Getting In Deep

"The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary."

– Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

"It's active."

The device looked like a doorway, a slight shimmer in the opening. The artificer stepped through.

"Nothing happened," the apprentice said.

"I already am who I am. If you step through, you'll turn into who you are."

"May I?"

First and foremost, Sherlock is actually nice? Like, he is never deliberately rude to people. He can be quite blunt, direct and to the point, but he's never going out of his way to be rude or dismissive of people. (He has immense amounts of cheek and sass about the competencies of the police officers once they are no longer present, but he is always perfectly polite to them when they are speaking.)

He is especially kind to people in the cases that they are working on. He tries to be respectful of people, particularly those who have been traumatized by the event that they have just experienced. He is very kind to women, and has great admiration for smart and competent women that he encounters in his work, regardless of their social class. (In the adventure of the copper beeches, he allows the woman to take a suspicious job, because she is in desperate need of the money, but makes sure that he is available to her night or day in case she runs into any trouble.)

Sherlock genuinely likes John. They are actually best friends, and Sherlock treats him as such. Sherlock is proud of John when John figures things out and offers him sincere praise. Sherlock genuinely enjoys John's company and makes a point to express that fact on multiple occasions.

The cases are often simple, but never stupid. The cases are interesting to read, and it's satisfying as a reader when you figure something out alongside the characters but before the big reveal. They're not trying to twist you in knots, tricking you into thinking that your first thought is going to be absolutely wrong because it's way too obvious. The stories make sense, but are layered with more complexity and clues that you might not have caught.

Sherlock does a lot of moral questioning and struggles with some of the implications of the cases, such as the adventure of the Abbey Grange. In that case, a young woman's admirer murders the woman's abusive husband. Sherlock makes a point of not telling the police about it because he thinks that that would be the wrong thing to do. He lets the man go and encourages him and the young woman to make a better life for themselves. Sherlock quite openly struggles with the results of his cases, the implications of them, their impact on him and the people around him.

Sherlock openly admits to his faults. And not in an “oh I'm so much better than you all but I have to keep my mind occupied somehow” kind of way, he is quite willing to admit where he struggles and where he considers himself to be weaker, and often asks for help.

John Watson is very much an equal partner, and Sherlock is openly quite reliant on John for a lot of things. Obviously, Sherlock's detective abilities are the star of the show and that is what Watson focuses on in his recounting, but Sherlock actively seeks out John's involvement and opinions on the cases, and relies on John's protection and support on many occasions.

The world blurred at the edges as the too-bright lights began to pulse. Colours bled together and tangled in ribbons until they screamed.

Jax couldn't breathe. Couldn't hear past the thick and fast beat of his own heart in his ears.

Ceres was talking. What was she saying? He should be listening. But all he could think about were the words she had said moments before.

"It looks like the changes are permanent."

It was permanent.

He was going to be stuck like this forever.

---

Thinking about Act One where Ceres tells Jax that his condition isn't reversible.

This is in the first few weeks when he's stuck small, and being told as far as they can tell he'll be stuck like that sent him into a pretty bad spiral.

[The few times I got really really bad anxiety/panic attacks, it was this pulsing neon onslaught of sound and colour all screaming and pressing in. Really bad light and sound sensitivity.

I think it's only been two months.

Okay just as a rundown, in the last two months:

My brother died of a sudden heart attack, which meant I had to drop everything and get on a plane to go be with my mom for a month. While I was gone, my cat Smyrtle had to be put to sleep (14 years old, had been sick and going downhill for a few months). I came back and a couple weeks later my eight month old kitten Newt managed to break her leg in the middle of the night leading to 4AM ER vet, and the difficult decision to amputate her leg rather than put her through long surgery and longer recovery that might or might not actually work. She's still recovering, but I'm confident we made the right decision based on how ready she is to be done with restrictions and cone after two weeks. I've been on 24 hour caring for her and not getting a lot of sleep/only sleeping in little bits on her schedule. And then our dryer just died and since it's 15 years old it's better to replace it with a cheap one than repair it.

And in a month I'm going back to my mom's to be with her because she's not coping well at all. I get to be a daily grief counselor for her and listen to her sobbing.

On top of all of this, I'm trying to get her to move back to Texas, buy a house for us all to live together. And that also means us moving. So there's a LOT to do and stress about.

So, yeah it's a lot and I'm just barely surviving day to day honestly. And financially, we've taken on a lot of credit card debt/care credit debt to pay for all this. But my husband's doctor just wanted to do a test that would have cost us $800 (we can't figure out why it's so expensive when we have good insurance) and we had to tell them yeah we can't. Like, sorry, we are fucking TAPPED OUT.

It's also partly that at the beginning of the year we committed to a vacation with friends because we thought this year was gonna be light on obligations and because we had some savings. So we spent the money we had on travel and then all this happened. Something something can't live in fear of the worst or you never do anything ....something something.

So anyway, we're getting by, barely. I'm eating a lot of beans, lol.

And absolutely do not take this as pressure or something to consider if you're also struggling. But if anyone feels inclined and can afford it, I do have a Ko-fi and it would help to start paying back some of this debt.

Source

Also: Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko

"First," the elf said, "let's agree we all have a right to exist."

The goblin nodded.

The orc looked at elves and humans and growled "Nah!"

The human looked at orcs and goblins and said "No."

I will be participating in Artfight this year!

Hopefully I’ll some of y’all around

"I'd like to see you do better!"

"Sure!"

She emptied her tankard, rode out, and soon returned with the princess.

"How?"

"First, make sure the princess wants to be rescued-"

"But-"

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Have you guys seen that clip