B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.
Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.
The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.
"there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to throw your bodies upon the wheels and upon the gears. Upon the levers. Upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!"
There's this thing I never realized I did when I was doing it that I like to think of as "Ownership of Space"
And it's that thing where you mentally place yourself as the second, auxiliary party to someone else that you consider to be "In Charge" of whatever space or occupation or responsibility you are assigned to
And when you are IN that mindset, it *feels* like you're being responsible. It *feels* like you're being respectful, and helpful, and contributing to the load.
But what you don't SEE- because it *feels* like deference- is that the other person who you're seeing as The Authority you report to- by being assigned that role, has also been assigned the invisible load of BEING YOUR MANAGER.
This is by FAR most commonly seen in husband-and-wife relationships, where the man says, "just tell me what I can do to HELP- you don't have to do it all by yourself, but it's like you won't even tell me when you NEED help. You just do everything and then get mad at me for not doing it first. I can help clean. I can help with the kids. I can help"
But I also see it- and am guilty myself of doing it- at work, at school, in public- that mental, "this is THEIR space, and i will be respectful and helpful to THEM"- without realizing that subservience in this manner isn't actually a good thing. That it actually shifts the burden of responsibility to the other person. That aspect was totally invisible to me.
I didn't understand that when I was told, "if you see something that needs to be done, just DO it", or, "take the initiative", what they ACTUALLY meant was, "I am not above you", or "you have equal say in what kind of environment you want to live or work in", or "I do not want full control over what happens here, I do not want to order you around, I do not want to be in charge, what I WANT is to co-command WITH you"
Being in The Assigned Authority position NOW, that is all so much clearer.
I am the senior member of my team at work, and now, every time I train a newbie, every time I finish catching them up to speed and giving them a list of everything that needs to be done, my next big hurdle seems to always be, "now take pride in the space when I'm not around". "Now don't assume I'll tell you when something is due or what orders to plan things in".
Now, having been on both sides of the struggle, I can appreciate the sticking points here
TO THE PERSON "IN CHARGE": The person deferring to you doesn't understand the invisible labor you're doing. They genuinely believe you know more, you WANT more, you see things they don't, and that they are being respectful and good by staying out of your way and waiting on your orders. THAT is the bit that's not clicking.
TO THE PERSON "WANTING TO HELP": "Help" implies that you are providing assistance to a problem that belongs to somebody else. Stop thinking like that. Understand that the problem belongs to BOTH of you equally, and consider what kind of shared space you BOTH want. What is your SHARED GOAL? Not THEIR goal, but a goal that belongs to you too. Own your space.
This is not a Commander-Lieutenant problem. This is a Partnership problem.
Having started my career as an Officer in the Military and then peacing out to work minimum wage and getting a Masters—Ive seen this from both sides too, but I think I have an important perspective that's missing here.
Typically Officers, Managers, and Team Leads get *paid* a whole lot more to specifically take ownership of their space. The buck ($$$) stops there, at the top, with the people who get paid to command the ship.
I use to get paid to be the Captain. Sure I wanted things to be equitable in my office, under my command, and I treated my Soldiers as equals.
Which in hind sight I realized was a fucked up thing to do. Since it wasn't their job, they didn't get paid to do it, and it wasn't their responsibility. It was mine.
You can't just subvert a hierarchy by pretending its not there. That just makes you a shitty abusive boss. But you're still the boss.
Fortunately I eventually realized that no one was making me be the boss but myself. So I quit.
Now I make minimum wage and I have a manager that tells me what to do. I don't really need her to, I'm smart enough to figure it out without her direction. But I don't get paid to think.
I didn't think to mention this because I'm *not* anybody boss- when I train new people, it's to work WITH me. The wage will be the same. I've refused promotion because it's more trouble to manage people than the money would be worth to me.
But your theoretical wife ISN'T receiving extra benefits for managing the housework. Your theoretical roommate ISN'T getting a discount on the rent for reminding you there's laundry in the washer.
I do not mean a normal amount of listening to the same song on repeat I mean that in October and November 2022 the only thing I listened to was Type O Negative's "Black No. 1" and I listened to it for 18 hours a day. This is, apparently, a kind of stimming.
To be clear I do not know what the normal amount is. When Large Bastard and I started dating I had a tape in my car with Tom Petty's "Dancing at the Zombie Zoo" on it that I knew exactly when to flip the other side (halfway through "Yer so Bad") so that I could flip it again and listen to Zombie Zoo again and I did that enough that Large Bastard still can't listen to Tom Petty and also it wore through the tape. So whatever normal is it is probably less than that.
Nope. And one of the things that made my doctors wave off the possibility of a diagnosis was "well, you don't stim or have trouble socializing or have sensory issues so you're probably just depressed and anxious."
No I just, you know, reexamined every interaction for hours after the fact and was convinced that I was evil or deeply broken for being unable to emotionally connect with people around me and had headphones hidden under my hair all the time to listen to songs on repeat so that I could pay attention to things and not get distracted by the way the classroom lights were flickering at exactly the wrong frequency.
Unfortunately it is worse than that; this is hours listened to podcasts per month, 1640 hours per month is like 55 hours a day, which is possible because I listen to podcasts at 2-3x speed and only sleep for about five hours a night. This was to show there were no podcast hours listened in october and november of 2023 (because they all went to listening to Peter Steele)
Black No. 1 is 11 minutes long and at eighteen hours a day i was listening to it around a hundred times daily.
I mean to be fair this does coincide with working from home and it wouldn't be out of bounds to listen to the radio for 8 hours a day in an office environment. Technology just lets me reallllly fine tune what I'm listening to so that i don't have to listen to broadcast news (derogatory).
My therapist has told me that I'm not good at recognizing "normal" and that I have a lot of incorrect assumptions about what is required to perform "normal" so I like using posts like this to collect data and also take notes about other people's show dogs so I can better train mine.
Getting this info from tumblr may skew the data but the only other people I hang out with regularly are a bunch of hackers who are *also* getting their midlife autism diagnosis and Explosions Georg, who is an outlier adn should be controlled for.
Do you think it's immoral to use chatgpt for college assignments? I think it's unfortunately unavoidable.
It is absolutely immoral, completely counterproductive to the goal of learning things, and turns out incredibly subpar work.
As for unavoidable….you understand that the vast majority of people who have ever graduated college throughout history did so without ever once using AI, right? You understand that?
You understand that the point of writing papers isn’t just to have a paper with words on it, right? You understand that the entire point is to do the mental work necessary to put your learning into organized words, such that you actually learn it? And that if you outsource that to AI you are not learning?
Let's cost out the idea of AI use as an unavoidable part of university life, shall we? Imagine the following scenario:
A professor uses AI to generate their lecture outline and slides, because it saves them time; their students then use AI to summarize the lecture, because it's easier than taking notes themselves. The TA, overworked and underpaid, uses AI to generate the class assignments, which the students use AI to answer - and once they're handed in, the TA uses AI to grade them, too. The professor then uses AI to make the final exam, which the students use AI to answer, and which the professor and TA again use AI to grade. The semester ends, and none of the human participants have materially done any work. Who benefits from this?
It's not the professor, whose skills begin to atrophy due to cognitive offloading, nor is it the students, who never develop those skills in the first place. And it's certainly not TA, because in a scenario where this level of AI use is normalized - which is what the AI companies want - they've functionally made themselves redundant. If the AI can do a TA's job, then who needs a TA? Come to that, if the AI can do a professor's job, then who needs a professor? And if the AI can do a student's job, then who needs to be a student? Why do any of these people need to be here at all? Why even have a university? To which the tech giants reply: pfft, never mind the ever-mounting financial, environmental, ethical and social costs of AI - isn't using it just easier?
Well, yes - in the same way that it's easier to die than live. Death, after all, is a tremendously simplifying affair. You don't need to learn or study or struggle or suffer or love or err or improve or feel or encounter setbacks or wrestle with anything difficult at all when you don't exist - and this, too, ultimately, is the lure of AI: to outsource the fundamental business of being human; which is to say, of living. But as this would make a rather terrible sales pitch, it's presented instead, not just as convenience, but as an exclusive convenience - one whose power is predicated on others being too stupid or moral or Luddite to do likewise.
Thus: students are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more quickly progress through their studies, while universities are pitched on AI as a convenience to help them more easily manage students. Both groups are told that using AI will help them keep up with their workload while surpassing the competition; that it will free up extra time to do more enjoyable things, and that, the more others use it, the more necessary it becomes to use it yourself. But the implication is still that the traditional professional, social and intellectual systems that AI intends to parasitize will continue to exist - because if they didn't, what would be the point in using AI to cheat at them?
The best-case scenario is that life becomes like an Olympics at which everyone is doping - which, as we recently saw with the Enhanced Games, turns out to be a fairly dismal prospect. Counter to the assumption that PEDs would cause the contestants to surpass all previous human limits, only one world record was actually (barely) broken and, in fact, multiple victories were claimed by non-enhanced athletes. In a lesson that AI shills would do well to learn from, it turns out that raw human effort, ingenuity and skill are actually the biggest factors in human success, and that whatever minor advantage you might gain from cheating is annihilated in a context where the whole field is doing it.
The worst-case scenario is that we irreparably break several centuries' worth of our most collectively vital institutions, innovations and accomplishments so that a handful of the very worst people on Earth can, briefly, be richer than god.
So, no: just because the AI industry has baited a hook for college students with the promise of Finish All Your Assignments Faster And Worse (While Getting Stupider) does not mean you have to swallow it. Use your own brain! Civilization will thank you for it.
Okay and I’m gonna totally sound like my mom for a second here but it’s interesting that soooooooo many women in entertainment have careers based on “embracing their sexuality” but the vast majority of men in entertainment base their careers on like … being people…. and like maybe there’s a reason most men don’t seem to find going on stage in underwear “empowering”…? Bc it’s not…?
The thing about referring to a woman embracing her sexuality as "upholding the patriarchy" is that it's falling into like twelve discourse traps that the feminists of the past already fought their way through.
Time to read just a sprinkling of feminist theory!
Marliyn Frye's 1983 essay Oppression should not be at all controversial to modern radical feminists; its conclusion is that men are not oppressed as men, even if they experience deprivation for other reasons or are oppressed as other identities. But when I first read it in my feminist philosophy class in the mid 2010s (right before reading Crenshaw's essay on intersectionality, which complicated Frye's conclusion) the part that stuck with me was Frye's evocative metaphor of a birdcage:
Consider a birdcage.
If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. If your conception of what is before you is determined by this myopic focus, you could look at that one wire, up and down the length of it, and unable to see why a bird would not just fly around the wire any time it wanted to go somewhere. Furthermore, even if, one day at a time, you myopically inspected each wire, you still could not see why a bird would have trouble going past the wires to get anywhere. There is no physical property of any one wire, nothing that the closest scrutiny could discover, that will reveal how a bird could be inhibited or harmed by it except in the most accidental way.
It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere; and then you will see it in a moment. It will require no great subtlety of mental powers. It is perfectly obvious that the bird is surrounded by a network of systematically related barriers, no one of which would be the least hindrance to its flight, but which, by their relations to each other, are as confining as the solid walls of a dungeon.
Frye used this metaphor in the context of explaining the twin pressures to not be a slut AND not be a prude, illustrating how women are kept caged by a society that justifies punishment for both sexual availability and lack of sexual availability:
It is common in the United States that women, especially younger
women, are in a bind where neither sexual activity nor sexual inactivity is all right. If she is heterosexually active, a woman is open to censure and punishment for being loose, unprincipled or a whore. The “punishment” comes in the form of criticism, snide and embarrassing remarks, being treated as an easy lay by men, scorn from her more restrained female friends. She may have to lie to hide her behavior from her parents. She must juggle the risks of unwanted pregnancy and dangerous contraceptives.
On the other hand, if she refrains from heterosexual activity, she is fairly constantly harassed by men who try to persuade her into it and pressure her into it and pressure her to “relax” and “let her hair down”; she is threatened with labels like “frigid,” “uptight,” “man-hater,” “bitch,” and “cocktease.” The same parents who would be disapproving of her sexual activity may be worried by her inactivity because it suggests she is not or will not be popular, or is not sexually normal. She may be charged with lesbianism...
It's been forty years since this essay was published, but the situation hasn't improved all that much with regard to the slut/prude double-bind. Women are pressured to be modest AND pressured to be sexy. If you're good at balancing these pressures, or if your personal style falls naturally ("naturally"🤔) between them, you may not even notice you've been caged. You may look at a woman in modest Mennonite dress and assume she has succumbed to the pressure to be modest; you may look at a woman in a push-up bra and a miniskirt and assume she has succumbed to the pressure to be sexy. But consider: did you yourself succumb to the pressure to be neither?
I had to dig back over ten years to find this comic by @rosalarian, but I'm glad I found it, because it encapsulates the problem pretty perfectly:
There is pressure to be sexually pleasing to men and there is pressure to NOT be sexually pleasing to men. This is not some "men want you to be slutty and feminists want you to be a prude" thing: BOTH of these pressures come, ultimately, from the patriarchy! The unifying theme is that women's sexuality should be entirely under male control; women should never make choices about their sexual expression based on what they personally find gratifying. They should entirely restrict their sexual behavior to whatever the nearest representative of patriarchal power happens to want in the moment, whether that's saving themselves for marriage or stripping for the camera.
The reason women are more likely to have careers based on "embracing their sexuality" is they're more likely to be forced to justify trying to look extremely sexy on purpose. Trying to look extremely sexy (and sexually available) on purpose is not limited to female pop stars by any means, but Sabrina Carpenter aggressively dressing like a pinup is political in a way that Harry Styles in leather pants with his tits out is not.
So it's time to drag out another classic of feminist theory: Deborah Tannen's 1993 article There Is No Unmarked Woman.
(It's a very short article and I'm reproducing nearly half of it in this post, so I encourage you to read it in full.)
As I amused myself finding coherence in these styles, I suddenly wondered why I was scrutinizing only the women. I scanned the eight men at the table. And then I knew why I wasn't studying them. The men's styles were unmarked.
The term “marked” is a staple of linguistic theory. [...] The unmarked form of a word carries the meaning that goes without saying -- what you think of when you're not thinking anything special.
[...]
Each of the women at the conference had to make decisions about hair, clothing, makeup and accessories, and each decision carried meaning. Every style available to us was marked. The men in our group had made decisions, too, but the range from which they chose was incomparably narrower. Men can choose styles that are marked, but they don't have to, and in this group none did. Unlike the women, they had the option of being unmarked.
Take the men's hair styles. There was no marine crew cut or oily longish hair falling into eyes, no asymmetrical, two-tiered construction to swirl over a bald top. One man was unabashedly bald; the others had hair of standard length, parted on one side, in natural shades of brown or gray or graying. Their hair obstructed no views, left little to toss or push back or run fingers through and, consequently, needed and attracted no attention. A few men had beards. In a business setting, beards might be marked. In this academic gathering, they weren't. There could have been a cowboy shirt with string tie or a three-piece suit or a necklaced hippie in jeans. But there wasn't. All eight men wore brown or blue slacks and nondescript shirts of light colors. No man wore sandals or boots; their shoes were dark, closed, comfortable and flat. In short, unmarked.
Although no man wore makeup, you couldn't say the men didn't wear makeup in the sense that you could say a woman didn't wear makeup. For men, no makeup is unmarked. I asked myself what style we women could have adopted that would have been unmarked, like the men's. The answer was none. There is no unmarked woman.
The woman in the teal shirt and jeans in Rosalarian's comic thinks she is unmarked. She judges the other women for 'marking' themselves. But she, too, is marked; she cannot escape the patriarchy cage simply by splitting the difference between slut and prude.
Similarly, OP is comparing Sabrina Carpenter's marked-ness with the way male celebrities are unmarked. OP imagines that Sabrina could base her career on "being a person" if she ditched her slutty pinup style. But do more modest female artists actually get to do that, as a rule? There are a million articles and studies about discrimination against women in the music industry. Plenty of stories exist about the forced sexualization of female artists who actively did not want to be sexualized. But OP isn't digging into any of those: OP is most distressed by the female artists who are vocal about choosing and controlling their own sexual expression. And that, unfortunately, means OP's concerns are 100% aligned with the patriarchy on this issue.
There's a surface-level feministy reason for this, in that if you are distressed about women getting forced to be sexy when they don't want to be sexy, you're afraid that a different woman saying "Actually I really enjoy being sexy and I'm doing it on purpose" is going to provide convenient cover for the victimization of the unwilling.
But that kind of concern has always been a cop-out. If women aren't allowed to say yes to sex and sexiness, then you are not actually advancing the cause of female sexual autonomy. You're just saying that the patriarchal pressure to NOT be a slut is more acceptable to you than the patriarchal pressure to BE a slut.
You have to reject both pressures. The pressure to dress sexy, the pressure to dress modest—they are both the patriarchy trying to control women. Neither is legitimate.
If a woman is less of a person because she's too sexual, the patriarchy is winning. If a woman is less of a person because she's not sexual enough, the patriarchy is winning.
If a woman is less of a person for literally any reason, the patriarchy is winning.
I need to add because I think this keeps being lost about feminism in the early 2000s of embracing sexuality: men fucking hated it
Because it was not "I am sexy and available to men" it was "I am sexy. I know I am. I know I don't have lower my standards or be grateful for attention or give my attention to anyone who seeks it. You want me. Too bad. I don't want you. I am not doing this for YOU. If I go home alone at the end of the night out that is not my failure. That is YOURS. Because you don't have access to me because I dress a certain way. I like how I look and your attention is worthless to me."
And men knew that and FUCKING HATED IT.
This is when you got pick up artists teaching negging and the rise of incel culture because "easy girls" weren't easy. Because women could and would laugh at them and they felt threatened
The male response was: "why do you look sexy to me if you aren't giving me sex!? That's lying!"
They were furious
So the people who look back at that time and call it "slut feminism" or "bimbo feminism" derisively are narrow minded in my opinion
Was it perfect? No. But slut marches and the like were a thing for a reason. And it did threaten the patriarchy
Everyone knows the first day of Friend Grace’s class is nickname day. It’s the day when every pebble is on their best behavior to try and make sure they get a cool nickname, something unique that they can brag to their friends and classmates about.
Sometimes, Grace will do it without thinking. That’s how Kiddo and Buddy got their nicknames. Often, Grace will nickname students after their coloration. Gaia got his nickname because he’s blue and green, and apparently looks a lot like Earth. Violet got hers because she’s purple. (She was initially disappointed since color means nothing to Eridians, but then Friend Grace showed them violet flowers and said that humans often associated purple with wealth and royalty, and she changed her tune.) Most of the time, Grace will give his students what he calls “regular human names” like Abby, Carl, or Martin.
But the most coveted nicknames are ones named after Earthen creatures. When ♩♪♬ 🎵 ♩♪♬ 🎵 first introduced themselves, Friend Grace immediately perked up and shouted “Robin!” After a bit of explaining himself and a few videos of bird calls, Robin was trilling and chirping happily, excited at having a nickname that felt like a 1-to-1 translation of their own.
Even well after Friend Grace is gone, his legacy remains. A hundred years into the future, when humankind finally launches a new ship with the express purpose of properly meeting their Eridian neighbors, one of the first messages exchanged is “Hello! My name Robin.”
Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice.
Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience.
So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people.
But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel.
This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him.
Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious.
And dangerous.
For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t.
In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way.
So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up.
Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions?
Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.
Okay also: in the original, when Elizabeth walks through the rain all the way to bingley’s to care for Jane while she’s sick, it’s a very dramatic expression of both Elizabeth’s love for her sister and her penchant for flamboyant rebellion, but consider, if there is a chance Jane will wake up a zombie and Elizabeth knows it, how does that change the dynamic? Elizabeth might be going to help take care of Jane, or to *take care* of Jane should things take a more morbid turn…by killing her zombie sister.
This works especially well if zombieism is communicable prior to death; if mr. Bennett is a zombie and only the elder Bennetts know, that means Jane has been pre-exposed and is almost certain to wake up as a zombie should she die in the Bingleys’ care— which the Bingleys do not know. Elizabeth has to forge through the rain to be there in case things get ugly, because she knows that the Bingleys aren’t prepared.
And I think you pretty much HAVE to make Mr. Bennett’s zombie status play a role in how and why Darcy separates Bingley from Jane—the heavy implication behind Darcy’s line about the want of propriety shown even by her father hits Elizabeth like a ton of bricks as she realizes he knows—he knows, and he thought Jane lying to Bingley about it was evidence that Jane didn’t love Bingley—but—but Darcy must not have told Bingley that part of it. Bingley couldn’t keep a secret on his life; if he knew, his sister would know, and word would already be out and they’d have been ruined by now—
And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.
AND THEN LYDIA HAPPENS. And Darcy realizes immediately that Mr. Bennett can’t do anything to recover her—and if Mr. Bennett doesn’t do anything about Lydia, Mr. Collins might become suspicious, or even just officously involve himself, so find out the while thing. When Darcy blames himself for not revealing Wickham’s character, it’s with a much more immediate sense of urgency. It’s not that the other sisters’ marriage prospects being ruined may impoverish them down the road—it might immediately drag them all into destitution. That’s why he rushes off to go look for Lydia himself.
anyways tmi/nsfw warning but since it helped me and my therapist hadnt considered the idea before im willing to bet a lot of others havent either so im gonna share:
if you have vaginismus and struggle with dilating regularly i highly recommend looking into wearable toys. theyre generally vibrators that hook onto your clothes or your person in some way, and they're intended to be worn long-term and in public which means you can safely+comfortably just put it in and go about your day without having to sit down and do the whole production of dilating on its own. theyre usually curved to follow your body and soft/flexible unlike the dilators which are straight and stiff, so theyre imo easier to get in and less uncomfortable to ambiently exist with, and the long term aspect gives your body more time to adjust to having something there. and frankly the vibrator part is helpful too, a big part of vaginismus therapy is teaching your body that sensations there arent actually painful like it thinks so introducing positive stimulus helps it relax, bc functionally it kind of is a type of massage lol. but yeah again i know this is oversharing and tmi but i also know this disorder majorly sucks to have and feel like you cant make progress on so if it helps anyone else then yeehaw
actually ive decided these tags are important enough to go in the post body
image id under cut bc it wouldnt fit in alt
image ID: screenshot of tags reading "#now obviously this is limited to once you hit a point where you can fit the vibrator itself "but once you do this is a speedrunning tactic LMAO #im torn on community labelling this bc on the one hand it is for sure sexually themed but on the other hands its medical advice #advice that i wouldve killed to be able to know as a minor bc i already knew i had it at that point i might add #and something thats p common to learn early on because when you cant fit a tampon in for no reason on your first period #you go 'what why not everyone else can what am i doing wrong' #or well i guess more intense cases like mine are more likely to be discovered early‚ ik for some ppl its more 'tampons are fine but #anything bigger is intense pain' so they dont find out until they lose their virginity #or after if they just assume its supposed to be painful which is p common too #hm yeah i will not be community labelling this and am going to specifically say to any vagina'd minor reading this: if your first time #is intensely intensely painful‚ THAT IS NOT NORMAL no matter what the other person says!! and there are excercises that exist that #can make it easier!!! #and also: forcing your way through the pain will make your condition worse in the long run because it reinforces to your brain #that any interaction down there = pain so the muscles lock down even harder next time #if it hurts really bad and you can do so‚ go to your doctor and ask to be referred to a pelvic floor physical therapist for potential #vaginismus and they should be able to help #you can also research self treatment methods online bc its primarily just dilating‚ kegels‚ abdominal/thigh massages‚ stretches‚ and #bowel health (any tension in neighboring regions will ripple effect back to your pelvic floor so indigestion can make things more difficult) #(hence also the abdominal/inner thigh massages‚ those muscles being tight pulls towards your chest and knees respectively which again increases tension in the pelvic region) #a physical therapist will help you set a timeline and pace yourself as well as assign homework excercises to fit you but #the general stuff that can be found online is helpful regardless #and also remember: any progress is good progress. since my first appointment i have been very bad about doing all my excercises #the amount i should be but ive already made ridiculous progress #oh part of the physical therapy too would be yknow. doctors getting their fingers all up in your business so thats another reason you might #prefer self treatment however personally i can confirm it gets wayyy less awkward after the first one i soend my appointments rambling #about terraria now #youll feel embarassed but dont‚ remember that this is their entire job and youre probably the fifth cooch theyve touched today #so this is just a part of their life‚ its not weird for them #also specifically if anyone is near Spokane i recommend core pelvic physical therapy w julia salazar shes a complete delight". end ID
alao i don't know enough about vaginoplasty to feel comfortable saying whether the first tip would be useful for that dilating too but its something to keep in mind at least, i cant see any reason why it wouldnt work the same though
i dislike "hey rb this actually" type things so if you dont want to thats completely fine esp considering a good chunk of it is abt vibrators lol, however it would be greatly appreciated as vaginismus was never mentioned in school / health class for me and ppl really do end up assuming (or being told by assholes) that the pain is just how it works and they have to push through it to be normal, i learned abt it somewhat early on bc mine was so severe i straight up thought i simply Didnt Have A Vaginal Canal and wanted to see if that was a thing, but for a lot of people its more subtle where penetration is /possible/ just not /comfortable/ so they think "ah this must just be how it works, everyone must experience this when they have sex so i just have to deal with it", which sucks on its own but is also something often taken advantage of/encouraged by abusive partners. or those with low/no libido* often find out when they reach the age for their first pap smear and either are in way more pain than normal for it, or are just straight up unable to complete it and then have to wait until after therapy finishes to get that test, so i want to give anyone i can a head start on that realization lol. and even medical stuff aside, the mental impact of not being able to engage in sex the "normal" way despite wanting to is really rough on its own, it's even been really rough for me and i'm transmasc so to a certain degree ive found it gender affirming not being able to do it """the girl way""", but at a certain point that just became a sprinkles-on-a-turd kind of thing yknow lol
*can also include those with active libidos who just choose not to sleep with anyone, but theyre a bit more likely to find out via masturbation whereas someone without probably won't feel the need to explore what's going on there as much
also i wanted to add vis a vis the physical therapy part, the "having a doctors finger in you" part does feel weird and awkward and embarassing and yes probably will hurt a bit when youre first starting out, but they will go as slow as you need and it really is helpful, because from that they can tell you what areas to focus pressure on with the dilator, test muscle control, make sure youre doing kegels/breathing exercises right, and gauge your progress while making sure youre not pushing too fast, so if youre willing/able to push thru the awkwardness of it then it really is worth it
editing bc i think this has started showing up on ppls fyps: there's another version of this post here where i go into more detail about treatment options, including a breakdown of the instructions my therapist gave me for mine, so if this post helped out then i would check out that version too! 💕
You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?
I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet
Stop tagging this about the Unabomber it's not about the Unabomber, it's about time we give the other fucked up mathematicians some recognition, it's about this fucking guy
OP you're right and you should say it. There are 9 planets in the solar system and two of them are in a binary planetary system. I will die on this hill.
EXACTLY. EARTH-MOON IS A BINARY PLANET SYSTEM. AND I WILL BECOME NOTABLE FOR MY FREQUENT POSTS TO VARIOUS TUMBLR BLOGS AND MY ADVOCACY FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE MOON AS A PLANET.
Now, dear reader, you might say: "But three of the Jovian moons and Titan are bigger than the Moon!". And to that I say yes, but two of those are bigger than Mercury also and people aren't usually upset about that. Plus all of those are satellites of bodies that are completely incomparable in scale.
Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.
You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.
In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.
[*No, Pluto is not a planet, but yes Pluto-Charon is totally a dwarf planet binary]
hello???? hello??????????? have we walked into the twilight zone or something??????????? yes, the moon is a percentage (a percentage almost exactly) of earth’s mass, but that doesn’t magically make us a binary system! the barycenter is still well within the diameter of earth! what next, are you going to say that since deimos and phobos orbit mars, they’re actually a trinary planetary system?? you fucking better not!
Hi, I'm an astrophysicist, I am well aware of the IAU (International Astronomical Union) definition of a planet. It is a definition that is relatively controversial and doesn't really make a lot of sense - it was mostly written to prevent the list of planets from getting too long as we discovered more dwarfs. This definition does not include anything to do with barycentres - I'll get back to that.
The IAU definition of a planet has 3 parts:
1. Object in orbit around our Sun
2. Object has reached hydrostatic equilibrium (i.e. it's a sphere, not a potato)
3. Object has cleared its neighborhood around its orbit
Both Earth and Luna satisfy 2. I will accept that 1 is debatable, but the crux of my argument is that Luna is the size of a terrestrial planet (yes, ~1% of Earth's mass, but still huge and of roughly the same order of magnitude as Mercury, which is a mere ~5% of Earth's mass) and exceptionally large relative to its orbital partner compared to any other "satellite", a factor the IAU does not account for.
It's important to note that 1 literally does not permit binary planets - even if both bodies are identical, one must be the "moon". This is major criticism of the IAU definition. It also doesn't account for exoplanets or rogue planets, but that's another story.
3 is where this definition falls apart. You could easily argue that most of the planets in our solar system fail depending on how you interpret it, because it's so fuzzy. The Earth fails, because there's a planet-sized body chilling out in its orbit (Luna), Jupiter fails because it has huge quantities of asteroids trapped in its Lagrange points, etc.
In the latter case, we say that because Jupiter is determining the motion of these bodies, it still counts. For the Earth we simply ignore Luna and say that the rule is more about stray bodies than orbital partners. But by the same logic we can say that for Luna we ignore the Earth, and Luna passes.
So I would argue that the IAU definition is bad, but if you fixed it so that it allowed binary systems to exist, it would readily define Luna as a planet in my view (if you deleted the Earth from the solar system and left Luna, it would unambiguously meet the criteria).
Now let's talk about barycentres.
The barycentre of two bodies in orbit is just their overall centre of mass. People often point to the external barycentre of the Pluto-Charon system to indicate that they are binary dwarfs. However, this is a poor metric in my view, because it's highly dependent on orbital distance.
The centre of mass of the Earth-Luna system is inside the Earth at present, but if Luna simply orbited further away, the barycentre would be in the empty space between them, with nothing about the two bodies individually, or the qualitative nature of their orbits, having changed. In fact, given enough time and pretending the Sun won't consume both bodies in a few billion years, Luna would actually drift far enough away due to tidal interactions for this to happen - it would be silly for it to suddenly be a planet one day when it wasn't the day before.
To answer your question, no. I would under no circumstances argue that the martian moons are planets. They are minuscule space potatoes that are not even large by the standards of asteroids. If Mars were close enough in mass to them for the system to be considered plausibly trinary, it would be far too small to even qualify as a dwarf planet (and there's no way such a system would be gravitationally stable to perturbation by Jupiter regardless).
@hereticalteapot Thank you so much for laying this all out! I totally agree. Something that's motivating to me is the fact that Luna is more gravitationally attracted to the Sun than to Earth- and by that definition is orbiting the Sun, not the Earth. This is not true of any other "moons" in our solar system except some which are not even large enough to become spheres- so this is another way in which it is different from the moons in our system.
It's really frustrating to me when people lash out and say "You're wrong because there's a definition, for the love of god look up the definition" about a topic where I think it's clear my point is that I KNOW the definition and I disagree with it. And that's allowed! Definitions are made up! "Planets" are made up, and I think we should make them up differently!
All the things in our solar system are just different kinds of rocks dancing to each other's gravity- they're all affected by each one's gravity, even in tiny ways. They do not fall neatly into subcategories "planet" and "not a planet" - we made this distinction up because we wanted it. We noticed that some of the bodies in our solar system seemed much more important and dominant than others and we wanted a name for that. But the planets don't know that- they don't have an inherent major distinction between them, nor are they obligated to. When we wanted to come up with a way to clearly decide which bodies were planets, we had to make something up.
What we made up is a little bit vague, and even if it were extremely clear cut, we could still debate whether it was a reasonable or intuitive or useful definition.
In science we have lots of definitions, and they aren't handed down by god, they're made by people, and they are made to be useful, and when they aren't useful or reasonable, they can be and should be and are changed. Knowing which things fit which definitions is part of science, but another part of science is thinking critically about whether things SHOULD be defined, how they should be defined, whether definitions need to be changed, and other things like this- and that's messier than just knowing facts. But that's science.
I hate to say it folks, but my fondness for the "Luna is a planet" argument might not just be because it's silly and I like to be silly. It might be a really convenient training ground for thinking about definitions which are social constructs in other contexts. Like race, sex, gender, disability, economics. These things, like planets, are made up. They are very real, don't get me wrong! They are real because we made them up! But what, exactly, they are... we decided it. And we could decide differently. We have that power. If you don't like something because it doesn't fit a definition- that's not really an argument against it. Because the definition could be changed. Should it be?
Also for any barycenter definition fans - the barycenter of Luna and Jupiter is within Jupiter. I think we can all agree Luna is not a moon of Jupiter.
Something else to note is that IAU bylaws require a new definition to be voted on to be circulating for at least a year in the scientific community. The one voted on in 2006 was drafted the same day. Also, the vote was specifically and carefully planned such that most of the planetary scientists who were only there for specific parts of the conference relevant to their fields had left already. It was rigged and in violation of their own bylaws, so I think its well past time we stop listening to this absurd definition.
Prev I would really like you to explain what you meant by some of this because I think I'm not aware of some physics you're referring to. But. On the other hand. I am SLIGHTLY afraid to ask.
okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”
and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!
his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.
So I Answered It.
and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-
i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.
anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.
You've been convicted of a crime. You've (perhaps) served jail or prison time, paid your debt to society, and you're done. You step out of those jailhouse doors absolutely free!
Haha. Hahaha.
Welcome to Part 5 of How Courts Actually Work. Part 1 (Why are police so bad at investigation?), Part 2 (How to pay money to leave jail), Part 3 (What is a trial and how), and Part 4 (Why prison?) are all available on my tumblr.
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In our current criminal punishment bureaucracy, realistically no one gets released without being on some form of "community supervision." This may sound unfamiliar to you, but you've heard of it before, usually in the forms of "parole" or "probation."
It works like this.
Once you are released, you report first to your parole/probation officer. (I'm going to be using "probation" here because my jurisdiction has abolished parole; see last post. This is essentially equally applicable to parole, though.) They have you sign a set of rules. These rules usually have some variation of the following:
1: NO CRIME.
2: Get a job, keep a job. (Exception is if you are disabled and on Social Security disability income.)
3. Always tell the truth to the probation officer and let them visit your house.
4: NO DRUG. NO ALCOHOL (maybe). NO GUN.
5: Call your probation officer if anything happens at all at any time and get their permission to do normal adult things.
There are some more subtle variations like don't live with anyone else convicted of a felony, and there can also be "special" conditions like submit to drug treatment, or register on the sex offender registry, or no contact with your ex.
On the surface, these things seem more or less simple: lots of adults every day in America get by with no alcohol, gun, drug, crime. However. You start running into trouble right there at "job." It's pretty commonly known that having a crime on your record makes finding a job A Lot Worse, so I'm not going to harp on that one; we all know. If you were hiring, you'd probably consider it, especially before you read this and realized how stupid most successfully prosecuted crimes are.
Let's talk about no drug, alcohol. You will probably be required to do random drug and alcohol screens (they can detect the byproducts of alcohol in your urine, so buckle up, you're still on the hook for that one). You will be observed peeing. It will be humiliating. That will be the least of it. You're like: no problem, I don't do drugs. Hold on, my friend.
Pretty much every "scheduled drug" (drugs that are classified according to potential for abuse) has benign/legal compounds that create false positives. Gabapentin can create a false positive for benzodiazepines (like Xanax, Valium, etc). Effexor can create false positives for methamphetamine. So can Prozac or beta blockers. Adderall creates a correct positive for amphetamines, but is, let's be clear, one of the safest and most effective psychiatric medications for any condition on the market. Various cold and flu remedies can give false positives. Depending on how they are washed and processed, poppy seeds can still give false positives for marijuana. Antihistamines, Benadryl, and ibuprofen can show up as PCP. Seroquel shows up like methadone.
In a simple drug screen, none of these are distinguished from each other. All a drug screen does is show yes/no. A more complex drug test (off to the lab!) is required to distinguish. Probation officers may not want to send a test to the lab, may believe you're lying about what you took, and may attempt to intimidate you into signing admissions for drug use. Given that a probation officer can have you arrested without a warrant or any kind of judicial approval, their threats are gonna seem pretty important!
So that's the problem with drug screens and their accuracy. How about timing?
One of the most common ways to do random drug screens is called "color code." People have to call in every (day? week?) by a certain time to hear whether their "color" is up for a random screen. If it is, they have to find a way to get in to the probation office to get tested. With lack of transportation, spotty cell access, and potentially great distances to the probation office, as well as punishing work schedules in places that will fire you if you miss your job without notice, these can be a problem. Moreover, those of you with executive dysfunction should be wincing right now, because you know that correctly calling in every week at the right time is going to be a problem for someone who's drowning.
In addition, probation will almost certainly require you to go and do some kind of treatment for something, these days. It's usually drug treatment, but sometimes psychological treatment. These groups will be whatever is cheap and available, which means it'll likely be during business hours. Pray to your gods that your Early Recovery Skills group is available by phone and you can fit it in your lunch break, or otherwise your constant need to drive to the probation office to go to that appointment is going to lose you your job.
And, oops, you violated probation.
Or you could skip the Early Recovery, keep the job, and –
Sorry, no, you've violated your probation.
You missed Early Recovery because it was a shift you couldn't reschedule, but you can make it in next week! Okay but if you miss one more you're terminated from the class, and, you guessed it –
Violation.
Folks, probation is actually pretty hard and complicated. In addition, it does not help the people who are going through it. Like, in an ideal world, we're talking: people get out of jail, and someone keeps an eye on them to make sure they don't return to a Life of Crime and to help hook them up with the right job programs to give them something to strive for. In reality, they go straight from being institutionalized and subject to a rigid routine to being free and needing to jump through what's actually an incredible number of hoops, very quickly.
It's hard to be an adult and alive. Imagine being an adult and alive who has to stay out of jail by doing a bunch of extra shit!
It's important to note that probation was not always this way. Not everyone used to get probation, and not every violation turned into jail time. There has been a noticeable change.
According to the Office of Justice Programs, about 1 in 6 offenders admitted to prison in 1980 were there for probation or parole violations. In 2021 and 2022, the percentage that were there for violations of probation or parole was 44-45%. From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.
From 17% in 1980 to 45% in 2022.
From 17% to 45%.
Are you starting to understand why the population of our prisons skyrocketed between 1980 and 2010?
The reality of probation and parole now is that you can't get free. There are too many requirements. It's made for failure. And even if you do complete your requirements completely, even if you are picture perfect on probation, you will never stop paying for what you did, because criminal records are forever.
In my jurisdiction, this includes juvenile records. If you have any conviction as a juvenile, it will last past your adulthood. A misdemeanor will stick around until you're 21 or after 5 years has passed, whichever is longer. A felony will stick around forever (but might not prevent you from voting or buying a gun after the age of 29!).
Okay, okay, you say, at least tell me that all this probation, all these violations, have done something. Have they made people safer? Have they reduced crime?
Uh, apparently? No. Extra-intense supervision has been studied with relation to both low-risk and high-risk offenders, and it doesn't help community safety with either one. What it does do is send more of them to prison in the first two years of probation. Same with extra-long terms of probation. Same with kids on probation. There's no point; there's no benefit.
If I bring this up to a prosecutor, you know what they have always said? Literally, without any exception? All of them?
"Okay, we'll just put them in jail instead."
Coool. Cool cool cool. That's the point you should take from this, for sure.
–
Let's talk about the impact of this incredible explosion in extra jail time.
This is felt most keenly in poor communities. (Especially poor communities that are black or Latino.) Remember when I was talking about investigations, and how nearly every case is low-hanging easy fruit? That stuff is all from poor communities. Search a beaten-up car, and the odds are pretty decent that you'll find, somewhere in the trash, a used baggy or bit of pipe that has some drug residue on it. Bam, drug felony, and that person's in the system.
Every time one of these people goes to jail, those closest to them are seriously affected. You're taking away single parents and primary wage-earners, and putting them behind bars long enough for them to lose their jobs, apartments, and cars, and have all of their possessions carted off to the dump, kicked to the curb, or destroyed. Imagine starting from zero. Imagine starting from zero with your credit score shattered because you couldn't make your car payments because you were in prison for not going to your Early Recovery Skills group.
Kids are deprived of their parents not once, not twice, but over and over again over the course of childhood. They're deprived of the food and shelter that adult could maintain for them. They see their parent get sucked back again and again. How is a kid like that supposed to have any hope for the future? How are they supposed to feel about themselves when they constantly see their dad over a tablet at a jail, fifteen minutes at a time?
Figures indicate that as many as a third of black men spend time in jail or prison over the course of their lives. Those black men and their sons are wrenched apart. Their futures are squeezed dry because Joe Senator doesn't want to pay for another program. The kids are deprived at school, stereotyped, and eventually arrested. When they're arrested and sentenced, more money is spent on them to lock them up a single year than has been spent on their education and medical care over the course of a lifetime.
In the meantime, the Atlantic is writing articles about our Generation of Loneliness. They note that in the inner city, facilities that used to be public are only opening behind locked doors. Pools, clubhouses, sports fields? Community gathering centers? They don't exist anymore. These kids have nowhere to go. If they go into foster care, and dare to express any non-positive emotion, especially the older kids, they're likely to be shunted off to restrictive and locked mental health facilities that are rife with abuse and corruption, and that, on the surface, look a hell of a lot like jails.
I'm off-topic.
What leaves me speechless with my clients isn't that so many of them fail. It's that some of them actually succeed. In the midst of the economy and more stacked endlessly against them, they manage to trick Medicaid into funding drug treatment programs long-term, or they find programs that act as job resources too. They build themselves up from the ashes they started with. And they thrive.
–
Let's talk about penalties for probation violations.
My jurisdiction, a couple years ago, switched up the penalties. If you do a "technical violation" – that is, if you don't get a new criminal charge, and instead you just fail a drug test or don't keep employment – your first time carries no jail time. Second time, a few weeks.
Great! That's a step in the right direction.
Again, not so fast. "Technical violations" did not include "special conditions of probation." You know, the ones like sex offender registries and no contact with exes? So, when faced with this limitation on their previously unlimited power to sentence for violations, judges began to list every
single
condition
as a special condition of probation, in their sentencing orders.
When the Court of Appeals shot this down, they started putting in any possible way they could expand those conditions to make it a special condition.
And it's worked.
You have to "follow the probation officer's recommendations for drug treatment." But if the court orders a special condition of drug treatment, and you don't go? That's a special condition violation, not a technical violation, and now you can get jail time for it.
Yes, courts responded to this clear signal of legislative intent by directly attempting to bypass it and give people more jail time. This should not be surprising. Judges sentence people to jail, and they have to believe that it works. Ego protection and confirmation bias entrench them in this position over the course of decades.
For a special condition violation, you could get all of your suspended time back.
–
Let's talk about an example in a previous post, Jane, who gets 3 years with 2 years suspended. Jane is ordered into drug treatment. Jane can't juggle it, mostly because of transportation. She gets 2 full years revoked. She appeals it – this is wrong!
The Court of Appeals will tell her: you can't appeal this jail time. It was previously imposed on you back when you agreed to your deal. It's too late now.
Let's go back in time. Say Jane appeals it at the time, and says that two years of suspended time is too much. You know what the Court of Appeals would say?
You can't appeal that jail time. It's not imposed; you don't have to serve it. You have no grounds for appeal. It's just suspended. It may never happen to you.
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To my authors reading this: there is almost no possible way that you can make a bureaucracy more nonsensical than our criminal justice system already is. You will, in fact, probably have to tone it down, if you're going to write about it. This is one big reason that nobody knows what a clusterfuck it is.
idk, y'all, I think I've basically covered it. If anyone has specific questions about aspects of this – appointed lawyers? Jury selection? Juvenile law? – let me know and I'll do my best. Again, I've been a practicing lawyer going on ten years. I don't mind spilling the bean tea.
I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.
I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.
This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests
@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.
Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches
And THEN.
I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.
HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.
I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."
Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.
I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.
It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research
There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA
Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."
The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.
It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.
I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.
Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.
The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.
Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.
Many years ago I did some (non-academic) research on native canes in the USA because I thought I remembered seeing a bamboo-like something in the wild that I'd been told was native, and I thought it might make a nice landscaping accent. But the sources I found said something like "unlike Asian bamboos, the American equivilant barely reaches the height of a man", and I went "nah, that is exactly the wrong height for anything." But if it gets 10 feet and up, I think there are a lot of people who would be VERY happy to use it as a sight barrier in public and private landscaping, and if it means putting in a bit of a wetland/rain garden, all the better. The lack of a good native equivelant to bamboo is something I have heard numerous people bemoan. Obviously it's very important to protect wild sites and expand those, but if it'd be helpful, I bet it wouldn't be hard to convince landscapers to start new patches too.
For instance, a lot of housing developments, malls, etc. seem to set aside a percentage of their land for semi-wild artificial wetlands (drainage maybe?) planted with natives, and then block the messy view with walls of arbovitae or clump bamboo from asia - perhaps it would be a better option there?
Good Lord. Arundinaria isn't just a better option, it's perfect.
I was in the canebrake near my house again this morning, and river cane is extraordinarily good at completely blocking the view of anything beyond it. It is bushier and leafier than Asian bamboos, and birds like to build nests in it. It would make a fantastic privacy barrier.
The cane near my house is around 10-12 feet tall. This species can reach 30 feet or more, but I think it needs ideal conditions or to be part of a large colony with a robust system of rhizomes or something.
It grows slowly compared to Asian bamboos, and seems to need some shade to establish, so it would take time to become a good barrier, but no worse than those stupid arborvitae.
plants like this were often intentionally cultivated in planter boxes as a form of water filtration and civil engineering by a bunch of indigenous nations.
There's a reason why Native Americans cultivated canebrakes.
Well, several reasons. As y'all may know, bamboo is stronger than any wood, and therefore it makes a fantastic building material.
The Cherokee used, and still use, river cane to make fishing poles, fish traps, arrows, frames for structures, musical instruments, mats, pipes, and absolutely gorgeous double-woven baskets that can even hold water.
This stuff is, no joke, a viable alternative to plastic for a lot of things. The seeds and shoots are also edible.
Uh I know this is out of left field but I work in plant cloning - it's a lot easier than you'd think to do for plants and it's honestly a really important conservation tool, and good for making a TON of seedlings in a short amount of time. I can look into this genus for like, cloning viability?
Hi y'all, reblogging the Canebrake Post again. It's been over a year since I fell in love with the coolest plant ever. I'm trying to bring it back but I am very small so if any of y'all have a Canebrake nearby you might wanna talk to the owners and contact some local parks and nature preserves yeah?
A lot of people are asking how to distinguish Rivercane from invasive bamboo species. This link should help you!
Here's some distinguishing traits I've observed myself:
River cane has a really full, bushy, leafy look that makes it really hard to recognize as bamboo from a distance, because the stems are harder to see. The shape of the individual cane with its branches and leaves is narrow, because the branches spread out very little, but the foliage is DENSE. It's like a plume.
River cane is stronger, denser and heavier than invasive bamboos I've seen.
River cane stems are always green all the way around, no yellow (unless the plant's been dead for a good long time)
River cane stems feel smooth like plastic to the touch. The common invasive bamboo I've seen here, when you run your hand upwards along it, the stem feels awful like sandpaper.
The biggest way to distinguish them: River cane grows 6-4 feet tall when it's in little patches, and up to 10-12 feet when it's in a large size patch (like, the size of a backyard) It is known to reach up to 15 feet tall nowadays and historical records claim heights of 30 feet or more in fertile river valleys. I really want to stress that it's RARE for it to get big. A canebrake will almost always be many times wider than it is tall (sometimes they grow in very long strips along fence rows)
The best time to look for it is in winter before things leaf out, because it's evergreen and grows in dense masses, making it easy to spot.
Some more cool stuff i've found out—River cane was a common food of bison! Earliest European settlers reported canebrakes so big that "100 bison could graze on a single canebrake." Apparently it used to make extremely high quality forage for livestock, before it was mostly destroyed.
European settlers apparently set their pigs loose in the canebrakes purposefully to destroy them, because the pigs would root up the nutritious rhizomes and kill the plant. Thinking of the relationship between Bison and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Eastern Native Americans and Canebrakes, and the relationship between Plains Native Americans and Bison...it seems like a pattern, huh?
In the case of both bison and canebrakes, they were a fundamental part of their ecosystem, and fundamental part of the indigenous cultures that used them for every material, their musical instruments, their homes, their most advanced arts, and even food (Rivercane shoots are edible just like other bamboo, and supposedly the seeds are edible too!) but European settlers purposefully destroyed the species almost completely. I can't help but wonder if there was a similar motivation.
Books that talk about Rivercane:
Weaving New Worlds: Southeastern Cherokee Women and Their Basketry by Sarah H. Hill talks about rivercane a LOT and gives tons of details of its uses and history.
Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks has a whole chapter about Rivercane.
Venerable Trees: History, Biology and Conservation in the Bluegrass is a book about Kentucky, but it talks about rivercane's importance including its relationship with bison. It's only a couple pages out of the whole book but it's still great information.
By the way, though, if you read any very early European account of Kentucky, the word "cane" is everywhere. It's just such a nondescript word it's hard to realize its significance.
On a more personal note...god, I love this plant. Here's another photo I took. When you're in the canebrake, it feels so cut off from the rest of the world; it's shaded, quiet, cool, and someone 10 yards away couldn't even see you.
i actually talked to my neighbor that I learned owns the canebrake. She had no idea what it was but she was excited to learn about it! It was a lovely conversation.
Apparently, she knew I had been down there a bunch of times and thought nothing of it. She said "Yeah I told my husband, If you see her down there, just leave her alone she's doing her thing." In the most sincere way possible, God bless this woman
She said I could transplant all I wanted, too. This was great! ...but I quickly learned how RIDICULOUSLY HARD it is to transplant from a canebrake of this size. The rhizomes are so big and tough, a shovel can hardly get through them, and unless you're at the edge of the canebrake, there's a thick mat of them going every which way. I was driving my whole weight down on this shovel and it kept just denting the rhizome and glancing off.
I did get some transplants but each one took like half an hour because I was fighting for my life!
Also, with a canebrake this size, it doesn't grow little canes that will later become bigger—it shoots up tall canes in a single season. The youngest canes, more accessible and toward the edge of the canebrake, were significantly taller than I was. I cut the top off of one transplant for ease of handling—I had a pair of hand pruners with me that were usually perfectly useful for small limbs, but I could barely get these things through the cane, it's just so strong and dense.
Someone research the material properties of this stuff ASAP. It's insanely strong.
Here is some YouTube videos that talk about river cane!
Roger Cain of Keetoowah/Western Band Cherokee shows and talks about Rivercane. This video has a BIG canebrake, the mature canes look as if they could be 15ft tall, but he says it's only a fragment of what they used to be!
Stan the River Man visits a Canebrake in Northern Kentucky. This channel only has 22 subscribers, I feel like I've discovered a rare and priceless treasure
River Cane Renaissance, Episode 1. This guy has devoted a large part of his life to studying Rivercane and now works with the eastern band Cherokee to try and bring it back.
Chattooga river conservancy video on Rivercane, haven't watched the whole thing myself but it looks really good and detailed
These videos barely have any views or comments, but y'all can help! We can spread the knowledge.
For privacy reasons, I share details online of my real world activities only reluctantly, and not very often. But don't be bamboozled into thinking I have forgotten the Canebrakes. It's exactly the opposite.
I have done a lot of networking and made a lot of contacts. I am not alone. There are other people with a story exactly like mine: first, they heard an offhanded mention of forests of American bamboo, which shattered everything they thought they knew about their environment. Next, they became crazed with fascination, searching for knowledge with insane ferocity. Then, they realized that river cane is not only a plant, it is a keystone species symbiotic with indigenous cultures for thousands of years, and it was almost destroyed due to the subjugation of its habitat and the genocide of its caretakers.
The canebrakes' devotees have been working tirelessly to compile every single scrap of information on canebrakes that exists in writing. Every record, every primary source, every historical mention, every comment and conjecture. I have been given access to some of this priceless treasure trove. The wealth of information is amazing, but even more amazing is how much is still unknown.
The history, properties, and ecological importance of the canebrakes is so much more than I imagined.
For example, the massive amounts of seeds produced by huge canebrakes in flowering events fed the passenger pigeon flocks. Likewise the Carolina parakeet was also dependent on canebrakes, and the extinct Bachman's warbler was a canebrake specialist. The destruction of canebrakes could be responsible for why these birds went extinct.
Canebrakes were absolutely fundamental to the indigenous peoples of the Southeast, providing for their every need. Food, shelter, containers, tools, music and art. The settlers foolishly thought the indigenous peoples were not "advanced" enough for metal tools, but in truth, they already had a material superior to metal. River cane by weight is stronger than steel. You can make knives and blades out of it.
I am excited for the future. It seems like momentum is building to save the river cane and bring back the canebrakes, and I am hoping to join together with all the other like-minded people to accomplish this task.
A new organization has just started in Alabama to bring back the river cane. Here is a blog post to read from a few months ago.
Was gonna go in the notes for this but screw it, I've reblogged this before because river cane is so cool
Nashville is actually reintroducing it at a couple of parks within the city limits! For example, Shelby Bottoms (where I ride bikes most days) has a bunch of smaller canebrakes dispersed along the river and they seem to be growing steadily
Also, Dr. Jon Evans, a professor at Sewanee, recently published a paper demonstrating that there are clonal stands of hill cane there that are around 1700 years old! Still a little inconclusive regarding the flowering/reproduction issue but still! I want to see that too if I can
Makes me sad every time I go to the greenways in Knoxville and am like "man you could be introducing so much river cane here, it's great"
Holy shit okay i looked it up and HOLY SHIT. Published 2 months ago.
1700 years old.
And it says A. appalachiana, (the Appalachian species of native rivercane), has actually NEVER been observed to flower, which means ???? i dont even know what the fuck that means.
THIRTY hectares. THIRTY. That's HUGE.
Does this mean that???? Most canebrakes are so small now because they're babies????
Thinking about the first time Grace & Rocky inevitably get into a big argument on the journey to Erid. Because, like, they are obviously inseparable queerplatonic besties, but Grace is slowly getting more and more irritable as he, you know, dies of starvation, and Rocky started this trip with decades worth of survivor's guilt and PTSD and is now adding a hefty dose of caretaker fatigue on top of that.
It probably starts as a misunderstanding--they still don't even perfectly speak each others' languages, and there's plenty of room for cultural differences to get in the way, too. They're both on-edge and living in extremely close quarters and for whatever reason it explodes.
And neither of them know what to do with that.
Rocky ends up feeling hurt and guilty all at the same time, frustrated with Grace but also with himself, because he knows his friend is going through a hard time, it's just also terrible to have to watch and he doesn't know how to fix that. Grace probably finds a corner to cry in, convinced he's doomed himself by making Rocky angry because how is he going to convince everyone else on Erid to care about saving his life if he can't even stay on good terms with his friend?
Eventually they get over it. They talk about what happened and get to a less shaky place. It's still a scary couple of hours for both of them, and they know it could happen again. But they still care about each other so, so much, and that makes it worth it.
So maybe I haven't been able to stop turning this over in my head and wrote this today instead of my job applications. 4400 words, be warned :')
---
Since being sent to space, I’ve done a lot of human firsts: first human interstellar traveler, first human to visit an exoplanet, first human contact with an intelligent alien species, first human to eat a different alien species (unless Dmitri and Ilyukhina were serious about doing astrophage shots. I don’t think they were. But they might have been).
I think I might also be the first human to tell my best friend that I wished he and his whole species were dead because I can’t have cake anymore.
I’m a lot less proud of that one.
I think I’m a bad friend.
It’s embarrassing to be upset about little things, because it makes you feel stupid, and feeling stupid makes you feel more upset, and feeling upset about that makes you feel more stupid, in a spiral of feeling bad about everything. Being upset that I was going to die in space? That was normal. Anyone would be upset about that. But about two years into the journey to Erid I realized I had eaten the last of the freeze-dried meals with the chocolate cake yesterday and now I was never going to have chocolate or cake ever again, and I hadn’t even appreciated it.
I stood at the food storage compartments, staring stupidly at them, trying not to either cry or throw something. I was in the third week of my new meal regimen: coma slurry for breakfast, taumoeba slime for lunch, and then real food for dinner, to end on a high note. Intercutting real food with taumoeba was my idea, and I was mad at myself for doing it. I had enough real food to last until Erid, but it was dwindling scarily fast. Rocky was insistent that Eridian scientists would drop everything and figure out how to make food that would keep me alive as their first priority, but… well, I’d come from an Earth that was having the same problems. I didn’t think they’d want to drop everything they were doing to save their own planet to invent a whole new technological infrastructure to keep one alien alive. So I wanted to make sure what I had would stretch out long enough for them to figure out something I could eat that wouldn’t kill me. But what that meant was slime for breakfast and slime for lunch, every day, and the lunch slime was filling but it wasn’t energizing. By dinner time I was always cranky. And this was going to be how every day was going to go for at least the next two years and probably the next rest of my life. And all I wanted was something with chocolate in it and there wasn’t any and never would be again.
I slumped down on the floor.
“Grace?” Rocky called from the other room.
“Just deciding on dinner,” I said.
“From the floor, question?”
“Yeah.”
Ilyukhina had wanted chocolate cake.
The memories still keep filtering up, though by now they feel more like remembering things normally that I just hadn’t been thinking about before. Ilyukhina’s 39th birthday was a few months before launch, and she was making the most of it.
“Cake, champagne, and zakuski should have eggplant, I like the eggplant,” she said, counting off on her fingers the things she wanted for her big birthday bash. Stratt listened with the kind of patience she rarely had time for anymore, but Ilyukhina was good at making you want to listen to her. “Smoked salmon on rye bread. Music, dancing. Flowers. Everyone brings me a little card that says nice things about how much you all love me and how much you all will miss me. Also I want bouncy castle from American movies.”
That actually earned a brief but real smile from Stratt. “We are not importing a… bouncy castle… onto the ship.”
“Will be my last birthday party ever,” Ilyukhina said. “And I have never seen a bouncy castle in real life.”
Stratt held firm on nixing the bouncy castle, but Ilyukhina did get her party with music, dancing, lots of champagne and vodka, eggplant, smoked salmon, and everybody on the ship making toasts about how great she was. There was also a chocolate cake.
My last birthday ever was a month later and was mostly DuBois and Shapiro ambushing me as I left the lab with leftover champagne from Ilyukhina’s party and cookies stolen from the mess hall. If I’d known it would be my last birthday party ever, maybe I would have tried to do something more special. There wasn’t even cake.
Rocky rolled up in his xenonite ball. He was working on a more articulated suit, but hadn’t come up with a design that worked well yet. The suit would help him interact with me and the oxygenated side of the Hail Mary better, and I was torn between feeling like it was really sweet that he would put in all that effort for something that he didn’t really need to do in order to make things easier on me and feeling weird that soon he wouldn’t even need me for the one thing I could do that he couldn’t. But for now he was still in the ball and he still needed me to interact with most things on my side of the barrier.
He nudged me with the ball. “Something is wrong with the food, question?”
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “It’s just that I’m out of the one that I wanted.”
“Other ones are not good, question?”
“You don’t taste flavors, or, I don’t know, maybe you do, but sometimes humans want specific things,” I said. Rocky still didn’t love talking about eating, so I wasn’t entirely positive if Eridians had any equivalent to sense of taste or not, but I’d definitely gotten that there was a lot less variety of things Eridians ate than humans did. “And right now the thing I want is chocolate cake.”
“Don’t know that word.”
“It’s a type of food. It’s a dessert. We eat it at parties. It tastes really good and… I mean, it’s really meant for sharing. It’s kind of sad to eat cake alone.”
Rocky made a sound that was kind of like a laugh and kind of like a disbelieving snort. “Human social eating. Strange strange strange. Humans are weird perverts.”
It wasn’t anything new, it was a running joke, but it was not what I wanted to hear right then. “I can’t help it if eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing, okay? Eridians are the weird perverts for getting weird about it! It’s important to me even if you think it’s stupid! I’m allowed to miss it!”
I didn’t mean to snap that forcefully, but I just wasn’t in the mood to be patient. Rocky was quiet, then when he responded, his tone was clipped. “I know. All you want to talk about is food anymore. I sit with Grace while eat because it makes you sad not to. You think I don’t know this.”
“All I want to talk about is food anymore because I’m afraid of starving, Rock. Even Eridians have to worry about that!”
“I know!” The whistle in his tone was frustrated. He made a noise kind of like “ugh” then said, “Was trying to make joke. Was not trying to insult.”
I had the presence of mind not to say “well, you did,” but what I did say was more like, “Mmh.” I got up and rifled through the food packets again. I paused over the babaganoush. That was eggplant, right? We’d has something like that at Ilyukhina’s party, back when I was on Earth and worrying about food was something abstract for me. Something I knew was a real problem in the world, but not one I’d ever faced.
Maybe even if I was still on Earth, I’d be worrying about having enough food. But at least everyone else would be, too, and they’d be willing to commiserate.
That wasn’t fair. I knew Rocky was worried about me. He spent a lot of time fretting over my health and my safety and if I was sleeping enough and if I had enough food and if I was feeling restless or bored and he freaked out a lot the first time I threw up the taumoeba slime because he was afraid his suggestion had killed me. I had to reassure him that I was fine and I wasn’t dying even as I had no idea if that was true or not.
“My turn to choose the movie tonight,” I said, as I mixed water into the babaganoush to rehydrate it. “The Great British Bake-Off.”
“Don’t know two of those words,” said Rocky.
“It’s relaxing. Humans like watching it because it’s calming. And I still miss cake.”
It was not relaxing or calming to Rocky. I could tell he was on edge the whole time. “Grace didn’t say it was food show,” he said accusingly.
“Like I said. Eating food together is the basic unit of human socializing.”
Rocky bunched up his arms around his carapace in a way I could tell was an expression of discomfort, and as much as it made me feel like a total jerk, it was also kind of satisfying. I was feeling like crap, watching this show while eating rehydrated chemical-infused babaganoush was making me feel like crap, and maybe I had decided to do that because I wanted Rocky to join me in feeling like crap. Also, babaganoush is a slime, which I hadn’t consciously remembered until I chose it. Three square meals of slime today. It didn’t even really leave me feeling full, and after I finished it, I couldn’t just heat up another one, because I had a ration schedule. I could eat more taumoeba, but eating taumoeba while watching polite and friendly British bakers in their cute sunny kitchens and green grassy lawns make cake I couldn’t eat would probably have pushed me over the edge.
“Grace feeling relaxed and calm now, question?” Rocky asked.
“I’m still hungry,” I grumbled. It wasn’t Rocky’s fault that he had 220 years’ worth of food and I had three, but it was hard to believe that when my stomach was grumbling and I had only eaten slime all day.
“Can eat taumoeba—”
“I don’t want taumoeba!” I was acting like a child and I didn’t care. I think I was also crying. “I want to go home.”
Rocky rolled his ball closer to me. “What can I do that would make Grace feel more like home?”
“You can’t,” I said. “That’s the problem. You can’t. The Hail Mary isn’t home and neither of us know what’s going to happen on Erid, if I’ll just die or what—”
“Erid will be Grace’s home! Grace won’t die!”
“It won’t be, and you don’t know that!” And now I was yelling, which Rocky didn’t deserve, but—“Nobody there knows me, nobody there will know or care what humans do, even you—you don’t really get it, and nobody ever will again and I’m going to feel like this forever—”
“I have been TRYING!” Rocky’s pitch shot up almost past the point I could hear him, and he had to bristle and compose himself to drop his voice back into the range my weak stupid human ears could pick up. “Trying everything that I can to make you comfortable and tolerate your stupid food rules because everything is about food always and you get sad when you eat alone and get sad when you eat taumoeba and get sad when you eat coma slurry and I watch your human movies where everybody is eating together all the time and you talk about how much you want to eat the food they are eating and it doesn’t matter that I try to make the Hail Mary comfortable for you and change my voice to talk to you and make xenonite suit so I can do outside hull tasks so you don’t have to do them all, because I can’t make more food for you! Don’t know what else I can do!”
“You can’t!” I said. “And I didn’t ask you to do any of that! You can’t fix what’s actually wrong!”
“I know!” Rocky hissed steam out of his vents, then said, in a tone so measured it was almost insulting, “Rocky can’t fix what is actually wrong. So I try to fix what I can. But Grace needs to tell me what can be fixed or else I have to guess and then make Grace angry that I try.” His words were choppy again, like he needed to use small words to get the point across.
The screen still showed happy humans being nice to each other on a sunny, happy Earth that probably didn’t even exist anymore and it was making me feel awful about everything. “I want to go home,” I said. “That’s what’s wrong. And that can’t be fixed, because I’m gonna be eating taumoeba soup alone on Erid forever and that was the stupid choice I made. I wish I’d never turned around.”
Rocky was quiet at that.
I should have apologized. I should have said I didn’t mean it. The problem was, right then, I did.
Stratt once told me I was a good man. She’s not wrong often but I think she was wrong on that one.
Then Rocky rolled forward and bumped his xenonite ball against me roughly. “Grace is being stupid. Grace sleep now.”
“I’m not tired.” I tried to shove his ball. Obviously it didn’t move because he weighs about three hundred pounds.
“Don’t care. Humans can choose when sleep. So Grace sleep now. Statement.”
It wasn’t like I had anything better to do. Neither could I come up with anything to say to Rocky that would make what I’d just said not horrible.
So I acquiesced, and I went to sleep.
Or I tried to. I mean, I brushed my teeth (I was running low on toothpaste, too) and flopped into my bed and pressed my face into the pillow and pointedly kept it there.
When Rocky was confident I was actually in bed, I heard his xenonite ball roll away. I looked up from sulking into my pillow in shock, sure that he hadn’t actually just left while I was sleeping. But he had.
It hurt way, way more than I expected.
“Screw you,” I mumbled into the pillow. And then felt bad.
Down the hall in Rocky’s half of the ship, I heard the muffled rush of escaping air I’d only heard a few times before when Rocky was very, very worked up, a sound that meant he was in the other room screaming in frustration.
Me too, buddy. We both got to be mad and miserable, I guess.
Unfortunately Rocky was right that lying down in my bed was making me feel… if not better, at least more tired. It was like the anger that had been pent up inside me that had been giving me energy was gone and now I was just tired. Tired, and stupid.
Was this it? Was this really my whole future? I couldn’t even avoid pissing off and getting pissed off by Rocky, who was easily the best friend I had ever had. He was still so sure that all of Erid was going to love me and dedicate round-the-clock care to making sure I could thrive in his crushing boiling ammonia world, when I wasn’t even convinced he would still love me by the time we got there. Definitely not if I was going to act like this.
It wasn’t his fault that he was going home and I wasn’t. It wasn’t his fault we both messed up the taumoeba breeding because neither of us could have predicted that taumoeba would adapt to escape xenonite, any more than it was anyone’s fault that his crew had all died and Yao and Ilyukhina had also both died and the two of us were the ones who survived due to pure stupid luck.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault, which made it feel really bad to get mad about.
I sniffled into the pillow. It brought back memories of grad school, getting comments back from my committee on my dissertation chapters; my advisor was helpful but thorough with her commentary, rewriting so many sentences and correcting my commas and n-dashes every single time, and I had a pure Reviewer 2 type who would add comments like “What? That’s not correct” and “this sentence is incoherent” and “this isn’t the original source for this theory, you should be citing Whoever, Date.” And it would make me feel like crap every time and I’d punch my bed and sulk and feel sorry for myself, and then take a nap because I didn’t want to deal with that right then. And when I woke up from my nap I would be ready to face the files again and make the changes.
It had never occurred to me before how lucky humans are that if we don’t feel like dealing with our feelings right away we can instead cry and take a nap. Eridians can’t do either thing.
I was doing a lot of napping on the Hail Mary on my way back to Erid, ostensibly to conserve my energy and stretch out my food supply, but mostly because there were long stretches where I had nothing else to do.
When Rocky was alone on the Blip-A, before I’d come to Tau Ceti and after the taumoeba had escaped and eaten all his astrophage fuel, he couldn’t even do that.
Yeah, telling him I wished I had left him like that was a really shitty thing to do.
This was what I was supposed to be going to sleep to avoid thinking about.
Rocky still wasn’t back. I fell asleep feeling bad and also very alone.
—
He was back when I woke up.
“Oh,” I said. “How long have you been there?”
“Hours. Grace feeling less stupid, question?”
“A little.” I was actually still feeling extremely stupid, but close enough.
Rocky fidgeted with something or other in his hands. I didn’t know if it was an actual project or just something to fidget with. He hummed a little, a low sound that didn’t mean anything. I guess he didn’t know what to say any more than I did.
“Uh,” I said.
Smooth.
A few years ago, I’d had to sit a student down and have a talk about why it was inappropriate to tell your classmate you hope they die. What would I say to me if I were a seventh grader having a fight with my friend?
“I’m sorry I said that to you,” I said, finally. I couldn’t truthfully say I hadn’t meant it, because yesterday, when I said it, I did. But I felt gross at yesterday-me for feeling that way. And I had to say something. “I don’t mean it. I don’t actually wish I’d made a different choice. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t leave you like that.”
“I know.”
“I’m not actually mad at you,” I went on, because Rocky was being unnervingly quiet. “I’m trying to be hopeful about going to Erid. I really am. I’m just…” I didn’t even know what I was trying to say.
“Erid is not your home,” Rocky said.
“Yeah.”
He kept fidgeting. Then he said, “When taumoeba escaped, I thought I would die on the ship and never go home, never save Erid. Then Grace came back. Gave up everything for me. But now there is nothing I can do for you even close to what you did for me. Never will be, no matter how much I try. Because I am going home and Grace is not and there is no way to change that.”
“I wouldn’t have even had the possibility of going back to Earth in the first place if it wasn’t for you,” I said. “So it’s a net zero change, really.” I wasn’t sure I really believed that. But it was better to believe than anything else.
Rocky made a sound that indicated he didn’t really believe I believed that either.
“If it helps,” I said, “there’s no way I would have ever been happy on Earth again if I’d left you stranded in space.” That was true. When I’d been facing down the choice to keep going to Earth or turn around for Rocky, even when I’d been trying to find a way to convince myself that Rocky would be okay and I could go home… I knew deep down that I wouldn’t know how to live with myself after, if I’d just left him there to die.
Rocky slumped a little. “Going home, or tired and hungry and restless always. No way for Grace to be happy then.”
I knew he’d been stressing about this, but I don’t think I’d realized how much he’d been stressing about this. I mean, I’d been stressing about this, but that was because I was going to have to live it. “I’m trying,” I said. “I really am.”
“I’m trying too.”
“I know.”
I think sleeping did make me feel better, at least a little bit. I didn’t feel as hopeless about the future as I did last night. “And hey,” I said, “If I had to be trapped in a tiny spaceship for four years on the way to a brand new planet with anybody, I’m glad it’s you.”
That earned a little laugh equivalent from Rocky. “We save stars together. We can do anything.”
“Yeah. I believe in us.” I thought about it, and then added, “Although, just so you know, when I’m feeling sad about missing Earth and hungry for Earth food, that’s not a good time to make fun of human eating habits, okay?”
“Understand. Sorry sorry sorry. Didn’t mean to hurt. Wouldn’t hurt on purpose.” Rocky clicked his fingers against the bottom of the ball. Then he said, sounding cautious, “Also. When human movie has eating scene that will be long or gross, please tell Rocky that will happen. So many movies have them, and is uncomfortable when not expecting. Regent of the Southern Kingdom was disturbing.”
“Regent—oh. Yeah. The Denethor scene is supposed to be disturbing, even to humans.”
“It worked.”
“I can do that, yeah. Springing Bake-Off on you last night was mean.”
“It was. I was trying to help and felt like you were punishing me.”
“I kind of was. I was being a jerk.” I sighed. “I think… I don’t know. It feels stupid to say it isn’t fair. But. I think that’s it, isn’t it? It isn’t fair.”
“Isn’t fair,” Rocky agreed.
“And if it can’t be fixed, it just… feels better to know that you know it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed, you know? Rather than try to fix it.”
“Not really.”
“Well. It does.”
“Will try. Well. Try to not fix unless you want.”
“Thanks.”
I sat cross-legged on my bed in silence for a couple seconds. Then, because sitting in silence has never been a thing I’ve been particularly good at, I asked, “Are you mad at me?”
“Not mad now,” Rocky said. “Frustrated. But mostly frustrated because it isn’t fair and can’t be fixed and don’t know what to do.”
“Yeah. Same here.”
I didn’t really know what to go from there, because I was already exhausted from trying to talk about my feelings and my next thought was “I’m hungry” which probably would not be a welcome topic of conversation right now. (It was coma slurry time. Wonderful.)
“Grace wants to see body suit progress, question?” Rocky asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Sure, yeah.” Rocky showing me the stuff he was making was much more comfortable territory.
Rocky rolled away. I stretched and got up. I could sulk about it, but this was going to be my future, and I didn’t want to spend it resenting Rocky.
I had changed into new clothes and was brushing my teeth by the time Rocky came back. He stepped stiffly and awkwardly, the form-fitting xenonite suit still clearly bulkier than was comfortable.
I spit into the sink, which earned a disapproving chitter from Rocky, then rinsed my mouth out and jogged back over to the “bedroom” area. “Hey! That’s impressive.”
“Still needs work on usage flexibility and use-length,” Rocky said. “More flexibility means less air inside, which means harder temperature regulation, so can only wear it safely for 36 minutes. Not good for spacewalks yet.”
“It’s cool that you can walk around in it, though,” I said. “And you can operate the controls on my side of Mary. That’s gotta be useful.” I was selfishly glad it wasn’t great yet, though, so Rocky would still need me to do some things on my side of the ship. I was trying to be optimistic but I wasn’t ready to be wholly useless yet.
“Can also do this,” Rocky said. “Get down.”
“What?”
“Get down. On floor.”
“Um, okay,” I said, and sat down on the floor in front of Rocky.
Rocky took a minute shuffling back and forth next to me in the awkward suit. Then, once satisfied, he braced three of his legs and reached out the other two to wrap around me.
“What—oh!”
“Can give Grace hug like this.”
“Oh,” I said, suddenly blinking back tears. “Oh. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, you can.”
“Is this good?”
I shifted position so I could hug him back. The xenonite was gently warm. “Yeah. It is.”
“Sorry upset Grace.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m the one who was an ass.”
“Don’t know word.”
“It’s an English swearword. It means jerk, except ruder. It refers to the human backside.”
Rocky yipped in delight. It’s not like he hasn’t picked up words from movies, but I don’t usually define them.
“Okay to tease about leaking?” Rocky asked.
I sniffed. “Yeah. That’s fine.”
“Grace is leaking all over fancy new suit.”
“You’re bringing me home with you, buddy, you have to get used to it.”
“Think I will,” Rocky said. I really, really hoped so. Even with the stiffness of the suit, it still felt completely different from hugging the hamster ball.
“Feeling hug over yet?”
“Nope.”
Rocky made a fond-exasperated noise but let the hug keep going. After a few moments, he said, “I want Grace to be happy on Erid.”
This will probably be my most controversial post by far, but it needs to be said.
Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.
Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.
From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.
Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.
By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.
When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.
The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.
Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.
Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.
The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.
I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.
I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.
Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.
Again - gendered socialization is real. This is a core aspect of feminist analysis. I am not going to pretend otherwise.
I'm sure I remember a time when it was a big part of trans theory that missing out on typical gendered socialisation was a big part of the abuse of trans people by a cisnormative society.
Thinking of it as like a language, where so much stuff is taught by exposure, all the "gendered manners" that are taught in single-sex situations (the proverbial thing of "girls act differently when there are no boys present/boys act differently when there are no girls present") which are the situations where a kid is taught how to perform "their" gender in the most nuanced and complicated ways that signal to other people of the same-gender that "we are the same type of person" - and, trans people are often cut off from that until they come out, meaning that they have to learn the "basics" as adults.
Likewise I see so many trans people say "Bold of you to assume I was socialised! I was treated as a weird thing." And I don't know how to point out that the things that get a child treated as a "weird thing" and put outside of the bounds of propriety are themselves different for children being raised-to-boyhood or raised-to-girlhood. Thinking about England because I don't want to extrapolate outside of where I personally know, a "girl" might get treated as a tomboy-outsider-weirdo for wanting to play toy soldiers or play in the woods, but a "boy" would probably be seen as normal for that. Likewise, a "boy" might be punished really badly for liking makeup and dresses, but a "girl" wouldn't be. Seeing "You can't say I was socialised as a boy, I was constantly getting in trouble for putting on my sister's clothes, and treated like I was disgusting for crying and being emotional!" And just... Yes! Because people that the patriarchy wants to turn into "boys" will be punished for showing femininity, that is how male socialisation works! Likewise "I was treated as a tomboy and put in a third gender category because I was sporty and outdoorsy, and punished and called monstrous and sent to see a psychiatrist for not playing with dollies" - That's female socialisation, because a "boy" who was sporty wouldn't be put into into third gender category for it, and wouldn't be called monstrous for having no interest in dolls.
Obviously the exact things that are gendered change from culture to culture, but that applies to everything, everything is culturally bound and affects different people in different ways and to different degrees, but we still try to talk about the broad trends which carry through cross-culturally (which has been a big part of feminist consciousness- Recognising that although the ways that women are treated worldwide aren't the same, that there are repeating themes...)
I don't know, it feels like we shouldn't have to ignore that gendered socialisation exists and is often a horrible locus of abuse (for both cis and trans kids, even before getting into how it's often SO MUCH WORSE for intersex kids regardless of whether they're cis or trans!) just because terfs also want to use it.
Yeah. I think it's important to keep in mind that not everyone who believes in (the observable and measurable phenomenon of) gendered socialization believes that socialization is somehow an INDELIBLE MARK ON YOUR SOUL, or that being PERCEIVED as a given gender by your parents/society when you were younger means you ever WERE that gender.
The whole point of modern feminism is that gendered socialization CAN and in many ways SHOULD be unlearned.
I think people also gotta keep in mind that everything with gender is going to be a bimodal distribution. It's not "boy result" and "girl result", it's "range of boy results" and "range of girl results". And they almost always overlap.
The other thing I think is useful to keep in mind is that socialization is different for children perceived as intersex or insufficiently gender conforming: adults will treat children intermediately if they are labeled with an intermediate level, and gender policing also begins very early and can shape a child's relationship with the whole schema of gender itself. I think this is often missed for people who were identified as gender non conforming at an early age hitting the concept of gender socialization: when one's nascent gender has been identified as a potential problem by the people around you in a way that is different from the gender conforming children, socialization studies that largely focus on gender conforming case examples land in a way that doesn't always align with one's lived experience.
This is one reason that paying attention to intersex theory and experiences is really important for trans liberation and gender liberation both: I don't think you can really understand gender socialization without paying attention to case studies of children whose gender has been problematized at an early age as well as those who are perceived and socialized as "normally" gendered children. Obviously trans adults can come from children from both normatized and problematized childhood gender experiences, and individual caretakers of a gender or sex divergent child may respond to that child in a range of ways. But it's really worth noting that socialization theory does have room for socialization experiences that differ from the presumed-cis, presumed-perisex norm, and I think that talking about those examples can resolve some of the rejection of gendered socialization among trans communities.
(I'm on my phone at the moment, but if people want I can get into the literature and source some additional examples for folks who are interested.)
I’ve been kicking around a thought lately that when it comes to SFF we could probably bypass some of the perennial political vs. apolitical vs. everything-is-political-apolitical-storytelling-doesn’t-exist by instead formulating a spectrum from politically coherent to politically incoherent
Essentially, politically coherent works are works where the political message of the story is supported by all (or at least most) of the major story elements, and a politically incoherent work is a story where the political messages of different elements are seemingly all shooting off on different vectors.
The nice thing about this is it can bypass authorial intent (and the discussion of whether intent matters). This is about the text.
Like, politically incoherent works that had no authorial thought behind them are a dime a dozen of course, and politically coherent works that clearly had a lot of authorial thought are if not equally common than at least easy to spot. But there are also plenty of works that are politically coherent without the author intending them that way—like, whatever faults there are with Project Hail Mary, the overall opinion the book has about the nature of humanity & of science is consistent throughout. Likewise there are stories where the authors clearly meant a coherent political point and totally wiffed it. (The works @specialagentartemis has collectively termed “cozy colonialism” come to mind)
So there’s a utility in replacing the question “is this story political?” (Yes, always, but if the answer is always yes the question becomes kinda useless) with “Is this story politically coherent?” Because a yes or no there will tell a prospective reader something about what to expect.
Meagan Morris and Autumn Hill have been sent back to FMC Fort Worth to await sentencing. If you want to write them letters, you'll have to use their deadname in the addresses, but please use their actual names in the letters! The addresses are below:
For Meagan:
Bradford Morris 11136-512
FMC Fort Worth FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER
P.O. BOX 15330
FORT WORTH, TX 76119
for Autumn Hill:
Cameron Arnold 11138-512
FMC Fort Worth FEDERAL MEDICAL CENTER
P.O. BOX 15330
FORT WORTH, TX 76119
If you provide them with contact information, you can get emails to and from them with Corrlinks. They need your legal name, physical address, phone number, and email address for Corrlinks, and if you ask to get in touch with them that way you'll receive an email from Corrlinks with their contact request and instructions on setting up a Corrlinks account. Corrlinks is free for the people on the outside, so if you want to contact them without paying for postage that's an option.
however, Meagan and Autumn do need to pay for a bunch of things - access to Corrlinks emails, food and toiletries from the commissary, mailing labels and stamps for mailing letters. If you want to send them commissary, the Bureau of Prisons website has the instructions on how to send commissary money. You'll need to use their deadname and register number to send money to their account:
For Meagan Morris:
Bradford Morris, register/account number 11136512
For Autumn Hill:
Cameron Arnold, register/account number 11138512
If you have any questions about all this, feel free to message me or send me an ask on Tumblr, I'm willing to pass along messages and help you troubleshoot things if necessary. As always, thanks to everyone who supports Meagan and Autumn and all the Prairieland defendants! To support all of them as they appeal their convictions and prepare for the future, you can donate to their legal fund here:
Please visit our website at https://prairielanddefendants.com/ for more updates, articles, and letter writing information.Español abajo Supp
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