Just a Thing

my friend's 5 year old recently got a toy veterinary medicine set - it's super cool, like one of those mini play kitchens a lot of kids have, but it's set up to pretend to be a vet (it's this thing) - it has stuffed animals and things to weigh them, give them medicine, take x-rays, write on their charts, etc.

so this kid, who is five and to my knowledge has no experience in the administrative bureaucracy of modern healthcare, puts a stuffed pig named Piggy on the exam table. she pretends to draw blood from Piggy using a fake syringe, and the blood goes into a toy test tube vial that she calls "the resulter"

i'm playing with her, right, so i'm like, awesome, what are the results of Piggy's blood test? and she says "we have to send it to the scientists." so we send the vial to the scientists (put it in her bedroom) and when we get back to the vet playset i'm like awesome what did the scientists say? and she says they have not gotten back to us yet

so she rolls her eyes, exasperated, and says we have to call the scientists. she pretends to call them. apparently, they tell her that Piggy's blood test is "at the bottom of the list" and "we have to WAIT." she frowns. we wait a bit longer and call them back. they tell us it will be a while! she says we should go ask the scientists in person so we go back to her bedroom and she inquires at this imaginary lab, at which point the scientists yell at her and tell her now they will make us wait even longer!

keep in mind she is 100% directing this play. she is making all this up. she is fully in control of this game, and she has decided that what we are going to pretend is that we are dealing with this exhausting nonsense, not actually treating Piggy.

finally the blood tests come back. they are inconclusive. the scientists do not know what is wrong with Piggy. the little girl walks back to the stuffed pig on the exam table, sighs deeply, and says in a very serious voice "we can never help you."

i'm obsessed with this kid. when given complete control over a make believe scenario, instead of becoming the heroic rescuer administering effective cures, she is instead a beleaguered vet making multiple calls to an overworked lab only to be left unable to help her patient.

Which are not words you expect a 3 year old to say. Except that her mom works in healthcare and DOES rant about not having time to see patients and spending all her time fighting with insurance companies.

For the "crime" of not wanting to be tracked/have ads pissed into your eyeballs 24/7.

Even if you've paid for the "privilege" of the latter.

IF YOU USE A DESKTOP PC OR LAPTOP, TRY INVIDIOUS

https://invidious.io/

No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

AO3 is not “in the cloud.” AO3 is stored on physical machines that the OTW owns.

(Quick shout out to Dispensary 33, where 1920s facial hair meets 2020s weed edibles!)

Title: A Very Distinctive Backstitch Rating: General Summary: Parker returns home to find Eliot has discovered both pinterest and handicrafts, and Hardison has had to use the fire extinguisher again.

Parker got home three days after the boys did, on that particular mission. When they were planning it, they seemed to think this wasn’t fair, and she’d told them they were right; she felt terrible, having so much fun without them. Still, they’d just have to keep a stiff upper lip about it and she’d let them have all the fun next time.

(When she mentioned that, Alec got his “You have misunderstood my intentions” face, but she l…she lo…she loved Alec in part because even when she didn’t understand, he wasn’t ever mean or judgey. He didn’t always explain, but he always accepted. In this case, he just got her a GoPro so she could tape herself on the stunt bike course during the mission.)

Anyway, she spent three days having so much fun, and didn’t even mind the long drive back to Portland in the taquito truck. But when she finally arrived home, letting herself into the loft above the brewpub, she was met with a mystery. As she entered she found, draped over the kitchen island, a large fold of cloth, heavily embroidered in the style of the Bayeaux tapestry.

“Did you take an entire other job without me?” she demanded, as Alec walked into the kitchen carrying an empty plastic takeaway container. He shouted, flailed, and threw it at her. She caught it and tossed it into the sink. (She was all for throwing them away, but Eliot got a really pinched look when they did that, so now they washed them and saved them forever in the Sacred Take Away Container Reliquary, aka the bottom drawer on the right of the dishwasher.)

“Parker!” Alec yelped.

“What kind of job would you need the Bayeaux tapestry for, anyhow?” she asked.

“Woman,” Alec sighed, but he hugged her, and once she’d gotten used to them hugs were nice, so she enjoyed that part. “Welcome home. It’s not the Bayeax tapestry. I have some bad news.”

“If you’re getting some 7535 you might as well grab the 7110!” Eliot’s voice drifted out from the bedroom.

“Eliot’s lost his damn mind,” Hardison finished.

In theory, Parker knew that this job would be rough on Eliot. It required their hitter to take a beating. Eliot had said he was fine with it, but he’d taken more of a hit than anyone (possibly including the bad guys’ goon) had intended. In practice she’d been prepared for him to be bedridden, doped up, and cranky, but she hadn’t been prepared for cryptography.

“What’s 7535?” she asked in a whisper.

“Embroidery thread,” Hardison replied, reaching for a plastic bin on the counter. He held up a hank of wooly yarn, wrapped in a piece of paper that did indeed read 7535. “Did you know there are seven different shades of black?”

“Well, yeah,” she said, perplexed. “I mean, Venetian Black is totally different from Cherry Black, and then there’s Dark Black – oh! I found it!” she added, plucking the other color, 7110, out of the box. “What does Eliot want with red and black yarn?”

“Thread. Embroidery thread,” Alex said. “He got high and picked up a hobby.”

At that point Eliot himself, apparently impatient with Alec’s lack of speed, thumped into the kitchen on a crutch.

“It’s not a hobby, it’s a historical tradition,” he said. “Hi Parker, welcome home. Textiles have always been dismissed as crafts while paint and sculpture are arts,” he added, aggrieved.

Parker turned to Alec. He shrugged.

“He found a really compelling Pinterest right as the opiates kicked in,” he said.

“I learned how to embroider at three in the morning,” Eliot said to her proudly. He held out his next project after the fake Bayeaux tapestry. It was a cross stitch announcing All Cheese is Hubris. Parker studied it, impressed.

“He also almost burned the building down,” Alec interjected, as if he wasn’t used to both of them almost burning things down on a very regular basis. It was cute how he always acted surprised.

“It’s a long story,” Eliot said. “Anyway once I got the hang of it, I thought, I’ve never forged a textile before.”

“Ooh, me neither,” Parker said thoughtfully.

“But there’s a couple of panels from the Bayeaux missing, right?” he continued. “And like…why shouldn’t one of the missing panels have aliens in it?”

Parker checked the tapestry on the kitchen island. Among other more traditional motifs, it did indeed have two large-eyed aliens abducting a monk.

“He’s still high?” she asked.

“Another two days on the Vicodin,” Alec confirmed.

“It looks very authentic,” she said loyally. “Construction-wise, I mean.”

“Thanks,” Eliot said. He accepted the thread Alec handed him. “I’m gonna go finish this one. It’s for the kitchen.”

He hobbled off. Alec looked at her, his face a careful mask.

“Poor baby,” she said. “I got to base-jump twice and you’ve been tripsitting him through the hobby store.”

“ART STORE,” Eliot’s voice drifted out from the bedroom.

“Yeah, well, you know, it’s been rough, but I held up,” Alec said, putting on a mock-brave face. She grinned and kissed his cheek.

“Go play some video games. I’ll handle him from here. With a little nudge, he might learn to knit before we have to get him off the hard stuff,” she pointed out. She felt the benefits of knitting were self-evident, but Alec frowned.

“Why do we want Eliot to learn to knit?” he asked.

“Hello? Custom sized winter hats?” she pointed out. Hardison fell well within the one-size-fits-all range of most machine knitted hats – she’d done measurements while he slept – but she just knew if he had a tailored toque he’d feel better about wintering somewhere it rained every single day from Halloween to St. Patrick’s Day. She herself had quite an oval head and hadn’t gone back to off-the-rack hats since her first tailored ski mask.

“I’m gonna go…Goose Game,” he said.