My Jumbleyard

Barbara has found love in a lot of things, but one thing she has kept to herself is her love of the opera. She knows the rest of the bats find it boring, she’s seen them fall asleep at performances before. Even Bruce! So no, she doesn’t tell them she loves opera. She doesn’t even tell them her love to perform opera. 

Lazarus pits grant the ability to see the fourth wall.

It’s why lots of people go completely insane after a dip in the pits. The average mind isn’t meant to comprehend that reality isn’t real.

Ra’s Al Ghul is a Batman fanboy who needs to be a villain for the sake of relevance. Otherwise he’ll be retconned and disappear from existence. He feels a little bad about killing people, yeah, but most of the people he kills aren’t really real.

Ras got into a lot of fights with Bat-mite before DC retconned his best friend that nuisance.

Thalia uses murder to compensate for that fact that the writers are using a femme fatale trope that has been tired for decades now.

Damian never got dunked in the pits the way Jason was, but he absolutely grew up around Thalia and Ra’s complaining about The Writers.

And then there’s Jason.

Jason, who decides to become intimately familiar with literature and tropes and story structure. If reality is built like fiction, he needs to learn to predict plot points before they happen.

So when he suddenly realizes Barbara has an interest in opera performance that he never knew about before? When reports of a ghost haunting the old Gotham Theater pop up? When he sees a kid walk through the theater walls while half asleep during a stakeout?

Jason can put two and two together.

This is some sort of Phantom of the Opera twist.

And since it’s an adaptation, it means he can predict a few key scenes, but not everything.

But Jason has the basic idea: Barbara is about to be stalked and manipulated by some sort of ‘ghost’ in the opera house.

Grace: "So. Ilukhina and Yao died."

Stratt going like "Oh GREAT. Just what we needed." She paused, realizing Grace DID in fact complete the mission. So she's confused and how one guy managed to do this all by himself. One cannot possibly both pilot the ship and use the collector. She keeps on watching.

Grace then goes: "So I met this alien since our ships were both here to solve the astrophage problem. I named him Rocky. He's an engineer."

Stratt is like. oh. okay. that's good. An alien? Unexpected. At least there's someone to make up for the losses. So convenient that he's an engineer.

Then Grace goes: "Then I met this one-third eel one-third tree one-third human guy we rescued from a blood ocean. His name is Simon. He's our pilot."

Stratt has to put down the footage just to recall everything that happened. You're telling me, Grace the biologist, Ilyukhina the engineer, and Yao the pilot were sent on this mission. Then Ilyukhina and Yao died apparently. Then conveniently Rocky the engineer and Simon the pilot got on the Hail Mary.

"Let me get this straight, more than half of the crew died and then oh so conveniently exact replacements came on board." Like, Stratt isn't complaining, she's just like. At that point, why didn't Grace die and some alien who is conveniently a biologist didn't replace his spot. Wdym everyone (but Grace) died and got their jobs replaced perfectly.

It seems like writers think spell check is for newbies???

I was strait up told "oh you use spell check? That shows you are struggling as a new author. That's okay!" In some form or another in writing groups on here.

Or it was "it's okay to use spell/grammar check until you learn batter?

There was very much a vibe of no "real" author use spell/grammar check?

Or it's seen a shamefull crutch???

I get that some writing platforms that have AI integration or something like grammarly is shamed if you use it.

But spell and grammar check now too????

even writers who have been writing for decades and writers who publish and sell their own original novels have been using spell and grammar check for ages. not only spell and grammar check, but they also have editors / beta readers.

so this is literally the first time I hear someone say “spell and grammar check are for newbies” and I don’t know where this person got that idea from or who told them that. but spell and grammar check have always been an essential part of professional writers. not necessarily because they don’t know how to spell or how grammar works (although there’s nothing wrong with that if some things confuse them), but because it’s part of making sure there’s no mistake in the works.

basically, there's been an ants' nest near a vent shaft of this abandoned Soviet bunker for decades. the nest spilled over into the bunker itself at some point once it was abandoned and there was no way for the ants to make their way back up to the nest, no queen but a constant supply of new colony members raining down from above, and no source of food in the bunker other than the corpses of their fellow ants.

fast forward to some scientists looking for bats that stumble on what's basically a post-apocalyptic ant society. they go "holy fuck" start studying, and observe that, all things considered, the ants still pretty much act like regular ants doing regular ant things.

fast forward some more, and the scientists feel like they have enough data from observing the colony as-is, so they decide to try an experiment. they put a little walkway between the bunker colony and the og colony in the vent shaft so the bunker colony members have the option of leaving and rejoining the og colony.

spoiler alert: every single ant in the bunker immediately nopes the fuck back to the colony in the vent shaft. within days the bunker is completely empty. the scientists leave the walkway in place so when more ants inevitably fall back down the vent shaft they can just climb back up instead of starting up the cycle anew.

"It is known that wood ants consume dead bodies of their conspecifics left in masses on the ground during spectacular ‘ant wars’ early in the season."

So the cannibalism seen in these trapped wood ants doesn't even seem to have been all that abnormal all things considering.

While a link to the scientific paper is in the article that is, itself, linked to in the second part of this reblog chain, I'll include the doi link/embed that links directly to the scientific paper here as well:

The dog robots are supposed to be autonomous, threehalves is explicitly only for being piloted by a human. The giant horns make it difficult for this machine to enter through doorways, and that is the point. Coupled with the built-in weak points, it is very easy to disable this thing, so it can't be used by the police or the military effectively.

Blanc

Alice Te Punga Somerville, Always Italicise: How to Write While Colonised - Kupu rere kē

Kupu rere kē

My friend was advised to italicise all the foreign words in her poems. This advice came from a well-meaning woman with NZ poetry on her business card and an English accent in her mouth.

I have been thinking about this advice.

The publishing convention of italicising words from other languages clarifies that some words are imported: it ensures readers can tell the difference between a foreign language and the language of home.

I have been thinking about this advice.

Marking the foreign words is also a kindness: Every potential reader is reassured that although obviously you’re expected to understand the rest of the text, it’s fine to consult a dictionary or native speaker for help with the italics.

I have been thinking about this advice.

Because I am a contrary person, at first I was outraged – but after a while I could see she had a point: When the foreign words are camouflaged in plain type you can forget how they came to be there, out of place, in the first place.

I have been thinking about this advice and I have decided to follow it.

Now all of my readers will be able to remember which words truly belong in Aotearoa and which do not.]

Like, back in the Old Days that would be a way that women would actually socialize.  So if a girl had a doll tea party, she was imitating her mom / other contemporary women.

But these days contemporary women don’t have tea parties. So now, the idea of “dolls having a tea party” is an echo of an extinct behavior, only repeated and referenced because it used to be so prevalent.

and then on the day of the show, my friend asks, "where is the camera I requested?"

gallerist: "you didn't request a camera"

my friend: "I did, and you confirmed that you would have one here."

gallerist: "that isn't true."

and then she proceeded to pull up the email thread, and my friend could see that every single email they had sent had been summarized by AI, and that the gallerist had then had AI write a response to them based on the AI summary, and that the AI had detected that they needed a camera, and confirmed on behalf of the gallerist that they would bring a camera, but because the gallerist had offloaded the work of actually reading and responding, she simply hadn't actually made any note of it herself, therefore didn't bring it, nor did she even know one was needed.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?