MK Nerds

Her friend’s eyes widened. “What?”

“Think about it! When we’re kids we decide who we like and stick by them no matter what. As adults, we’re taught to be polite.

But, friendship is an imposition— at least, I want it to be. Call me after nine o’clock. Don’t think you’ll ever wear out your welcome. Overshare, show up at my door, go to the grocery store with me so we can waste another hour chatting.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Literally. He has shut down cancer treatment and research funding.

Pulchrocladia ferdinandii

Lacy coral lichen, Biblically-accurate-angel lichen (I made this one up)

Almost forgot that this is the whole point. This fruticose lichen is endemic to southern Australia, where it grows on dry, sandy or acidic soils. It grows in large cushions (15 cm tall, 75 cm wide) of rigid, perforate pseudopodetia. It is whitish-cream to yellowish in color, and isn't known to produce apothecia, but produces globose pycnidia on the irregularly-branching, tips of the pseudopodetia. The official description of this lichen refers to it as "horny," which I am choosing to believe refers to the horn-like structure of the thallus, not to its desire to jump some bones. But if I am mistaken, go off, queen, you can get it. P. ferdinandii looks similar to sister-species P. retipora, but is overall larger, and prefers dryer habitats than the latter. And before you ask no, we don't know why it looks like this, so let's just appreciate that it does and that we are blessed to be able to see it.

images: source

it’s the same thing as what’s going on right now with people equating drag to some sort of child exploitation. “but the children!!” they wail, and people listen because oh, if drag is harming children, then drag MUST be BAD, so we HAVE TO BAN DRAG.

Do you think they're going to like vote themselves out of jail? Vote to make murder legal? What exactly are you afraid of.

Realistically they'll just... vote just like anyone else. They'll help elect city councilmembers they think will better their hometowns, and presidents they think will best serve the country. They might even vote in their own interests! To reform prisons, fund rehabilitation programs, and outlaw predatory practices by telecoms. Are you saying you don't want any of those things?

And even if there were one of those super-duper-unambiguously-evil totally misanthropic death-row convicts, who's scheduled to be execute the very next day and just wants to sow chaos and watch the outside world burn however they can... what's the worst they could do, vote republican?

I am PRO-WOOL

I am PRO-LEATHER

I am PRO-BEES

Fuck the idea of replacing durable, sustainable animal products with cheap, flimsy plastic that doesn’t bio-degrade. Agave nectar and other artificial sweeteners are expensive, labor-intensive, and destroy the environment to be farmed.

Leather - one cow makes SO MUCH leather. One deer makes SO MUCH leather. Well-treated leather lasts almost FOREVER. Even animals with small skins like rabbits, a pair of well oiled rabbit leather gloves will last decades. Every animal usually made into leather is also a meat animal, so it’s more sustainable to get more than one product from a single ethically butchered animal (humane kills make less punctures in the hide!) Leather can be tanned with natural resources like brains and doesn’t require treatment with chemicals that seep into the groundwater!

Cotton: Cotton is a fucking plant, it burns. The growing and harvesting of cotton is rather water intensive but it IS possible to sustainably harvest and reuse the water spent in the cleaning process to reduce the ecological footprint of the crop. It burns clean, it cuts clean, it’s sturdy, and there are 1000 ways to weave it to change its properties.

1. know they are scamming you with dangerous pseudoscience so you shouldnt let them near your neck or give them money

or

2. genuinely believe their dangerous pseudoscience so you shouldnt let them near your neck or give them money

There’s a document at work that’s an illustration of why things need to happen a certain way — we build arguments and pull in citations and just carefully set up fifteen pages that prove a course of action is not only a good idea but the best idea.

I’m pretty sure one of my coworkers is writing it with chat gpt.

I have an impressive track record with getting these approved so I have editing power over everyone’s. He sends it to me, I read it, and it is… words in order. Sentences that make sense. There’s no ARGUMENT there, just a series of sentences that say something is important. And the worst part (for me) is that reading it with attention to detail, with a desire to track the argument, fucking turns my brain to soup. He keeps making claims that aren’t relevant to the argument. There’s no through-line. Mentally, it’s like reading something very complex that hasn’t paid off yet — but there’s never any payoff. It never coheres.

Also (because the aforementioned could just be that he writes badly but has also leveled-up his spelling/formatting recently) I told him to take the in-text citations and put the files in a publicly accessible place and he just stripped the text of all citations instead. Which! OK! OK ok OK ok OK great good fine. Before that I was split between “if we work on this together we can fix!” and “let me understand your genius.” but afterwards I’m pretty sure he just handed it over to chat GPT.

The first time he did this I spent like fifteen hours editing it — I could write this from scratch in ten — and had a product that retained some of his original text. The second time (the lost citations time) I just added a couple of paragraphs on things he’d overlooked and noted the citations, assuming that we’d do another round after I read all these amazing papers he’d found. But he decided that the citation-free version is ready to go out so. I’m unwilling to spend work capital on fixing it, and current dynamics mean that it’s unlikely to be an independent issue.