thoughts on tlt & phm crossover where stratt is on john's cryo project/cult?
I was actually just pondering this, I think stratt has exactly the kind of "obsessed with saving the world" je ne sais quoi that would get alecto's attention, and since we know how she acts when given absolute power I also don't think she'd fumble it so hard as to use her new magic powers to blow up the earth in a vindictive rage. the kind of abuse of power stratt would get up to with those kinds of abilities would be things like nonconsensual body modification to make her core team as useful as possible and *threats* to nuke melbourne to force powerful governments make actual use of their resources, but she wouldn't actually ever do it.
if john is still getting the powers in this universe, then stratt is immediately getting feverishly into the art and science of Emotional Manipulation. an emotionally volatile egotistical tumblr user outside of her direct control has just been gifted demigod powers by mother earth herself, this is eva stratt's nightmare scenario, but if she needs to then she is sedating that man and periodically wiping his memories so she can try and fucking re-parent the bastard to train him out of his vengeful streak, she'll just tell everyone the amnesia is a side effect of the god powers, who gaf. I don't know if she could actually do it, emotional soft skills are her one weaker spot as a project manager, but she is going to try. and if we're taking religious movie!stratt then she's also all kinds of fucked up about it, but, crucially, this does not change her actions in any way, she just thinks she's going to superhell for trying to make the second coming bend to her to put a leash around his neck.
ok but this unironically works. talk about how the working class is exploited and you can basically sell full-on marxism to your average republican if you do it right. all you have to do is avoid the words "Marx," "capitalism," "socialism," "communism," "means of production," etc - just use synonyms. say "big business" or "corporate shareholder interests" instead of "capitalists." say "a government that prioritizes the needs of the working people" instead of "socialism." it WORKS. I've DONE it. the hardest sell are usually things like social and racial equity, welfare, things like that, because people have been primed with the racist/classist idea that those things are somehow unfair - but you can get your foot in the door to getting them to buy into those too if you start with class issues. read up on your theory, make sure you REALLY understand your own ideology, because that will enable you to reword it and successfully sell it.
In my experience, you can often help sell 'welfare' stuff by appealing to self-interest with a touch of Aren't We Great.
Disability benefits: "I mean, sure, there are probably some sad sacks who are gaming the system, there always are, but hell, with the amount of taxes we pay, the government can afford a few freeloaders, right? I'd rather pay for a couple people who don't really need it than not have the system at all for if I need it, or my kids do, or whatever. I mean shit happens. What if some asshole drunk driver puts me in the hospital and it takes me a year to get back on my feet? Or Heaven forbid something permanent happens. I'll sure be glad that I can get disability then, won't I?"
UBI: "I dunno, the kind of guy who'll just sit on the couch playing Call of Duty all day if he doesn't have to work, I kinda don't want him on my job site anyway. That type is just taking up a place that you could fill with someone who'll actually get the job done, you know? You end up short-handed even though you technically have enough people because everyone else has to pick up his slack. And it'd mean that if your boss is a dick you can tell him to shove it and not worry your kids are gonna go hungry while you find a better place. We can sure as hell afford it."
Racial equity: "I've got a lot more in common with a Black guy who's just trying to get the job done than I do with some rich white asshole who thinks the sun shines out of his ass because of how much money mommy and daddy have."
Speaking of book recommendations after I just shared a post of them...one of the ladies I volunteered with had a shit year a few years back, losing her son and other family members. With my sympathy card I sent her a typed list of books on grief and grieving that had helped me after losing Theriac (Joanne Cacciatore's Bearing the Unbearable, Louis LaGrande's Healing Grief, Finding Peace: 101 Ways to Cope with the Death of Your Loved One, and Raymond Moody's Life After Loss are all pretty short, accessible, and offer a board first aid kit. Also, you could do worse than to grab some of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's lectures.). Apparently it really helped her, and this past weekend she told me she still had the list and passed it on to a relative of hers who lost her husband this year.
Not all of the advice in every book is going to help; there are some aspects of grief I doubt any book can actually help with. But the recommendations are successful, I'd guess, because a) reading can occupy your mind when you're grieving (and you might as well read about grief because you're not going to be distracted from it), b) learning something new helps people feel more in control of their life & environment and can offer a sense of hope, c) even if the recipient never reads any of the books, being given a book list is a way to say "I care about you and want to help" which is a good message to send. From my own grief experience I also think it's especially powerful to hear "I went through something similar to you and this is what helped me" - it's proof there's life on the other side.
Anyway, 2 more book recs for 2 quite different end-of-life outcomes, which I think you should ideally read before any of your loved ones die so you can actually use the information (also, honestly? Very helpful writing research):
Final Journeys and Final Gifts by Maggie Callanan -- a hospice nurse's guide to the kinds of decisions, conflicts, and sometimes puzzling behavior and experiences encountered when a loved one is in palliative care. Journeys is the more broadly practical book (from the 'writing research' perspective, it also offers some great examples of conflict, memorable scenes, and psychology insights); Gifts looks particularly at spiritual experiences at the end of life, including end of life visions (which happen to all kinds of people and can be a good thing to be prepared for regardless of your own spiritual beliefs). If Gifts proves fascinating, a more recent book on the subject of end of life experiences is Death is But a Dream.
I Wasn't Ready to Say Goodbye: Surviving, Coping and Healing After the Sudden Death of a Loved One is for the opposite end of experience, where a loss is abrupt and unexpected. It offers advice, myth-busting, and real-life stories from people who are bereaved through suicide, crime, and accidents. I recommend this for everyone because 1) It could happen to you (speaking as someone it's happened to multiple times) and having some knowledge ahead of time will not make it less painful, but could make it less bewildering, 2) It could happen to your loved ones, friends, and co-workers, and you can be more supportive with some knowledge, 3) Back to writing research: this book's information on myth-busting, how grief affects children at different ages, tips for coping when a loved one's' death is part of a tragedy that brings media attention, and vivid examples of the various ways real people have responded to grief can make you a more accurate writer. And I'll be honest, as someone who's Been There, when I read a book that was clearly written by an author who hasn't Been There and hasn't even tried to figure out what it's like, it's ranges from annoying to offensive to actively painful. [Also, if you want to do better at understanding+ depicting grief, read grief memoirs: Elizabeth McCracken's An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is about miscarriage but resonated so strongly with my very different grief experiences, so I think it's tapping into something, if not universal, at least very broad; Sonali Deraniyagala's Wave, about the loss of multiple generations of her family in the Boxing Day tsunami, manages to depict events and feelings that verge on the indescribable.]
Herculine Barbinâs life is often introduced as a âcaseâ â a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide
Herculine Barbinâs life is often introduced as a âcaseâ â a nineteenth-century medico-legal puzzle that forced doctors and judges to decide what, exactly, made a person male or female. Born in 1838 in France and raised as a girl within Catholic schools and convents, Barbin would soon become the subject of medical examinations, legal judgments, and public scandals aimed at determining her âtrue sex.â The historical significance of her life, however, is not just tied to the ambiguity of her physical body but also to the extraordinary paper trail she managed to leave behind. Indeed, much of what we know about Barbin comes from her autobiographical memoir, written near the end of her life and after her legal sex reclassificationâa groundbreaking text shaped by both hindsight and a need to justify a life that had been made publicly scandalous. This written work survived alongside a dense archive of medical, legal, and journalistic records, offering a rare first-person account of how sex was defined, enforced, and punished in the nineteenth century. Collectively, these materials reveal how Barbinâs personal experience was subordinated to institutional authority, as well as how the modern demand for a single, fixed sex could transform an individualâs life into a problem that needed to be corrected.Â
i feel so defensive and protective of people with ARFID like if i had a disorder that made my brain register 90% of food as poison for no reason and i had a bazillion people on the internet constantly calling me a manchild who needs to just grow up and stop being a picky eater i would start killing people
people with ARFID and people with very few autism safe foods and people with contamination OCD and people in ED recovery and everyone else with a complicated relationship with food that no one takes seriously GET BEHIND ME!!!!!!!
Much more butter and a bit more sugar, actually. You know traditionally, pound cake meant every ingredient was added by a pound, so really there should be 250g of sugar and 250g of melted butter, and hopefully the eggs come out to 250g as well. I'm guessing the full 455g of each ingredient is probably more than you need.
Of course, since this makes such a dense batter, you pretty much have to bake it as a bundt, but that's your classic Pound Cake right there.
Cake seems to have cooked all the way through, which surprises me given how wet the batter is, but I'm scared to taste it. It smells like an imminent hospital visit.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."
She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.
But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.
To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.
San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.
Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.
Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.
Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.
Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.
When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.
He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.
It was a mistake that would change American history.
Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghostsâskeletal, in pain, and terrified.
She saw "her kids."
She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.
Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.
She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.
So, she made a choice.
She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.
Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.
The most expensive ingredientâthe cannabisâwas donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.
She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.
She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.
"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."
And it did.
Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.
Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."
For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.
She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.
She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."
By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.
In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.
This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.
One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."
They underestimated who they were dealing with.
They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.
When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.
It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.
Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.
She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.
Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.
"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."
The quote ran in newspapers across the country.
The court didn't stand a chance.
Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Maryâs brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.
The charges were dropped.
Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.
She needed to change the law.
August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.
She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Clubâthe first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.
But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.
She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.
She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.
In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.
It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.
She never got rich.
She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.
She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.
Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.
Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.
Most of them have never heard of Mary.
They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.
They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.
They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.
Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."
She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.
She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.
She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.
Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.
It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.
It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.
Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.
Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.
Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025
I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
...wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
baratheonpilled
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