“Of course we’re in love, that’s why i tried to shoot you” “if you really loved me you wouldn’t have missed” is such a raw ass line you would think it comes from Goncharov (1973) and you would be right

i think ultimately you do really have to kill that part of your brain that vividly imagines how you would redo parts of your life.

Lords and Ladies - Terry Pratchett

My mom once told me she didn’t regret not going out and party more when she was younger because at the time she didn’t want to, so that was her decision at the time. I took it as, “I may not have made certain memories that may have been fun or good while I had the chance, but I don’t regret not making them because it’s not something I wanted at the time” and that really reshaped how I feel about regret and missed opportunities.

I do not wonder what my life would have been like if I had done this or that, because the decisions I’ve made up to now are the decisions I wanted (or needed) to make at the time. I’m not who I am because of my decisions, but I made my decisions because of who I am, and regretting the past is not going to change that <3

I keep seeing gif sets for Outlander going past my dash and getting excited to see Sam Heughan in a kilt again (the man has excellent legs and I am weak, weak, trash) and then I saw a picture of Diana Gabaldon and had this weird transportive memory moment where suddenly I am 18 years old again working in the tea house on Sauchiehall Street and I’m taking the order of this really polite American couple who keep telling me about all the tourist things they have done here and asking me if I have been up to Inverness and visited XYZ. And I’m just there for the tip man, Americans tip so good I am just giving it my all, laughing along and chattering away, I’m one step away from doing a jig for them if it will get me a tenner I can keep to myself.

And then the husband goes off somewhere, and it’s just the dark haired lady sitting up by the window seat watching the Glasgow world go by, and I refill her cup several more times and talk her into trying the freshly baked shortbread and soon she’s my only table left and I’m just sort of lingering nearby polishing cutlery. And then this dark haired woman with bright eyes turns to me and says “you said you’re going to college for literature, right?”

I confirm, yes, that is what I said, but then for some reason I say “I figure I should try and teach or something. There’s not much stable work for writers.”

And there’s this frozen in time moment where she turns to me and says “oh you’re a writer? what do you write?” and 18 -year-old me only has half-baked ideas and is too embarrassed to say, so I just sort of shrug and say “nothing yet, some sci fi I suppose…” and then I get asked “have you read a book series called Outlander?”

It’s only my customer service facade that saves me, because yes, I had read Outlander, everyone and their nan, has read some of Outlander, because everyone and their nan wants to commit several types of sin with Jamie Fraser but other than that I think the book is awful. It was like the Fifty Shades of Grey of its time in terms of popularity but with period clothing. So I say, “yea, I’ve read it” and she sort of half laughs and says “You don’t sound that enthused.” and I sort of shrug and say “it was all right, it waffled a bit for me. You can tell the author has never been to Scotland either.”

And on the conversation goes for several more moments before this lady turns the conversation back to what I want to write and I admit I really don’t know but I just want to write eventually and she smiles and nods and then she hands me a business card along with my ten pound tip and tells me “when you’re published let me know” while I smile, nod and glance briefly at the card—remembering vaguely the name Watkins and an address in Arizona—then move on with my life.

Until this very moment in time, over a decade later, I am sat frozen on my couch watching this dark haired woman speak about how she came to write Outlander, and then an image of her husband comes up and I’m just like no, no, no so I look up her website and his last name is Watkins and they live in Arizona guys…guys I’m not 100% sure, but I think past me might have told Diana Gabaldon her book was shit.

Context, for those coming from the other blog, lol.

I have had a really full and busy day today, but the highlight was:

So I'm sitting in the staff work area and one of my colleagues comes up to me. There's an open day this weekend, and so we need to plan an activity for the would-be students.

"Simple!" I say. "Let's get them to dissect some owl pellets. Hands on, fun, they get to play with skulls."

"Good idea!" she says. "But we'll need something even fancier for the open day in February. What can we do? Perhaps we can take some soil samples."

And as we're debating the photogenic merits of soil Vs dead mice...

Suddenly, a Dashing and Handsome Stranger (read: an autistic engineering lecturer) appears with a flourish (read: launches himself into a seat beside us while visibly and physically vibrating with excitement about his special interest being Useful) and asks "HELLO I'M SORRY DID YOU SAY SOIL BECAUSE I HAVE A RAMAN MICROSCOPE"

"Amazing!" declares my colleague. "...Who are you?"

"COME AND SEE IT!!!" he says, currently the human embodiment of the :D emoticon.

We went and saw it. It's an excellent microscope and his ten minute infodump about it was both spectacular and also extremely useful. We're going to use it to assess microplastics.

I have a new friend.

Guess who I saw again today! I say 'saw', he hunted me down to invite me to train on using his microscopes - it turned out some of the engineers asked if they could look at explosive substances with it and he was like NO YOU MAY NOT IT'S POWERED BY A LASER so now he's insisting that everyone train on it, but wanted to ask me if I'd like to do it. Obviously I have said yes. He's getting an SEN as well so he's put my name down for that, too.

And then we compared notes on working in labs, and he told me about the time he was sent to the 'chemical cupboard' in his last lab and found a Tesco bag of asbestos, three and a half kilos of TNT, and half a pint of cyanide, and when he told the health and safety woman she just said he should use a lone working protocol, and he was so angry he yelled A LONE WORKING PROTOCOL WILL NOT SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM A DIRTY BOMB, CAROLINE

I love this man

Why did the chemical cupboard have three and a half kilos of trinitrotolulene (the full name for TNT, for those unaware), and was it at the very least an explosives cupboard?

It was not in an explosives cupboard, and he didn't know. Basically this was in an HE building being converted over to a young offenders institute, and for whatever reason, all the science teachers quit en masse as the switch was happening, leaving all their students in the lurch. So one morning he came into work, was told he was being promoted to Technical Demonstrator, given a Bunch of Mysterious Keys, and told he had three hours to familiarise himself with the contents of the chemical cupboard.

"Great," he said. "Where is the chemical cupboard?"

"Shrug emoji," his boss said gravely, and wandered off to have crisps.

So he spent an hour wandering the building and trying his keys in every lock before finally finding a door that opened, and upon finally opening it, was immediately greeted by a Tesco carrier bag on the floor labelled 'Asbestos, do not touch'.

"Right-o," he thought. "No touching that."

But then he had two hours left to familiarise himself with the packed shelf contents of quite a large room, and the problem is that when you tell an autistic lab tech to familiarise themselves with a room full of chemicals, what they hear is not "Have a quick look so you have an idea of what's there", it's "These chemicals must be catalogued in detail and also here have a time pressure," so he was going to be both Thorough and Grumpy about this. And this room was packed.

The oldest bottle he found was a reagent opened in 1959.

It had crystallised.

("It was quite beautiful, actually," he told me dreamily. "A work of art. I wish I'd kept it.")

The cyanide, when he finally found it, was in a stoppered glass vial. So that was the point he lost his shit and went and grabbed Caroline.

The kicker is, Caroline didn't care. She insisted they didn't have the money or resources to spare on getting rid of it. So he had to march all the way to the Dean's office.

"You look like you're having a bad day," she said warily.

"Well I thought it would peak with the Tesco carrier bag of asbestos I found," he said, "but I was very wrong."

And that's how you give your boss a heart attack.

When I was in middle school, I really wanted a rat and my mama got me one before I had the chance to do any research, and I named him Mildew, and then I learned that rats get all fucked up if they don't have a buddy, so I got him a brother and I named the brother Dildew. Something to consider if you are currently pregnant with twins.

AVIANHURST NUKE 💥💥💥💥💥💥

VAGUEBLOGGING BE DAMNED HERE IT IS

A vsmp inspired OC group fan project!!!! Go follow @avianhurst if you want to see what this is all about! Thank you once again to @notozthewizard and @mikomlette for collaborating on this animatic!!!

You know technology literacy is dying because I saw this meme with 76k likes

F11 the full screen button? You’re scared of the full screen button? F10?? It opens the menu bar???

Computers are so scary what if I accidentally hit F12 in a steam game and it takes a screenshot. What if I press shift + F12 while in word and accidentally save my document 😖

If you had to learn what the F keys on your computer do through me reblogging this post, then I'm glad you did. Computer literacy is not a skill that gets taught anymore, and it is absolutely one that needs to be taught in order to be learned. Don't ever feel bad for not knowing something, but ☝️ don't ever stop learning learning about your environment, the tools you use, and especially the people around you

Never stop learning+ Never stop sharing what you learned

I saw a sign at a nearby village advertising a "veillée", a storytelling evening, which sounded intriguing, so I went out of curiosity—it turned out to be an old lady who had arranged a circle of chairs in her garden and prepared drinks, and who wanted to tell folk tales and stories from her youth. Apparently she was telling someone at the market the other day that she missed the ritual of the "veillée" from pre-television days, when people would gather in the evening and tell stories, and the people she was talking to were like, well let's do a veillée! And then she put up the sign.

About 15 people came, and she sat down and started telling us stories—I loved the way she made everything sound like it had happened just yesterday and she was there, even tales she'd got from her grandmother, and the way she continually assumed we knew all the people she mentioned, and everyone spontaneously played along; she'd be like "And Martin, the bonesetter—you know Martin," (everyone nods—of course, Martin) "We never liked him much" and everyone nodded harder, our collective distaste for Martin now a shared cultural heritage of our tiny microcosm. She started with telling us the story of the communal bread oven in the village. The original oven was destroyed during the Revolution; people used to pay to use the local aristocrat's oven, but of course around 1789 both the aristocrat and his oven were disposed of in a glorious blaze of liberty, equality, and complete lack of foresight.

Then the villagers felt really daft for having destroyed a perfectly serviceable oven that they could have now started using for free. "But you know what things were like during the revolution." (Everyone nodded sagely—who among us hasn't demolished our one and only source of bread-baking equipment in a fit of revolutionary zeal?)

The village didn't have a bread oven for decades, people travelled to another village to make bread; and then in the 19th century the village council finally voted to build a new oven. It was a communal endeavour, everyone pitched in with some stones or tools or labour, and the oven was built—but it collapsed immediately after the construction was finished.
Consternation.
Not to be deterred, people re-built the oven, with even more effort and care—and the second one also collapsed.

People realised that something was amiss, and the village council convened. After a lot of serious discussion, during which no one so much as mentioned the possibility of a structural flaw, people reached the only logical conclusion: the drac had sabotaged their oven. Twice.
(The drac, in these parts, is the son of the devil.)
The logic here, I suppose, was that no one but the devil's own child would dare to stand between French people and their bread.

The next step was even more obvious: they passed around a hat to raise money, assuming the devil’s son was after a cash donation. But (and I'm skipping a few twists and turns of the story here) the son of the devil did not want money, he wanted half of every batch of bread, for as long as the village oven stood.
Consternation.

People simply could not afford to give away half of their bread, and were about to abandon the idea of having their own oven altogether—but then Saint Peter came to the rescue.
(In case you didn't know, Saint Peter happens to regularly visit this one tiny village in the French countryside to check that its inhabitants are doing okay and are not encountering oven issues.)
Saint Peter reminded them of one precious piece of information they had overlooked: holy water burns the devil.

People re-built the oven, for the third time. The son of the devil returned, to destroy it and/or claim his half of the first batch—but on that day, the villagers had organised a grand communal spring cleaning, dousing every street and alley in the village with copious amounts of holy water.
The poor drac simply could not access the oven; every possible path scorched his feet for reasons he couldn't quite explain.
So he was standing there, smouldering gently and wondering what was going on, when some passing tramp seemed to take pity on him, pointed at his satchel and told him to turn himself into a rat and jump in there, and the tramp would carry him where he wished to go. The devil's son, probably a bit frazzled at this point, agreed without much thought, became a rat and jumped in the satchel, and of course that's the point when everyone in the village sprang from the shadows, wielding sticks, shovels, pans, and started beating the devil's son senseless. (Old lady, calmly: "You could hear his bones crack.")
So the son of Satan slithered back to Hell and never returned to destroy the village oven again—and the spring cleaning tradition endured; the streets were washed with holy water once a year after that, both to commemorate this glorious day of civic resistance when the village absolutely bodied the devil's offspring and to maintain basic oven safety standards.
(Old lady: "But we don't bother anymore… That's too bad.")

She told us five stories, most of them artfully blending actual local events or anecdotes from her youth with folk tale elements, it was so delightful. She thanked us for coming and said she'd love to do this again sometime. I went home reflecting that listening to an old lady happily tell stories of dubious historical veracity involving the Revolution, property damage, demonic mischief and baffling municipal decision-making is literally my ideal Saturday night activity.

spiritual successor to my email post

we are NOT reclaiming "female hysteria". listen to me. women fucking died because their every issue was labelled "hysteria" in recent fucking history. we are not talking about the old times we are talking about my grandparents' generation. the legacy of the hysteria diagnosis is alive and well in many many forms we are not. under any circumstances. reclaiming this one

WE ARE NOT RECLAIMING HYSTERIA. I will kill you. your murder will be more peaceful than the myriad number of ways women have been killed by their doctors seeing every issue as "hysteria". you are not being controlled by the unruly nature of your uterus. for the love of god.

to be clear the end of Hysteria As A Diagnosis wasn't even the end of "hysteria". I cannot believe that. in a world where many women (and people perceived as such) still experience medical neglect at the hands of post-hysteria diagnoses. anyone would think it would ever be appropriate to go "haha hehe this is me and my female hysteria". don't even joke. I will kill you

I spent 30 fucking years dealing with Endometriosis. I would bleed multiple weeks out of each month. "Day four" was my code for "I am physically incapable of walking because something has ruptured inside me yet again". (Rupturing cysts. Starting at age 9.)

30 years.

My doctor informed me after a merciful hysterectomy that she had been a doctor, practicing for 20 years, and it was the worst scarring she had ever seen. Ever.

So for the 30 years before that? I was told that the pain was in my head when I begged doctors for a resolution. That if I just thought about it less, the pain would get better. Perhaps take a couple Tylenol. (Golly gee willikers, why didn't *I* think of that?!! </sarcasm> ) This concept? Is "female hysteria" at its core: the belief that we are falsely claiming distress and becoming distraught without cause. That it is "all in our heads" when we exhibit distress.

Do not fucking try to reclaim female hysteria. Do. Not.

Do not let our pain and problems be brushed off as "poor widdle schnookums must be so confused. Would poor widdle baby like a lollipop while we denounce every reasonable thought and concern in her head?" Because that's what reclaiming female hysteria will lead us.

Some concepts need to remain dead.