grade’s mildly traumatizing book was The Hatchet.
Do not put a double quotation mark inside a double quotation.
DO: "His article, 'The Proper Wearing of Hats', made me want to throw mine into the fire."
DO NOT: "His article, "The Proper Wearing of Hats", made me want to throw mine into the fire."
DO YOU DARE?: "His article, 'The Proper Wearing of Hats', contained a dubious saying from the self-proclaimed Sir Hattingsworth, who declared, 'If I ever read anything other than "The Proper Wearing of Hats", I'll eat mine!'--a phrase so utterly and obviously made-up that I nearly threw my own hat into the fire."
Surprisingly, this does not always apply to legal writing. I found this out from the research attorney reviewing the order I wrote very kindly directing me to the style rule that says to do the exact opposite.
Let me tell you, my writer’s heart nearly broke when I checked and saw she was right.
Still can’t do anything else because adrenaline crash, so you get to hear me rant/gush.
I finally, finally read a fic that had a character with multiple pronouns and managed to handle them properly.
1. There was a legitimate story reason for the character to be addressed with multiple pronouns as it was a being of magic and shadows that wasn’t seen as a person before that point.
2. Asking preferred pronouns made sense in the story and didn’t come off as virtue signaling because one of the characters felt bad they were referring to the shadow being as an “it” after it became obvious it was a person and not a thing, but there was no obvious way to tell which pronouns actually applied without asking.
3. There was no confusion, despite the character being okay with multiple pronouns, because each POV character picked one to use and stuck to it. We always knew who the POV characters were referring to.l even if they each used different pronouns to do so.
4. The only character who did switch pronouns in their POV was the shadow being, because he was still getting used to thinking of himself as a person and not a thing. As he got used to being a person, he swapped between he and it less often.
Too often, if I see the tag “character A is he/they” or “character B uses she/it” I cannot read the story beyond a few paragraphs. Because the author will randomly switch pronouns for the character within the same sentence regardless of POV. Which makes it really hard to keep track of who is doing what and takes me out of the story. Like I can put up with a lot of shit when indulging a hyperfixation, but constantly pulling me out of the story is one I cannot forgive.
But by switching pronouns only when we switched POV characters, this writer managed to have their multi-pronouns character and minimized confusion. Like, if you insist on doing it, this is how you do it.
It’s a low bar, but it’s annoying how few fic writers clear it.
Got home from work, noticed my upstairs was still a bit warm despite the AC definitely working and realized it’s probably because of the very badly sealed window unit still in my bedroom. So I decided I’ll just take it out and get the window closed!
Easy enough. I’ve done it before.
Except I forgot to account for the fact that all the weight was on the left side of the unit, which was the side over my bed and which I could not get a good grip on before opening the window.
Let me tell you, my heart pretty much stopped beating and time slowed down when that thing started leaning backwards. I had all the time in the world to envision multiple ways the resulting crash would look and sound as it fell out of my second
story
window.
I barely managed to catch it with my fingertips before it tipped all the way over the edge, somehow getting a death grip on the accordion wings.
How did I manage not to rip them? I don’t know.
How did I manage to hold onto that thin strip of metal long enough to get my other hand under the unit and keep it from dropping onto my driveway in a spectacular cacophony of broken metal, plastic, wires, and the trust and respect of my sister and brother-in-law who lent it to me? I don’t know.
How did I manage to lever the thing the right way through the window and onto my bed? I don’t fucking know.
But I did it. And it’s safely in my spare room, no worse for wear. And the window is closed with a noticeable drop in the room temp now that warm air isn’t seeping in constantly.
Oh, and my right hand, arm, and knee are scraped and bruised to hell and back. That happened, too.
Oh dear Lord it could’ve waited another day after I asked someone to help me remove it.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
We are also more likely to die from the consequences of STEM scholars Not knowing enough sociology and history and Art, or from the consequences of Business scholars knowing neither enough science nor enough humanities, than we are to die from the consequences of Humanities Scholars not knowing enough Science, but it is nevertheless important (for Society as a whole working as well as possible, through people being appropriately appreciative of academics as a way to holistic problemsolving, and to prevent fraud and quackery and conspiracy-ideologies), for everyone in a decisionmaking Position and ESPECIALLY for academic researchers and teachers-for-older-youth, to have a functional/adult understanding of the very basic principles of the Things they're NOT an expert in.
This is one of the few things I will praise Yale for, unequivocally, and with no disclaimers or suggestions to do better:
To graduate from Yale you need to fulfill 6 different credit requirements divided into two sets of three.
One set is a skill requirement. You need two credits per skill in courses that are writing, quantitative reasoning (math, programming, logic), or foreign language focused.
The other set is, well, course type. You need two credits each for science, humanities, and social sciences. So there were course for non-majors offered for nearly every major.
And each credit is distinct. You could not use a single course for your science and your quantitative reasoning credit even if it qualified for both. You had to pick one and get the other from a different class. This guarantees each student takes 6-12 classes outside their major.
For example, I was a Poli Sci major. Some of those credits I knocked out with my required courses, but I still had to take first order logic, history of the revolutionary war, astrophysics for non majors, art history, Japanese, Russian literature, Japanese film history, intro programming, ancient anthropology, modern philosophy, etc. to fulfill the other requirements.
I know about that one, have for years, got my brother to sign my niece and nephews up for it, tell anyone I know with kids to look into it too, amazing thing she's done, what said about Dolly in the tweet is right on the money.
Mainly I'm wondering about the twitter account, it's puts out some just wonderful to read heartwarming short stories like this, read one yesterday from it about a spiritual experience at Buc-ee's, so it could be aggregating stories from other people or a creative writing thing, possibly AI but if it is it's doing better than all the other AI stuff I've read.
Thank you for adding the link there, I'd posted this from mobile and meant to add it on but haven't had the chance yet so you've saved me that trouble there.
I think the other ones are humorous exaggerations, possibly aggregations of the various experiences our World Cup guests are having, but this one I would 100% believe to be real.
Because that’s the kind of effect Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and her story always has on me. Every time.
And I can easily see it having the same effect on someone from halfway across the world.
The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.
The magic of childhood is that you were constantly encountering new things. The best way to feel that way again is to fill your life with new experiences.
I mowed the front lawn. Mostly. I didn’t do the stuff by the car. But I was dripping sweat in the 77% humidity and at the point where if I didn’t stop to eat soon, I’d regret it.
Came in and showered right away. Something about getting clean after hard work feels so nice. So now I’m in sweats, all comfy and cozy, and I made dinner. Sloppy Joes.
Also getting ready to settle in for a night of relaxing. I’ve got Palworld up, a new little keyboard, and dinner ready to go. It’s gonna be a good night.
Can’t wait for that folding lap desk to arrive, though.
I have to go to target for new dishwashing gloves. The ones I have fell in the sink and got water on the inside and now they’re disgusting.
I also need to mow the front lawn before I get fined by the city. Except I can’t if it rained at home today because the cheap mower does not do well with wet grass. It down poured at work, but I have no clue how it was at my house. I really hoped it didn’t because the grass got ridiculous while my mower was broken and it will be even worse by the time it dries. But I kinda hope it did because shopping and mowing and cleaning the kitchen is a lot to do after work.
I also have to make dinner. My leftovers are past the “still safe to eat” limit and must be tossed. So fresh proteins must be cooked. If I do salmon, I have delicious salmon but no leftovers for tomorrow. If I do chicken, I have leftovers but also I’m getting kinda sick of chicken. If I do sloppy joes, I will have delicious sloppy joes and leftovers that I am not sick of, but I will probably get heartburn.
I also want to play a game tonight. If I have low energy- Coral Island. Energy plus brainpower - Baldur’s Gate. Energy but no brainpower - pal world. If I mow it’ll probably be coral island. Clair Obscure requires energy and brainpower and time. I seem incapable of playing it for less than two hours. I will not have time.
Also, bought a little folding desk for the couch. I’m trying to learn to play with a keyboard and mouse but with using the TV as the monitor, trying to use the mouse while on the couch puts my wrist too low to be comfortable. And it doesn’t track that well on fabric. The desk gets here tomorrow. That has to be it for impulsive spending though.
Speaking of, the walking sandals should be here on Monday. I’ll have 10 days to break them in. I really hope they fit well. I went with my actual size because the brand supposedly has a wide toe-box. Usually if wide isn’t an option I go a half size up. I will not have time to return them and get replacements if they don’t fit.
We just finished a run of the slay the spire board game. That is intense. Like, they went all out to faithfully adapt a rogue-lite video game to physical form. It has meta progression. We’re gonna take a break from it, though. Don’t want to get burned out.
I am considering offering to DM a DnD game for the group. Let my brother be a player for once. Our game is kinda DOA because my brother got burned out running two campaigns and got into Warhammer. I’ve never done it before, but I think it’d be fun. And that way all the miniatures I’ve bought and painted won’t go to waste.
Had AI training at work today. And the next two workdays. It was useless. Especially since all the training exercises were some weird corpo busywork with a courthouse veneer slapped on top. Ms. Microsoft Drone, I do not think you know what it is we do. When there are cases scheduled for the next week, we are not running “risk assessments” or “co-ordinating schedules” with the Marshalls, judges, and attorneys. The cases will be heard and the people who are supposed to be there better show up or else they fucked themselves over. As to my job, I am analyzing briefs and applying law. Copilot does not seem to even have any words in its “legal” directory that apply to actual lawyer work, only to corporate drones having to interact with the faceless monolith that is a business’ “legal department.”
Also, copilot is not a “genius,” no matter how often you compare it to Einstein. It’s an LLM that has yet to show even once that it can do the very basic tasks I asked it to do that even a college student hoping to go to law school can figure out. You blatantly lying about its ability makes me trust it even less.
I am seriously considering asking for a religious exemption. If they actually require me to start using it, I actually might. I’m Catholic. It could work. The pope says I have a moral obligation to use my human creativity and shut this genAI shit down.
I saw your Locke and Stolas comparison and I …don’t really get it ? Stolas is flawed but he is also a victim as his wife did abuse him and s/a him once , but Locke did not only took his child away from his mother , for over a decade , he also forced himself on his ex, even when she was already engaged with someone else…and isn’t Stella doing the same thing as Locke is doing by keeping their child away from Stolas ? Just like Locke she told lies about her ex to their child. Stolas also tried to talk to Stella about how he stayed in the marriage for their child while Locke had no problem telling his wife that she better deal with it and neglecting his son, telling him lies that his mother is dead and experimented on him. He also led Knuckles believe he was dead at the age of ten.
Stfu. Stop making him being a victim a shield for him constantly screwing over his daughter to get back at his wife and to be an abuser himself. Also that dumbass noise trying to make him a rape victim. Also Stella was only able to keep Octavia away because of his own dumbass decisions she had to rely on her brother to get anything. No, Stella told no lies. Stolas just showed his shitself he cared more about his affair than his own child. F off. Stella didn't need to make Stolas miserable he did it himself when he had the power but is a pathetic man with a crybaby complex who needs to be the powerless victim to justify not doing anything.
I’ve said this before, but people really need to remember that, sometimes, in a conflict
BOTH SIDES SUCK.
A fight can be shitty person vs shitty person. Both sides can absolutely deserve what’s coming to them. Both sides can be victims and perpetrators of truly heinous things done to each other. You are allowed to hate both sides of a conflict and cheer for no one!
There isn’t always an innocent party. There isn’t always a good guy and an evil person attacking them. Sometimes it’s two selfish a-holes hurting each other because they’re selfish a-holes who’d rather hurt other people than actually admit they’re selfish a-holes and change their behavior.
everytime I think "oh well this fandom for which i write is actually pretty well adjusted" and then i write a fic in which a character dies because I mostly write angst and crimefics, and someone i've never heard before pops out of the woods to comment that they're glad to see someone else hating that character and wanting them dead and i'm like. ok i killed them off because i liked them actually. but beyond that here's one more hidden face of the fandom i actually like to not have interacted with so far.
Reasons to kill off a character that are not "the writer hates them"
Writer wants to show how much everyone loves them by having them grieve the character.
Writer wants to show how important that character was to the plot by showing how much their death would change
Writer wants to lament how little importance they have in canon by showing how little their death would change, and yet love was still there etc.
Writer wants to lament how little importance they have in canon and invents a ton of reasons why their death would change canon beyond return even though it's unlikely it would have happened that way.
Writer isn't sure to do justice to their canon writing and prefers to kill them off so they're this unattainable ideal that they do not have to actually write.
Writer knew there was no way this character to whose glory they have written 150 drabbles would be suspected by the readers so they had them murdered at the beginning of the crimefic to throw off their readers.
Writer knew that objectively if someone was to die it was their fave because they have enemies / wouldn't kill someone else so can't be suspect / allows to explore what could bring another character to kill this well liked character.
Writer is sick of the fandom putting that character on a pedestal but they themself are pretty neutral about 'em so they just kill 'em off at the beginning of the fic to not add to the number of people who wrote about 'em.
Writer realised too late that there wouldn't be enough place in the plot for every character so let's kill one that probably no one will miss except a couple hardcore fans.
Writer can't afford so many characters but in this specific setting The Character they're least interested in writing wouldn't be absent unless forcibly removed first and by forcibly removed we mean murdered.
Writer is actually doing an homage to another story where the equivalent of that character is dead or has to die
Writer is feeling petty that day but holds no real inimity to that character
Writer is killing that particular one off just to torture one of their mutuals who loves that character.
the plot needed someone to die and they did a PickWheel about it
The plot began to head that way, and by the time the writer realized, changing course would make the story worse or completely undermine it so the writer has to stay the course and kill the character (the Stranger than Fiction dilemma. Except no real world person dies here).
The plot demanded someone make a difficult choice and the character was the only one who could do so without it being OOC and the writer wants to do them justice because they love the character so much, so character has to die.
Writer loves the character because they’re a self-sacrificing idiot and sometimes being willing to idiotically sacrifice yourself has consequences, up to and including death, and the writer wants to be faithful to the character.
What… why is Jesus part of that list? Jesus is the opposite of what that guy was trying to do.
Jesus accepted His death. Like, that was the whole point of why He was here? To be the perfect sacrifice? For the sake of the world? There was zero hubris. He was not trying to defeat death and prove He was greater than God. No, he went willingly to His death as an act of ultimate humility and obedience.
Like, Jesus foretold multiple times that He was going to die. He was not shy about it. He even rebuked His followers (Peter) who said they wanted to prevent it.
So, yeah, this guy can compare himself to Gilgamesh and Asclepius and how they were struck down for their hubris in daring to go against the natural order. That’s a fair comparison.
But Jesus never tried to escape His death. The closest you could get to that claim would be the agony in the garden, but even that ended with “Thy will be done.”
Did He defeat death? Yes, as God the Son, the one truly perfect and ever living sacrifice, Jesus conquered death and was resurrected. But He still died for us first. The guy above could not be any more different than Jesus Christ.
I’m not hungover (my tolerance isn’t that low), but I always have a hard time sleeping after I drink. It’s like I can’t find the off switch for my thoughts.
So yeah, full day of work on less than 5 hours of sleep, an early game night, and I’m in charge of dinner. I’m so tired and it’s barely 10.
