עזרא

(Not talking about hard military sci-fi since I haven’t read enough of it to say one way or the other. I’m talking soft quasi-military sf like Trek)

Like if you think about it narratively they’re incredibly useful because it’s a type of battle where:

1. No matter how spectacularly well the people fighting one do, it’s inherently not gonna successfully take down the big bad. Because the battle that could have done that is already lost. So it’s a time when they can win (achieve their objective of a successful orderly retreat) without winning. Always useful in a story where you need your protagonists to not win until the end.

2. You have an excuse for your Very Clever Plucky Band of Protagonists to be taking on a much much bigger and better armed force without it being just plain stupid to do so. No idiot balls here, just an acknowledgment that we inherently have to be asking a small force to hold off a large one, so the rest of our large force can get clear.

3. Great potential for a heroic sacrifice that doesn’t feel contrived BUT a sacrifice is not required. As mentioned in point 1 your protagonists can also do really well without it screwing up the pacing of the story. This means that your audience will not know for sure which way it is going to go based on the rules of storytelling. So you can get genuine tension/suspense and genuine catharsis.

4. Battle tactics and objectives can be complex and difficult to get across on page or on screen at the best of times, but “cover everyone else’s retreat from a lost battle” is easy to understand, sufficiently high stakes, and emotionally impactful—much more so than any convoluted “get the macguffin” or “take this territory” could ever be.

5. The combo of high stakes, inability to retreat (the whole point is they’re already retreating) and desperation mean it’s a perfect excuse for your protagonists to pull out all the stops. That experimental weapon that has a one in three chance of blowing up? Might as well use it because if we don’t not only are we dead, all our friends retreating behind us are too.

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

I entered the working world in 2005. I had a few odd jobs for a few years and then finally just bit the bullet in 2009, got a job at a grocery storeas an inventory clerk. My job was to count surplus items in the backroom and update the counts. Additional responsibilities included helping stock the front end. I left that job in less than a year.

A friend of mine now works at the same chain, different location, same job title, in 2022. But where I shared that title with two other people, he's the only one with that job title. Additionally, there are less stockpersons, and he is often called out to the floor to help them, which impedes his primary job function. He is also expected to clean bathrooms and some other maintenance things that I cant imagine doing as an inventory clerk.

And I thought maybe it was just that his location is understaffed, but looking back on the past few years where I was expected to do everything (be the front end, the dispatcher, the manufacturer, the teacher, trainer, janitor, delivery driver, account handler... christ, how did I do all this?) I'm looking at the issue with fresh eyes.

I hear sometimes about the 'slim down,' where a lot of companies took on a trend of hiring less people than they need to cut down on the cost of labor, and I look at how fast a person can burn out at a job. And how many jobs are considered 'high pressure sales' when they dont need to be.

Like I'm looking at the possibility of starting a business and I'm looking at the jobs I've had that burned me out and why. And it's almost always been 'I was always juggling responsibilities because we needed more staff'.

Like it seemed like I was doing everything, but getting paid the same.

And I think about that backroom job, where occasionally i would have to help out the stockers on big days, but mostly my job was one function.

I feel like we should be able to do something about this. Like we should be able to say 'no' to lean staffing and we should have a say in what our responsibilities are.

I'm thinking about all the times i should have just straight up said something. Like I think I had it in my head that if I took on all the responsibilities in the shop, eventually I would be rewarded with higher pay. But it doesnt work like that anymore. The reward for digging the best hole is a bigger shovel.

That's no way to live, though. And I just put up with it like it was normal to be so tired at the end of the day that I couldnt move. Maybe I should have just said 'no, you do it' when they started making me work outside my title.

It is part time, contract, hourly, full remote. Because it's union? They have to offer me a minimum of 25 hours a week. If I *voluntarily* go under, that is on me, but they ALWAYS offer me up to that. If I ask for the hours, they HAVE to give them.

Overtime doesn't trigger until 40 hrs/wk... but any time spent on emails, spreadsheets, my timesheet, ANY admin task that's more than 15 min? I can bill for that. ALL training, meetings, etc? I bill for that.

I get holiday pay. Seperate from vacation, sick leave, personal time; if it's a federal or state holiday I *automatically* get 5 hours of pay for that day. Period. Unlimited. I got paid 5 hours to do nothing on MLK day and presidents day, no questions asked, nothing taken away from my other pay.

I get sick leave, vacation leave, "personal" leave (anything that isn't the former two -- like, "my friend had an accident and I need to drive them home"). I get health insurance, dental insurance, life insurance. I get access to the credit union. I get access to job search help if my position gets dissolved / I get laid off!

It costs about $80/month in union dues, but I MORE than get that back in terms of benefits and peace of mind, and it's automatically deducted from my paycheck.

https://www.iww.org

The slim down has affected everything. It's why most of the movie theaters around me are nasty, the retail stores are always a trainwreck, and you constantly have long wait times at restaurants and grocery stores. It's the captains, NOT the crew.

We were waiting for tires at Walmart, and they'd called someone to a section on intercom a buncha times and some ol fart customer was so offended "Why don't they send a MANAGER there???" WOMAN. It's WALMART. They do not hire the goddamn people! I get unreasonably pissed about this cuz too many people have no idea what work is actually like now and make dumbass complaints and harass workers, bitching at the wrong thing.

Food service has gotten way worse thank staffing slim downs, ghost kitchens and online ordering. Seriously, look up the ghost kitchens. Tons of big chains try to pass off hokey "local" sounding food on grub hub and door dash that comes straight outta IHOP and Applebee's. It leaves the people working those restaurants effectively running numerous restaraunts of the same kitchen for single restaraunt pay. Ghost Kitchens have come under serious litigation in Houston specifically for having such poorly maintained spaces, workers have gotten seriously hurt.

It is so fucked how we're conditioned into saying yes to everything till you end up doing 5 people's work under the false promise of a better future. It burned my careers and bridges to the ground. Don't make my mistakes. I'm hopeful that GenZ and the rest of the up and comers will continue to take less bullshit at work and justifiably cry on TikTok behind the service counter cuz work is NOT working.

Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.

We had free healthcare including dental, mind you, my parents just couldn't be bothered. When my brother, as a teenager, asked our mother if she could take him to his orthodontist appointments (which he'd already arranged for on his own) she basically told him she didn't feel like it and he had to take the bus.

Did that, plus the free healthcare, translate into them actually parenting and caring for us properly? It did not. They only ever did any of that reluctantly when not doing it would make them look bad, and most of the time they did a shitty job because they could never resist the urge to boost their egos by means of bullying literal children.

We are at a point in humanity where there is no meaningful reason why we shouldn’t be structuring our societies around wellbeing for all instead of wellbeing for the “deserving”.

They can be busy, tired, stressed about finances, ignorant, etc. They can want to do the best for their kid and Fail Anyways.

GAMBLING IS NEVER PROFITABLE

Scratchers have more prizes when the game is new, but those prizes are pretty much enough for you to break even and get addicted to the game.

They are the "first time it's free" wins. Because your brain doesn't remember that you won $10 on a $10 scratcher, it only remembers that you won. So you go back. And you go back. And in a few weeks you spend $100 to win $10 but it's fine, it's just a streak of bad luck, this game pays out all the time.

I once watched a woman pour almost $500 into scratchers, using her "winnings" to buy more and going back to her car and coming back in, jittery and shaky like every depiction you've ever seen of a speed addict in withdrawal. The symptoms didn't end until she lost her last dime. And then she tried to use our ATM. I'd actually called my manager in between buying bouts to beg her to let me do something, because I wasn't allowed to refuse the sale and if I did and it got back to corporate I'd be fired but I felt like I was handing lit matches to someone covered in gasoline, and she'd told me I could say the ATM was borked. So I taped a huge sign over the screen that said OUT OF ORDER STUCK CARD.

She was the most dramatic case, but far from the only one. I had people who came in every day after work and dropped $100 on scratchers. Daily. And that's not even the scariest part.

I had a customer I became friends with. We'll call him Jim. Jim invited me out for his birthday with his husband and a couple of other friends. We went to a casino, and because it was my first time I got a $10 free credit. And I was like "cool! I can play nickel slots all night long and never spend a dime of my own money!" And that is indeed what I intended to do. Early in the night, I won a $56 jackpot. I decided that was super-cool--I could fill my gas tank, grab a snack, and still have a little left over to throw in my savings account. Only five or six bucks, but hey! That adds up.

So I spent out the end of the original $10 and ended up with $63 total in winnings. At this point we'd been there like three hours, I was out of the money I'd been willing to spend/lose, and the noise and cigarette smoke was getting to me (the casino had gone nonsmoking but the carpets and stuff were still totally saturated, it was awful). So I said I was going to cash out and call it a night.

Jim physically took my playcard from my hand and forced it into a machine and said "no, no, you have to spend it ALL." He literally wouldn't let me leave the casino until I'd lost my winnings. And again, these were not huge winnings. These were "oh, that's nice." But he couldn't stand the idea of not gambling to the last penny--not just his last penny, but anyone's last penny. I hadn't realized until that moment that he had a problem--because he spread his lotto buys between multiple gas stations and never shared how much he spent at the casino.

Now Jim was a very nice guy with a very big problem (a few months after this he ended up in therapy for gambling addiction). I don't say this to slag off on him. We're actually still friends on Facebook. But he lost tens of thousands of dollars, several friends, and almost lost his husband, and he was taking other people with him. He was so deep in his addiction that he was putting the financial stability of other people at risk. I drew the line at spending my own cash--I'd actually left my bank card at home on purpose--but what if I hadn't? What if I wasn't autistic enough to basically have a built-in timer for flashing lights and ringing bells instead of finding them attractive? What if I hadn't grown up hearing my mother say "never take more money into a casino than you're willing to lose"?

Gambling addiction isn't just life-destroying, it can (in a way) be contagious. Your boss buys you a scratcher to put in your holiday card as a nice little token. What can it hurt? Your church holds a weekly bingo game for cash. It's just a chance to get out of the house, right? Your friend has a little casino outing for his birthday. You're just going to have a couple of drinks, play slots or blackjack for a couple of hours, meet some interesting people and go home--

--until you do more than that.

OMG they're amazing

I made lowpoly locs just to see if I could

I dont think I ever clarified that I just went in and modeled her locs vertex by vertex. I placed every single polygon by hand. No curves and nothing procedural about it. Im too picky for that

and then i went in and manually placed Every bone

I'm gonna talk about my FAVORITE Irene and a lot of people will probably agree with me when I say it's Granada series' Scandal in Bohemia starring Gayle Hunnicutt as none other than The Woman. (Yes this is an excuse to gush about Hunnicutt Irene) You can tell the production crew love this character so much they shower her with great care and greater writing. So much that I am moved to tears every time she appears.

First of all, the backstage crew definitely got paid overtime because look at this absolutely gorgeous lighting. It's like a thousand stars came down to adorn her features.

Every scene that Adler is in, she is lit with such delicate luminosity that seems almost ethereal and dare I say it, regal. Especially when she's looking after a disguised Holmes who faked his injury, she still displays genuine care and attentiveness, such grace such kindness.

And in those scenes, the faint light is reminiscent of a halo. It caresses her hair, highlights her expressions. I'm starting to think they're trying to imply something 🤔

For reference, most of the episode is lit like this. Clear, crisp with enough differences in intensity to create the setting, realistic and practical.

Even when candles are not involved, they still work a scene to make her stand out effortlessly like she's the protagonist of the show 🤣 Look at the striking contrast between her ivory hat and dress and her deep crimson hair. All sharp and defined features softened by a veil. A blurred filter over the scene like an enchanting memory. Now that is a face that can launch a thousand ships.

But secondly, and more importantly, they extended her canonical screen-time. The story of Irene Adler (in the original publication) is relayed to the readers by Watson who's retelling Holmes' retelling of what actually happened. So we never got to see the lady in action! But film language allows depiction with a little more objectivity. Rather than "I saw her get on a hansom cab," we actually see her get on the hansom cab.

And they sure took their sweet 54 minutes to flesh out The Woman

For one, IRENE AND GODFREY BEING LOVEY DOVEY 😭🥰🥹

"I allowed you to persuade me, you must allow me to persuade you."

That additional dialogue just perfectly encapsulates what their relationship could be. I like that Godfrey is depicted as stern and even cold but when it comes to Irene he clearly loves and respects her above all else, and would do anything to ensure her comfort (like suddenly leaving the country to evade her crazy ex). And all the same, she loves and respects him so much.

Another precious moment that was extended from a sentence to a scene is when new bride Irene gifts horse groom Sherlock a gold sovereign for being a witness at her secret wedding. The framing of this scene makes it look like she is bestowing an honor, a prize upon him for helping her. She is utterly sweet and lovely, but how very convincing.

"I don't take no tip, ma'am." "Oh no sir, let us call it a souvenir."

So why are these additions important? Well up until this point, it has been a "he-said" game (not even "she-said" because she didn't say anything about her opponent). The King of Bohemia depicts Irene as some femme fatale, a master manipulator with an ulterior motive to bring down a nation, or a temptress who tries to slither her way into power and wealth but is left bitter when she was denied of it (similar to a good chunk of modern adaptations that you have to wonder if they even read the very short story they're adapting).

But now we, and Sherlock, have to see with our own eyes that she is not at all what he said she is! She is fair and generous, kind and caring (see how gentle she is with her servants). Her power doesn't come from some "sinister sexual spell," she is simply clever and charming.

Ironically, the King of Bohemia is blackening her reputation while claiming that she blackens his!

Third and finally. If I had to pick a favorite scene in the original story, it would be the "walking clothes" scene. But in the Granada series, it's this extra one here, and you just have to watch the two actors go at it. They're full of hostile tension, almost like sizing each other up.

At this point, the jig is up, Irene knows what's going on. And with each pressing question, she is getting him to reveal more of his plans and intention. Yet, Sherlock is still trying to look smart with lines like: "There are some people to whom revenge is in itself a reward." As though to sneer at and ridicule her.

But she is authoritative and genuine in her reply: "I cannot imagine such feelings." She brings into question his opinion of her, which has been somewhat steered by the King's biased narratives and in part, his own views of women. He has spent some time with her, could he really think that she would stoop so low and act so cruel?

And I can't get over how Gayle played this scene, her face oscillating between so many emotions from realization, to dread, to anger, she's confrontational but still puts up a clueless facade. As Holmes cowers out of there, her face settles in acceptance with a twinge of sadness.

The King has given her no choice but to leave her home in London and never return.

All the while, the light still endows Irene, as her opponent is portrayed as dishonorable, sneaking around, making excuses, bumbling and yeeting the moment he's caused quite enough trouble.

Granada Scandal might be the only adaptation that frames Irene Adler as completely good, even virtuous. But it doesn't come off as demeaning or reductive. She is still shown engaging in "scandalous" activities for a woman of her time, i.e. attending a Can-Can cabaret dressed as a gentleman in a top hat (but now, we call that ICONIC). Rather, it forces the audience to confront the many narratives we've been told about her, within the story by the King, and through the many adaptations that makes her the femme fatale villainess.

By the way, the goal of the Granada production was to stay as faithful to Arthur Conan Doyle's original words as possible. So it's more than disappointing that the most book-accurate portrayal of one of the most popular canon characters is an exception and not the norm.

Also, just a bonus point again, I love her "walking clothes" because it's not like "ho ho hello my name is Macho McStraightman" like they sometimes do in the theatre. If you see a person like this on the street, you'd think they're either a very pretty man or a handsome woman. And it's interesting that she looks completely natural in her disguise while Holmes looks a bit comical in his. Plus, we love the fluidity.