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my bf has many interesting stories and observations from his new job as a 911 operator

my favorite is how meandering people are, even in the midst of a terrible emergency

they respond to “what is the emergency” with “well, the thing is, four weeks ago–”

and then he’s like “WHAT IS THE EMERGENCY RIGHT NOW”

and they’re like “so what happened this morning was, i said to my wife, i said–”

“WHAT IS CURRENTLY HAPPENING AT THIS MOMENT”

“oh i’m having a heart attack”

my second favorite is how specific he has to get sometimes

like, “what is your emergency?”

“i’m sitting in a pool of blood.”

“… is it… your blood?”

“yes i think so”

“do you know where it’s coming from?”

“probably the stab wound”

“have you been stabbed?”

“oh yah definitely”

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"Following the tragic drownings of 15 schoolchildren in his home town, an Indian man has started a swimming club that has seen more than 10,000 learn how to handle themselves in the water.

He’s narrowed down the introductory course, which focuses entirely on swimming for safety rather than for sport, to just 16 lessons that begins by removing the fear of the water and the river’s current.

It’s called the Valasseril River Swimming Club, and it now boasts thousands of members among the communities living along the Periyar river in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala.

It was created by Saji Valasseril, a humble furniture shop owner who, according to the Better India, was overwhelmed with grief following the overturning of a boat carrying a school class and its teacher in 2009. He started by teaching his children to swim, then his friend, then his friend’s children, then some from the neighborhood.

Soon the news spread that free swimming classes were available and the trickle of interest turned into a torrent.

“Most drowning cases reported here are of people boating close to the banks and not in the middle of the river,” says Saji. “You only need 16 days to learn how to remove your fear of water and save yourself from drowning.”

[Note: In India, drowning kills an estimated 38,000 people each year. Source]

“All kinds of people come together, young and old, men and women, from diverse professions, backgrounds and belief systems. We don’t see any of those differences. No one is looked down or looked up, there’s only teaching.”

In the water of the Periyar, swimming lanes are formed by strings of floaties or tires which are separated based on difficulty level. Deeper lanes with a stronger current are playfully called the “doctorate lanes” while those under which the student can place their feet on the riverbed are called “Kindergarten.”

All children have to be accompanied by a guardian who will be able to reach them from the riverbank in case something should happen. This, the Better India reports, has led to many of the guardians becoming club members themselves. Older folks, disabled, and the neurologically disordered have all learned to swim at the Valasseril club, which even attracts athletes.

Recently, one of its teenage students set a record in the Asian Book of Records for the longest open-sea swim by a minor. Another is preparing to swim the English Channel.

Those who ‘graduate’ not uncommonly pull on a branded aquatic shirt as a volunteer teacher or lifeguard, reflecting how at 5:30 a.m. before the heat of the day sets in, and with the chorus emanating from the Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary nearby, there’s no place most would rather be."

-via Good News Network, June 5, 2025

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fucking. what?

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no one had “real names“ in ancient times if you wanted to be called broadback or servant-of-god or whatever everyone was chill about it

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I have some news for members of the united states armed forces who feel like they are pawns in a political game and their assignments being unnecessary.

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When I was little my mom’s meatloaf was my favorite food. But ONLY her meatloaf. I didn’t like anyone else’s, and she told me that she would teach me how to make it when I was older. And when I was like 19? She finally taught me, but she told me never to tell anyone else and I was like weird but okay

Anyway, she was super fucking homophobic and abusive to me when I told her I was gay, so here’s the recipe

4-6 lbs of Hamburger/turkey burger

1 pk onion soup mix OR ranch mix

1 TBs ketchup

1 Tbs spicy brown mustard,

1 Tbs bbq sauce

1 Tbs steak sauce

1 egg

mix, shape into a loaf in a big pan, and bake at 350 for 2 hrs (maybe 2 and a half if you’re feeling dangerous)

You can get almost all of these ingredients at the dollar store, and have leftovers if it’s just you. The leftovers make great tacos if (taco seasoning is also like a dollar). Enjoy your revenge loaf

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obsessed with the description of the fabric of the lothlórien cloaks... how could you try approaching this effect irl? I think shot silk, probably chameleon tafetta but with four instead of three colours somehow? Here's an explanation of chameleon tafetta, a very difficult to produce type of fabric.

light but warm silken stuff that the Galadhrim wove. It was hard to say of what colour they were: grey with the hue of twilight under the trees they seemed to be; and yet if they were moved, or set in another light, they were green as shadowed leaves, or brown as fallow fields by night, dusk-silver as water under the stars."

Only silk probably wouldn't be warm enough, so perhaps lined with something warmer on the inside? Hm. OR somehow chameleon tafetta technique but in wool though given the description of the technique in link I don't know how well that could work? Textile people help...

Either way not quite like the movie cloaks.

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"You don't know me. I'm not the same person anymore."

"That's okay. I'll get to know you again."

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also the older i get the more i want to wrip Lydia up in a blanket and keep her safe and sound

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i'm just so exhausted by the alienating and infantilizing of autistic people. it's to the point that when ppl find out i'm autistic i DREAD them telling me they have an autistic relative because they almost always immediately overshare about that relative's personal life to me for no reason whatsoever.

i'll say i'm autistic and someone i barely know will be like "omg! my cousin is autistic! he's nothing like you though. he doesn't talk and he has meltdowns all the time. if he gets really overwhelmed sometimes he bangs his head on walls."

like ok 1. consider i'm not always verbal and i also have meltdowns but that's neither here nor there.

imagine if i told you i have a cousin [allistic] and you said "omg! i have a cousin too! [allistic]" I bet you would either end there or tell me something fun about her like a hobby she has or where she goes to school. I bet you wouldn't tell me how she acts when she's completely overwhelmed and having a terrible day. I bet you wouldn't tell me, within 5 minutes of meeting me, that when your allistic cousin failed a big exam she cried until she threw up and got a migraine.

because that would be weird for me and invasive for your cousin. so you wouldn't say that, if she's not autistic. you respect her privacy, because she's not autistic.

i swear a lot of y'all talk about your autistic siblings/kids/nieces/etc. like they're family pets

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Things to watch/read now the #GameOfThronesFinale has aired:

If you’re here for something with the most tenuous connections to history & canon, but with more agentive PoC and a relative lack of casual sexual assault, may I interest you in #TheMusketeers.

If you want queer people and pirates and PoC and hyper-competent women and politics and platonic inter-gender friendships, please turn your gaze towards #BlackSails, and its iconic Unburying of the Gays, with added straight-baiting.

For polytheistic pseudo-Europe with queer people given a patron god, nurturing and non-creepy older men, visions, hallucinations, mentally-ill middle-aged women with a destiny, dynastic curses and marriages, please read #LoisMcMasterBujold’s #Chalion series.

For three-planet dynastic politics, a disabled hero in an ableist world, personal and political loyalties, spy-masters and diplomats, badass and tactful and quiet and heroic women, and a canonical bisexual military hero and politician, read the #VorkosiganSaga by the same author.

For a disabled, acrobatic, quick-witted hero, a heroine I couldn’t but read as Dark!Sansa, coups & conspiracies, irritated nobles, impending invasions, the sweetest boy to ever ascend a throne, gods & their chosen ones, the theft of earrings & empires, read #QueensThief+sequels.

For Stone Age mysticism, children on quests, telepathic wolves, and dark magic that threatens humanity, please read @MichellePaver’s #ChroniclesofAncientDarkness. I know it’s kidlit, but it *haunted* me for weeks. (Paver’s Dark Matter and Thin Air are amazing spec-fic/horror stand-alone novels written for an older audience, beeteedubs)

For an exploration of medieval England & administration, religion, the consequences of war, the occupations of women beyond wife & whore, monastic life, aristocratic pursuits, the Crusades & their impact, please read #EllisPeters/#EdithPargeter’s #BrotherCadfaelChronicles. (You can also watch these with #DerekJacobi in the lead role, if you can get hold of the 94-98 ITV series. Fewer episodes (13) than novels (20) but otoh Derek Jacobi!)

Staying with detectives but moving back in time to ancient Rome, read #LindseyDavis’ #Falco series: a twenty-book romp through the length and breadth of the Roman Empire under Vespasian with crackling wit, historical accuracy, and gruesome deeds to spare.

If you’d rather have politics, please try #ColleenMcCullough’s sprawling #MastersofRome, which takes you from #GaiusMarius all the way to #AugustusCaesar and made me fall predictably in love with the vicious, brilliant, queer #LuciusCorneliusSulla who I fancast as Ian Somerhalder

Or stroll back another three centuries for #MaryRenault’s lush and amazing Ancient Greece novels, all the way from #Theseus to #AlexandertheGreat and then some. Complicated, queer, mystic and political, and the tiny bit of misogyny won’t even register after Game of Thrones.

But I’m straying too far from dragons. @naominovik’s #Temeraire series reimagines the Napoleonic War with dragons, and you should read it for stubborn & honourable, tactful & wounded, loyal & furious heroes, warrior women, a delightful Wellington, human & draconic politics.

Also, back to YA, but #MaggieStiefvater has a fabulous quartet of books with dead boys, living boys, magicians, oracles, dreaming trees, prophesied kings, a houseful of witchy women, queerness, friendship, & a goat-girl. Read #TheRavenBoys & wait for the sequel trilogy.

For queerness, politics, swords, assassins, family, love, magic, academia, and above all chocolate, please please read the amazing @EllenKushner’s Swordspoint, its sequels & the prequel series Tremontaine. I know I talk about it often, but I feel like I can’t talk about it enough

I feel certain I’m missing out on someone I love reading and will be sorry later. I assume everyone knows and has read #UrsulaleGuin #OctaviaButler @Nnedi, @zenaldehyde @kuangrf @tashadrinkstea @nkjemisin @seananmcguire? Good. Good. 

Plus the amazing @Miminality @emilyenrose @her_nibsen, & all the free-to-read SF/F/H mags. if you haven’t please check out @anathemaspec @PodCastle_org @LightspeedMag @fyremag @FiresideFiction @BCSmagazine @UncannyMagazine @strangehorizons. There’s so much out there, just read.

Katherine Addison’s #TheGoblinEmperor is both very kind and unflinching: a story of a neglected fourth son who abruptly becomes emperor, and all the consequences spiralling out from that. Featuring the sweetest boy who ever got a crown, version 2.0

Nicola Griffith’s #Hild leaves me drunk and reeling every time I read it, and you should too: the life of St. Hilda of Whitby as intricate and detail-drenched as any fever-dream and just: political and historical and queer and feminine and everything the best bildungsromans can be.

All these writers are women, several are WoC, several are queer, some are all three. I got frustrated with GoT back in its first season, so much so I still haven’t read A Dance with Dragons. I already read a fair bit of SFF/Hist; I’d read le Guin and McCullough. But at that point I started reading women authors in SFF deliberately and pretty much exclusively, because it wasn’t a male genre, and I wanted to read about other worlds and times from a non-masc perspective as much as I could. I also read historical romances & a ton of fanfic.

(Oh. I forgot @Berlin_Marina! You should go read her stuff.)

IDK whether any of the authors I mentioned will get TV/film deals, and as everyone watching #TheMagicians can endlessly tell you, there’s no guarantee an adaptation won’t take away the things you liked most. So just. Go and read these wonderful worlds by these amazing women.

but uh. For creation & breaking of worlds, kinstrife & kinslaying, murder of innocents, incest & torture, imprisonment & kidnapping, werewolves & wizards, stars & sailors, spiders & demons & seafaring birds, humans & dwarves & elves & gods, turn to the master. Read some Tolkien.

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To me the most fun part about fix-its is placing dominoes.

Tragedies often consist of escalating series of actions and circumstances which, in isolation, were not clearly leading to the tragic end but form a chain of cause-and-effect directly towards it in hindsight. In equal but opposite fashion, I love starting with small inoccuous changes to canon that in themselves do not obviously fix everything but start a new chain that leads to a better ending.

It's kind of impossible for fix-its to feel fully natural– the reader by definition knows what the original ending was and that this ending will be happier because the writer wants it to be– but it is possible for them to not feel contrived. A big deus-ex-machina, or a character breaking with their pre-established tragic flaws to suddenly make all the "correct" decisions almost always feels unsatisfying to me.

But a few carefully placed small domino pieces slowly knocking over bigger and bigger tiles until the entire story has radically changed? That's a lot more fun.

It recquires the author to both correctly identify the original chain of cause-and-effect and understand the characters well enough to know how they'd react to different circumstances. Because if the story feels like it's fixing the wrong problem or the characters don't act like themselves the magic is lost. But when it works? When it clicks and the reader sees the domino chain laid out in front of them? It's beautiful.

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Happy Pride!

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“The original orgies and bizarre sex were perfectly sufficient” I am always saying this

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I love every fucking part of this.

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Submitted comment: “I wanted to submit this paper from 2021 which is like. one of the single most aggressive academic papers I have ever seen; for context there are as I understand currently two main strains of thought as to where life first evolved— in submarine alkaline hydrothermal vents, or in above-water volcanic hot springs. The author here I believe is one of the original proponents of the hydrothermal vents hypothesis, defending it against some recent publications from the hot springs camp criticizing it for lacking evidence, and it gets. heated. The whole thing is kinda nuts but this paragraph in particular actually had my jaw actually drop reading it”

Here we counterface all the arguments made in recent papers from the very well-funded and promoted groups militantly opposed to AVT. One of these papers offers the advice “Don’t try to prove an idea is right. Instead, try to falsify it”. Fully cognizant of Popper’s “Reason and Refutation”, this has long been our own mantra, though notably unshared across the community. As an example of good faith, Branscomb and colleagues wrote, “arguably the key virtue of the alkaline hydrothermal vent (AHV) model as a scientific hypothesis regarding the initial steps in the emergence of life is its essentially unique vulnerability to disproof. It places all of its chips on the claim that certain naturally arising, but experimentally reproducible, geochemical circumstances do produce castles of mineral ‘cells’ in which three key, undeniably life-like chemical disequilibria are ‘abiotically’ generated and maintained. If it proves not to be possible to experimentally substantiate these conjectures, then we may expect interest in the theory to wane.” Furthermore, falsifiable predictions of AVT were listed in Russell that would, if demonstrated, “reveal embarrassing missing links, or even leave the AVT as just one more casualty of the general theory of natural rejection.” We look forward to similar commitment and clarity from the wet-dry polymerizing pond people. However, we do admit to being impressed over the one prediction made by this group—viz., Dimitar Sassalov’s promise that Harvard University “will soon have the equivalent of a living thing in the lab at the chemical level”. We will be particularly interested to hear what bearing such an artifact might have on the putative ‘first universal ancestor’, its evolving progeny and the geochemical/geophysical disequilibria responsible for its emergence?

The “Water Problem”(sic), the Illusory Pond and Life’s Submarine Emergence—A Review (Russell, 2021)

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ranking the best things I have heard surgeons say mid-surgery:

1. "Five second rule!" while scrubbed, after dropping a sterile scalpel on the floor (no they did NOT pick it up again but I swear everyone's buttholes puckered)

2. (spoken during the closing of a particularly long and difficult case) "Nurse - my tunes." :heavy metal starts blasting:

3. Gently to a fretful patient, pre-anaesthesia: "It's going to be okay. I promise, I've dealt with worse." As soon as the patient is unconscious: "This is literally the worst thing I've ever seen."

4. [okay this one was a med student] "Wowwww, that's so gross!!" Reg: "Please remember that [patient] is awake for this procedure." Student to patient: "Oh my god. I am so sorry, that was really unprofessional - " Patient, cheerfully, also engrossed with what's happening inside them on the screen: "Nah - it's, like, super gross, right?"

5. [another procedure where the patient couldn't be put under GA] Patient: *starts singing country roads midway through the procedure* Surgeon: *shrugs and joins in with surprisingly good harmony*