Vaudevillain Girls and Violin Strings

We ran out to get sandwiches for lunch and my beloved was talking to me about dinner last night, which was delicious Turkish food.

After a while they said, “I’ll stop talking to you.”

“Why?”

“You’re responding like a Zelda NPC that didn’t warrant a voice actor.”

I laughed but in retrospect I could see their point.

“I wanted you to try the little lamb and pita roll ups they do, I think you’d like them.”

“Ah”

“I liked the donar we got, though it was a little gristly.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m happy you liked the rose mocktail we got you.”

--

TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

Grace goes swimming! Rocky is not thrilled.

Eridians cant "hold their breath" like humans do, their vents dont close completly so water can still get in, if they fall in water they drown and die. safe to say rocky is not a fan of when grace does it for fun xD

(i got the inspo for this from this fic: Enrichment by alatarmaia4, please check it out it is so funny)

Do you think she felt a pitching, gut-wrenching horror when she realized that he was alone?

Do you think she thought back to that day that she forced him to go, soothing herself with the reminder that he at least wouldn't be alone, and realized that, no, she not only sent him to his death but she sent him utterly alone with two corpses?

Do you think that she remembered the fact that Grace had always been forcibly alone: ostracized from his communities, humiliated into silence, and realized she was only compounding on that?

Do you think that, upon hearing about Rocky for the first time, she felt a wash of relief rather than wonder or awe or surprise?

#apparently The Load Toad was a force everyone in the electrical division sincerely believed needed to be appeased #and the ritual for doing so involved the blood of a virgin (easy to get in a nuclear power plant tbh) and chicken bones #you'd burn the bones in a burning bowl after splashing them with the virginal sacrifice

#ANYWAYS apparently one time they got a new head who was either devout Methodist or Mormon I forget #and he made them stop like all of that with firing threats and criminal threats too #then every day for a month 4 loads would randomly inexplicably fail #at first he blamed the men for acting out the Toad's vengeance #but after babysitting down in the pit himself he could see that all the failures were borderline miraculous and impossible to anticipate

#so without admitting his wrong he just threw a kfc bucket full of bones into the breakroom and curtly said "just make it stop" #moral of the story I actually agree with this sentiment #prev [left arrow]

“They’re not smarter or faster they’re buying up others’ lifetimes to do their chores”

I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of “It is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?”

Exploitation isn’t in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.

I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they don’t like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.

When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasn’t paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.

I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and that’s how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasn’t what I had scheduled or paid for.

I’ve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. It’s the customers that can do a number on you.

There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):

Smallpox:

Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)

There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)

There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.

Other relevant viruses:

Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.

Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.

Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.

So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?

There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.

Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)

Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.

Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).

Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.

Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.

TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).

(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)

Sources & further reading under the cut!

I'm going to hold your hand as I say this to you. Those same expectations are placed on trans men. Trans men are also expected to be mothers and wives. Trans men also face misogyny and are harmed by it, in the same ways cisgender women are.

It reads like a lot of people think of trans men as Cis Dudes With Pussies when the vast majority of trans men are living (or have lived) many of the same experiences as cis women, and should be included in these conversations.

These photos show the embryonic form of Limulus polyphemus, commonly known as the Atlantic horseshoe crab. The eggs of this species are initially opaque, with a grayish-blue, green, or pink coloration, but they become increasingly translucent as the embryos mature, providing a glimpse of the tiny horseshoe crabs developing within.

Above: several embryos twirling around in their eggs

The legs become visible roughly five days after fertilization, and the embryos begin to move shortly thereafter, eventually flexing their legs and twirling their bodies. They molt for the very first time just a few days later. Each embryo will shed its skin and grow a new one four times in total before it even hatches from the egg.

The color variations are likely related to the growth rate of each individual embryo, which can differ slightly based on the temperature, salinity, moisture, and oxygen levels around each egg. Certain colors can also arise from bacterial or fungal growth in the egg membrane.

Above: Limulus polyphemus embryos

The hatchlings finally emerge after 2-4 weeks. The freshly-hatched larvae measure less than 1cm long, and they look just like miniature versions of their adult form, except that they do not yet have tails (which are actually known as telsons) and their exoskeletons are still soft and translucent. These young horseshoe crabs are often described as "trilobite larvae."

Above: a young horseshoe crab discarding its egg

Atlantic horseshoe crabs generally spawn in May and June, with hundreds of thousands of individuals gathering along the coast on the night of the full moon and new moon. Each female lays up to 100,000 eggs per season, but very few of those offspring actually survive to adulthood. Most of the eggs are eaten or destroyed before they can even hatch, and many of the remaining larvae perish at some point during the 10 years that it takes for them to reach full maturity (i.e. the age at which they begin to reproduce).

Above: the freshly-hatched larvae

Wild horseshoe crabs can live to be more than 20 years old, and they can measure up to 60 centimeters (2 feet) long. They have 10 eyes in total, including two compound eyes that are specifically adapted for the purpose of finding a mate:

The most obvious eyes are the two lateral compound eyes. These are used for finding mates during the spawning season. Each compound eye has about 1,000 receptors or ommatidia. The cones and rods of the lateral eyes have a similar structure to those found in human eyes, but are around 100 times larger in size. At night, the lateral eyes are chemically stimulated to greatly increase the sensitivity of each receptor to light. This allows the horseshoe crab to identify other horseshoe crabs in the darkness.

Above: a close-up of a horseshoe crab's compound eye, which is covered in tiny hatchlings for some reason

Horseshoe crabs have been around for at least 445 million years, which means that these creatures are about 200 million years older than the dinosaurs and at least 50 million years older than trees, and yet their morphology has changed very little in that time. In fact, modern horseshoe crabs are frequently described as "living fossils," because they still look strikingly similar to their fossilized ancestors.

Above: the juvenile form of Tachypleus tridentatus, commonly known as the Chinese horseshoe crab

It's important to note that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact, they're not even crustaceans -- they belong to a completely different group of arthropods known as chelicerates, and they are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to crabs.

Above: Tachypleus tridentatus and Limulus polyphemus

This is a revised/updated version of a post that I published about two years ago, with much more information, photos, and sources.

Sources & More Info:

iNaturalist: Horseshoe Crab Eggs

Maryland Department of Natural Resources: Horseshoe Crab Life History

Current Zoology: Developmental Ecology of the American Horseshoe Crab

PBS: Once a Spawn a Time: Horseshoe Crabs Mob the Beach

Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute: Limulus polyphemus

National Wildlife Federation: Horseshoe Crabs