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This is a thing I’d actually want to do.

Gods it’s a great idea.

history podcast but it's the history of a scifi/fantasy world that isn't like... from anything. it's just lore and worldbuilding and backstory for a story that doesn't exist.

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The ribs story

    Way back in the olden days, before the advent of fancy things like tact and smartphones was a young lad who decided that a background in history studying the black death and seeing Sisters of Mercy in concert was enough to give him what it would take to be a mortician. So this lad decides to go off to school for it, hoping to be surrounded by Uncle Fester and Cousin Itt types and is instead sunk into a corporate world of red state good ol’boys, but decides to keep going regardless, since there should always be a job in the field unless the singularity comes soonish, but then he’ll retire early. 

    Part of the wonderment of his return to school days, which is filled with interesting things like chemistry and empathy classes are these things called Clinicals. Clinicals are the proof, the hard stuff, the vodka in the pudding. Clinicals are where you embalm people. Dead people, for those of you playing the home game. Each student has to have ten clinicals on record to graduate, now we can assist each other and overlap, but more than about five students to a body things get a little crowded and you know what they say about too many cooks...

    Now our lad is going to school at Guts and Bones down in Georgia, OTP, but just barely, and the school will occasionally get a, well let’s call them, volunteer from the Fulton County Morgue. This person had what they call a full post autopsy, full Y incision front and back, brain and all chest cavity tissue removed, weighed, tested, and replaced, but the cause of death was fairly obvious. They had suffered multiple gunshot wounds and unfortunately been left unclaimed and unidentified, thus donated to the school for embalming in the hopes that preservation would allow more time for identification. I only mention this because the wounds in addition to organ and tissue removal makes an embalmers job that much more difficult. Without the majority of the cardiovascular system in place you have to embalm each limb, and sometimes part of limb, separately, as well as each side of the head, and treat all the soft tissue with formaldehyde.

    Let me set the stage for you, five students, representing all the various genders and shades of humanity, running the entire gamut of people in their twenties. The instructor, a jocular man, short red hair, clean shaven, you can picture him at a bar with a pale beer and a Hawaiian shirt, but today everyone is in zombie protection gear, tyvek smocks and pants, slippers over our shoes, rubber gloves, and face masks and shields. We don’t know if our volunteer had any pathogens, and TB is a nightmare that’s woken up more than one of us since last semester’s class on diseases, so safety first, second, and third.

    We’ve been told the day before a little about what we’re getting into this afternoon and most days a lot of the class will meet up for breakfast to share notes, drink coffee, complain about instructors, etc. Not today. 

I am not gonna vomit. Not happening.

So I don’t eat, I don’t want to get ill when I work on this person. There are five of us so we each get assigned tasks by the instructor. Everyone gets paired off with a limb to embalm, going to a femoral or brachial artery so see if there’s still enough of a circulatory system to allow for the flow of embalming fluid. I get the soft tissue, which means treating all the organs that have been removed with high test formaldehyde since just because you’re dead doesn’t mean the micro bacteria in your intestines are as well. This is eye stinging, nasty work. Formaldehyde is nasty stuff and we know how it works and why it preserves tissue. CH2O. The building blocks of life. When put together in that order it wraps around individual cells, blocking air and decay.

I’m off to the side holding a huge hollow steel needle with a rubber hose connecting it to a bottle of formaldehyde. I use it to pierce the organs then as I withdraw the needle vacuum pulls the formaldehyde into the holes I’ve made. It’s nasty, but I didn’t eat today and I’m not nauseous, just wincing my eyes watering.

One of my fellow classmates is having issues with the left arm, the instructor I believe is doing the head, since it’s delicate work and we’d all rather he teach that by example. He asks everyone to stop and come watch as he help find the brachial artery for the arm as it’s retreated like a rubber band into the muscle of the shoulder (a common occurance and one we’d have to know how to solve).

The instructor folds back the Y incision on the chest cavity, to give us all a better view of the interior of the rib cage and I’m face to face with a rack of ribs. I’ve grown up and spent my life in the south east. We’re very much a BBQ culture and in the areas I’ve lived in that means pork BBQ. I know you get beef ribs in Texas and I’m not going to argue which is better, I just know what I saw and what my brain and stomach started arguing over.

My stomach starts to growl.

Loud.

Not a cute little, “I skipped my midmorning snack,” kinda thing, no.

This was full on, “FEED ME, SEYMOUR!” 

Six other people in that room, including the corpse on the table. Five stepped away from me and I’m sure the last one would have, but they were already lying down.

Silence. But only for a moment. Then again, “Feed me.” Another step back.

I’m rapidly running out of shades of red to turn. The rest of the Clinical passed in a blur, I vaguely remember being sent back to treat the rest of the organs and soft tissues while the rest of my classmates finished embalming our subject. I think I apologized to the instructor afterwards, it seems like the type of thing I’d do.

I do know I had BBQ for lunch afterwards.

#gore #embalming #mistakes #nonfiction

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@wolvensnothere somebody’s stealing yer fuckin look.

Ricky Whittle photographed by Dimitry Loiseau for Regard Magazine (2017)

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Concept: a magic-heavy D&D campaign where the party is charged with investigating the gradual proliferation and expansion of dead magic zones, with the mid-season twist that the “dead magic zones” are discovered actually to be bubbles of a setting with a different magic system.

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When I first started working at my current library we got a request in from a local author asking if we’d purchase his book. Not every author in the world can afford to give out copies, especially when they’re just starting out and I’d seen the patron in the library before so I thought, sure, why not?

We got in his book and got it cataloged and it hit the new book shelves one morning and that afternoon he came in to use the computers. I raced over to get him and let him know his book was in and to show him where it was on the shelves only to find it had already been checked out.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so happy.

Adventures in Librarian-ing

So this little kid donated a book to the library a couple weeks ago. 

They’ve been coming into the library every so often to look proudly at their book on display and tell anyone who’ll listen about how they donated THAT book, it has a sticker the librarian had them pick out that they got to sign their name on in the inside cover and everything!!!! (I saw them once excitedly insist a high schooler grab the book and open it to see the sticker, much to the high schooler’s amusement, lol).

Today they came into the library to ask me where their book was, ‘cause they’d looked around the past little while and couldn’t find it anywhere.

“Ah, that’s ‘cause it’s out right now,” I explained.

Their jaw dropped and their eyes went wide, “It’s out?!”

“Yep! It’s not here because it’s at somebody’s house right now.”

“AT THEIR HOUSE?!”

They started practically vibrating in excitement.

“Yep!”

“Like, for real?”

“Uh huh.” I grinned, “It’s the second time it’s been taken out too.”

“TWICE?! It’s been taken out TWICE already?! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!!!!”

Something tells me that’s all they’ll be talking about tonight at dinner. lol

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Edward Hopper, 1925; Charles Addams, 1946; and Alfred Hitchcock, 1960; The Comic Worlds of Peter Arno, William Steig, Charles Addams, and Saul Steinberg, by Iain Topliss, 2007

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Old, but hopefully not crusty.

What's the eldergoth scene like?

Tired, a lot of the time. We’re lured out of our tired, hermit-like ways for big fancy events, or for reunion tours of favorite bands. A lot of us want to go out to club nights more often, but work schedules / family life / chronic illnesses / budgets make it difficult. 

But given a chance, we will flock together in dark clusters, talking about bands we’ve seen, books we’ve read, clubs that no longer exist, and makeup and fashion tips we’ve figured out as we’ve gotten older.

I hope I speak for the rest of the eldergoths when I say that we also love watching the newer members of the subculture learn about things. Seeing folks newly-giddy with enthusiasm helps rekindle our own dark joy. 

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@angelmays This is what I was talking about. The expressions!

she’s beauty she’s grace she scronch she face

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Incorrect Rogue One Quotes ( 18/? ) 

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“I want to speak to a manager,” the middle-aged woman said in her stern I-used-to-be-a-soccer-mom-ten-years-ago voice, looking down at me over the top of her Gucci reading glasses.

A wicked grin split across my face and the gates of Hell opened up behind me, releasing a gust of hot wind that whipped my apron around my body and forced the woman to shield her face. Demons came forth, dancing around in flames with songs of, “She wants to speak to a manager. Did you hear that? She wants to speak to a manager!” before erupting into earsplitting shrieks of laughter, none louder than my own cackling.

I took in the woman’s look of utter horror before my eyes rolled back into my head and I growled,

“I am the manager.”

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Attention @angelmays @amycharriene

OSCAR ISAAC AS GOMEZ ADDAMS. I REPEAT. OSCAR ISAAC AS GOMEZ ADDAMS

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@geesycreesy

Paramount Pictures: Hey guys, we are making a Bumblebee centered prequel!

TF Fans: Ugh. Bumblebee is so boring. This is going to be trash.

Paramount Pictures: It has a female protagonist, and a Starscream that actually looks like Starscream!

TF Fans: Bumblebee has saved us.

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ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this.  you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.

humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.  

i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.