me, having deeply fallen out of the practice of writing poetry: I can’t write any more, I am now a Talentless Hack
the voice of my 11th grade journalism/12th grade creative writing teacher who rly did know everything: if you stop writing for a while the words will build up and stagnate. to clear the water, you will have to open the dam completely, and accept the fact that what initially comes out will not be palatable
This. This is so true. Starting again is more important than what you actually write. You are rusty. You’ll build up momentum again. All you need to do is start.
I have had "I am now a Talentless Hack" moments more times than I care to count. This is excellent insight from 11th grade journalism/12th grade creative writing teacher.
It’s so creepy how people take a completely platonic relationship between two heterosexual male characters WITH WIVES and obsess over how “gay” they are. All it shows is you weirdos have no idea what a best friend is or what genuine friendship is or what healthy platonic relationships are period.
"Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend." -C.S. Lewis
This is something I loathe about our current culture. Every friendship is automatically sexualized. You aren't able to have deep, loving, meaningful friendships with anyone of your own sex anymore, it is all just about having sex. It's such a sad and shallow view of life. It's terribly lonely. It's unloving.
I'd say that developing deep, loving, meaningful friendships with anyone, regardless of your or their sex, has been made more difficult because of the assumed inevitability of romance developing and the misperception that relationships with any depth undoubtedly contain an element of Eros.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
That’s not sad, that’s awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
Civil War history is giving me whiplash. I read a bit of an ebook about 1860 Washington, and then listened to the 1840s chapter of my commute audiobook, and the contrast between James Buchanan and Zachary Taylor is wild.
James Buchanan (1860): (crying) Maybe if I ignore it people will forget about seceding? It's not like there's anything I can do to stop this.
Zachary Taylor (1850): (using "unpresidential language") IF YOU GUYS SECEDE I WILL PERSONALLY LEAD AN ARMY TO TAKE OVER YOUR STATE AND HANG YOU AS TRAITORS!
It gets even wilder when you consider that in 1850, Taylor's former son-in-law Jefferson Davis was already heading secessionist movements. The Civil War had a very real chance of being a family feud, had history gone a bit differently. Frankly, the South is lucky that Taylor died when he did (and it's no wonder that there were conspiracy theories that he was poisoned).
I took some of @headspace-hotel 's advice and let a part of my front lawn go unmowed. I chose a spot that, two years ago, was just dry dust. But even though we planted grass seeds and all kinds of fertilizer, the patch is now lush and blooming with everything BUT grass.
I don't even have names for what is growing there; I've only ever known grass. There is some stuff with a bouncy texture that grows outwards more than upwards, and I think it is doing the most water retention. There are some things with long, tall stems and purple pigment in the center of their top leaves, like a proto-flower. And of course there are the vines that bloom white flowers.
The HOA of course mistook this menagerie as weeds and sent a letter wanting to cut it down. So to make it more clear the patch is deliberate, I put a decorative low fence around it.
And as I was installing it, I saw a TOAD. I have never seen that in suburbia before! Our great plains climate is typically too dry. I'd like to think it was because of the uncut patch that the toad found habitable, with more shade and more bugs.
This patch is significant to me now, and I really hope I am not forced to cut it. Something about the absolute fervor of how the plants are determined to grow and life itself to thrive when given the smallest space to do so spits in apathy's face.
I have never in my life willingly described the physical characteristics of my OCs. I don’t know WHY but I find it so hard to pin down. Like I dunno, the air and stature of a mongoose and whatever eye color goes with existential dread.
This is how I am! I love developing characters - their backstories, their goals, their weaknesses, all of that jazz - but the physical characteristics are generally not important to me.
For the sake of John Adams, if any Americans could manage a few celebratory Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and/or Illuminations today, that would be great.
you know what gets me? is that, in job descriptions, you go through the list of required skills and actually go, "Oh yeah, y'know I could do all of this!" only for them to cap the list with "at least five years of professional experience."
like, do they realize I'm looking for entry level positions?? do those just not exist???
Ok, Public Service Announcement: Ignore the Year Requirements!!!
I was in college and I was attending a job-hunting seminar with a recruiter from a biotech company, and he told us all that job descriptions are intentionally written with more requirements than they actually want. I forget the exact number, but he said that if you can fulfill either 1/3 or 2/3 of a job description (so let’s average them and say 1/2), you are probably qualified. This especially includes the “3-5 years of job experience” required, especially for entry-level positions.
The reason for making job descriptions so intimidating to the point of being laughable (3-5 years of experience in the field for an entry-level position???) is basically for CYA (“Cover Your @$%”). Let’s say, hypothetically, that the company interviews a guy and he turns out to be this insufferable, entitled jerk in the interview. Obviously not the kind of toxic individual you want on your team. Naturally, they reject his application. Apparently, being an insufferable jerk, it is a very common scenario that this guy will sue the company for discriminating against him in the hiring process. The company now has an out: “Well, sir, you didn’t get the job because, while your resume is impressive, you did not have the requisite experience that we clearly listed in the very official, publicly available job requirements. It’s nothing personal—it’s just business.”
Now, companies all over the US are facing staffing shortages, and there are a lot of things companies do that make the job-hunting process one of the more arduous circles of Purgatory for hardworking young people. I think that the staffing shortage is more due to these counterproductive business practices than many older adults think, because those practices weren’t around when the Boomers and GenXer’s were young adults. But that is another rant. The real moral of the story is that even if you don’t fulfill every single requirement, if you know you can do the job, you can do the job. Go ahead and apply, show them that you’re excited to work for them, that you’re a good person to work with, and that you can do the job.
(Another pro tip: lots of companies have a phobia about people signing on for a little while and then just dipping out after a few months. By hiring that person who dipped, it means they missed out on somebody who was willing to stick around, and now they’re back to square 1. What many companies want is someone who is willing to stick around long enough to learn how things are done and get really good at the job so that they can operate smoothly, efficiently, and reduce the stress for everyone already there. If you are interested in sticking around for any longer than a year, you are worth your weight in gold. Just don’t expect to be paid that way in this economy :) )
the feeling of learning is legitimately so cool. there’s a little whoa sound effect that plays in your brain whenever you read a sentence that expands reality for you a tiny bit
Seeing your latest fairy tale post and some misconceptions about fairy tales, I’m interested to see your perspective on how they portray love cause lots of people believe it to be not of much substance
Not much substance? The love that sends a woman east o' the sun and west o' the moon in search of her beloved? The love that wears through seven pairs of iron shoes? The love that makes seven nettle-shirts while keeping silent for seven years? The love that sends a prince through brambles that that have killed dozens of men before him? Fairy tales contain some of the most awe-inspiring examples of true, substantial love--romantic, platonic, and familial--that one can imagine, and anyone who thinks otherwise has not read far enough into the genre.
Perhaps these people are referring to commonly-known Cinderella types of tales, where a prince falls madly in love with a woman after one night of dancing, and we are meant to believe that this is a solid-enough foundation for a lifetime of happiness. How could he truly love her? Isn't it more likely he's been blinded by her beauty? No, because these too-literal takes forget that Cinderella's appearance in a dazzling gown is a revelation of her true self; the interior beauty that has been hidden by her stepmother's efforts to keep her enslaved as a soot-covered, rag-wearing servant is now put on full display, clad in silk and jewels as such beauty deserves to be. Often in fairy tales, beauty equates with goodness, not because beauty is good, but because goodness is beautiful. It is this beauty, exterior and interior, that the prince can now recognize and fall in love with, and a love built upon a foundation that clearly sees the interior self can be as lasting and true as love built upon years of acquaintance.
Or maybe these skeptics are talking about the many tales in which a husband or wife is merely a reward for success in the hero's endeavors, just another piece of the happily-ever-after, a love that we're supposed to believe in just because we're told it exists. But how is this different from any of the other unbelievable things in the story? In fairy tales, we don't expect things to happen like they do in the real world. Animals talk, monsters eat children, strangers hand out magical gifts that work upon arbitrary rules. We don't question these things, merely marvel at them. Things happen because they happen, and we don't need to understand more than that. It's a very childlike approach that doesn't wonder why or how, but just plain wonders at the marvelous news that it happened at all. If the story tells us that the couple lived happily-ever-after, who are we to doubt the truth of the tale? Why can we believe that the ogre can turn into a mouse, that the cloak can make a man invisible, or that the boots can travel seven leagues in one stride, but doubt that the love between husband and wife can last through a lifetime? Why is human fidelity the one miracle that we doubt? Fairy tales are a genre that asks for innocence--for child-like trust that the story happened the way they said it did. As marvelous and unbelievable as it sounds to the skeptical ears of adults, love can last a lifetime, whether a couple has known each other for a few hours or a few decades, if they choose to keep loving each other every day of their lives. If the story tells me it happened, I am more than happy to believe it was so.
I cannot fucking believe how much I'm losing my mind right now over soy sauce history. I'll tell all of you about it after I finish this essay because I need to un-distract myself enough to finish it but what the fuck? What the fuck is going on? I'm losing my fucking mind.
During World War 2 there was a push to industrialize the Japanese soy sauce industry to be better for mass-production. This innovated the chemical fermentation technique and the semichemical fermentation technique utilized by Kikkoman; rather than ferment for four years in gigantic cedar barrels, kioke, instead fermentation takes place for six months or a year in stainless steel barrels which utilize electrolysis to artificially speed up fermentation processes.
During Postwar occupation by Americans, Japan was experiencing massive shortages for the raw materials needed to make soy sauce nationwide, and was forced to rely on exported materials from America to make production. A single American woman named "Ms Appleton" was given total control of apportioning all American soy bean rations to companies, how much, and to who. She had no knowledge of soy sauce, allegedly.
She apparently had so much power over Japanese soy sauce production that she could singlehandedly shape its future by threatening to not give soy beans to any company, family, or factory which did not utilize her specific requirements of semichemical fermentation (reduced from chemical fermentation, since it was that abhorrent). These days, the term soy sauce is distinct from traditional shoyu, and requires distinguishment because of such a radical difference the two products are.
Here's the problem, folks:
I can find absolutely no evidence that Ms Appleton ever existed. There are no sources about this specific period in Japanese history that I'm able to definitively confirm. All of the sources which reference Ms Appleton are referencing in circles with each other; there is no listed source for any of them. Kikkoman's official English website is a veritable goldmine of information regarding this piece of history, with an entire 4 size 13 paragraphs. It not only gives me a first name, Blanche, but also tells me she worked for General Headquarters and that her policies and decisions shaped governmental policies heading into the future.
Except any variation of searching for Ms Appleton, Ms Blanche Appleton, and so on gives me absolutely no information about her ever existing. By appending keywords such as Ms Blanche Appleton+soy sauce, or Ms Blanche Appleton+GHQ, we can find the same couple of sources that are circling each other--or, in the case of the latter, only Kikkoman.
But there is NOTHING else. I'm getting pageantry from some minnesotan town; I'm getting world war 2 veteran records and obituaries when trying to follow that route; I'm getting k-12 teachers and a Titanic survivor named Charlotte. There is no fucking evidence of a Blanche Appleton to substantiate these claims.
And this is fucking massive. Because there should be way more information on her if this was the case; she was apparently powerful and influential enough during the occupation that she could singlehandedly enforce whatever arbitrary rules she wanted on the soy sauce industry and they had to comply or else have no product at all. That level of power is fucking insane. Imagine having so much raw influence over Japan that you could order them to completely renovate and change how they produce and make SOY SAUCE, literally one of if not THE most important thing in Japanese culinary history--and yet there's absolutely zero reference to this outside of like, three specific sites, and none of them have sources, or if they do, they source those sites.
What the fuck is happening here? There shouldn't be radio silence about this woman. There should be records of her policies, there should be legal documents in America which record how she apportioned out American exportation of soy beans to Japan, there should be sources talking about this woman's ability to transform Japan's soy sauce production so heavily that today only 1% of all soy sauce is made with pre-WW2 traditional techniques.
So if she's that big a deal then why does she not exist?
I feel like I'm losing it. I can't think about this too hard because it gives me a headache trying to comprehend any possible answer. There is so many levels to how this shouldn't be happening that I can't settle on just one. I don't understand how some foreigner American could have an iron fist over soy beans so hard that she could apparently influence national policy heading into 2022 but I can only find a first name on the Kikkoman website.
I literally just sent in a Freedom of Information Act request to the national archives asking for any records of a Ms Blanche Appleton, her reports, census information, anything. I can't believe that I'm having to use FOIA to try and ask the government to prove a woman existed because she was that big of a deal in SCAP/GHQ.
This is a translated page of Kikkoman's .co.jp website, with an apparent picture of Ms Appleton.
But this says that she has an apparent good knowledge of soy sauce brewing--directly contradictory to the Kikkoman.com claim that she had "no experience". And it also claims she was in charge of GHQ, which I'm going to assume is a mistranslation, but still.
Major General Murcutt doesn't exist. Douglas MacArthur was appointed head of GHQ/SCAP during the occupation of Japan. This now just has more questions. How did this woman become so important to GHQ that she could directly speak with a Major General? Any level of power or public view she SHOULD have isn't here. You don't just get to be colleagues of a Major Damn General in Post World War 2 Japan. That isn't given to any random housewife.
I just emailed a shoyu brewer family, Yamaroku, about this. The Yamaroku brewery was established 400 years ago; if the company/family were affected during the 1950 import rations and under the thumb of the Supreme Command of the Allied Powers, they'd have records and memory of Blanche Appleton or what it was like during that period as a brewery.
I am at the point where I am genuinely considering the possibility of Blanche Appleton never having existed. There is the chance that Kikkoman invented an 'ambassador'-type person with high influence in the General Headquarters during the occupation to grant itself apparent influence/validity/power above the rest of the competition. "The woman who controls all soy materials coming into Japan visited our main factory and said she liked us :)".
It's incredibly fitting that my first act of serious investigative journalism is about soy sauce. Like, I'm a little annoyed at how on brand this is for me. Of course I'm overly invested in this weird little nitpick about soy sauce. Of course I'm making this the government's problem.
It's currently 12:14AM. I have just learned that a private individual submitted a research query to the Japanese National Diet Library in 2008 regarding any information or proof of Blanche Appleton in relation to soy sauce production.
The researchers found absolutely no reference or evidence of her that was not directly related to the Kikkoman company, even after trawling the archives of the Asahi Shimbun Newspaper since 1945.
This information was told to me by a follower of mine--who asked to be anonymous. So right now we have evidence that Japan as an entity cannot find evidence of Blanche Appleton ever existing within relation to soy sauce production. And I can't find evidence of Blanche Appleton existing in obituary records, nor any publicly available birth/deaths.
Right now there seems to be more and more evidence that Miss Blanche Appleton was a complete invention of the Kikkoman Company possibly dating back nearly a hundred years. But why?
If nothing comes back from my Freedom of Information Act request, I'm going to be contacting Kikkoman directly. I'm not going to just let this slide. People have been noticing this since at least 2008. Who is Miss Blanche Appleton? Why would she be faked by Kikkoman? What's the point of this lie, and if it's the truth, if she was real, why can't I find any proof of that?
Why is everything starting to point towards yakuza/organized crime Kikkoman origin story and why am I researching zaibatsu breakups of the GHQ and where assets from various clans got sent to.
I have an active Ancestry.com account, so I made a guess at her birth year and hit paydirt basically immediately
Ms. Blanche Appleton was born Blanche Harriet Schnitzer, October 22, 1903, in Manhattan, New York City, the only child of affluent immigrant parents who were apparently very invested in her education. I found records of at least two international trips with her parents before she turned twenty. Here's her passport photo from her original application in 1922, to compare against the above photo:
(cut for record dumps and original documents ahoy)
When I said her parents were invested in her education, I meant it. She earned a bachelor's degree from Wellesley in 1924...
...and a master's degree from Columbia University in 1925.
Blanche followed that up by pursuing a doctorate (what.) in Political Economy from Columbia U in 1926
buuuuuut her academic career was put on indefinite hold when she apparently eloped with one Charles Applebaum in December of that year.
Ten years later, they were both apparently going by the surname of Appleton, both on their international travel records and on the following census.
I couldn't find when they divorced, but by the middle of 1947 Blanche's permanent address was in Washington D.C., and she was working full time for the UNRRA, bouncing around various posts from China to California.
I can also definitively place her living in Tokyo, Japan in 1954. She apparently remarried at some point, to a Dr. Melville Day Dickinson, also of GHQ-SCAP, because she's his surviving widow on his American Foreign Service death certificate, seen here. (Note his last American address matched hers on her earlier travel papers.)
Blanche Dickinson (nee Appleton, nee Schnitzer) died September 9th, 1974, and according to the Ancestry research page put together by one of her relatives (which I think you need to be logged into Ancestry to see), her obituary was published in the Washington Post on September 17th, 1974 and featured a comprehensive overview of her long career in US foreign service, including her time as a "food analyst" at SCAP under Gen. MacArthur.
I can't access that obit, I can't find access to any archive for it online, but apparently the obit's title was "Blanche S. Dickinson, 70, AID Economic Adviser," so I'll pass that mission off to somebody else.
tl;dr, Blanch Appleton WAS a real person, and apparently she was something of a badass, but the jury's out on whether she was involved with the yakuza at all
(btw @inneskeeper if you want, I can and will download any and all documentation you want off Ancestry so you can have the primary source documents for your own reference)
Most surprising (in a good way) book of this year? I was surprised how much I enjoyed Sharpe’s Tiger. I know Bernard Cornwell is a famous and prolific historical fiction writer, but I felt like I came in holding my breath to see if he was worth the hype. He is.
Most disappointing book/Book you wish you enjoyed more than you did? I wished I enjoyed After Virtue by Alistar MacIntyre more than I did. It was still a great book that I enjoyed a lot, but it was more academic than I expected and referenced more obscure philosophers that are not household names, and further did not discuss the influence of those philosophers that rejected virtue ethics on contemporary society in ways that I think might have invested readers more in the academic debates.
Despite enjoying historical novels, I hadn't heard of Bernard Cornwell until now. Granted, it looks like he's known for chronicles/series, and I more often read stand-alone historical fiction novels. After Virtue, though, I am aware of. I read short portions of it as part of a research project, but didn't commit to the whole book. Are there resources that you would recommend on the academic debates about virtue ethics that MacIntyre didn't address?
@patchworkperceptions I’m just foraying into that world myself, so I can’t say I have any recommendations.
I would always recommend reading foundational texts—for Western virtue ethics, those texts would be Aristotle’s Ethics, St. Thomas Acquinas’s Summa Theologica, and the Christian Scriptures. If these, I have only read one in its entirety, but knowing foundational texts puts one on a footing to compare with everything that crosses one’s path.
For foundational authors rejecting virtue ethics who have shaped the culture, I am pursuaded that the writings of Karl Marx, Freidrich Nietzche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault are the most influential on the modern progressive movements, although with MacIntyre I think Bentham, Mill and Kant are also important to understand classical liberalism. Not saying I’ve read those authors, but I know they are influential to the conversation historically.
Most surprising (in a good way) book of this year? I was surprised how much I enjoyed Sharpe’s Tiger. I know Bernard Cornwell is a famous and prolific historical fiction writer, but I felt like I came in holding my breath to see if he was worth the hype. He is.
Most disappointing book/Book you wish you enjoyed more than you did? I wished I enjoyed After Virtue by Alistar MacIntyre more than I did. It was still a great book that I enjoyed a lot, but it was more academic than I expected and referenced more obscure philosophers that are not household names, and further did not discuss the influence of those philosophers that rejected virtue ethics on contemporary society in ways that I think might have invested readers more in the academic debates.
Despite enjoying historical novels, I hadn't heard of Bernard Cornwell until now. Granted, it looks like he's known for chronicles/series, and I more often read stand-alone historical fiction novels. After Virtue, though, I am aware of. I read short portions of it as part of a research project, but didn't commit to the whole book. Are there resources that you would recommend on the academic debates about virtue ethics that MacIntyre didn't address?
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