#have some insider knowledge

[oreramar]

Florist Talk: Mother's Day

Given when I'm writing/posting this, it felt too topical to skip for later.

As always, I'm writing this at least in part with the idea that anyone writing their Florist AU can use it as a reference point for framing their story or throwing into dialogue. Whenever the Florist Blorbo comes up, I shorten it to Florbo.

Also, as always, whatever info I have to share is gonna be anecdotal and colored by the experience I have myself (US, smaller town, etc). Some stuff might work differently in other countries or larger population centers.

So! It's May and the Florbo is preparing for the second biggest florist working holiday of the year: Mother's Day (US, CAN, AUS, NZ according to my wall calendar). Unlike Valentine's Day, this always falls on a Sunday, and there's a lot more flexibility in terms of when a customer might want the flowers delivered - most of them go out from the preceding Thursday to Saturday, but occasionally orders will be made for the Wednesday before or even the Monday after.

Note here that the shop I work for is typically closed on Sundays, and it doesn't make an exception for Mother's Day. Other shops might - I don't know well enough to say one way or another. Write whatever makes sense to you for that aspect of it.

Another Difference from V-Day is the types of flowers: there's kind of a lot more variety. People still get roses sometimes but most flowers sold are just colorful variety mixes. That being said there's a possibly-regional thing were certain groups - churches, mostly, around here - advance-order huge numbers of carnations to hand out to mothers in said groups. I'm talking like 150 here, 120 there, sort of numbers. These have to be ordered in, counted out, and set aside in reserve for them about a week ahead just to make sure there's enough for both these massive orders and for general florist use.

So all that aside, what do these days look like for the Florbo, moment to moment? Let's start here, beneath the cut as it got long:

The Friday before Mother's Day (48 hours remain): Florbo arrives early. So does extra staff. If Florbo has friends and contacts and former workers still in the area they might have agreed to work for a couple of days, answering phones, handling front counter/store space, driving deliveries, or making arrangements if they know how. This day does not run on normal staffing arrangements.

You start the day making the stuff you either didn't finish the day before or stuff that came in online overnight, as well as stuff called and ordered in throughout the morning for the same day. Drivers are going going going, back to back trips. If Florbo owns the shop or manages it, it's possible they aren't arranging much flower stuff themselves - they might be too busy coordinating and organizing everybody else just to keep things moving mostly smoothly.

The printer always chooses the busiest time to jam up, run out of ink, or otherwise cause problems. This is a law of the universe.

Lunch breaks are short. There is not time for someone to disappear for an hour, not this day. The nicest thing a character can do is bring snacks/drinks for everyone working, so keep that in mind if you want another blorbo involved in the story to do something sweet for the Florbo (and company).

Once you start running low on same-day orders you can begin working on next-day (Saturday) orders. If a same-day order comes in then it gets immediate priority, though, especially as the day wears on. Anything coming through the phones can be redirected to the next day by the people answering said phones but internet stuff can be trickier if you don't have (or know) a convenient way to lock customers out of choosing same-day after a certain time.

Generally speaking, any orders made the day before will be delivered first (morning) and any orders made the same day will be delivered last (afternoon/evening). This is to keep it as fair as possible.

For some reason there always seems to be someone who decides to call on this day to order something to go to someone at a school which means dropping everything else to get whatever it is into a delivery van before school lets out for the day. >:(

Lack of forethought on a customer's part so often becomes an emergency on a florist's, I swear.

Between the sheer volume of stuff being made and delivered on Friday, for Friday, and the stuff that has to be made on Friday, for Saturday, this is the day Florbo is likeliest to go home late. How late depends on how popular the shop is and how much help they have and so on. It's not unusual to just leave the last few orders you have to do for the next morning.

It's also not unusual to start running out of flowers during this day! Florbo will likely have to figure out what's going down fastest and order more of it by early afternoon so it'll arrive in the mail the next day - if the wholesaler is far enough away, that is. If Florbo has a shop in the same town/city as their source(s) then I imagine this might be a bit faster.

This brings us to--

The Saturday before Mother's Day (24 hours remain): An early start again, but for some reason it's usually a little quieter while still early; it can take a while for phones to start ringing this morning. My best guess is that nobody is awake at 8am on a Saturday unless they are forced to be.

There's still probably internet orders to sift through from after closing the night before though so a slow start on the phones does not mean a slow start for the designers.

Now, this might just be my experience, but this day is never as intensely busy as the day before, and while incoming orders might flow in the later morning, not long after noon they tend to slow to a trickle if not stop altogether. In fact, aside from drivers who stay busy all day just catching up with the volume of stuff made the day before, the shop's activity tends to shift from "take orders, make flowers" to "clean up and make sure the last bunches of stuff go out properly" halfway through.

Mid-afternoon or so is when you get a handful of people calling to ask if the thing they ordered got delivered yet. Late afternoon, near closing, is when the shop people start calling anyone who ordered a pickup to make sure that they didn't forget about it or something.

While Florbo may stay late on Friday, there's every chance of getting to close up and leave on time on Saturday, barring anything unusual coming up at the last minute.

That is, more or less, the regular breakdown. Other stuff can be added to the mix, though. For example, drawing from experience:

Teacher's Week, Nurse's Week, and Mother's Day (Week) are all the same damn week. Rest in pieces, Florbo, and best of luck when someone wants to give their mom who is also a teacher or a nurse something extra special.

There's a funeral. Two funerals. Three funerals, all on that weekend. Mother's day flowers weren't enough, Florbo also has to make two casket sprays and like a dozen large funeral pieces.

Someone forgot to order their hundred carnations the week before and now Florbo gets to see if it's even possible to source those on short notice. The answer might very well be no, unless they can manage a small miracle.

A final note to ponder:

A Florbo will have a relatively easy time making flowers for their own mom(s) (assuming such are alive and well and local to the area), but what is to be done if the Florbo is themselves a mom? I don't know what the Florbo demographic is to be fair, so this might only be a question to consider if A) any child is old enough to buy flowers, or B) a partner would buy flowers on the child's behalf. If so, do they buy the flowers from the Florbo directly? Do they sneak the order to a coworker/employee to do in secret? Do they skip the flowers and do something else entirely? Is this not even a factor and the Florbo just gives themselves flowers as a treat? There is characterization work to be done here. Have fun.

[zahri-melitor]

This might be a strange question but is there a divide between editing and writing when it comes to comics? I was having a conversation with a friend about female comic writers and I realized that (at least in the 80s and 90s) I can think of a lot more women who were editors than writers. That seems strange to me since I can think of a lot of fluidity between creative and editorial department when it comes to male writers, but I am probably missing some context, and I was wondering if you knew anything about the behind-the-scenes.

Oh, this is an interesting question. I don't have any insider knowledge on this, unfortunately, but you're correct: there is definitely something there.

I suspect, especially around DC, some of it is going to be the influence of people like Jenette Kahn and Karen Berger offering opportunities for employment, and some of it is good old misogyny at work.

Editor is an out-of-the-spotlight role on a book. Sure there are some who are particularly well known, particularly at Executive Editor level, but a lot of the general editorial work, especially at Assistant Editor level, is scutwork doing things that are incredibly necessary but not really appreciated by readers.

There is also the dynamic that editor and editing falls into the pre-computer category of typist work, and thus for women. It was generally expected pre-word processing software that a good typist would just...fix spelling and grammar, and in some circumstances were doing full edits, rewording things to make them more clear, providing plotting ideas and so on. There's a long history of unacknowledged women in academia who 'typed' their husband/father/brother's work but in modern terms would be considered a full collaborator in the process.

It does not shock me, as I started sorting through lists of female editors and executive editors, that a bunch of them are or were married to male comics writers. These three popped out at me, but they're not the only ones:

Barbara Randall Kesel

Anne Busiek (worked on various Astro City)

Alisa Bendis (edited her husband's work under the Jinxworld imprint)

Karen Berger, from some articles I've read, actively incubated and fought for women to get opportunities to edit and write comics. Vertigo ended up being her very own territory and you see a bunch of women working for it. (Also her own pregnancy and maternity leave probably contributed to changing the direction of comics in the early 1990s, but this is not the time to relitigate Armageddon 2001 and War of the Gods)

But yeah, I think the transition between editor and writer was less common for women in the 1990s, because of the dynamic where women were often only offered writing opportunities on female-led books. Mindy Newell worked on Wonder Woman and Catwoman stories. Barbara Randall Kesel started out on Batgirl, then got Hawk and Dove (with Dawn Granger!) collaborating with her then-to-be husband, and has noted that she pushed Karl to include more depth in Lois Lane.

I think it's partly that it's harder to make that leap into the spotlight if you are mostly only offered writing opportunities with someone else plotting, on female-led titles. There's just fewer chances available!

And we see this all the way to the present day: it's still notable for a woman to get to write a run on a male-led book, to the point that we still have titles where no woman has ever written one. Batman famously has never had a woman write a run on it (Devin Grayson has a single issue and one annual), and Detective Comics didn't have one until Mariko Tamaki in 2022 (Devin again has 2 earlier issues, because of the way NML stories were divvied up). I don't think a woman has ever had a run on The Flash or Green Lantern. I believe Green Arrow has had only one, with Julie and Shawna Benson in 2018, and equally I'm pretty sure Kelly Sue DeConnick was the first to get a run on Aquaman in 2018. I don't think a woman has written a Justice League title outside of fills (unless we are counting Devin Grayson writing JLA/Titans).

So yes, basically. Editor is seen as a lesser job (unless you get to the top of the greasy pole and get to be a group editor or executive editor, where you're setting direction for titles, and even then it's underappreciated and the writer gets the the majority of praise/condemnation for the title).

[sharkneto]

Reading Pet Sematary, and I'm absolutely fascinated by what Stephen King thinks neutering does to a cat

[hollowsart]

those two posts about tssm Otto and how he's written in fandom spaces honestly makes me think of these words my friend said to me when I was talking to them about that:

"If you had a fandom you'd get the tssm Ock treatment and I'm very sorry for that"

..They're absolutely not wrong, honestly. it'd be funny if it weren't also a bit scary and sad.

sometimes, once in a blue moon, I jokingly think about if I was a fictional character from a popular media how the fanbase would react to or treat my character. what horrible little tropes would I be subjected to? how will my character and personality be judged and perceived? what trends and all would be done to my character? will I be liked or hated? how horribly mischaracterized would I become? just how unrecognizable would I be redrawn? redesigned?

Then I stop and be thankful that I am real and unpopular.

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

THE BEST OF PRIORITY: SUR'KESH

Featuring: Cmdr. Sophie Shepard, Lt. James Vega, EDI, and Urdnot Wrex With: Lt. Steve Cortez, Dr. Mordin Solus, Major Kirrahe, and Urdnot Bakara And a Special Guest Appearance by: Adm. Steven Hackett Alliance R&D has officially begun construction on the Prothean device. The team has dubbed it: "Project Crucible". We're throwing everybody who knows how to throw a hammer at it. This is gonna be the most ambitious undertaking in human history. I'm not saying it won't be a challenge- but we can do this, Shepard. You can do this. Never doubt that. Mass Effect 3: Legendary Edition (2021)

+BONUS (the smirk™️)

[herearedragons]

I am: feeling emotions about Aqun Adaar

[babacontainsmultitudes]

80 or so years of life really ain't enough can I have an elf lifespan instead please? Or at least a dwarf's... I need at least a couple hundred years... Oh and a new spine every 5 or so years, if that's not too much to ask. 3. 3 years actually. Yeah, a new spine every 2 years, and a lifespan of 350-750 years, that's all I want really.

[eldritchamy]

A question for Uneiverse (to give you an excuse to talk about it, only if you wanna. Since I also just really hearing about it). What's a detail about it that you really enjoy but haven't gotten a chance to use anywhere story related or otherwise just don't get to play with much (silly or serious)

This ask has been sitting in my inbox for over 5 months.

It's time.

And so, we begin with a question of my own.

What IS time?

We're off the map now. Come with me. Take my hand as we walk through the valley of the shadow of time. We're going to uncharted waters, and I'm going to put the fear of god into you. I'm going to make you ask yourself (and me) Amy, how the fuck does you brain WORK like that?

Let me tell you about time and fate, and about what it means to "predict" the future.

And you will begin to understand the scale of what lives within me, eternally gnawing at the inside of my skull, begging for release.

If I asked you to conceptualize time, what would you say? Is it the neat and rigid tick-tick-ticking of regular intervals on the clock? Is is the fluid, indivisible space between?

Is is all just an illusion conceived by the animal brain to account for the changing shape of the universe as one dimension passes through another, which our three-dimensional eyes are too flat to see all at once, and our souls have concocted for us a comforting lie, that we may pretend to know the universe in its whole, by knowing it piece by infinitesimal, grinding piece, seeing the pan-dimensional amalgam of existence as an endless, continuous sequence of cross-sections in a number of dimensions our meat-circuitry can pretend to process?

Time is shadows.

Imagine, if you will, a sphere.

You hold it up against the light. Suspend it in the air, perhaps, for simplicity's sake. And the sphere casts a shadow.

Is the shadow still a sphere?

Far more importantly, is it even a circle?

At even the tiniest fraction of an angle, the sphere casts a shadow that no longer perfectly represents a cross section of the sphere. It has ceased to perfectly capture the nature of the object that cast the shadow, even accounting for the wrong number of dimensions. It's skewed. You can never unskew it. The distortion is irreversible.

And the floor isn't flat.

The sphere casts a shadow at an angle at a surface that ranges in distance and direction from the object casting the shadow. Is the shadow still an oval? Has it become a shape you can't name?

But the shadow isn't cast upon a floor, even an uneven one.

What shape is the shadow of a sphere cast at an angle upon a field of grass blowing in the wind? By now there's no pretending you know the answer. And even if you could snapshot a single instant of a single shape, the very next instant that shape would change in the breeze as the grass shifts.

The world is not a field of grass upon the ground. The world is endless variation of leaves upon trees, forests upon mountains, birds in the sky, hunting for the bugs that crawl on the branches of the trees. Massive floating pools of water churning in the low atmosphere as humans decide whether that one looks like a mouse or a sheep. So many humans walking, their clothes flowing behind them as they talk, eat, buy goods, shed tiny particles of skin and hair into the wind, their breath adding chaos to that same wind and a hundred miles away a leaf turns slightly more to the left than if that human had said nothing.

What is the shadow of a sphere cast upon that world? Twisted by its unfathomable complexity of shapes and movement?

And now, to make things worse, imagine if that shadow were a tangible thing that you could pick up. That could cast its own shadow not on the floor but up against the wall.

And all of that is if the shadow is cast by a perfect sphere.

Imagine you are a being that can see the shape of time. Could you look at the echo of a shadow of a shadow of a reflection in a fun house mirror, and recreate what it once was?

Could you look at a crooked set of lines upon the wall and know the meaning of cause and consequence? Could you predict what consequences of which actions would lead to favorable outcomes when realization dawns on you that

𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖕𝖍𝖊𝖗𝖊 𝖍𝖆𝖘 𝖙𝖊𝖊𝖙𝖍, 𝖆𝖓𝖉 𝖎𝖙 𝖎𝖘 𝖘𝖔. 𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞. 𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖗𝖞.

Time is an ocean of possibility. Each possibility has consequences. Each consequence a sea of new possibilities. How can you hope to understand the shadow of a shadow of a shadow, and not only know what's coming, but how to stop it?

Nothing is fated. But I said something important that bears repeating. Time is an OCEAN. We'll come back to that.

Time MOVES, at least the way we perceive it. I don't like the phrase "everything happens for a reason." I prefer something of my own creation: for every effect, a cause. To achieve a desired effect - a desired outcome - you must change the circumstances of cause that lead to that effect. But there are limits to your influence.

The time to change the course of a river is when the river is still small. The longer that river runs its course, the deeper it shapes and erodes the ground around it. The larger and faster a river the harder it is to redirect it. It will go where it's going, and there's nothing you can do about it. There is an element of momentum that must be accounted for. An element of inevitability.

The path of one person's life, one set of choices available to them in one specific context, may feel perhaps like the current of a river, when you look back on it. But if different changes were made during its formation, it could have taken a completely different path. Ended in a completely different place. And influenced the formation of completely different paths in the future as a result.

But I'll say it again, and you'll know its significance now: time is an OCEAN. It is not a river, but an IMMENSE network of currents with no clearly defined borders, flowing with or against or around each other in an unimaginably complex churning of possibility and consequence and cause and effect. A shift in one current may brush up against another. The second current may shift with it, or crash violently into it, or ignore it entirely.

For every effect, a cause. But for every CAUSE, many POSSIBLE effects.

So time becomes a series of choices beyond number. Each choice leading to fathomless changes in the flow. As the earth turns, some currents flow inevitably in certain directions. If not here, then somewhere else. SOME CHANGES ARE INESCAPABLE.

The universe must be dynamic. If nothing changed, the universe would not need to exist at all. Change is the point. Variance is the point. Choice is the point. The universe exists to know itself, and it knows itself through change.

There is an endless sea of currents flowing in various ways with, beside, against, around each other. Some directions of flow are strongly influenced by the shape of the seafloor and the rotation of the earth. There are changes in the world that are virtually guaranteed to exist, whether because the nature of the universe has made them inevitable, or because changes long past have created the currents that are now too old and too deep to change.

Picture a river again. What happens when you throw a stick into it? The stick is swept up in the current and carried along the river.

Throw in more sticks. Same thing, right? You can make small changes without affecting the overall outcome. Within one large shadow of a sphere, the details of a hundred blades of grass whose shadows are lost within the larger shape.

Anchor a large stick to the riverbed so it can't get swept away. Now, it's just one stick. The water will flow around it. There are small ripples. Tiny changes in the river, micro-currents that will affect a localized area. But on the whole? The river still flows. You changed something. But you didn't change the course of the river.

Add stick after stick after stick until the river is obstructed completely, and the current is forced to change shape.

Which stick built the dam?

Which straw should the camel's back blame?

Back to the ocean. Can you dam the sea? Can you build that dam one stick at a time, by throwing sticks into separate currents, hoping the currents bring them where they need to be in time?

There are patterns borne out from the endless flow of possibility as the ocean of time churns. With all those ancient currents running together, what difference does the wake of a boat make on the shape of the waves? How many breaches from how many whales would it take to turn a current south instead of north?

What if you could make a bigger change? What if an avalanche altered the shape of the seafloor, so the rotation of the earth forces new waters to resist the old currents? So the inevitability of the dynamic universe drags forth a new set of possibilities?

There are a LOT of currents. They've been turning for a long, long time, ebbing and flowing with a billion tides and ten thousand quintillion waves. Choices can make new currents. BIG choices, with a lot of consequences, may even change existing ones.

But the ocean still has a geography to it. There are places where water is forced through the gaps between landmasses, or forced into the shallows, or freed to dive into the black beyond a continental shelf. There are places where, no matter how many changes you make, many currents are still guaranteed to meet.

There are fixed points in time.

What if one of those points is a whirlpool, threatening to swallow everything drawn into the place those currents meet?

What about a whirlpool on the scale of worlds and gods?

How do you keep from drowning?

How do you give yourself the best chance, not of AVOIDING the whirlpool of inevitability, but of entering it at the farthest possible edge, where the right momentum, the right decisions made in the moment you are caught in its gravity, may carry you through to the other side, so you still remain when time marches on?

Is it better to see things coming at all? Or is the ability to see time, to speak a language of the universe that no one else can speak, one of the greatest cosmic horrors you can imagine?

Imagine the burden of time on those who can see it.

Imagine the WEIGHT of being able to see those currents. Of knowing which threads of fate to pull. Of knowing which ripples to make, which waves to break, which currents to shift. Of knowing.

Imagine the complexity of figuring out WHICH changes to make. And the great leviathan of guilt left on your shoulders when the decisions you made - even in pursuit of the best possible outcome - bring harm to the ones you love most, the ones you're most desperate to protect.

Even if you're right.

Even if you played 17-dimensional chess with the wizard-addled corpse of god and knew, with certainty, that if a single problem you had a hand in creating had been resolved more neatly by even minutes, the sticks would not have fallen into place within the dam, and the entirety of creation could have been swallowed piece by piece by the horror you were trying to stop.

Imagine the horror. Imagine the responsibility. Imagine the unending, agonizing pain of the burden of Knowing.

Because what time is, most of all, is a nightmare.

And there's no waking up.

[unopenablebox]

every now and then one of my mutuals starts getting into something that one of my other mutuals has had a like self-directed home dissertation level of obsession with for years, and i still don't know anything about it either way but it's very funny learning what a normal trajectory of somebody experiencing it would be like

[lokh]

dog just came in with half his mouth swollen??????????????

[nebulaedaniel]

im never gonna use my film degree but at least i can be annoying about it with my dad

[spotsupstuff]

i wonder if it goes both ways tho, here is a simple phrase in my native romance language

"Como foi o seu dia?"

can you get the gist of it?

-fixes glasses- i know only because i tried to learn a lil bit of spanish at some point, i'm not the cleanest slavic slate- i can say that "como" is probably like. "how"??? if i remember right- and "dia" should be day?? i think? so i think the general gist is maybe "how has your day been"/"how was your day". Maybe.

it definitely goes both ways though, yes! i'll be watching Gabriel Iglesias and he suddenly takes out spanish n i'm left to transform into the white blinking man gif

[magpiesbones]

worst thing about being disabled is that now I am fully and completely aware of exactly how much I am worth to everyone I know. And it is not a lot!!

[mxtxfanatic]

Alright, it’s absolutely ridiculous at this point. I cannot in good faith promote the official mdzs English translation until someone figures out wtf is going on with these mistranslations and why they just so happen to change key points of characterizations for the main characters. Because I can no longer ignore this as “honest mistakes” as if other translations don’t exist and other translators have not gone over these same parts years in advance to have someone come and completely fuck up major lines.

The other translations don’t have these issues, and the mdzs translator also worked on svsss, if I’m not mistaken. So what’s the deal?

[smile-files]

here's my wally puppet - in action!!!

as you can see, he isn't perfect - his mouth is a bit odd and his hair isn't big enough - but i'm very proud of him all the same! using lots of time, energy, felt, and love, i sewed up this little fellow in a few hours... and considering how he's my first real puppet (as opposed to a sock puppet), and how he was made with a non-standard method (not an inch of foam in his fuzzy body!), i think he turned out just delightful!! don't you? :)

[sableprince]

i really want to sit down and make a proper Real lore doc for these goobers and not just the paragraphs of shtuff from whatever-ago, but like....... (buries myself underneath the dirt) lazy!!!!!!!