#it's not the point

[terriwriting]

(Crossposted from Dreamwidth)

Diane Duane is a vegetarian.

This is a harmless example of the sort of gossip I heard years ago, when I was more involved in volunteering at conventions than I am now. Other non-harmless bits of gossip include: Author A is a mean drunk; Author B and Author C use conventions to hook up away from their respective spouses; Author D hasn't written in years, and all their recent works are ghostwritten; Author E is a dimwit who can't manage their own household accounts.

Neil Gaiman can't be trusted around young women.

This rumour was told to me with the same tone of authority as the rumour about Diane Duane. She had health problems, you see. So if she was ever a guest at a con where I happened to be working, I should make sure to mention to the organizers that she really needed a vegetarian option.

As it turns out, the rumour about Diane Duane is half true. She has written about her IBS at least on Tumblr, possibly in a few other places. Which is why I'm willing to share the rumour. I don't know if the person I got the rumour from years ago had heard it from someone else, or if someone in the chain of rumour-mongering heard part of a slightly different rumour and decided that Diane Duane should be a vegetarian for her own good. Maybe she ate a salad and complained about her stomach in front of the wrong person. It's a harmless example of the sort of gossip you hear when you're an insider, or useful to insiders.

The rumour about Neil Gaiman turned out to be true. By his own statements on the matter, it's true. Neil Gaiman can't be trusted around young women.

I heard the rumour after about five years of work. I'd joined a writing group, volunteered at a couple of local conventions, volunteered at a couple of larger cons, worked my way up from moving tables and chairs to coordinating which room got what audiovisual equipment when. I went from being an outsider to being someone who was invited to hang out with authors and agents at after-parties. And after five years of work, I got to be somebody who could be warned that Neil Gaiman needed to be kept away from young women.

And that you had to provide a vegetarian option for Diane. Poor girl. Sensitive digestion and all.

The rumour about Neil Gaiman turned out to be not harmless. But it was told to me in the exact same tone as Diane Duane is a vegetarian. I heard the rumour about Diane Duane once, and it never came up again. I heard the rumour about Neil Gaiman once, and it never came up again. I heard lots of rumours once.

I don't hear rumours anymore. I haven't volunteered for a convention in decades. I still attend a few, but they're for different blocs of fandom than I used to be in, and I don't see many of the same people at them. I'm sure there are creeps and abusers and predators at these conventions, but I'm not one of the special people who gets to protect myself from them. I'm not an insider anymore.

It took over twenty years for the rumour about Neil Gaiman to turn into a bomb exploding under multiple fandoms and franchises. I can't stop wondering about the next bomb that con organizers are trying to hide.

But at least the next Diane Duane will get their vegetarian option, thanks to the whisper network. If the right person hears the rumour at the right time.

[neversatisfiedwithlife]

It always feels weird when they have moments like this. Because I will always think of the way maya gets her shit brushed under the rug. "No one is alone in it"

[autoneurotic]

i’m going to burst into tears. such a hauntingly stupid and wonderful phrase to immortalize somewhere. LOOK AT PIttbert!

[silvermoon424]

Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

EDIT: Y'all OOP is not whitewashing and brushing past the crimes of the fucking Taliban, they're simply pointing out that unlike the American elite- who have never suffered a day in their lives- terrorists like the Taliban usually go through some radicalizing event caused by poor life circumstances. That absolutely does not excuse or condone the horrible things they do, of course.

Also, Somali pirates and the Taliban were explicitly mentioned because this comment is in response to a couple of their former hostages saying said groups supplied them with soap and toothpaste, which the US government refuses to give to migrants. You can stop misinterpreting and derailing this post now, thanks.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

we need more divorcebaiting. how strongly can canon imply (without technically outright stating) that these two characters are bitterly, acrimoniously divorced? essential we explore this

[redstonedust]

a lot of media assumes robots would be immortal but i think its a lot more interesting to explore robots dealing with their parts wearing down and battery life shortening and all the horrible little failings that come with being a complicated machine. sure they can replace parts but you'd assume you cant completely ship of theseus them, or it'd have pretty big rammifications on their sense of identity. idk. give me robots with distinct, unique signs of aging. as a treat.

[time-to-leave-machine]

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

[wishfulsketching]

Girl dad Silco is a source of endless entertainment for me

Extra doodles:

Someone save Sevika, she is in hell

[astronnova]

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[xiaq]

Absolutely wild to me how sometimes you don't even realize the way you'd been taught to perceive things as a kid was kinda fucked up, actually, until decades later.

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

Right. Of course. Right.

[flowersnax]

im gettin real sick of people he/him-ing kris (id in alt)

[kedreeva]

Please meet Rube Goldberg.

While collecting eggs a couple of weeks ago, this egg slipped out of my hands from 5 feet up above wood, wire, and cement. Quail eggs are VERY fragile when it comes to impacts, so this egg's life flash before my eyes and time slowed down as I watched the world's most ridiculous accidental cartoon egg drop.

It somehow missed every obstacle on the way down (3 shelves) in order to land upon the side of a milk jug I had dropped the day before. It bounced off of that to a couple feet away, and hit the side of a hay bale. It bounced off of that, and somehow landed on the open lip of an empty feed back laying on the floor that I had put down under the towers to prevent the cement from sinking heat from the space. The bag gently collapsed, and rolled the pristine egg to a stop back at my feet.

I stared at it in disbelief. I took it inside and candled it- not a crack in it. So I noted the pen I got it from (CER) and scribbled "dropped?" on it. I figured SURELY it would not develop after that kind of nonsense, but when I candled at lockdown, the little thing was ready to go.

So, I stuck the egg into its own hatching bag, and sure as shit, the little fucker hatched!

And as if the rest of the story is not weird enough, this is possibly the first coturnix chick in the world who didn't immediately faceplant off of a human hand in the pursuit of the cold embrace of death. It just sat there, posing with the egg. Looking around like Hm so this is what being alive is... it's alright I guess.

[nerdpiggy]

i completely understand & agree with the backlash against students using chatgpt to get degrees but some of you are out here saying "getting a degree in xyz means pulling multiple consecutive all-nighters and writing essays through debilitating migraines and having severe back pain from constantly studying at your desk and chugging energy drinks until you get a kidney stone and waking up wishing you were dead every day, and that's just part of the natural process of learning!!!" and like. umm. i don't think that any of us should have had to endure that either. like maybe the solution for stopping students from using anti-learning software depends on college institutions making the process of learning actually sustainable on the human body & mind rather than a grueling health-destroying soul-crushing endeavor

[justladders]

[mushyooms]

buying him time