#contemplatingchicken this is for you

[enchantedengland]

Bath, England (@alixelay)

[kawuli]

Apollo and Artemis asks!

@contemplatingchicken said: I hope artemis sits on apollo because DOG PILLOW           

I think Apollo is still too skittish for that but a year ago they could barely be in the same room so maybe someday! 

@reyofsunlight666 said: i wish to borrow your fluffy adorable animals. for Official Reasons  @batbetbitbotbut said: i am jealous

They are very good animals I enjoy visiting them

@9thbutterfly said: Can you please compliment your family on the excellent pet names? The excellent pets, too, of course!

The names are thanks to my sister! Artemis came first, she showed up on their doorstep as a ~7-month-old and my brother-in-law was like CAN WE KEEP HER? enough for my sister to capitulate. The name was because she caught a couple mice for them so clearly she is the godess of the hunt.

Then when they decided to get a new dog obviously the names had to go together, so -- Apollo!

(my sister is 100% the kind of person who coordinates mythological figure names for her pets. also has opinions about fashion and interior decorating and fancy food stuff, and still corrects my grammar (”I’m going to lay down” “don’t you mean LIE down?”). we are in many ways very different. she’s great tho)

[glorious-spoon]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post:

I feel like adulting would be a lot easier if I...

This feel, I know it. And when you (I) HAVE made a few of those job/relationship-ending fuckups, it’s hard to relax about what might be small stuff.

y e p

That’s honestly most of it, because I know my calibration is faulty; I’ve lost jobs and friends over things that I didn’t think twice about when I did them, so every potentially minor mistake is like ‘OH GOD WHAT IF THIS IS WHAT MAKES IT ALL COME CRASHING DOWN’.

...and then the thing that actually does it is always something that it never even occurred to me to worry about

[seldnei]

Tagged by @lookninjas, and I need to do something besides play Animal Crossing today, so ...

So basically you look at your last 20 fic/story titles (I have 19!  Just shy of the goal!), and answer these questions about the titles.

1. How many are you happy with?

12.  Titles are the bane of my existence.  Coming up with a title is my least favorite part of writing anything.

2. How many are…not great?

7.  Basically any one-word or article-then-noun two-word title is probably one where I just decided to give up.  Actually, the most recent thing I sent to @lookninjas for Fuckit had no title at all because I don’t know how one would title the thing, so that one wins for worst title.

3. How many did you scramble for at the last minute?

None of them.  They are, for the most part, a result of sitting in front of the keyboard for a long time really thinking about what the hell to call this thing.

4. How many did you know before you started writing/creating, or near the beginning?

Five.  Although--okay, so I used to just call WIPs by the name of the main character, and that actually made it harder for me to title the stories later.  I write slow, so by the time I got to the end that name was pretty firmly entrenched in my brain as the name of the story.  So now I try to at least start out with a working title that could work at the end of the process.  That said, five of these titles were there immediately with very little effort:

“The Idaho Ghost Job,”  “There are No Lost Worlds,” “Primary Manifestations,” “Mary In the Looking Glass,” and “Items Found In a Box Belonging to Jonas Connolly” (although that one started out even longer and was cut back a bit by the editor).

5. How many are quotes from songs or poems?

One: Dropping Slow, which is a bit of a Yeats poem (”The Lake Isle of Innisfree”).

6. How many are other quotes?

Some of them are quotes from the story itself (”Primary Manifestations” is one, “There are No Lost Worlds,”  “String of Stars”).  “Safe As Houses” is an old turn of phrase.

7. Which best reflects the plot of the story/content of the fanwork?

Probably “File 29520: Notes from Immediate Aftermath of Attack by New Villain, ‘The Daemon’” and “Four Cassandras.”

8. Which best reflects the theme of the story?

“Safe As Houses,” I think.  That story is about a house, and about safety ... but how safe are houses?

9. Which best reflects the character voice of the story/pov of the fanwork?

“Items Found In a Box Belonging to Jonas Connolly,” which is exactly what it says: epistolary story told in fragments of notes, books, news clippings, and a couple of other objects.  Still one of my favorite things I’ve written.  Also the hardest to fit together.

10. Which is your favourite title?

it’s a tie: “Safe As Houses” (because it’s doing double duty, which it sort of has to as the title of a flash piece) and “The Lost Languages of Exiles,” which I kind of think may be more title than that story calls for, but its sound is gorgeous.

Anyone who would like to do this, please feel free!  I’m not sure how many of y’all write fic or originals or whatever, but I’m going to specifically tag @contemplatingchicken and @kawuli.

[obstinatecondolement]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post: I finished the granny square slippers. Spent...

yep, require ADORATION when creative task is completed!!! otherwise it is all terrible and I failed.

See, you get it!

[finnglas]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post: hm 

How do you usually run your giveaways?

i haven’t really done one before now so idk

(except that i owe @kalenel a scarf lol but uh I have yet to FINISH any knitting project so)

[naamahdarling]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post “smdh”

I'm glad that you don't seem too bothered, but it really sucks that you have to get that kind of crap in your inbox.

It’s pretty rare?  I get it maybe every couple three weeks depending on how much yelling I’ve been doing.  I get WAY more random positive messages.

It’s just . . . I’ve only been properly diagnosed and medicated for like 10 years now, so that’s 30 years of unfettered mental fuckery my own brain was able to perpetrate upon me unopposed, and if some whey-faced, chickenshit anon thinks coming at me with literally the weakest shit imaginable is going to rattle me even a little after dealing with that, well, that’s real fucking sad.

And then to not even indicate why they’re so upset.  It’s just . . . nobody is getting anything satisfying out of this interaction.

So unfortunate.

[myfairytalelogic]

Oh hey, @contemplatingchicken tagged me! And now I am doing this! 3 weeks later! I am king of the internet time. 

Rules: Tag 10 people you want to know better. Or not.

Relationship status: Me and my partner have been together for ten years now and live together. Side note: I find it really interesting that english does not have a good word for “serious long term relationship” that does not involve marriage. My native language does and culturally it’s treated as just as serious as being married. In english it definitely feels like the only way to be considered serious is to married. It’s weird.

Favorite colors: Warm greens and blues.

Pets: We have two pet rats! Merry and Pippin. Rats are underappreciated as pets. They are smart, personable and easy to take care of. They are unfortunately frail healthwise. This is our third set of rats in about two years. I don’t know if we’ll get more after these two because it hurts so damn much when they die.  

Last song I listened to: “Back to black” Amy Winehouse. I just discovered this song for some reason? Music is how I am the least cool, I am always so behind the curve. 

First fandom: Final Fantasy VII! This game was the reason I learned english. I was obsessed with websites and stories and theories about how to revive Aeris. I am so stoked for the remake that I can’t even

Hobbies: Lifting weights. I don’t think netflix binges count as a hobby. 

Favorite book: Jesus f*ck don’t make me choose??? I mean, favourite of what kind and for what reason? 

If I have to pick I usually go for “Sophie’s world” by Jostein Gaardner. It’s a novel about the history of western philosophy. I read it when I was 9 and it literally changed my entire outlook on life and how I think about things and I think I’d genuinely be a completely different person if I hadn’t come across it at such a young age. Absolutely mind-blowing.

Worst thing I have ever eaten: Octopus stew. It was made out of tentacles with the suction cups still on it. It was like eating a lovecraftian horror. Don’t do it.

Favorite place: My partners parents have a horse farm and I genuinely think it’s the best place on earth. It’s so beautiful and peaceful there and I wish we could go there more often and visit. 

Tagging: Anyone who feels like it? I’d be curious to learn more about anyone who reads this. 

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken mentioned you on a post “Ask me my "TOP 5/TOP 10" anything!”

@kawuli​ : TOP FIVE GRAINS, TOP FIVE SLIGHTLY UNUSUAL BOOKS, TOP FIVE DESSERTS, TOP FIVE BIZARRE TRAVEL STORIES

Top 5 grains:

(in no particular order)

Wheat:

excellent staple carbohydrate, relatively high in protein, -10 points for that protein being Actual Poison for some people. Can be made into SO MANY TASTY THINGS: bread, pasta, tortillas, various kinds of dough-with-stuff-in, couscous, etc. Drought-tolerant, lots of different varieties suited for a wide range of climates, one of the First Ever Crop Plants

Quinoa - LOOK I KNOW there were a couple articles a few years ago about how rich food snobs are RUINING EVERYTHING BECAUSE QUINOA IS EXPENSIVE NOW but actually it’s much more complicated than that, because having a high-value marketable crop is the only way farmers have ever been able to make a decent living! Evidence suggests it’s probably a net good thing. I will argue this point only if people bring references.

Also, it’s good for you and it’s tasty and the plant is really pretty (src)

Maize (aka Corn aka Zea mays):

Look, ancient Mexican crop breeders were fucking geniuses, I read recently that indigenous people in the Mississippi river basin were starting to domesticate certain grains, but basically maize showed up while they were still fucking around with “how do we get erect knotweed to quit shattering at maturity” and they very logically went “fuck it, this maize stuff is already domesticated and super efficient, we’ll just use that.”

Similar processes have happened everywhere maize is introduced, which is why it’s a staple grain in East Africa despite being unknown there 500 years ago.

This is also why Zea mays is my Problematic Fave: it keeps shoving out other crops by being very efficient, but then it’s not particularly nutritious, especially if you don’t also import the indigenous American (North and South) food preparation methods that unlock the hidden amino acids. Not quite as bad as the British, as colonizers go, but still: problematic.

Fonio

Objectively, it’s kind of a terrible grain, because it’s low yielding, has seeds that look like grains of sand, is a bitch to thresh by hand (and afaik there aren’t threshers for it because see: tiny ass sand-grain seeds), and really is only mostly domesticated. Also I lost count of how many times I went to park a motorbike on some grass only to have someone tell me “no, that’s fonio.” \

But! It is super drought tolerant, very nutritious (so I hear), and is super tasty, especially when you cook it by putting a bunch of it inside a sheep, closing the sheep up, and then slow-roasting the whole thing. Granted, literal sand would probably be good cooked that way, but fonio is especially tasty. Also now if it becomes the next “superfood” I have evidence that I Liked It Before It Was Cool.

Rice

It’s like half the world’s staple carbohydrate, so it kind of has to go here. You can grow it in a wacky polyculture system with fish and ducks, which is neat. Most varieties are easy to thresh, there’s not a lot of post-harvest processing required, and it gets pretty good yields for anything that’s not maize. It’s an excellent substrate for putting sauce on and it cooks quickly. I can eat it daily and not get sick of it.

NOTE I JUST THOUGHT OF: I am only considering grains-as-in-grasses (and Quinoa, which is a pseudograin, but WHATEVER). Grain legumes are a different thing.

(aaaaand that’s long enough for one post I think)

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken mentioned you on a post  “Ask me my “TOP 5/TOP 10” anything!”

@kawuli​ : TOP FIVE GRAINS, TOP FIVE SLIGHTLY UNUSUAL BOOKS, TOP FIVE DESSERTS, TOP FIVE BIZARRE TRAVEL STORIES                  

5 travel stories that aren’t necessarily bizarre but are memorable:

[ETA: this is basically just “Why Not To Fly Through O’Hare In Winter” as it turns out]

1. I was 3 hours late to my Peace Corps orientation because I was flying through Chicago O’Hare in February (really, that’s all you need to know), and it was “too cold for the de-icing machines to work”

quick question: what the fuck? It was around 0F (idk -20C? i’m better at the hot end conversions) which is cold but not abnormally so for Chicago in winter and you only need de-icing machines when it’s cold so ?????

2. I was ONE ENTIRE DAY late to start my PhD because I was flying out of Chicago O’Hare (just...don’t fly out of O’Hare, it’s--okay no, Washington-Dulles is the worst airport, O’Hare is second)...

Anyway, my flight was CANCELED because a bird flew into the engine and broke enough stuff that they couldn’t get it fixed.

Don’t fly with me when I’m starting new things, apparently.

3. The most surreal culture-shock-y trip I’ve had was when my grandfather died: my mom called me in my ~500-person mountain village on a Wednesday, I took a 6h bus ride to Quito on Thursday, flew Quito->Miami->O’Hare on Friday, then drove to Kansas with my parents on Saturday. I ordered breakfast in Miami in Spanish because at least half of everyone around me was speaking Spanish so I hadn’t switched languages yet. I didn’t realize why the cashier gave me a slightly confused look until later (I am Extremely White). And then it was my mom’s giant loud family and lots of questions and at some point I was like “I...am leaving now” and went for a very long walk in very flat wheatfields.

SAME TRIP, when I flew out of O’Hare it was snowing, (it was the end of November) so my plane was 1.5 hrs late, so I had to spend the night in Houston, and even in 2008, trying to make a long-distance phone call without a cell phone was a nightmare, I couldn’t call my parents to tell them what was up until I got to the hotel and bought a phone card.

Don’t fly out of O’Hare in winter.

4. I was home for Christmas 2013 and got caught up in the January 2014 Polar Vortex Snopocalypse. The day I was supposed to fly out, there was an emergency “DO NOT DRIVE” order on all the roads from my parents’ house to Chicago. O’Hare had been closed for 24h the day before, but now it was open, so I had to pay to rebook my flight (still annoyed by this). The airline was like “well, we can get you from Washington to Bamako in 2 days but we can’t get you out of O’Hare for at least a week” because O’Hare had been closed for 24 hours and everything was a giant clusterfuck.

I ended up flying out of Detroit, which I would do more often because my parents’ place is equidistant between Chicago and Detroit, except that there is literally no way to get to the Detroit airport other than “someone driving there and back” and it’s a 3 hour drive. There’s busses and a train to Chicago.

That time it was so cold that salt wouldn’t work on the roads and everything was super icy so it was a FOUR hour drive to Detroit, which was experiencing residual clusterfuck from O’Hare, but it was fine, because Detroit airport is fucking amazing comparatively.

No really, don’t fly through O’Hare in winter.

5. Ethiopian Airlines LOST MY BAG on a DIRECT FLIGHT from Addis Ababa to Bamako -- the flight continued to Dakar and they forgot to offload my suitcase first.

OH AND bonus 6. One time I flew from Bamako to Accra via ....Togo I think?... went through airport security twice on the way there and twice on the way back, and when I got home I realized I’d had my Leatherman with its 3 big knives IN MY CARRYON the entire time and nobody noticed.

Honestly, while African airports are often dingy, crowded and unpleasant, the worst I’ve gotten is “annoying inconvenience.” US airports are superficially “nicer” but actually much more likely to be catastrophically terrible.

And I’m pretty sure Crowley got a very big trophy for the creation of Washington Dulles International Airport because it’s just awful in the banal, annoying, death-by-a-thousand-papercuts way that isn’t even interesting.

[kawuli]

mathemagicalschema replied to your post “contemplatingchicken mentioned you on a post “Ask me my “TOP 5/TOP...”

do you have any Millet Opinions

Oh shit is there Millet Discourse?

Millet is incredibly drought-tolerant and will grow in shit soil with limited-to-no fertilizer. It makes the best tô (which is the Malian/Burkinabé version of the “basic starch paste you dip in sauce” concept that a lot of African cultures have), followed by maize, and then sorghum (with apologies to my friends who are sorghum breeders)

It is however fuckoff tall and tillers a bunch so standing in a field of either millet or sorghum is asking to get your skin torn up and is oppressively hot and still.

Overall I’m in favor, so long as I don’t have to deal with it until it’s in grain form.

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post “I got a note yesterday saying "your lease is up April 30, would you...”

"can I stayed employed for an enitre YEAR? this seems like asking too much" -- me, probably

EXACTLY

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post “Sometimes I think “well, I wasn’t really that affected by homophobia...”

I remember saying to a group of college friends, “Haha, if I were a lesbian, my dad’s family would tell me to cut that weird shit out. GOOD THING I’M NOT, RIGHT, HAHA.” Also in college: I said to my mom “I’m afraid that if I sleep with the wrong person, no one will ever love me.” Response: “Good, that way you won’t sleep around.” I feel reasonably confident that I am never going to have an identity exactly . . All the sympathies I guess! I am sometimes awe-stricken by the amount of damage parents can do with love and best intentions in their hearts.

Honestly, my identity was ?????????????? until I was about 30, at which point it moved to “not actually straight ?????” I’m 35 now and “queer” still feels weird but it’s the least-wrong-feeling option (and I’m still not out to any of my extended family or most people I know irl). This shit is complicated, especially for those of us who grew up in ...call them less-accepting spaces.

I am sometimes awe-stricken by the amount of damage parents can do with love and best intentions in their hearts.

This is so real, and a big part of why I don’t want kids.

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post “My old job was such an absolute shitshow, y’all. [[MOR] I’m tracking...”

Damn, I hope you're proud of yourself for getting through and getting away from those people.

@hrovitnir​ said:

For fuck's sake, that horrendous.                    

@unproductivepeanut said:

At least you got to leave for better things?          

@anetesenpai​ said:

Congratulations for having enduring this dude                    It’s interesting because when it was happening, I definitely knew it was fucked up and I was definitely pissed about it but was also very much an “of course that fucking happened” situation. Totally unsurprising, notable only for being more egregious than the usual heinous bullshit I had to deal with.

Thanks y’all for reminding me that actually no that is fucking insane and I should not have had to deal with it but I did it, I survived, and fuck those guys.

(to be perfectly honest though? if I was giving advice to my 2013-2014 self I would say “just leave. it’s not going to get better.” But I am the stubbornest asshole ever, so I stayed. them’s the breaks.)

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken replied to your post: random PSA: the wireless bra I got from Uniqlo...

I pretty much live in sports bras for this reason…

OK so because my work computer is installing updates and anyway i really don’t want to deal with fiddly code-debugging... (cut for body-talk)

So I’ve been thinking lately about the weird contradictory body-image shit my mom accidentally taught me, and I think the most concise way to put it is this: 

You shouldn’t worry about your weight or how you look, but you should always look Correct. 

Looking Correct means dressing “modestly” and ensuring nobody can see any evidence that you are wearing undergarments or e.g. have nipples, or that your body in any way deviates from... y’know, I’m not even quite sure what the standard is, because of course I’m not supposed to look like a Barbie doll, my mother is a Feminist! If I was wearing a sports bra that you could see evidence of through my T-shirt, I would get a “you might want to change, I’m just telling you this to be helpful.” (of course, when I decided as a scrawny kid that well, fine, I just won’t wear a bra, that was also only okay if you couldn’t tell I wasn’t...and yes, believe me, I noticed the inconsistency, and no, that didn’t matter). I should look “nice,” and not show too much skin, and God forbid I wear leggings without something that covers my entire ass. And tight shirts just aren’t very flattering, dontchaknow, maybe you should wear something over that to cover up your stomach... 

But you shouldn’t really care about how you look, you don’t need to shave (who cares if girls whisper behind your back in gym class about your hairy legs), and you definitely should not spend any more money than absolutely necessary on clothes. Bodies are awkward and messy and have to do with Sex, which is Bad and Scary, and what’s important is what’s inside. (God doesn’t care how you look, so why would it matter that kids at school make fun of your secondhand clothes?) 

Of course none of this is atypical, particularly for women growing up Christian in the US (even though it’s bad theology as well as being sexist nonsense), but it is a very roundabout way of explaining why I can’t wear sports bras to work, even though there really isn’t any dress code here: Because someone might be able to tell that I’m wearing a bra, or it might get cold and (horror of horrors) someone might notice that humans are mammals!  

[kawuli]

contemplatingchicken replied to your video: slowmogymnastics: Simone Biles training in 2018...

I love watching Simone Biles because it never seems like she’s at risk of putting a foot wrong? It doesn’t seem like she would ever accidentally hurt herself. That sounds really shallow of me, but ah well.

Actually not shallow at all! The worst thing for me when I was a kid in gymnastics was that on beam, the less confident you are the more likely you are to fall. so the fact that she’s just like “yeah i own this beam and also the entire sport of gymnastics” is further evidence that she does indeed own the entire sport of gymnastics.