The reason most indie novels are written like the author is terrified of doing something wrong is because the overwhelming majority of indie novelists get their start by networking in the violent panopticon of the social media indie publishing community, which favours the people who are able to win at the social policing game.
disabled ppl we need to start lying to nosy people okay? you tell me i'm too young to need a cane and i will tell you point blank that maybe you should tell that to the guy who ran me over. you don't get an explanation of my health issues you get lies and depending on how much of an asshole i want to be that lie will be anything from a humble car crash to a 1 billion lions attack. mind yr business.
"i could never live like that" well maybe you'll have to because this happened overnight. yeah you heard me i was the most able bodied man in the world but then one morning bam i woke up disabled. yeah you could have that too. there's no cure either you'll just wake up one morning and now you have to live like me
if there was any justice at all in the world “every helen has her troy” would be an idiom (“every beautiful woman leaves a disaster in her wake”) and misogynistic renaissance authors would use it to describe hot women they didn’t like but, of course, inadvertently making her sound insanely awesome in the process. and then in modern times instead of talking about things being their hill to die on women could say “this is my troy to burn” and people on tumblr would be kind of horny about the whole thing and it would get incorporated into the whole “can yuo put that out on me” genre of posts. anyway just a glimpse into my beautiful mind tonight
“If you love cooking with garlic, you know it does a lot of good in recipes by helping build flavor — but its strong odor can linger for hours, especially on our hands. We’ve all been in the situation where after preparing a wonderful meal, we’re left with the stench of garlic on our fingers — yuck! There are a few tricks people often recommend to eliminate the smell: lemon juice or vinegar, rubbing your hands with salt, or even using toothpaste! But those don’t work — all they do is mask the garlic smell. So what does really work? Stainless steel.”
STRONGLY recommend jerking off a stainless steel spoon or just getting one of those gimmicky stainless steel ‘soap’ bars rather than using your expensive and hard to replace plumbing hardware - the stainless steel does get the stinky sulfur compounds off your hands, yes, but they have to go somewhere, and where they go is onto the steel. And stainless steel is not actually corrosion proof if you keep putting sulfur compounds on it frequently long term!
- local friendly chemist with considerable experience in What Things Can Eat What Grades of Stainless Steel (for spacecraft purposes mainly; don’t rub copper chloride on your taps either).
Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
A Lich Lord covered his head with rags and disguised himself as a cleric, then joined the heroes' party. His reasoning? He was bored and wanted to see the world without instilling fear.
There's an adventurer's code, is the thing. Not any of the official ones. Something more subtle.
You see—people who pick up this trade aren't quite normal. Normal people stay home and become the miller or the baker and raise a bunch of kids. Adventurers are almost defined by being a little different.
Like, take Lissar, our swordswoman. Big, buff, drinks a lot, what you would expect mostly. Doesn't talk about her family. Skittish about the full moons. Turns out that she got a bad spell for her gender-fixing and ended up with a nasty case of avolitional lycanthropy, which means that her girlfriend has to use a restraining collar whenever there's enough moonlight. (And no, I don't know if they do anything else with it, I have a firm policy that I don't hear anything that happens in other people's tents, even when I do. So don't ask. I also don't get the human gender thing at all. Sounds strange for a dwarf to say, but I almost think that the elves and their twelve-gender system make more sense, at least they're dividing people up based on actual traits that they have rather than vague physical generalizations that are sometimes dead wrong anyway.)
And me, I'm an absolutely normal dwarf, you think. Why would I go adventuring. Well, you may have noticed the odd-colored left eye, but you might also want to look at the things I do—the petty magics and the prestidigitation—and wonder exactly why a dwarf, scion of a decent family in a well-run cavern, would pick up what are essentially thieves skills—
And then you would want to mind your own business. Because that's the code. Everyone has some odd wrinkles in their backstory, it happens. It'll probably come out at the worst possible moment, too. But you don't pry.
So when dude shows up with a bandaged face telling us to call him Brother Healhand and using a bizarre mix of slang that spreads across the last three hundred years, if not more—we knew perfectly well that something was up, and we didn't ask.
Which works up until he ended up commanding, not turning, a full legion of the Smoke King's undead forces. That gets…hard to ignore.
"Hast thou a notion what I should do with these fuckers?" Brother Healhand asked me, sitting pensively on a rock. His bandages were disarranged enough that I could see glowing eyes, and the crystal on the end of his staff was a rather disturbing eldritch greenish purple rather than its usual soft white. I don't think I'm supposed to be able to see that color. I looked at the army of obedient zombies instead.
"Did you do the same ritual as the Smoke King?" Probably not what I should lead with.
"The blood rite of immortality?" Becoming a lich has a body count. A large one. That's why decent people don't do it. Brother Healhand looked away. "People change."
Can't argue with that. I've changed some myself.
For one thing, I'm talking to an undead rather than dying in a futile attack. That's a change. Dwarves have opinions about things that don't stay dead. (Except the Star-Jeweled King, who I think may actually be dead, but people hope he isn't—although even there, there's a kind of relief in the fact that he hasn't woken up, because that would be the Big One, the War at the End of the World, and we all know we're not all getting through that one.)
"You going to stand with us against the Smoke King?"
"Even had I not changed," Brother Healhand said promptly. "My kind are territorial and combative. And the Smoke King is just plain crass."
The enemy of my enemy is not my ally, necessarily, but he's still a guy you'd rather have around than not. So long as you keep an eye on him. "And these guys—"
"Spread the word not, I pray," Brother Healhand said, "but mindless undead have always slightly—bothered me. Nature abhors a vacuum. I feel that Things creep into the gap where the soul was. Which can lead to—unpleasantness."
And these zombies were old. "Do you think we can safely use them to fight the Smoke King's other legions?"
Brother Healhand was quiet for a moment. "I abhor the notion of being the distraction. However. Thou canst picture it, no? Another lich approaches, raises his banner, hails the Smoke King in his lair and threatens him with his own minions, telling him to come on if he thinks he's hard enough. Hardly a challenge any lich could or would ignore. Meanwhile a small team, slipping through the tunnels beneath the mountain— it could be done. Perhaps. The odds are not good but when have they ever been?"
I thought about it.
It might be the best chance we were going to get.
"No heroic last stands," I said. "You distract him and you get out of there, get it? We want to see you again when we get out."
Brother Healhand gave me a wry look. Which is difficult with eldritch glowing eyes. "I did not come to this state by loving the notion of death. I'll be there, with bells on. I would have thy promise of the same."
It occurred to me that given Brother Healhand's age—whatever it was—there might be significance in the fact that about a month ago, he switched to calling us all thou. I think most of us wrote it off as, oh, he talks like that. Maybe not.
THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST
June 28, 2026
So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.
That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.
What the tick explains is the SHAPE.
Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.
The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.
(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)
So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?
You get a line.
You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.
The gate was the railhead.
This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.
Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.
And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.
(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)
So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.
It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.
And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.
The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
One important takeaway from this article, if you're a gardener, is that there's a corresponding Heat Zone Map put together by the American Horticultural Society that isn't widely known.
With tools like the USDA plant hardiness map, we typically only consider low winter temperatures as the primary metric by which we determine
They're trying to implement this info more in the Hardiness Zone map, but trying to account for too many factors in a single metric runs the risk of muddling the metric, so it's worth considering them separately.
Hey so as the economy continues to get worse in the next few years, gambling companies are going to go extra hardcore predatory as people become more desperate. Yes, even more than they already are. You have to promise me right now you're not going to fall for it. No gambling, okay?
This is going to be especially bad with prediction markets and sports gambling, and it's already really fucking bad. But it also goes for loot boxes, blind box collectables, trading card games, and ESPECIALLY gacha games.
We are seeing this right now with Kalshi's sudden push towards people watching reality dating shows like love island, as they are starting to tap out on their first big market block - young straight men into sports/politics. They are moving on towards young straight women now with the dating shows thing but they will start diversifying into other niches soon!
Do not start gambling. A friend of mine used to work for a bank's anti-money-laundering dept and they'd review flagged accounts for suspicious withdrawals, frequent charges, etc, and sometimes it was fraud but other times it was just severe gambling addicts absolutely hemorrhaging money. It is not worth it!!!
turnnoffyourmind
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
blakekathryn
