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if i look back, i am lost
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@gently-chamomile
"Look, my boss wants me to grant your wishes in the most obtuse, literal way, so I'm going to do that. HOWEVER, I am technically allowed to let you redo your wishes infinite times if you are unsatisfied. I tell you this because I felt really bad for the last guy. Please don't abuse this rule."
the last guy said he wanted to cure cancer. the genie's boss made the genie give the poor man a tumor mass and with instructions to soak it in brine and smoke it over a fire. technically, 'curing' cancer.
You were born with the ability to see how many times a person has avoided death. It's been decently useful, but humans are fragile, so the number above most heads is pretty high. One day at a diner with your friends you realize something strange: the number above the waiter's head is a zero.
You watch the waiter carefully all night and nearly have a heart attack when you realize the woman with a zero has neither a shadow nor a reflection.
After that, the clues fall into place: her pallor, her blood-red lips, and most damningly, the needle-sharp canines in her upper jaw. You didn't know people could be born as vampires, rather than turned, but you suppose it makes sense. After all, you can't avoid death if you're already undead.
You notice when the waiter slips her number to one of your friends, the one she'd been flirting with all night. At the end of the meal, your friend doesn't see you snatch the slip of folded paper, the one containing the phone number, from beside her plate.
You tear the piece of paper into confetti, and the number above your friend's head ticks one value higher.
one of my favorite parts of the Iliad is when Athena (via Diomedes) stabs (her brother) Ares in the gut and Ares screams really really loud and then goes to show (his dad) Zeus the wound and complain about Athena. and then Zeus goes "don't whine, you wuss. ugh you're just like your mother. this is probably her fault somehow. [he's right, it is] but you are my child too so I guess I'll get you some first aid."
like. i think the Iliad's gods are so all-powerful and they demand/inspire awe when they interact with the human heroes, but then when they interact with one another it's an absolute trainwreck of dysfunction and human pettiness and flaws.
just saw the new spiderman and it was a great movie and i also thought it was kinda funny when they were like "oh no... your spider hormones... they're too high... your senses are too heightened... you won't be able to process it all..." and depicted it really dramatically with flashing cuts and him falling to the ground clutching his head.
and yep yep that's sensory overload right there. it do be like that sometimes. i personally recommend leaving the grimy loud rooftop asap and going back to your apartment and also earplugs and a soft blanket if possible. no dude don't go fight crime right now--
You are a knight who practically raised the children of the king. With the throne vacant and civil war rising, each sibling asks you to pledge to them.
You use your age and influence to persuade them to accept a regency system, viewing it as the only way to avert a destructive civil war. You are appointed the regent. A few years into your rule, you realize that the country will never know peace as long as rival claimants to the throne persist. With a heavy heart, you order the assassination of the king's children.
the funnest fact in all of US history is that George Washington technically and accidentally started the Seven Years War (called the French & Indian War for the bits fought in America) when he was TWENTY-TWO.
for context the Seven Years War is widely considered the first world war prior to WW1. it was fought on five continents by Britain (plus Prussia, and also Portugal, the Iroquois Confederacy, Russia, etc) against France (plus the Holy Roman Empire/Hapsburg Monarchy, Spain, Bengal, Sweden, Russia again, the Wabanaki Confederacy, etc). like. this is THE war and it had MASSIVE repercussions for almost the entire world.
and the events of the 7 Years War slash French & Indian War directly and specifically caused the American Revolution. like the whole entire reason the colonies were being "taxed without representation" was to pay for the cost of that war and after it ended to keep up soldiers to maintain the new American territory Britain got in that war. (also, less well known but just as relevant to the cause of the Revolution, the American colonists were extremely salty about Parliament not letting them settle on that new territory per the agreement with Native American wartime allies.)
so i'm getting off topic but the punchline here is that not only did George Washington pretty much single-handedly win the American Revolutionary War, AND preside over the Constitutional Convention, AND be the first president, AND step down from the presidency (thus allowing the baby US government to dodge the single most common pitfall of baby governments which is your charismatic wartime leader becoming a dictator)---not only all that on purpose, but he also by SHEER COINCIDENCE (probably) by accident technically CAUSED the American Revolution to even happen at all. not an accomplishment per se but nevertheless truly iconic.
imo the 1920s are really THE decade of all time for us history. you have the mass adoption of indoor plumbing and electricity. you have high school, which 3 in 10 kids attended at the start of the decade to over half by 1930, creating the teenager as a concept. child labor went from a Thing to Not.
you have the advent of credit cards and luxury spending. starbucks is a 1920s concept. you have the creation of the modern mortgage. you had the advent of the car as a popular means of transportation and hence america's infrastructure planning can literally be separated pre- and post-1920s.
you had the Great Migration and the Harlem Renaissance and the flourishing of Black American culture. you had the rise of jazz and the seeds of rock'n'roll that would in turn spawn pop and a half-dozen other genres. you had the mass adoption of the wireless radio and the inception of mass entertainment and the birth of mass culture. social media is a 1920s concept. the billboard hot 100 is a 1920s concept. memes are a 1920s concept.
you have the tipping point for urbanization where the number of people living in cities crossed the 50% mark. you have the first western fashion in centuries if not millennia where it is acceptable for women to show their knees. also, women can vote now. you have independent unmarried working women as a concept.
you have the birth of talkie films and also Disney. you have the Scopes Trial and the increasingly definitive separation of Science and Religion in the public consciousness.
you have the upheaval of the entire social order, the breakdown of family ties, the reforging of social norms, and also pole-sitting and goldfish-swallowing and so many weird causes of death because of prohibition and accidental poisoning and also it wasn't common knowledge that running a car in an enclosed space would kill you and literally just so much. so much. i will never shut up about the 1920s.
this is your daily reminder that until 200ish years ago, everyone had a 50/50 shot of living to see puberty. you had about a 1 in 3 chance of dying before your first birthday (27% infant mortality rate), followed by a 1 in 5 chance of dying before puberty (49% overall child mortality rate).
this was true of hunter-gatherer societies but also literally every other society (with variation +-10%) right up until worldwide mortality rates fell off a cliff in the twentieth century.
as of 2025 in the United States, the infant mortality rate (before age 1) is 0.005% and the total child mortality rate (before age 14) is 0.041%.
globally, infant mortality is 0.028% (2024) and total child mortality is 4.3% (2020).
so no matter how dissatisfied we are with modernity, there is also quite a bit we can be grateful and celebrate about.
things that will happen if women get the right to vote (according to anti-suffrage political cartoons):
men will be forced to HOLD babies and/or small children
women will SMOKE in PUBLIC
women will WEAR TROUSERS
men may be forced to COOK and contribute to household chores
women may FROWN instead of smiling attractively
the ghosts of the Founding Fathers will CRY
some attractive women may choose to remain SINGLE
ugly women will force men to MARRY THEM
they will pass CHILD LABOR LAWS
The problem with being a history major and watching a period romance drama (specifically those set in late-eighteenth or nineteenth century Britain with upper class class characters) is that 1/3 of me is happy for the leads and their cute little courtship and the other 2/3 is screaming "WHERE are your CHAPERONES this is a disgrace to your families and you deserve to be SHUNNED BY SOCIETY. If you're going to be licentious reprobates then AT LEAST be SUBTLE about it. Your poor parents."
On that note I would like to formally apologize to my sister for my inability to shut up for longer than three minutes when we watched Enola Holmes 3 together.
A crew of 5000 humans are placed in Cryosleep and sent to another planet to colonize it. When they arrive 1000 years later, they learn that, thanks to advancements in Space Travel, the planet had been colonized by humans for over 500 years.
The 5000 humans are relieved that their new planet comes pre-colonized, while the existing humans on the planet are glad to have fresh people entering the workforce. The spaceship's sceintists are excited to learn about advances in tech and the planet's historians are excited to interview the new arrivals about Ancient Motherworld Customs. Everyone lives happily ever after. The end.
these can even describe the very same sentence when you first write it vs when you reread it or vice versa unfortunately
i don't use ai and i never will, but not because of any moral or ethical reason. rather i simply Do Not Trust It. not in the world domination sense but in the group project sense.
like i can make my own mistakes because at least i know how to look for and fix those. i don't lie to myself about my capabilies but ai sure does. and in the end i do not want to claim as my own work some shiny hollow garbage and its polished-over yet structurally-compromising breaks with reality.
Writers have two modes and they are "i haven't written in three weeks and i am rotting from the inside and everything feels wrong and i don't know who i am anymore" and "i wrote for four hours straight and forgot to eat and it's dark outside and when did that happen and i feel like a god" and there is nothing in between. no chill. no medium setting. just famine or feast and a very confused nervous system.
hey so fun fact this is also what it's like to have ADHD
i dont "go on walks," i dont "use character sheets" and i dont "plot before writing," i raw dog it, and if it doesnt flow, I FUCKING CRY.
i do this with essays/academic writing and whenever i try to make an outline each bullet point becomes a paragraph and et voila i have once again rawdogged a six-page paper except now i have to go back through and get rid of the bullet points
"REAL MEN cry IN PUBLIC and SOB LOUDLY and REND THEIR GARMENTS. women, as part of their inferiority, are naturally less emotional than men."
--the patriarchy in Greece around the time of Homer
patriarchy is so silly it's not even consistent
"REAL MEN cry IN PUBLIC and SOB LOUDLY and REND THEIR GARMENTS. women, as part of their inferiority, are naturally less emotional than men."
--the patriarchy in Greece around the time of Homer
