“Life after menopause is exceptionally rare in animals. It can evolve only in creatures where grannies help younger family members survive. Only human, killer whale, and short-finned pilot whale females routinely live for substantial periods after they stop breeding. Like humans, killer and pilot whales have roughly twenty-five to thirty childbearing years, then can live another thirty or so. And as Ken’s just explained, some live a lot longer. Up to a quarter of the females in a group are postreproductive. These whales are not waiting to die; they are helping their children survive. As human children often benefit from their grandmothers’ attention, killer whale grandmothers boost their grandkids’ survival. A rather bizarre twist of killer whale society is that killer whale mothers remain crucial to the survival of their adult children. When older killer whale females die, their adult children start dying at high rates, especially males. Male killer whales who are under thirty years old when their mothers die suffer a tripling of the annual mortality rate compared to males in their age group whose mothers are still alive. Male killer whales who are more than thirty years old when their mothers die face death rates more than eight times as high as males in their age group whose mothers are still living. Daughters under thirty show no mortality increase after their mothers’ death. But daughters older than thirty when their mothers die have more than two and a half times the death rate of same-age females whose mothers are alive. Males’ handicaps of the extra drag of their huge dorsal and pectoral fins and the extra food required for their immense size (at around 20,000 pounds, males can be one-third more massive than females) seem to make them reliant on their working mothers for food. Females don’t have the males’ impediments, but while raising young, females may rely on food shared by their no-longer-breeding mothers. Adult females share essentially all the fish they catch, and more than half goes to their children. Adult males share their catch only about 15 percent of the time—usually with their mothers. While no one fully understands their strange death pattern following the loss of a mother, extreme parental care is likely at the root. Toothed whales are the world’s champion nursers. Short-finned pilot whales continue to produce milk for up to fifteen years after the birth of their last calf, likely nursing other females’ young. In bottlenose and Atlantic spotted dolphins (further study might reveal others), some females never give birth. Denise Herzing dubbed them “career females,” because their role in society does not include motherhood. They might be infertile. They might be gay. But their contribution is crucial: they do a lot of babysitting. When Herzing entered the ocean with a visiting nine-year-old girl, “White Patches, the eternal babysitter herself, had never seen me babysitting a young human before. Her excitement vocalizations were audible and electric and she continued to swim around us, eyeing the human youngster attached to me.” (Researchers sometimes call babysitters “aunts.” That’s precisely who they often are.)”
I've been pretty good about not making y'all look at my grad school work but I'm making an exception. I went all out on this model of the building that i designed for my thesis project. Between 3d printing the pieces, painting, detailing, and assembly, this has pretty much been my life for the last couple of weeks. But, pending a few touch ups to the paint, she's done!
So my dad was the assistant music editor on Tarzan, and idk if it was Bring Your Kid to Work Day or something but one day he did just that so there I was, this incredibly small 1st grader, in an absolutely cavernous recording studio with a full orchestra and a giant screen playing the scene they were taping the score for, and my little brain couldn't handle the big music and the big movie happening all at once so I started crying and it was the first time music ever brought me to tears and it was too much to take in so we stepped out of the studio and ran directly into Phil Collins, who looked to me very much like my dad, and in my delicate emotional state I became immediately convinced that my dad had been copied and nobody had told me so I started crying harder, and Phil Collins said something that was probably meant to be calming but it was with a British accent so I thought there was a copy of my dad in every country and I absolutely lost it at the notion that other kids would get to have my dad, and my dad ended up having to carry me back to the car.
So.
Sorry for crying very loudly at you Phil Collins, your work on Tarzan was so moving it triggered my first emotional breakdown.
For anyone wondering: it's called Hyalinobatrachium dianae, and Kermit Frog is one of its actual recognised names (alongside Diane's bare-hearted glass frog)
This however isn't a recent discovery as it was first found back in 2015
The reason I reached for genre romance novels for Star Trek is Ive read so so so many of them and I know roughly how most of them convey something about the culture that produced them, in content and structure and what it means for what a culture values in a partner, and in themselves. It’s somewhat easy to use the scaffolding I already know to use existing genre conventions to explain something about the aliens in Star Trek.
I have not read enough murder and thriller novels to articulate what the genre is establishing about culture and values so I can’t be like ‘this is the dime airport novel about women getting sexy murdered but in Vulcan’ because I don’t know which genre conventions are load bearing and which are just more traditional. The murder mysteries i HAVE read are literally just Agatha Christie and maybe a handful of others that are directly inspired by her. I’ve watched a lot of murder television, but that is nottttt the same medium.
Bringing out those tags because so, so interesting, perhaps one of my favourite things, to mess around with patterns of story*. When I sat down with Spock to transcribe his autobiography, we came up with a form for what Vulcan memoir might look like, which he subverts. (There’s some of Sarek’s poetry too.)
Meditations on a Crimson Shadow is described as being set during a future war, so is a Cardassian sf novel. I figured it would surely, at least superficially, tell the story of Cardassian supremacy and permanent conquest, like Orwell’s boot stamping on a human face forever. Except maybe if you were reading it in the basement of your father’s home as your whole civilization implodes around you. Then I thought it might read differently. Or at least you would start the previously unimaginable work of imagining differently.
If historical fiction tries to reconfigure what we think was possible for people in the past, sf tries to configure what we think can be possible to us in the future. They feel very close, in my mind. Can we find sources or traditions in the past that give us succour or hope? What visions of the future are available to us, or do we need to imagine, and how do we map our way there? I think about these things all the time.
Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, VI
* Patterns of Story was the title of my MA creative writing module where we read 6 novels and mucked around with them in as many ways as possible. This week we’ll go through one scene in Madame Bovary and see how meticulously it’s constructed. This week we’ll read some post-apocalyptic Kentish dialect and I’ll do my party piece from Ulysses. This week I’ll tell you why Moll Flanders is like the Doctor Who Hartnell-era story “The Sensorites”. This week I’ll explain what I think are the two distinctive modes in the crime novel. And this week we’ll read a modernist novel that you’ll doubt at best or hate at worst but ten years later you’ll email me to ask the title because you haven’t been able to get it out of your head. I loved teaching that class. What an amazing technology novels are. I really do like them, probably nothing nicer than novels.
Oh, just to add that if we go with Harold Bloom (wait! come back!) and read Shakespeare as "inventing" the human, then Garak's blustering that Shakespeare is rubbish and pointless can of course be taken as yet another crock of performative bullshit - not only does he QUOTE HIM TO TAIN (let me throw words learned from my beloved in your fucking face), but Shakespeare represents his encounter with humanity by which we mean Bashir by which we mean the crumbling of Garak's belief in Cardassian supremacy. Shakespeare by which we mean the human by which we mean Bashir rewires (see what I did there) Garak's brain to such an extent that I would not be surprised if Garak regularly catches himself thinking in blank verse.
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
