Victory or Madness

Happy 30th anniversary!

both of them understand status as one way to protect themselves. bethany tells hawke, 'we need coin, status, smth we can hide behind. as long as we're just refugees, we're no one.' like she does straight up just say it.

vivienne's status-seeking is i think self-evident. bethany has the advantage of being temporarily embarrassed nobility, but vivienne proves that it might be more abt who you know and the wider context. having a wing in bastien's home is a privilege afforded to circle mages from montsimmard, not kirkwall — not that vivienne seems any less anxious even when she in theory has the empress of orlais' ear.

the game frames it as pure ambition, and some of it is, yeah. vivienne's a social-climber. but idk that i have that much disdain for a social-climber like vivienne when whatever safety she's afforded seems to be perpetually seconds away from vanishing.

vivienne says her mean thoughts aloud. bethany typically doesn't. i argue, tho, that both of them are demonstrating comparable levels of self-monitoring their behavior. like the panopticon lives inside of them, do u get me. some of that bleeds out into interactions w others. it feels like a constant white noise of 'be nice be nice be nice be nice.'

bethany will self-police if no one else does it for her:

Bethany: So, there's no Circle among the Dalish? Merrill: Any child with the gift of magic is apprenticed to a Keeper... in another clan if there's no need in her own. Bethany: That sounds nice. Merrill: Magic is a gift of the Creators. Why wouldn't we use it? Merrill: It just seems... wasteful for humans to lock their mages away where they can't do any good.

like maybe this is the most affirming thing bethany's ever heard abt magic. but if fenris jumps in to remind everybody that merrill's a blood mage, and thus a Bad Mage, bethany goes, 'oh. right.'

if fenris isn't there, bethany will be the one to bring up that merrill is a blood mage, albeit much more reluctantly.

she also regulates others' behavior: bethany has to frequently and verbally remind hawke to shut the fuck up. one of her more common barks is, 'we shouldn't talk here.' vivienne externalizes the control freak thing much more obviously and confidently than bethany, but while the other characters either cower or resent her to varying degrees, it's painfully clear that she's just holding everyone to the standard she holds herself.

Cole: Everything bright, roar of anger as the demon rears. No, I will not fall. No one will control me ever again. Cole: Flash of white as the world comes back. Shaking, hollow, Harrowed, but smiling at templars to show them I'm me.

to me, vivienne gamifies logic in a way that's relatable if agonizing: if i make every single correct choice and phrase things precisely and w the ideal tone while presenting myself exactly the way i need to, then i will succeed. bc it's not abt my feelings, it's just abt facts. my feelings don't have to factor into it, bc i've run the numbers, and the numbers say you don't even have to take my word for it. look, i have a quote, even. look my argument has citations. i've made myself objective for you.

as a result, vivienne values knowledge so much. finding the lost tomes is her personal quest before the big personal quest. she impresses upon everyone over and over and over again that the need the circle fulfills is primarily abt education:

'magic is dangerous just as fire is dangerous. anyone who forgets this truth gets burned.' 'in my own experience, nothing is more deadly to a young mage than a lack of knowledge.' 'where else can mages safely learn to master their talents? we need an institution to protect and nurture magic. maker knows, magic will find neither on its own.'

bethany immediately becomes a mentor after she passes her harrowing. she enjoys teaching children, and she's particularly protective of ella. she adapts to the scholarly environment of the circle quickly — 'for the first time,' her circle route codex entry reads, 'she can study magic without watching over her shoulder.'

even before she's taken to the circle, she rly and truly seems to believe that if mages could just lay out their case for freedom, someone would listen.

Anders: The Rite of Tranquility is the whole problem. If they didn't have that to hold over us, we'd have so many more options. Bethany: Right! If we want to fight back... or just engage in intelligent debate... they make sure we can't do it. Anders: They're forcing our hands. There's no way to change things peacefully. Bethany: There must be something. Anders: If it's Tranquility or death, we have no choice but to make every confrontation a life-or-death struggle. Bethany: I know, but... there are good people in the Circle, the Chantry. There has to be a way to reason with them. Anders: Not if they take away your ability to reason.

in this way she differs a little from vivienne. it's the circle that has to be defended — the circle is an idea (the correct one), and 'ideas cannot be dissolved.' what she and bethany share, tho, is the idea that mages have to present a cogent argument that they're not threats. the first enchanters who voted to rebel were technically following protocol, but vivienne thinks the ethical thing to have done was to have required the vote to be unanimous. she's horrified that fiona's vote was the deciding factor, and she has ZERO faith in other mages' ability to prove their trustworthiness to the average person without the structure of an institution.

vivienne talks abt the non-mages of thedas like they're less ppl capable of critical thinking and more just like. robots who have to have the correct buttons pushed or they start killing you. she holds v little disdain for the 'ordinary ppl' caught up in the mage/templar war, even as she acknowledges them as potentially v dangerous to mages.

'so many people dispossessed. another generation that learns to live in fear of magic.'

for her it's game over, start again.

she rly is most concerned abt mages being feared — if a low approval inquisitor says, 'it will take time, but people can learn not to fear magic', she gets +1 towards her becoming divine. bethany, at the end of the game when she is at her most radical, tells hawke if they side w the mages, 'a new age begins today. people will overcome their fears and find better ways to live with mages.'

for all that, both vivienne and bethany hold the opinion (at least publicly, and at least for a while) that the circle isn't so bad. bethany's circle route codex says that in spite of witnessing templar abuses, 'she supports the circle as is.' she's 'surprised at how many templars are honest andrastians.' vivienne calls the rebel templars 'renegades' who sully the name of the order, and she thinks circle abuse varies much too much to make a moral call abt it. mostly, they both seem resigned to the circle and disinterested in focusing on the bad parts.

Hawke: Happy to be out of the Circle? Bethany: It's strange. I miss a lot, but other things . . .

vivienne says, 'and there is comfort to be had, you know, in the company of fellow mages. those born without magic will never truly understand us.'

they both hold v conventionally views regarding demons. vivienne has earned that perspective vividly:

Cole: A sour smell in the Tower library, rotten meat and ashes. Too quiet without the apprentices. Something crunches underfoot. Burned finger bones glitter in the ash like pearls. Ice in my veins. The archivist... what was her name? Vivienne: Get. Out. Cole: Why did they kill her? She was just like them! Vivienne: They "helped" her. Just like you did. Anyone who wouldn't fight for freedom was "freed" by fire and lightning. Stay out of my thoughts demon. My memories are my own.

i think bethany's horror at orsino's blood magic is comparable here. there are ways to fight for freedom, and there are ways that render your fight immoral.

but both of them absolutely prefer to fight than not when given the opportunity — both of them have little love for hiding.

Bethany: I don't mind it so much. I don't have to hide, or worry about templars hunting me. Bethany: It's funny. The idea of the Circle is much more terrifying than the reality of it.

the above is just resolved dread! she spends a lot of time dreading the circle, and she deals with it by wanting to do something.

'it's the templars or the darkspawn, mother. at least i'm allowed to fight darkspawn,' bethany says, and ''better to work our way into this expedition than sit around waiting to be thrown in the gallows.'

when asked what her motivations are, vivienne answers, 'the same thing anyone gets by fighting this chaos: the chance to meet my enemy, to decide my fate. i won't wait quietly for destruction.'

after bastien dies, she approves of the inquisitor asking her if there's anything she needs help with, but she mostly just wants to handle things herself. she also approves of being told that she'll be kept busy or left to her own devices.

in general, they both have a strong adherence to duty.

Anders: You know, we're a long way from the Circle. Down here, a mage could easily slip her leash. Bethany: I'm not leashed, Anders. I allowed this. Anders: You gave up, you mean. Threw your life away. Bethany: I accept what I am and act accordingly. I can pretend to be miserable if you want, but I'm not. Anders: You don't understand the stakes. Bethany: Well it's a good thing you're here to carry the burden.

bethany 'acts accordingly'! she's not trying to get distracted by feelings!

vivienne's approval for the sit in judgment stuff is p consistent: across the board, she'd rather recruit where possible and punish the accused directly, whether by humiliation or helping to fix what they broke, rather than handing them over to authorities outside of the inquisition, like the wardens. she wants ppl to be useful. she wants ppl held accountable. the most unforgiving she gets is approving of erimond being made tranquil, and i think that has everything to do w holding mages to a higher standard of behavior than everyone else.

that duty isn't always the most practical course of action, but they feel strongly abt it. when orsino fusses at bethany for putting herself at risk to save him the fight at the end of act 2, bethany replies, 'we had to do something! we couldn't just . . . '

similarly, vivienne will advise the inquisitor to keep moving during the attack on haven, but she approves of saving everyone — she approves if you only manage to save one person.

sometimes they're a little bit funny abt it. bethany approves if hawke v sternly tells vincento, feynriel's absent father, to make up for his neglect. vivienne approves if the inquisitor chooses to tell the newlyweds in val royeaux that happiness is tempered by duty.

but i think the most significant thing they share, esp wrt being mages, is that they see v clearly that if anything's going to change, it has to be thru the chantry. if the inquisitor tells vivienne that the circle needs to be restored, she gets +1 to her becoming divine; if she tells vivienne that mages need to be in the chantry, vivienne gets +5 to becoming divine. she greatly approves in both instances, so i think the divine points do count for smth here beyond the game mechanic. clearly, vivienne believes that a mage can reform the chantry.

“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:

It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.

You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.

Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.

Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%

During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.

When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.

You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.

You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.

If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.

Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.

Please feel free to share this.

And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.

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.