leo mcgarry kinda character of all time. runs the white house like a 50s mobster and is also a recovering alcoholic that convinces other men to get therapy
Wrecking Ball is so perfect for Appalachian Andy who never got out, who went to Berkeley, who drempt large enough for DC and Maryland and all of California, but who never got out.
The days were rough and it's all quite dim/ But my mind cuts through it all/ Like a wrecking ball
Fallen daughter on a scholarship/ I got tired and let my average slip/ Then I was a farmer in the pogonip/ Where the weed that I recall/ Was like a wrecking ball
This is a lot, but Fallen Daughter. Fallen Daughter, my girl with ADHD, who was never quite good, quite perfect enough to execute her dreams and complaints. My addict darling, my beloved with generational addiction trauma, who's falling, falling to that devil anyway.
I met a lovesick daughter of the San Joaquin/ She showed me colors I'd never seen/ Drank the bottom out of my canteen/ Then left me to fall/ Like a wrecking ball
So. That is. A lyric.
Thank you to Genius annotations for putting the reference(?) to LSD in my head because I'm now about to explode. Because my addict darling is now addicted to a lovesick daughter from Dayton Ohio.
Drank the bottom out of my canteen. Then left me to fall. Well. I am now infact thinking about The Fall's Gonna Kill You. C. J. is going to leave, like she has too and always has too, like a wrecking ball.
Standin' there in the morning mist/ A Jack and Coke at the end of my wrist/ Yes, I remember when first we kissed/ Though it was nothing at all/ Like a wrecking ball
Alcoholism welcome back to the conversation. Also hello comphet. Which are nothing at all, like a wrecking ball.
With too much trouble for me to shake/ Oh, the weather and the blinding ache
(I want to say Andy with chronic pain here, a blinding ache she has no words to describe and no way to deal with, but knows might scare people away.)
Was riding high until the '89 quake/ Hit the Santa Cruz Garden Mall/ Like a wrecking ball
"i don't care if they make their whole way though uni with chatgpt" i think you guys are so internetpilled that you have forgotten there are actual jobs out there that require people to know what they are doing in any way possible or else people die
114 people died in the Hyatt Regency collapse, and in the US it's the third largest structural collapse fatality count, behind 9/11 and the Pemberton Mill collapse in 1860.
I've learned about this tragedy in my physics classes, to demonstrate tensile strength, and as a reminder about the importance of calculations being done right. I've also learned about it in my legal classes as an example of construction defect lawsuits. I've seen it referenced in disaster response classes.
Between AI and the current Presidential administration, we're barrelling right back towards this nightmare.
There are multiple errors that resulted in this collapse, but these stand out to me:
1. Kansas City was facing high unemployment and needed to attract jobs and business into the city. So the planning and inspection departments may have looked too closely at the designs.
2. An engineering firm too lazy to double check their designs or design changes by the manufacturer before approving them. The error that resulted in the collapse was one that the owner of the engineering firm said that a "first year engineering student" would spot.
3. The steel manufacturer treating preliminary plans as final plans, not verifying the math on their end.
The bridges' original design could only hold 60% of the minimum load required by city code. The design changes recommended by the manufacturer halved that. Less than a year and 3 weeks from opening to the public, the whole thing collapse.
Articles about the collapse say that everyone "trusted" the other party to have done the calculations correctly.
A significant portion of the population trusts what the computer or AI tells them, without checking. Imprecisely calibrated AI hallucinate information. The US economy is going into a downturn and federal regulatory agencies are being gutted.
We are going to see the Hyatt Regency Collapse repeat over and over for decades, not just in buildings, but in medicine, manufacturing, the environment, etc.
Some of this we're just going to have to weather, but the message for AI users comes straight from IBM (once the world's leading computer manufacturer) back in 1979:
"A Computer Cannot Be Held Accountable. Therefore A Computer Should Never Make A Management Decision."
The owner of the engineering firm that designed the Hyatt Regency spent the rest of his life lecturing on the disaster, to serve as a warning to his fellow engineers about the real-life consequences of sloppy design.
I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk will have the courage or the honor to do that when OpenAI / Meta / xAI are responsible for getting people killed.
So if you're going to blindly trust the AI to do critical work tasks, I hope you're prepared to be making an apology tour for the rest of your life if it all goes wrong.
what is it about things being gender neutral having to also be ‘masculine’. like, why can you wear a suit and tie and call it gender neutral but not a dress cause that’s feminine. why can you call people dude or guy as a gender neutral term but not girl cause that’s feminine. short hair is neutral but long hair is feminine. i mean i know why this is fully a rhetorical question but let’s think about that
Okay so actually letting a serious topic be vague and confusing is much more scary for a child than explaining it in calm language they can understand.
When you are in a safe place, explain the serious topic in a way the child can understand.
The fire alarm went off at school today because of a mistake, but your teachers did the right thing to take you outside to be sure it was safe.
Some people use wheelchairs because their legs don’t walk very well. It can happen because they are old and tired, or because they got hurt, or because they were born that way.
Your Uncle Jerod talked to mom and dad, and wants you to call her Aunt Kari now. We will call her Kari too, and we can all practice together if it takes some getting used to.
Anticipate age-appropriate fears the child might have so you can assuage those that are not a threat.
Yes, Kitty died at the vet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not safe for Puppy to go to the vet.
Yes, Peyton and Jo are getting a divorce, but they are both still part of our family and love you very much.
Yes, Grandma has cancer, but cancer is not contagious, so you are not going to get cancer by visiting her.
Anticipate fears that are realistic, and give the child clear direction about what to do, and what happens next.
If someone asks you to get in their car without permission, find Mom, Mama, or a teacher and tell them right away. We will make sure you are safe.
If Sparky’s sickness makes him hurt very badly, we are going to take him to the vet and she will give him some medicine, and he will die, but then he won’t hurt any more. Because Sparky is very sick, we are going to spend some special time with him over the next few days.
If the fire alarm goes off at school again, follow the teacher’s directions. If the fire alarm goes off and you are somewhere alone, go outside, and ask a grownup to call 911.
Reassure the child that they’re safe and loved, validate their feelings, and see if they have follow-up questions. Give them the option to take space to process, or to stay near you to feel safe.
I’m sad about Sparky too. Do you think we could make his favorite peanut-butter treats, while we are spending special time with him?
I understand why Grandma’s cancer makes you feel angry. It doesn’t seem fair that people we love get sick. Would you like a hug?
You were worried about calling 911 if there’s not a grownup around. I wrote down some important things, like our address, and we can go over these together so you are ready if anything like that ever happens.
These things are principally the job of the child’s parent or guardian, but in some cases directing the child to that caregiver is difficult or impossible (parent refuses/confuses the child, parent is absent, child’s questions are specific and relevant to a situation their parent was not present for, etc.) so I think all adults should be prepared to have these conversations with kids.
@malkaleh tagged me to share a snippet of a fic I’m working on so: this is the start of a one-shot dealing with some of the headcanons around Andy and sobriety and a potential mentor relationship with Leo over time. Except set during/after his funeral.
Warning for mentions of alcholism and relapse (and canon character death in the form of it being Leo’s funeral)
The day of Leo’s funeral, she’s four days sober. Toby doesn’t leave her side.
He sits next to her during the service after he’s met her at the twins’ daycare so they could take a cab together. He’d hooked his arm through hers when they entered without asking, and while that drew looks she hadn’t pulled away.
Andy tells him that she lied to CJ about being overwhelmed with work now that she scraped by with a win seven days ago, because she couldn’t bring herself to say that if she joined the others at the White House after the service she’d drink. Toby tells her she made the right call; he won’t be attending either and they don’t talk about why.
Talking about why would be talking about the reason she’s four days sober instead of the five and a half years — over two thousand days just this October — she’d made it to. They don’t dare.
Toby sits next to her during the service and she can see the tears gathering in his eyes when she looks his way.
She’s nauseous, a sick urge to flee the scene rolling around in her stomach as all she really wants is to leave the church and find a bar. Buy a bottle, nothing fancy — she’s never cared for the little things Leo said he loved so much — and drink until she loses the career, the sobriety, and the memory of Leo McGarry she’d tried so hard to cling to on Election Day.
She wants to flee. She holds Toby’s hand tighter than can be comfortable and appreciates the way he squeezes her right back. He doesn’t dare let go.
Tagging @broadwaybaggins @muldxr @divorcedlizbartlet @pelorsdyke @thebartlets @lemonjellylemonjelly if you want to!
I'm nowhere near Appalachia--Texan born and raised--but I've heard stories. And there's just some little pockets of civilization you just leave the hell alone and forget you ever heard about them.
holy mother of fucking classism WHAT is this post and why was it recommended to me??? “feral people”???? “their kind”?????? hello???? do you hear yourselves????? do you think before you type out words and hit send??? Be Normal About The Appalachias Challenge, Difficulty: Fucking Impossible i guess. y’all really see a low income family living in a rural area and start pissing your pants with fear and writing horror stories. fuck off with that. there’s no “feral people”, there’s no whispering in the woods, and you don’t go into the woods after dark BECAUSE ITS THE FUCKING WOODS AND ITS DARK AND YOU’RE MORE LIKELY TO GET LOST. fuck. i’m so tired of this shit. we’re literally just people.
you don't go wandering around the appalachians after dark because they have a fuckzillion natural caves a fuckzillion additional mineshafts with a fuckton of random-ass poorly husbanded new growth forest skinned overtop. you don't need feral hillbillies to explain why people disappear in a mountain range with more holes than fleshlight factory. you need two seconds of looking at a map.
As an actual, low-income Appalachian who HAS had to live in a shitty trailer in the woods? I'm talking no running water or power that didn't come off a generator for six months? Fuck you. Fuck off. Fuck all the way directly off and then keep going.
It's not my fucking fault that I was born into the cycle of poverty. It's not my fucking fault I wasn't born in a big city with tons of fucking resources, either.
Do you know what it's like to graduate as part of a class of less than 150 people? Do you know what it's like to have to drive an hour and a half to buy shoes? Do you understand how much harder that all becomes when your only fucking options for a job are the only Dollar General in town or some warehouse, factory, or coal/ore/mineral mine?
Do you understand why so many of us, MYSELF INCLUDED, end up doing the backbreaking work that keeps the consumerist bullshit on your little rich-bitch city shelves? Do you understand why we end up falling apart, falling into opiate and drug addiction, falling into despair and death and ruin at much younger ages than the general population? Why this same cycle is so hard to break, because there ISN'T ANYTHING FUCKING ELSE?
Do you understand, FINALLY, why we kind of end up fucking hating you, because you'd rather make up stories about inbred cannibals in the woods, rather than stare down the VERY REAL horrors of your own fucking classism?
Of course not. Y'all don't understand a fucking thing. The history goes all the way back to racism against so many different groups, and the modern version of this poison is directly linked to propaganda spread by the US government after the Coal Wars. Get off of tiktok with this bullshit and go read some actual, honest to god history. I won't do it for you. There's too much and the wounds go too deep.
But in summary? Unironically, fuck anybody who thinks like this. I'm just a person. Look, I'm even literate!
And now this hillbilly is telling you to go and fucking read.
AU for you for the game, and I'm sorry. AU where one (or both) of twins died, of stillbirth, a timeline change prematurity, or possibly - condense the timeline a bit - even of SIDS during or after Gaza. (Again, profusely sorry for this one.)
Send me an AU and I give you five facts about it!
Well. Okay. (I love it; I love angst, but oh. Oh.) This came in like an hour after @muldxr sent me an AU prompt for “what if the fertility treatment worked earlier and the twins are born circa the start of the show” and the irony did in fact plague me all day. I’m answering this one first cause it’s gonna destroy me and hopefully you too (said with such love) and then the evening can only become brighter.
Heavy trigger warning here for child loss and mentions of suicide attempts.
1. Because really the fact of the matter is that there is a lot, and I do mean a lot, that Andy Wyatt can withstand without losing her sunshine, her positivity, her optimism, her fight. Without losing herself. The divorce, the infertility and the miscarriages, the leak, Gaza, sure. Any headcanons around suicide and alcoholsim and chronic illness, sure. Losing her dad, sure. If her mom died, sure. Hell, you could kill off Toby or CJ and Andy Wyatt would be going through Hell, but she would find a way to come out of that the other side. It’s who she is. There is so very little you can throw at her from which she does not recover. But losing the twins? She can’t come back from it. She just can’t do it. She doesn’t want to even try. If she finally has her rainbow babies, and then buries them? It’s just not something she can go through and come out the other side, it’s not.
2. Going with the idea of the twins being stillborn. Toby does not remember the doctor saying what happened. He doesn’t remember hearing the words, he doesn’t know if they were told “i’m so sorry” or if they were told the facts first, or anything. He doesn’t remember a word any doctor said to him that day; the words “they didn’t make it” just did not stick, he might as well not have heard them. And he almost didn’t, because the thing that’s never, ever going to escape his mind, no matter how hard he tries to forget it, is the sound Andy made when the doctor said whatever he said. He’s never heard anything like it, he’s never going to hear anything like it again, and for years after it’ll wake him up sometimes, in the middle of the night, and he’ll cry like it just happened. That sound is the only thing he remembers from the day their children died. (After she screamed like she never had before, she didn’t say anything; she barely made a sound for days, if not weeks or months after.)
3. With a tragic aside. If one twin dies and one twin lives, be it from SIDS or even later in life, a car accident (god knows the trauma from Gaza would be good for it), a fall, an illness, a freak accident or just really bad luck. If one twin dies, Andy cannot be a mom to the other one, and she’ll never forgive herself. But it kills her, it just kills her, and I think she buries one of her children and feels awful, jus so awful, asking her mother to take the child she has left, because Andy frankly doesn’t want to make it to morning, and she’s afraid of what’ll happen to her only living child if she doesn’t.
4. Andy resigns. In any scenario. But especially after a stillbirth, it’s just… she got sued for this pregnancy. She got sued and she loved it and she fought like hell for the right to be pregnant and do her job and the idea of coming back to work without her babies? It’s just unbearable. She cannot do it. She resigns, and no one tries to talk her out of that. She has no plans for what she’ll do next, and this worries her mother and Toby and CJ so greatly, but she can’t do it. She resigns and goes home to the house she bought to raise her children in and I think the only reason she doesn’t successfully kill herself is because she’s too desperate to die to do it properly. (And because she’s loved, so loved, by people who know better than to think she wouldn’t try after this. She’s checked on.)
5. Toby buries himself in his work. Like with when David died, he can’t stand the idea of not being here, not having this to do, and resents the suggestions that he might take some time, might go home and sit with Andy and do something there. (But when the leak happens, and it still does, he cares even less to make a deal, and he’ll take the six plus however from the second indictment years in prison, and Andy’s not lobbying for his pardon anymore than she’s doing anything else in DC right now. And maybe Jed still signs a pardon because he couldn’t imagine what they’ve been through.)
6. Because I have to try and make it something sorta okay-ish. Andy never really comes back from this. She never tries to have children again, and that breaks her, too. But she gives it a place. Eventually. It takes her years. She meets with other moms who’ve lost their children, she finds work that keeps her busy but not in the public eye yet (she can’t stand the idea; has never stopped thinking what might’ve happened if she’d not been so eager to Fight about her children before she even got to hold them). She’s in therapy and she’ll be on a daily dose of antidepressants for the rest of her life and that hurt her to realise, too, but it gets her through the day and that felt unimaginable the day she heard she’d lost her children. And one day, years later, Toby’s going to get a visit in his office in Columbia and he’ll be struck by how different and how just like Andy Andy still looks, and she’ll have tears in her eyes already before she asks if he thinks there’s any point in her considering a run for Governor after all these years. (He loves her so much; he never wanted to go back into politics, but dammit, they can take that step together.)
"dni if you engage with irredeemable media! dni to kill a mockingbird stans" ok well CLEARLY you have never read to kill a mockingbird if you think it's irredeemable media and also having a book that was published in 1960 on your dni stan list is kinda ridiculous actually
i love discovering new music. but there's actually nothing like rediscovering old music. like, hello me from 5, 10, 15 years ago. so good to see you. same heart, i see. god, i love you.
When you hear the news that there is a growing life expectancy gap between republicans and democrats partially because of the right-wing anti-science conspiracies that have taken hold (especially after COVID) you’re like “Lol. They owned the libs so hard they died.” and then you remember these are the same people having 6+ kids to populate the polls with their white Christian children and medically neglecting them. Then you squint at the data and realize it is not measuring voter data and life expectancy but life expectancy in red areas vs. blue areas and you realize that voter suppression, corruption, racism and poverty is actually killing the people in these places faster than the national average, not their own reactionary views. And you’re so angry it’s being presented like it’s their fault they’re dying.
