#i have... never been to arizona

[morallygreys]

reading that jo's depression and voluntary check in to inpatient psychiatric care was supposed to be callie's s13 storyline has absolutely destroyed my whole day, possibly life

[edupunkn00b]

Hey hey Edu! I am having a day™️today and I have been thinking about why it is so hard for me to reread "What Might Have Been", but not "The Uses of Adversity"

Buckle up, there are spoilers for anyone who somehow has not read those masterpieces already

So, I think, I figured out my difficulty with WMHB is that at the core, I can barely cope with how much Remus spirals in that fic. The way he loses his grasp on himself more and more, the way his mind offers him another reality to deal with the how his life is getting out of order just- it did blindside me. Not because it's unrealistic or because you wrote it badly.

I think it just took me so off-guard after reading Happily Ever After where Remus, may have struggled but ended up helping Logan so often. Like, there is this underlying strength in his character that I adored. This hope and playfulness that never seized to show up.

And then he falls apart. It all falls apart and shatters. And I know that people do that. I know that characters do that and that it creates so much more interesting stories.

Later in different tidbits you show us how Remus was, versions of Remus and how he self-destructed before. You showed us better versions of himself, where he gets help earlier, chooses different paths, is able to choose different paths.

So it makes sense that he spirals, gets worse than ever before.

It just hurts so much because to me, it felt like he had it already. It felt like he was out of the woods. It felt like he had gotten better and was stronger than this. But the problem is that healing isn't linear. Sometimes you don't heal at all. Sometimes you just deal with the chipped state you're in.

And I think that was the thing that hurt. That Remus wasn't broken, but chipped. He seemed fine. He seemed to be doing well, to adjust, to grow. But he wasn't really broken, he was just chipped. He is chipped. And that is not something to be fixed but to be dealt with. And it's exhausting and tiresome if you don't know how to do it or have lost the motivation to do it.

But in TUoA we have Logan. And this version of Logan, who has suffered so much and is hurt and fearful and so very much in pain is less painful for me to see than WMHB Remus could ever be. Because that Logan has been broken. That Logan has been irreparably changed and will never be the same again.

And yet. And yet he gets the chance to become someone new. He gets the chance to be put back together in a new way. He gets to have Roman by his side, who looks at his broken pieces with love and care and is with him anyway.

And I think that hit less hard than what happened with Remus and feels more hopeful to me even though I understand that there is much more to come for Logan in that universe. But maybe, he'll be spared to have his son admitted to a mental hospital. Maybe he'll he spared to see his love fall apart because of something he couldn't have.

Maybe at least this portion of his life ends up being gentler than what WMHB would have given him.

Yeah.

I am very normal about your fics.

Kudos.

First of all, all the hugs in the world for you, Eir <3. You are beautiful inside and out and I hope you know that your stories touch me in so many of the same ways you're describing. (Most especially Life on Crow Avenue and Words Are Hard.) <3

I first read your note last night and had to sit with it because you're right, at the core of Remus' journey in What Might Have Been is the terrible truth that mental illness doesn't just go away. It can be managed to varying levels but it won't ever simply 'heal' like a cold or a broken leg. It's always there with us.

That was a difficult lesson for me to learn and one I'm probably still learning. I knew it intellectually but there have been times when life decided I needed to really learn it.

So many of us are those chipped cups, sitting on a shelf or serving some purpose. Just like those chipped cups, some of us break more easily than someone who has never been cracked and we do require extra care.

When I wrote Happily Ever After, I intended it to be a fairy tale. A fantasy, my fantasy, of what my life could have been like had I had friends like Janus and Roman in my life during my darkest times. Of how much stronger and better I could be if I'd had the support they gave him over the years.

I structured it like a fairy tale, took every chapter title from the first line of famous books. Logan started the story sad but unbroken, still surrounded by love and support. He ended the story discovering what I discovered about my self, ended the story with love for him and promising futures for his children. It was my dream fairy tale ending.

And it was completely unrealistic.

After sitting with the story for bit, I wanted to see how that might have actually happened, what a real ending to Logan's story might have been like, because if I could make Logan's fairy tale ending more realistic, I could make it realistic for me, too. That if in the more realistic version when Remus couldn't just bounce back again this time, if in even that version, he and Logan (and Janus and Roman and all of them) could still find a happy ending, I knew I could, too.

The Uses of Adversity is the same tale but backwards. What could possibly lead Logan to a happy ending when he started without Janus as a friend? The first part of TUoA, It Could Always Be Worse was very dark and was nearly even darker. I wasn't sure how it would end until I got to the last chapter. The original tags included an "author chose not to use Archive warnings" tag because that story nearly ended very differently.

Strangely, The Uses of Adversity, as straightforward as Logan and Roman's love story was, was much harder to write than WMHB or any of the other tales.

I hope that for every person who can't ever go back to WMHB, there's a person who reads it and can see that happy endings aren't just for fairy tales. That we can go through it all and still find a way to happiness in the end. That, chipped and broken and spiraling, there's always another chance for us to pick ourselves up or to allow ourselves be picked up, and keep on going toward a place of warmth and joy.

No matter what we've been through, it's never too late to build joyful connections with other people. It's never too late for a happy ending.

[3416]

thinkin abt this. and thinking about mitch realizing that he'd never get the full suburban nuclear family hockey best friend life with auston.... thinking about the little adjustments of expectations they've made about each other and their futures together....... thinking about where they are now and might be later on.

[aspecbuddie]

mark calling callie AND arizona's dads his 'fathers-in-law' 🥺🥺

I just... I love the mark&calzona relationship so fucking much

[secondpersonpoetry]

hi! oh my goodness. i am SO sorry i didn’t say anything earlier. i did read everything a couple days ago, and i Have been chewing on it, rotating it in my mind, etc etc…..and the graphic has been my phone lockscreen since i first read it!!!!!

frankly i am obsessed and have also been a little frazzled this month lol. saw your post late because of the general whirlwind that is december and then couldn’t quite get my thoughts into sufficient words n got worried “oh no would it be weird to say something now…..” which is incredibly silly in retrospect, so sorry for that. 

i’m relatively new to hockey fandom and the Narratives don’t always quite click for me (yet, at least :)) because i don’t know all of the lore for a lot of the popular pairings haha, so it means a lot that you’ve taken time out of your day to break things down for me and share your own thoughts <3 tysm. again, super sorry for the delayed response. i’m very sorry if you felt as though you’d wasted your time or something along those lines :’) just wanted to let you know that i really appreciate you and the time it took you to get everything down and make the graphic!!!! and like i can’t overstate how much your tags both over here and on your other blog have helped me to Get It since the start of this season, so thank you.

but now the house is quiet, the in-laws are gone, and no new work stuff until january :) so i can finally get some stuff down. every point you brought up hits in it own way but gosh you are very incredibly right the mcstrome of it all…..that’s sort of the lens i’ve been listening to the song through since you mentioned it.

the golden boy and the “draft bust” and the ever present notion of “isn’t it all about old friends? like everything? all of it?”.  like idk looking back on a bestfriendship from when you were a teenager that was Super intense and the lines were blurred and maybe realizing (if you hadn’t had the words or the “guts” or awareness or wtv to put a name to it at that point in your life) that y’all were a smidge more than just friends. 

best friends forever until you just aren’t! growing up and growing apart. it’s just the way things go but it can and will ache for a damn long time! you think you’re over it until their birthday or the holidays roll around and you wonder in a distant sort of way who they’re spending it with. what you would’ve hypothetically gotten them as a present if you still spoke. what do they even like nowadays, anyway?

maybe having the friendship end subtly. going from playing and traveling together and living in one another’s pockets to 2,080 miles of distance? (i may have my timeline/details confused here so sorry in advance) texting as much as you can at first but he’s a phenom he’s mcjesus he’s the next in line he’s expected to win the cup with his new team and end the drought for Canada. and they have him now but he was yours first, wasn’t he? but it’s fine. because you’re busy too. you’re captaining the team now. you’re gonna get the memorial cup that he couldn’t. it’s fine. you’re fine. you don’t even have time to worry about it anyway. 

one conversation a week turns to one a month turns to once in a blue moon turns to stale words until it goes cold. these days you can’t quite seem to remember who ended things, but does it really matter all that much now?

or maybe it doesn’t end like that at all. maybe it ends in a flurry of angry words and digs in some or other of the endless hotel rooms you’ve shared together over the years. who knows!

and that’s not even getting into the rest of the 2015 draft class. or the ld19 of it all! ooh hoo hoo. you grew up with him but he’s not your waiting room. he grew up with you but he’ll grow “old” (end his career) with someone else. and isn’t that just something! 

i don’t think it’s totally them, but sort of the sentiment of “I hope you get everything you ever wanted and I hope I never hear a word about it.” I want one ticket off of your carousel!!!! merry christmas, please don’t call!!!!!!!

dylan being sent up and down and traded around until finally landing in washington, a place where he is clearly at home and LOVED for the guy and player he is!!!!!!!! watching a game and seeing all the strome jerseys in the crowd……..wagh.

all that said. some other songs that are mcstrome to me in various ways: hot & heavy by lucy dacus (lol kinda the whole song). before the world was big by girlpool (“i just miss how it felt standing next to you wearing matching [jerseys? sweaters?] before the world was big”). happiness by Taylor swift (“i guess it’s the price i pay for seven years in heaven”), cut your bangs by radiator hospital (maybe? possibly? unsure. i like the whole dog thing there). i’m so glad i feel this way about you by insignificant other (!!!!!). there are so many THEM lyrics in there……..waough.

anyway. other things off the top of my head: 2015 connor specifically saying something like “hey let’s wait a minute so we can see this” to stand by the stage when dylan was getting drafted after him. MAN. you reminded me of the fact that they couldn’t even make eye contact at the handshake line!!!!!!!!! they didn’t go to each other’s weddings!!!!!!!!!! (do you think once upon a time they ever thought they’d being each other’s best man?). just a couple months ago dylan liking the tweet of connor getting that goal during the playoffs!!!!!!!! makes you wonder if he texted him………..

lol this was all over the place and i was probably wrong on some things and there’s SO much more that someone else could say way more eloquently, but i digress. i dunno everything about them is so nuts to me!!!!! needless to say i will be incredibly sat for the game january 21 ��‍↕️

thank you again for your time :) hope you have a good one and a happy rest of the holiday season! <3333333

what a lovely message to receive 🥰😭🥹 i had to break it up into chunks because i couldn't sit down to read all of it at once without just. bouncing right back up and shrieking. i am also at heart terribly shy so i understand the struggle but it is never too late to say something <3 you are always welcome here

first!!! i love sharing!! i think most of hockey tumblr loves to see people finding out the Lore for the first time and the wonderful thing about hockey is that. it keeps going on. so there's years and years and generations and generations and always something new to learn about. i've learned to just not be afraid to ask!!! between different teams and players i'm always discovering new narratives (learning about the sharks old man yaoi rn... cbj rarepairs...)

no... to my heart's despair... you have the timeline right. i think in the best most tragic sense there's a mcstrome narrative where it is truly that nothing went wrong. the love was there. we couldn't do enough to save it because we didn't see it slipping away. i didn't notice when you didn't call until you never did. i don't know you now but i still remember when i did, do you?

HE'S NOT YOUR WAITING ROOM?? passing out. i do see "i hope you get everything you ever wanted and i hope i never hear a word about it" as them because!! they didn't go to each other's weddings!!! i don't wish you harm but i'm not going to put myself through that!! i hope you're happy and i'm never going to look on purpose.

i love dylan strome so much and the best part is that they all love him so much too. he wore a cool vintage ovechkin jacket!! and got slapped in the face with a tortilla!! he loves to gently rag on the rookies!! it just takes some time, everything'll be just fine. you're only on the middle of the ride.

OKAY WHEN I READ THIS PART I SCREAMED BECAUSE I DO HAVE A MCSTROME PLAYLIST AND!!!! HOT & HEAVY BY LUCY DACUS IS IN FACT ON IT!!! SO IS CUT YOUR BANGS (BUT BY GIRLPOOL SO DOUBLE JINX)!!!! i have dorothea by taylor swift on there but i don't know happiness so i'll have to give all the other songs a listen. mostly i just shrieked because i was like NO YOU GOT THE VIBES EXACTLY

🧠〰️🧠 truly the mind meld happening here. the handshake line. the mutual wedding non-invitations. i won't block your number or your name on twitter i just hope i don't see it come up on screen!! i do think that we got confirmation the last time they played each other that dylan did text him to say congrats on a milestone but i would have to check the archives

p.s. i think you said it perfectly eloquently :) what matters is that you said it at all and i was delighted to read it 💕

[loptrcoptr]

Lmao one of my friends is getting married in August so the friend group is planning trips etc. and my friend and her partner were thinking of flying into the us and then roadtripping from here (New Mexico) to LA, which I had volunteered to drive for and to take everyone to the Grand Canyon on the way, you know, all that jazz

So they are trying to buy tix from Heathrow to Denver and then not fly here but instead drive which is six hours and I’m kind of like… have yall ever driven for that long before, let alone on the wrong side of the road in a backwards car? Like my American ass did the 5 hour drive from London to wales once, first time doing the wrong car on the wrong side thing, and let me tell you I loooove long driving roadtrips and six hours is literally my preferred length of driving day but that 5 hours s u c k e d oh my god I was so scared the whole time, just white knuckling it the whole way.

They want to spend as many days in Colorado as possible, which is great and all, but still need to come here to meet me and, theoretically, take my truck to LA instead of a rental car. And I just know that if they drive all day to get here they won’t want to do anything the next day because they’ll be exhausted, so we won’t do anything fun and I won’t get to show them around and stuff and then we’ll get right back in the car for two more days. And I get a little irked when people don’t consider that there is, in fact, tourist stuff to do here. Honestly tourist stuff is the only stuff to do in this whole damn state, and where I am is just Colorado Adjacent™️, same damn landscape. but when I moved out here I thought it was gonna be like the Sahara or some shit, so I assume that’s what they’re thinking, and I don’t know how to make it clear to them that they should spend two days here if they intend to drive from Denver so they can see stuff, and if they tell me the kind of stuff they want to see, then I can plan accordingly. Because I think we’ll all be sad if they don’t get to spend any time here, because they’ll get here and go “oh wow it’s actually pretty, I would’ve liked to check it out” and idek? I don’t want to be pushy but may have to be like ���listen if you bypass me because you think there’s nothing to do here I will be butthurt about it and feel like I missed out on sharing my new life with you” because I mean I’ve never been to Denver so maybe it’s awesome and they should just stay here but… don’t you want to come crash for free and let me chauffeur you around and go to ruins and tourist traps and national parks and go swimming in beautiful mountain streams and have a ride on my pony? I guess it’s one of those “I would love this, why don’t other people love this” kind of things

[ohthestoryteller]

applying to movie jobs. scary

[steviescrystals]

there is no feeling worse in the world than missing your grandma :/

[kakashihasibs]

Whenever i meet someone from basically anywhere outside of my bubble of the US or Canada I'm like "oh that's really cool :]" and they always get kinda defensive and angry like "why is that cool >:/" and it's just do they realize they are familiar with entirely different ecosystems? All the cool plants and animals I've never seen in person and likely never will? Ive never been able to go outside the US T-T cut me a little slack please. I'll share all the cool stuff i know about prairies and wet lands from where I'm from

[zodiacsea]

going home fucking finally oh my god i am so tired of being in arizona

[cygnusposts]

wanting to draw but what...

[sillimancer]

amazing how one shot of dopamine and a hot meal can do for one's spirit. I ate scalloped potatoes and went on a little drive and now I've got the pomodoro timer out. who is she.

[arcane-strangeness]

[foldingfittedsheets]

The dog I think of as My Dog was picked up from the shelter when I was about 16 and he was six months old. He was a cattle dog mix, which at the time was really uncommon in our area.

We were only getting a dog because my mom was worried about home invaders which was a bit insane as we were out in the country and we’d left our German Shepherd down in Arizona with my dad for complicated reasons.

I turned the corner and saw him. Instant connection. He was curled up dozing, all blue and white freckles with red ears and feeties. His clipboard said “SLY” in huge red letters. I called it softly and he opened his eyes, ears perking. He roused to sleepily amble toward me, lick my fingers, then go lay back down.

My mom joined me in dismay, seeing the love dripping off of me. She hadn’t wanted a puppy but it was clear which dog we were going home with.

Sly was a monstrous puppy. Fans of cattle dogs will be unsurprised to learn he was exceedingly clever, mischievous and Bored a Lot. It turned out his name hadn’t been Sly. It was Billy. But I think we all know why a huge red warning had been applied to his kennel. We named him Sly anyway.

My mom doesn’t remember threatening in earnest to bring him back but it happened. Sly loved to chew. He had no interest in fetch or most toys but he adored chewing. I lost headphones, backpack straps, and pillows to his voracious teething. We tried to dissuade him. He just learned to chew when we weren’t looking. Then one day, clever but not smart, he set his teeth to a plugged in cord and electrocuted himself. He was fine, just really startled!

Thus ended the chewing, forever.

He wouldn’t even pick up toys. He was fully convinced having things in his mouth was only a matter of time before they turned on him. He’d run after a ball at dog parks, grab it in the euphoria of the chase, then immediately spit it out.

He was still a lot of dog and my moms rumblings about his poor behavior led me to join 4H with him. My friend Lia was in with her spaniels so I had an in. We did twice weekly training in obedience and showmanship.

That was it. Sly transformed into the best dog. From a bored unmanageable puppy he became a partner, ready to work on whatever we needed to work on. He learned buckets of commands, eager to please. Sit, down, wait, stand, front, back up, shake, roll, heel. The only thing we could never convince him to do was speak. His bark was reserved for Danger.

We went to compete in the county fair together, entering obedience trials and dog show portions.

The instructions are clearly stated before obedience testing. A dog must stay sitting for two minutes when told to stay, and three minutes for laying down. If our dog broke we were not supposed to speak to reissue commands, simply wait quietly.

It was us in a line with five other dogs. He passed the sitting part just fine. The down one was longer and a wretched golden retriever broke. But then his trainer pulled out a ball and started trying to redirect him with it. The other dogs watched with interest but stayed down. Sly started up. He desperately wanted to herd the golden back into place.

With elbows off the ground he froze, realizing his mistake. His head whipped to me. In silence, I swept my arm down in the nonverbal command for down. He dropped obediently and watched me fixedly for the rest of the time. I think he could feel my disappointment.

We failed.

But the judge came up to us afterward as I was petting him and said, “I was so impressed your dog knows nonverbal commands, and that other dog was so distracting! Let’s retest with the next batch.”

I was thrilled and Sly was steadfast, staring unblinkly at me for the full three minutes with utter determination. He won blue ribbons in obedience and got later best in breed since there was no other cattle dogs.

[who-goes-maractus]

if your first answer to any computer problem that isn't explicitly "i want to change my computer's operating system" is switch to linux i'm killing you. sorry

We need to lay more blame for "Kids don't know how computers work" at the feet of the people responsible: Google.

Google set out about a decade ago to push their (relatively unpopular) chromebooks by supplying them below-cost to schools for students, explicitly marketing them as being easy to restrict to certain activities, and in the offing, kids have now grown up in walled gardens, on glorified tablets that are designed to monetize and restrict every movement to maximize profit for one of the biggest companies in the world.

Tech literacy didn't mysteriously vanish, it was fucking murdered for profit.

[reasonsforhope]

Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds

Article | Paywall free

When lightning ignited fires around California’s Big Basin Redwoods State Park north of Santa Cruz in August 2020, the blaze spread quickly. Redwoods naturally resist burning, but this time flames shot through the canopies of 100-meter-tall trees, incinerating the needles. “It was shocking,” says Drew Peltier, a tree ecophysiologist at Northern Arizona University. “It really seemed like most of the trees were going to die.”

Yet many of them lived. In a paper published yesterday in Nature Plants, Peltier and his colleagues help explain why: The charred survivors, despite being defoliated [aka losing all their needles], mobilized long-held energy reserves—sugars that had been made from sunlight decades earlier—and poured them into buds that had been lying dormant under the bark for centuries.

“This is one of those papers that challenges our previous knowledge on tree growth,” says Adrian Rocha, an ecosystem ecologist at the University of Notre Dame. “It is amazing to learn that carbon taken up decades ago can be used to sustain its growth into the future.” The findings suggest redwoods have the tools to cope with catastrophic fires driven by climate change, Rocha says. Still, it’s unclear whether the trees could withstand the regular infernos that might occur under a warmer climate regime.

Mild fires strike coastal redwood forests about every decade. The giant trees resist burning thanks to the bark, up to about 30 centimeters thick at the base, which contains tannic acids that retard flames. Their branches and needles are normally beyond the reach of flames that consume vegetation on the ground. But the fire in 2020 was so intense that even the uppermost branches of many trees burned and their ability to photosynthesize went up in smoke along with their pine needles.

Trees photosynthesize to create sugars and other carbohydrates, which provide the energy they need to grow and repair tissue. Trees do store some of this energy, which they can call on during a drought or after a fire. Still, scientists weren’t sure these reserves would prove enough for the burned trees of Big Basin.

Visiting the forest a few months after the fire, Peltier and his colleagues found fresh growth emerging from blackened trunks. They knew that shorter lived trees can store sugars for several years. Because redwoods can live for more than 2000 years, the researchers wondered whether the trees were drawing on much older energy reserves to grow the sprouts.

Average age is only part of the story. The mix of carbohydrates also contained some carbon that was much older. The way trees store their sugar is like refueling a car, Peltier says. Most of the gasoline was added recently, but the tank never runs completely dry and so a few molecules from the very first fill-up remain. Based on the age and mass of the trees and their normal rate of photosynthesis, Peltier calculated that the redwoods were calling on carbohydrates photosynthesized nearly 6 decades ago—several hundred kilograms’ worth—to help the sprouts grow. “They allow these trees to be really fire-resilient because they have this big pool of old reserves to draw on,” Peltier says.

It's not just the energy reserves that are old. The sprouts were emerging from buds that began forming centuries ago. Redwoods and other tree species create budlike tissue that remains under the bark. Scientists can trace the paths of these buds, like a worm burrowing outward. In samples taken from a large redwood that had fallen after the fire, Peltier and colleagues found that many of the buds, some of which had sprouted, extended back as much as 1000 years. “That was really surprising for me,” Peltier says. “As far as I know, these are the oldest ones that have been documented.”

... “The fact that the reserves used are so old indicates that they took a long time to build up,” says Susan Trumbore, a radiocarbon expert at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “Redwoods are majestic organisms. One cannot help rooting for those resprouts to keep them alive in decades to come.”

-via Science, December 1, 2023