Rosebriars and ink

(Via umadoshi )

"GenX Tribe: Breaking Bones and Other Stories of Walking it Off"

CW: Link and this post contain stories about injuries, treated and untreated.

I'm not Gen X, but my dad's a Boomer (I was a late in life baby), and he was (and is) very much in that medical mold. He liked to call it 'caveman medicine'. (Luckily my mother was not as much, so I was actually taken to the doctor for things like dislocating my elbow as a kindergartener or having a 104.5 degree fever because I had swine flu.) His opinion is that you should walk it off if you possibly can, and that superglue (with baking soda on it to make it cure faster, and an ice cube on that to keep the exothermic reaction from burning you) is preferable to going to the hospital for stitches.

He yelled at me once because the wound care clinic visits prescribed to keep my feet from going septic after I had to go to the hospital for burning all the skin off my feet cost money, and apparently I should have just stayed at home and suffered? And/or gotten sepsis? (I went into shock! Twice! I burned all the skin off my feet and there was asphalt ground into them!)

I was definitely told that if I pulled something in my back or twisted my ankle (or possibly sprained my ankle!) I should just get up and walk it off. One time when he was in college, he fell roller skating to class and twisted his whole leg and could barely stand, but he got up and kept going and it was fine!

I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about growing up with this kind of thing, except maybe jamethiel, and her dad's a doctor, so there's another kind of dimension going on there. Very interesting for me to read, and really makes me appreciate that my mom actually believes in doctors, because I got off damn lightly compared to some of the stories in the link.

(My dad is even more anti-doctor now, he's been inducted into the weirdo We All Have Candida Overgrowth and Microwaves Cause Cancer and Wheat Binds To The Opium Receptors Of The Brain nonsense via his girlfriend, sister, and mother. I think my mom was a lot more of a mediating influence on him than I ever realized before the divorce.)

I definitely didn't come out of that upbringing unaffected. I'm disinclined to go to doctors for anything I can possibly deal with myself, which ranges from 'treating my ear infections with neosporin' to 'lancing my own boils'.

new CW: animal death

It's also, frankly, to blame for the deaths of my cats, because he doesn't believe in veterinary care any more than he believes in doctors--he bought vaccines from the feed store and gave them himself when they were kittens and then nothing else ever--and I had no money for emergency care, and I knew he wouldn't give any to me, so I tried to nurse Tabby through her final decline without asking (after he refused for Bluebell and my mother cleaned out her savings for her) because I didn't want to live the rest of my life knowing he'd refused to give me the money that could have saved her, and that her death was 100% his fault. (So now I just get to know that it's my fault, instead. Both of them. If I had just realized that Bluebell had gotten out of the house sooner, I could have found her before she froze to death somewhere lost and I never saw her again, it's my fault, if I had fundraised if I had put up posters if I had tried harder--) (I miss them so much. Koschei is a darling and I love him, but Tabby and Bluebell were the first pets I ever had and I'd had them as long as I could remember and they're gone.) But my dad, who cheerfully talks about Tizzy kitty, who was two years old when she never came home but he doesn't see this as a reason to stop having outside cats because he has no goddamn empathy--

This got away from me. I don't have a conclusion.

I want my girls back, and I'm never going to see them again, and I don't even have Bluebell's ashes like I managed to hysterical breakdown my father into paying for cremation for Tabby. (More willing to pay for death than life.)

More DW Markdown guide

Why Is a ‘Pepper’ Different From ‘Pepper’? Blame Christopher Columbus-- More things to blame Columbus for: the linguistic ambiguity of the word 'pepper'.

via umadoshi, The Plant Breeder Who Minted a New World of Flavor is a sweet little history of a man who hybridized dozens of new varietals of mint.

How Architects Are Designing Buildings With Birds in Mind--95% reduction in bird mortality, damn!

Is Japan losing its umami? is a very clickbaity title for a genuinely really sad piece about heritage methods of food production in danger of being lost.

Neat: Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays (not something he plagiarized, but something he almost certainly read and was influenced by.)

Two cool small articles with lots of pictures of China's "bicycle graveyards"--I have never seen so many bikes in one place in my life, holy crap. First link, second link. I'm used to the concept of airplane boneyards, because I grew up in Tucson, but this is so much more dense and disarranged and plants growing through and--just wow.

Mildly irritated that chrome is willing to autofill 'linkspam' as a title but not 'linkdump', which I have used more times. Autofill is an arcane mystery.

Markdown Simplifies Formatting Your DW Posts--the only thing I have trouble remembering how to do in HTML is username links, so maybe I'll try markdown for that? Otherwise I just don't want to be bothered having to remember another type of formatting mostly. I know how to code a link in html! I sincerely doubt I can reliably remember how to do so in markdown. (I am notably terrible at remembering how to do things involving text commands, it's a large part of why I stopped using linux. GUIs are my friends. My DW posts I code the links and italics and bold manually, because that's something I can reliably remember, but I use the rich text editor to inset images because I can never remember how to code in the width restrictions, and also to include username links because how to do it just keeps falling out of my head.) Anyway, this being a 'silent feature' seems kinda... hm. Why do you have a formatting method that you have to hear about by word of mouth, that's weirdly exclusionary. I'd actually been looking for a page on what markdown DW supports because my friend lethe mentioned she thought it was supported, and I straight up could not find one or even any indication that it was supported. I mean, maybe I'm just bad at google now, but... nothing on the new post page itself mentions the feature or links to a page on being able to use the feature, soooo. Hm.

A lovely post about Buttercup (of The Princess Bride) as a poet, and how it improves the story

A Suspense Novelist’s Trail of Deceptions is a disturbing investigation into an author who apparently lies constantly, about everything, and typing this has made my brain start playing why the fuck you lyin, why you always lyin, mmmm oh my god, stop fuckin lyin! Anyway this Dan Mallory dude sounds fuuuucking terrifying. Also, the fake emails from his "brother" about him being in hospital are so... this is a dude who would have stirred up drama and pseucided on lj, except he somehow managed to make masses of money doing it. Yikes. God, this story just keeps GOING. Also like, wow, this dude's novel was bought by the publishing house at whish he worked--I wonder just how much promotion money was poured into that book and how much that affected its #1 debut. Or if he pulled a more competent version of the Handbook for Mortals NYT scam--he's certainly got the money for it, christ.

via hellofriendsiminthedark, Why Sign-Language Gloves Don't Help Deaf People is an interesting article about terrible translation attempts. ("It translates the alphabet!" Oh my god do you have any idea how slow and annoying it would be to fingerspell everything you wanted to say. No one talks like that.) (Reference point: I've taken ASL 1 and ASL 2; Alex, my housemate and best friend, is in the third year of a degree in ASL/English interpreting. I've gone to a fair few interpreting social events with him, even though my sign is pretty rudimentary.)

Hunger Makes Me, on women being expected to want nothing

On Fandom and the "culture of selling"--money quote, which I read aloud to Alex: If you look at the proliferation of gofundmes and patreons and think, "ugh, why do people keep asking me for money?" and not "how can we burn late capitalism to the ground and salt the remains?" then I think you're not seeing the big picture.

Show vs. Tell: Lessons from Wake of Vultures has an interesting take on the well-worn adage "Show, don't tell": If something important changes, render it on the page (show). If nothing changes, summarize it (tell). It claims to illustrate with examples, but ime they're too spare to demonstrate anything. I'll have to think about this more.

An interesting twitter thread about How Not To Write Supporting Characters In Shipfic (or, in her own words, "How to Avoid Making Your Main Couple Accidental Psychopaths")

The Mysterious Discipline of Narratologists: Why We Need Stories to Make Sense at Tor.com is a very interesting piece about how stories work. I think I'll want to muse on it more. the audience has a set of shared communal knowledge makes me think of how Alex's interpreting program discusses extra-linguistic knowledge (which has become something of a household catchphrase). They seem to be fairly conceptually similar.

Tor.com is offering a new short fiction newsletter

The Wii Shop Channel's closure marks the death of a piece of Nintendo magic-- I'm not that surprised about the channel shuttering, because over christmas helping my mom I discovered that the YouTube app for the wii no longer works and the NetFlix app stopped working this month, but wow. That's the end of some kind of era. (I ended up helping my mom buy and set up a Roku, since she could no longer use her wii as a hilariously low-res set top box. Seriously, it was like 480p, on like a 60" television, it was so funny.)

The Story About The Story: Or, How Writers Talk About Their Books by Chuck Wendig

25 Steps To Being A Traditionally Published Author: Lazy Bastard Edition (Guest Post By Delilah S. Dawson). I just like reading about writing, even if posts like this make me increasingly sure that I am not cut out to be an author (of novels, anyway, I still harbor dreams of short fiction publication). (Though it's entirely possible that my badly managed mental health is the one saying that and I'd be more up for it if I was less A Mess With No Insurance To Do Anything About It.)

25 Humpalicious Steps For Writing Your First Sex Scene, By Delilah S. Dawson (Author Of Wicked As She Wants). When I wrote my first sex scene, the hero accidentally removed the heroine’s corset three times, which made me sound like an idiot with a corset fetish. AS IF. I'm amused. Also (partially) potentially applicable to fanfic sex scenes.

Tucker Leighty-Phillips interviews Ursula Vernon is a website with truly abysmal formatting, fucking pale grey text on a white background, what the fuck. I used the 'white background with black font' bookmarklet from this incredibly useful page to render it bloody readable. Anyway: And a lot of the messages that do come across by what I’m retelling I choose to change, like in the snow queen version I did, if there’s a moral to the story it was the dude chosen by Hans Christian Anderson was an absolute douche bag and you could do better. I guess that’s a moral. Love me some Ursula Vernon. And The Raven and the Reindeer was a great book, with lesbians, A+ highly recommended. This is a fun interview because Ursula is inherently interesting and hilarious, if you can get past the TERRIBLE DAMNED WEBSITE. God, who the fuck chose this font color. Why.

Half of this post has been sitting in notepad since mid December, let's just get it out here.

Misc

Dinosaur comics has told me that ctrl shift esc opens task manager without having to click through the ctrl alt del menu??? I mean I have it pinned to my taskbar now so this is of limited utility to me these days but WHERE WAS THIS KNOWLEDGE TEN YEARS AGO?!

Comping White at the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses racism in the publishing industry, and what comp titles, a facet of publishing unknown to most laymen, can tell us about it. It's a pretty brutal picture.

Music

I'm listening mostly to the Bohemian Rhapsody soundtrack and miscellaneous other Queen (Who Wants to Live Forever is breaking my heart and something's bubbling under the surface in response), but also assorted S.J. Tucker, as I usually am--right now especially her Witchy Things 2018, which I also cannot link for you, as I bought it at Pagan Pride Day a few months ago, shortly before she had her baby, in a handwritten cardboard sleeve, and it's not online. Look to the Water is, as far as I can see, the only new track from it that she's uploaded to bandcamp thus far, and while it's great it's not my favorite on the album. (That honor goes to 11:57 ('Til It's Over), with Papa's Groove in second place.) It does also contain a few songs that are on other albums: Rootless, Little Bird, Sultry Summer Night, Witch's Rune. (Several of those are on Stolen Season, which is one of my absolute favorite of her albums.)

Since I wrote that paragraph, I've also discovered (via Rap Critic on youtube) Sammus, through her song Time Crisis, which has a great music video. I've been listening to Infusion, the album Time Crisis is on, way too much. Great stuff.

Fanfic

Fairy tale origfic, What the Frogs Knew. Frog Princess/Sleeping Beauty. Sweet and intricate and I really like the style.

#friendlyneighborhoodspiderpeople because I'm poking around fic after seeing Into the Spider-Verse and I always like fic with fake tweets or whatever, and this has tweets and reddit and discord and it's great! Citizens of New York: Why the fuck are there so many spiderpeople

Also a zillion Harry Potter fics, as usual.

Profic

I finally read Robin McKinley's Chalice! I haven't been up on her newer work in years--I still have Shadows and Pegasus yet to read, of the ebooks my library has--but I love her work and I've been meaning to get to it. It was such a Robin McKinley sort of ending, it was lovely. And there wasn't as much menace as I feared, because I know full well she can write a book I'll regret reading. (Looking at you, Deerskin.) But I loved it! It was great. And filled with bees. Robin McKinley's writing (when it's not wildly upsetting, Deerskin) makes me feel like I fit better in my skin.

Singing My Sister Down, recced by jamethiel, dark and sad.

Beyond Comprehension on Fireside Magazine was also sad and ended ambiguously, and is very much about the exploitation of black and brown communities and the ways we fail people with learning disabilities.

2086 at Strange Horizons is... also dark and sad and about the exploitation of communities of color, this seems to be a theme in what I've read lately.

The Date at Uncanny Magazine is a joyously monstrous bit of delight. With lesbians!

I love following AI Weidness, Janelle makes really great machine learning humor. Her post on neural net Christmas carols is true to form in weird.

The 19th Century Trope Generator is great fun, and has some quite interesting ideas, actually.

Guidelines For Female Protagonists In Hallmark Christmas Movies at McSweeney's is great--I avoid watching movies in almost all circumstances because I find plot stressful, but McSweeney's is always hilarious, and judging by the like four people I'm following on twitter who keep livetweeting Hallmark movies, this sounds pretty on the nose. Regardless, it's funny.

More sciatrix, this time older links stumbled across on girlgay, on struggling to learn to write f/f smut even when one knows how to have f/f sex at f/f writing gripe of the night and a collection of links associated with that topic and trying to work out an answer to it.

A list of f/f communities on dreamwidth.

The Bad Sex Awards
Warning: one of the quoted sex scenes contains a man having sex with (raping? unclear from minimal context available) a woman who is asleep and unaware that it is happening
As usual, they leave me going '...surely these authors have to do this on purpose. How can anyone possibly put together words this exquisitely unsexy by accident, while trying to write good sex.' Her vaginal ratchet moved in concertina-like waves, slowly chugging my organ as a boa constrictor swallows its prey. Soon I was locked in, balls deep, ready to be ground down by the enamelled pepper mill within her. Really? Really. Pepper mill? *Enamelled* pepper mill?!

Dinosaur Comics on "concealed shoes"

A twitter thread imagining a Muppet Les Miserables. It's so on the nose and I'm in love. Sam the Eagle IS perfect as Javert! Miss Piggy singing On My Own would be HILARIOUS! I wasn't quite on board with Cosette being Camilla until we got to 'Marius is Gonzo' and then I was '...yeah, okay'. Rizzo in Master of the House, omg, that wasn't dwelt on but I'm imagining it and filled with glee.