MISTER frankenstein was a punk ass bitch

the story behind the song is also very good

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.

Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.

Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?

They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.

You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”

Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.

The Gavinner's "Guilty As Charged Tour" will be at Sunshine Coliseum tonight!

The Gavinner's "Guilty As Charged Tour" will be at Sunshine Coliseum tonight!

And when the Blip-A has been gone twice as long as it should have been with no indication of what happened to them, when the astrophage has been attacking Erid’s sun for 50 years and they are starting to feel the pressure of its effects, when the Tau Ceti plan looks like a failure and the whole crew aboard has been assumed dead and they need to figure out something else… Eridian governments approach Adrian’s dome habitat team with the serious question of how much of the Eridian population could feasibly be moved into climate controlled geothermally-powered xenonite dome cities. (The answer is inevitably “not enough.” But the debates over sending a second crew to Tau Ceti in case what happened to the Blip-A was a weird fluke are not finding any consensus and the planet is snowballing towards total climate collapse and the world is ending and Adrian is bitterly glad that they and Rocky never had children because what kind of future is even left—)

Wow you did not have to build me such a big enclosure. This is massive and that is just what I can see from my bedroom window.

^tags from @bwabbitv3s

While I love and greatly enjoy all the adorable fics, art and headcanons about Rocky, Adrian and Grace forming a little family unit together... I strongly doubt that Eridians have any real concept of the nuclear family.

The thing is that nuclear families (family units consisting of a married couple and any kids they have) are a relatively modern and largely Western invention; for most of human history and in most parts of the world households have been larger and involved extended family members, tending more towards clans than individual units.

Notably, this is also more common in more collectivist societies- and Eridians are supposed to be even more collectivist in nature than humans are.

Eridians make major decisions by joining together in large groups that form a single consciousness.

They need to watch each other sleep on an irregular timeline, which would be wildly impractical with two people who aren't stuck on a tiny spaceship together, and instead have jobs and obligations outside the home.

They traditionally stored food from hunting in large communal piles.

In the movie Rocky has a family crest that he uses to introduce himself, indicating a major focus on family/clan as a part of identity.

James Ortiz's headcanon about arranged marriage also fits, since those usually happen in societies that view marriage as a union between families, rather than between individuals.

All of this points to Eridians living together in large groups joined by kinship, and potentially friendship as well. They have many adults in the home that all support the family, watch each other sleep, and come together to make important decisions. And this family identity is an important part of how they see themselves and their purpose in the world.

And then there's the issue of Eridian reproduction.

When you put together that Eridians lay five eggs at a time, that they live for centuries, and that egg laying is easier than giving birth, you're looking at one Eridian mating pair having up to five kids at minimum, and dozens at maximum. Maybe in the past it evened out due to child mortality, but assuming they've largely solved that with modernity it's a recipe for massive, unsustainable population growth.

I've seen several fan explanations for this, but for me the simplest is that Eridians just don't put as much emphasis on individual couples having children as humans do. Each family generation is probably quite large, but only a couple kids in that generation will choose to have children of their own, and then those children will be raised by the family, It-Takes-a-Village style.

It's similar to how it was an evolutionary benefit for human families to have single, gay and elderly members: including childless adults increases chances of survival for the children the family does have. And quintuplets have gotta be a lot for one couple to handle, even with Eridian multi-tasking abilities.

If I can get even more out there, considering the collectivist nature of Eridians and the relatively detached method of laying eggs vs. childbirth/nursing, it's entirely possible that Eridians don't actually put that much stock in who a child's biological parents are. There are human societies that historically reckoned kinship similarly, referring to some or all aunts/uncles as parents, and cousins as siblings.

All of which is to say that again, large and tight-knit extended families are very likely the default for most Eridians.

And oh boy, the implications this has for the story!

Imagine Ryland "No close family, no friends, not even a dog" Grace, arriving at Erid to discover that he has not only been adopted by Rocky's mate but by his entire, massive family as well.

Imagine Rocky's relatives, many of whom are likely also engineers, working to maintain Grace's dome. Because that's what you do for family, and any family of Rocky's is one of theirs.

Imagine Rocky and Adrian having a clutch and Grace getting ready to be an uncle only to discover he is 100% considered a parent too.

Imagine this lonely, isolated person having a huge support system for the rest of his life.

Usually, I appreciate English for its artistic freedom, the way it lets you play with words. I love that the word “breakage” is a thing, I love that you can turn any body part into a verb by slapping “to” in front of it and then getting a little nasty, et cetera. It is rare that I actually complain about words English doesn’t have. Famously, I grieve for “Guten Appetit”, the German version of “bon appetit” that exists in many languages in some way, but not in English. Earlier today, I was complaining to my spouse, not for the first time, about the lack of direct translation for “Treppenhaus”. The literal translation is stair house, and the internet is currently telling me that “stairwell” is the English word I’m looking for. I guess it is translatable, then. That’s fine, this was all just supposed to be a lead-up to another word anyway, one that really doesn’t have a proper English translation:

Feierabend!

Clunky English translations include closing time, quitting time, but also after-hours, off-hours, and of course the clunkiest, end of the work day.

So, the first question burning on my mind is:

Feierabend is a genuinely important part of German culture, and a treasured word among many of us. It is so salient that there is a BBC article about it. So what’s it mean?

Well,