Literary Superheros

1) reading a longfic chapter by chapter, leaving an increasingly emotional comment on every chapter, descends into keysmashes near the end: outstanding

2) read one fic by accident, clicked the author name, now working steadily through the backlog and commenting on everything, I wake up to an AO3 inbox full of enthusiasm: precious beyond words

And it pissed me off so badly that I spent the ENTIRE WORK DAY today compiling evidence from every project my team has ever done for her, pulling past emails she’d sent us, putting together an entire case proving that she had been the problem all along. That she got projects mixed up, that she’d made requests that were nonsensical, literally everything you could possibly imagine. Screenshots of emails, reports we’d submitted, EVERYTHING.

This woman in particular has been terrorizing my team for years, her name is almost a slur in my office, I had simply had ENOUGH of her.

I put all of this evidence together and sent it to all of my bosses at 4:30pm. Then I took a long break to eat a sweet treat and drink some tea.

After my break, my bosses all called in an emergency meeting with me and they said they read my report and fucking loved it. And I sat on a teams call with my boss’ boss as she wrote my nemesis the scathing email I had always fantasized about sending, using the evidence I’d compiled, and hit send.

Alix Breeden at Daily Kos:

When Lorenzo Salgado Araujo arrived at a Houston hospital after being shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Tuesday, he was admitted as a John Doe.  The federal agents may not have known his name when they set out to the predominantly Latino East End neighborhood to apprehend immigrants that day, but they were extremely aware of who Salgado was as they stripped him of any form of identification and his belongings after shooting him. That move kept his family from claiming his body, according to news reports. “That is Soviet gestapo tactics when you want to hide a crime or victim,” Juan Proaño, chief executive of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a conversation with Daily Kos. The organization is supporting the Salgado family in their quest for answers. 

The details around this latest ICE shooting are murky at best.  When news first broke that the 52-year-old Mexican national was shot, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that ICE agents were en route to detain a different man who drove a similar vehicle as Salgado. Officials also claimed that Salgado tried to ram an officer with his vehicle, although they have offered no evidence to prove it. It’s unclear who the actual target was—or why ICE agents zeroed in on Salgado as the veteran builder drove employees to a construction site that morning.  “There are thousands of those trucks around Texas,” Proaño told us. What’s clear is that this case of mistaken identity had tragic consequences.

“There were two men—one in the driver’s seat and one in the passenger seat—that were of brown complexion and of Latin descent. This is very clearly a case of racial profiling, very clearly a case of civil rights violation and due process violations, and excessive enforcement on behalf of ICE and its agency,” Proaño said. “It’s very clear that they have not changed their tactics since [Kristi] Noem and [Greg] Bovino were in charge.” [...]

The Salgado family knew the risks of being Latin American in the U.S. under the Trump administration.  “The family had a protocol in place should there be an encounter with ICE,” Proaño told Daily Kos. Salgado, who had lived and worked in the U.S. for 35 years, was “weeks or possibly months away” from obtaining his citizenship.  As they anxiously awaited that day, Proaño said, the family—including Salgado’s three U.S.-born children—was told to “not overreact” and to call a family member and the family lawyer if they were detained by ICE. “And they knew that even if he was detained, they could always get him back. But the escalation here clearly got to a point where the families now had to suffer a terrible loss, a family that never wanted this national attention,” Proaño said. Now the Salgado family, with the help of LULAC, is reluctantly in the spotlight seeking what justice there is left to claim.  And DHS, in a similar response to the shootings of Pretti and Good, has continued to deflect responsibility.

[...] As it stands, LULAC and other community advocates are demanding an independent investigation. So far, LULAC has obtained over 100,000 signatures on a petition calling for just that. Similarly, the organization has pushed a GoFundMe to help foot the family’s legal and household bills.  “They’ve lost a husband, a father, a provider, a protector,” Proaño said. “Something that no one would ever expect on a normal, routine day for Lorenzo and for his family.” Salgado’s death prompted Mexican government officials to announce that Mexico will file criminal complaints in the United States on behalf of 14 of its citizens who have died while in custody at U.S. detention centers. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Wednesday said it’s time to “go further than diplomatic notes.”

The whole metaverse can no longer be properly viewed without an account and I am definitely not making one just to see your contact info or opening hours.

Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space — sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was — they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.

Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.

I mean full-on khaki-shorts-wearing, traversing-wilderness-with-nothin'-but-a-machete Adrian who yoinks snakes outta trees and pets swamp puppies and will unflinchingly dig around in elephant faeces for signs of a rare parasitic tapeworm if needed.

Oh, humans eat socially? No problem, Adrian has observed many many animals eat. Did you know that an obscure species of small underground dirt creature from the north side of Erid also eats socially? Adrian can give you a not-so-short presentation on them.

Oh, the human has no external carapace and so its internal sounds are absurdly loud, wet and off-putting? No problem, Adrian was just conducting an expedition last month researching the incredible eridian animal, the Wet Loud Worm from the south-east region of Wet Loud Wormland. They're desensitised, it's fine.

Oh, Grace leaks often from many orifices and it can be a bit of a learning curve to get used to? No problem for Adrian, see Wet Loud Worm paragraph again!