The Fiction Treehouse

okay this has actually led me down the rabbit hole of the beanie baby environmental impact, and apparently the big problem is that they used to be stuffed with PVC pellets. the science in all that is REALLY over my head, but from what i can tell from wikipedia and some googling around, that's actually a suuuper nasty plastic to have your little kid potentially gnawing on. like, "may release noxious chemicals and give them lifelong respiration problems" nasty.

These companies are convincing people to buy as much useless, plastic crap as possible, crap that can't be reused (because it isn't useful in the first place) and won't be recycled (not that recycling them would even do much).

This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

Rabbits

what iron lung fans see

on a fanfiction site, such as ao3, proper etiquette is to tag for all properties included. this lets people who aren't interested specifically filter out crossovers.

on tumblr dot com, where filtering out tags is not possible (no, blocking a tag does not count), tagging a crossover post with all root properties is INCREDIBLY rude, specifically for this reason. no one likes seeing their tag overrun with things that they aren't interested in.

there are rare exceptions! if it's a one off post or particularly rare crossover, it's fine to main tag. but as soon as something gains a lot of traction, like has happened here, main tagging will literally run people out of their own property tag.

(as an aside, there are accepted exceptions for Canonical Crossovers-- stuff like deadpool vs wolverine. but most of those take place in the Comics Fandom which has a very different approach to this stuff anyways, since so much of it is already crossovers at a source material level)

however, the correct etiquette is to tag for the crossover (phm x il / project hail mary x iron lung / any iteration of that) or ship name (bloodymary), and the individual relevant characters (grace phm, simon iron lung, etc etc). this allows those interested to locate the posts, while preventing the main tags from being inundated and becoming useless.

crossover tagging etiquette is also dependent on relevance. i.e.: if you have a crossover with three properties, but only two of them are the focus and one plays a bit role, you only tag for the two prominent ones. a real life example: i have posted a kingdom hearts fanfic to ao3 that is technically a crossover, because it briefly mentions two naruto characters by name. it is not tagged for naruto, as a crossover, or for those characters, because by doing so i would be functionally submitting spam (stupid, pointless, annoying message) to those tags. i would be making it harder for people who want to find a naruto fic with those characters to actually do so. and it would also waste the time of anyone looking to read a real crossover.

that's rude. it's rude because fandom is a communal activity, and we do actually have a responsibility to keep it nice for those around us. that means we have to be cognizant on how our actions, tags, and posts will effect the greater fandom ecosystem. this is especially true for crossovers.

so in this scenario, where 90% of bloodymary tumblr posts and premises take place in phm, it should not be tagged for iron lung at all.

there are rules. they do exist.

When ranchers in Utah's Rich County found eighteen sheep killed in March 2022, they assumed coyotes. USDA Wildlife Services flew a plane over the kill site and found something feeding on the carcasses that had only been confirmed in the state eight times in forty years. It was a wolverine. Utah sits at the extreme southern margin of the wolverine's North American range. The animal is built for the deep snow and high alpine of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, country above ten thousand feet where the winters last eight months and the terrain rejects everything that is not specifically engineered to survive it. A wolverine showing up in Utah's ranch country was not a routine predator complaint. It was a biological event. State wildlife managers had no protocol for it because they had never needed one. Biologists set specialized barrel traps near the sheep carcasses. Catching a wolverine in a live trap is considered one of the most difficult captures in North American wildlife management. The animal is trap-smart, solitary, covers enormous distances daily, and operates almost exclusively in terrain that humans struggle to access on foot. The odds of a wolverine walking into a barrel trap were close to zero. The next morning, a sheepherder found one of the trap doors dropped. Inside was a healthy, twenty-eight-pound male, estimated at three to four years old. It was the first wolverine ever live-captured by biologists in Utah's history. The team sedated him, packed his body in ice to keep his core temperature stable during the examination, fitted him with a GPS tracking collar, and released him into the deep snow of the Uinta Mountains. For researchers who had spent careers studying an animal they almost never got to see, that collar was the first real-time data source on wolverine movement the state had ever produced. The data that came back over the next twenty-five days confirmed what wolverine biologists in other states had documented but Utah had never been able to verify on its own ground. The animal logged over 195 miles of travel in less than a month. He did not drift south toward lower elevations or leave the state. He locked into the high peaks of the Uintas above ten thousand feet and ran massive looping circuits through avalanche chutes, rocky ridgelines, and snowfields deep enough to bury a man standing upright. The daily distances he covered would qualify as an endurance event for a human athlete on flat ground. He was doing it through the most physically punishing terrain in the state, in winter, alone, at elevation, without stopping. The eighteen dead sheep that started the whole sequence were never repeated. The wolverine moved into the high country and stayed there, operating in a landscape so remote and so hostile that the only evidence of his existence was the GPS signal pinging coordinates from ridgelines that no person had visited in months. The collar proved what the forty years of scattered sightings could only suggest. The wolverine was not passing through Utah. It was living there, quietly covering nearly two hundred miles of frozen alpine rock in less than a month, completely invisible to every human being in the state.

if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars

literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?

you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)

if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too

learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life

I am PRO-WOOL

I am PRO-LEATHER

I am PRO-BEES

Fuck the idea of replacing durable, sustainable animal products with cheap, flimsy plastic that doesn’t bio-degrade. Agave nectar and other artificial sweeteners are expensive, labor-intensive, and destroy the environment to be farmed.

Leather - one cow makes SO MUCH leather. One deer makes SO MUCH leather. Well-treated leather lasts almost FOREVER. Even animals with small skins like rabbits, a pair of well oiled rabbit leather gloves will last decades. Every animal usually made into leather is also a meat animal, so it’s more sustainable to get more than one product from a single ethically butchered animal (humane kills make less punctures in the hide!) Leather can be tanned with natural resources like brains and doesn’t require treatment with chemicals that seep into the groundwater!

Cotton: Cotton is a fucking plant, it burns. The growing and harvesting of cotton is rather water intensive but it IS possible to sustainably harvest and reuse the water spent in the cleaning process to reduce the ecological footprint of the crop. It burns clean, it cuts clean, it’s sturdy, and there are 1000 ways to weave it to change its properties.