Nienna Weeps

Like, yes, the models at parties are a good source of info, but that's mostly for women's clothes.

Bruce goes to Alfred and is like "Alfred, you know about clothes stuff, hit me up with issues you have with clothes." Alfred has many opinions and Bruce comes out of this meeting with a big stack of ideas.

When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.

He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.

But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.

That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.

The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said

"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"

we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight

Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.

Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:

and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever

"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.

If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.

[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]

160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.

And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.

For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."

The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.

It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career

Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.

But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.

In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.

“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”

“Is that important?” They asked.

“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.

“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.

“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.

“How often does that even happen?” They asked.

“Every day.” I explain.

“Bullshit.” They said.

“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.

“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.

“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.

“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.

“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”

They stared at me.

“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.

They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.

Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.

There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.

British rationing did not end until 1954 (that’s still 8 years away from the time this scene takes place).  Rations applied to all food staples, soap, clothing, fuel, and paper.  In some cases, they became worse or more stringent after the war.  In 1946, when this story takes place, Britain instituted bread rationing for the first time, food packages weighing more than 5lbs from foreign countries sent to private citizens were subtracted from that citizen’s ration book (so decreasing the amount of food they could buy), and gas was rationed again.   While America also rationed during the War, the rations were never as severe as the ones in the UK and were lifted immediately after peace was declared.

Babies gain language much earlier than they start talking. They can understand you before they know how to make the right word sounds with their mouths. Speaking, like writing, is a feat of incredible physical coordination that we generally undervalue because it's been muscle memory for years or decades, but it involves a lot of very precise coordinated physical movements that take a lot longer to learn than the words themselves do for someone who's new at this whole having a body thing. Complex language is also not all that critical for baby sign language. To a baby, communicating hunger via crying or via reaching towards your food isn't markedly different to communicating it with a hand gesture, and they don't need particularly sophisticated language skills to do any of those things, so you can start teaching them hand signs pretty much as soon as they have a concept of deliberately communicating with others.

She wants to learn photography. Do it stupid. Take a million photos. Don't think about why they're not good. Enjoy the process of taking photos.

Pick out tge ones you like the most and figure out why you like them. Is it because the subject is centered? Is it because you caught them doing something cool? Is it because the light made cool shadows?

Han: Yeah

Wedge: Womp rats?

Han: Sure. Chewie uses ‘em for bowcaster practice. Kinda gamey tasting. Sandy colored fur, lotsa teeth, little over two meters…

Wedge: Luke wasn’t lying???

There are of course the aforementioned womp rats, which are both terrifying and a fantastic way to develop shooting skills.

There’s beggar’s canyon for piloting.  And if Phantom Menace brought us nothing else, it actually showed us the living death trap that is beggar’s canyon.  He’s not like zipping around the Grand Canyon, he’s literally goofing off in a place that killed off a shit ton of professional pod racers.  So needless to say, Luke’s had a chance to develop scary good reflexes, information processing, and spacial relation skills.

The Lars’s economic status means that they had to make do with ancient, crap equipment.  Luke would have learned how to make incredibly fine tuned repairs, and keep shit going forever.  And sure, he never built a C3PO or a pod racer, but honestly, if he found the materials to do it, he probably would have used them in a moisture collector.  

BUT THEY ALSO ATTACK IN PACKS

You think you just pissed off ONE rodent as long as you are tall? Oh no. It’s calling ALL SIXTEEN OF ITS FRIENDS

AND THEY ARE ALL AIMING TO BITE YOUR CROTCH OFF. 

*THAT’S* what Luke grew up sniping to keep them away from the droids and moisture vaporators. *THAT* (and Beggar’s Canyon) is what prepared him to take down the Death Star. 

What do you think the odds are that when Luke had that first lightsaber duel with Vader he was thinking of Vader in terms of a womp rat. 

Dude towers over everyone, strikes fear into the heart of every Rebel he comes across, this massive, looming force of nature like a shape out of a nightmare.

Stormtroopers = a pack of womprats

Vader = 1 Large psychic/telekentic Womprat with lazer claws

It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.

Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.

In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.

Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:

Making It by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen [book] (The big crunchy household DIY book; includes every level of self-sufficiency from making your own toothpaste and laundry soap to setting up raised beds to butchering a chicken. Authors are explicitly left-leaning.)

Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust [book] (A guide to simple home repair tasks, written with rentals in mind; very compassionate and accessible language.)

How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis [book] (The book about cleaning and housework for people who get overwhelmed by cleaning and housework, based on the premise that messiness is not a moral failing; disability and neurodivergence friendly; genuinely changed how I approach cleaning tasks.)

Gardening

Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale [book] (Really great introduction to urban gardening; explicitly discusses renter-friendly garden designs in small spaces; lots of DIY solutions using recycled materials; note that the author lives in England, so check if plants are invasive in your area before putting them in the ground.)

Country/Rural Living:

Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler [book] (Memoir of a lesbian who lives and works on a rural farm in Maine with her wife; does a good job of showing what it's like to be queer in a rural space; CW for mentions of domestic violence, infidelity/cheating, and internalized homophobia)

"Debunking the Off-Grid Fantasy" by Maggie Mae Fish [video essay] (Deconstructs the off-grid lifestyle and the myth of self-reliance)

Sewing/Mending:

Annika Victoria [YouTube channel] (No longer active, but their videos are still a great resource for anyone learning to sew; check out the beginner project playlist to start. This is where I learned a lot of what I know about sewing.)

Make, Sew, and Mend by Bernadette Banner [book] (A very thorough written introduction to hand-sewing, written by a clothing historian; lots of fun garment history facts; explicitly inclusive of BIPOC, queer, and trans sewists.)

Sustainability/Land Stewardship

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [book] (Most of you have probably already read this one or had it recommended to you, but it really is that good; excellent example of how traditional animist beliefs -- in this case, indigenous American beliefs -- can exist in healthy symbiosis with science; more philosophy than how-to, but a great foundational resource.)

Wild Witchcraft by Rebecca Beyer [book] (This one is for my fellow witches; one of my favorite witchcraft books, and an excellent example of a place-based practice deeply rooted in the land.)

Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"

Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.

"The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" by Kathleen Belew [magazine article] (Good, short introduction to this issue and its history.)

Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby (I feel like I need to give a content warning: this book contains explicit descriptions of racism, white supremacy, and Neo Nazis, and it's a very difficult read, but it really is a great, in-depth breakdown of the role women play in the alt-right; also explicitly addresses the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.)

Like The Hobbit– the book– is canonically a very biased account of events written by Bilbo himself. It’s also Canon that some of things Bilbo wrote were flat-out-lies (Ex. the original version of Riddles in the Dark, where Gollum willingly gives him the Ring as a gift.)

In the books Frodo also says that Bilbo “always jokes about serious things”, makes light of things that were actually important to him or hurt him. Which obviously also puts the bright, jokey tone of The Hobbit in a new light

I seriously love how Tolkien handled that. For those who don’t know, when Tolkien was writing The Lord of The Rings he realized he was going to have to alter a few details of The Hobbit to make sure the continuity smoothed out the way he was obsessively compelled to ensure. Which is to say that there was a slightly revised reprint of The Hobbit shortly before Fellowship came out, with the main change being the Riddle Contest.

But Tolkien didn’t want to leave returning fans who’d reread their old copies of the Hobbit to be left confused! So when Bilbo and Gandalf are discussing the Ring, Bilbo, our kind, reliable narrator who lead us through the entire first novel in Middle Earth, Bilbo remembers the original version. But Gandalf? Wise Gandalf who greatly helped Bilbo and the dwarves through the first half of their journey? Gandalf remembers the version from the recent reprint.

New readers who’d only ever read the reprint get the surprise jolt of Bilbo clearly remembering his story incorrectly, lending strong credence to Gandalf’s concerns.

Old readers who knew the original? Get the horrifying moment of Gandalf disputing the story they read and Bilbo remembers. Bilbo’s not just remembering his story wrong, he copied it down wrong. Is Gandalf lying? Is Bilbo? Was Bilbo wrong about more? They don’t know! The only thing they can say for certain is that whatever is going on, it is a Big Deal.

Have your smarty-pants solve in one day a problem that took you all month. Have them learn in two months what took you two years. Have them know things offhand that you had to look up. Have them fire off snappy comebacks that took you a week to think of.

No need to pretend to knowledge you don’t have or give them nonsense Moffat brain magic.

A good character acts like a person. Doesn't have to be a good person, but a person. Plenty of good characters are terrible people. Which means that all the characters have to behave like a real person, with their own thoughts and desires in their head beyond serving the plot. Which a lot of authors don't bother to do for most of their characters.

I think that in a world where yeerks need kandrona every two hours, the invasion can't happen like in canon. We know a kandrona generator is "the size of a small car" and that yeerk pools don't work without it (#7). The yeerks might have to take a few decades and improve kandrona technology (i.e. #41) and then invade Earth, because an invasion would be too risky without that tech.

That said, the yeerks are fleeing the andalites as much as they are colonizing planets — the andalites control their homeworld, part of why they're stealing everyone else's. So maybe the yeerks try to make do, for lack of time. Probably they'd equip humans with thermoses of kandrona à la AniTV, and then help controllers create excuses to slip out every two hours. The thermoses might have to be refilled often, but there's a system for that in canon.

However, as anyone who's ever raised an infant can tell you, humans do not function well if their sleep is constantly interrupted every two hours. So lots of tired/confused controllers. And all kinds of other issues — work shifts with an "on" component, long tests, driving really far, needing a security team 24/7, being in hospital, etc. It'd preclude taking most important people as hosts, including anyone who regularly flies on airplanes. Animorphs can go for weeks without morphing, and can pop briefly out of morph in a pinch (even underwater and in the yeerk pool as needed). Yeerks literally die without kandrona, and they can't leave their hosts unattended for even a second; Mr. Pardue gets like 10 seconds of freedom in #8 makes a huge mess.

i think their best bet would be homelessness and drug addict outreach-- they could give people food, shelter, a cause to believe in, a sympathetic friend who can help them with self-control, and a people to help.

instead of ‘we are going to take over earth whether you like it or not, so you might as well get in with the winning team early’ they might actually find a number of sympathetic ears (heh) with people who are, themselves, incredibly disenfranchised from normal human society. who would hear ‘we’ve lost our homeland and our way of life and our very ability to operate most of our salvaged technology-- join us, help us, let us make use of your incredible skills and your wonderful body, and you’ll never be hungry or despised or alone again!’

First, and this is something that Sol has brought up before, but we have to ask “how voluntary is voluntary, actually?” Chapman is basically blackmailed into being voluntary with his daughter’s life at stake. Tom, if he is voluntary after Temrash threatens Jake, is the same. We know that Mr Tidwell is voluntary, but we also know that Mr Tidwell got very lucky with his yeerk ending up a member of the Yeerk Peace Movement, instead of ending up with another Temrash. Tobias was originally voluntary in MM4, but that’s because The Sharing doesn’t actually get consent, because they don’t spell out in no uncertain terms what’s going to happen to you. They ask “are you sure?” many times, but that means absolutely nothing when the person in question is 13 and doesn’t have all the information needed to make an informed decision.

But you might say, okay, well Tobias could end up in a cage after that, right? Well, maybe . . . but the thing is, what the yeerks do is a form of abuse, and there are many different trauma responses to forms of abuse. One form of trauma response is to freeze. This isn’t necessarily a literal freeze; what it means is that you don’t do anything to fight back. You keep your head down and stay quiet in a way to minimize the abuse. If a host is told, “If you be quiet and don’t try to run away, you can have control of your body for a few hours in a comfy chair with a hot meal,” they might go for that not because they are okay with the situation, but because they feel hopeless and trapped and they will take any form of respite they can get. Not everyone has the strength to scream and sob and fight back against the big, terrifying, bladed alien captors. And while we know that some hosts sat dejectedly in their cages, we don’t know how long they’ve been like that. We don’t know that they don’t “upgrade” to the “voluntary” lounge for “good behavior.” We just don’t have enough information.

Also, I personally have a very hard time believing any host is “best friends” with their yeerk . . . again, I know we have Mr Tidwell and Illim, but I feel like a.) that’s an incredibly rare scenario, they’re like Controller Georg over here, and b.) it’s still such an imbalanced relationship that I just can’t feel comfortable even calling them friends, really. I mean, if Illim decided one day that actually the imperialism of the Empire was good and great and Mr Tidwell sucked actually, he could do all manner of things to hurt Mr Tidwell, and Mr Tidwell would have no recourse to fight back. He could force Mr Tidwell to hold his breath until he got dizzy and passed out. He could force Mr Tidwell to eat garbage. He could force Mr Tidwell to self harm in a variety of other ways. And Mr Tidwell wouldn’t be able to so much as “blink once if you need help.” Now, from what we know of Illim that would be out of character . . . but nevertheless it would be within his power, because the yeerk has total control over the host’s body. The host can’t breathe without the yeerk giving the OK. So while it’s nice that Mr Tidwell and Illim get along okay, ultimately it’s an incredibly unbalanced relationship and I’d be more inclined to believe that for most Controllers, the host holding any kind of affection for the person that controls their every twitch has trauma bonded* rather than formed an actual relationship.

(*Contrary to popular fandom belief, trauma bonding is not when two or more people go through a traumatic experience together and bond because of it. Trauma bonding is instead what happens when a victim of abuse forms an attachment to their abuser, i.e. a bond is formed out of the trauma the other person is inflicting on them. This is commonly seen in situations where the victim will say “they’re a good person deep down” or “they’re nice to me sometimes” or “they only hurt me because I make them angry” or “I know they love me, though.” The victim feels dependent on the abuser and holds onto those brief moments of respite, thus forming a bond of attachment.)