storytime

And now it’s time for some epic fanart from 2018! ☆ﾟ.*･｡ﾟ  (the last one (two …) was mirrored in the name of composition)

This year my love to Trigun (and Vash…) is extremely strong… ლ(́◉◞౪◟◉‵ლ

Closest match: Raphanus sativus genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Radish

and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote

the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work

going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.

and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???

we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.

These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"

There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:

Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR

Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.

In spite of all this! Through some amazing marketing and philanthropy work, you can help them out right now! You can make a difference! They managed to get a lovely donor to agree to a match challenge for up to $50,000!!! So if they raise $50,000 they'll actually get $100,000. The match challenge ends on December 31st 2023, and they're already at $26,4448.10 which means they're halfway there!! Please spread the word, if you can't donate then a reblog to someone who can will help.

If the link above doesn't work, you can find the donation page here:

Somebody ate a hole in the flour.

Mace Windu panted, the Force fizzing through his veins, then focused his mind and will and brought everything about the fight together.

Inhaled, and felt all the tension and grief and loss, all the triumph and energy, that had fuelled the most intense fight of his life.

Exhaled, and let it go into the Force.

Any battle in Vapaad was a dance on the razor’s edge, and this had been far more of that than normal.

“Thank you,” he said, turning to the man in the office with him.

“My pleasure,” Luke replied, with a respectful nod, and Mace took the opportunity to study the young man.

My dad’s parents were Okies–environmental refugees, before anyone had a word for it. They left their families, the land they were renting, their animals, took their 1-year-old daughter, and drove to California. My grandpa worked in a peach packing plant. My grandma cleaned houses.

They were so lonely that after a couple years they went back to Oklahoma, with their total savings of $20. Later, they bought land. Built a house. Survived.

My mom’s dad was a kid then, and his family stayed in western Kansas. Stayed because my great-grandpa was too damn stubborn to leave, stayed when their neighbors had all left, stayed because they didn’t have enough money to leave. They slept with wet rags over their faces. My great-grandpa tied a string around his waist, tied the other end to the house, and went to check on the cows, while my great-grandma tried to make soup from a little milk and a little flour. There was so much dust swirling in the air, the soup turned to mud. She cried, begged her husband once more to let them leave, and they went to bed hungry.

My grandpa’s oldest brother was the first one in the county to leave his wheat stubble in the field instead of plowing it under after the harvest. His neighbors made fun of him. His parents scolded him for having messy fields. 70 years later, at his funeral, someone told how people from Japan came to visit the farm, to see what he was doing differently.

More than 80 years after the Dust Bowl, I stood on a mountain in Ecuador watching, horrified, as a man with a tractor plowed a steep field. He would back up the hill, set the disk in the ground at the top of the field, and drive down, breaking up the soil, dragging it downhill. Dust billowed around him.

The man next to me, a rich-for-the-area farmer, sighed happily. “Look at all that dust. Isn’t that great?”

“What? No!” I was shocked.

“Why not? That’s what a modern farm looks like.”

I thought of the old black-and-white photos, dust clouds like black walls rolling in across the prairie. That’s what a modern farm looked like, too.

The next field down, four people and four oxen–well, dairy cows used as oxen–were planting. They used plows, too, but instead of a disk pulverizing the soil, their plow was a straight piece of wood, metal from an old leaf spring bolted to the end. One team of oxen used that plow to open a furrow, the women walking behind dropped maize seeds into the soil, and the second team of oxen dragged the same kind of plow just above the first, closing the furrow and burying the seeds. They walked along the hill–side to side, furrows running along the contour of the hill. If they were raising any dust, it wasn’t enough for me to see from across the valley.

The man with the tractor probably finished in an hour or two. The whole group, people and oxen and all, probably spent the whole day planting the same size field.

As the maize grew tall, you could see the difference: In the tractored field, the top rows were yellow, spindly, trying to root in the yellow-brown clay the topsoil had once covered. Down below, in dark, rich earth, the maize was tall, green, strong.

In Mali, years later, a farmer explained to a group of visiting scientists why, despite having made erosion control bunds, his rows of maize still went up and down the slope, instead of along the contour, parallel with the bunds. “Because of the wind,” he said, like it was obvious–because it was. In the rainy season, the wind comes from the south, and when storms come it blows hard enough to send dust and dishes and clothes left on the line flying and tumbling with it.

The rows of maize have to be parallel to that wind, or they’ll blow over. So sure, you can put the scientists’ earthen ridges in to block the downhill flow of water, but your rows can’t follow that meandering contour. Your rows have to face into the wind. 

For thousands of years we’ve been coaxing, wrestling, dragging our food from the soil. If we’re careful, and lucky, we can make our peace with it. If we charge into places unknown–the high plains of Kansas and Oklahoma, the steep slopes of the Andes, the storm-swept fields of West Africa–if we plow, and plant, and harvest without thinking? Without learning from the place? Dust clouds blackening the horizon, stunted maize on worn-out soil, crops blown down in  thunderstorms–the earth is forgiving, but only so far. We have time to learn, to make mistakes, to do what is easy even when it does harm, but only so much. Beyond that, we destroy the very literal foundations of our lives.

When I was researching the book, I encountered story after story like the ones above; if folks think they’re unbelievable I’m here to tell you they’re shockingly common. There are families in the midwest now who still put their plates and bowls away face-down because grandma learned as a kid that if you put them away face-up, they catch the dust. After the storms you’d have to sweep off the roof and the internal support beams because the dust would eventually collapse your house otherwise.

I will say – not to argue with but to augment the above – the farmers in the dust bowl weren’t stupid, and by-and-large they weren’t greedy or malicious. The reason we destroyed the heart of the country in the way we did is that they were fucked with. Land speculators, most of whom were greedy or stupid or both, worked on the thesis that “rain follows the plow” – that if you plant a prairie with crops and trees, rain will magically appear. Some of them based this on studies that themselves had been….let’s call it “hopefully falsified”…to support the theories of people who wanted the midwest settled; manifest destiny played a part for sure, but “rain follows the plow” was the curse of the dust bowl.

The farmers didn’t know better; how could they? They did what they’d always done, and had to do it harder and more after the economic collapse post-WWI, and the prairie simply wouldn’t forgive them for it. The indigenous people did know better, but the military genocide had already mostly swept through by the time the land was sold to farmers and stripped bare.

The fact that the midwest today isn’t a barren desert is a miracle of science and good governance, correcting what greed destroyed and poverty perpetuated. The good news is, the Earth is remarkably resilient and wants to grow things. The bad news is that it’s also indifferent to what humanity wants, and if we keep choking it, it chokes right back.

Particularly when the fragility of our topsoil is mentioned, but even these days just with discussions of climate change in general, I think often of the anecdotal story of the sign posted on an abandoned dust bowl homestead:

I have been writing since I was a kid and it's always been the only part of my life that I never stress over. Maybe the story is good; maybe it's not-- the important thing is that I had fun writing it. Even writer's block was rarely a problem. I could either take a break and wait it out or just Write Something Anything, and the words would start to flow like always.

For almost the past year, the words won't come. I can come up with ideas, sure, but when I sit down at the keyboard the sentences are clunky and my brain feels like a cat being given a pill. That's the worst part-- I'm fine with writing badly but this just isn't fun like it used to be. I've tried all the classic tricks, tried giving it time, tried finishing old projects, starting new ones, different font. Same result.

Since you're an experienced writer I hope I'm not out of line in asking, what do you do to break writer's block? How do you call the words back?

I wish I knew, but the state of my own WIP folder is an indication that I don't, and your comment (bolded) is one I can appreciate.

That's the worst part-- I'm fine with writing badly but this just isn't fun like it used to be. I've tried all the classic tricks, tried giving it time, tried finishing old projects, starting new ones, different font. Same result.

Confronted with all The Usual Suggestions, I can add the one which isn't there: have you tried reverting to pen / pencil / notebook and writing in longhand "for spontaneity"?

There are two general directions from which one can come at an issue like this: the instrumental and the operational.

"Instrumental", the way I'm using it here, would have to do with aspects of the work of writing that involve the interaction of the writer with writing (and the written) through a given interface. These are, broadly speaking, external issues. They can be tweaked and poked at with varying levels of success, and when things have been malfunctioning, such tweaking usually shows results in the relatively short term.

Operational issues, though, are ones affecting what's going on inside the writer before (or during) getting anywhere near the interface. I'd say this is the kind of thing you're dealing with.

Operational writing issues can be challenging to debug...and even when their nature or causes seem clear, the the results of the debugging can take a while to implement. So before we start getting into this: with regret I have to tell you to set aside any thoughts of a quick simple fix.

Briefly: my guess—from the symptoms you've described above—is that something writing-associated may have happened to you a year or so ago, or perhaps earlier, as sometimes the effects of this kind of situation can take a while to manifest. (And that you're able to identify the time frame that clearly speaks well of your powers of observation.)

Now let's be clear: whatever this thing was that happened, it doesn't at all have to have been anything bad. In fact, it's just as likely, or maybe more, to have been something really good, a positive life change—a shift in a location or a relationship to something newer or better. But its effect in the longer run is that your relationship with your internal writing process has changed, or your perception of it (and the way it felt) has shifted. Or possibly both.

As regards analysis of the a-year-or-so-ago situation: even if you successfully identify an event that seems likely to have been involved... that identification, by itself, is unlikely to make any difference to your current situation. The shift has happened, and seeking to simply undo it by processing it somehow is likely to be a waste of your time.

The bottom line is that if I'm right about this, you and your interior writing process have for some reason started growing in a significantly new and previously unexpected direction. The reason writing doesn't feel easy or fun these days is that the new direction of growth is causing you to need to expend more energy and effort than previously—because growth does that. The sense of effortlessness that used to be there is missing now because the new, more complex level of function can't be carried on, or carried out, with the old sense of ease.

The tl;dr; Odds are strong that you're currently on your way to being a significantly better writer. You just can't do it on the same terms as you used to.

If this sounds like bad news, it's because of course you'd like things to just (after some quick useful instrumentational adjustment or other) go back to the way they were! Unfortunately, though, I think that in your case, that ship most likely sailed a year or so ago.

Your options now are somewhat limited. You get to either:

(a) Sit around where you are (developmentally speaking), writing "retrospectively" in an attempt to recall that sense of ease, and be really pissed off about this whole mess:

or,

(b) Admit the likely context of the growth change you're edging into, and start the work of pushing through where you are at the moment to the other side.

And the only way you're going to be able to do that is by just keeping on writing on a regular basis, even though you're not satisfied with how you feel while it's happening, or what's coming out.

I'm entirely aware that this isn't going to sound at all pleasant. It sure wasn't the last couple times I went through it.

I've had two, possibly three of these—let's call them "reconfigurations", for lack of a better word. Fortunately they haven't seemed to come oftener than once every decade and a half or so. Just as well, because they're really annoying. (Especially when you're on deadline at the time.)

I mean, here you are going about your writing life and everything seems to be running smoothly, and then all of a sudden there's some kind of triggering event. (Or an unexpected internal shift that simply coincides accidentally with an external event that might or might not have had anything to do with the internal events. Even with my psych nurse hat on real tight, I haven't always been able to tell.) In the long run, the reason for the shift hasn't mattered: it's simply occurred. There's no way to go back, and nowhere to go but forward.

The only good thing to say about this kind of situation is that eventually—assuming you don't give up, or try to cheat on the increased energy required to push through to the new level—you will come out on that far side significantly stronger and tougher and better a writer than you were before everything apparently went to hell. You will also find the enjoyment again, and a renewed sense of ease. But they'll be different sensations, hooked to different and more powerful levels of function.

If I'm right about all the above, you now have ahead of you a difficult and annoying slog. And it wouldn't be kind to pretend otherwise.

My advice to you, if any or all of this rings true, is to take the writing part of it in baby steps, but regular ones. And no matter how much you may have been accustomed to write in a day, you'll be wise to scale your expectations way back while starting to deal purposefully with this. You are going to have to push through the feelings of dysfunction and unease and regularly commit words to screen or paper whether you feel good about them or not. This is not going to be easy. You are going to have to build yourself—at least temporarily—a new normal, a version and experience of regular writing that doesn't depend on you necessarily having an easy or good time of it

You are going to have to keep reminding yourself that growing pains of this kind are normal; that you're building new mental "muscle mass" and "bone structure" to support the increased stresses of the writer you're going to be when you come out on the far side of this.

Now, the nitty-gritty. How long is this going to take?

Probably wisest to assume a matter of months. But beyond that, I wouldn't have data enough to predict how long this is going to take for a different writer. What I do know is that I didn't start seeing signs of improvement or increased ease of operation until I had both realized and acknowledged what was happening to me and stopped trying to go backwards to "the way things were". Then, slowly, like the crocuses coming up in late winter, things little by little began to shift. Those first green shoots won't come up all at once. But they will come.

Also possibly helpful: watch your diet. Make sure you get enough protein: boost your intake if you can. And a good B-complex supplement wouldn't come amiss, either. Brainwork needs those vitamins in particular.