Writer at the Table

Yeah, yeah. It's bad. We get it. Kinda hard to miss right now. You know what? So is everywhere else. You are not going to find a single government, a single nation, anywhere on earth that is perfect and unproblematic.

We need to acknowledge this. Nowhere is perfect. Everywhere has corrupt people who actively seek positions they can use to exploit power and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The vast majority of countries in the world have a lot of blood on their hands and were founded in war; loads of countries have a history of colonization and exploitation of other countries, and a lot of that is continuing to this day.

Now raise your hand: who here was taught as a child to believe in the good your nation can do for its people and the world? Who here was raised with the idea that your country had an awful past but has learned better and is trying to move forward to do better and be better in the future?

Short of buying a boat and hiding away at sea, you are never, ever going to be free of nationality. Not even if you burn it all down; something new will just arise in its place. This is the world we have; this is the society we have to live in. Do you not wish it was better? Do you not wish that is did reflect that optimism you were raised with?

The reason children around the world are taught to believe in the good side of their nation is NOT because the people teaching us want to indoctrinate us into the cult of nationalism (okay yeah, some do do that on purpose, and sometimes that's just the result despite teachers' best efforts), but because they want us to see that good side, see what things are like now, and get angry and disappointed and energized enough to fight to make it reality. To actually do better and become a better world for everyone.

It says we are creating a more perfect union. In less flowery language: a better one. Closer to what we want to be. We're not there yet. (Fun fact, many of the founders agreed we were nowhere near there yet!) But we have the tools to get closer, and closer. And perhaps one day to reach it.

That's it. That's my answer. Endor.

you get to barbeque, eat good food, do fireworks and sparklers, dress in unnecessarily patriotic clothes, and most of all, make fun of the british. why would you want to just sit at home moping about america being bad when you could be doing all that? idkidk seems kinda stupid to me.

I loved going to Prospect Park in Brooklyn as a kid and seeing Hasidic families eat kosher hot dogs right next to halal barbeque pits. I loved hearing people speaking Yiddish, Arabic, Haitian Creole, Spanish, and English in one space, all celebrating side by side.

Every year, the Fourth has meant everything from celebrating that my family was granted refuge in early 1900's Brooklyn to my cousin recently being granted US citizenship.

Like, if people who think they're being righteous had any recent immigrant friends or family at all, they would know that people who just came here really don't want to hear griping about a perfectly good holiday.

& Even when I lived in Japan, it was so much fun to gather my two (2) American friends and go to the one (1) place in my town that sold American-style beef hot dogs (it was literally a vendor in an old samurai house) and then set off sparklers by the riverside.

It's a nice holiday!

And when I was a very earnest kid and cared a lot about history, I would personally read stuff like Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" and Born on the Fourth of July during the day, then go set off fireworks and eat watermelon at night. My mom spent yesterday morning watching a bummer documentary about Project 2025 and urging all her boomer friends to vote, and then she chowed down on a burger. You can/should do both!!

P.S. The fake idea that Americans don't have culture? This is our culture!!

P.P.S. It makes me think about how Muslims fasting during Ramadan is a communal event; it's considered better to break the fast with company than alone (ditto for fasting in Judaism). For a month each year, almost 2 billion people around the world are united by that fasting.

By contrast, Lent for Catholics, at least in the US, is much more of an individualistic self-improvement project.

There's not a lot of value placed on community in general in the West.

when readers choose to engage with a story, they're investing their limited time in an unknown outcome. they might like the story, they might hate the story, it might be the greatest thing they'd ever read. but part of the social contract between readers and writers is that it is the writer's own original writing. it is their effort that they are offering in exchange for the reader's attention.

the heart of fandom is that it is a community of people who are putting in labour for no outcome other than human-to-human enjoyment. no one is earning money. no one is "getting" anything out of participating in fandom other than comradery and community.

when people use AI to generate writing and don't tag it, there is an act of deception. it's not a story written by a person, but content generated by a machine. it is taking reader's attention under a false pretext.

my threshold for what i am willing to read if it's written by a human is completely different than if i know it's AI generated. a human with a beautiful unhinged brain may bring a brilliant horniness to a trope that i'm not otherwise that fond of and make it well worth the time to read it. a human can write a story with a take i've never considered before, or a perspective so unique it changes the way i see things.

AI can't do anything new, because it is simply averaging out everything that humans have already written.

when readers choose to spend their limited time writing comments to authors, they need to know if they're commenting on someone's actual writing or something generated by AI. it is absolutely true that some people are happy to read AI generated stories. but I'll see comments on stories that are clearly AI generated talking about how great the writing is and how much they admire the author etc. and it is my guess that at least some of the people wouldn't have chosen to leave that feedback in that way if they'd known the story was AI generated.

people can and do choose to spend their time on things created by AI. but AI can create more content than humans would ever be able to engage with. which is why we need to know if something is AI generated or not.

a human's writing is something that we can't get anywhere else. part of the deception in not tagging that something is AI generated is that we all have access to the same AI apps. do i want to read the slop churned out based on your prompts? or do i want to feed in my own prompts to get slop that is more specifically tailored to my taste? (i mean, i don't. but hypothetically.)

i think there are a lot of good reasons not to use AI to create fic (environmental, writing is great, the joy of the craft etc.), but at the end of the day, that's a choice everyone is going to make for themselves.

We also often have headache-specific rescue meds like triptans restricted and rationed which, when we cannot access proper preventatives, puts especially those us of with chronic headaches at risk of overusing OTC painkillers like paracetamol or ibuprofen instead, or—depending on how bad the headaches are—folks might even resort to street drugs to numb the pain.

but! did you know migraine is one of a cluster of linked chronic conditions often co-occurring in patients with ADHD or autism? & that this can/should impact how your physician approaches treatment?

The fact that we can put fluids into people via IV saves more lives than I can actually communicate. There are so, so many more ways to die when we can't do that. You can go from literally at death's door from an illness you have no other cure for, to Basically Fine, You'll Feel Icky A Bit Longer But You're Otherwise Fine and Your Own Immune System Will Work Now, from sterile saline into a vein.

Or even fucking subcutaneous, under your skin. It still gets into your system faster and bypasses any fuckery going on in your gi-tract.

But you want the other end?

I recently got the answer to a crapload of symptoms of mine and it turned out to be Crohn's. Ileal crohn's.

For most of human history there was literally nothing to do about this but hope and pray that your immune system didn't decide to rip ulcers and lesions in your digestive tract to the point where you bled out, or the point where parts of it died and killed you with sepsis, or enough to build up stricture bands of scar tissue sufficiently to cause impactions or any other really gnarly and unpleasant ways you can die because for some reason your body decides the walls of your digestive tract are the enemy and need to be dismantled cell by cell. (Including a fuckload of cancers caused by the constant damage to the cell wall.)

Even as recently as when most of the younger people reading this were small children, mostly all you could do about it was take corticosteroids when you were in a flare. And that was better than Nothing. But at the same time, corticosteroids have a potential laundry list of side effects and you want to take them as little as possible and for as brief a period as possible. And there wasn't a lot else.

I am on a medication with the proprietary name "Skyrizi" and the generic name risankizumab. It's made from taking antibodies from a non-human source and then modifying their protein sequences to be more similar to human antibodies, after which they modify them further in order to make it so that the literal only thing they do is go into my body and bind to something called "tumour necrosis factor" so that this will stop flagging my own goddamn digestive system walls for destruction by the rest of the immune system.

Please feel free to read that paragraph over again.

There used to be a common, horrific illness that sailors would get, which was mysteriously cured by limes. People know about this one, it's scurvy. But there are other horrible ways to be sick from vitamin deficiency that weren't considered curable at all, and people had no idea what caused them.

Rickets is a disease caused by vitamin D deficiency where your bones get bendy and grow in the wrong shape (it is most apparent in children). It causes permanent deformity and very easy fractures, along with debilitating pain and persistent dental issues. Historically, it was known that milk, and later, cod liver oil, would improve or prevent it, but the reason was not understood until the vitamin was discovered.

Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome is a complication of alcoholism that leads to psychosis, dementia, and death if left untreated. Severe alcoholics used to just go completely mad before dying, basically. It ultimately results in permanent memory loss (retrograde amnesia), as well as the inability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia). It is caused by the fact that alcohol prevents the absorption of vitamin B1 (thiamine). It is treatable and preventable by giving the patient thiamine shots - if caught early, before permanent brain damage has occurred, it is fully reversible, although the underlying substance abuse issue still needs to be addressed to prevent recurrence.

Pernicious anemia is caused by vitamin B12 deficiency (in turn ultimately caused by an autoimmune issue causing poor absorption). It causes blood cells to be the wrong size and too few in number, resulting in dizziness and fatigue. It also causes neurological symptoms like tingling in the extremities, poor coordination, confusion, and, in late stages, dementia. There was no cure for pernicious anemia in the past. People would simply become anemic and die from it. That's why it's called "pernicious" - that's an old-fashioned way to say "insidious and deadly," named for its slow onset and then-incurable course. Now it is curable with vitamin tablets or periodic injections.

Cretinism, or, less stigmatizingly, congenital hypothyroidism due to iodine deficiency, is a developmental disorder caused by the inability of the thyroid gland to function properly without sufficient iodine. it causes short stature, intellectual disability, infertility, hair loss, and a large lump in the neck known as a goiter (i.e. a hypertrophic thyroid gland). It was historically associated with poor inland populations living far from the ocean (due to the protective effect of consuming seafood, which is naturally high in iodine). We now simply put iodine in table salt, and this disorder is virtually unheard of in regions where this is the case.

Neural tube defects are a leading cause of birth defects, infant mortality, and stillbirth. The most common nonlethal forms of neural tube defects include spina bifida, hydranencephaly, and encephalocele. These defects are caused by a failure of the embryonic structure that becomes the spinal canal to close properly during development, leading the central nervous system to have a distorted shape that may impair cerebrospinal fluid drainage and put pressure on the brain. In severe cases, e.g. anencephaly, the brain/spine essentially develop outside of the body, which is not compatible with life (anencephalic and iniencephalic babies typically die within hours or days; fetuses with more severe forms are usually stillborn if they are not terminated). The risk of these defects is drastically reduced by taking supplemental folic acid (vitamin B9).

Vitamin K is perhaps the most amazing one on this list. Newborns often have very low vitamin K levels due to the fact that it does not cross the placental barrier easily and is not found in high levels in breast milk. It is only produced by gut bacteria, which babies do not have when they are born, and it takes time for them to acquire the right flora from their environment. Deficiency impairs blood clotting, and in infants, can lead to brain bleeds and sudden, unexplained death. Tiny babies would simply die of brain hemorrhaging for no good reason at all. But if they're given a quick shot of vitamin K at birth, that doesn't happen.

However, he replied to said email within five minutes, asking a question that required an answer. So I answered and was like "Also, I was going to apologize for answering emails during this call, but I see we're both here at the Devil's Sacrament, so I don't think an apology is necessary."

I watched him read that on screen and try not to laugh. And then at the end of the call as everyone started saying goodbye, he goes, "Hey, MJ, I meant to tell you. I like your shoelaces."

And I looked straight into my camera, stone cold serious, and said, "Thanks. I stole them from the president."

And the rest of the team was like, "What...the fuck...?" before he abruptly ended the call for everyone.

"Ich mag deine Schnürsenkel."

The Tree of Life shooting seems so long ago. Not just because it happened back in 2018. Not just because there's been a world-altering pandemic since then. But also because, when it happened, the shooter was not lionized, and college leftists didn't go around sniffing that Those filthy Zionists deserved it. There was at least some recognition that antisemitism was present in the United States, and that this was a negative thing.

ice water

the common use of dryers for your clothes

carbon beach in malibu california

fall foliage in boston massachusetts

central AC

that thing where if you pump your arm at a passing 18 wheeler they'll honk their big loud horn just for fun

your ability to attend college/course of study/subsequent career isn't locked in by the results of one exam you take at 16 years old like in most of eurasia

that it's appropriate to wear blue jeans almost anywhere

rock music, and all its parent genres

these really beautiful string art earrings i bought on the agua caliente rez

mexican, italian, and chinese food all on the same street

no official national language or religion

how we smile too big and shake people's hands too hard and immediately give ourselves away in foreign countries by our gregariousness

broadway musicals

Every year, we can remember everyone who chose to believe that equality is possible, that the "same old stupid plan" must be fought with all we have, and dedicate ourselves to living that every day, to carrying our quiet part in the battle to create what Lincoln called a "new birth of freedom."