Ramblings of a Mad Stressball

Gray they/them    reader - writer - human disaster  

[infectiouspiss]

dj physical therapist wants you to put your hands in the air !!!! now slowly lower them !!!!! now repeat 8-10 times !!!!! stretch those muscles !!!!

[votoms]

this same regular asks if we're hiring at least twice a week. the real answer is virtually always yes but none of the managers will give him the time of day because he never cleans his table up after himself. The interview really does begin the second you walk through that door...

[votoms]

times are tough i know but we all fantasise about running you over. you don't want to work here. we'll cook you. you'll be food. we'll sell you.

[tanadrin]

Bacteria do have souls, but binary fission doesn’t produce new souls 99% of the time, so most single celled organisms share these sprawling souls that just get bigger every time they divide. Over time they compact down into these big mats of soul get compacted into geological layers that gradually accrete to the world soul. Sexual reproduction creates new souls but they’re much shorter lived as a result, and rarely make it into the bedrock, so most of the world spirit is from the Proterozoic.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

but do viruses have souls?

[tanadrin]

No. Some people think that this is because viruses have no metabolism and can’t reproduce on their own, and therefore do not qualify as life. In fact it is just because they are too small. Pneumatons, the constituent particle of soul, have a wavelength of about 1 micrometer, and so can’t be contained in cell membranes or protein envelopes smaller than that. This also means the smallest bacteria also don’t have souls. This includes mitochondria and their immediate ancestors, which was a major impetus for their symbiosis with eukaryotes in the first place. The eukaryote cell got a source of energy, and in return the mitochondria finally got to directly apprehend a portion of divine eternity.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

this is super useful information, thank you!

[luna-azzurra]

Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.

[rolex-kaard]

(coughing violently) they laced the damn story . with character

[whetstonefires]

the problem with knowing things about battle tactics is that an ever-increasing subset of popular media becomes impossible to enjoy properly because you have to sit there like 'wow Captain Protagonist good to know all those dead people on your own side are a direct result of your total lack of anything resembling brains'

[whetstonefires]

seriously i'm not talking about anything elaborate, just basic common sense, but common sense is so much harder to ignore once you've got systematized data to back it up, like

what do they even think a fortification is for???

what do you think a shield is for. what do you think ranged weapons are for????

make the other sonuvabitch have a hard time killing you without getting killed first! most basic goal of combat! why are movies so bad at writing characters who actually attempt this on even a very small 'army' scale?

[whetstonefires]

and like i said in the first post, it's not just that it's Dumb, the thing is that once you put the character in a command role, their ability to think their way through a combat situation with some degree of optimization becomes a reflection on their character on like. a moral level.

if your tactics are dumb and reckless but you usually win and it's just you punching people that's one thing. or even if it's you and five guys who've decided they like how you roll!

but if you are put in charge of soldiers. and you throw their lives away because you don't know what you're doing. that's not okay.

it's not always avoidable! one of the basic problems with armies! but when it happens in fiction it needs to be on purpose, to make sure the military elements of the narrative remain thematically congruent.

when you have a bit where Main Character is in command and then makes avoidable bad decisions and people die who didn't have to. either the protagonist has been put in a horrific position by whatever authority figure thrust them into a role they didn't want and weren't competent to handle, without support.

or the protagonist, voluntarily assuming a management job they suck at, has committed a grievous harm against others by not recognizing their own limitations.

even if they win! i don't want to be watching a movie where the main character squanders every tactical advantage and loses 40% of their forces totally unnecessarily for Narrative Tension, but the enemy retreats or gets eaten by a dragon or loses the MacGuffin or whatever, and then there's triumphant music and a party because They Won!!!

no! they fucked it up is what they did! this is some Light Brigade gaslighting shit! shut up. our boy just massacred people who trusted him.

[curlicuecal]

kind of a tangent but this is also how I feel when the good guys mow their way through dozens of faceless grunts and then suddenly the big bad in charge is the life they face a moral quandary over

the random foot soldiers and henchmen's lives matter too! tbh

[whetstonefires]

#tbh they should matter MORE #they are way less culpable than whoever's in charge #it's just plot convenient to dehumanize the work force

[contribute-a-verse]

I think it’s worth noting that history is littered with examples of wasteful tactics. A common element is that often times technology advances while tactics do not.

For example, in the American Civil War, the tactics used of soldiers, marching into open fueled, and exchanging musket fire was not all that different than the tactics of the American revolution a little under 100 years prior. However, the rifles that infantry men were armed with were significantly more accurate. As a result, casualties, both in terms of lives lost, and soldiers, injured were horrific.

The concept of trench warfare in World War I was not all that different from wars, fought all over the continent in the century prior, and were designed to try and curb advantages of cavalry. But again, of mortars, more accurate, rifles, and chemical warfare meant that charging trenches resulted in truly grotesque numbers of casualties.

There is certainly evidence that World War I era generals were fairly callous when it came to casualty figures. They were more interested in territory gained. And it mattered very little how many lives that cost since soldiers were replaceable.

I agree that there should be some narrative coherence when protagonist squander advantages due to bad tactics, but when you look at actual history, it’s very clear that even if there are “good guys“ and “bad guys“ in war, there’s also just a lot of waste. That doesn’t make for a very sexy narrative, but it’s the nature of the beast. Militaries in particular are conservative institutions slow to change. you do things a certain way because that is the way they are done. That will always get people killed. But that’s also excepted as the way things are done.

At the end of the day, I’m just not sure there is a good way to organize two groups of people trying to kill each other.

I think the more interesting question is, should there be?

[whetstonefires]

i mean maybe, but that's not what the post is about, it's about fiction that places warfare centrally, but then engages with it only on an aesthetic level.

thereby creating major ruptures in the narrative logic and characterization for anyone who knows (for example) what the point of a wall is.

this is a writing complaint, about failure to adequately situate motive within character and maintain internal consistency.

i'm not going to ask every piece of fiction that wants to have swords in it to engage in a meditation on the nature of conflict. that sounds boring, and also like it's asking too much of people. i'm aiming way lower here.

the problem is a general failure to care enough about the battle as an event within a narrative to make the pieces go together according to an internal logic. people being dumb is fine as long as they're dumb on purpose. people not doing The Most Winning Thing is fine as long as the priorities they're supposed to have are the priorities they're actually displaying.

[mysteryteacup]

There's nothing more frustrating as an audience than being told "this person is a Good Person who Cares about their men and is also a Genius Tactician" and being shown a clown that never thinks before getting most of their people needlessly killed.

[nihilisticlinguistics]

adulthood notes:

The Rodeo Rule: you only have to do it for the first time once.

The Rohan Rule: if you are at a social function full of new people and you want to be liked, find someone doing important work like setup or food prep and offer to help.

The Tutorial Mode Rule: to navigate an unfamiliar situation where you fear you will mess up an interaction, preface the interaction by mentioning that you've never done this before, and let them know if you have a specific concern or question.

The Rocket Science Rule: most new things you want to try seem very complicated but are simple when taken step by step.

The [X] Will Remember That Rule: if you need to make small talk with the same person on a regular basis, try to save one fact or current event in their life from a given conversation and bring it up next time you talk.

The Cool Binder Rule: by wearing clothes and accessories that are to your taste instead of trying to blend in, people will be more likely to compliment you and show interest in you as a person.

[not-handsome-enough-to-tempt-me]

Rewatching Avatar lately. Decided to try reading some fanfic…

[muffinlance]

His foxes keep bringing him fics to be archived, their foofy tails wagging

His foxes know what they are doing

[s-t-a-r-c-o]

im reading discworld and im on the third book and i only just realized they arent arranged like this

[sator-the-wanderer]

I raise it to

[sandpancakecat]

My mom thought it was an elephant standing on four turtles

[specialagentartemis]

Intelligent alien species based on bugs but specifically those moths that don’t have mouths and only live for a week after they pupate. This species’ whole conscious life is actually in the larval phase; larvae are the ones considered people, larvae are the ones with conscious and complex brains who build society, and each instar of the larva is treated as a different phase of life. Larvae become emotionally and socially and cognitively mature without ever becoming sexually mature. When they pupate, they metamorphose into something different and strange and close to mindless, with no mouth and no digestive system, whose only instincts are to mate and then quickly die. Metamorphosis is treated, functionally, like a person’s death, and the imago phase is a kind of proto-afterlife of majestic flight and the continuation of the species. Birth and death inextricably intertwined. Sex is not something people do during their lives, it’s a thing that is done as an imago after you’ve passed on from your life but before you return to the soil in death. Resultant eggs are collected by family members to raise. I think this would be fun.

[tgirl-thucydides]

[tgirl-thucydides]

one struggle

[bakwaaas]

I think having small friendly interactions with strangers is so important for humanity

[sophieinwonderland]

The idea that a modern Avatar needed to destroy the world to have globe-spanning adventures across the world only makes sense from a 1st-World perspective...

In real life, countries around the world are in frequent states of war. Not everyone has access to easy air travel. There are places in the world ruled by war lords and terrorists. There are countries which do not allow foreigners to move freely.

There are still refugees who have to make long travels across dangerous parts of their country just to get to a border stop where they might be granted asylum.

Child soldiers are still recruited by terrorist groups, and it would actually have been pretty cool to have explored modern child soldiers in the Avatar universe, juxtaposed with the Gaang everyone cheered for in the original.

If the post-apocalyptic Seven Havens is just the story they want to tell, I guess I can't argue with that. The property belongs to its creators. They should be able to tell whatever story they want to tell. But if they decided to go with the post apocalyptic setting because they felt it was the only way to have the same type of adventures that existed in the original series, I find that short-sided.

[muffinlance]

oh fuck now you've put in my head that we could have had the new Avatar starting her quest like Aang, along with other children... only for her and the viewers to slowly realize that she's actually started on very much the wrong side, and have to come to terms with her child band being child soldiers (/negative) in a world where the last fondly remembered Avatar was also a child soldier, and cheered for it, and somehow they ended a war, but her own world isn't nearly so clear cut in who The Big Baddy is

EDIT: AND WE COULD EXPLORE KORRA'S MESSED UP RESTRICTIVE UPBRINGING BY PEOPLE DELIBERATELY KEEPING HER IGNORANT! DOUBLE AVATAR TRAUMA FOR THE NEW GIRL!

[insomniac-arrest]

I think we should figure out what age we’re living in now so we can say how it’s collapsing to each other

[insomniac-arrest]

Our age of plastics is collapsing

[insomniac-arrest]

Our age of information is collapsing! *remembers generative AI, nods to self* our age of information is collapsing.

[internet-sentences]

Kind of rules tbh?

[bongwaterbunny]

is this anything

[bacontoktok]

[cellarspider]

May I present to you Wheel Running In the Wild, a published research paper that delights me to no end:

This paper intended to test whether would mice would run on a wheel if they found one, to try and determine if this was a natural behavior or a stress response in captivity. They put a wheel in a protected little box with a camera that took pictures any time the wheel turned, and tallied up how often it was used by what.

Mice were, happily, the most common users of the wheel, and their patterns of use indicated they were doing so voluntarily once they figured it out.

But the second most common users.

Those were slugs.