all information is worth having

Former ICU nurse, current ops person. Rationalist-adjacent, aspiring effective altruist. A boring person with strong opinions about accounting and fictional characters. Going by wordcount, potentially responsible for most of the Last Herald-Mage fanfiction that exists. 

[jedavu]

Mountains of the Sea by Ray Collins

[swimmer963]

YOUR GLOWFIC IS REALLY GOOD!!!!

Awwww <3

[lifeinpoetry]

We have so many gods / and none of them / can be trusted.

Hafizah Geter, from “Fajr,” Un-American (via lifeinpoetry)

@swimmer963

(via darkersolstice)

...called out

[just-evo-now]

I have spent the last two weeks doing more or less nothing but read @swimmer963‘s Valdemar fic A Song for Two Voices (https://archiveofourown.org/series/936480). It’s good. I mean, I actually read the whole thing, of course it’s good.

But now I need to get back to, you know, saving the world. I’m not going to do research today: I have two productivity tools I want to finish, which I should be able to finish in a day if I don’t get distracted.

[just-evo-now]

oh and be warned that it’s over 1M words long and not quite finished yet, in case you’re considering reading it.

oh also unlike every other ratfic ever (except for alexander wales’ stuff) it doesn’t do the “clever munchkin dropped into a world of 2d characters” thing.

@gruntledandhinged if you haven’t read it already I think you’ll like it? It’s like 60% processing trauma.

[sigmaleph]

I’ve been meaning to read The Last Herald-Mage anyway; fic says it’s “accessible regardless of whether you’ve read canon“, and I have other stuff I want to finish first; would you recommend reading canon first or not?

[syzygy-zo]

So guess what I just started reading

[swimmer963]

oh man, guess who a) never checks Tumblr anymore, and b) is now squeeing about more people reading my absurdly long Mercedes Lackey rationalfic, eeeeeeeee 

[tastefullyoffensive]

7 New Punctuation Marks We Desperately Need [collegehumor]

[geezersquad]

The not Angry, sinceriod, and sarcastises are perfect.

[weirdlandtv]

Dutch artist, Redmer Hoekstra.

[nimmenstjer]

Ooooh, because “path” and “toad” are written and pronounced the same way in Dutch!

Pad en pad.

Een paddenpaadje.

A road of toads.

[krakenartificer]

Recovery is like cleaning out a house that’s been through a hurricane.  There’s mud a foot thick on the floors; some of the windows are cracked; there’s leaves stuck in cracks you didn’t know existed.

So unlike in the movies, there are no “breakthrough moments”, where you suddenly realize one thing and the whole house is clean.  Oh there may be important turning points – moments when you realize that those aren’t frosted windows, that’s dirt, and you need to clean it off, and that’s why it’s so fugging dark in here.  And that is an important breakthrough, in the sense that without it you would not succeed in cleaning the house, but then you still have to clean the windows.

Therapy is just someone who’s had experience with post-hurricane cleanup, Consulting over the phone, recommending tools and giving you advice. “Start with the floor,” they say, when you’re too overwhelmed to even begin, and they tell you what shovel to buy.  So you start shoveling, and it’s HARD, and you’re exhausted all the time, and you’ve only shoveled out the front hallway, and it feels like it’s never going to really get better.

But you do get good at shoveling, and slowly you build up your strength, and after a few months you can shovel as much as you need to, but there’s still a LOT of mud here, so it takes a year to get that shoveled out, and your house is still muddy and the windows are cracked (and frosted), and there’s still debris everywhere, and every time you walk around you’re stepping an a quarter-inch of mud, but you CAN walk around, you can get anywhere you need to go, and the house is still a fucking mess, you’re a fucking mess, a disaster not fit for human habitation, but on the other hand you can no longer convince yourself that “nothing’s ever going to work”.  It can get better.  You can point at things that used to be super-fucked-up and now are only moderately-fucked-up.  Progress is possible.

But then again, you’re not making any progress anymore. You thought you had the hang of it, but now the shovel isn’t working, and every time you shovel mud out of one place it slides into another and you’re not making any headway and you can barely pick up any mud with your shovel anyway and so maybe that was it – you had a nice run, but this is as good as it’s ever gonna get, you’re still gonna be fucked up forever, and you finally bring it up to your therapist, and they nod, and tell you to buy a hose.

So now you’re hosing down the floors, and that’s a new skill set to learn, and it splashes everywhere, and now you’ve got mud on your walls, but it does get the floor clear.  But you hosed out the front hallway, and then realized that to clear out the living room you’re gonna have to hose it out into the front hallway, which means the hallway’s just gonna get messy again, so then you have to redo the front hallway, but you start planning out which rooms to do in which order, so it goes pretty smoothly after that, until the day when you’ve got all the big mud puddles gone, but there’s still mud on the walls, and stuck in corners, and no matter how hard you spray you still end up with this thin coating of mud-dirt-dust on the floor after it dries, and honestly you’re making more of a mess than you are cleaning up a mess at this point. And you express your frustration, and the therapist tells you where to find, and how to use, a mop.

So you mop all the floors, and it’s actually looking pretty good, and you remembered to start mopping from the inside out, so that’s not a big deal, until you open a door and realize you forgot to shovel out the pantry. You didn’t think it could get into the pantry, with the door shut, but there it is, mud 3 inches thick, and the only way to get it out is to shovel it, and you’ll have to take it through the kitchen, so you have to shovel out the pantry, and then hose down the pantry, and then re-hose the kitchen, and then mop the pantry, and then re-mop the kitchen, and EUUURGHHHJHH.

But you’re really good at it, at this point, so it’s not like it’s a big deal.  It’s irritating af, and you’re sick to death of doing this, but it’s not scary, or overwhelming, or horrifying.  It’s just really, really annoying.

And the fact is, you will never be done cleaning.  Even if there’s never another hurricane, there’s dishes, and dust settling on counters, and spills, and mud tracked in after snowstorms, and laundry.  There’s not some magical moment when you’re “done”, and you can stop working forever (except possibly, depending on who’s right about the afterlife, after you die).  But you do reach a point where you it transitions from “impossible” to “meh, just a thing”

You do reach a point where you look around, and you’re kinda proud of what you’ve done You do reach a point where you recognize that your current tools aren’t doing the job you need, and you research and find and learn how to use a tool all on your own. You do reach a point where, when you see a storm coming, you know how to prepare for it, and you purchase and lay out all the supplies you need, and when the storm finishes, you can get your house back up and ready in practically no time at all. You do reach a point where storms aren’t so scary, because you know how to weather them and you know for a fact that you can recover from them. You do reach a point where friends ask you for tips on how to clean their houses You do reach a point where, every time you need a tool, it’s one you already posses. You do reach a point where you’ve replaced all the windows and sealed up all the cracks and replaced the insulation, and for the first time, you’re comfortable all the way through a winter. You do reach a point where someone compliments you on how clean and comfortable your house is. You do reach a point where you’ve done all the remediation, and you can start remodeling the house to fit your needs.

So yeah, it’s a lot of hard work that’ll never be done.  But it’s also so, so worth it.

[ms-demeanor]

This is it. This is the thing.

[swimmer963]

This is really good!

[swimmer963]

A Song for Two Voices Soundtrack, a playlist by Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg on Spotify

A playlist featuring Jackie Evancho, Emilie Autumn, Joel Ansett, and others

There now exists a PLAYLIST for my Valdemar fic (well, I’ve had one for ages for writing inspiration, but I finally curated it down to songs that I still like and thing are Thematically Relevant). 

It is super not in order in terms of chronological correspondence to the fic, because Spotify does not offer any way to re-sequence playlists on iOS as far as I can tell. I guess this at least means that any implicit spoilers for books later than 8 is going to be jumbled. 

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Why were we allowed to read Animorphs as kids, anyway?

It’s a question I see come up in this fandom again and again: How the heck did Animorphs books make it into school libraries and book fairs across the country to be marketed to eight-year-olds when they feature drug addiction, body dysmorphia, suicide, imperialism, PTSD, racism, sexism, body horror, grey-and-black morality, slavery, torture, major character death, forced cannibalism, and genocide?  

To be clear, I don’t actually know the answer to that question.  It is, admittedly, a little odd to consider, especially in light of the fact that Bridge to Terabithia gets banned for killing one character (much less several dozen), The Witches gets banned for having a character trapped in the body of an animal (without even going into issues of predation or body horror), The Chocolate War gets banned for having moderately disturbing descriptions of violence between teenagers, Bird gets banned for dealing with the realities of drug addiction, Winnie the Pooh gets banned for having talking animals, Harriet the Spy gets banned because the main character lies to her parents, and The Secret Annex gets banned because Anne Frank describes normal teenage puberty experiences throughout her diary.  And yet Animorphs was marketed to children as young as six nationwide, and (despite selling better than even some classics like The Chocolate War at its peak) no one ever bothered to burn those books or cry that they would rot children’s minds.  

If I had to take a wildly inexpert guess, knowing as little as I do about the publishing industry and the standards parent groups use to determine whether books are “moral,” I would venture to speculate that there were several different factors at work.

Grown-ups judge books by their covers just as much as children do.  For proof of that phenomenon, just scroll through the Animorphs tag on tumblr, any relevant forum on Reddit, or any old post that uses that stupid meme.  The book covers suggest that the stories inside will be silly, campy adventures about the escapist fantasy of turning into a dolphin or a lizard.  People don’t look too closely at the books with the neon candy-colored backgrounds and the ridiculous photoshop foregrounds, especially not when they imply a promise that the novels themselves will be the most inane form of sci fi.  

There’s no sex.  To quote the show K.A. Applegate most loves to reference: “I guess parents don’t give a crap about violence if there’s sex things to worry about.”  The large majority of books that get banned from schools are thrown out for having sexual content: the freaking dictionary was banned from California schools for explaining what “oral sex” is, And Tango Makes Three was removed from shelves because apparently married couples are inherently shocking if they happen to be gay, and the list of most-banned books in the U.S. is full of books which explain in perfectly child-appropriate terms what puberty is and where babies come from.  Animorphs, by contrast, never gets more explicit than Marco calling Taylor a “skank” or Jake and Cassie’s few stolen kisses.  The only mentions of nudity are implied (and even then only when the kids are first coming out of morph), and the most explicit thing we ever hear about Rachel and Tobias doing is staying up late in her room to do her homework together.  It becomes unbelievably obvious in retrospect that there’s a decent level of queer representation in the books (Marco repeatedly describing both Jake and Ax as “beautiful” or “handsome,” Mertil and Gafinilan, multiple characters casually morphing cross-gender), but it’s also possible to overlook the queerness if you don’t know it’s there.  There might be explicit autocannibalism in this series, but at least it never uses the word “nipple.”  

There’s no profanity.  Again, there’s a strong implication of profanity—Rachel and Jake especially often “use certain words to describe things” in a way that makes it incredibly obvious what they’re saying, and context clues tell us Ax says “fuck” at least once—but given that the strongest expletive that comes up with any regularity is “good grief,” this can act as an obvious (if dumb) heuristic for parents that a book is appropriate for children.  People love to count the swear words in Catcher in the Rye when describing why it should be banned (generally without, heaven forbid, reading the goddamn book).  Other works such as To Kill a Mockingbird have been banned for using a single word, regardless of context.  If a parent is looking to object to a single word or set of words as grounds that a book is inappropriate, the worst they’re going to find is half a dozen instances of “heck” and maybe a dozen of “crap.”

Some of the worst content is context-dependent.  As I pointed out above, at least five or six different characters (Tobias, Arbron, Alloran, Tom, Allison Kim) attempt suicide over the course of the series.  At least three or four species that we know about (Hork-Bajir, Howlers, Nartec) get largely or entirely annihilated.  However, in order to understand that any of that occurs, you actually have to read the books.  Not only that, but you have to read them closely.  Cates pointed out that some of the most disturbing passages from #33 are, in a vacuum, just descriptions of blinking diodes and weird hallucinations.  The description of Tobias attempting suicide is just a long list of mall venues that flash by as he zooms full-speed toward a glass wall.  Even the passages with Rachel threatening David (or carrying out those threats) don’t make much sense unless you know how a two-hour limit on morphing works.  For the parent skimming these books looking for objectionable content, nothing jumps out.

The books are, in fact, appropriate for children.  This quality is what (I believe) prevented parents like mine from taking the books away from us kids even after reading several entire novels out loud to us before bed.  The books contain violence, but they sure as hell don’t condone it.  They touch on subjects such as drug addiction and parental abuse, but they do so from the point of view of realistic-feeling kids and don’t fetishize that kind of content.  Most of the lessons contained within are tough—that there’s no such thing as a simple moral code, that people with the power to prevent atrocity also have the obligation to do so, that members of the hegemony aren’t actually all that special, that the world is a scary and violent place for most people who have to live in it—but they’re also important lessons, and good ones to teach to children.  I would be comfortable with my own children (assuming I had any) reading these books at the same age I started reading them, in first and second grade.

You have to understand the fictional science to understand (most of) the horror.  Trying to describe some of the most horrifying passages in Animorphs is like “and then they flushed the pool for cleaning, but the pool was full of slugs!” or “but she explained to her son that she had to have a parasite in her brain so the parasite’s friends wouldn’t be suspicious!” or “and then the hawk ate a rabbit, as hawks are wont to do!” while one’s non-fandalite friends stand there and go “… so what?”  The laws of Applied Phlebotinum in the series turn those earlier moments into a war crime, an assisted quasi-suicide, and a loss of identity, respectively; however, you have to understand the laws of applied phlebotinum in order to know that.  For anyone not reading closely, the horror can be overlooked.  For those of us who are reading closely, phrases such as “host breeding program,” “fugue state,” “eight minutes too late,” and “the howlers are all children” (or any mention at all of people being injured while taxxons are in the vicinity, for that matter) are enough to chill your blood.  But again, for that to happen, you actually have to read the books.  Which we can assume most of the people skimming for curse words do not.

Some of those exact same premises wouldn’t be horror at all if handled by a different author.  K.A. Applegate subverts the “wake up, go to school, save the world” trope; normally premises that feature teen superheroes fighting aliens are considered appropriate for all ages (e.g. Avengers Assemble, Kim Possible, Teen Titans) because they feature bloodless violence and gloss over the question of whether aliens are people too.  The utterly arbitrary standard that kids should be allowed to see violence but not blood allows for justification of movies like Prince Caspian, Night at the Museum, and Ghostbusters to feature characters getting murdered in all kinds of ways in PG-rated movies.  “Violence” and “sci-fi violence” are two different categories according to the MPAA rating system; guess which one gets a lower rating.  Of course, there’s a crapton of science showing it doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference to kids whether or not they see blood, they’re still gonna learn violent behaviors and potentially be traumatized, but again where the arbitrary standard persists.  Therefore, if most of the premises of Animorphs books don’t sound horrifying, they must not actually be horrifying.  Right?

The books are almost as light as they are heavy.  Part of the reason I have comfortably loaned my copies of the early books to friends with ten-year-old kids is that it’s not primarily a downer series.  Animorphs aren’t R.L. Stein books, which always end on (the implication of) the protagonist’s death.  They’re not uniform horrorfests like Dolls in the Attic or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.  Applegate doesn’t fetishize violence the way that Cassandra Clare and Ransom Riggs do.  The most-quoted passages from these books are the ones that are funny, not horrifying.  These are stories about the joy of aliens discovering Volkswagen Beetles, about the wonder of being able to fly away from one’s life, about friendship and the power of love being enough to make the gods themselves sit up and pay attention.  The whole saga tells the story of six kids sacrificing more than their lives to save their families, and of how that sacrifice brings down an empire.  I suspect that many parents were either paying so little attention they didn’t realize these stories could be classified as battle epics or as kiddie horror, or else were paying so much attention that they concluded that this series is a battle epic worth reading.  

Then again, maybe there was a whole other set of market pressures which accounted for the lack of censorship which I don’t know about.  If so, the economics side of tumblr is encouraged to enlighten me.

[dr-jekyl]

Speaking from my experience as an (ex) public librarian here, I’d say that all of those are valid points.  But, ultimately, I think that they - and a few others I was going to add (around the value of science fiction and the lack of formal study or requirement to read) - come back to a single factor: 

The people most likely to complain are least likely to read.

I’ve never encountered a wowser who was well-read.  And by well-read, I don’t mean ‘well-versed in the English Literary Canon of Dead White Dudes’.  I mean someone who has read, who reads, who takes enjoyment from reading.  Someone who reads because it is a pleasure to do so.

Someone who doesn’t read will simultaneously under and overestimate the impact that a book can have on its reader.  That’s human nature, cognitive bias at play.  In particular, we have interplay between:

The Dunning-Kruger Effect People who don’t have the skills to properly engage with a text will overestimate their ability to do so, and underestimate others’

The Third Person Effect People perceive that media has a greater impact on others than themselves

Trviality Bias People latch onto minor, incidental details of something because they are easier to understand.

Empathy Gap People are very bad at judging their own emotional states, and the states of others

In other words, wowsers who don’t read imagine themselves to be expert readers when in reality they’re not engaging with the text very effectively at all.  What they’re doing instead is latching onto trivial controversies - a mention of sex, a swear word, talk of the Dreaded Gays, Are You There God, it’s Me Menstruation - which trigger a visceral, emotional reaction.  And then, because they imagine themselves to be well-adjusted experts, they presume that everyone else will have an even more extreme reaction.  Ban that Book!

But because they don’t have the skills to engage with the text in anything more than a trivial fashion, they don’t understand subtext.  At all.  Anything that isn’t obvious, there on the page (and some of the stuff that is) - that shit just flies right on over.

Meanwhile, librarians tend to be both expert readers and good judges of reading competency in others.  And being experts and good judges (these two things don’t necessarily go hand in hand), a good librarian knows that reading expertise, and the ability to engage with a story beyond what’s just written on the page, is something that is developed over time.  A reader can only engage with a book to the extent of their expertise.

An eight-year-old who reads Animorphs and thinks it’s a rollicking adventure with cool aliens is reading at an appropriate age level.  A twelve-year-old can read the same book and realise it has themes about suicide and talk about it with their friends will be reading at an age-appropriate level.  An adult can that same book and realise that it’s not just suicidal themes, but that the text has a densely layered narrative that’s fundamentally about what it means to be human, both physically (through the continued and sometimes extreme use of body-horror) and metaphysically (is it human to sacrifice?).  And that adult will be reading at an age-appropriate level too.  Same book, appropriate for multiple audiences, separated by their expertise in reading it.

Books and their readers are self-selecting.  Wowsers select ignorance.

[swimmer963]

This is making me want to do an Animorphs reread! 

[insomniac-arrest]

bard is a combat class which is true bc I’ve never met anyone in marching band that didn’t want to throw down

[tyrannosaurus-rex]

playing tuba in marching band means you can power walk 2 miles backwards on your toes in 16 minutes whithout bending your knees while carrying a 35lb blunt metal object with your arms held at right angles and blasting every extra gulp of oxygen you can spare without asphyxiating to make sounds loud enough to deafen the dead in an an act of pure unchristian violence, your bard is the party member who will teach you how to kill god by example

[swimmer963]

Reblogging just for the description. 

[swimmer963]

Life milestones

In which I receive an AO3 notification that someone has written a 3000-word, actually pretty well-written and high effort crackfic of my weird niche Valdemar fanfic. 

Which is Leareth POV. And is a 500-years-ago backstory/prequel that doesn’t NOT make sense as AU-canon, and has juicy worldbuilding, and I miiiight just have to headcanon that this happened. 

It contains the phrase “Pascal’s fucking”, which somehow actually kind of makes sense in context. It is, needless to say, *hilarious*. I am so delighted right now. 

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21487672

[mastreworld]

You’re supposed to enjoy baths but… I just get bored?

[rhaenyra-first-of-her-name]

What’s supposed to be enjoyable about them?

[mastreworld]

I think it’s supposed to relax you and make you feel good or something. Like the whole “pamper yourself” thing. I just can’t feel it.

[pennie-dreadful]

I can’t help but think I’m sitting in a soup of my own sweat and dead skin and whatnot. Very luxury, yes.

[swimmer963]

I love baths in a very specific situation, which is that when I’m sick I sometimes get this weird intense-muscle-pain that feels like it’s *in* my bones, and painkillers do relatively little about it and take forever to kick in, but one five-minute hot bath gets rid of it for the next hour. 

The rest of the time, baths are boring and I would rather do other things for pure enjoyment or feeling pampered. 

[darkersolstice]

@batcoins loves me!

Nickname: Sols, Sol, Solsy, Satana

Zodiac sign: Proudly on the Sag/Cap cusp!

Height: 5′6″

Hogwarts house: Slytherin

Last thing I googled: chicken and spinach

Song stuck in my head: Wolf by PHILDEL

Following: 2,152

Followers: 1,096 (on this specific blog)

Amount of sleep: ~6 hours?

Lucky number: 3, 9, 27, 81

Dream job: Erm. Good question

Wearing: Jeans and a red plaid flannel

Favourite songs: Remind me later, and I will link you to some playlists.

Instruments: Uuuh. I don’t play. I like listening to…music? All instruments.

Random fact: I’ve worked security at Anime Central for 5 years in a row, most of those as dispatch.

Aesthetic: Summer Camp Counselor meets Office Butch

Tagging in…hm… @swimmer963, @nudityandnerdery and @cannibalcoalition

[swimmer963]

h/t @darkersolstice, I don’t do these memes often but seems fun? 

Nickname: uh, none commonly in use? My husband sometimes calls me “Braveheart” for high-context reasons. 

Zodiac sign: Sagittarius, probably, I never really think about this

Height: 5′5″

Hogwarts house: Hufflepuff

Last thing I googled: high protein vegan foods

Song stuck in my head: “When the Bell Tolls”, Anthony Ramos

Following: 213

Followers: 198

Amount of sleep: 5.5 hours because I made poor choices last night

Lucky number: idk, but I like 9 

Dream job: for a while it was “ICU nurse” and I did that, now it’s...complicated

Wearing: Jeans, black t-shirt with a quote I can’t actually read

Favourite songs: currently “The Tower” by Vienna Teng, “Open your Eyes” by Bea Miller, “Safe & Sound” by Jackie Evancho

Instruments: Flute (been picking this up again recently after not playing since high school!) 

Random fact: I used to compose (terrible) music in high school

Aesthetic: don’t have a good description, but, like, “elegant business casual, only with incongruously muscular shoulders.” 

[beeferly]

i had an idea but twitter didn't appreciate it enough so i'm putting it here

[star-anise]

Praying to a saint is essentially cozying up to an important person’s admin assistant, giving her chocolate, and saying, “Do you think you could slip me in sometime today?”

[swimmer963]

This is great

[animalwoonz]

[bibliolithid]

Last one is 200% @argumate

[swimmer963]

This is so my aesthetic. 

[guitarbeard]

Wizard who got tired of fighting and casts fucked up unethical spells like “super brain hemorrhage” to end them faster

[blackkkabutops]

One time I did “Summon Water” inside a guys lungs and the GM allowed it because he had been playing for years and never seen anyone do that

[indyexploits]

Me “I can raise the temperature of a space by 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) per success” DM “Okay.” Me “And that’s 6 successes, so 30 degrees…” DM “Okay…” Me “And ‘inside the human body’ is a space, right?” DM “…I don’t like where this is going.” Me “So I’m going to raise the temperature inside his body 30 degrees.” DM “Yeah, so he’s dead now. He was fine, and then went through all the stages of heat stroke in half a second before his body went ‘No thank you’ and just shut off to stop it from being so hot. Good job.”

[unabashedlybi-deactivated201911]

[swimmer963]

This is my aesthetic. 

[urhajos]

The art of Francisco Martín, aka Mocaran

[swimmer963]

Pretty!