(possibly) five kobolds in a coat

that being said. can we not erase the fact the entire conversation began with disabled people talking about being medically abused pretty please. & also, iirc the post that first really blew up about "mean girl nurses" never said "ALL nurses are evil bitches who hate everyone and they deserve to be mistreated" it was saying "women who sought power over other people in high school go into careers where they can wield power over other people, same as men, and there are women who go into nursing and present themselves as kind and caring and maternal, who are motivated by a desire to have unquestioned authority over other people's bodies to make themselves feel powerful, again, same as men who do the same things in masculinized careers." & i just find it "interesting" how all that has been reduced down to "all nurses are mean girls")

i think nuance is always important & doctors and nurses do need better treatment and society frequently praises them while also supporting their abuse. and yet they are also universally recognized as vital important members of society & empowered to have immense control over the lives of people who are systemically vulnerable and seen as leeches who add nothing to society. and yet who has to deal with the impacts of their stress and their trauma and their anger and their burnout? the disabled people under their care.

again. Nuance! but i just cannot help but Side Eye In Cripple some things people say on this topic. it can both be true that nurses (& doctors) experience horrible working conditions and that, in my opinion, that any conversation about burnout and abuse of medical professionals needs to also criticize the authoritarianism of the medical field and how widespread medical neglect and abuse is, lest we simply fall back into "the poor beleagured doctor who is Jesus Christ On The Cross Himself, all-wise and all-knowing and forced to tolerate all these entitled know-it-all ungrateful patients!" which changes nothing for anyone.

like. look at this article. the actual context for the "mean girl to nurse pipeline" (that some women seek out power over people to control them and make themselves feel bigger, and women are likely to do this through caretaking in the role of nurse, teacher, mother, etc.) is not brought up at all. the fixation is entirely on "its mean to call nurses mean girls! they experience a lot of bullying! you don't REALLY know any mean nurses, just poor tired bullied ones!"

First, the phrase itself is unfair to women. Although nursing is a female-dominated field, this phrase focuses on women as being the “mean” ones to worry about.

like. do youuuu fucking see the erasure of medical abuse. the actual bullshit nurses do to real living human beings, which goes massively under-reported. & not just disabled people but people of color as well. god fucking forbid medical professionals are treated as anything but literal saints descended from heaven. god forbid white cisgender women are recognized to have the ability to be cruel and power-hungry and to hurt other people through traditionally feminine roles based on caretaking. like I genuinely do understand that nurses are subject to immense stress, bullying, and violence, and that providing better working conditions for nurses is vital to improving medical treatment for all patients.

but when the actual neglect and abuse nurses can do to their patients is ignored and drops out of the conversation entirely, in the name of complaining about nurses being called "mean"? sorry but it pisses me the fuck off.

(links to some sources on patient abuse under the cut since this is long enough as is)

Subtypes/conclusions:

- turns out he would not do that

- the people who firmly believe he would do that are not sufficiently skilled

and

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

The Wicker Man comes to mind. It's not a metaphor for anything. It's about the confrontation between Christianity and The Old Ways. There's metaphors in the story that are explained, but the film itself isn't a metaphor for anything. Christopher Lee's character says things elder Pagans taught me to say to Christians. The filmmakers did as much research as they could and cared about portraying the religious practises accurately according to information they had available to them at the time. The way the Christian character behaves, and what he says, is 100% things I have had said and seen done or had done to me and mine. There's no metaphor for anything, it's all right there in the open.

Sometimes there's no fucking metaphor.

Lately I've stopped writing because I feel so trapped by the audience assumption that everything I write will be seen to be, not just a metaphor, but specifically a bad metaphor, for some real-world thing when I am writing about literally what I'm writing about. A changeling is not inherently a Bad Metaphor for being autistic or disabled, writing about a religion is not inherently about Christianity. Vampires are not inherently a metaphor for sex or disability or what-the-hell-ever.

Not everything is a fucking metaphor, and tbh someone thinking everything must a metaphor for something else is a deeply Christian behaviour.

To assume that everything must be a metaphor is a very Christian way of viewing the world, I'm just gonna come out and say it plain. It's an established Christian belief that goes back at least as far as the medieval period, to think that everything in the world was created by their one-god as a metaphor or a parable for them to learn some kind of Christian idea, and that the whole world is meant to serve this purpose at all times.

Y'all need to stop fucking imposing that on everything. If you want that, stick to bible parables. Don't come out here reading stories by non-Christians expecting that's why or how we write stories, and certainly don't come out here combining it with bad faith readings and accusing people of things.

"well but I'm not christian anymore--" a person is what they PRACTISE, not what they say. People can SAY anything! So if you don't like being called christian, stop fucking behaving like one. Actions speak louder than words!

"but death of the author" that means YOU bring projection to the art, and YOU need to take responsibility for your response and interpretation. It isn't MY fault you are bringing a shitty, poisonous, lack of critical thinking to my story, and it isn't my job to soothe you either! death of the author means DEATH. It means grow up and take responsibility for your fucking projected meaning over the fucking text, not "my interpretation is what the author intended and even if it wasn't it's the author's responsibility to respond to me about it". No it isn't. You experience what YOU bring to the art.

Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.

Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)

I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)

YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)

The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)

The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)

The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)

It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)

Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???

To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)

This stuff was at its peak in 2023 when my last business of ferrets got old and Tux was dying of kidney failure and Kit was dying of IBD. Nothing radicalizes you more than buying the exact same brand of paper towels (Bounty, which I've ragequit), using the exact same amount, and suddenly having diarrhea soak onto your fingers every time because the paper towels are now only 60% as thick as they were last week. And this stuff has just continued since then.

It's sometimes shocking to me how many people don't notice the degradation of quality. (I have a food allergy so I have to check food labels every time; I know a lot of people don't.)

This is important because if you keep using these terms eventually you are going to run up against someone who knows their actual origins and actual meanings and they will use them correctly and you are going to have to be normal about people using the actual meanings of words and not accuse a middle age trans woman of being anti feminist because she knows what words mean and isn't plugged into internet discourse among people who have never been to an orgy in their life.

Ok, I get why you are saying this, but you are wrong. Specifically because these terms are not historial, they are practical. As in they are terms to describe the sex people are actually having in practical ways.

Lets start with a fact: Topping does not mean penetrating, bottoming does not mean penetrated. I know you have seen this a thousand times, but it is dead wrong. That is not what these words mean. The reason why you have been told wrong is because topping and bottoming are complex ideas that are not easily defined. There are a lot of conditional intricacies to how they are used that are very intuitive when you are actually having and experimenting with sex a lot, but are hard to define in a simple, easy way.

So why is it so often said that top = penetrating and bottom = penetrated? Well, clinical sources rarely want to write a 4 paragraph explanation of what a term means, so they give a technically correct partial definition.

I want you to imagine two men having penetrative anal sex while laying in a bed (in an abstract sense, if that makes you more comfortable). One of them is going to be penetrating, the other is going to be penetrated. The fact of the matter is that your body is not designed to easily bounce your ass on a dick. Your body is just not set up properly to move easily like that. So mechanically speaking it is much easier for the person penetrating to move, and it is much easier for the person penetrating to be physically on top of the other person. This is why "penetrating" is often conflated with "topping". But that is not what topping actually means.

In the above example, you will notice that one of the men, specifically the one physically on top of the other, is going to be the one moving more and therefore controlling the scene in a physical sense. Because the person on top can move easily, while the person on bottom is pinned down and can't move nearly as well.

With that in mind, top vs bottom is a matter of a sexual situation in which there is unequal control. The partner who acts is topping and the partner who is acted upon is bottoming.

This is why bottom and top are used so often in situations where no penetrative sex is happening. Or even in some cases, the top is the one being penetrated. For example, a rope bottom is called that because the person being tied up *can't move*, and therefore is being acted on more than acting, and is therefore the bottom. A woman riding a man cowgirl style is topping because she is the one acting and the man is being acted on regardless of what kind of penetration is happening.

This is why you can say "top" instead of "dominant" - because the dominant is controlling the scene and is therefore topping. The dominant acts on the submissive no matter what physical position they are in due to the power exchange at play. That is basically the literal definition of dominant vs submissive in the most general terms. Dominating is not the same thing as topping, because it is the subset of topping in which power exchange is occurring. Therefore in any situation in which power exchange is implied or assumed, top and dominant are interchangeable. As are bottom and submissive.

My sycamore tree began life in the gravel at the edge of a parking lot. If trees can feel pain, that is a painful, unlucky death. I carefully dug it up and put it in a pot I made out of a disposable cup.

Hello small one. This world may be cruel, but I will not be.

I decided to take care of it, not expecting it to survive, and when my sycamore tree unfurled one tiny leaf and then another, it chiseled a tiny foothold in my terrified brain, the kind of brain that doesn't remember a world before the atomic bomb and before 9/11.

I googled the lifespans of trees. My neurons had to stretch and expand to accommodate what I learned: My sycamore tree may live five hundred years. It's hard to think something so big. In twenty years, my baby sycamore tree will be three stories tall, and the home of many creatures. In five years, my sycamore tree will be taller than I am. In one year, it will be summer.

There's this concept called sense of foreshortened future where people who have lived through trauma can't conceptualize a future for themselves because deep down they don't expect to survive, When I look forward, all I see is fire and death, melting ice and burning sky. We were raised Evangelical. All we see is Judgment Day, except there is no heaven.

But now there is a tiny gap in the wall, a crack in the door of my cell

and on the other side, I see a tree

There is, in the future, a great old sycamore tree, full of clean winds and the stir of a thousand wings. A hundred years from now. Fifty years from now. There will be forests in that world. There will be a world.

It takes courage, but we have to imagine it.

Most tree species can live in excess of three or four hundred years. I think I'm learning something. I think there are ancient voices saying hello small one, touch the dirt and the leaves, for now you are part of something that cannot die

in 2030 I will be thirty years old and the world will not have ended and there will still be hummingbirds, and we will have photos of the stars more beautiful than we can now imagine.

I planted an Eastern Redcedar; they may live nine hundred years. There will be nine hundred years. The people in that time will remember us. Maybe we will meet the aliens (hi aliens!).

I will blow out the candles on many birthday cakes in a world where there are wolves in dark forests far from home. I am learning to imagine the future. I learned recently that elk were reintroduced to the Appalachian Mountains after over a hundred years of extirpation, and that they are expanding their range.

That tiny crack I can see through now opens a tiny bit more:

Maybe elk will pass through my hometown, maybe there will be a forest where the pasture is on the high hill that I can see from my home

say it, say it, say it: ten years, thirty years, a hundred years from now

You've got people out here making youtube videos about the legacy of dragons and dragonriding in fantasy fiction without talking about the dragonriding Grand Master of SFF herself Anne McCaffrey.

This isn't some obscure thing where I'm trying to promote someone who is only kind of known because of forgotten representation. Anne McCaffrey was A HOUSEHOLD NAME when I was a kid when it comes to fantasy literature. She's the first woman to win a Hugo and to win a Nebula. In 2002 there was a TV pilot filmed for Dragonriders of Pern.

Eragon, Temeraire, Toothless, and the dragons of Fourth Wing exist because these people grew up on the blueprint set by the Pern novels. Talking about dragons and not mentioning Pern is like talking about Orcs and not mentioning Lord of the Rings.

One of the things that ended up driving us apart in the end though is that they didn’t believe me when I told them this. They didn’t believe that I didn’t care about their disabilities. They didn’t believe that I was prepared to support them because my love turned all of that work into nothing.

As we drifted apart I learned something about myself. I can only fight to try to make someone believe that I care about them for so long. The hospital visits, the care tasks, the financial stuff, the limitations, I don’t care about. I could do that forever without a second thought. Fighting to be believed though? To have my love for someone questioned by them at every turn? I can’t do that.

Food: Russian fig and honey layer cake