We Learn to Live With The Pain

eliott: i have a tragic history being entangled in the mafia and even now i could kill the most dangerous fighters without firing a gun

You have Parker, who has been designated as bad and wrong since she was a very young child and who has let go of any expectation of being anything else, so that identifying and doing what she thinks is the right thing is consistently an overwhelming and scary experience for her;

Then there's Eliot, who can point to exactly when and how he became irredeemable in his own eyes and whose highest ambition now is to do the wrong thing for the right people this time at least;

Nate, who is clinging to all of these ideas about morality and legality and good and bad that are completely inconsistent both internally and with his behavior, because his very normative view of the world was shattered and he never put the pieces back together in any kind of coherent way;

Sophie, who sees right and wrong as primarily about relationships between people, like she does everything else: right and wrong is in how you engage and who you hurt interpersonally, anything more abstract is irrelevant. But within that, there's also this weight to how she engages, this sense of regret at how she's treated people in the past that we never really see the full scope of;

May I present the best apple:

This is why most fruit trees, along with loads of other kinds of ornamental and edible plants, aren't grown from seed. The rootstock (a hardy variety of your tree that may have some bonus qualities like disease resistance) is grafted onto the scion (a cutting of a tree that produces a known cultivar of the fruit you're after). So the apples you buy at the store come from clones of a really good, or at least really reliable and profitable, apple tree.

You can actually get funky fresh with it if you want and graft different trees in the same family together, so you can have an apple where every branch bears a different variety or a fruit salad tree where every branch is a different kind of stone fruit. You can also crossbreed certain fruits to create hybrids!

So far I've only mixed up the main batch of colors, but I'll split them up and create a palatte of tints and shades once I have access to a scale again.

I don't have any fancy tools and have been blending the fiber by hand, so it's probably best I have a forced break for the sake of my fingers. Once I'm done I should have a very useful set of 57 2g swatches to play with! (Plus 5 more for a set of grayscale swatches)

The ratios are presented in the same order as the wool swatches in the photo above it. I didn't simplify any of the ratios so you'll have to deal with 2:2s instead of 1:1s, oops.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

"If there's no solution, should we just make things even queerer and more diverse?"

Unironically, yes. Edge City was written in 1991 - do you think 5% is still the threshold for the "median white shopper" to describe the mall as half black, 35 years later? I'd be very surprised if so.

Except for a small minority of extremely hateful people, things like outrage and discomfort can't be sustained. They fade with time and exposure. This is the same idea with the Overton Window, it's what we mean when we say "normalization".

For some people, and in some ways, that idea of "normalcy" is locked where it was in your childhood, but most people are more pliable than we like to think. Marketing and propaganda are massive industries for a reason - what we see affects how we act and how we see the world, often without us realizing and in ways that aren't comfortable to admit.

So yeah, making things more queer and more diverse isn't giving up on a solution, it IS the solution.

Beautiful, you don’t HAVE to forgive them. You just can’t ridicule them after leaving for being “tainted” or “evil” or whatever the acceptable word is now. Do not punish the behaviour you want to see.

“But they should’ve known sooner” and we should’ve known sooner that Destiel was never gonna meaningfully happen outside of queerbaiting, what’s your point?

“I never want them near me” that’s fine, but you do realize to insult them, YOU have to get near THEM, right? Wouldn’t it be more conducive to what you want to just leave each other alone?

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").