Somebody at work keeps adjusting one of the perimeter cameras to have this beautiful artistic angle on the museum in a historical building across the way. The sun sets just behind it and the whole sky turns golden-blue, clouds streaked across the sky above. The lush tree line beneath the museum is perfectly lined up along the rule of thirds and the building itself towers above, almost mythical in its evening glory. Like damn, take a still from this camera and send it to the museum to frame and hang on their wall. I do need the camera to be pointing at the parking lot. Tho
The setting sun bounces off the skyscrapers downtown and hits the museum’s windows and every one of them turns the same golden hue as the sky behind, reflected in the trees just starting to turn golden-orange beneath. The bottoms of the clouds take on the slightest tinge of purple and birds circle above, speckling the evening sky as they call autumn’s last farewell. Someone’s car got broken into in the parking lot last week, Tammy, point the damn camera at the cars
I don’t know who needs to hear this today, but “second sleep” as a widespread societal thing in the past is highly debated. I read the main 2004 paper on which that whole theory is based, and it seemed to me that the author (Robert Ekrich) just took examples from literature, letters, and diaries of people talking about waking up in the night and doing something before they fell asleep again, and tried to say that it was a codified Thing
Some of his sources did use the term “second sleep,” but it wasn’t like “this is a thing called second sleep that we all know and acknowledge and experience.” It was like “I woke up at 2 a.m. and had trouble getting back to sleep, so I read a book, and my second sleep was deep and pleasant.” People use that term, but the phenomenon was just… Waking up in the middle of the night occasionally. Not some grand secret of natural circadian rhythms that capitalism forced us to abandon
Generally speaking, I would recommend that people be wary of any bold claims regarding the secret way humans are wired to do things that our ancestors understood and we have forgotten. Or at the very least, read the actual paper
(it’s so weird. He’s like “this is what the first sleep was called! This is what the interval in between was called!” And then you read the paper and look up some of the primary sources in context, and it’s just. people talking about waking up in the middle of the night and using terms to describe waking up in the middle of the night, but not really much to suggest that it was actually something everyone experienced as a Known Everyday Phenomenon)
every day I learn bot comments on ao3 are stooping lower and lower
anyway if you get a comment like this, chances are that they are bot and their goal is to do whatever it takes to get you to delete your work, most certainly (from what I’ve heard) it’s because they want to “safely” steal your work, use it to train their ai without you being able to rightfully claim ownership of your work since “there’s no proof that the work was stolen/was posted elsewhere first by you” because the original source has already been deleted.
report their comments to ao3 for spam—in this case, specifically, I think you may be able to report them for harassment too—and don’t pay attention to them, most importantly don’t delete your works, don’t feel discouraged by their comments. remember that they are bots and they mass comment something like this on people’s works at random to get people to delete their works. (or even if they’re not bot, they are still pathetic bullies who don’t deserve your time or attention.)
A character whose weapon is a gun with red dot sight laser, except the gun is just a dummy that’s been carved out of wood and sprayed black, with a laser pointer pen taped onto it. It’s obviously fake to any character who knows anything about firearms, and it’s always a gamble whether anyone who doesn’t know anything about guns is going to be fooled by it. But that’s the neat part: The gun isn’t the weapon.
This character has a familiar, a big cat beast that’s been trained to attack on command, attacking whatever the laser is pointed at.
This made me chuckle. Also, if the cat beast is named “Bullet” then your character could say things like, “The laser points to where my Bullet will land,” and “Yes, the evil wizard died by my Bullet.”
having lunch and someone’s watching cnc videoes loud as fuck style so i’m just here chewing my food while there’s sounds of water jetting and steel screeching in the back
