Too invested in fiction

someone on reddit explained 😭

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

#my old phone looks like this on my shelf lmao #im too scared to touch it to throw it away #idk what trash this even goes into when its at this point

The pillow-shaped object here used to be the phone’s battery. It’s not a battery anymore. Now it’s a balloon full of corrosive, pyrophoric chemicals and hydrogen gas and it’s one puncture away from burning your house down. I am 100% serious. You should be scared to touch it.

But you gotta touch it, because you gotta get it out of your house before the pressure builds up to the point where the balloon pops. This isn’t going to happen soon – there is no need to panic – but it will happen eventually.

And, indeed, it doesn’t go in the ordinary trash. You put this in the ordinary trash and you’re gonna set the garbage truck on fire. Don’t do that to the garbage collectors, their job is hard enough already.

The first thing you need to do is get a fireproof container. The most common household item that qualifies as a fireproof container is a cast-iron cookpot with a cast-iron lid – often sold as a “Dutch oven.” Any other cooking container that’s unreactive, has a very high melting point, and has a lid made of the same materials will also work: enameled or stainless steel, Pyrex with glass lid, etc.

However: Do not use a pot with a PTFE-based non-stick coating. If the battery does explode, the fire will probably be hot enough to degrade a PTFE coating, producing toxic smoke. (Not that you should breathe the smoke from the battery fire either, but PTFE breakdown products are worse.) Do not use a pot made of aluminium or copper. The fire might even get hot enough to melt those.

Whatever container you use, you might have to throw away along with the phone, so don’t use your good Dutch oven for this. Go to a thrift store and buy a cheap one.

Once you have the fireproof container:

Gently pick up the phone and put it in the fireproof container. If possible, gently tape the phone to the bottom of the container to prevent it from bouncing around. Don’t put any padding in there, that’ll just make a fire worse if it does happen. Put the lid on and tape it shut.

Put a label on the container, something like “DEFECTIVE LI-ION BATTERY – FIRE HAZARD”.

It is now reasonably safe to move the container around. However, if the battery does explode, the container is very likely to leak smoke and get hot, so keep it in a well-ventilated area and away from things that will be damaged by heat. Don’t leave it exposed to the weather, either.

You need to find either a hazardous waste disposal site, or an e-waste recycler that will accept defective Li-ion batteries. I can’t help with that because I have no idea where you live.

However, your local fire department, if you have one, will probably be happy to help. Call their non-emergency number. Nothing is on fire yet, so this isn’t an emergency, but things that can easily start a fire are still within the fire department’s responsibilities. Tell them you have a phone with a bulging lithium-ion battery, you put it in a fireproof container, and you want to know how to dispose of it safely.

If the fire department tries to tell you this isn’t dangerous or it’s okay to throw it out in the regular trash (with or without fireproof container), hang up on them and write a cranky letter to your local government representatives, then keep looking for a proper disposal site.

IDs: 2 variants of a "Toronto Star" headline for a book review article about new historical fiction books. The first reads: "Sylvia Plath, [comma] a New York vigilante and Shah of Iran featured in latest historical fiction."

The second reads: "The latest historical fiction books take inspiration from Sylvia Plath, [comma] a New York vigilante and Shah of Iran." There is a subheading reading "We review 'Daffodil Days,' 'Lady X,' 'Love Lane' and 'Mistress of the Persian Boarding House.' /end IDs.

the original, were it to mean that Sylvia Plath is a vigilante and shah, is missing an appositive comma (a pair of commas that separate a clarifying dependent phrase from the rest of the sentence, like the commas in the part of this sentence outside the parenthetical).

without the appositive comma, the only grammatically correct way to read the sentence is as a list without the oxford comma.

it is confusing because the comma in that place and the order of the list may prime you to read it as an appositive phrase, added to the fact that newspaper headlines drop helping/auxiliary verbs, and this headline did not clarify that there were multiple separate books with different subjects.

[i am a strong proponent of oxford comma, *especially* for three-item lists, just because it is clearer and more aesthetically pleasing. however, the sentence is grammatically correct to the intended meaning, and readers misinterpreting on first read does not mean it is wrong.]

the new phrasing... oh boy.

the new phrasing is now completely grammatically ambiguous as to whether it contains a list or an appositive phrase, because an appositive at the end of a sentence can be denoted by a comma and a period rather than 2 commas.

they fixed one problem with the ambiguity of the first headline by clarifying that it is about multiple separate books, but in doing so, their new phrasing adds proper grammatical ambiguity to the subject(s) of the books.

the second headline can reasonably and correctly to English grammar rules be parsed as either:

"Three subjects of new historical fiction books include writer Sylvia Plath, a New York vigilante, and the Shah of Iran." (the intended meaning)

or, "Multiple historical fiction books have been published about Sylvia Plath, who was also a New York vigilante and the Shah of Iran."

both are equally correct readings of this headline!

while the first headline was colloquially ambiguous but grammatically correct to the intended message, the second headline tried to fix the misinterpretations by clarifying that there were multiple books, and providing a list in the subheading of the books in question. [the list also does not use oxford comma, per the paper's style guide i'm sure, but it is completely unambiguous due to both the single quotes as title markers and having more than 3 items on the list.]

I had another client today get confused and upset at how I labeled their final file.

(If you don't know already, I'm a graphic designer)

The filename was something like "ProjectnameFNL-BLEED-DIE.pdf"

I also named the email "Projectname Final File - Bleed & Die"

Now, for the non-designers out there, a bleed is how you get the picture to the edge of the page in a document. You can't just print an 8.5x11 page in that situation, you have to print a larger page, and trim it to 8.5x11, and that overprint that you cut down is called the "bleed".

Die is short for dieline. If you are printing something in a different shape than a cutter can make (basically anything without straight lines) then you need a die. A die also helps trim things a lot faster, some can do a hundred sheets at a time, as opposed to manually doing it (which I'm not even sure how you'd even do that)

In this situation, I was making a box. They are notoriously tricky, but I've done a bunch before. And the person I was dealing with was new, and she had to send along the final approval to her boss.

She wasn't rude, but was clearly uncomfortable in our meeting today. I really had to explain it to her, and said that these were industry standard things and her printer needs this info. I also have worked with her boss before and absolutely knew that they'd understand the terms.

This is a kind of sample of what I mean. The dieline is the pink line. It is where things will be cut. You can see that it is a special shape that can't just be cut out regularly.

Everything blue outside the pink line is the bleed. you won't see any of that in the final folded box.

And the white lines you see are just the fold lines. They are usually part of the die line, but have a different process to use them.

 But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.

 Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.

 In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.

 Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.

instead of the logic of:

*a character says/does/feels something* -> I wonder why they did/say/feel that way? what is the subtext of that? what does it say about their beliefs and values? about other aspects of their personality? is this inherent or conditioned? what does it say about their past? what does it say about the world around them? how do they define/conceptualize xyz? is this the same as the rest of their world does? as we do? what happens when the boundaries of xyz are disturbed/recontextualized/troubled? how does that (re)shape their worldview?

it becomes the logic of:

*a character says/does/feels something* -> i do/say/feel that way too! and I do it that way because of my (personal and culturally specific) identification/understanding of xyz. therefore, the character does that because of the same shared identification/understanding of xyz, which is now a fixed feature, because my pleasure of the text is predicated on this identification.

which is fine, whatever, i'm not one to stay in the way of your pleasure, but it does become an issue when it turns you into a self-appointed cop on a path of righteousness to defend the character against (sometimes entirely imagined) infidels who are "disrespecting" or "misreading" them (because that means they are disrespecting and misreading you) and then turning it into some kind of overarching and targeted judgment of "well it's because fandom hates people like me," and looping the over-identification more and more into a knot. no one else understands this Character like you do! no one can touch them but you! woof-woof-woof!

but it's not about you. it's about the Character. And I'm not saying it in the sense of, "you can't hurt a character's feelings, they aren't real," because that's beside the point, but what I mean is that the character is embodied within a particular world - and I'm talking about speculative worlds specifically here - and you're completely disengaging with the fun part of unpacking that rich world because you jumped to a conclusion based on a solipsistic analysis. and yes, that includes when you bring in the undead author arguments of, well canon says-- no it doesn't. the Character says. the Author says about what the Character's perspective is. see point A.

and also, none of it negates the validity of your interpretation! but the problem is, because you didn't actually look at the thing on its own terms, you have deprived yourself of a different kind of pleasure of textual engagement, and multitudes of experiences that might also make you understand where other people are coming from.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.