I can’t do justice to one of the weirdest camp stories I know. My friend tells it so well, and I can offer only a pale shadow of his story.
Last summer, he was working with one of the younger units comprised of ten year old boys. They had spent the night camping on another beach and were just readying themselves to depart. “Make sure you have all your things!” called my friend. “Don’t leave anything behind!”
One small boy came up, dragging a massive tangle of decomposing seaweed behind him. “But… what about me boy?” he asked, lip trembling.
“…what is ‘me boy’?”
The child held up the stinking wad of bull kelp. “This is him. This is Me Boy.”
“Me Boy is not coming back with us,” said his counselor. “You’re going to leave Me Boy behind on the beach where he belongs.”
The campers loudly mourned the loss of Me Boy. They insisted on giving him a Viking burial at sea, which just consisted of pushing him solemnly off the back of the rowboat into the water and watching him drift away in the surf.
That was only the beginning. Me Boy would be back.
The campers, in true camp fashion, possessed some kind of cultic hive-mind and a predisposition for bizarre memes. Me Boy would not be forgotten. They started telling each other stories about Me Boy and how he would one day rise again. There were warring factions with contradicting dogmas about Me Boy. Only when the gardener allowed them to take home a zucchini she had harvested did they find their god, born anew.
Me Boy, The Zucchini That Was A God, became the whole unit’s mascot. The kids would bicker over who got to carry him. They built nests and carriers for Me Boy and brought him to different activities, fiercely defending him from those that would do him harm. One child appointed himself the Voice of Me Boy and would translate the zucchini’s divine wishes into human speech.
It got out of hand. Me Boy had become a distraction, a fixation, a violent controversy. Something had to be done.
My friend, their counselor, took it upon himself to kill Me Boy. The children wailed in despair as he chopped their God into refreshing slices. With this sudden turn of fortune, followers of Me Boy turned to theophagy. “We must eat him to preserve his power!” they cried. Boys who would otherwise never have touched a vegetable ate greedily of this sacrament, eager to let Me Boy live on within them.
For a time, it seemed that peace and order had been restored, and the religion had already faded into its silver age. But only for a time.
In the last few days of camp, the religion of Me Boy splintered into several denominations. Every meal yielded new vegetable matter said to be a reincarnation of Me Boy, only for opposing groups to dismiss these as false prophets. Some believed that Me Boy was gone. Others believed his spirit lived on, intangible, omnipresent. Some believed he had found a new vessel inside a carrot, a pear, a slice of cantaloupe… even inside a child. There was chaos, and strife, and heartbreak without the guidance of Me Boy.
The tags on this post are very polarized. Half of them are “#I’m glad I never went to camp” and “#reasons why I never want kids”, the other half are “#BOY I LOVE CHILDREN CAMP IS SO GOOD AMIRIGHT?”
If youre a closeted person somewhere out there thinking "I want to transition but it would be less progressive/unique/countercultural for me to be that gender instead of this one" please know that you are a real person not a character in a narrative and cant live your life based on what is good media representation. You are real you can only be yourself and theres no moral weight to any identity over another
Liberal transphobes enjoy positioning trans identities as regressive compared to cis queerness or like non-transitioning transness or anything else they can leverage to make transphobia look progressive and I think its easy to absorb that message subconciously. But in real life we just are what we are and no ranking of validity can change the fact that you have an identity that is NOT chosen and is just your unchangeable truth. Not only should you not have to live a life dictated by what is most countercultural to identify as or whatever but also: being trans is extremely countercultural and feminist and leftist to begin with and theyre only trying to convince you otherwise bc theyre bigots
"Why cant you be a feminine man society hates feminine men 🥺" and "all the butch lesbians are becoming men we need u 🥺" = stay in the closet for the noble purpose of being an abstract representation point in my new york times opinion column. You wont actually be a gnc cis person youll be a closeted trans person who uses the wrong words but I need you to do that because i hate you
Hey, when you talk to children, you know you can explain things to them right? thats theyre capable of comprehension? In fact you should be explaining things so they understand comprehension better?
Earlier my little sister slammed her closet and room door-- not out of anger as far as im aware, she just pushed them too hard. I yelled at her to stop it.
she said she would, but it was clear from her tone she just said so out of obligation and was annoyed. i tell her to stop making loud noises a lot, so she probably assumed this was just another example of that.
realizing this, i explained her the reason: our rooms are right next to each other. When she slams doors, the wall shakes. When the wall shakes, my mirror shakes, and if it shakes too hard it can fall and break
after the explanation, she apologized genuinely and actually understood the reason instead of just thinking im nagging her or just want quiet. the fact that she knows the reason means shes more likely to remember, and she can apply the knowledge in different ways: "even if my older sibling isnt home, their mirror could still break, so i still shouldnt slam the door." She knows im not just trying to annoy her or assert dominance over her like a lot of rules and demands we give to children do- i just dont want my mirror to break. It helps her understand cause and effect.
Would this result be the same if i had just screamed at her or spanked her? Or did it make more sense to just explain? After all, it was a simple mistake. I could see my parents doing the same thing-- when you close a door, youre not usually thinking about the walls in the other room.
Children are humans, humans use logic. Use logic with children. Its simple.
yesterday was what i think of as my fake birthday.
when i was getting ready to start kindergarten, it fell to my dad to register me with the school system. he registered me with the wrong birthday.
i feel the need to preface this with the fact that my dad was a very involved dad. being a teacher, he was also home with us during the summer and most evenings growing up, and handled most school-related things since he worked in the same system. he took on a lot of the "second shift"-type childcare and housekeeping work that normally falls to moms.
however, this did not typically extend to administrative tasks like filling out forms. i also would not be surprised to learn that he has at least mild dyscalculia.
all to say that my loving, attentive father (who definitely knew that i had been born smack in the middle of his summer break) registered me as born a whole month early. fortunately, i was nowhere near the grade cutoff date so it had no meaningful impact on my education. but from kindergarten through 6th grade, every other year i would correct my teacher and ask the principal's office to update whatever system kept forgetting my actual date of birth.
i don't remember if i actually told my parents about this until years later. i do know that my dad was mortified the first time i remember bringing it up. i still don't know whether it got permanently fixed that last time or if it just stopped being noticeable once i hit junior high and no one was keeping track of that stuff for classroom activities anymore.
in any case, now i get just a little wistful every time june 10 rolls around.
You should take some time to read @3liza's post documenting the Phantom Report Bug (which she deserves praise for doing, thank you eliza) and see how fucking broken Tumblr's report tool is.
I also want to reiterate something she is once again correct about: no one files bug reports. I have first hand experience working at Tumblr and I remember having to tell web devs on Staff "i saw a post about someone talking about a bug" and they were unaware because no one followed through to file a bug. I have fixed bugs that I saw people posting about that were in my domain (I'm a mobile dev) but were not in the system.
No this is not an endorsement of "complain about it enough and eventually someone will see it", this is an endorsement of "file a bug report directly to computer companies and people will most likely read it and probably fix it". I mean it this is not a Tumblr-only thing. I've seen this at every company I've worked for. Just fucking file a bug report please I beg you, software gets complicated and the devs are just unaware that there's a bug until you bring it to your attention. And they want to fix the bug! I promise!
WHAT AM I ALWAYS SAYING TO YOU PEOPLE. COMPLAINING GETS THE GOODS. YOURE NOT ALLOWED TO GET MAD UNTIL YOUVE COMPLAINED ABOUT THE PROBLEM TO SOMEONE WHOSE JOB IT IS TO FIX IT
The quality of your bug report can also have a huge impact on how quickly and effectively the bug gets fixed. I have received a lot of user reports that I could not turn into ticket items for the dev team because the report was unclear about either what the problem actually was or how/where the user was experiencing it.
For example, saying "When I reblog a poll, the page crashes" might seem like it clearly describes a bug, but it's actually maddeningly ambiguous. Was this on mobile or desktop? Was it a "reblog now" or a reblog from the editor? If from the editor, did the problem happen when the editor was opening or after you clicked the "Reblog" button and were being returned to the dashboard? By "crash" do you mean the page froze or the app closed itself or a secret third thing?
If we can't identify the problem or reproduce it, then we can't fix it, and your report just gets added to a list of "unconfirmed issues" and filed away. Plus, having an actual dedicated QA person on staff is becoming less common everyday, and I can promise you that the average Developer is not going to put the same amount of effort into researching a bug report as QA would.
So here is my template for how to write a bug report with maximum impact. [I will put explainy commentary in brackets.]
STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
[Start with your environment and a clear, neutral starting point, then go step by step through every action you take until the point the bug appears. Lists are better than paragraphs here.]
- On the Android mobile app, open the dashboard
- Scroll to a post containing a Poll and click to submit a vote on one of the poll options
- Click the Reblog icon, and when the selection menu appears, click "Reblog..."
- When the editor appears, add tags then click the "Reblog" button
CURENT BEHAVIOR:
[This is where you describe the fuckery. Please be specific and literal. If you can also attach screenshots, even better.]
Nothing happens for several seconds after clicking the Reblog button, then the screen turns grayscale and audio of a guttural voice saying "IT IS ALREADY TOO LATE" followed by screaming plays at full volume. Then the app closes and reopens itself 6 times, at which point I'm returned to the top of the dashboard, and the post was not reblogged.
EXPECTED BEHAVIOR:
[This part gets skipped more often than not, because it feels obvious, but it's actually super helpful in identifying and fixing the problem. A lot of times, bugs will come in for features that have not been worked on in a long time and which probably don't have good reference documents. Describing what should be happening goes a long way in determining the location of the bug in the code base and the scope of the fix, as well as ensuring that the fix ends up being what you actually want instead of a surprise new thing.]
After clicking the "Reblog" button, the post should be posted to my blog with the added tags, the editor should close, and I should be returned to the position on the Dashboard that I had scrolled to prior to reblogging the post.
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
We need to fricking stop with this CinemaSins TVTropes style crap in fandom. Actually, we need to stop that attitude in all creative fields, but I'm talking about fic right now.
I have seen many posts ragging on over-used phrases in fanfic, and yes, I find 'cerulean orbs' deeply strange, but if I ever said anything hateful on the topic I wish I hadn't.
You know why we say 'smirk' a lot in fic? cause its faster than 'gave a tiny smile to one side with their lips closed, a little cocky and provocative' Smirk is an easy way of saying it. It's the correct word. We say it in fic a lot because people smirk a lot in real life. Go people watch, its all over. Also. Bring me a true synonym for smirk, and I'll use that instead, but these ain't it.
If you have a better way of saying 'took off his shoes without untying them, just levered the heel with the toe of the other' that isn't saying 'he toed off his shoes' I'd love to hear it. Cause that phrase is perfect for it.
'Huffed a laugh'? Yeah, they did. Cause I'm not going to spend extra words describing how they 'exhaled through their nose once, amused, but not enough to fully laugh aloud' Its a specific action. You think people don't do that all day? five bucks says its exactly what you do when you see a meme most of the time. You didn't lol. You huffed a laugh.
The idea that something that's been used before is inherently less valuable is ridiculous. Same with the inverse.
If the phrase you want to use is common or widely used, but is the best way to communicate it? Use it. Don't fall for this trap that is currently consuming hollywood. You don't have to have a clever twist just because 'they survived and were happy' is a trope. You don't have to use some insane alternate phrase just because someone thinks fandom uses 'smirk' too much.
And, as always, if someone gives you hell and you don't want to fight them? let me know, cause I volunteer.
1. The court holds Google responsible for statements made by its AI, considering them Google's statements (search engines have limited liability for results in their engine as they're the words of other sites/companies/people), meaning when their AI lies/hallucinates they're liable for the defamation/harm resulting from those statements.
2. Google's defense that customers are generally aware of the lack of reliability and are responsible for fact checking was dismissed. As the court pointed out, that would "significantly diminish" AI Search's stated purpose and it can't be distinguished from Google's business practices/statements as a search tool.
3. Studies have found about 91% of Google's everyday AI responses are accurate, leaving millions of searches per HOUR with potential liability for falsehoods. 56% of correct responses weren't supported by the sources the AI listed. Both of which mean Google is now liable for a LOT more AI "errors."
4. Google was held liable for 80% of court costs in this case and this precedent is expected to reverberate around the world. This is a massive shift from the 3rd-party search provider role Google has previously played and it comes right as they've tied ALL searches to their AI search.
ohhhh shit. target is recalling their up & up baby wipes (fragrance free & fresh cucumber scented) because they're contaminated with Burkholderia cepacia complex and Burkholderia gladioli, multiple people are reporting discoloration & infections. i just got a call about it cuz i had purchased those but i've already gone through them 😅 so no refund for me. but im fine. if you have these they're saying you need to immediately stop using them and bring them back to target for a full refund. this bacteria can cause life threatening infections in children/infants and people with compromises immune systems (ESPECIALLY cystic fibrosis!!) and i know lots of other chronically ill people follow me!!!!
