I need a… racism beta?I don’t know how

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I need a… racism beta?

I don’t know how to ask specifically for that. I’m having A Trouble with a Star Wars thing, because I’m trying to balance a fictional society in which the Atlantic slave trade never happened, with an audience for whom it did, and I got a note on a thing that’s innocuous in one context and irritating in the other, so I did what I do and had the characters banter about it to resolve it, and want to post the banter bit– but I don’t know if it actually addressed the possibly-icky thing, and I can’t tell, and I’ve been beating my head against it for two weeks now and– I got a wonderful spelling and grammar beta on it, but it turns out the spelling and grammar wasn’t what I was super worried about and so I need a Greater Societal Context kind of beta on it. 

I have no idea how you ask for a thing like that. But like. I’m a Well-Intentioned White Ladytype and like, most of the people I know are Probably-Well-Intentioned White Persons, so I really don’t know how far outside that perspective I’m capable of getting. And I’ve been turning this over in my head for two weeks trying to think of a less-awkward way of discussing that, and I just can’t come up with it.

I mean, I could just, post it and take my lumps but I am so bad at taking lumps, it all became such a big deal because I couldn’t take lumps, I’d really rather attempt to take lumps in private. 

And like also. It’s not a big thing. It’s a small thing. It’s short. It’s one conversation. I’m not trying to write Boring Issues Fic that nobody wants to read. But if you try to Deal With Something Important in a light-hearted fashion, chances are real good you’re gonna miss and come off flippant. 

I don’t want a cookie for trying, I want a story that is going to say what I meant it to say and not just slap clumsily at somebody. 

ineptshieldmaid: captainhelion replied to your post:captainhelion replied to your post:Answers...

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ineptshieldmaid:

captainhelion replied to your post:captainhelion replied to your post:Answers about…

DO NOT SHAG THEM UNLESS THEY COMPLETE THIS TEST I HAVE

I once had a boyfriend who submitted an application in triplicate to my best friend at the time when he desired to date me.

My middle-little sister has such terrible taste in dudes that the other three of us have banded together and informed her she can’t date unless the committee of us approves it. She TELLS DUDES THIS. She is allowed to hook up but cannot date them unless they pass. Notably, she has declined to submit any candidates to us. Dudes grow feelings for her all the time and she’s just like, Nope, the Sisters definitely wouldn’t approve you, I’m not going to convene them, they’ll just get mad at me. It’s kind of hilarious.

undermoonlit-skies: Adding this to the world after a...

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Adding this to the world after a conversation with @mnemehoshiko, @dustkun, and @elithien. Honestly, I’ve been scared to draw Finn because I wanted to do him justice, I’m really happy with how this turned out. :)

While we’re talking about Snap Wexley

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ineptshieldmaid:

(my dash is talking about Snap Wexley today)

So there’s this subset of Finn/Poe fic where Poe is anything from moderately squishy to adorably chubby and Finn is positioned as being Into That, because of how squishiness is a novelty after Stormtroopers.

Fair. Fine. And if you’re fixed on your ship, I guess that works. N/mind that Poe as we saw him was actually pretty lean, whatever floats your boat.

But let’s say you’re a multishipper.

Allow me to posit:

Finn/Snap.

Snap Wexley is a large man, clearly plenty of him to grab hold of in strategic moments, etc. Skilled at what he does but what he does does not require him to be lean or toned. 

Probably actually pretty muscular, under the squish. Can probably lift large things and look nonchalant about it. Might even be able to lift Finn???? (Okay, not Finn at peak fitness, but Finn post-recovery? Finn totally loses mass in a coma, that’s a thing that happens.)

Also Snap Wexley is large and huggable. I bet Finn enjoys being little spoon. I bet being hugged by Snap Wexley is like being hugged by a delightful combination of teddy bear and protective manly whatsit.

That’s it, that’s the total of my proposition here, but you gotta admit, it’s got about as much canon logic as most rarepairs and more than some popular ones.

oh no, i’m into this

I got more Poe Music feels on this one.I’m torn

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I got more Poe Music feels on this one.

I’m torn on Neko Case, I don’t know if I like her A Lot or Not Much, it’s weird. She has the edge of being real good for singing along to though because while our vocal ranges aren’t identical, her Howling Range intersects 100% with my Howling Range, so there’s that.

Literally everyone has recorded this song too, so there’s that. I should find The Best Version. But I haven’t yet.

I’m getting a lot of feelings. 

I’m going there to see my mother
She says she’ll meet me when I come

I need a title for tomorrow though. And I need a title for the next thing. And I’m just. This isn’t the fun part of writing. I need to get my shit together and deal. 

Hi there! I adore Home Out in the Wind and have been following it obsessively. I was just wondering

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I made it up, so all medical improbability is mine– I decided they must have stimulants and it’s Space Fantasy so the side effects are whatever I want them to be– but I abdicate any ownership of the idea, so please, do as you like with the idea! 

I got a lot coming, I just gotta figure out final details for tomorrow. I remembered already that tomorrow’s Wednesday though! so go me! woo! ahead of the game!

Thanks. :)

blue-author: prokopetz: whitemarbleblock: prokopetz: drneverland: prokopetz: unsurpassedtravest...

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prokopetz:

Some of my favourite urban sights:

Bricked-up windows

Upper-storey doorways that open into empty space

Staircases that lead nowhere

Clean, working, fully stocked vending machines in obscure and inaccessible places

Detailed graffiti on surfaces with no obvious spot for the artist to stand, like the underside of a high bridge, or ten metres up a bare wall

Machinery left to rust because there’s no use for it anymore, but it’s in a weird or precarious location and there’s no way to safely remove it

(I’m sure there’s a theme here…)

I’ve been rereading Unknown Armies again recently and there’s a part of me that wants to find occult significance for this sort of nonsense.  But then, I kind of enjoy looking for occult significance for a lot of nonsense.

I’m not convinced that there isn’t some occult significance to some of these. The vending machine in particular stems from what’s definitely one of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had.

First, some context: I don’t know if it’s like this everywhere, but major Canadian cities tend to have a lot of underground infrastructure - particularly in their downtown areas, where train tunnels, parking garages, underground shopping malls, and hotel basements often connect in such a way that you can easily walk for miles without ever seeing sunlight. The interconnections typically aren’t public, or at least not advertised, but a surprising number of them are accessible if poke around; I once followed a maintenance tunnel in a shopping mall parking complex and emerged in the basement of a nearby casino!

Anyway, I was snooping around in the maintenance tunnels below one of the larger local hotels - legitimately, mind you; I was working for the local telecom at the time, trying to track down an errant network cable - when I rounded a bend and noticed that the corridor a few dozen feet ahead of me was brightly illuminated by something. On top of being filthy and difficult to access, the tunnel was also unlit (I’d been navigating by flashlight), so this really stood out.

I couldn’t see any obvious light fixture to account for it - the light seemed to be emerging from an alcove off to the side of the tunnel - so I went to investigate, and discovered… a Coke machine.

Spotlessly clean, fully stocked, and apparently in full working order; the illumination was coming from its interior display lighting.

In a grimy, unlit maintenance corridor twenty feet below ground level.

In retrospect, I’m kind of glad I didn’t have any change on me at the time, because I’d have been sorely tempted to buy something, and who knows how that would have worked out.

This is like those (____) Gothic posts.

Infrastructural gothic should totally be a thing.

(Honestly, working with infrastructure is a bit like living in a video game, at times. I once had to navigate an honest-to-gods jumping puzzle in order to track down a missing router, all hopscotching from beam to beam and dodging hanging bits of machinery inside the pitch-black vault of a false ceiling, with nothing but a thin layer of cardboard veneer between me and a thirty-foot drop to the floor of the ballroom below. And then there was time I installed a giant laser on top of a skyscraper and pointed it at City Hall…)

Can it be story time forever? Please, good sir, tell us more. 

Okay, sure. This one isn’t weird or creepy, but it’s definitely in line with the whole “infrastructural gothic” thing, and anybody who’s worked corporate may find the circumstances of it hauntingly familiar.

Another gig for a local telecom (though a different one from the vending machine story): I’d been tasked to track down a phantom server. It was an old database box - probably it’d been running for twenty years at that point - and it was normally administered remotely.

Well, it had finally developed an issue that needed to be addressed in person - and here’s the catch: owing to the company’s high staff turnover (to say that they had a personnel retention problem would be an understatement), there was literally no-one left who’d ever laid eyes on the thing. In fact, nobody knew where it was physically located at all!

I ended up having to work backwards, mapping out the building’s network topology, identifying the nearest router whose physical location was known, and physically tracing the cabling as it snaked through the walls and ceilings in order to find where it ended up.

(Luckily, the phantom server had been set up before wireless networking was commonplace - otherwise the little bastard could have been anywhere.)

Finally I narrowed it down to the exact cable the phantom server was using to communicate with the outside world. Nothing can ever be straightforward, though, so a new problem faced me: the cable disappeared under a baseboard on one side of a wall and simply never came out the other side. That was a big problem: if it ran for any distance inside the wall, I might have had to start tearing out drywall in order to figure out where it went.

Before anybody broke out the sledgehammers, it occurred to me that the dimensions weren’t adding up. In the absence of a floorplan, I had to eyeball some measurements, but it seemed like there was a gap of several feet between one side of the offending wall and the other, about what you’d expect if there was a closet there - but there was no door to be found.

Long story short, it turned out that what had happened is that at some point in the preceding decade, an inattentive (or perhaps simply overzealous) contractor had drywalled over the door to a server closet, without first checking whether there was anything inside. Since the phantom server was remotely administered, and it had never had a problem demanding physical intervention before that point, nobody had noticed that it was now literally sealed inside a wall, all Cask of Amontillado style.

My job was simply to find the thing, not to fix it, so I never did find out how the situation was resolved, but I’d loved to have been a fly on the wall at the resulting meetings.

“For the love of God, processor!”

So the phenomenon is actually called “Thomassons”, after a Japanese journalist who came up with a name for it, in a column in a photography journal in the 80s. Specifically, though, a “Thomasson” is an architectural feature that 1) no longer serves a purpose, but 2) has been carefully either preserved or maintained despite its uselessness/decommissioning. So, it’s one thing to have a stairway that goes to a now-absent door, but it’s another to repaint said staircase’s railing. For example. 
The phenomenon was named after a baseball player with an astonishingly disappointing career.

It’s detailed in this book, which I own, which is sort of… weird, because it’s a collection of said journalist’s columns, which were lackadaisical and informed by greater interest on the part of readers than by the journalist himself, but remains an interesting read.