my-life-in-stars

[my-life-in-stars]

In battle, that is!

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I'm gonna regret this

So, this... dish? Food item? Thing to eat?:

Seems to have a lot of names. And now I'm going to make a poll with a bunch of the names I've heard this dish called.

I am already 100% certain that this will be one of those "OP is about to find out their experience isn't universal" polls.

In fact, what I call this *isn't even listed in the Wikipedia article about this dish*.

I'm starting to believe that it what I call it is a regionalism so narrow in both place and time that the only other people who call it what I call it went to sleepaway camp in the Berkshire Mountains in the early 1980s.

P.S. WHY THE HELL ARE REPLIES RESTRICTED?? I DID NOT SET ANY RESTRICTIONS!

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The Motherfucking Lizard King

No one at work trusts my boss. 

He's smart. He works hard. He's not trustworthy. He hasn't actually fucked anyone at work over, but he's ruined his last two marriages with affairs, and got dumped by his third fiance when he wouldn't sign a prenup. The fact that we all know this is just a hazard of working in a small town. 

Anyway: The thought process of the people in the lab is that if he screwed over his first wife, and his second wife, and was probably planning on screwing over his third wife, it would be insane for him not to screw us over. After all, what kind of idiot treats their employees better than their spouse? 

I dunno. His kind, I guess? He's had a few chances to fuck us over, and he hasn't taken them. Opposite really. When our parent company was doing furloughs, he stayed in the office almost a hundred hours, talking and talking and talking his way up the corporate ladder. And in the end, no one at our site got furloughed. 

He's pulled strings like that before. And it baffles me, right? Because it really does make zero sense. He'll move the heavens and the earth for us, but his wife and kids are afterthoughts. It feels like any moment, he's going to look into the mirror and realize how stupid that is. It feels like I'm betting on him making the same stupid mistake again, and again, and again - like it would be less cynical to believe he was, eventually, going to stab me in the back. But he hasn't yet, and as far as I can tell he's been making that mistake for close to fifteen years, and it's already cost him everything it can. If he was going to learn, he would have by now. 

So my position on him is that if he wanted to date someone I cared about, I'd warn them off. I don't trust him there. But I tentatively trust him to be my boss. Maybe one day he'll stick the knife in and twist, and everyone will say Ah, Babs, we warned you, but for now, I accept that he's doing a very predictable, very irrational thing, and I've made my peace with it. 

---

My job has glue traps. 

No one likes the glue traps, but we don't have a lot of options. Poison's banned by state law, spring traps are banned by company safety, and several non-lethal options tried in the past failed to work. The mouse problem can get pretty bad if it's ignored, and there's some real health hazards in that. Our site has never had a positive hantavirus test, thank God, but the big base about a half hour away has. That guy's gonna be on oxygen the rest of his life. 

If a mouse gets caught, we just euthanize it. But more than mice get stuck. Lizards can wander into those traps too, and the people working there have different feelings about the lizards. They don't pose nearly the same kind of risk mice do. They're chill little guys, and they keep the moths away, and they're just 

You know. They're friendly. There's something to be said about walking into a room, and hitting the light switch, and seeing two little guys on the wall start to do pushups as soon as they see you. 

People used to just euthanize the lizards too, but I had pet leopard geckos as a kid and I couldn't take that so I wound up googling how to free animals from glue traps. Now, when a lizard gets stuck in a trap - which happens once or twice a week - I get some vegetable oil from the breakroom, and a little plastic fork, and I'll spend fifteen to twenty minutes just kind of gently prying the little guys out. 

I have a team of technicians that help me operate one of the larger machines. They're real blue collar guys, ex-airforce, and they make me look like a little kid. Being an engineer means they'll look to me as a leader sometimes, which is a wild experience. And I started helping the lizards for my own conscience, but one of the crazier consequences of it has been that it seriously boosted my leadership cred. Because those guys see me, and they go: Hey. If he's willing to fight for a lizard, he's gotta be willing to fight for me. 

I cannot overstate how nice that is. Most engineers that want to make a change to a maintenance practice, or try an upgrade, they have to work their asses off to get the techs to buy in. But I can just ask. They already trust me to do good. They know I'm new, and they know I'm not the smartest engineer in the building, but they also know I'm the one who gets lizards out of the glue traps. 

And just because of that, they're willing to follow me. 

---

My boss has a meeting every month or two. It's typically basic house cleaning stuff - reminders about routines we've gotten lazy on, and updates on future projects. Maybe some warnings about problems coming from higher up in the company.

People are, in my opinion, a bit too cynical about the meetings. It stems from people not trusting our boss, which again, I understand, because it would make so much more sense if he wasn't trustworthy. It's a testament to the man's incredibly unhealthy priorities that he is. But as we made it to the end of the meeting, one of bullet points was: 

Do NOT mess with animals in the building. 

So I looked at my techs, and they looked at me, and when he got to the point, he was so scathing I actually just wanted to crawl under a rock and die. He said basically that he'd heard some reports about someone in the building handling animals that found their way in and got stuck, and that he just wanted to emphasize how insanely inappropriate that was, not to mention dangerous, and that if he needed to speak to anyone about it again, there would be severe consequences. 

I was willing to just take the shame and move on. I was. But one of my techs is old. Old enough he could've retired two years ago. And his actual literal goal is to one day get angry, yell at someone, and storm out. That's how he wants to retire. So instead of biting his tongue like everyone else, he stood up and said: I hate the glue traps. You hate the glue traps. We all hate glue traps. But we've all sat here for years, ignoring the little things that get stuck in them, watching them die, and then Bab's comes in, and he is the first person in decades to give enough of a shit to start pulling the lizards out. And I don't want him to stop. 

Get humane traps or shut up but we are not going back to the old way of just letting things starve. 

And my boss actually froze up. He got all wide eyed and stared at Marc, and then the other techs jumped in, and there was a very small but intense rebellion in the meeting and my boss kept trying to interrupt while getting absolutely bowled over by this gang of angry middle aged air force vets, and eventually he just went 

I will speak with Babylon about this afterwards! After! And then he will speak with everyone else, but I have more points to cover. 

So they went silent, and my boss rushed through the last five minutes, and we all adjounred. The techs really didn't like that I was going in alone - they thought our boss was going to try and shout me into compliance. Marc in particular was like, Look, if he tries bullying you, stand your ground, and if he threatens anything, just come get us, and we'll give him hell. 

So armed with that, I went to my boss's office. I sat in the chair across from him, and he kept his composure for maybe five seconds before just flopping back into his chair. 

I had no idea you were saving lizards, he said, but I'm glad you are. I always hated seeing them die in the glue.  

I wasn't expecting that. I was about to ask him what the comment from the meeting was about then, but he answered that before I even got the chance.

A snake got into the building last week, and - someone picked it up and chased a coworker around. Turns out that coworker was severely afraid of snakes, and now it's a shitshow. We're a small site, and now I can't ask those two to work together anymore, to say nothing about how the snake fared after all that. Being upset about that is a reasonable thing, right? 

And he gave me a look like he actually wanted an answer, so I said Yeah, totally, chasing a coworker around with a snake is a dick move. Especially if that coworker is already afraid of snakes. 

And he said Exactly! and then we sat there a few moments longer. He looked so incredibly tired that I did, actually, feel kind of bad for him. And then he somehow managed to sink even further into his chair, and said

Look, I know I'm not a good guy. But I'm not evil. I'm not some sort of crazy asshole that's going to demand that everyone watch lizards starve to death. When you go back downstairs, could you try to pass that on? That I'm not evil? 

I said Sure because it wasn't a hard request, and he looked relieved. I actually made it halfway out before I realized I had a question. 

Who grabbed the snake? I asked. 

Not supposed to talk about it, he said. But whoever comes to mind first is probably right. 

ThatGuy? I asked. And he looked me in the face, nodded his head yes, and said No. 

---

The techs seemed a little disappointed that they didn't get to storm the boss's office, but were otherwise in good spirits. They were actually a little bit embarrassed to hear about the snake story - apparently, it wasn't much of a secret. It'd just slipped their minds because it happened three weeks ago. 

We did maintenance after that, the same basic repairs we did every week. The meeting had been stressful and it was a relief to work with my hands. When the parts were reinstalled, everything cleaned and smooth and ready to go, Marc found me again. 

You know what the lesson of today is? he asked. And there were quite a few answers to that that I could have taken - from don't assume the worst of people to be careful with how you spend your trust - we all need it more than we think. 

But instead I said what? because I wanted to hear what his answer was going to be. 

That I got your back, he said. Then he clapped one very, very large hand on my shoulder, gave it a good squeeze, and walked back to dosimetry lab.

---

The next day, Marc gave me a package and told me to open it in my office. I was suspicious, but I followed the request.

Cardboard gave way to a small baggie, obviously full of fabric, which opened to reveal a t-shirt that read

"I Am the Motherfucking Lizard King."

I looked at it, I loved it, and then I got an idea. I went to my boss's office and knocked on the door. When he opened it, I asked him if he would be willing to allow something very unprofessional to happen for morale building purposes.

How unprofessional? he asked. I held the shirt up in answer. He gave the shirt a short look over and snorted.

You can wear it on weeks without customers, he said. Which just so happened to include that week.

I'll pass on that it came with your blessing, I replied, and he looked oddly relieved.

Thanks, he said. And then I went downstairs.

---

The techs were very, very happy to see the shirt. And while my boss's reputation remains in tatters, and probably will be until he moves (or dies), the next time there was a meeting, there was quite a bit less complaining about how mere presence. Which is, I guess, a start.

We'll see if he squanders it.

[my-life-in-stars]

Jimmy Carter appreciation post.

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the only things i know about jimmy carter are:

-he looked straight up dead when he turned 100 and voted early cos he was straight up dead and now he's actually dead dead

-was president during the three mile island reactor partial meltdown incident and because he had worked on nuclear subs before he knew that shit was fine and went over there to be like lalala i <3 reactors while the media were shitting their britches over a teeny tiny amount of radiation

[my-life-in-stars]

HOLD THE LINE!! KEEP PUSHING!!!!!

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UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting (4 December 2024)

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

[my-life-in-stars]

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TIL that the reason lead levels in children’s blood have dropped 85% in the past thirty years is because of an unknown scientist who fought car companies to end leaded gasoline. He also removed it from paint, suggested its removal from pipes, and campaigned for the removal of lead solder from cans.

via ift.tt

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has tumblr heard about the saga of raefarty yet

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Religious art leaves out the best part and it’s such a goddamn shame. Livestock, Agriculture and Food is an integral part of any culture and we all need to be pushing for more realistic sheep in religious art. #FATTAILSFORJESUS

[my-life-in-stars]

[my-life-in-stars]

10 Non-Lethal Injuries to Add Pain to Your Writing

If you need a simple way to make your characters feel pain, here are some ideas: 

1. Sprained Ankle

A common injury that can severely limit mobility. This is useful because your characters will have to experience a mild struggle and adapt their plans to their new lack of mobiliy. Perfect to add tension to a chase scene.

2. Rib Contusion

A painful bruise on the ribs can make breathing difficult, helping you sneak in those ragged wheezes during a fight scene. Could also be used for something sport-related! It's impactful enough to leave a lingering pain but not enough to hinder their overall movement.

3. Concussions

This common brain injury can lead to confusion, dizziness, and mood swings, affecting a character’s judgment heavily. It can also cause mild amnesia.

I enjoy using concussions when you need another character to subtly take over the fight/scene, it's an easy way to switch POVs. You could also use it if you need a 'cute' recovery moment with A and B.

4. Fractured Finger

A broken finger can complicate tasks that require fine motor skills. This would be perfect for characters like artists, writers, etc. Or, a fighter who brushes it off as nothing till they try to throw a punch and are hit with pain.

5. Road Rash

Road rash is an abrasion caused by friction. Aka scraping skin. The raw, painful sting resulting from a fall can be a quick but effective way to add pain to your writing. Tip: it's great if you need a mild injury for a child.

6. Shoulder Dislocation

This injury can be excruciating and often leads to an inability to use one arm, forcing characters to confront their limitations while adding urgency to their situation. Good for torture scenes.

7. Deep Laceration

A deep laceration is a cut that requires stitches. As someone who got stitches as a kid, they really aren't that bad! A 2-3 inch wound (in length) provides just enough pain and blood to add that dramatic flair to your writing while not severely deterring your character.

This is also a great wound to look back on since it often scars. Note: the deeper and wider the cut the worse your character's condition. Don't give them a 5 inch deep gash and call that mild.

8. Burns

Whether from fire, chemicals, or hot surfaces, burns can cause intense suffering and lingering trauma. Like the previous injury, the lasting physical and emotional trauma of a burn is a great wound for characters to look back on.

If you want to explore writing burns, read here.

9. Pulled Muscle

This can create ongoing pain and restrict movement, offering a window to force your character to lean on another. Note: I personally use muscle related injuries when I want to focus more on the pain and sprains to focus on a lack of mobility.

10. Tendonitis

Inflammation of a tendon can cause chronic pain and limit a character's ability to perform tasks they usually take for granted. When exploring tendonitis make sure you research well as this can easily turn into a more severe injury.

This is a quick, brief list of ideas to provide writers inspiration. Since it is a shorter blog, I have not covered the injuries in detail. This is inspiration, not a thorough guide. Happy writing! :)

Looking For More Writing Tips And Tricks? 

Check out the rest of Quillology with Haya; a blog dedicated to writing and publishing tips for authors!

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Tell me a soft memory

[my-life-in-stars]

i can’t do this, sam.

i know. it’s all wrong. by rights we shouldn’t even be here. but we are. it’s like in the great stories, mr frodo. the ones that really mattered. full of darkness and danger they were. and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. because how could the end be happy? how could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?

but in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. even darkness must pass. a new day will come. and when the sun shines it will shine out clearer. those were the stories that stayed with you. that meant something. even if you were too small to understand why. but i think, mr frodo, i do understand. i know now. folks in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. because they were holding on to something.

what are we holding on to, sam?

that there’s some good in this world, mr frodo. and it’s worth fighting for.