#but i had already written so many paragraphs... sorry OP

[thanatika]

really good points, i feel like dankovsky's connection to isidor isn't talked about much... maybe because a lot of people focus on patho2, which so far seems to have discarded that element entirely? i think that the second half of his line you posted at the start is even more indicative of his strong feelings about isidor:

simon's "murder" is what has doomed daniil's research, since he was depending on being able to study simon to avoid persecution by the powers that be. i previously wrote a post discussing how violently he reacts to the news of simon's death on day 1, as he makes a ton of homicidal and even a few suicidal remarks in response to that (he tells eva on day 1 that he'll "blow his brains out" if he has to return to the capital empty-handed). the fact that he is apparently even more enraged by isidor's death probably indicates the high level of regard for the man -- after all, he didn't know simon personally, but he and isidor probably had some amount of continuous correspondence to be called his "selfless advisor".

and i don't think that meant he truly understood isidor: based on that yulia dialogue, they had disagreements over their different systems of classifying and interpreting the world. and considering daniil knows almost nothing about the town when he arrives, i would assume that their correspondence focused much more on daniil's situation than on isidor's work. (after all, isidor sent his son off to study in the outside world, so he probably saw some value in scientific goings-on and reached out to daniil. hell, he and daniil might have been corresponding more regularly than isidor and artemy, since it's implied that artemy was a bit disconnected before returning to town.)

the fact that they had this connection does add an additional layer to daniil trying so hard to convince artemy that isidor's intended urdurgh was simon (and by extent, the polyhedron). i think the game leaves it ambiguous whether daniil is actively trying to manipulate artemy to get his desired outcome, or if he actually believes everything he's saying. i think it's some combination of the two -- i think he has really convinced himself of his theory, and it isn't a completely baseless theory either, but the way he's pushing artemy to arrive at his version of the truth is ironically so similar to the way aglaya pushed him to arrive at suitable conclusions about the polyhedron, which daniil felt so manipulated and infuriated by.

but back to his apparent strong fondness for isidor, i think part of it can be taken as a general character trait of daniil's -- he also refers to aglaya as his "best friend and most reliable ally" before discovering her "deception", and says "we are best friends now" about block just a few hours after being rescued on day 8. (he also gives andrey some pretty glowing praise in his quest log after first meeting him on day 2). i think that implies a certain amount of emotional disregulation, despite his mask of being the rational and impartial scientist. then again, his strong praise for all three of these people does come after they've saved him from certain doom: isidor gives him one last hope when he's on the brink of having his laboratory shut down, aglaya tells him she's going to help him when he's expecting her to have him executed, and block literally saves his life when he's about to be beaten to death for trespassing in the abattoir. so it also just goes to show how very desperate daniil is for any allies at all, and this desperation feels like it's being exploited from all sides by the end of his route.

Isidor and Simon, Daniil and Artemy

There’s one line that Daniil says to Yulia that has been driving me absolutely batty. Yulia says:

“You can call these demons what you want… you may refer to the Hair Eater as ‘time’ if this will make you any happier. I am comfortable with a more juvenile vernacular. It is what I am used to.”

And Bachelor replies: “You are repeating something that Isidor had once told me, almost word for word…”

When did this conversation happen? We don't have many letters between Daniil and Isidor to know how well they knew each other or how often they spoke. How did they meet? Why? How close were they? It’s hard to say, but Daniil refers to Isidor as “[m]y gentle associate, my selfless advisor.” Assuming he’s not being sarcastic, this is high praise. It also makes me think that Daniil took Isidor’s words to heart- deeply. That means that this idea, that people can be using different words to talk about the same things, is one that Daniil is more comfortable with that he’s always given credit for. Bachelor might be more open to setting aside semantic/linguistic differences for the sake of finding middle ground to agree on.

In the introductory healers cutscene, Daniil says, “it seems unlikely that we will ever get along well,” and then a few moments later he amends that statement to, “no… We won’t ever get along.”

That sounds sad. He seems almost like he had hope that the other two immediately dashed to pieces. Before, it was "unlikely" that they would get along "well," not impossible that they could get along at all. Now it is simply "we won't ever get along." He seems uncertain, perhaps because it is against his hard logic to completely bar any possibilities without confirmation. And he is usually adherent to standard social etiquette/ideas about politeness. It is possible that certain ideologies can find overlap and find a means of coexistence. But unlikely. Termites and Utopians don't often share tables. 

But Isidor tried to teach him that they could, and Daniil tried to remember that.

[foone]

Unbreathing Vacuum

I got an ADHD inspiration to write a short DS9 fic off a shitpost about Star Trek-but-all-the-computers-run-windows-98, so I wrote a thing about Odo and the crew's reaction to his seeming death. (This was written for twitter, so it's gonna have some weird paragraph breaks, sorry about that)

Odo is tracking down a Bolian weapons dealer with as many morals as hair follicles when he finally corners him in a cargo bay. It goes south, quickly, as it turns out weapons dealers have access to a lot of weapons.

His Bajoran security officer is laying down suppressing fire as Odo sneaks around behind the Bolian who is trying out a wide variety of strange weapons, colored beams shooting across the room like we're in a deadly disco of death.

Odo reforms into a grumpy humanoid behind the blue man group reject, shedding his Andorian Ice Fox form that let him cross the sea of crates without detection. Odo grumbles "I think that's enough, don't you?" as the Bolian turns and screams.

The football shaped object in his hands that was beeping increasingly frantic pitches drops to the floor, and he dives for it. Odo looks down in surprise, then recognizes what it is, but it's slightly too late, as timers on Klingon grenades are not known for their accuracy.

There's a flash of light and pressure as it detonates, and the cargo bay wall cracks, and the one sound no one wants to hear in a space station begins: the high pitched hissing of air rapidly leaving.

Odo gets to his feet in that uncanny way he sometimes does when he forgets to move like a being who has bones. He simply transitions from a body on the floor to a standing vaguely humanoid form. The Bolian, being closer to the blast, appears dead, or at least soon to be so.

He turns to his security officer to tell her to go call Chief O'Brien, when the hissing wall suddenly groans with the sound of bending metal, and the wall gives way completely. An entire semi-rectangular wall panel is ejected into the black, taking Odo and the dead Bolian with it

The security officer, nearer to the door, slams the access panel and dives through the door before it can finish opening, and rips off a barely attached wall panel to yank on the manual bulkhead release.

The door slams shut with typical Cardassian efficiency, not caring or bothering to check if there might be a limb or two in the way. The hurricane wind of all the station's air trying to escape is suddenly ended, and deafening white noise gives way to the low hum of the station.

Moments later, the crew up in Ops are reacting to the news of Odo's death in almost comically predictable ways.

Kira, the career soldier, is angry. She's seen many friends die in front of her, and she never let herself become numb to it. She's swearing at Odo in ways that the universal translator is so good at eliding, saying she always told him he was taking too many risks.

Just because he won't mind when someone stabs him doesn't mean he's invulnerable, she told him, and he, as always, almost-smiled in the way he only seems to do around her and grumbled about how he'd be careful.

The young doctor is barely holding it together. Kira's lashing out but it's a controlled sort of anger, a way she keeps a handle on the pain of losing people. Bashir, the eternal optimist to Odo's eternal pessimist, doesn't really believe in death, a strange trait for a doctor.

O'Brien is focusing himself on technical issues to avoid having to think about the emotional ones. What kind of weapon could have taken out a reinforced cargo bay wall? Had it been damaged before and incorrect repaired? He makes a note to do a full check of structural integrity

Dax has seemingly no reaction, but that's almost to be expected. You have a different outlook on death when you've died before, multiple times. As a near-immortal you see many people and make many friends, and nearly all of them will die long before you.

You have to learn to accept it, or it will kill you by inches. One of the downsides of seemingly endless life is there's a lot of time to mourn.

The commander is definitely feeling the impact of the loss, especially having had far too much experience with this particular kind of loss before. He flashes back to that time he always, in some way, still resides in...

When an alien force shows up and starts carving your ship into digestible chunks, you quickly become intimately familiar with the effects of sudden decompression on the humanoid body. It's not pretty, it's not as fast as you'd hope, and it's something you never forget.

He maintains his composure, leaning on his command training, and asks Kira to make a list of security officers she'd suggest promoting to Chief of Security. He thinks for a moment, realizes Odo had no family, and says he'll send a note to Dr. Pol

He turns back to go into his office when there's a dull thudding noise, and a sort of faint tink-tink-tink caused by the flexing of glass that happens with even the thickest of reinforced viewport.

He looks around in confusion, and Dax suddenly points at one of the high-up viewports. Floating outside the window, looking only slightly more annoyed than his resting "I hate life" face, is Odo.

It feels like something outside of a horror movie, a ghost floating silently outside a second story window, because humanoids don't just happily move around in the harsh void of space without needing a suit or a forcefield to keep them breathing.

But Odo isn't like most humanoids, after all. He's not a humanoid, for one. He's more a confounding self-propelled pile of goo that sometimes feels like pretending to be a humanoid shape.

This is made more obvious by the fact that he's only half there. His lower half is not legs, but a shimmering stretch of undifferentiated shapeshifter material, in order to hold onto an access handle tightly enough to give him the leverage to knock on a window.

Seeing he's got the attention of the crew, he pulls his hands from the window and starts attempting to sign to them. Kira's the only one with any experience in Bajoran sign language, and the best she can make out is something like "he broke his... Weasel? Columns him... Boat?"

He sighs, rolling his eyes, like only a shapeshifter really can. The sigh is silent of course, but if anyone could grumble in disappointment in the vacuum of space, it would be Odo.

His hands blur together as he shapeshifts them into a new form: a small flat panel, with Bajoran lettering in a large block font, perhaps a little too blocky as his aggravation is coming across even in typographical form.

COMBADGE DAMAGED BEAM ME ABOARD

Dax and O'Brien quickly confer, taking a painfully long moment to figure out how to lock onto something that is neither wearing a working combadge or reads as a life sign. Finally they figure out how to get a lock, and engage the transporter.

The grumpy-looking chief of security rematerializes on the Ops transporter pad, adjusting his "uniform" in an entirely unnecessarily maneuver he long ago picked up in his study of humanoids. He's naked, after all, he just looks like he's wearing clothes.

"Thank you for bringing me in", he grumbles, not saying the "finally" everyone can clearly hear in his tone. "It turns out that you can't open airlocks from the outside, so I wasn't able to come in the obvious way."

O'Brien, still slightly surprised by the sudden reappearance of his "dead" coworker, falls back on technical details as always. "That's a safety system we installed. The airlocks won't open unless they detect a ship is docked."

Kira chimes in with "Yeah, the Cardassians didn't have that restriction, as they wanted the freedom to just toss Bajorans out the airlocks when they felt like it." Odo responds with his usual grunt, a dismissive "pah, you solids and your weaknesses and your squabbles" noise.

Sisko replies "Regardless, it's good to see you alive and well, Odo."

Odo half-nods. "Commander, if you'll excuse me, I have reports to file and a safety lockout to implement. As tempting a prospect as it might seem, I wouldn't want Quark to end up to be sucked out the station's new orifice when he comes looking for his shipment of Yarmok sauce."

O'Brien jumps in with his typical urgency, half-covering up the feeling of "I should have fixed that already, damn" that he's seemingly always feeling around here. "I'll send a repair team down there right away."

Odo doesn't turn as he walks to the lift. "That would be appreciated, Chief. I'd rather not have to walk along the outside of the station again today." he says, punctuating it by activating the lift and descending out of view.

Sisko rubs his forehead. This is a strange place indeed, and despite all the headaches it gives him on a daily basis, he's beginning to feel almost at home in this remote alien place.

This place is strange, the people are strange, the situation is strange... But they're his strange.

Maybe someday they'll stop surprising him. But he doubts it, and he isn't sure he would want them to.

He sits down at his desk and pulls up another of the day's reports, thankful he doesn't need to write that letter to Doctor Mora Pol, for more than one reason.

It's never easy losing someone under your command, and writing that letter to their next-of-kin never gets easier either. But it's a good day when you don't have to do either.

[santaclausdeadindian]

Sorry for doing it this way, I think OP deleted their post or blocked me like a mature, balanced person would, so I have to tag you in

@mr-laugh

Oh boy, lot to unpack here.

So you didn’t even know there were that many subgenres of fantasy, one of the most popular classifications of fiction on the planet... And you think you know enough to tell ANYBODY what classic fantasy is?

And where exactly I attempted to do that, huh?

If you don’t even know the most common subgenres of this vast pool of fiction, why are you jumping into this discussion? You just admitted you don’t know anything!

There is no discussion, there is a stupid ass post. Don't flatter yourself, you don't know jack shit.

Me not knowing what exactly are the precize subgenres of a genre of literature, which, btw, are completely arbitrary and for your information, sword&magic is a legitimate category, has absolutely nothing to do with what that post you were so keen on agreeing with above. It was you who said pretty much any classic fantasy is like that: some poorly written, self-indulgent and borderline racist.

Did ya read the link, buddy? Howard talked about knowing what burning black man smelled like. He was quite approving of these things! And the books are pretty racist, it’s not hard to see, unless you ain’t looking.

Yes, I started reading and by the end of the first paragraph I was convinced he was ahorribly racist man. And? Still doesn't change the fact, that for my 12 year old self, there was nothing racist about it. I definetly wasn't looking for it, that much you got right. If I'd read it again, I'm sure I'd catch on to it now, that I know what kind of asshole he was. So the implied racism would be there. You got a point for that.

Rugged individualism? It always amuses me how that argument always pops out of the mouths of guys who are aping what they’ve heard their buddies say. If ten thousand mouths shout “rugged individualism”, how individualistic are they?

Then you should amuse yourself by looking up why this thing crops up as of late. It's coming from certain, supremely racist yet unaware of it publications that claim ridiculous shit like "rugged individualism" is a hallmark of white supremacy, among other, equally laughable things, like punctuality. It's a joke.

Again, I will give Howard to you, if someone that racist writes a black man saving the hero of the story, I bet there was something else still there to make it wrong.

Conan’s not some avatar of rugged individualism.

Uhm, yeah, he pretty much all that.

He’s as unreal and unrealistic as the dragons are,

It's called fantasy for a reason, buddy.

but more dangerous because White Men model their ideas of reality on Big Man Heroes like him;

Glad you are totally not racist, yo!!! It's such a relief that White Men are the only ones with this terrible behavior of looking up to larger than life, mythic superpeople and nobody else. Imagine what it would be like, if we would have some asshole from say, hindu indian literature massacering demons called Rakshassas, by the tens of thousands, or some bullshit japanese warlord would snatch out arrows from the air, or a chienese bodyguard would mow down hundreds of barbaric huns without dropping a sweat, or some middle eastern hero would fight literal gods and their magical beasts in some quest for eternal life.

it's a poison that weakens us, distracting us from actually trying to solve the world’s issues, or banding together to deal with shit.

This is what you just said. It's up to the white man, to get their shit together, be not racist and solve the world's problems, because those poor other people's just can't do it. If we would just not be oh, so racist, then China would surely stop with the genocides they are doing now, or blowing more than half the greenhouse emissions into the athmosphere, the muslims would stop throwing their gays from rooftops or ramming trucks into crowds and would just start treating women as equals, India's massive rape problem would be gone, subsaharan African would be magically bereft of the host of atrocities committed there on a daily, yeah, you sure have that nonracism down, buddy!

A rugged individualist would be smart enough to realize that even the most individualistic person needs others; no man’s an island, and a loner is easier to kill.

Individualism doesn't mean at all what you think it means, it's a cluster of widely differeing philosophies that puts the individual ahead of the group or state, it's ranging from anarchism to liberalism and is also has nothing to do with my point.

Central Europe?  What, Germany?  Because let me tell you, historically they are SUPER concerned about race!

Germany traditionally considered western european, central europe would be the people stuck between them and the russians, to put it very loosely. We are equally nonplussed by the self-flagellating white guilt complex and the woe me victim complex of the west. We did none of the shit those meanie white people did to the nonwhites and suffered everyting any poc ever did and then some. We don't give a shit about your color, we care about what culture you are from and if you respect our values.

I’m an American from a former Confederate state; trust me, race is everything.  It always is.

No it really isn't. How old are you? Asking without condescension, genuinly curious, because if you are in your low twenties at most, it's understandable why you think like this.

See that hike? Do you know what happened at that time that made virtually all american media suddenly go all in with racism?

Occupy Wall Street, that's what. It's a brilliant way to sow victimhood and hate and desperation amongst the people who have one common enemy, the powers that be, the banking sector, the politicians, the megacorporations.

Can't really blame you if you are in your early 20's at most, you grew up with this bullshit hammered into you. If you are older, step out of your echochamber please!

If you actually believe, that mankind doesn't progress naturally towards a more accepting society purely on the merit of there being more good people than bad and sharing a similar living with all the hardships in life, seeing that our prejudices inherited by our parents are baseless, that's how we progress, not virtue signalling courses and regressive policies. I was raised as any other kid, I had a deep resentment towards the neighbouring nations, I said vile, racist shit against people who I actually share a lot of genes with, of which fact I was in deep denial about, and then as I gradually got exposed more and more actual people of these groups, I started to realize I was wrong and everybody should be judged by their individual merits. It works throughout the generations, my grandma was thought songs about Hitler and how all jews are evil in school, she legit thought all black people at least in Africa are cannibals and shit, my mother stillsays shit that would get her cancelled in the USA, and I will probably have a mixed race kid as we stand now.

This whole racism is an eternal problem is laughable and disingenuous and I am actually sorry for you that you feel like that.

Moving on. As for Dany, the “noble white girl sold to scary dark foreign man” is a very popular trope, especially in exploitation films, which Martin draws on much more heavily than most authors do.

No, he fucking doesn't. I already wrote a bunch of examples from the books you seeminly ignore willfully. First of all, she is sold to those olive skinned savages by a white man, who is a terrible, increadibly evil man. He want's to fuck the then 11-12 ish Dany so bad, she picks his slave most resembling her and rapes her repeatedly, "until the madness pass." He also maimes children and traines them as disposable slave spies by the hundreds. There is no boundaries colour here, GRRM prtrays all kinds of people as reprehensible, evil and disgusting. Just like you can find plenty of examples to the opposite.

What is he drawing from your exploitation movies exactly? He writes about the human anture, he writes about the human heart at war with itself, that's his central philosophy of writing.

ASOFAI is basically just a porn movie with complicated feudal politics obscuring it, which is probably why it worked so well as an HBO series (up until the last two seasons or so.)

There is no gratuitous sex scene in the books, the rapes are described as rapes, they are horrible, they are very shortly described and usually just alluded to.

The people commiting them are not put into generous lights and one of the single most harrowing stories hidden behind the grand happenings of the plot is a girl named Jeyne Poole, whose suffering although never shown, is very much pointed out, along with the hypocrisy of the people who only fight to try and save her, because they think her a different person.

Honestly, if you actually read the books and they came of to you as porn, you might want to do some soulsearching.Btw, the HBO series was a terrible adaptation, it immedietly started to go further and further from the books with every passing season and the showmakers made it very clear to everybody, that they didn't understand the very much pacifist and humanist themes of Martin. And neither did you.

We also get no indication Essos will eat it when Winter comes; hell, they seem to not know Winter exists, given the way people act, even though that is also unrealistic and weird.  Essos was just super badly designed, and Dany is a terribly boring character.

to be continued

[heyftinally]

I've reblogged this before, but I really need to talk about the last paragraph from OP.

However, teens have an inherent interest in reading about sex and violence and drugs, and so authors who are able to incorporate these kinds of themes into their YA novels in a discrete way such that it flies under the radar of the moral guardians are met with success.

Not necessarily?? 98% of the books that I read as a teen had no sex or drugs. Many of them had no violence. Notably, "Stargirl" was one of my favorites, and it has none of the above. Neither does "Define Normal". Pretty sure "Dash & Liliy's Book of Dares" fits that, too. My point being, drugs, sex, or violence are not necessary in order for you to write a good YA book, and including those things doesn't automatically make your book good.

Also, "discreet" is often the downfall. No, the best books I read didn't shy away from their mature themes, they just made the content on the book cover unsuspecting enough that I wouldn't get questioned too hard by my over-sheltering mother. The kids who know their parents will flip out about the book's content already know how to lie through their teeth about it or pirate the pdf online. Making your themes "discreet" aka palatable for parents just means watering down what many people are looking for, which isn't going to work in your favor.

But this is a precarious tightrope to walk. Not enough "mature" themes and the teens will loose interest, to much or to blatant and the teens won't be allowed to read it.

Again, most teens will get to the book if they want to.

And so, it should come as no surprise, that the first person to successfully navigate this tight rope was a Mormon housewife with a vampire fetish.

No. Just no. I'm sorry, but on a purely literary analysis standpoint, Twilight sucks. It's badly written, racist, normalizes and glorifies abuse and pedophilia, and the entire main relationship is unhealthy as FUCK. The Mormonism is plastered on their thick enough to choke, and it show. It's not a shining example of anything except a bad book.

It's also not the first YA book to do anything mentioned in this post. Harry Potter and The Hunger Games had just as much or more violence. There was a small, stand alone paperback I read that took place at a christian boarding school that had just as blatant a sex scene. Books with heavy drug use were never really my thing, but I definitely still read a few.

I was 14ish when Twilight came out. I had been reading YA for two years prior to that. I promise you, Twilight was only "unique" because of the vampires. The rest of it already existed if you spent enough time at the library.

And that's nothing to say for fanfiction, of course.

So, like, the thing you have to understand is that prior to the mid-2000s, the "Young Adult" genre as we now know it didn't exist. The expectation was that you would graduate to the adult aisle of the book store at, like, 13-14. This worked because the only people still reading long form novels into their teens were precocious bookworms who were better read than their parents.

Harry Potter changed all this. The success of the Harry Potter books convinced the publishing industry that selling full length novels to normie children was a business model. The thing about the Harry Potter books, though, is that at least for the early books, the target audience was a bit younger than what we think of as the YA demographic; tweens, rather than teens. Now, the publishing very much wanted to keep all these normie kids buying books into their teens and beyond, but the previous model of treating teens as functionally adults for marketing purposes would not work; there was simply no way that normie parents were going to let their normie kids read fully adult novels where the characters, like, do drugs or have unprotected sex and stuff. So, in order to be allowed to market to the teen demographic, the YA genre was created.

However, teens have an inherent interest in reading about sex and violence and drugs, and so authors who are able to incorporate these kinds of themes into their YA novels in a discrete way such that it flies under the radar of the moral guardians are met with success. But this is a precarious tightrope to walk. Not enough "mature" themes and the teens will loose interest, to much or to blatant and the teens won't be allowed to read it. And so, it should come as no surprise, that the first person to successfully navigate this tight rope was a Mormon housewife with a vampire fetish.

[stereoskopiandaydream]

Sometimes i think about the fact i’ve been suicidal my entire life

The first time i felt it... i can’t remember, but i do remember years later, the first time i ever wrote about it.

It was english class, we were writing in our journals for the first five minutes like we did every day.

And i turn mine in when time’s up, like everyone else.

At the end of the day, i remember being called into my 1st grade english teacher’s room alone, where all of a sudden i realized, from hearing her tone and reading her body language, that i was in trouble again, and then I saw the journal from that morning sitting on the table where she sat me down, with a yellow sticky note sticking out of it. And i knew thats what it was.

She asked me questions, opening it to the page where i’d written the small paragraph about how sometimes i wanted to die, like my dad and my cats, and had drawn in a shitty looking little set of tombstones, with ghosts floating up out of them.

I remember scrambling for an explanation, and i got lucky, cuz it was close to halloween. I said i was just in the spooky mood, and that it had just been me being really excited and that yeah dad and some cats of mine were dead but i’d gotten over it a long time before that. I wasn’t even 7 yet.

First fucking grade.

That’s the first of many times i realized that you couldn’t trust people, adults especially, with important things.

You couldn’t trust any of them. Not your teachers, not your cub scout troop leader, not counselors or therapists or doctors or your parent or your friend’s or their parents.

Nobody.

Because if you did, then they’d stab you in the fucking back.

They’d treat you differently. They’d want to make you better, or they’d tell you that you *need help* or that its bad for someone your age to feel that way.

Somehow there was always something wrong with you. Something shameful, something to be fixed.

And i guess that’s what pissed me off the most.

Because

I’m

NOT

FUCKING

BROKEN.

I always hated that. I always hated when people said “they’re broken”, especially whenever my parent tried to use it to manipulate me. I always hated the thought of “being broken”, and i mean... i fucking hate it so much that sometimes, even songs i like, “Burn MF” by 5FDP for instance, where the singer keeps singing shit about being broken... it makes me wanna throw up, makes me wanna put my fucking fist through a wall and tear out the two by fours, it makes me wanna fucking hurt myself.

I remember reading some spec ops dude writing about “the shame of being suicidal” as he “came out” about it. And you know, i guess maybe i shouldn’t put “coming out” in quotes because i guess for some people it is something they come out about, its something thats a part of themselves that they hide.

I remember reading his coming out post and realizing again that, yep, suicide’s still taboo as all fuckin hell.

And i remember that it’s been this way all my life. Wanting death, or at least not wanting this life, and not how nobody wants to talk about it, but how nobody wants you to talk about it.

You know, unless they’re trying to fix you, then they want to hear your whole sob story and they want to say “im so sorry” and they wanna feel their own heart break for you and look deep in your goddamn fucking eyes and god its so fucking patronizing and you know they dont give a goddamn flying fuck about you, they just wanna make themselves feel good, or, in the case of most of ‘em, they just wanna make themselves feel good for hating you.

Because what happens when you tell someone, “no, i don’t need to talk about it, i dont want to talk about it, i’ve been doing just fine this whole time, and suddenly you feel bad because you just found out like, bitch, i’ve been here this whole goddamn time and just going about my business and all of a sudden its a big deal. Like, shut up already.”

I’ve had people blow up at the version of this that’s actually polite and respectful and full of smiles and “no thank you, i appreciate it, but im good” and just... that’s it. That’s the whole point. You tell em no, and then they get to feel righteous about treating you like shit because “they only wanted to help and you turned them down, which means you’re ungrateful and disrespectful and arrogant and”

The list just goes on.

I don’t even know what else to say.

Yeah im done.

[tessatechaitea]

Dark Days: The Forge #1

Sometimes when I see John Romita Jr. artwork, I think, "What did I ever have against Rob Liefeld?!"

Hawkman's final journal? Hooray! Go to hell, you stupid prick! And I thought these were going to be dark days!

Does anybody else find it weird that Carter Hall records his journal on Swiss cheese? Many years ago (I guess? There's no time stamp on the opening scene!), Carter Hall recorded the crashing of a spaceship on his lunch. But since he didn't know the word "spaceship," he wrote "sign written in metal." That will probably be important later but for now, it's time to move the story into the present. And where better to begin an adventure story than The Bermuda Triangle! Wait. I should rephrase that. "Where better to begin an adventure story in the 1970s than The Bermuda Triangle!" Oh boy! Eight year old me just came in his pants! I mean if that were possible. Nothing but pee would be coming out of there for at least another five years.

You know you can read and reread the data once you get somewhere safe? Or did you not save your data to the cloud? Idiot. You should use both terrestrial and cloud backups!

That scientist sounds like me in high school after first hearing Mr. Crowley: "There's something in the metal!" Batman rescues the scientist whose name is Dr. Madison (MADISOOOOOON!). Batman tells Dr. Madison that the only to safety is back through the volcano. Batman: "The only way out is in!" Dr. Madison: "Does that actually make sense? I don't think that makes sense." Batman: "If we don't go back through the lava, we'll be covered in lava!" Dr. Madison: "Do you ever listen to yourself speak?" Batman: "Outside will also have flying debris! Inside is just, um, you know! Liquid hotness!" Dr. Madison: "You mean lava?" Batman: "If you want to get technical about it! Now get in my Liquid Hotness Proof Bat-mech (trademark and action figure pending!), sit on my lap, and don't ask me if that's a bat-grapple in my pocket or if I'm happy to see you! I'm never happy!"

So they had to go back through the lava to get to the ocean? Batman does know Dr. Madison was standing in front of a window overlooking the water, right? How was just crashing through that not an option? Especially since Batman loves crashing through panes of glass!

Whenever an editor tells Scott Snyder to make something more exciting, he should just say, "Shut. Up!" Aquaman helps with the rescue and then he and Batman get into an argument about who's keeping bigger secrets. Batman probably wins that one because even if Aquaman had some really juicy secrets to tell, I'd never remain interested long enough to hear them. I'm already bored with this paragraph because I had to type "Aquaman" three times. Apparently the Blackhawks have some super secret covert black ops shit going on again. Remember how they returned in All Star Batman? Oh, you got tired of reading that series too? Well, believe me. They returned there. Meanwhile on Mogo, Cornelius the Guardian wants Hal to do something seedy to him.

"Don't tell Guy! I just got him to stop calling me gay!"

Oh sorry. His name is Ganthet. I must be thinking of Roddy McDowall's character from Scavenger Hunt. Speaking of Scavenger Hunt, I caught an episode of Family Ties the other day when some actor walked on and I was all, "Hey! That's short sleeves, checkered shirt, black sneakers!" Plus his son in the episode was Chunk from The Goonies. Should I mark irrelevant passages like these with asterisks?!

Ganthet having once asked Hal to jerk him off is now canon.

Once again, everybody in the universe is gossiping about how Earth is going to destroy the universe. If only the Justice League would stop saving it already! Just let somebody destroy Earth for the greater good, you hypocrites! Ganthet has pinpointed the threat to the universe in the Batcave so Hal Jordan decides to go invade it and not radio Batman saying, "Hey, buddy. I've got a possible issue that maybe you can help out with. Let's meet up in the Batcave." Instead he decides to sneak in and start going through Batman's things. I get it. It's the only way to ensure that a couple of heroes fight so all the fangenders can lose their shit over it. This part was probably Tynion's idea. "Hey! You know what I've read in comic books about five thousand times? That part where two heroes fight over a misunderstanding! Can we add that scene?!" And Scott Snyder snorts and wakes up and is all, "What? Whatever. Just write the script already! If I wanted to write it, I wouldn't have purchased you from your parents!" Anyway, Batman isn't home so Hal has to fight Meadowlark. You know, Not-Robin. Duke!

What is Duke reading to get his Green Lantern information? The Who's Who books from the mid-80s? That's where I get all of my information too!

Is Green Lantern just fucking with Duke or is there something about the yellow flaw that I don't know about? I thought it was completely gone. Is this Snyder and Tynion trying to backdoor the flaw back into the ring but only if the person using the ring is inexperienced and stupid? In the next panel, Hal Jordan says, "It's good to see Batman's still recruiting teenagers." Hey man. You better be careful with statements like that. At least he's not, you know, fucking them. Duke Thomas admits to not having a code name yet. That's adorable. All this fucking time and he still doesn't have one. Why can't Snyder just spit one out already? Waiting to find out his superhero name is like waiting for Sting to come in your mouth. Not that I'd know and not that it was the worst sixteen hours of my life. Meanwhile there's this place called The Campus underneath Philadelphia where The Immortal Men are headquartered. One of them is Immortal Man because of course it is. The other one is a guy in a robe with shaggy eyebrows that might be Carter Hall but I'm hoping is anybody else. Another one of their possible members would have been Elaine Thomas, Duke's mother. But she went crazy from Joker Toxin. They apparently know they need to save the world from something bad that's coming because it's always easier to tell a story about prophecy. It would be too hard to wedge these Immortal Men into the story if they didn't already know some huge Crisis was about to happen. So the guy in the robes isn't Hawkman because Hawkman gets the next scene. He's been having visions during the times between death and reincarnation. Whew! I thought he wouldn't have some secret inside information to get him right into this upcoming Crisis! In his vision, he sees a gigantic Batman statue with lots of people tied to its legs. I guess somebody is going to have to kill Batman before he becomes evil! After that scene, John Romita Jr. takes over on the art. I should probably snort some Ativan before continuing. Mister Terrific is helping Batman with the Mystery of the Dark Days. Hopefully they'll explain it in long, large word balloons that cover up most of the art. Something has been interfering with the harmonic frequencies of Earth-Main-Earth and Earth-2 (which I guess is back to its normal self? Or maybe Mister Terrific just got off before he wound up in that whole World's End mess? For some reason, I can't remember the story well enough to know if Mister Terrific was in any of it. Thank Jesus!) but neither Batman nor Mister Terrific know what's going on yet. To help them figure it out, Batman decides they must let Plastic Man out of his prison cell. They say they agreed to lock him up because he was too powerful but I think they just got sick of his stupid jokes. Back in the Batcave, Duke and Hal are investigating the Mystery of Batman Investigating the Mystery. It all started when somebody said, "That whole electrum in the tooth thing that resurrects the dead Talons is stupid! It's not scientific at all! Who comes up with such dumb shit?! DC Comics sucks!" Then Scott Snyder was all, "Wait! Wait! You haven't heard the whole tale of that! You shouldn't believe everything you see at first sight! You should wait for the second sight! Or maybe the third sight if everybody on Twitter complains about the second sight! But I don't think they will because this is going to be a huge Crisis! You'll love it!" So instead of electrum being in the teeth, Batman found a metal that shared the same energy signature as the helmet of fate, the quintdent of Aquaman, and the bracelets of Diana. To investigate this metallic mystery, Batman created a team that everybody forgot about. Everybody except me, of course!

Halo's costume is terrible. But Geoforce had better stay away from her anyway!

Duke has no idea who the wobbly speech bubble is. But that didn't stop him from saying, "Dick? Is that Dick? You know, Dick Grayson? Nightwing? Is that you?" So the metal is probably Nth Metal which would make it more believable that it was resurrecting the Talons. Because nobody is going to say, "Nth Metal can't do that!" I mean, they might. But they'd be wrong because Nth Metal isn't real and it can do whatever the fuck it needs to do when the writer needs it to do it. Although if it were Dionesium, nobody would say, "Dionesium can't do that!" Because that's exactly what it was made for! It's just that Nth Metal works better, plot-wise. Why would Aquaman's five-pronged trident have Dionesium in it? Deep in Batman's secret Batcave, Duke and Hal come to a door. Apparently the owner of the voice is behind it. I hope it's not The Joker. I hope it's Detective Chimp. I also hope it's revealed before this issue is over! Batman has also been keeping another secret in Superman's fortress. With the help of Mister Miracle, he unlocks the unopenable room it was stored in. It's a big yellow tower that Mister Miracle recognizes but I don't. Maybe it's Qwardian! It could also be something from Final Crisis which I've never read. Or something from an obscure 1967 Batman story. Or maybe it's something that, when it's explicitly named, I'll say, "Oh yeah. Fuck. I totally remember that thing now!" Anyway, I don't think it's important enough to reveal this issue. Because The Joker needs to be revealed in the Hal Jordan scene! Oh look! The Joker was the voice! What a surprise! Surprise! Are you surprised? Oh! You should also keep in mind how there were three Jokers, remember? That was a dumb bit that had to be thrown in so that Batman would say, "Impossible!", when he asked the Moebius Chair what the Joker's name was. Remember how that one guy on Tumblr got all pissy with me when I said they'd never reveal The Joker's name and how could I know that and I don't know what I'm talking about and all that shit? Fucking stupid kid. I didn't even get to say "I told you so!" to that kid when the reveal was that the Chair's answer was that there were three Jokers! Well, I'm doing it now! I fucking told you so, kid! So that's the end of Dark Days: The Forge! Maybe that thing Batman revealed was The Forge. I guess the next stop in this series is the event, Metal. It'll probably be about Dionesium and Nth Metal and how, when combined, everything is destroyed! What will this Crisis be called? Not just Crisis in Dark Days, right? How about Alchemical Crisis on Earths Starring Plastic Man?

[smartphone-science]

The year was 1999. I was in the third year of my chemistry degree in Amsterdam, and doing a million things on the side. One of these things was being on the committee that created the “lustrum almanak” for the 35th anniversary of our university’s chemistry students’ society. (It was basically a yearbook that only came out every five years, but I’ll keep calling it “almanac” throughout). Did I have time for this? Somehow, I did. I think time worked differently before we had social media and streaming video.

The topic of the almanac was “The Future”, because the previous one, five years earlier, was roughly themed around looking back at the past, but also because a future theme seemed appropriate for 1999. It was the last year of the millennium, and a lot of exciting things were about to happen.

I felt that we couldn’t possibly publish a future-themed almanac without mentioning the most talked about science project of that time: the Human Genome Project. Because I clearly had nothing to do aside from my studies, lab work, the almanac committee, running a career day, and running the group who organised field trips, I took it upon myself to write that piece.

Reader, it’s cringey.

But I didn’t want to spare you that cringe, so for your enjoyment I have translated the whole thing from Dutch to English and annotated it with comments from 2019 Eva. I am particularly embarrassed about one error, which I even contemplated fixing in the translation, but I left it in, just so you can see that I have at least improved my fact-checking skills. I think this might have been my first piece of non-coursework science writing, even if it was only in a departmentally published booklet.

Alright, let’s hop into the time machine and cringe along to my opinion piece from 1999.

  Human Genome Project

(originally written in Dutch and published in the VCSVU Almanak 1999. Translated and heavily annotated with snark, corrections, and hindsight by the author twenty years later.)

When you think about the near future, the terms “millennium” and “Euro” [1] probably cross your mind, but there are also several large projects happening in the different subfields of chemistry. In the area of biochemistry/molecular biology, the Human Genome Project is certainly worth a mention, and I shall attempt to put into words what’s so special about that project. [2]

First, let’s get back to the very beginning: [3] Cells of living organisms contain DNA, used to pass on genetic information. DNA consists of long strands of four different “bases”, these are indicated with the letters A, C, T, and G. [4] A DNA chain is formed by two strands, in such a way that the bases A and T are opposite each other and C and G as well (“base pairs”). The three-dimensional structure of DNA is a helix. This was first discovered by Watson and Crick in 1955. [5] The total DNA of an organism is called the genome of that organism. [6] The human genome consists of approximately 3 billion base pairs, with approximately 80,000 genes in them. [7]

This space was actually reserved for an image, but I couldn’t find anything that was both suitable for viewing and for print. That’s why there is text here now. [8]

And then now what this is really about: [9] The goal of the Human Genome Project is roughly speaking the elucidation of the complete sequence of human DNA and the localisation of the different genes. But why is it so important that the entire sequence of all those letters is known? Many disorders and diseases are genetically determined. So if you know exactly where the gene for a disease is, it’s possible, for example, to determine whether someone could get a certain disease, by checking if the gene is present. [10] Then methods to intervene can also be discovered. Of course this is extremely interesting for medical research, among other things. That’s why, since 1990, several countries are working in collaboration to find all the genes and decipher the order of the bases. [11] The goal is to have everything uncovered by 2005, around the 50th anniversary of Watson and Crick’s discovery. [12]

Humans are not the first organism of which scientists have wanted to know the genome. For some organisms, the search is already over, for example E. coli, a bacteria, some readers have now gotten to know it personally, which could also be said of the yeast S. cerevisiae. [13] The quests for the genes of these “creatures” were completed in 1997 and 1996 respectively. [14] The genome of the little worm C. elegans is also already known. [15] But that was already too much of the past for this almanac. [16]

As with everything to do with expanding our knowledge of the human body, many ethical aspects also pop up. In the United States, 3-5% of the budget for the Human Genome Project is spent on studying ethical, legal and social issues around the availability of genetic information. [17] What kind of problems could arise? A much-cited example in this context is the problem of insurances. Let’s suppose: someone wants to take out a life insurance policy with an insurance company. If genetic information would be openly viewable by anyone, the insurer would be able to check if the customer has a hereditary disease. [18] Someone with a higher chance of a shorter lifespan would then be quoted a higher premium than a “healthier” person. Another point of discussion is the following: parents would test their fetus for a genetic disorder and could choose an abortion if they didn’t want a child with a higher chance of a certain disease or with a genetic disorder. [19] When the media touches on the project, these are the sorts of discussions that usually happen. [19 again].

Personally, I think that it’s certainly useful to know the full DNA sequence of humans [20], particularly to simplify research into hereditary diseases. For the project, only a limited number of people were screened. [21] (At least, I don’t personally know anyone who lent their DNA for this purpose and I think most readers don’t either.) [22] Still, there are mutations [23] that only occur in a small number of people and those will now probably be overlooked if those people weren’t screened. [24] As far as the ethical issues are concerned: I agree with the objections against the “insurance story”. [25] It’s simply not on to have someone with a hereditary disease pay a higher premium. If insurance companies were to have access to hereditary information [26], they might as well, in the name of equality, also have access to psychiatrists’ files, to see if their customers are perhaps suicidal. [27] When it comes to the matter of abortions, I think the issue is somewhat inflated: This is already a matter of concern at the moment, because we already know the genetic location of many hereditary disorders. [28]

For any further in-depth discussions, this almanac is not the right place. [29] Do you want to know more about the progress of the Human Genome Project (and are you curious about the source of my information for this article) [30], then pay a visit to the homepage of the project: http://bit.ly/2Y1md7I [31] (NB. this is not a link, so clicking on this page is useless. You need to turn on a computer, which perfectly brings us back to the theme “future”.) [32]

Annotations by 2019-Eva 

The Euro! This was written before the Euro was introduced!

As I told my science writing students a decade later, you don’t need to start your essay by explicitly stating that you’re going to discuss this topic. That’s clear from the title.

The cringe is strong in this sentence.

Yeah. That should have been two separate sentences. It’s equally bad in Dutch. I kept the awfulness in there just for you.

No! 1953!!!! This is the worst mistake. Why did I not fact check this? Why did I just guess a random year in the 1950s? Wow, I sure hope I put some more effort into the other basics, like finding a catchy image to go with this piece…

Again, not a translation issue. The sentence was really that clunky.

Clunky sentence aside, this is not an error! Remember, this was written before the human genome project was finished. We didn’t really know how many genes there were yet, and the estimate used at the time was MUCH higher than the real number. It was a sobering experience for us humans to discover that we have fewer genes than potatoes or water fleas.

Oh. Oh no. Not only did I fail to find an image, but instead of just leaving it out, I decided to point that out in the middle of the piece. Granted, there were many other jokes in this almanac, but the middle of an otherwise serious essay is not really the place for one.

I didn’t even get off-topic that much, but I had no idea how to structure the piece so that the introduction connected to the main thesis. This might also be a good point to notice that I often started a new line without starting a new paragraph.

I take it back! 1953/55 was NOT the biggest error. THIS IS! Oh no. It’s so bad. I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I ever used this phrase. I’m sure I *knew* that we all *have* the same genes, and that it’s all about the variants. I must have used this turn of phrase just because I had seen others use it in popular media. But when we talk about people “having the gene for….”, that isn’t accurate. Everyone pretty much has all the genes, but it’s the specific DNA sequence within those genes that makes some people more likely to get certain conditions. (It doesn’t seal your fate. You can have the variant linked to a certain disease and still never get it.)

At this time, I was only really aware of the public Human Genome Project, and not the privately-run competitor project (Venter et al). I think this is a side effect of the way that the project(s) was/were talked about in the media in Europe.

It was complete in 2003, which was indeed the 50th anniversary of Watson/Crick. I’m not sure whether the prediction was at one point actually 2005, and that I wrongly assumed that was the 50th anniversary, or that I knew the goal was for it to be the 50th anniversary, and got the year wrong because, as we learned, I did not fact check the actual year of the double helix paper. (1953!!)

Another run-on sentence that should absolutely have been at least two sentences, and with entirely different grammar at that. (Again, I tried to keep the bad grammar of the original.) Another thing wrong with this sentence is the inside joke that’s alienating a big part of my audience. Don’t do that! I was referencing the fact that our biochemistry groups used E. coli and yeast in their labs, but a large chunk of the audience of this piece were people from elsewhere in the chemistry department, who maybe took one biochemistry lab and forgot all about it.)

I absolutely do not trust the years in this piece anymore. Let me fact check this… Oh, hey! It’s correct!

1998. I know you were wondering. 2019-Eva has you covered on the dates with her modern access to Wikipedia.

Remember, the theme was “the future”. Got to bring that home to the readers. Over the course of this piece I am clearly wearing several hats. Instead of just sticking to “informative writer (who can’t fact check, but whatever)” I dip in and out of my other roles. Here as editor of the almanac, and elsewhere as a member of the department, joking with the readers, many of whom I knew personally .

I got this from a .gov website at the time and I have no idea if this number is correct, and if I really meant “spent” or just “set aside for”. Please don’t ever use this piece as any source of information.

Not really. The insurer would AT MOST be able to tell if this person was AT RISK for a disease with a known link to a certain genetic variant. Again, please don’t ever use this piece as source material for anything.

Hoo. Wow. This is a Bold Statement, all right. In the second sentence I attempt to make it clear that it wasn’t my own point of view, but something that a lot of people FEARED would happen at the time. But that’s not clear at all! I should have started the sentence by reiterating that this is about people’s fears, and not necessarily what was predicted to happen.

Which humans, 1999 Eva? Did you mean “the human genome”? Did you feel that you used that term too often in this piece and tried to mix it up with ambiguous language?

I misused the term “screened”. I do it again later in this piece, and I have done it for years after that. They were not “screened”, they just had their DNA sequenced.

Wrong tone of voice again. Keep the whole piece in the same tone. Then go back to it twenty years later and make fun of it in a blog post using whatever tone you like.

2019-Eva would say “genetic variants”, but I’ll let this slide because I do remember that “mutation” was pretty commonly used back in 1999.

YES! This is EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED! In fact, it’s even worse: Variants that are really common have been overlooked because the group of people whose DNA has been used to determine default sequences was too homogenous. 2019-Eva even wrote a piece about the inequalities caused by the exclusion of certain populations from genetic research. Don’t worry, it was fact-checked and edited by real professionals, and I got a lot better at writing about genetics in the last twenty years.

This sentence was equally clumsy in Dutch. What do I even mean? From context, I think I meant to say “I agree that we need to be concerned about the use of genetic information by insurance companies.”

Genetic information.

WOAH. Woah, woah. I get what 1999-Eva is saying, and she’s not wrong in pointing out how absurd that would be, but she is extremely crass. After another two decades of life experience, I would no longer casually bring up mental illness in such a trivial way. I can’t really judge whether this was bad writing on my part, or if it was a Dutch bluntness thing, or an “anything goes” nineties mentality, but I don’t remember anyone saying anything about this line at the time. It certainly looks extremely weird and in bad taste to me now!

Huh? I think what I was trying to say is that in 1999 it would already have been technically possible to do prenatal testing to find out whether an unborn child had certain genetic variants, but that it wasn’t done to that extent (only for certain chromosomal abnormalities) so it wouldn’t make sense to immediately assume that having even more information about individual genetic variants would expand the range and specificity of prenatal screening tests. I had to read over this bit several times to figure out the leaps in logic I left unexplained. Writing critique: take the reader along with your line of thought and don’t assume they’ve made all these connections on their own.

1999-Eva, you already took it way too far, but I’m glad you’re at least somewhat aware that the medium was not suited to the message.

Yes. I would like to know where you got that wrong double helix discovery year. I’m very curious about that.

Remember when people would give you a url with the full “http” and “www” parts included? Also, 2019-Eva was somewhat skeptical that the Oak Ridge National Lab website was THE source website for the entire Human Genome project, but I put it through the fabulous Internet Archive Wayback Machine to see what it looked like in 1999, and you know what, it looks pretty legit – and VERY nineties.

Again with the stupid jokes! Oh, hilarious, a url on a piece of paper isn’t clickable. We have never heard that one before. And the theme reference! Yes, this was all about “the future”. And now, in one particularly dark timeline of that very future, we can all cringe at my bad writing from 1999.

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