No More Apples in the Vending Machine Please

ME: Ah! I've been a library assistant for 5 years. Surely I can explain this in a reasonable and nuanced, yet concise way!

2 HOURS LATER:

Like, here are some VERY COMMON examples of personal breaking points that can come up in archiving:

Trans person whose friend keeps writing Harry Potter fanfic

Parent whose coworker loves drawing shota/lolicon

Uncle going down an anti-vax documentary hole

Mom pushing diet magazines on her daughter

Racist old dudes on school reading lists

True crime Youtube clickbaits

AI-generated Elsagate brainrot shorts

Comic books by a white guy posing as Asian

$2 exploitation porn DVDs

School shooter simulator video game

Guides on making explosives

LiveLeak content

Odds are pretty good that at least one of those made you, reading this, viscerally cringe and want to argue about, WHICH IS WHAT I MEAN. Every person has a breaking point, and THAT'S NORMAL.

The point of the library training isn't to make you into a unique person who has never, ever been reviled by or wanted to destroy a piece of media. It's to learn how to live with that feeling, step back, and work with your team to maintain the archive, anyway.

And sometimes, maintaining means recognizing that not every place IS an archive! I'm only able to maintain an archive space BECAUSE I know I have spaces where the stuff that revolts me is banned! It's okay to curate multiple spaces; tolerance is more than blind acceptance.

The library archives information, the bar should not be allowed to become a Nazi bar. The AO3 tags archive every fic, the Discord group chat isn't made to be a museum. You don't have to take everything home with you at all times to prove yourself.

I’VE GOT THE VOICE OF THE MANY IN MY THROAT 

You're not crazy, that was an old fic idea I had in my pocket where Zim invites Red to the dance to Win At Humans or whatever and Red, not paying attention, says yes and can't get out of it.

And then Purple gets jealous Red gets to essentially get a free day off and why does he get to go to a dance I never get to go to the dance what the fuck why doesn't anyone ask me to dance.

As a result, this happens:

Dib: -opens the door to find a gigantic Tallest there staring at him with a box of candy and a corsage-

Dib: ...What are--

Purple: Guess what fuckshit you're taking me to the dance. You're welcome. -aggressively hands Dib said box of candy. Every piece of candy has a giant bite taken out of it-

Dib agrees to go because dunking on Zim supercedes punching Zim's leaders in the nose and also if he goes to the dance he can keep an eye on Zim. This is also probably some sort of trick on Zim's part, so something something doublecross plot.

Red meanwhile is having a horrible time because, again, he didn't want to go in the first place.

I have no idea how it was supposed to end, but I do know that the Tallest were exchange students from Canada. Their cover story for why the wheelchairs float because Canada has free healthcare.

@nohriantomatoes It probably did happen with dinosaurs! At least the big carnivores. Birds they might be, but when you look at the ends of their faces, they have sensory pits.

Sensory pits are clusters of nerves- they're part of what we call the ISOs in crocodilians. ISO means "Integumentary Sensory Organs," and they're exceptionally sensitive- a crocodilian's face is more sensitive than a human fingertip. They can sense tiny pressure changes in water (as in "the pressure change from a single drop") even when their hearing is disrupted.

You can see the foramina for the nerve endings really clearly on this alligator skull.

And while they do use these nerves for hunting, they also use them for courtship. It's seen across species, and it's an important part of the process. While we can't entirely reconstruct something so complex as courtship in theropods, we do know that there are several species with the sensory pits that indicate the presence of ISOs. Juravenator had them on its tail, Daspletosaurus had them on its face- so did Neovenator and the other tyrannosaurids.