The summer between the end of high school and the start of college, I wrote a ridiculous play about pirates and put on a staged reading with some friends at an amphitheatre at a local park before a small audience of friends and family. It was never published or staged again. But I just got a message from an old high school friend I haven’t seen in years. He accidentally quoted the play in a conversation with friends, was asked what he was quoting, he couldn’t remember either, and wracked his brain until he finally remembered it was that silly play reading that we did one day in the park over 10 years ago. It made me happy. (The line was, “Huzzah for mercantilism!” by the way.)
A very tiny percentage of creators go on to be famous, but that doesn’t mean that people don’t remember little things you did for years and years. Who came up with most of the world’s most famous jump rope rhymes? Who coined some of the famous idioms we use in daily speech? Who made up ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells?” Somehow, all of these things stuck and spread around.
When I was a small child, I saw a high school put on a production of the musical HONK. In one song, the mother duck describes various dangers that her baby should avoid in the water, including fishing line, which could strangle him. A member of the ensemble played the role of fishing line, doing a maniacal laugh and over-the-top strangling motions, and I found it hilarious– and to this day, that’s an example I often think of when talking about how ensemble members can still stand out in theatre. The guy who played the role might not even remember that he did that, but I do.
I took Suzuki violin lessons as a kid. The teacher made up lyrics to some of the songs, and she let her students make some up, too. Now whenever I hear the instrumental of one of those pieces, I always remember these ridiculous lyrics about a skunk that we sang in violin class. I don’t even know which student invented them!
In middle school, I found a video about atoms parodying Bill Nye made by some kids for a school product. It probably had less than 1,000 views, but I think of quotes from that video all the time. They had a parody of “We Will Rock You” with the chorus, “Protons, neutrons, electrons” that I think about a lot.
I just love that this is part of human life. Our memories don’t just pick up quotes from great art, literature, and music, but little things, too.
thing I am proud of: when the doctor started going on a weird rant about long covid not being real I paused and listened to his nonsense for a bit and then very calmly said, in a polite and curious tone, "you don't believe in post-viral illness?" and he like. stammered a bunch and was like OH WELL I'M NOT SAYING -- I DON'T...I just think ..! and backpedaled awkwardly while I just sat there like :3c interesting :3c thank you so much for clarifying your stance on this :3c
an important skill for chronically ill people to develop is the ability to treat the doctor as though they are simply a person you are interviewing to find out how much they know about your condition.
Holy shit op this is LITERALLY in the book 'Never Split The Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depends On It'. Written by a guy who did hostage negotiation and then tried doing business negotiation, and mopped the floor with industry experts.
I'm fortunate enough to have a primary care doctor who knows about hEDS, but it's occurring to me that the skills in this book could be medically life changing for chronically ill folks of all kinds. Like. Literally a matter of life and death, especially for BIPOC and/or fat and/or young people who are having their issues dismissed.
So on the roadmap of Subnautica 2, they are planning to add in-game voice chat.
And you know how you find all the black boxes of the other pioneers and you can hear their last moment?
With that said, just imagine:
You go to collect your friend's black box to get the resources they lost back and as you click it, you hear "AAAAH! GET AWAY FROM ME!! FUCK, FUCK, FUC--"
or "Come on! Swim up! I'm gonna drown!! Noooo, come one, no, no, noooo! I'm almost--"
It for sure won't happen, but damn the comedic opportunities.
Grace is built different than me because if I remembered I got kidnapped and shot into space I would not be thinking "oh no I'm a coward" I would think FUCK THOSE GUYS and make it my personal mission to make sure everyone knew what happened. Every video diary would start with "Fuck you Stratt." You wanna get into the taumoeba farms? The password is "I was forced to be here." I'm renaming all the beatles to "I don't fucking forgive you guys." Would send back one of the Beatles with nothing but essays on why I hate every person involved in this.
hey did I ever post the best business card I’ve ever been given by a customer?
a woman wanted me to let her know if I had a particular item in storage, and she went to get a card out of her purse and went ‘oh no. I’m out of my work cards, I’m so sorry about this’ and handed me this:
apparently her husband made them for her as a joke but then she just had like 300 of them so they’re her backups when she runs out of her real business cards.
Oh, speaking of my intense fondness for my transfem egg!Jim Kirk TOS headcanon, I have a longer post about it in drafts, and why I strongly prefer nb!transfem!Kirk to the inescapably popular binary!transmasc!Kirk thing. But here's my shorter TOS-only transfem nb Kirk headcanon manifesto, aka "We need to talk about Charlie":
It's genuinely kind of fascinating to me that Charlie in "Charlie X" is so absolutely mired in incel masculinity bullshit he gained from, presumably, the "tapes" that were his only human contact that any expression of strength or authority reads as masculine to him.
Like, Charlie leaps to this whole "Captain Kirk as strong masculine role model/father figure" thing that Kirk himself finds repugnant because Kirk almost immediately chides him for being rude and tells him to stop interrupting the grown-ups and wait his turn. Charlie isn't threatened by this the way he's instantly threatened by Spock's absolutely imperturbable masculinity, but he sees it as strong and authoritative in a parental-ish way and thus masculine and fatherly.
And, okay. Plenty of people (including me!) have pointed out the intriguing contrast between Kirk's strong aversion to this masculine role model father-figure position he's backed into in "Charlie X" and Kirk interpreting Nomad's confusion of him with its creator in "The Changeling" as Nomad seeing him as its mother, placing Kirk in a specifically maternal position throughout the episode. But there's still more to this.
Firstly, Charlie's recognition of Spock (not Kirk) as the most supremely masculine figure around and greatest challenge to his sense of power never really changes. He tries to force Spock to concede his superiority through various forms of adolescent games and violence, but to his frustration, none of them succeed; he never even manages to break Spock's inexpressive composure when he breaks his legs (Spock's inscrutable fortitude is very much framed as hyper-masculine in a way fundamentally beyond Charlie). It's Kirk who is unable to maintain his (undesired) standing as this ideal masculine, paternal authority in Charlie's eyes. Kirk is ultimately unable to leverage it to save the ship, or retain it at all in the end. They're only saved by the deus ex machina intervention of the Thasians.
In "The Changeling," on the other hand, Nomad understands people purely as "biological units" and lacks any understanding of gender (this is explicit, they actually try to explain what a woman is at one point without making much headway). Moreover, the creator whom Nomad has mistaken Kirk for was a man. So Kirk's insistence that Nomad regards him as a specifically maternal figure seems like something he's projecting onto Nomad rather than the other way around; no one other than Kirk ever brings this up, either, so it really is just his thing (Spock vaguely goes along with it, but pretty evidently is indulging him; he's forgotten about it when Kirk brings it up again later).
Kirk, however, is conspicuously far more comfortable stepping into the parental role of Nomad's mother-figure than Charlie's father-figure, even before he knows much of anything about Charlie as a person except that he's been isolated and is desperately seeking connections and role models from other human beings, and even though Kirk knows Nomad is set on wiping out large numbers of organic life. And Kirk never really falters in his role as Nomad's "mother" or in exercising maternal authority; he uses that authority and his wits to destroy Nomad without further harm, with no deus ex machina needed.
And something about this sharp contrast between Kirk's visceral repulsion from stepping into that "ideal masculine paternal role model" image in "Charlie X" (a hostility that recurs in pretty much every episode—serious or comedic—where there's any possibility of that particular role being foisted on Kirk) and basically everything about his relationship with Nomad in "The Changeling" has had me thinking about that initial impression Charlie forms of Kirk.
Kirk breezily chiding Charlie for being rude before returning to his own conversation is an authoritative move, yes, so it's understandable how someone with Charlie's issues would interpret it as masculine and paternal. But the stereotype of the parent who's preoccupied with their adolescent kid's poor manners and publicly dresses them down for being rude to other adults is primarily a maternal stereotype. Sure, fathers can do this, but at least in my experience, it's very much associated with tropes around stereotypically overbearing mothers (or distant glamorous ones who can't be pleased).
I think it says something about Charlie and the kind of perspective he embodies that something that's pretty conventionally maternal and associated with strong feminine-coded assertions of authority can only register as paternal and hypermasculine to him, though less so than Spock. But I think it also says something about Kirk that his kneejerk reaction is this more maternal move, that he's so fundamentally repulsed by this masculine father-figure role imposed on him and unable to succeed at it even when he tries, but when an essentially genderless parental role is imposed on him later, his kneejerk reaction is to conceptualize it as maternal (seriously and jokingly at different points) and that makes it workable for him.
Nomad is incalculably worse than Charlie, honestly, and threatening much worse than Charlie ever did. But Nomad's awfulness isn't gendered the way Charlie's is, and its projection of parental authority onto Kirk doesn't impose anything gendered on him that isn't coming from Kirk himself.
can you imagine being a parent in the pokemon world and your kid comes home with one of those straight up basically human pokemon. i know those motherfuckers can talk.
its morning. i see my childs Throh getting some oj from the fridge. 'morning', i say. he doesnt catch himself in time and says 'morning' back. he freezes and we both stare at each other knowingly. 'throh,' he says, but its too fucking late
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
