Neurotically Meta

@everything-you-feel-is-real I know by tumblr tradition that I'm to say "impossible, my posts never blow up like that," or "please don't do this to me."

Marie Kondo, gently over my shoulder: why is a pair of pants you find unwearable still in your dresser drawer

me: oh shit that’s right!! The dresser is for clothes that under some circumstance I might conceivably wear!!

Marie Kondo, beaming proudly: Yes, that’s correct!! These pants must have been your favorites. How wonderful that they were so comfortable and practical that you wore them out. But now since they no longer function as pants, you should move them from the drawer where you keep your functioning pants!

me: Yes thanks I got it they’re in the fabric basket now

Going to hospital to visit someone where you aren't the primary visitor? "I can just sit in a corridor whilst you and your son talk in private... I brought a book!"

Going to have to wait with someone while they do an important task? "Don't worry about it, just get on with the Task, I'll have a book in my bag so I'll be happy as a pig in shit."

Arrived somewhere before your companions so unavoidably need to sit at a station? "I didn't even realise you were late, I was just in my book." Etc.

14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."

and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.

so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.

on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.

the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.

I’m 33 now, and I still discover a new joke every time I reread it.

*starts thunderously knocking on the doors of heaven*

In the UK, the book of the peerage is called Burke’s Peerage. Burke sounds like berk, which means a silly/annoying person. So Terry took ‘twerp’, another word for a silly or annoying person, and replaced the e with u. 

Trans silvas very simply translated into german would be über den Wald

Trans silvas -> Transsilvanien -> Überwald

The Venturi Effect is a scientific term referring to the acceleration of a liquid through a narrow tube (like a jet).

Selachii is a classification of sharks. (I discovered this when my stepson got really into sharks)

The Malleus Maleficarum is a very real, very nasty and absolutely batshit insane book from late 15th-century Germany, basically laying out the procedure for catching, torturing, and executing witches. Its title translates to The Hammer of Witches. The other titles are Pratchett's inventions.

Because rye wasn't domesticated like other cereals. It was a weed with enough of a passing resemblance to wheat and barley that there was accidental gradual selection for similarity to crops, which meant larger seeds. At which point rye still mostly stayed as a weed, but a arable (useful/edible) one. And then (after thousands of years of arable weediness) it was intentionally cultivated, likely due to its frost resistance and ability to grow in poorer soil than it its ostensibly higher nutrition domesticated competition, becoming a regionally vital crop. The cultivated strain continued to hybridize with its weedier/"earlier" rye relatives in the wild in a way that was hard to control, leading to a high level of genetic diversity (until relatively recently) compared with other grains.

I'm just saying that at some point, maybe a couple years into the road trip, maybe not until linguists dig in post-nutrient crisis, Rocky, who on day two (2) of their collaboration/friendship, was informed the bipedal leaky space blob's name was "Elegant movement" and duly provided the eridian tranlation with the same sense of amusement that new Merry Men got upon meeting Little John, who called him that name in literally every possible emotional register from sarcastic glee (watching sleep-deprived 'elegant motion' trip on its own feet for the 4th time that day) to great and terrible fear (rocky was not actually thinking about dramatic irony while watching Elegant-Motion be thrown to the wall and lay there unmoving while its body weight crushed its lungs, but he did maybe think about it with dark humor later) to unfathomable love, gratitude, shock, relief, thankfulness (at a certain point a funny nickname ceases to mean anything but that person. Grace is here, Grace came back, Grace is here!), Rocky is going to find out that was not in fact the only translation for his name.

It’s like a combination of the morbid fascination of watching a car crash in slow motion layered with the upbeat thrill of a heist movie plus politics intrigue and spy-movie style paranoia, all in a gigantic blizzard swirling around this one little guy. I didn’t know how I would be able to become attached to a character in this series after reading Shards of Honor and Barrayar, because I loved Cordelia so much as a protagonist, but Miles Vorkosigan did the job. Truly the character of all time.

He’s a strategic genius. He can figure out a solution to almost any problem. He’s in love with his childhood best friend and gets shut down repeatedly. He serves as the officiant at her impromptu wedding to a guy he saved through another random act of kindness, and plays out the roles of three different people in it like some kind of vaudeville comedy act. He makes people laugh. He inspires everyone around him to genuine loyalty and trust. He was playmates with the current emperor of his home planet when they were kids and is the heir of an aristocratic family. He refuses to get anything by nepotism and uses his mother’s maiden name when he meets people so they won’t know who he is. On a whim, he decides to help a random stranger and has to lie to do it. He commits to the bit so hard that he ends up faking his way into running a mercenary fleet whose existence was initially a complete lie and stopping a war he had nothing to do with. He has stomach ulcers from how stressed out he is. He refuses to break a promise, even when doing so would allow him to escape the web of lies he’s woven. His house of cards is always one gust of wind from toppling and he’s somehow able to keep it standing by sheer force of character. He will not stop because if he does he’ll have a nervous breakdown.

So… EVIL WINS… somehow? AGAIN! ALL HAIL CHAOS is currently the 21st bestsellingest book in the land of America!

This is my weird book with the musical, sold for an advance I spent entirely on promo, written when I was sure publishing was done with me. Nobody more pleased than me when people were BAMBOOZLED into buying it but I spent this whole week expecting and dreading that the sequel would fall off a cliff. And it didn’t! THANK YOU TEAM CHAOS.

This kind of response to things I say about sex work, which isn't always phrased like this but almost always focuses on me being male or a man or my pronouns, shows a fundamental misunderstanding of why mansplaining is bad.

I am a sex worker. I have been for a decade. The majority of people I know are sex workers and I'm embedded in sex worker community. I started before 18 and have done it in brothels, cars, my own home, clients' homes, saunas, and hotels.

"It must have serious value!"