Lambent Light Rays

That's it. That's my answer. Endor.

"I wish someone would see through it when I tell people I'm fine-" Well, but have YOU considered not lying when people ask you how you're doing?

"I am so resentful of my friend because they keep doing this thing that really bothers me-" Well, but have YOU directly communicated that the thing is bothering you?

"I am burning out because my friend keeps expecting me to help them with serious struggles-" Well, but have YOU tried to establish the boundaries you need to feel okay?

"No one ever asks me about this thing I really care about-" Well, but have YOU brought it up yourself?

"I miss my friend but they haven't texted me-" Well, but have YOU been reaching out to them?

Being cared for is not a fantasy. But you have to let people know you need it. And you have to understand that sometimes they will let you down. Just like you totally could live in a cute farm, but you still have to shovel shit, and the crops sometimes die anyway. Or maybe you win the lottery, but you still have to manage your money and learn real estate law.

@nordicninja Aaaand Avatar the last Airbender

And like, okay, true! But also consider: on this particular front, AtLA is good at this because it is a solid 8.5/10 on the FMA side of this scale.

(The 8.5/10 isn't a critique of AtLA, which is an excellent show on all counts, but it doesn't quite measure up to the FMA threshhold here simply because of the limitations of being an American kids' show. It can do the thing, but it can't foreground the thing or spend five seasons of anime/27 volumes of manga meditating on the ravages and implications of violence, because it's busy also being aimed at 10-year-olds and about other stuff too.)

Witness:

You could defeat the enemy, if you killed him. Your allies say you should. It would work.

It wouldn't even make you a bad person -- not here, not now, not in these circumstances. Of course you wouldn't be "as bad as they are," that's bullshit. Putting down a single mad dog does not equal literal genocide. FFS.

You could do it. You should do it. It would work, and isn't that the most important thing? To stop the horror? In the light of all the sheer destruction and evil at play, your own personal lily-white rejection of culpability is purely selfish. Isn't it?

But, god, you don't want to. You don't want to kill. The whole point is that life is important, is sacred, is worth protecting. You haven't been forced to yet. You keep finding ways around it. You've seen enough death. You don't want to do it.

Here and now, if you did -- it would fix the problem. It would fix things! It would save the day! The world would be inarguably better. You know this!

You know this. You know it because the world will not stop telling you this. Everything you've seen, everything you've been taught. Everything the people you love and respect say to you. And it's not a lie, it's not made up, it's true -- killing, here, in this one case, would help.

Why is the world so set on forcing you to kill? Why is this how the world works, that a child (you're not as young as you were when you started, but you're a child, you were a child, the first time somebody assumed you would someday simply have to be a murderer) gets handed a weapon and made to use it?

We are using the rules that the world set. We are using the rules that the genocidal maniac set. They are the same rules, because there's a reason genocidal maniacs are able to come to power in the first place, because the world is built in a way that violence works.

You know this. You're good at it! You're skilled at violence. It's how you've come so far.

But.

((and you know, the only reason you're able to have these thoughts, is because other people have already killed for you. will kill for you again. will wear the blood on their hands to save your life. somebody else is taking it so you don't have to, and you do not get to forget that.))

But maybe, if you're skilled enough. If you're good enough. If you can find a third option. Maybe, maybe, if you are just clever enough, if you're willing to risk losing entirely, you can do more than save the day.

Maybe you can rewrite the rules. Maybe you can rebel, not just against the genocidal horror villain about to doom the world, but against the entire world in the process.

If you're good enough to find the loophole -- to master the magic -- to put everything you've ever learned into practice. If you can find another way. If you can prove that another way exists.

Maybe you get to do more than close the door on one evil.

@thoughtful-collections Could you go into the Animorphs side of the child soldier question? Obviously they do kill and I think one character even kills many of the yerks while they are defenceless and justifies it as a necessary step to win. I suppose that series is saying there is no avoiding murder/killing/getting your hands dirty in war?

Yesssss

Look, there are a lot of child soldiers in the genre, whatever 'genre' that may be. Some kill easily, thoughtlessly, like any action movie star. Some have Important Moral Lessons on how killing makes us no better than the bad guys. Many of them get their very own generous plot device get-out-of-jail free card: either they have some form of captivity that their opponents get sent to at the end of a fight and we never have to think too hard about false imprisonment without trial (Steven Universe; at least one instance of Power Rangers?; Batman and Robin generally; etc), or, their opponents aren't really people, so it doesn't actually count as murder (media as diverse as the Persona series all the way back to good old Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sometimes, through sheer force of will, grit, and absolute unparalleled protagonist energy, child soldiers get to avoid killing in a world that makes it a genuine option.

Animorphs looked at all of those options, and it said, nah.

You want a war story, little child? Okay, the books say. Here's a war story. This is war.

Here's how it starts: you're goofing around with your friends one night. You take an ill-advised turn. You watch somebody get horrifically murdered.

No, you can't save him. Yes, you can save yourselves. Get used to that. Get used to it so, so fast.

You're on a trolley. Up ahead are two tracks. On one side: a dozen evil aliens. On the other side: your brother. Make a choice.

Good job, you didn't crash the train into a cliff. By the way, did we mention there are a thousand more tracks? More people tied to each and every one?

You get to put your hands on the steering wheel. You get to drive the trolley. This is a gift. Make a choice.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

You can jump off the train, if you want. You don't have to be the one to steer. Maybe you'll even survive the fall. Maybe the friends you're leaving behind will be good enough to make sure they don't run you over on your way down.

Your mom is on one of the tracks, by the way. Your dad. Your sisters, your cousins. Your brother, still.

You don't have to steer. You don't have to do this. You can let the train take its course, you can let it plow through all of humanity. You can let it happen. You get to do that, if it's what you want to do.

Nobody is coming to save you.

On one track: the aliens have names, thoughts, dreams, personalities. On the other track: there are six billion humans on this planet today.

Every single option in front of you is a war crime. If you're lucky, you'll get to pick which one.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

It's fun sometimes, driving a train. When there's nobody in the way, for just a little while. When you can pretend you're mowing down enemies in a video game. When you can give into the rush of adrenaline and just be glad you have the skill.

Maybe, maybe somebody will come to save you. They'll take over steering. You won't have to choose.

(Refusing to act is still a decision.)

Who will they choose to hit? Will they care? Will they care enough?

You watch TV. You watch Xena, and X-Files, and Buffy. You can pretend to live in a world where your enemies are nameless monsters without souls, if you want. If that makes it easier.

Is it easier, to kill them soft and vulnerable and completely powerless, unable to fight back? Does that feel better than killing the ones hunting you down, weapons in hand?

You are looking for a loophole. You are looking, and looking, and looking for a loophole. You don't get to fight monsters without souls. You don't get to lock them up in tiny bubble jail. They are going to kill you. This is what you get.

It's you. You're the one standing here. This is what's happening.

Refusing to act is still a decision.

(There is a loophole, eventually. A third path. One of you finds it, eventually.)

(It would not have worked, without years of war first. It took you years of war to find it and if you hadn't killed so, so many, it would not have worked.)

You don't get to be good, in war. You don't get to save the day by sacrificing your own life and remaining morally pure. That would be too easy. War means dead bodies. That's what it means.

That doesn't mean you give yourself over to despair. That doesn't mean you shrug and figure the lives being spent don't matter. You don't get to throw your own moral code on the altar of heroic sacrifice and claim to be the real victim here. It never stops mattering. It will never, ever get to stop mattering.

That doesn't mean you never fight. It just means that when you choose to step up and fight for something, you'd better be goddamn sure it's worth the cost, because chances are somebody a lot less powerful than you is going to be the one to pay.

On one track: Your brother. Your cousin. Seventeen thousand unarmed, helpless enemy agents.

On the other track: a new train's barreling straight at you and all six billion members of the human race. All-out slaughterous war. Giving over the steering wheel to the last hands that decided the best answer to their problems was genocide.

(REFUSING TO ACT IS STILL A DECISION)

Dear Animorphs Readers:

Quite a number of people seem to be annoyed by the final chapter in the Animorphs story. There are a lot of complaints that I let Rachel die. That I let Visser Three/One live. That Cassie and Jake broke up. That Tobias seems to have been reduced to unexpressed grief. That there was no grand, final fight-to-end-all-fights. That there was no happy celebration. And everyone is mad about the cliffhanger ending.

So I thought I'd respond.

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don't end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.

That's what happens, so that's what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn't by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it's a start.

Here's what doesn't happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn't a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don't do a lot of celebrating. There's very little chanting of 'we're number one' among people who've personally experienced war.

I'm just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I've never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn't going to do it at the end. I've spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I've written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I'm a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I'd wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don't like the way our little fictional war came out? You don't like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don't like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you'll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

If you're mad at me because that's what you have to take away from Animorphs, too bad. I couldn't have written it any other way and remained true to the respect I have always felt for Animorphs readers.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.