Wir sind Menschen...We are people

@fictiondaily event iii — dark academia ↳ the atlas six, @olivieblake

““Fiction forgives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people…”

"My turtle follows me and seeks out affection. Biologist have reached out to me because this is not even close to normal behavior. He just started one day and has never stopped. I don’t know why"

This is like 20 thousand years ago! And the joy and happiness of going to water made this child playfully skip along! It’s universal! Dancing their way back to their family!

In a language we will never hear, a culture we’ll never know, with thoughts and ideas we can only imagine! There are millennia of untold moments of happiness, of human connection and warmth that are gone forever. But they still happened! Did that family even notice the tracks they left? How could they have known that that one day their impossibly distant descendants would be able to see the imprints they made?

Another set of tracks in the same area shows three men hunting a giant kangaroo, running at incredible speeds, but one of them had only one foot! They jumped along on one foot, every so often an imprint from a stick appearing. How did they lose their limb? An accident? A fight? A predator? Was it completely gone or maimed? Was it from birth? Either way this person was cared for by their family and was able to heal and participate fully in life! They most likely felt grief when their family member lost the use of their limb! Who cared for them? Who gave them the stick to help them walk? What kind of joy did their family feel when they made a recovery? Did someone shape and carve the stick? They certainly worked all of their other wooden tools, something as essential that would have been too.

This was during the ice age when Australia became a brutally cold, dry desert. Their entire food system had to change. By all indications it should have been a stark and difficult life of little resources. But no! They worked together! They looked after their wounded and sick! The speed that these hunters were running at was incredible and means they were well fed and healthy! A millennia of helping one another and caring for one another and all we can get are tiny glimpses of these moments did they catch the kangaroo did they laugh and congratulate each other when they did how happy were they to bring it back to their families I just

We’re really bad at cutting avocados. So many people have cut themselves while trying to slice open the slippery fruit that hospital employees often refer to the injury as ‘avocado hand’.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

Being abused at home, bullied at school and lost in the world, the library and all the books I could escape to the most amazing worlds, kept me alive!

I would walk to the library, and spend all day, from 10 am to 9 pm reading there!! I got special awards for how many books I read, I wrote little blurbs on why i loved the books (probably why I love to BETA and do ARCs) 

PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE Just hit the green arrows and the reblog!!!

As a 50 year old woman, the library offers me so much. Digital art pads to borrow, 3D printing, book clubs that are face to face (yeah, the introvert likes face to face because a moderator will stomp on anyone getting snarky)

New books in LARGE PRINT! I’m visually challenged and as much as I love my kindle, The feel of a real book in my hands will always be a beloved feeling!