The user formerly known as Ailuromatron

The traditional Establishing Scene for "How many people live in this house?" And "What's the family dynamic like?" And "How's the financial situation going?" AND--!

Is it noodles for the seventh day in a row? Is Father asking about your studies as he carves the turkey, or is Mom saving a plate for Dad, since he's working late again, or is the Main Character finally getting into the Leftover Takeout she's been looking forward to all day, only for the cat to try to steal it?

As you chit-chat over dinner, do people talk about the war, or the stranger that came to town, or plans for the future, or reminiscing about the Old Days?

There are so! Many! Things! That can happen in a Dinner Scene!

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

"This can be very harmful for neurodivergent people, as many neurodivergent people struggle to feel internal cues and bodily sensations, including hunger and fullness. An emphasis on “only eating when hungry” can result in neurodivergent people delaying eating until they are so hungry that they are shaky, highly irritable, or even on the verge of passing out. A focus on “stopping when full” may cause neurodivergent people to overthink every bite they take and scrutinize whether they are truly hungry or truly full.  To modify Intuitive Eating for neurodivergent people, it may be important to focus on eating enough and eating consistently throughout the day, rather than eating according to one’s hunger and fullness cues. Neurodivergent people may need more of a structured meal and snack schedule than neurotypical folks in recovery, as well as some guidelines around a minimum amount of food. This does not make their eating less intuitive or their recovery less real - it is an important way of honouring their body’s needs and unique ways of functioning."

- "no, you?"

"me neither but we probably should eat something soon"

And when a kid would assert something incorrect In class, he wouldn't tell them they were wrong, he would help lead them to the right answer and then when they admitted/ accepted the new information, he'd say "now we're both right! Nice work!"

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

When he found and married my mom, he was nearly 45 and they had so much trouble conceiving that he went to a Guanyin temple supposedly "magical" for praying for children. When I was born (not a son, also an only child until now), my mom said, "when you prayed at the temple did you ask for a son?" He said, "Aiya, everyone is asking for sons, so I said any gender is okay. If I asked for a son, maybe we wouldn't have gotten a child because Guanyin's son quota is already used up. Do you want that to happen?" My mom laughed for days about "son quota" and continues to tell people about it today, but her honest answer was: "Any child is okay."

Jokes on them. They didn't specify a gender, so Guanyin Ma gave them a non-binary child!

More seriously: my dad doesn't care about sons. When I told my parents that I wouldn't marry or have children, I thought he might be disappointed, but he wasn't. Then again, maybe I should have expected that, given he tried to become a monk at 18 🤪 I think he said the thing about sons to poke fun at people who care too much about sons because he frankly thinks it's all a bit ridiculous. In his eyes, a child is a child, so what's the point in caring about gender? If the child "changes" gender, does it make a difference?

And my manager was like no!!!! If that happened, I would drive to find you guys in my truck and we could eat stuff from my wife's garden and I would make sure everyone I know survived!! I would carry you all on my shoulders away from the zombies!!

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.