Woefully Undercaffeinated

plus six or seven people who just….can’t figure out what a frog paper could possibly be. (guys it’s…a scientific paper. about frogs.)

and this one

which made me laugh despairingly because i mean

"Underwent unplanned rapid disassembly" -- it exploded, and it wasn't an explosion we wanted to happen

"Lithobraking maneuver" -- it stopped because it hit the goddamned ground.

"Engine-rich exhaust" -- the engine bell melted or evaporated, or the engine ejected itself out the back of the rocket without having a very good reason to do so.

"Fishing orbit" -- the craft is in the ocean instead of space and we didn't mean to put it there

"Thrust was observed along an undesired vector" -- the engine leaked and the rocket spun off into oblivion.

"Wearing his manager hat" -- a moron who shouldn't be an engineer (a reference to the infamous quote "take off your engineer hat and put on your manager hat" in the meeting in which the Challenger was cleared for launch)

Suddenly having 50 moving eyes can make you disoriented and barfy and the adjustment period sucks ass

It takes both more and less time than you’d think to figure out what the structure as a whole looks like and where those eyes ARE

After you get used to it the entirety of the structure itself and all of the eyes you can see from feels like an extension of your nervous system in a very bizarre way. Like I have dreams now from the perspective of A Building and I’m not sure how to describe that.

Like being your own neurosurgeon

Hemming stitch.

But somewhere along the line they just… Disappeared. My mom says they’re not being paid and they’re not in collections. It’s almost as if someone out there did…exactly what Parker did.

My orthodontist tells me I can make an appointment with the surgeon. I call the surgeon. They tell me I need a new referral. I call the orthodontist. They do a referral. I call the surgeon. Referral didn't come through. They tell me about their special unique system we have to use. I call the ortho again and walk them through the referral. I call the surgeon. They say the referral was missing some details so they have to do it again. I call the ortho.

The insurance company calls me about repair shops. I give them the name of the repair shop which I already gave them yesterday. They say they're not in their system but I can use them, but I have to call the repair shop to ask them to contact the insurance company. I call the repair shop and they say the insurance company is supposed to email them.

I have no money to spare for a thing so frivolous as this, but here we go.

Currently, sitting at my PC desk causes intense pain in my hip. This is die to the cyst and flap tear, which require surgery to fix. After surgery, I will be on bedrest, but no idea how long because hEDS is gun like that.

I would really like to work on my book. Writing by hand is not an option, so don't suggest it. What I need is a laptop. Preferably, a wide one or the means to have a wide keyboard. I have arthritis and osteoarthritis in my hands and wrists, and hEDS. This has resulted in me requiring a specialized keyboard, which is in two pieces I can shift to comfortable positions. Can't really do that with a laptop keyboard.

Laptop requirements:

Not a tablet

An outlet for me to insert a little thumb drive, or at least an adapter to use one.

ideally, an headphones jack ir an adapter so i can use them.

Can use scrivenr, the program I use writing

Minimal bloatware and what is present can be removed

Does not function at a snail's pace. I need mine as speedy as my PC.

Bonus points for a wide keyboard. The standard size messes me up from my hands to my shoulders. I need to be able to type without requiring days or weeks of recovery because the cramped space messed up my already bad joints.

Extra bonus if I can disable the camera and speaker, seeing f as these come default now. That stuff creeps me out.

I can apply some sort of cover over the screen to elimate glare. I have a non-glare PC monitor because any other kind results in setting off seizures. The monitor also keeps my eyes from feeling like they're gonna bleed. If there are laptops without glare, I may cry with joy.

Not chrome or apple. No ai ever at all.

It could be months before I see a surgeon because I need one familiar with hEDS. Too many are not. Plus, finding an orthopedic surgeon is gonna be difficult. Apparently, it's not a popular field for medical students to sign up for.

Reply or reblog with suggestions. The laptop will be used for writing, and probably watch movies. No gaming at all. I'm currently stuck with using my recliner, and I can't even use my shower chair because pain.

My budget is currently $0, but the most I would ever consider paying for something I need just for writing is maaaaaybe $800. If you decide you wanna buy it for me, that's awesome.

It’s the ASUS Vivobook Go 15 OLED (E1504F), which at a quick glance is retailing about $349.

I specifically picked it because of migraine/neuro issues, and their screen tech is some of the best/most affordable I’ve found on the market.

I get severe, debilitating migraines from normal LED screens—the kind that land me in the ER because I can’t see/stand/speak/throw up so badly my neck and collarbone subluxate (thanks, hEDS).

The ASUS zero flicker screen tech combined with their low blue light and OLED screens means after two years I can finally use screens again without crippling myself for weeks at a time. If you needed even less glare, you could probably find a way to put an anti glare film on it—which is what I used to do with my LED screens, but I haven’t needed to do it with this.

Unfortunately all of their models are coming loaded with Windows 11, which has the AI enabled as default which as far as I can tell runs like dogshit for everyone because of the bloatware.

I didn’t want to fuck around trying to uninstall it and just went full Linux install, which I did have to tweak a little because it didn’t like the AMD processor, but once we figured it out (I say we, @mothman-etd went on reddit and the kind souls on the Linux board immediately knew how to fix it) it’s been running like a champion.

I don’t use Scrivener (currently using Ellipsus) but you can get it to work using Scrivener 3 using Lutris to make it compatable. You specified the need for a wider keyboard, and I don’t know if that would be wide enough for you, but I have very small hands and find this keyboard to be a little too big for me, so mileage may vary?

I forget if the Windows install let me disable camera and mic, but it does come with a little camera blocker thing which I keep closed as default and I have it all turned off via my Linux install. (I think Mint was the recommended install to get it working.)

I hope some of this information has been useful.

One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.

So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.

Enter the gray economies.

Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.

Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.

Because what do these groups actually do?

They:

set norms for compensation and contracts

regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting

provide a framework for dispute resolution

establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)

That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.

Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!

The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.

That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.

Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code

Again: not altruism. Stability.

And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.

Which is very historically grounded.

On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.

Pirate codes, for example, often included:

compensation for injury

shared distribution of loot

limits on captain authority

Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).

So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:

The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.

The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.

And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.

If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.

If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.

But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?

You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.

So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.