a distant birdcall; the hush of rain

For the first time in over 100 years, we have confirmed evidence of cougar reproduction in the state, as the Voyageurs Wolf Project caught high quality footage of a mama and three kittens on their trail cams.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

It's called the glass cliff, and it's a phrase that was first coined in 2005 by University of Exeter researchers Michelle K. Ryan and S. Alexander Haslam. The research was inspired by an article in the Times (of London, not New York) that suggested women leaders have a negative impact on stock performance. Perhaps Ryan and Haslam smelled the whiff of bullshit coming from the page. They wondered if it was actually true that women brought doom and gloom to the businesses they led, or if there was some other reason why women were more likely to be found in leadership positions at troubled businesses.

They found that women were indeed more likely than men to be in leadership positions at distressed companies, but they also found that the problems were not the women's fault... These firms had shown months of decline and seemed at risk of failure prior to adding women to their boards.

When Allison Cook and Christy Glass at Utah State University followed up on this research by looking at US companies, they also discovered disturbing patterns impacting women and people of color in business: women and people of color were most likely to be placed at the head of a company when it was already at risk of failure; white men were less likely to accept leadership positions when companies were at risk of failure; and when women or people of color fail to quickly turn around the struggling company, they were most likely replaced with white men.

Women and people of color are often only given the opportunity to steer ships that white men have already rammed into icebergs. Then, when the ship sinks, the media reports that women make bad captains."

I really wanted to show how I see what is happens to bloodymary right after the moment when Grace takes Simon from the bloody ocean I feel like I want it to be creepy and disturbing.

As funny as it is that rocky sees grace and complains about grace and humans in general as a terribly inefficient blob of water and fluids and teases constantly...

I REALLY think this should be a relatively rocky-exclusive perspective. He's watched this incredibly stressed human drip all kinds of tears and goos while they were floating around in space, and grace let down basically all of his guard around rocky personally, have discussed and understood eachother over life threatening missions. To Rocky, grace is Grace!

But grace does have some naturally combative push to him (see, the commentary that got him stonewalled in the scientific community in the first place, and being able to keep up with and handle Eva stratt) and further more, when an eridian is Not Rocky, i.e. not incredibly socially withdrawn and traumatized and maybe on their own spectrum of divergence before his ill fated mission and was very susceptible to latching onto a strange and unusual creature in just as much crisis as him...

That is to say. The eridians are going to meet grace with wildly different priorities and expectations. And what they're going to get is a human dangerously close to deaths door, and cornered and dying humans aren't always the most friendly or cooperative and kind, even the Nicest Humans You Can Get.

So they get a dying human. And as tumblr loves to say, humans are terrifying to aliens, and fuck do they persist. Rocky's so-described "pathetic space blob" grace is terrifying to most eridians, especially the scientists studying him.

I trained for years to be a con artist. I told my friends and family that I wanted to be a magician, but that was just a cover for why I was constantly practicing sleight of hand. 

In junior high and high school, I would shop lift a bunch of candy on my way to school, sell it to kids at the morning break, and use that money to run a crooked poker game at lunch.

Finally, when I was 19 or 20, I felt I was ready, and I picked my first pocket. I was on the bus, bumped a guy as I passed down the aisle, got his wallet, super clean.

In the wallet was several hundred dollars. A huge first score, I had been hoping for a couple twenties. I sat there looking at the, like, 400 bucks, thinking.

That was my rent at the time. We were both on the bus. It was likely his rent too. Lord knows the only reason to carry that much cash on the bus is you’re on your way to pay a bill. We were both on the bus, you know? That’s not someone I was comfortable stealing from.

I tapped him on the shoulder and told him “hey i think you dropped this” and gave it back to him with all the money still in it. It was the first and last time I ever picked a pocket.

Picking a rich person’s pocket is a loosing game. They probably have credit cards and not cash, those credit cards probably have the best anti-theft measures their bank can provide, and you probably can’t get close enough to those people to pick their pockets unless you’re already rich yourself.

The people who’s pockets you can reliably pick are the people around you. The people who are also on the bus, who are in this same shitty situation with you.