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bomberqueen17 · 1 year

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uhhhhmuhgawhhhh

ok this has been a long fucking month.

i am back in buffalo. i am in my house. i had to find my pillow, which had gotten misfiled. but i have had a slep, i have gotten catsnuggles, i have gotten *cough* we'll call them dudesnuggles. i have awoken. i have made my coffee the way i like it. i am on a couch on my computer and don't have to do anything for at least an hour.

now i can tell to you the Saga of All Of It.

so like ok August was a really rough month. It was just-- busy, and I had been tentatively on a three-weeks-on, one-week-off schedule at the farm, and had thus managed to visit Buffalo like, well once this summer but you know. Anyway the last time I was home I'd spent the entire time helping Dude's mom clear out his aunt's house, so it hadn't exactly been relaxing or let me do any of my own projects, but it had been something. But I got back to the farm and it was go-go-go-go, and then BIL and Farmsister and Farmkid and my mom went on vacation together for a week so I had to watch the house and fill in some farm duties especially dealing with the farmer's market and such, and then they got back and it was a frantic game of catch-up, and then the Livestock Manager got married so he had a week off before and a week after, prearranged but the amount of work was still the same. And it meant that BIL especially was very overworked and was horribly cranky about it and, I'm not gonna tiptoe around it, was real fuckin mean to specifically me for a bunch of it, so that sucked out loud. And in the midst of all of this there were a couple of events where everybody else was invited to a thing and I had to stay home and cover for the absences. And it all kinda piled up and like, I'm a grown ass woman and can handle not being invited to things but it was a lot of things. And I tried, in the middle there, to celebrate my birthday a little bit? but there wasn't a ton of time, I found out Friday afternoon that I'd be able to have Saturday off, so I did scrape together an expedition for myself to a nearby art museum at least but that was the sum total of it, a flying visit from a friend for which I had like four free hours and then had to return to work, and dude visited for the weekend and I got to spend a couple hours looking at art. That was it.

So I was really tired and really done, and this final week BIL was just like outright shitty to me, yelling at me about things that either 1) went against a policy he'd made up earlier, like using a particular method of cleaning on a particular floor drain which he had specifically told me not to do, clearly changed his mind about, and then was furious i hadn't done, but see I wasn't notified of the mind change there so I didn't know? anyway, or 2) were things that I'm not in charge of and I just happened to be the person closest to him when he noticed that something hadn't been done the way he thought it should have specifically been done today even though there would have been reasons at other times to not do it like that, and in fact in this case later it became useful that it had been done as it was, and-- just anyway. It was stuff normally I'd not be so upset about but at the culmination of this extremely thankless-grinding month I was just distraught.

So I got my work done early enough to leave at midday on Friday. And I did, after lunch I did a tiny bit more work but left the farm before 2pm, absolutely giddy at the thought of getting home to Buffalo in time for dinner.

And traffic was annoyingly heavy on 787, but all was fine and doable and not a problem until some jackass decided to cut into the entrance ramp for the 90 at the last possible second and some even bigger jackass decided that the only way to react to this was by theatrically overreacting by coming to a complete fucking stop and so

well i hit the person in front of me, and the person behind me hit me, and the person behind her hit her, and we all pulled off on the side of the road and had to wait for the cops. My hood was crunched shut, and my exhaust system, already having become noisy from part of a pipe rusting through, snapped clean in half.

But nothing was leaking. And nobody was hurt. The lady in the car behind gave me her number and left, because she had dogs in the car who were likely to overheat in the 90F high humidity, and also recently a woman had been killed on the side of this very road in this very situation and she was too afraid to wait. But the ladies in the car ahead were nice and offered me a drink from their cooler and just seemed tired but not mad, and had already called the cops which was great because I had forgotten how to operate my phone in all the kerfuffle.

So we waited for a state trooper to show up-- and notably, he was actually really nice, very reassuring, understanding of how I was also on the phone with my insurance company (also very nice, and I had to have her on the car speaker because the traffic noise was so much i couldn't hear my phone microphone at all, and I was so distracted I kept being like "you want me to what" and then not hearing the answer-- telling her my license plate number was like the most difficult thing for some reason), and he got us to move our cars to a different off-ramp where there was less traffic, and we filled out all the paperwork and stuff and he gave me directions for how to get back to the westbound interstate. He called the lady from the car behind me, for me, and the two of them explained to me that since there was negligible damage I didn't actually have to report that accident if I didn't want to, and so I was like okay fine let's not even bother, since it has to be a whole separate accident report and none of the damage to my car is from that accident. (Not visibly anyway, though I expect it's probably why the exhaust system did what it did-- still though, not likely to be relevant. Even though surely the accident I did report is going to be determined to be my fault, but this second one wouldn't be-- it wouldn't help anything.)

I took off and immediately realized I wasn't going to be able to drive the car as it was, and helpfully a man pulled up next to me at that light and said "your exhaust system is definitely dragging, do you know about it?" and I said wearily "I was just in an accident so thank you for helping me identify what the problem actually is", and went past the on-ramp into the parking lot of a fire hall right there that happened to also be a pokemon gym in my color. I sat for a moment, put a defender in the gym (thanks, random team instinct person, for having taken that gym half an hour previous, that cheered me up a bunch), and then got out of my car, found a work glove I knew I'd thrown in there, crawled under the car a bit, and tucked the muffler pipe up to sit on top of the catalytic converter so it wouldn't drag on the ground. (I don't know that the glove was necessary but I do know exhaust systems get real fuckin hot so i do recommend gloves if handling any of those parts on a car that's been running lately.)

It worked, it held, and I was like well. Car runs. Hood's all cattywumpus but it's definitely not going to fly open because it's literally crimped shut. Already had some front-end damage on this thing from an accident we mutually decided not to report a couple years back-- very minor but the plastic is cracked and the foglight mount damaged. Well now it's proper fucked, so that's fine. I was going to have to find a mechanic to repair the muffler assemblage anyway, it was already loud as fuck, so now it's just done with the polite fiction of being an exhaust system.

So I walked around the car, open and shut all the doors to make sure they still did, and then got in and got onto the Thruway. Fuck this shit, I was not going to drive back to the farm and then have to rely on a bunch of people of whom I'm slightly tired and who are clearly also slightly tired of me to have to ferry my ass around, and miss my extremely extremely necessary week off of work (because you know if I'm there I'm going to fucking do work on the farm, that's how it works, I have no boundaries).

All I wanted was to see a person (and cat) who actually enjoy my company and want to see me.

So I put in earplugs because the noise was not great, and drove 300 miles, and arrived just before dark, and pulled into the driveway and Chita was so surprised to see me that she came right out to me even though i was still sitting in my car. She doesn't like cars, hates them when they're moving and really doesn't like being in them, but she does like to sit under them when they're off.

[image description: a small gray cat with her paws up on the running board of a blue car, peering in the open driver's side door with motion-blurred interest; the foreground is my bare leg and the hem of my dress and my filthy car floor]

So I'm home, and I have already done all the awkward phone calls, and I was expecting I'd need to call the garage my insurance company has set up to do the assessing (that's how my insurance company does it) but the text of it says they'll call me. i still might call them midmorning today to see if they're open. IDK I don't even care what happens now, I'm home and I've had my own coffee and my cat missed me and my dude missed me and i'll just figure the rest out later.

#about the author #car accidents #not graphic don't worry

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thejakeformerlyknownasprince · 2 years

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Errors, “Errors,” and Animorphs

So in a different post I ranted about how a tiny non-distracting unfixable difference between two shirts is not an error in Jurassic Park. IMHO, a continuity gap is only an error if:

It draws attention to itself and distracts the audience

It could’ve been fixed pretty easily in-story

It makes character, plot, or setting nonsensical

Animorphs has continuity gaps of its own. And I have opinions about what we readers do and do not count as “error.” First, an example that’s clearly an error:

I wondered if Tobias had heard my thought. I concentrated. Tobias, can you hear me?

«Yeah,» he said, «I hear you.»

“Did you hear my thoughts before that?” I asked.

«No, I don’t think it works that way. You have to think at me for me to hear.»

—#1: The Invasion

Tobias briefly hearing Jake thought-speak in #1 breaks the rules of the setting; several other books (#2, #23, #31, #33, #46) clearly state that it’s impossible to thought-speak if one is human and not in morph. It’s an easy fix; the re-releases and audiobooks delete this moment, and the graphic novel makes Tobias unable to hear Jake. It distracts the audience; I’ve gotten 5 or 6 separate asks over the years of people going “I was rereading #1, and the weirdest thing...” It’s an error. I can’t say what happened behind the scenes — K.A. Applegate toyed with a thread that was later dropped, or decided to introduce a limitation for plot fuel at a later time. But it’s an error.

Second, an example that I don’t think counts as an error:

I returned to my life, feeling strange and out of place. That night Jake came over. We went outside.

"I tried morphing the Tyrannosaurus," he said. "Nothing. Didn't work."

"You could ask Ax. He may know why."

Jake laughed. "Yeah, but even if he explains it, I still won't understand it."

—MM2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs [Cassie’s narration]

The kids not being able to morph dinosaurs outside of the Cretaceous Era makes a lot of sense in context. The whole book series would fundamentally change if they could use T. rex — that would become heavily a favored morph for many of them. It kicks off all kinds of plot questions that demand answers: Where do the controllers think the “andalite bandits” got dino DNA? What anti-dinosaur measures would they be forced to adopt? Would the Animorphs’ whole strategy change around having those morphs? How would Rachel feel about everyone but Tobias suddenly having a much stronger morph than her? Would they even bother with contemporary animal morphs afterward?

If the kids are morphing dinosaurs all the time after ~#18, then the series loses a lot of its uniqueness. Applegate has said that most of the inspiration for the series was about trying to help kids understand what it would really be like to be inside an animal mind, with as many animals as possible. That’s part of why so many of the plots hinge on giving the Animorphs an excuse to learn a new morph (e.g. #4, #17, #27, #47, #52) so that we can experience the coolness right along with them. That’s why the war is explicitly about fighting for Earth, nonhumans and all (#7, #23, #53). If it’s not a menagerie of six different critters — including one immigrant from space — rolling up to battle, then it’s not Animorphs. No, it makes no dang sense that sario rip morphs stop working once the rip gets unripped. But the series acknowledges it, and it allows us both to have a unique animal-based story (dinosaurs! Heckin dinosaurs!) without ruining its own premise.

Third, one that I find fascinating because it’s kind of right on the margin:

"What I don't get is why I have to be a girl wolf," Marco grumbled.

"We had one male and one female," Cassie explained for the tenth time. "If two of us morphed into the male, we'd have two males. Two male wolves might decide they had to fight for dominance."

"I could control it," Marco said.

"Marco, you and Jake already fight for dominance, and you're just ordinary guys," Rachel pointed out.

—#3: The Encounter

Later, Tobias’s narration uses the word “alpha” to describe Jake’s morphed behavior — howling and peeing to mark territory, challenging another wolf pack to protect his own.

There is scientific consensus right now, as of the 2020s, that the term “alpha” is an inaccurate descriptor of pack-lead behavior, and that dominance fights between adult males are almost nonexistent. That although wolves usually run in a phalanx-like shape with one middle-aged male and female at the point, this isn’t the result of dominance fights but rather an effort to have the physically strongest wolves absorb blows from rogue prey animals or rival predators. That the dominance fights observed in captive wolves in the 1970s were the result of an ecology error, putting wolves from rival packs into single enclosures. Fox (1972, 1973) gave a reasonably accurate description of how wolves behave if you put a bunch of adult strangers in a zoo together: the young adult males fight, the winner of that fight wins first access to food, and the mate of the winner gets the most resources for her puppies.

However, time rolls forward, and advances like hidden cameras (and the resurgence of wild wolf populations) allow us to watch wolves without needing to capture them first. Mech (1999) follows some such wolves around, and quickly realizes that dominance and submission aren’t nearly as important among wolves who chose to make a pack. Stahler et al. (2002) figure out a better way to introduce stranger wolves in captivity, and get full cooperation among young adult males. Nowadays drones and radio collars get 1000s of times the wolf data Fox had to work with, and reveal intense cooperation with little more than play-fighting among puppies.

The Encounter comes out 1997. Mech publishes the first big takedown of the alpha concept 1999.

Did an error occur anywhere in this process?

No, in that Applegate presumably doesn’t own a Time Matrix and published a book based on the scientific consensus at the time about how wolf social dynamics worked.

Yes, in that the error is pretty distracting — I get drawn up short by it every time I reread #3, and I know others have too.

No, in that the error was corrected in the graphic novel adaptation.

Yes, in that the error is still present in the audiobook, and Michael Crouch delivers the moment about Jake being backed into a dominance fight with all of Tobias’s exasperated humor.

No, in that the error allows for some character moments, both silly (Jake peeing on trees) and sweet (Jake being ready to take on an entire rival pack alone, over a rabbit he doesn’t want).

Yes, in that the error takes away from one of the series’ most fundamental purposes, to educate kids about animals.

Anyway, books are great, science is imperfect, and I think the more we all engage with amateur criticism the more we’re all going to learn about what counts as an error in fiction writing with inspiration in scientific reality.

#animorphs #animorphs meta #continuity errors #retcons #fandom #lit crit #3 #1 #mm2 #there's a related question: if the third graphic novel is also set in 1997 #then how does cassie know about the alpha wolf hypothesis being debunked in 1999?#but again #answering that question would make the book worse not better #so i don't worry about it

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