siegeofangels

I was talking to a twitter friend about sinus rinses and I have too many thoughts to put on twitter. Here they are:

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Still thinking about the name-on-wrist trope.

I'm coming at this from the perspective of it HAVING to be a genetic mutation, because in my mind everything has to be a genetic mutation. And I suppose it could be a relatively recent one, given that there are other mutations that are relatively recent.

(blue eyes: ~10kya
lactose persistance: ~10kya

and writing: ~9kya for the earliest proto-writing)

so it COULD be a thing. Maybe just a thing among certain ethnic groups? Maybe a thing among other subsets of the population? Maybe it's a recessive gene. Maybe it only expresses in gay couples.

Maybe it started out as a symbol and then evolved into an alphabetic representation of your soulmate's name. Maybe some people in the current time have a full written-out name and some people have other sort of representative symbols. Maybe the script comes down through the mother's side and is "fixed" when your mother's ova form in utero, so if your ancestors are from China and then your parents move to America and have you and you grow up mostly speaking English, your wristname is still gonna show up in Chinese characters.

ANYWAY what this could mean for a story is that maybe not everybody has a wristname, or there could be a bigger variation in what they look like: everyone in your family has their names in the Latin alphabet and then you're born with, like, a little turtle and three circles.

Which I think could be interesting to play with, as a writer, a world where it's not that unusual to have a wristname that looks different from other people's, or something you have to puzzle out, or other kind of variations.

Thoughts?

Heck yeah we still do commentfic!

In honor of FUCKING SPRING, please join me in writing small fic (any fandom) that contains any or all of the following elements:

- crying
- sniffles
- pollen (sex or regular)
- reproductive material all over the fucking place

I took the day off so I could menstruate in peace. Slept in and played some Don't Starve, which I am slooooowly getting better at. Or I got a random good build.

I have a political thought:

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Anyway. It's supposed to rain all weekend so I am looking forward to being a lump for three days. I bought YET MORE yarn on Monday so I should work on turning it into things.

We have been officially recalled to work but I'm still waiting to hear that my building is ready for occupancy, so I'm home again today (this morning?). I would telework but I have most certainly forgotten my remote login password. Got up early and walked to the store, so at least I'm set for breakfast food now, and I can cobble together lunch.

I got a bee in my bonnet yesterday about wanting a new watch, and this red one caught my eye, and now I'm wondering if not spending money on anything other than groceries for a solid month (and like three lunches out with friends) justifies spending $250. It's SO SHINY, though.

I've been filling my time with reading fic for That Particular Podcast Fandom We Do Not Speak Of In Public, Apparently, and would like to note that I get a strong Rodney McKay vibe from Jon L. and therefore would like someone to write fic where Tommy is a secret elf. Look, that's just how it works. I don't make the rules.

What I SHOULD do today is go to the phone store, because mine has been delaying texts and dropping calls, but I hate the phone store SO MUCH. Gonna try restarting etc and see if that helps.

Aquaman!

I feel like the visual and costume designers worked really hard on this movie. And that the script writers did not.

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corbae was asking for audiobook recs and I realized that I have too many to effectively tweet.

Apparently my listening fits into five* rough categories: evolution/prehistory; biology; history of racial inequality; other American history; Gen Kill and adjacent. And a few misc.

*The sixth category is fiction, which these days is almost exclusively M/M romance.

I got all of these through Audible. You might also find them in your local library, def look into their e-audiobook collections.


a) EVOLUTION/PREHISTORY

- The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, by Steve Brusatte. I just started this and I like it a bunch, although the author could stand to take about 5-10% off the bro "look how cool" side of things. But so far it's a really interesting listen about How, When, and Why Dinosaurs. I'm up to the Jurassic, things are good. It's narrated by the same guy who narrated Gen Kill, but with a little less relish.

- The Monkey's Voyage, by Alan de Queiroz. This is the book of how EXTREMELY improbable long-distance overwater dispersal of plants and animals is nevertheless the only possible solution to how some species ended up in weird places. The most notable is that there are monkeys in South America when monkeys evolved in Africa: how did they get there? We can't figure out any other way than freak chance involving a massive natural raft floating across the Atlantic. It's amazing. I love this book.

- Domesticated, by Richard C. Francis. Different animals and how they domesticated themselves, how domestication changed them, etc.

- Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham. Argues that cooking is the defining human characteristic, from Homo erectus to today. Goes into both the evolutionary stuff and how modern humans literally can't make it long-term on a raw diet.

- The Last Lost World, by Lydia V. Pyne and Stephen J. Pyne. Historiography of the Pleistocene. We talk about the Ice Age the way we do because reasons. Gorgeous language.


b) BIOLOGY

- A Natural History of North American Trees, by Donald Culross Peattie. Apparently this version is abridged? I don't know, I haven't finished this one, there is just SO MUCH TREE CONTENT. If you want to hear about trees and what they're like and what we use them for and their history and all of that, this is where to go. It's from the 50s so some info is out of date but sometimes you just want to hear someone wax eloquent about white pines.

- Anatomies, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. Learn both about human bodies and about how we know things about human bodies. Really interesting. You probably already know if you're going to find this icky.

- Splendid Solution, by Jeffrey Kluger. The story of Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine.


c) RACIAL INEQUALITY

- The Half Has Never Been Told, by Edward E. Baptist. American chattel slavery, all about it. Really good and interesting but obvs it is not the most fun topic.

- Slaver by Another Name, by Douglas A. Blackmon. The post-Emancipation system whereby black men were arrested and sentenced to labor in, e.g., mines.

- The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. You can't legally discriminate against black people, but you can discriminate against felons, so what you do is you make black people be felons.

- The History of White People, by Nell Irvin Painter. Race is a social construct, which is not to say it's not real, and this is how our perceptions of race solidified into what they are today.

- Empire of Cotton, by Sven Beckert. How cotton turned all the economic wheels of the world.

- King Leopold's Ghost, by Adam Hochschild. Not American history but just as sad! The Belgian Congo and how terribly fucked up it was. Like. It's real bad. Man, I really picked some doozies for depression reads, didn't I?


d) AMERICAN HISTORY

- Wicked River: The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild, by Lee Sandlin. I never did finish this, but it was hella interesting. I especially remember the shout-boasting, which is the EXACT SAME THING that is Ray's first speech in Gen Kill, and the earthquake that made the river flow backward.

- The Johnstown Flood, by David McCullough. What if you put a big manmade lake for rich people up in the hills and then didn't maintain its walls? and then you had a huge rainstorm? Nothing good!

- This Republic of Suffering, by Drew Gilpin Faust. How all the deaths in the Civil War affected society. Includes stuff like spiritualism and Memorial Day.

- 1491, by Charles C. Mann. What the Americas were like before European contact. There's also 1493, which is about how American-European contact affected the world. These two are very good; they go into a lot of depth but are still accessible.

- Climate and Culture Change in North America AD 900-1600, by William C. Foster. Maybe a little too archaeology textbook for some folks. The time period above was the Medieval Warm Period etc in Europe, so what was happening in North America?

- Last Call, by Daniel Okrent. All about Prohibition. Narrated by a guy with a cool old-timey accent, it's great.


e) GENERATION KILL GETS ITS OWN CATEGORY, DON'T JUDGE ME

- Generation Kill, by Evan Wright. It's a great book, the narrator does all the voices, and it's got the same tone of humor and facepalming that the miniseries does. It's my fucked-up comfort listen.

- One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick. Fick's book, and Fick reads it, and you can hear all his feelings and it makes you want to claw your own face off

- The Pink Marine, by Greg Cope White. Kid joins the Marines in 1979, despite being an hilariously bad fit (skinny, unprepared, SUPER gay). This book is about boot camp. It's very funny but there is also a lot of yelling.


f) MISC

- Junkyard Planet, by Adam Minter. Hey do you wanna hear all about recycling and how it works and what they do in China (because a lot of recyclables go there)? It's FASCINATING.

- Consider the Fork, by Bee Wilson. The history of kitchen implements. They invented the whisk a lot more recently than I thought.

- Lost to the West, by Lars Brownworth. Byzantium got a bad rap and now I am a defensive Byzantiumwife.

Thinking about a sequel to In The Mood To Be Scared (https://archiveofourown.org/works/15659610). M had requested the sex debrief and you know, I just like the thought of continuing it and seeing where they go.

Thinking about having Nate be like "well, I just divorced the Corps so I'm gonna go nuts re everything I couldn't do for the last several years" (ref every former soldier I know who immediately grew a terrible beard)

And then Brad is like, "I want to be with you like I wanted the Marines, and also I don't keep secrets from my team."

I think it'd be fun to sort of flip the dynamic that you usually see of Nate having to convince Brad to get his head out of his ass.

Tell me what you think.

Dear Secret Santa,

Here are some things I like, if you need ideas:

art supplies (watercolor stuff, papers, fancy pens)
tiny notebooks
bath salts
lipsticks (red and/or with a good name)
sampler packs of things
dark chocolate
mint things to eat or put on my body
nonfiction books about science/natural history/social sciences
Starbucks

Of course if you have something in mind already or see something you think I'll like I'm sure that I will love it! <3

I've started uploading my fic to AO3. I am siegeofangels over there too.

My only question is this: If you have read If you want to kiss the sky: should I use the official noncon warning?

My initial thought is to use the official CHOOSE NOT TO USE ARCHIVE WARNINGS warning and then tag it dubcon, because it's a creepy societal situation but John's choosing to consent.

Looking over the delicious tags, I see one person tagged it noncon (although with a note that they weren't sure whether to) and a couple for dubcon (and one for "thinky," which tickles me pink). But I don't know if that is more of a reflection of the audience. Do you think that people who want a noncon warning would like one on this story?

(My other quandry is whether to tag it asexuality, because in my mind that universe doesn't really allow for an asexual identity--I don't think anybody in that universe is identifying as straight or gay either--but people *are* tagging it asexuality on delicious, which leads me to think that people looking for ace fics on AO3 would like to find it. Hm.)

I'm leaving this post unlocked because I would like to hear from anyone who has thoughts on this. I'll even put in a text-box poll so you don't even have to click Reply.