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Safety inspection in the Mines of Moria.

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Do kids today even understand why podcasts are called podcasts?

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imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

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A series of events:

1. I put in an Annual Leave request form almost 3 weeks ago and my boss has not approved it yet

2. I went into my office today and replaced every single writing utensil with crayons in preparation for April Fools Day on Monday

3. Whilst searching for pens to remove, I found my unsigned Annual Leave form in my boss’s drawer

4. I placed my unsigned Annual Leave form in a photo frame and put it on his desk

5. The frame I used was from a photo of his kids that I deemed less important than my Leave form

6. My boss sometimes goes into the office on Saturdays to work

7.

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if u ever find a genie and you’re really craving a dessert that looks like this:

do NOT say “i’d like a lifetime supply of raspberry crowns”

while this is, in fact, the name of the pastry, it’s ALSO the name of a species of wasp for some reason. the genie, being a nasty trickster, will no doubt give you a bunch of wasps.

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“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative

“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot

“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.

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everything is a horse if you are wrong about what things are

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i do think a lot of implausible medieval plot devices make more sense when considering the fact that these people simply did not have glasses

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look: our neanderthal ancestors took care of the sick and disabled so if ur post-apocalyptic scenario is an excuse for eugenics, u are a bad person and literally have less compassion than a caveman

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Sometimes you'll see a certain strain of Liberal Environmentalist talk as though environmental destruction in Imperial Periphery ("Third World") nations is the result of some personal failing of the people living there; that they're only cutting down trees and eroding the soil because they're too stupid and/or greedy to do otherwise. When in reality your average "third world" peasant knows very well how much they rely on their surrounding ecosystems to live and develops a pretty good idea of the deleterious impacts their action have. Their actions are a result of pure desperation; the grinding poverty forced onto them by Imperialism means living like this is the only chance they have at feeding themselves and their families for another day. The charcoal sellers around Lichinga (Niassa Province, Mozambique) in the 2000s provide a good example of this dynamic in practice:

The charcoal vendors also complain. They cycle with 3 or 4 huge bags of charcoal, easily exceeding their own weight, from as far as 80 kms away, pushing their bikes up the many hills. It is hard work to cut the trees, put them in heaps, cover them in grass and mud, burn them in a very controlled way, then load the bags and get them to Lichinga to sell them for $2 a bag of 25 kg - $6-8 per trip if they are lucky. If there was another way to earn this money locally, they wouldn't do this, they said. And they knew that the forest was fast being destroyed, moving further and further away, but what to do? As they say: 'Poverty sucks your bones dry'.

Joseph Hanlon & Teresa Smart (2008) Do bicycles equal development in Mozambique. Boydell & Brewer

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Charlotta Maria Hauksdotti, Topography Study V, 2017

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I get that sex and drugs are fun but even im like. at least have a 3rd thing. at least one more hobby. you can have a 3rd hobby. this isnt a purity thing this is a some of u are fucking boring thing.

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There is a species of butterfly that lives in the mountains.

When it hatches as a caterpillar, it lowers itself to the ground on a strand of silk, and then produces a chemical that smells like the larvae of ants. An ant eventually discovers it, lured by the scent, and brings it back to the anthill, where it is cared for by the colony until it pupates. After a few weeks, the adult butterfly crawls back up through the anthill, through the dirt and the winding tunnels, and out into the sunlight before it can finally open its wings.

Some say that the caterpillar “tricks” the ants into doing this. I don’t know if I agree – I think it’s too small a thing to accuse of guile, don’t you?

With this in mind: Once upon a time, there were seven dwarves.

They lived and worked in the mountains, mining for gold and jewels and precious things. And one night, after a long day’s labour, they heard a knocking at the great stone doors of their mountain.

Outside, shivering and small, they found a human child.

I’m sure you can guess most of what she told them. Stepmothers were involved – it’s not important. What’s important was that each of the dwarves felt a dire and pressing need to care for the child, and they took her into their home, fed her, clothed her, and gave her a warm bed to sleep in. And many seasons passed around that mountain, with the dwarves raising the child as one of their own, until one autumn’s day.

The girl laid, slender and still, in a coffin of spun glass. And some weeks later, one of the dwarves had the idea to call for a prince. This was of course the sensible thing to do, and the prince of a nearby kingdom who listened to the story thought an ensorcelled girl would be a grand thing to rescue.

Poor devils. It feels cruel to judge them. But there were so many questions they could’ve asked – what was this stepmother’s name? Was she real? Did she exist? Who had made the glass coffin? Surely one of them must’ve thought of the question. And why did it grow more opaque with every passing day?

Were they wrong to trust?

I guess it doesn’t matter now.

The moment the prince stepped into the subterranean chamber with the glass coffin, it shivered with a twinkling, plinking noise. Threads of glass exploded into glittering, razor-edged confetti.

A claw split the great glass cocoon.

The thing that spilled out of it, hulking and huge, knew in the fog of its mind, in a base animal sense that screamed, that it was in a room too small for it to fit. It wanted up. It wanted out.

In front of it was some twiggy little thing holding a sword.

It took its first breath.

The flames were the colour of cornflowers.

The dwarves fled. The thing followed close behind, up, up, up through the stone and the winding tunnels, not to chase, not to hunt, but to get up, to get out, out, out–

It struck the great stone doors at a run. They crumbled like gingerbread. And then there was sunlight, and the open sky…

And it could finally open its wings.

Convergent evolution is a hell of a thing.

The dragon, of course, lived happily ever after with its loot of gold and jewels from a hastily abandoned dwarf mine. Being much bigger than a caterpillar, we could accuse it of tricking the dwarves who were kind to it, had taken it in, had fed and clothed and warmed it.

It probably wouldn't mind.

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Years and years ago, I read a book on cryptography that I picked up because it looked interesting--and it was!

But there was a side anecdote in there that stayed with me for more general purposes.

The author was describing a cryptography class that they had taken back in college where the professor was demonstrating the process of "reversibility", which is a principle that most codes depend on. Specifically, it should be easy to encode, and very hard to decode without the key--it is hard to reverse the process.

So he had an example code that he used for his class to demonstrate this, a variation on the Book Code, where the encoded text would be a series of phone numbers.

The key to the code was that phone books are sorted alphabetically, so you could encode the text easily--picking phone numbers from the appropriate alphabetical sections to use ahead of time would be easy. But since phone books were sorted alphabetically, not numerically, it would be nearly impossible to reverse the code without exhaustively searching the phone book for each string of numbers and seeing what name it was tied to.

Nowadays, defeating this would be child's play, given computerized databases, but back in the 80s and 90s, this would have been a good code... at least, until one of the students raised their hand and asked, "Why not just call the phone numbers and ask who lives there?"

The professor apparently was dumbfounded.

He had never considered that question. As a result, his cipher, which seemed to be nearly unbreakable to him, had such an obvious flaw, because he was the sort of person who could never coldcall someone to ask that sort of thing!

In the crypto book, the author went on to use this story as an example of why security systems should not be tested by the designer (because of course the security system is ready for everything they thought of, by definition), but for me, as a writer, it stuck with me for a different reason.

It's worth talking out your story plot with other people just to see if there's a "Why not just call the phone numbers?" obvious plot hole that you've missed, because of your singular perspective as a person. Especially if you're writing the sort of plot where you have people trying to outsmart each other.