Gremlin Den

Anyway, she really, really loves it when I tell her stories. She loves stories anyway, and at first this manifested as "stories about Tad-Cu Bryn", aka my father (her grandfather) who died before she was born. This has been a lovely way to keep his memory alive, and she adores every story - she has her favourites, which she will request.

Then it became apparent that she specifically loves me telling her stories. She'll happily ask others for them too, but from me she just wants any anecdote at all; which of course is wonderful and demonstrates that she is a child of impeccable taste and wisdom and brilliance, but also she has ADHD and the energy reserves of a seven year old and so this gets Tiring very quickly

Yesterday, in the car on the way back from the wildlife centre, she asked for one of my longer stories, and I was like hey, how about we try something different?

And she was like, no, tell me a story about Tad-Cu Bryn

And I was like, this will be a brand new story and you get to play it and help me tell it

And she was like, explain

So I gave her three characters to choose from. The first was a warrior with a sword she could name, who was nonetheless dyspraxic. The second was a gymnastic elf who could commune with trees but was afraid of heights. The third was a dyslexic witch whose spells sometimes go wrong when she spells the words wrong.

She picked the witch. I pulled up an online d20 on my phone. I went to start, and she insisted my mother had to play as the elf.

So I told them that the new queen of the kingdom had called for them, because their palace treasury had been robbed - specifically, a single enchanted coin that brings luck and wealth to a ruler's reign had been stolen. And tales of enchanted coins were suddenly emanating from across the land, so each one needed investigating until the right coin was found.

It turns out kids who like stories will absolutely lap this shit up. She was enthralled. It was the simplest story - they had to get into a bank, revive some unconscious gnomes, then enter the vault, find the coin that had been deposited into it, then get back to the queen. Enough to fill a half hour car ride, basically, but she managed to fill it with all the wacky hijinks you get from a ttrpg, particularly when she tried to smash a door down with a hammer but rolled a 1.

We finished with the queen saying it wasn't the right coin, and then my niece demanded we go again, this time with her playing as a sapient reticulated python. That time we made it all the way to the final boss fight, which was a sorcerer who created a big coin monster out of loads of coins; I asked my niece what she wanted to do, and she described graphically how she wanted to constrict and eat the sorcerer and immediately rolled a 19. So, sure! Okay. The sorcerer is now very dead. The coin monster, though, was still there, and as my niece tried to say she would do the same thing, I was like, no, you're a snake and you just ate. You're now immobile.

At this point, my sister advised her to regurgitate the sorcerer.

Great! said my niece. I'm going to do it at the coin monster.

And rolled a 20.

So she projectile vomited a dead sorcerer into the coin monster, and won the day.

Anyway, today she immediately demanded we play "the game with the story where we choose", and my brother in law is now asking me how he can do this with her ("Are you making it all up as you go along??"). But yeah, turns out, this is a fantastic way to entertain a seven year old. Vague ongoing quest, then three steps: get into (place), resolve (minor puzzle), boss fight to finish. Boom. Easy.

She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.

“When he died the ravens sat in the trees outside for a week, watching. Taking turns. A horde of raccoons tried to break into the house every night, tearing at the siding. Eventually they gave up, but it was unsettling.”

Every other job as above. Maddening that’s not taken seriously by people who haven’t been looking for a job in the last 10 years or longer. Partner spent a year throwing himself on that impenetrable wall.

The Hardware Store:

The office: Ask anyone for the manager. He may be at the workbench in the middle of the store, helping a customer with a contraption, or trying to organize the management office a little for the first time in 30 years.

The recruiter: A sign taped only to the upper story entrance that says “Help Wanted.” Your first application test is going to the hardware store often enough and observantly enough to read the sign, or know someone who tells you about it.

The interview: Bring in your paper resume and ask to speak to the manager. He’ll go over it with you at the workbench between customers. Bonus points if you can chime in about a customer’s contraption.

The job posting: Very real physical sign, may stay up for unknown number of hires until the workload feels manageable for everyone. Or they just really like you.

The acceptance/rejection phone call: When it’s been mulled over, but relatively soon so it’s one less thing to do manually.

Your data: This company is tech-savvy enough to have an out-of-date but actually useful inventory system and super-basic customer rewards program, but actually doing anything with that data sounds like a tedious and antisocial thing to do and it has never once been considered.

—

Like, to be clear, that is not how any business should be expected to operate in 2026. They got to about 2006 and decided this routine was perfectly good and very little tech or business management hoo-ha has been appealing, so they just didn’t change. And they were right. It all just got worse. They’ve managed to become one of the best places to get hired today by just not falling on their face from listening to the empty promises of big-tech.

2. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism Within US Slave Culture by Vincent Woodard

3. "Abolitionists turned the tables on Europeans by accusing them of being cannibals when they ate sugar tainted with the flesh and blood of slaves."

here's the intro

surgeonsblog

article i found this from^ (w/even more resources)

redwoods medical edge

^article where i found that

this article is short/basic/doesn’t link anywhere else, but i found it very helpful anyway

supposed to be good but to me, seemed difficult to navigate. (dp lyle)

this on the otherhand, is the jackpot (novelmalpractice)

tumblr blog centered around this topic

this is more about the common pitfalls/anachronisms of medical fiction but still helpful

writing medical scenes: useful links by paul anthony shortt

the last one im going to include is an article by a doctor about common mistakes in popular medical shows, i liked this one

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

Here’s the general art style Chinese mountains are drawn in:

And here’s how some of them actually look:

When I taught second grade, one of the options for students who had finished their work was to write a letter to the president. I would send all of the letters in a big envelope at the end of every month.

Watching my students get more and more frustrated with him (and concerned about his wellbeing) was not the result I'd hoped for when I came up with the idea, but it was kind of hilarious.

See, Obama had a standard packet with information and activities about his dog he'd send in response to letters from very young citizens...and of course his office sent one back to our class every single time we sent mail.

So eventually all of the letters looked something like this: