Just another Fan

Tim: …? We did meet?

Jason, genuinely confused: what? No, no, I would have remembered meeting your scraggly ass-

Tim: First of all, you once told me you refused to remember rich people’s name because they ‘aren’t really people at that point’.

Jason: this is true.

Tim: secondly, we literally talked for like, an hour? Do you really not remember?

Jason, lowkey feeling a little bad now but refusing to admit it: Maybe you just weren’t memorable.

Tim: we talked about Frankenstein!

Jason: why were we- OH MY GOD THAT WAS YOU?!

Tim: yes! I thought it was a good conversation :(

Jason: YOU EXPLAINED HOW YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD DO EXACTLY WHAT VICTOR FRANKENSTEIN DID BUT BETTER.

Tim: YEAH CAUSE HE SHOULD HAVE USED ELECTRIC EELS INSTEAD OF WAITING FOR A STORM.

Jason: DUDE. I only kept talking to you because I deadass thought you were gonna be a future Rouge.

Tim: huh?!

Jason: dude, you even told me about how easy it is to steal bodies from hospitals in Gotham.

Tim: yeah that… I wasn’t always the best at keeping my cards close to my chest, so that’s on me.

Jason: the only reason I didn’t tell Bruce about you is because I was worried he’d try adopt you and I was worried about getting kicked out.

Tim: I appreciate it.

Jason: if I had he probs wouldn’t have made you Robin.

Tim: that’s… unnerving to think about.

Tim, fiddling with his sleeve: Do you… wanna hear about my new take on how to reanimate the dead to create a whole new person?

Jason, fully aware that Tim could one day be a bad guy and he would have more of a chance if he had Tim on his side: As a reanimated corps, I am more than happy to listen. Have you actually read the book yet though?

Tim: No- so, first thing your going to need is a alibi-

I cannot sleep at night so now I'm running on adrenaline

The house in which I live you see is almost like a character

And the secrets of my husband set a truly odd parameter

I'm very well acquainted too with all the secret passages

I shelter in the lib'ry and overcome all challenges

And running in my nightgown is something I am so skillful at

Hearing footsteps in the darkness but of feet themselves there's not a trace

In short in matters terrible, hysterical and feminine

Still in pursuit, we followed the ball toward a small lake in Motor World that had been earmarked for a fleet of tiny bumper boats for children. The area wasn’t open yet, but the empty boats were being tested and floated on the surface. The ball soared over the grass and smashed into several of them, scattering the others with rippling waves from the impact, which launched some of the boats several feet in the air.

Charlie and Ken waded into the water looking for the hatch. After some difficulty, they got it open. Charlie pulled Frank out by grabbing him under his armpits like a baby. Frank crawled up the bank, coughing and sputtering. He splayed across the grass as we all stared at the ball, which bobbed in the water like it was attached to a fishing lure.

We did not ask for the inspector’s report, nor did we ever hear of one being filed. Ken Bailey returned to Canada. The snow-makers cleared away the PVC. Told to dispose of the Bailey Ball, they rolled it into the woods, where it remained for many years."

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Remembering what I said about the original work "haunting" found-language works, I point to an example here. The final line ("You Come Too") comes from the wiki page for Robert Frost, and is referencing a tender and serene poem "The Pasture" in which the speaker is inviting the listener to come with them to clear the pasture spring and fetch the little calf, a request of pure companionship in an activity that is routine necessity but leisurely.

It's a very different tone, isn't it? Many interpretations of the final line are possible, but if it is understood that "The Pasture" is the context it came from, the final line is an invitation.

It was very interesting to me to source my last line from something so calm and peaceful when the rest of the poem is filled with imagery of horror.

As part of "Monster," the line becomes more firm and has a sort of foreboding but it does not lose its reassuring nature. This is because the rest of the poem expresses the necessity of monsters to intervene in the gaps that separate us from recognizing the horrors and traumas within ourselves and the world around us. The monster itself is an invitation, to confront the difficult parts of ourselves and the world that may otherwise be impossible to truly realize. "You come too. Come acknowledge this reality with me. You come too, be liberated by the monster."

Wikipedia is a non-fictional source, so most of the quotations are nonfictional in nature. I mostly preserve the non-fictional tone of Wikipedia in these poems, allowing the words to generally retain the echo of their purpose of defining and providing information about a topic. Wikipedia is also a living document being constantly edited and re-written, so the wording shown in these poems often has changed in contemporary versions of the Wikipedia pages.

one thing i am quite grateful to Brian David Gilbert for is the phrase "If you needed ME to tell you that... I'm glad I told you that."