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french people will really be like “our société? culturally catholique? mais non, this country is laïque there is no public religion to be found here!” and then 5 minutes later say “oh we do not work tomorrow because it is *checks french fonction publique calendrier* the feast of the assumption of the holy virgin mary so every public building in the whole entire country is closed :)”

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Proto-Indo-Europeans be like “*g̑n̥néh₃mi stéh₂tim” and then they take you into the middle of the steppe

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storytelling rule 1: contradiction

Everybody knows that a character has to have conflict to be interesting. I have become disenchanted with the use of the word "conflict" in storytelling. Some conflicts in stories are better described using words like: movement, transformation, or even decay. My favorite concept of conflict within a character is contradiction.

I made a rule for myself that, no matter how small a character's role in the story is, even if they exist for only one sentence, they must contain an element of contradiction.

Viewing a character from the outside, their internal state can't be known, so this contradiction often takes place in the mind of the POV character, or even in the mind of the reader, rather than necessarily being inherently part of the character.

Tropes and stereotypes are deeply related, overlapping things, in fact almost the same thing. As background characters populate the background of a story, they become sorted into recognizable forms: bratty children, air-headed teenage girls, sweet old ladies. As we traverse the world around us, a similar process occurs where we understand the people we encounter according to categories.

We can't know very much about a stranger, so they aren't complex to us, they are simple. This simplicity can take away the humanity of people, deprive them of value, and lead to treating them badly. That is the harmful action of stereotypes.

I noticed that many writers evoke the reader's feelings and attitudes using stereotypes. If a character is fat or ugly, the story is shaped so that we are meant to dislike them; if a character has some foreign characteristic, we are supposed to fear them. It's mean-spirited, and a betrayal of the purpose of literature. Literature illuminates humanity; to use a stereotype to strengthen a response of disgust or fear is the opposite of illumination. Stereotypes simplify and obscure humanity.

The rule of contradiction means that each character must change the reader's perception of them. Even within a single sentence, the reader's understanding must break into two parts: an initial impression, and a deep and fundamental change to that impression. The reader's first picturing of the character and their second picturing of the character must be incompatible. Contradiction.

For example, let's say I mention a character who is a little old lady. The reader pictures a trope or a stereotype. How can I contradict that first picture? I can say that she is carrying a large python. I can say she is wearing thigh-high leather boots and a jacket with spikes. I can say that she is covered in mud and twigs, or that she is reading a book about penguins, or that she has a gun holstered at her hip. Even if she only exists in the story for one sentence, I can communicate that she is fully human and has complexity.

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Maison Margiela Artisanal 2025 collection metal face mask via Julia O'Callaghan

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I've talked a lot in the past about the virtues of one player/many GMs tabletop RPGs, but a tabletop RPG designed specifically to be played on stream where the streamer is the player and chat is the GM compels me in a way I have not heretofore encountered.

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There was an interesting situation at work recently. I'm gonna keep it vague for privacy, but basically the husband of a patient threatened to shoot hospital employees after he perceived they were ignoring his wife's situation. Which, looking at the case, people were like, yeah, this patient was in prolonged discomfort and had delayed care over multiple shifts due to factors that weren't malicious but were careless. Basically, the task that would have helped this patient was classic "third thing on your to do list." It had to be done, but it didn't need to be done urgently. The impact of not doing this task likely wouldn't be felt on your shift. The work of doing this task would require the coordination of a couple different people. Very easy to just keep pushing it back, and because it wasn't an emergency (until it was), it just kept being pushed back.

You could do a root-cause analysis of the whole thing (and we have) to really break down what happened, but ultimately the effect was the same as if the neglect had been malicious. I'm sympathetic to the husband, as were a lot of people in this situation, because, yes, hospital staff dropped the ball in a way that meant the patient was in unnecessary pain and discomfort with delay of care for over a day, despite multiple requests from patient and family to address the situation. The husband reacted emotionally to a situation where he'd felt helpless and ignored. Institutional neglect ground away at him until he verbally snapped.

And the way he snapped was to tell staff, "I'm going to come back with a gun and shoot you all for what you've done." Which is about as explicit a threat as you can get. Does he get to keep visiting the hospital after that? How do we be fair to him, to the patient, and to the staff? He probably didn't mean it. Right? But how do you ignore a statement like that? If he does come back and commit a shooting, how will you justify ignoring his threat? But does one sentence said at an emotional breaking point define him? How much more traumatic are we going to make this hospital stay?

A couple years back, I worked on a floor a few hours after a patient had been escorted away for inappropriate behavior--by the way, you can't imagine how inappropriate the behavior has to be for us to do that. I have never seen another case like this. That patient said he was going to come back with a gun and shoot nurses that he identified by name. This didn't come to pass. Whether that was because the patient didn't mean it or changed his mind or was prevented or simply was not mentally coordinated enough to follow through on the plan, I don't know. I do know that shift fucking sucked. I remember the charge nurse telling me that it wasn't our jobs to die for our patients. If there was shooting, she told me to run.

There was another situation recently involving a patient in restraints. I despise restraints. I think the closest legitimate use for them is in ICUs for stopping delirious patients from ripping out their ventilators, and that should still be a last resort. I discontinue restraints whenever I inherit them, and I am very good at fixing problems before restraint seem like the only solution. Having said that, I work in a hospital that uses restraints, and so I am complicit in their use. Recently I walked into a situation involving restraints with zero context for what was happening, just that there was a security situation involving a patient who had been deemed for some reason to lack capacity to make medical decisions. They were on a court hold and a surrogate med override, which means they cannot refuse certain medications. The whole situation was horrible, and I've spent the days since it happened thinking about every way I personally failed that patient and what to do different next time.

At one point, the patient called one of the nurses a bitch, and the nurse said, "hey cmon, that's not nice," and the patient replied, "if you were in hell, would you call the devil a nice name?" And yeah! Fair! It is insane to expect people who are actively being denied their autonomy to be polite to us as we do it.

Then there was another patient on the behavioral health floor who got put in seclusion. It's so frustrating, by the way, that staff put them in seclusion because it would have been extremely easy to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it got to. But the situation did escalate, and by the time the patient was locked in a seclusion room, they were shouting slurs and kicking the walls. Other patients were scared of the patient even when they were calm because the patient talked endlessly about guns, poisons, bombs, etc. When I checked in with the patient in the seclusion room, they called me a cog in a fascist machine just following orders. And I was like, yeah. Fair.

Another patient: one night when I was charge nurse, I replied to a security situation where a patient trapped a staff member in the room and tried to choke her. The staff member escaped unharmed. She told me later that the patient had been verbally aggressive to her all day, but she hadn't told anyone because she knew he was having a bad day, she didn't want to get him in trouble, and she didn't think anything was actually going to happen. She said, "Patients are mean all the time."

And another case: I had a different patient with the ultimate combination of factors for violent agitation--confused, needed a translator, was hard of hearing so the translator was of little use, in pain, feverish, scared, withdrawing from alcohol, hadn't slept in two days, separated from his caregiver who had also just been hospitalized--the whole shebang. He shouted at us that we were human trafficking him and could not be reoriented to where he actually was or that he was sick. I tried all my usual methods of deescalation, which I am typically very good at. I could not get him to calm down. He had a hospital bed where the headboard pulls out so you can use it as a brace during compressions. He ripped that out and threw it at the window, trying to shatter the glass. At that point, with the permission of his medical surrogate and with help from security, I forcibly gave him IV medication for agitation and withdrawal. He slept all night with a sitter at his bedside to monitor him. I pondered when medication passed over the line into chemical restraint, but I stand by the decisions I made that shift.

Last one: I had a different patient who was dying who had a child with a warrant out for arrest. We didn't know for what, and no one investigated further because no one wanted to find out anything that might prevent this person from visiting his dying parent. Obviously, "warrant for arrest" could mean literally anything, although it was significant enough that security was aware of the situation and wanted us aware as well, but I was struck by how proactively the staff protected his visitation rights and extended him grace. Everyone was very aware of how easily the wrong word could start a process that would result in a parent and child losing the chance to say goodbye to each other.

In the case of the husband who threatened a mass shooting, you'd be surprised how many of the staff advocated for him to keep all visitation rights. After all, the patient wanted him there.

Violence--verbal, physical, active, passive, institutional, direct, inadvertent, malicious--pervades the hospital. It begets itself. You provoke people into violence, and then use that violence to justify why you must do actions that further provoke them. And also people are not helpless victims of circumstance, mindlessly reacting to whatever is the most noxious stimuli. But also we aren't not that. You have to interrupt the cycle somewhere. I think grace is one of the most powerful things we can give each other. I also think people own guns. Institutions have enormous overt and covert power that can feel impossible to resist, and they are made up of people with necks you can wring, and those people are the agents of that unstoppable power, and those people don't have unlimited agency and make choices every day about how and when to exercise it. We'll never solve this. You literally have to think about it forever, each and every time, and honor each success and failure by learning something new for the next inevitable moral dilemma that'll be along any minute now and is probably already here.

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"Trans people were invented by doctors in the 1950s"

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there are many things tumblr as a whole has to learn but one of them is “someone can reblog a post without them endorsing every action the op has ever taken, we are not beholden to do background checks on the producers of every shitpost on the internet”

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Big heart, acute senses key to explosive radiation of early fishes

Digital reconstruction of tiny, 400-million-year-old fish shows how anatomy geared toward evading predators equipped it to become the hunter once jaws evolved.

An international team led by scientists from the Canadian Museum of Nature and the University of Chicago reconstructed the brain, heart, and fins of an extinct fish called Norselaspis glacialis from a tiny fossil the size of a fingernail. They found evidence of change toward a fast-swimming, sensorily attuned lifestyle well before jaws and teeth were invented to better capture food. “These are the opening acts for a key episode in our own deep evolutionary history,” said Tetsuto Miyashita, research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature and lead author of the new study published today in the journal Nature. Fish have been around for half a billion years. The earliest species lived close to the seafloor, but when they evolved jaws and teeth, everything changed; by 400 million years ago, jawed fishes dominated the water column. Ultimately, limbed animals–including humans—also originated from this radiation of vertebrates...

Read more: https://nature.ca/en/about-the-museum/media-centre/tiny-fossil-offers-new-insights-about-fish-evolution/

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the acorn woodpecker is a unique woodpecker species found from the southwestern united states through central america, ranging as far south as colombia. these birds are ‘cooperative breeders’ - they live in groups of up to fifteen individuals, with all females laying their eggs communally in one nesting cavity. pairing arrangements vary, with some birds remaining monogamous while others join breeding collectives of up to 8 males and 4 females. as their name implies, acorn woodpeckers highly rely on acorns for food. it’s believed that the acorn crop’s importance to this species leads them to sometimes nest during fall, a rarity for birds. acorns are stored by these birds in granaries or storage trees formed by the birds drilling holes, sometimes thousands of them, and stuffing acorns in them for later retrieval. despite acorns being an important part of the diet - which are fiercely defended by territorial acorn woodpeckers - their diet also includes sap, insects, and fruit.

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the fact that estrogen can just make the penis act like a clitoris will never fail to impress me because it shows just how much of an effect hormones have on our bodies. however the fact that hardly anyone talks about this and instead expects all girl dick to act like cis guy dick is very bleak. it's also exactly in line with how misogyny demands the mystification women's genitals and bodies in order to strip women of their own autonomy and subjectivity more generally, because that's exactly what it is. you aren't supposed to acknowledge the biological realities of transfeminine bodies, because in order to benefit from transmisogyny you must deny us our humanity by living in ignorance about us and casting us strictly into the realm of "sex object"

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Hi, just finished reading house of leaves and ive been absolutely eating up all your HOL art lately. Would love to see more of lude in your style, your design for him is phenominal :3

I notice that alot of people don't seem to remember that lude is...a stylist! I will take advantage of this.

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The censorship of women's nipples is craaazy. Like it is blatantly just "we will censor your body but only if you're a marginalized class who we consider inherently obscene/sexual" like holy shiiiiit why do we even humor this bullshit?

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It's crazy how many people use Death of the Author to mean "separating the art from the artist" when it's actually not supposed to have anything to do with who the author is as a person and is supposed to be about the idea that the author's interpretation of their own work should not be seen as the definitive, correct opinion on that work. Like you're not supposed to invoke Death of the Author when JK Rowling devotes her entire life and fortune to transphobia, you're supposed to invoke it when Trent Reznor says Closer by Nine Inch Nails isn't a sex song.

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I cannot overstate how fucked up I am today. I’m operating on almost no sleep and I’m pound for pound more fatigue than person. But we needed cat food.

So I went in and the worker did a little shudder as she’s finishing up with the last customer.

“I had one of those days yesterday,” I commiserated.

“No, it wasn’t them, I was just- it’s kinda heavy.”

I waited.

“My coworker just passed a way,” she admitted. “I just saw her name on a receipt, it hit me kinda hard.”

I nodded. I was painfully aware how little energy was in my tank, and empathy uses so much, but this is not the kind of thing I am capable of brushing off. “Have you ever read Terry Pratchett?”

She looked very confused by the apparent non sequitur. Shook her head.

“He’s a really famous fantasy author,” I told her. “Very funny. But in one of his books he has a system kind of like telegrams. And if someone dies while operating that system, their name is put into it. Their name goes back and forth across the line forever, and he posits that people aren’t really gone as long as we see echoes of them and remember their names.

“That’s what it’s like when you saw her name on that receipt, right? It’s her memory, still going.”

Her eyes got wider as I went on. When I finished she gave herself a little shake. “That’s. That’s really beautiful, thank you for that. I. Wow.”

I smiled over my mask and left with my cat food.

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pomegranates are so damn difficult to eat like could you be less of a metaphor and more of a fruit for a second im trying to have a snack

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"The word pandemonium was coined by John Milton as the name for the Parliament of Hell" is an all-timer etymology. Oh yeah did you hear that Mrs Higgins's dogs got loose at the village fête? It was like a vast golden edifice in which fallen angels debate their strategies for vengeance against god, yeah.