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#FLAMONTAGUES #operation mincemeat musical #i know this is not entirely OMM relevant but. all i can picture is tash!monty as romeo flamontague

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Another day in the Office

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The novelist writes from inside. I’m rather sensitive on this point, because I write science fiction, or fantasy, or about imaginary countries, mostly—stuff that, by definition, involves times, places, events that I could not possibly experience in my own life. So when I was young and would submit one of these things about space voyages to Orion or dragons or something, I was told, at extremely regular intervals, “You should try to write about things you know about.” And I would say, But I do; I know about Orion, and dragons, and imaginary countries. Who do you think knows about my own imaginary countries, if I don’t? But they didn’t listen, because they don’t understand, they have it all backward. They think an artist is like a roll of photographic film, you expose it and develop it and there is a reproduction of Reality in two dimensions. But that’s all wrong, and if any artist tells you, “I am a camera,” or “I am a mirror,” distrust them instantly, they’re fooling you, pulling a fast one. Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside. OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do? You write.

--Ursula Le Guin, from the "On How To Become A Writer" at LitHub, from The Language of the Night (via @neil-gaiman)

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one of the best tips for Real Life that I’ve ever picked up is to always highball your estimate whenever someone asks you “when can you get this done by” by about 25% (if you can get away with it). that way, if it ends up being harder than you thought, you’ve got extra time to figure things out and if you were right about how much time it takes then you get to look like an absolute genius instead of just a simply competent person.

what you may not have realized is that I learned this crucial piece of life advice from an episode of Star Trek where Scotty is telling Geordi that whenever he told Kirk something on the Enterprise was at full capacity, it was always only ever a notch or so below full capacity so that Scotty looked like the god of all engineers when he was able to magically hack the warp drive to run a little beyond what he’d told everyone else was “full capacity” and honestly that one throwaway gag from Star Trek has changed my life.

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Source

Source

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One of the many weird things about depression is that it retcons your life. Not only are you lying in bed feeling like a piece of shit and that everything is awful, but you start projecting those feelings back along your own time stream - you start low-key believing you’ve always felt this way, that nothing good has ever happened, or if it has it happened a long time ago.

On January 1st of last year I decided to start keeping a tally of good days and bad days, because I stopped trusting my brain to report on that accurately. I expected to come and look at the tally when I was depressed and go “oh, I had a good day only a few days ago. this hasn’t always been like this.”

What I didn’t expect was that the process of asking myself whether a day had been good or bad would radically shift my perspective on what a bad day was and what a good day was. On the very first day, when I’d achieved nothing and had felt sad and slow all day, I went to put a notch in the Bad Day column before stopping myself:

wait, i thought. has today actually been bad? not bad enough to write it off. i played rummikub online with my partner. i drank some water. i had a long bath. no, today wasn’t a bad day.

And so I put a notch in the Good Day column and went to bed. The next day I did the same thing, and the next day, and the next day. Just the process of going over my day every day meant that I found at least one good thing that happened every day. I had a good meal. I went to the pub and was around people, albeit quietly. I went for a walk. I saw a duck. There were days where truly awful, terrible things happened, but even on those days there was always something - even if the something was a simple as We Were There For Each Other or We Reminisced.

On December 31st I put the final tally down. Not a single day had been so bad that I could justify writing it off as a bad day. The bad day column was completely empty.

I’m still depressed, occasionally deeply, but I think I have more perspective. Depression is a physical feeling, and an emotional feeling, but even without trying *something* comes along every day that makes me glad I’m here despite that feeling.

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This is gold this, absolute gold, the most over the top melodramatic hysterical ridiculous thing I’ve ever read

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year 4 of posting this! HAVE FUN

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Related

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it kills me how much people love to speculate on the trans male experience. transphobes and even other trans people will conjure up ideas of what it must be like for us to live, how hormones affect us, and especially what society treats us like. they love to tell us how we live our lives; strawman after strawman about fictional trans men who started hormones and became "evil and ugly", completely fabricated stories about about how every trans man they know suddenly "gained male privilege" and never deal with misogyny or transandrophobia.

people who tell you how your transmasculine experience will go have no idea what they are talking about. even if they sound confident, they are not correct- each and every transmasculine person has a different experience in life- we do not automatically gain the societal privilege of cishet white men once we decide to socially transition. they cannot see what your future holds. you don't deserve to have someone telling you how you will experience your own life, it is yours, you are allowed to live your truth, pave your own way and prove that we have varied lives that transcend what transphobes think the trans male experience is.

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do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button

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Submitter comment: I'd like to submit this '[s]tudy of defensive behavior of a venomous snake as a new approach to understand snakebite' not for it's topic (worth studying!) but for it's insane methodology, which... well, I'll just let the researcher speak for himself:

[Q: Why did you decide to do this experiment?

A: Snake behavior has been generally neglected as a field of research, especially in Brazil. And most studies don’t examine what factors make them want to bite. If you study malaria, you can research the parasite that causes the disease—but if you don’t study the mosquito that carries it, you will never solve the problem. Up until now, the popular wisdom was that the jararaca would only attack if you touched it or stepped on it. But that was not what we found.

Q: Why did you need to be the victim?

A: The best way to do this research is to put snakes and a human together. In this case, the human was me. We put the snakes inside a ring on the floor of our lab until they got used to it, then I stepped in wearing special protective boots. I stepped close to the snake and also lightly on top of it. I didn’t put my whole weight on my foot, so I did not hurt the snakes. I tested 116 animals and stepped 30 times on every animal, totaling 40,480 steps.]

From the recent (aptly named) interview: Researcher steps on deadly vipers 40,000 times to better predict snakebites

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“what? no he didn’t” took me out completely

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I have been thinking about small children and small dogs.

It is sometimes observed that small dogs can be unholy terrors. I have come to think this is more because of unintentional training rather than a lack of training.

If you have a large and potentially dangerous dog, you will probably seek to train it just so it does not damage your home or family. If you have a 2 kg dog, you just pick it up and move it if it is misbehaving.

This inadvertently trains your small dog to escalate if it wants any degree of self determination. It avoids someone but gets picked up. It runs away but gets picked up. It barks, it growls, it gets scolded and picked up. If it goes absolutely berserk and does its best to kill someone, it might not get picked up. You have taught your dog *this* is what it takes to be taken seriously as a very small animal.

Small children are often treated a lot like small pets. They are small people filled with needs and wants, almost powerless in the face of a nigh incomprehensible world. And larger people scold them and pick them up when their needs and wants are inconvenient for the larger people.

I have been around many small children this week and seen many meltdowns. Some of them are just exhausted and overstimulated. Some are probably classic brats who have been taught they can get their way if they just whine enough, which is a variation on the same idea.

But I must believe that some of them have learned this is the *only* way they will get *any* attention to their stated wants and needs.

Your parents have a plan and an agenda for the day, and you were not consulted because you are 4 years old, but you are still a human being with needs to understand and to some extent control your environment, and if the only way you can get anyone to listen to you for 5 minutes is to make those minutes absolute hell for everyone involved, yourself included, well, that is what it takes.

When you are 4 years old, fairly petty inconveniences can in fact be the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Small children can have the best and worst moments of their lives several times a day. They are learning the bounds of "normal," and they don't have many days that could have been worse.

It can be hard being a Very Small Animal.