It’s a little early to say that the holidays are coming up, even though that is technically true almost all of the time, but despite that I wanted to share an idea I had today for broke writers: write a character introduction for a loved one in their favorite genre style. Your best friend can be introduced in a gothic horror novel with special attention to their vulnerable neck, a parent in a mystery novel from the perspective of a very suspicious detective, a sibling in a high fantasy novel where they stumble through the trees at just the right moment to scare away a monster in a mass of jaw-dropping confusion. A paragraph or two should suffice, written or typed on red-splattered paper if appropriate and you’re feeling crafty.
Humans are packbondy creatures. I mean, there’s just no arguing it. They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly. Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.
There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned. It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded. It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Yeah? So?” So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career. No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired.
Not to mention the big things. They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects. It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place?
Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with. They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss). They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.
“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –” Listen to me. Listen.
You may be right. You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization.
It does not matter
Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do.
All you can do is work with it.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –” Hey, my pal, I feel you. I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger.
For you, I have good news: Humans will packbond with anything.
Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest.
If you can talk with them, that speeds things up. But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go
You: boy, sure is hot out! Human: Man oh man, can you believe it? You: Wow, yeah Human: Totally You: …. Human: ….
This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results.
THE TAKEAWAYS
You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers
Tips
Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected. In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
Keep some packbonding-time questions handy. My go-to list is:
(If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
(If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
(If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
How’s your day been?
You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions. Therefore questions are your friend. If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
Learn to disengage from packbonding. You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural. I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”
I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need. Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.
additional crucial packhack: humans will like you more IF you ask them to do you a small favor AND THEN express gratitude and indebtedness. it seems counter intuitive to ASK for favors instead of DOING favors but that’s the key! they will keep tabs on your welfare if they think you owe them; they will want to keep you around if you establish yourself as someone who appreciates their efforts. humans thrive on mutual caretaking. invite them to caretake you and then show you are eager to caretake back and you will have a solid workplace alliance started.
small favor examples: can you pass me that tool item? may i try some of your snack? could you remind me of a fact? can you give me some advice?
most humans feel safe when they feel valued. it is this crucial emotional drive that underlies many human interactions. it is especially important in the workplace, where those that are not valued are ruthlessly cut out and discarded from the pack. so assure your humans that you appreciate them and they will come to you for the comfort of it.
super shortcut pack hack: share food.
i have a tendency to go nonverbal in workplaces. this is an absolute dealbreaker for most employers. in theory they’re not allowed to fire you for being autistic, but in practice, if you randomly lose the ability to words, they will find a way to get rid of you. i usually ended up being the one cast out because of that. but there’s a funny loophole i discovered: in workplaces where people bring lunches and eat at their workstations, i was not a pariah.
i realized pretty quickly that it had to do with my tendency to bring lots of food and share it freely. i enjoy cooking and i like to feed people. so instead of just bringing a sandwich and an apple, i’d bring like, a huge box of vegetable maki, and offer them to everyone.
it turns out that the guy who gives you cucumber rolls is pack, even if he sometimes bluescreens while you’re talking.
so if you’re having trouble bonding with your coworkers, try sharing food.
Scooby Doo idea: Daphne Blake as the weird rich kid whose parents signed her up for a shit-ton of rich-kid extracurriculars like polo, fencing, and all of this other shit so they wouldn’t have to deal with her/bolster her college resume. She puts a lot of effort into actually being good at all these extra-curriculars bc she’s competing with all of her ~super successful and talented~ sisters for attention and ends up athletic as hell and socially stunted and like…really aggressive and competitive and never quite satisfied with anything she’s doing. The only other ‘High Society’ kid who can put up with her is Norville “Shaggy” Rogers —an anxious stoner with freaky strict parents whose only friend prior to Daphne was his equally anxious rescue dog—Daphne’s been beating up Shaggy’s bullies for years. Then there’s student council dweeb Fred Jones who’s always been groomed to be this ‘leader’ by his parents and is always pressured to go to these youth leadership things and stuff and yeah he’s pretty good at directing group projects, but really Fred’s kind of shy and more interested in engineering, forensics and maybe criminal justice and he’s been friends with this chick Velma Dinkley in engineering club who’s brilliant but she’s also tactless, awkward and very bitterly sarcastic to cover up for the fact that her book smarts far outweigh her social skills.
So then there’s this mystery downtown and all five of them show up and there’s a mutual, “Oh hey it’s you: The weird kid from my school. What are you doing here?” and everyone goes around. Fred’s like, “Oh I knew the owners of this place and they said they might have to close down because of this ghost and I told Velma about it and Velma thinks we can get to the bottom of this.” And Shaggy’s like, “Scoob and I didn’t want to be home right now and we honestly didn’t know about the ghost but hey Daphne’s here so we feel safe enough to hang out and maybe Scoob can sniff out some clues or something.” And then everyone turns and looks at Daphne and Daphne’s just like, “I want to fight a fucking ghost.”
As someone from the five colleges this is extra hilarious
Source: 12 If you want more facts, follow Ultrafacts
marriage is fucked up
Evil Spirit: FUCK, THERE’S 8 WOMEN ALL WEARING THE SAME COLORED DRESS AND ONE IN WHITE, FUCKING WHICH ONE IS THE DAMN BRIDE?! DAMN IT, FUCK THIS SHIT I’M OUT OF HERE
actually originally the bride and all the bridesmaids wore the exact same dress and veiled their faces heavily. Which one was exactly the bride wasn’t revealed until the very last minute.
I love this so much Groom’s bff: bro id die for u and ur wife Bride’s bff: lets confuse the fuck out of these spirits
this is actually a small sub branch of botany thats been growing and gaining some recognition in the past 5 years or so called plant cognition! we’ve been thinking about if plants can possibly be intelligent to any degree for centuries, but the main paper that started up this huge discussion in the modern era was one called Experience Teaches Plants to Learn Faster and Forget Slower in Environments Where It Matters by Monica Gagliano, a plant researcher in Australia who specializes in it. because the results indicated that plants were possible of learning and retaining information in a kind of memory in response to environmental changes, it received a lot of backlash and denial- generally in science, that kind of intelligent reaction to an organism’s environment is a good indicator of cognitive behavior in the organism. it got rejected by 10 different journals before being published in 2014.
the experiment worked like this. i’ve talked before about mimosa pudica, a tropical plant that curls its leaves back when touched (they go back to normal in a few minutes):
this is to help deter predators among other things. but in this experiment, Gagliano used it as an indicator of stimulus and to test cognitive function. It’s well known that pudica has a rudimentary nervous system that can even be temporarily inhibited using anesthetics (just like ours can!). she hooked up a ton of these plants in pots to identical rail systems that allowed them to be lightly dropped in an identical way, juuuuust heavy enough to trigger the stimulus so all the leaves drop down when they hit the bottom (a piece of foam so they wouldn’t actually hurt the plants). every time the plants would be dropped, they would close up.
but after the plants were dropped about 60 times each, they stopped responding to the drop.
they remembered that no harm was coming from this actionand decided that it was against their best interests to keep expending energy closing their leaves. they 200% learned to stop.
she decided to test it further. she put some of the plants in a shaker and let them receive a more jarring response; the plants closed up as usual. then, she put them back in the droppers and dropped them again. they didn’t close up. they had remembered that response. this dispels the obvious rebuttal to this experiment of the plants just being tired; they still closed up when stimulated differently.
they just chose not to close up when they hit a stimulus they remembered.
it turns out that not only could they remember to keep their leaves open when dropped on the apparatus, but they remembered after28 days when she kept testing it!! apparently by the end of the experiment, all the plants had decided to keep their leaves open when dropped!!!!
how do they do this?? we literally dont know. they have no central brain, only a basic nervous system. can other plants do this???
well, adding onto that, venus fly traps can count! like. they have three hairs inside their traps, and all three must be touched within 20 seconds for the trap to close. once closed, those three trigger hairs must continue to be stimulated by thrashing prey, or the trap will reopen.
so yeah like. basically ‘are they sentient’: apparently to an extent???? we dont know exactly why or how but they are??? maybe???? sort of????? at least some of them are?? but they dont have a brain so everyones like????????????????????? maybe its through a signaling network????????????????? but like how would that even work?????????
plant consciousness is still new enough to be dismissed as crazy by a lot of biologists but like. the evidence is there. we don’t know a whole lot and its clearly a radically different kind of intelligence than we know in animals, but it’s there and we 200% dont know how it works yet or even the full extent of how plants use this intelligence (for example: does a redwood have the same intelligence as a venus fly trap?? how does it learn things and use that knowledge???)
national geographic wrote an awesome article visualizing the experiment here if you want to read more!
This isn’t even touching on the fact that plants exchange nutrients with other plants through their root networks and engage in constant “bartering,” sometimes withholding resources until they get something extra. This is all performed with the aid of fungi, and the fungi in turn seem to weigh options and make decisions that will best benefit both themselves and their plant symbiotes. Sometimes two plants even get territorial and try to poison one another, and the fungal network steps in to put a stop to it.
Specs wasn’t really an engineer. Their friends took him to be more of the theoretical sort, someone who could crunch numbers but was never seen in the lab for more than the minimum amount of time. He could be relied on for knowledge, but anyone who’d been in group projects with him had heard he preferred working with people, and that splitting work with him and expecting it done was a lot less productive than sitting him down in a work space on campus and bouncing the work between you.
His flatmates knew he wasn’t in the flat that much, and assumed he spent the rest of the time with societies and work. If anyone had checked, they would have noted that there was always a two hour gap in his schedule, but since he seemed to be perfectly ordinary (or as ordinary as the majority of EU student body were, at least) no one paid it much attention.
The shop students knew him as the guy who’d borrow their time to get little things done on their machines. A pinch of solder and iron to fix a wire, a small bit of the forge to cast some metal bits in the unused space of a bigger project. The chemistry students knew him as the guy who’d drop liquids in the liquid waste bin. Never more than a glass, a good way of disposing something you didn’t want to drink or keep nearby. The physics students knew him as the guy who’d request a few minutes with some of their meters. Strain gauges were the most common, but voltmeters and pressure gauges were close behind.
He always had an air of detached interest whenever gossip about the Gentry passed around the lecture halls. It was always another student who’d had a run in with a shadowy figure down by the lot, or had met Jimothy to trade beads, or had carefully not looked too closely at their flatmate recently.
Specs remained a guy with a few good friends who was a nice enough person to chat to throughout his first year. Then, in his second year, his sister came to EU.
Frizz was a drama student, eccentric, always ready with a smile and with a temper that was righteous in its fury. She wrote her own plays, sang her own little songs and drew in her spare time. She and her brother met up every other day for a quick hug, her drama friends quickly becoming acquainted with the smaller group of second year chem eng students who accompanied the elder sibling. When Frizz began dating, in as quietly dramatic a fashion as always, her brother was the one who looked her partner in the eye and stared for half a minute before calmly patting them on the shoulder and giving them a grin when he felt them shaking.
It was only a few months before Frizz had racked up a substantial number of encounters with the Fair Folk, as the liberal arts students tended to. One of Specs’ friends caught the occasional glimpse of worry beneath his usual friendly demeanor, but since Frizz had seemingly taken her brothers words of mild caution to heart she’d not come out of any of them the worse for wear.
Then, halfway through the year, Specs went backstage after a production had finished, he and the rest of the group of friends who’d come to support those of their number involved, to find Frizz’s partner running to him, terror in their eyes.
“They took Frizz!”
Specs face lost all emotion, and the rest of the group took a step back to give him space. A couple of them followed him as he left the theatre with a steadily quicker stride, and lost him as he began sprinting out into the grounds. They hoped he would be alright, knowing that the loss of a sibling would be heartbreaking. One or two of them resolved to go to his flat to comfort him the next day.
What they didn’t expect the next day was for Specs to be sitting behind a table on one of the main university paths with a selection of gadgets and items in front of him and a big digital timer counting down.
The first person to approach him was met with a fake, friendly smile and asked if they’d like a free sample. When they asked him what on earth he was doing, he took a yo-yo from the table in explanation.
“I’m starting off with the smallest stuff. Wholly iron and steel, six metres long wire string. Get it swinging at two and I guess you could even wrap someone up in it. Time goes on, I’ll start getting rid of the bigger stuff I’ve got stashed around. There’s a spray paint system I worked on the other day, it’s got a lovely red finish at up to twenty metres. I put some red iron-based paint in it, easily replaceable.”
Of course, most people steered clear of his stall, afraid of angering the Fair Folk, but there was always someone desperate, and soon he’d given out about thirty of the smaller things. There were several people who observed a tall man, lines of red rising on his skin in a manner that suggested something had coiled round him, stride over to the table.
“You will stop,” he said in a sibilant, angry tone.
“Huh?” came Specs disinterested reply. “Oh, you’re right, two hours have gone past and still my sister hasn’t turned up. Time to move on to the next batch.”
The man seemed to grow taller, hands becoming more pointed. Specs pulled a hula hoop from the stand and tossed it over the man’s head, breaking a catch and allowing a spool of chicken wire to spring from within, encircling his interrogator. After a couple of minutes, he pulled the chicken wire down, taking a small water pistol from the table instead. The tall man glared and retreated.
After half a day, Specs was seen walking to several iron electric boxes and pulling out things stashed within, before returning to the stand to place his unearthed stash on display. Unlike the steadily grander toys he’d been selling, these things didn’t hide what they were made for. An ugly looking thing with springs held several iron bolas. A mass of batteries were strapped to a couple of electromagnets with a supply of iron filings to feed between the two. Swimming goggles with lenses and rocks. Flashlights with reticules and chemical warning labels. Ball bearings and a hand cranked handheld self reloading catapult.
For those who were desperate, the rumours that had spread around campus were enough to bring them in. Each piece of equipment was explained, warnings about not firing this through a glass window, it could put someone’s eye out, that shouldn’t be aimed at the legs in case it trips someone up, this should be handled with a paint mask and with no-one in the immediate vicinity.
In the evening, as Specs handed out the last of the things he hadn’t been holding onto for himself, a group of assorted people with burn scars, pocks of red and faces in assorted angry expressions that looked near inhuman came towards him.
“You’ve made a lot of people angry.”
“They can join the club. I still haven’t seen my sister.”
“You have no more threats to hand out. You will be sorry.”
“Oh? No, I’ve got a whole wardrobe full of these things. Then there’s the emergency stashes I made, just in case. Then the stuff I’ve left half finished. And, of course, I might start handing out copies of my designs, I had a bunch of people interested in what I offered today and I’m sure some of them would love to know how these things work, try a hand at making their own-”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Wouldn’t I? I don’t see what the problem is. I’m just putting my frustration into something productive. If only my sister were here to calm me down…”
The next day a girl with Frizz’s face approached the stall. She left when Specs offered her a wire Chinese finger trap to try out.
It was midday when Frizz herself appeared, wandering drunkenly over to Specs stall and hugging him as though she’d never let go. Specs brushed her hair with a hand covered in iron rings, murmuring in her ear. He kept one arm around her as he packed up the stall, hefting the duffel bag and stall with difficulty with one hand before the siblings’ friends arrived from class to help.
That evening, in Specs flat, with Frizz lying exhausted on the couch in the kitchen, one of his friends quietly asked why he’d had all that stuff prepared. In the course of one and a half days he’d handed out enough anti-fae tools for a small mob, and he’d been hinting he had even more. One of Frizz’s friends, the one who never wore iron and smiled all the time, looked slightly scared as she asked why he hadn’t used it.
“My family have always been creative,” he said. “You can see my sister’s talent. My dad paints, my mum sings. I imagine things. And some of those things are not very nice.”
He looked at his hands. After two days of being either clenched or solid as a rock, they were shaking now.
“It was fun to imagine solutions to a problem I’d never faced. To make something cheap, effective and that I’d never need to use, but should have around just in case. Heck, I even said to myself that it was alright to design bigger, because it wasn’t as if it’d be used on anyone nice.”
So You Want to Name a Sino: A Guide to Not Making a Fucking Fool of Yourself
Note: this will be long and very, very extensive because god I am so sick of this shit 2k16 I just want absolution and I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and even if it is I’m asking it, I’m not asking it emptyhanded I’m asking it with a WHOLE GUIDE FOR YOUR PERUSAL, because I’ve found that Wiki’s great if you want to know why and how we use names and not really great for when you actually want a name.
A theme of this blog seems to be my long suffering, and I want it known, recorded, carved in stone that as of almost 1:00AM on Thursday, December 22nd, 2016, I am officially Fed Up with the way Sino characters are named in fiction.
Let us be clear: this is first and foremost An Attack™* on all the white authors whose imaginations can only extend so far to provide us with a glut of Lings and Linglings and Ailings (not that those aren’t beautiful names) and Peonies and Pearls and, god forbid they start getting creative with their Sachas and their Wai-maes, but this is also for the Sino authors who can’t seem to do it either. And like, I get it. It’s not easy. Sinos are a disparate bunch with varying degrees of fluency in varying dialects of Chinese. Romanisation and naming customs are weird.
But also can we leave the idea of the inscrutable mysterious unknowable East in the 20th century please? There are resources. This is one of them. Let’s start before I steep for too long in my own bitterness and annoyance.
just moving along like everyone else 