Otter's Rock

i don’t want to complain about my subjugation or suffering, i don’t want to have to mourn my murdered dead. i don’t want to have to flinch every day for the rest of my life for being what i am.

Oh my god

In this part of the chapter, Yudharry tempts Draco to the cause of SCIENCE by showing him a photo of the moon landing:

"The one with the white, dry, cratered land and the suited people and the blue-white globe hanging over it all. That picture. The picture. If only one picture in all the world were to survive."

with just one (1) problem

this photo doesn't exist, never did, and can't exist for various scientific and practical reasons sfmlkjgsg;ls everyone i am LOSING IT

[ Alt text: It's that "always has been" meme of astronauts looking at earth. 

LEFT ASTRONAUT: wait, yudkowsky doesn't fact-check his science before putting it forward as the pinnacle of human achievement, so he hallucinated moon landing photos that don't exist?? his "rationalism" is just "science storytime with yudyud"???

RIGHT ASTRONAUT, POINTING A GUN: always has been ]

(I am, as a scientist might say, as close to certain as I can be that this photo cannot exist because it was physically impossible to get a picture of more than one astronaut on the moon. ("Visor" doesn't count as far as I'm concerned.) But I'm open to the possibility that there's a photo that shows the Earth and the lunar surface and an astronaut.)

Also, while we're talking about space stuff, did you know that bra seamstresses from Delaware made the space suits worn by American astronauts on their moon missions?

double points if they don't even plan to do it. they decide to soft launch via no longer actively hiding their relationship, just slowly acting more like a couple around other people. they're both at some event and ilya finds shane and just wraps his arm across his shoulders, which maybe that could just be ilya being ilya, but then shane just leans into it? like this is fine and normal? and when someone questions it shane panics and is just like "why wouldn't i? he's my boyfriend" and whoever they're talking to is like "what? since when?" and ilya is immediately onboard with this game "since 2017."

they just keep doubling down "you don't remember me sneaking out to go visit him every time we played in boston? you were all chirping me about it."

"wait, did you two drive here together?" "why would we take separate cars, we live together?" "you WHAT?"

when someone thinks they're joking they bring up the group chat with shane's parents, ilya scrolls back to a text where yuna calls him her favorite son. they bring up a video clip jackie sent of the twins saying "we love you uncle ilya!" shane brings up his thread with svetlana where she sends him russian words and phrases she thinks he should know.

they quickly enlist everyone who already knew, get them all onboard to pretend like their relationship wasn't ever top secret information. shane posts a picture of him with anya, when someone comments "that looks just like ilya rozanov's dog?" he just replies "yeah, we adopted her several months ago" and ilya replies "love our daughter ❤️"

here's a selection of the fics that have been directly linked or indirectly referenced/recommended in the notes of this post.

fics where hollanov go full gaslight:

Gaslighting by 1410_Sunshine

#gaslight by stabthroughme

if you liked that idea, you might like... (alternate relationship reveal recommendations)

fics where they slow-roll it and decide to stop hiding but not actually come out, and everyone around them is confused as hell:

Fanning the Flames by cjr2

Operation: How Gay Can We Go? by CaptainKitler

they (don't) know about us by rachelrae

Fuck it we Puck by SunYiJie

fics where they keep trying to come out, but no one believes them/everyone thinks they're trying to gaslight but they're not:

but daddy i love him by rachelrae

Drawing Conclusions by halfbaked_ziti

Ilya Rozanov is the World's Biggest Troll by frizzyanya

Ilya Rozanov's Guide to Reinforcing the Closet by pink_starfish

fics where they pretend they haven't been together for a decade and let everyone think this is them getting together for the first time:

fall in love again and again by hollanovest

The Chaos Theorem (or: Shane Hollander needs a nap and a therapist. He got Ilya instead) by Goffi_3197

people have mentioned the uno-reverse gaslighting of them being very obviously together and denying it "what are you talking about, we're married as friends, platonic bro-husbands" and the closest thing to that i've come across is this:

None Family With Heart Beef, A Hollanov """Fake""" Marriage

Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.

People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.

If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.

In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.

People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.

It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.

I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.

Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.

#cerebral palsy and #bread. bread is good

Huh. I have C.P., too. But I never made the connection between how avoiding carbs might effect my symptoms (probably because I never made a point of avoiding carbs). Makes sense, though. The brain can only use carbs -- can't convert fat or protein into the sugars it needs. And C.P. means the brain is using more energy to do ordinary things.

Here, have an old English folk song all about the work people are willing to do to get their beer and porridge (mostly beer)-- told from the point of view from the grain itself (no eye contact, open captions/lyrics on screen):

Guild: -chilly silence-

President: so the challenge to you all is a quilt with your interpretation and/or feelings towards our current “democracy”

Guild: 👏👏👏

How I spent my July 4th.

At the start I thought stitching “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” for the last quarter would be therapeutic

I was correct.

I have one more line of embroidery and I think it needs to be bolder and messier than I started it.

Hard to tell in this light, and without ironing it, that the embroidery does get gradually bolder as it goes. Two strands at the top versus 5 at the bottom (6 for the started to be redone final line).

Not bad for first time doing appliqué.

When I was "under 18" I had a job and friends from different parts of town and options for transportation. I volunteered at a food bank. I had an income and the desire to spend it. and I would have been told to leave if I had the audacity to go hang out in a community space without a grown up.

My parents made the point that teens often cause a Ruckus which can be unpleasant to be around. which is true but 1) adults are just as capable of being a public nuisance and 2) if they can enforce this rule, surely they can enforce rules such as "no swearing" or "no loud music" or "no roughhousing" or whatever else they're afraid will happen if a teenager goes out in public.

A game has to list if it has any paid in-app purchases. In theory, this should make it easier for me to avoid games with dark patterns. But it does not work for that at all. Because most games have this warning. It treats every aspect the exact same.

A game that has designed itself to be a psychological minefield to set me up to feel increasingly weaker against guessing it money is labelled the exact same way as a game that gives me a free base game but offers to let me pay for expansions if I want to, even though you will get some of the expansion content for free.

It does...nothing, for me, as a consumer. Or for anyone worried about trying to avoid badly designed dark pattern games and reward good ones.

That is not me trying to argue that some AI is "good", that's not really up to me to decide. Only labelling all products or services that feature AI at any point in their creation doesn't feel transparent. It doesn't feel like it really helps me with my choices.

I'm working on starting a stitch n bitch at my local library. Thing is, I need a name for it that isn't "stitch n bitch," because I guarantee the library will not go for that.

THE SPECS:

--In Arizona. As a warning: all libraries in Maricopa County are named for local flora and fauna, so as cute as something like Cactus Crafters would be, it's gotta be off the table because there are in fact two branches named for cacti species. That runs the risk of being too confusing.

--should include lesser-known fiber crafts like bobbin lace and nålbinding (I already have a tatter who wants to join!)

--should be at least somewhat clear that this is not a quilting group, for the bizarrely large number of people who decided a stitch n bitch was the same thing as a sip n sew (listen if you want to bring some hand sewing go for it but I do not have and am not providing a quilting machine)

--should be all-ages friendly. If you're ten and you want to learn to crochet, get an adult to bring you with a hook and yarn and we will get you going. If you're 80 and just want to hear the juicy goss, we can do that too.

Current suggestions from my roommate:

--Fiber Folks

--Strings n Things

--Makers Anonymous

--Craft n Chat

--Project Pals

--Yarnapalooza

--Craftchella

--BYOP (Bring Your Own Project)

The reason for this was very simple and very practical. In the very early AVEN and immediately pre-AVEN days, back before my time when the disparate ace communities were first finding each other and creating a public online network, there was a fair lot of exclusionist discourse. There are a lot of ways to be asexual, and the early community of course fell prey to the usual infighting about whether someone with a libido counts as asexual, whether someone who chooses to have sex can be asexual (usual tiring Purity Brigade Bullshit), whether someone without a libido counts as asexual (after all, if you have no sex drive, are you sure it's a matter of sexual orientation?), whether ace people count as lgbtq, all the usual nonsense. This worked out the way it pretty much always does -- the inclusionists "win", because exclusionists always break off into smaller and smaller communities so the largest group is, of course, the one where all different kinds of people stick together and welcome each other. And that was AVEN.

And when you're trying to have a strong community and somebody shows up at the gates saying, "hi, I think I'm asexual", it's a fucking horrible idea to start doubting their credentials. They saw the public definition and started calling themselves asexual; they're here, and now they're under the internal definition. An asexual is somebody who calls themself asexual. Sometimes, these people would be frustrated allosexuals, or people choosing to swear off sex, who might not fit the external definition of the term. We made sure that everyone knew the external definition, and there were always conversations about asexuality and how it affected our lives, if they asked us directly what we thought then we'd say "only you can know for sure" and then give our thoughts on the matter for as long as they asked for them, and other than that it wasn't anyone else's fucking business or anyone's place to judge. If people weren't nasty and didn't create problems, they could stay and call themselves whatever they wanted.

Many of these people who didn't fit the strict definition eventually left after receiving support and discovering more about themselves. Some stopped IDing as ace but became allies to the community. Some people who came in with the most "I'm a heterosexual girl who is angry at my boyfriend" intro posts you've ever seen in your life discovered that they were in fact ace and that the messages that society had taught them about sex and romance were simply not for them -- these are people who, in a gatekept community, would have been incorrectly ousted immediately.

And then there were people -- a LOT of people -- who found themselves in grey areas. People who said "okay, this community makes sense to me and is useful to me and I have so much in common with a lot of you, but not EXACTLY like you. However, what I experience may not be the strict default definition but it's an awful lot like these other members on the forum." And they formed sub-communities. The grey aces. The demisexuals. The aromantics and greyromantics. Through these dialogues, between subgroups who in a more exclusionary community would be arguing about who the "real" asexuals are and splintering off into their own communities away from all those stupid cishet fakers, we developed language to describe our similarities and differences. The sexual/romantic/aesthetic attraction model came out of these dialogues and it became so massively important to our understanding of asexuality that basically everyone in the ace/aro community describes themselves by it, as do a large number of people outside the community. The community made massive leaps ahead in just a decade or two by, well, being a community. By being a place where anybody who called the place home, and didn't bully other people in the home, was right. By being somewhere where anybody who saw "asexual: someone who doesn't experience sexual attraction" and thought "that sounds like a term with some use for me" was allowed to use it.

An asexual is somebody who does not experience sexual attraction.

An asexual is somebody who calls themselves asexual.

These definitions are not in conflict -- they are both, in concert, fundamentally necessary for a safe and vibrant community where we can protect, support, and learn about each other and ourselves.

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

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