Month: August 2015

Regaining Normalcy: Flame Girl Saga

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

dragonsmagiccircle:

sinesalvatorem:

The day after I escaped from The Freaky Kidnapping Facility, I had a calm, civilised talk with the college admin about security. I impressed upon them the importance of having security procedures that don’t let sock-wielding kidnappers drive into the campus, pick people up, and roll out like nothing ever happened.

I only screamed a little bit. I only kicked a potted plant once. I’ll admit that half the screaming I did was a direct consequence of having kicked a potted plant, but I never claimed I made the best decisions. What matters is that after my terrifying-yet-unbearably-cute rantings, they increased security. Which is to say, they implemented security. Being scaredorable works! Never again would travel-sized students have to worry about involuntary shipping and handling!

After half a day spent watching over my shoulder, eyeing the knives in the cafeteria warily, and giggling senselessly at the mere mention of mitochondria, a representative from student affairs told me to take the rest of the day off. I was disappointed yet resigned. Just because I could heal (and get off on) a stab wound didn’t mean I wasn’t traumatised.

After I was safely ensconced in my dorm-room, I pulled out my phone. I’d never been the most social person, so my contacts broke down neatly into four categories: Important authority figures – from college admin to the police – that I’d already screamed at as much as I cared to; my parents, who would learn of my kidnapping over my dead body

(they really would: I had set up a system to notify them should I become unresponsive); my study group, who would either be in class or, y’know, studying; and pants-less fire goddesses I’d promised to call. It wasn’t that hard to figure out who I could commiserate with at the moment.

“Hi!” I said, trying not to sound traumatised. “This is that girl from last night.”

“Hi!” A warm and familiar voice replied. “If it were any other ‘girl from last night’ calling and sounding this traumatised, I’d probably feel like a terrible person. As it stands, your response is pretty normal.”

“Uh, OK, I think.” I replied, eloquently. “Thanks, um, I actually don’t think I got your name -”

“Emma.”

“Thanks. I’m Clare. You sound… Really normal. Like, given the whole… Everything. The whole everything. Shit. I’m bad at words. But I’m sure you noticed that. I didn’t need to say it. Shit again.”

There was soft laughter on the other end. However, it didn’t sound like someone laughing softly, but someone holding the phone away to laugh loudly.

“Sorry,” Emma said when the laughter had died down. “I’m really sorry. I’m just kind of giddy. Like, I’ve been in bad situations before, but I kind of expected to die. I’ve never had to deal with people with that much resources. Usually a couple muggers or burglars – rarely organised crime, and never this.”

I was really sorry to here that Emma lived in such a bad neighbourhood that they were constantly dealing with criminals. It made me feel lucky to live in a place so safe that, until today, there was no campus security. Although, seriously: what was up with the whole no security thing? That didn’t feel right.

Wait a second. Emma was waiting for a response. I’d zoned out mid-conversation. Crap. What was I supposed to do at this point? Make sympathy noises? Which ones? Why didn’t human interaction come with a manual? Or even just a regular text book. I could probably do a better job cheering up some Gram-negative bacteria than anything this macro. I just said the first thing that came to mind.

“I’m sorry to hear that. You must live in a pretty rotten neighbourhood.” Yes, I insulted her home. Smoooooth, Clare. You must be a real hit with the flame-ladies.

“Oh, no.” Emma assured me. “It’s pretty nice here. Workload’s pretty low. In fact, if I want to do the most good, I should probably move downtown. That’s where the real bad guys are.”

Do the most good? What? Was she a social worker? That might explain why she could stay so positive-sounding in the face of all this craziness. I’d never imagined Gram-positive bacteria trying to cheer me up.

“I’m sure the people you work with really appreciate how altruistic you are,” I told her. Honesty probably works as an OK sympathy-signal. Or not. I’d know if anyone had been so kind as to give me a manual. I couldn’t even tell if this was an appropriate time to ask her out. Despite my best efforts, I’d been unable to locate a copy of The Gay Agenda, either.

“I actually work alone.” She informed me. “It’s not like there are enough criminals to justify two idiots in tights chasing after them.”

…Was this a euphemism? I could sort of see the stuff about tights and chasing, but where do the criminals come in? I’d only learned the meaning of “booty-pirate” last week, and I didn’t think it was relevant here. But what did I know, really? I probably missed an entire lexicon by avoiding all humans during high school. This could be the most transparent thing in the world to everyone else.

Sigh. I guess I would have to suck it up and admit that I was confused.

“Um, I’m sorry, Emma, but I don’t really know what you’re talking about.”

“I mean I’m a solo crime-fighter, of course. I’m not a part of any superhero teams. I’m a lone wolf. I know; shocking, right? I guess that means you roll with a pack, right?”

…………

“You’re a superhero!?”

“You’re not!?”

“No! Definitely not! I only learned I had powers yesterday! I learned them as a result of getting stabbed by a torturer! This is a thing!?”

“Oh my God, I totally need to get you up to speed. There’s so much to teach you! Let’s meet for coffee tomorrow afternoon. Know anywhere good near you?”

“There’s a coffee shop on campus, and I can be there at 5:30.”

“Great! Don’t worry about directions – I’ll just use my ~super powers~. See you then!”

Wow. So…. Wow. The third most surprising thing to happen in my life: superheros exist.

The second, of course, was the whole torture/kidnapping debacle. I still needed to sort out my shit after that.

However, they both failed to compare to the Most Astonishing Thing Ever:

Holy shit I’m going on a date tomorrow!!!

(Major thanks to ilzolende for editing and good suggestions.)

Wait wait wait… I need to find part 1.

Part 1 is ‘Didn’t Want To Move Because Wet Chocolate Mousse’. You can find it by following the tag ‘flame girl deserves a phone call’, which I’m using to organise the story.

(Part one was initially just some random dream so, while part one is definitely cannon for all subsequent parts, the reverse is not necessarily true.)

Tags:

#storytime #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #reblogging the version with context included

Anonymous asked: compliments?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

comparativelysuperlative:

Look up on a clear moonless night, you’ll see maybe up to ten thousand stars. And you’re more important than any of them. They’re nothing more than what they look like, enormous balls of plasma, but you’re a conscious being with intrinsic moral worth.

I haven’t been doing a lot of complimenting people’s physical attributes in this meme, but for you I’ll make an exception. The jar your brain lives in is an incredibly complex and useful machine unmatched by anything humans can yet design. Compared to most possible people, who are Boltzmann brains, you’ve basically got superpowers.

Actually, scratch that. You’ve literally got superpowers. You can look at an outside world made entirely of math and physics, and tell inanimate objects what to do. And to you it’ll seem trivial, as mundane and boring as picking up a rock, but of course it would seem that way to you. You’re so used to the epiphenomenal cosmic power of free will that being able to tell gravity “nope” is just a background assumption.

Since that’s not enough, you also happen to be one of the most intelligent known beings to have ever existed. Honestly at this point I’m just hoping you use your powers for good.

Last thing, and I realize it might be a little bit blasphemous but speaking about you this is totally true: YOU ARE.

You are the best person to call in for the following apocalypses: Well, without knowing who you are I can’t answer this one. But right this minute you’re the person standing between half the universe and…actually, stand up for a minute? Now you’re standing between half the universe and the other half.

Tags:

#got a point there

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

comparativelysuperlative:

Well, if I volunteered, I’m also going to get complimented the heck out of. (Shut up, Apocryphal Winston Churchill; no prescriptivism.)

Who do I know who’s doing that meme?

I’m not sure if sinesalvatorem (who was the first option when I pressed the “@” key, before I typed any letters) is still taking them or not. I think it’s too late for Ozy. wirehead-wannabe, maybe?

When I first learned you had a Tumblr, I read the entire archive. (I’ve also read the entire WordPress archive a couple times.) I stuck with you even after Tumblr quietly stopped showing me your posts twice.

You’re very good at taking premises to twistedly logical conclusions, a genre I’m rather fond of. It was you who introduced me to the rationalist-sphere; thank you so much for this source of comfort and enrichment in my life.

In the event of a sudden East Coast road trip*, I would ask you for restaurant recommendations in the DC area. I currently doubt I’ll ever have need of a dead drop, but it was nice of you to offer.

*It would not be the first time: my family was in Florida during 9/11 and was forced to drive back to New Jersey after our flight was cancelled.

Tags:

#reply via reblog

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elennare asked: First, I wanted to say that I love love love your Harry Potter fics and what-ifs! thank you so much for writing them :) And I also wondered if you ever written what if the Dursleys had refused to take Harry in?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ink-splotch:

When Petunia Dursley refused to take Harry in she forfeited his birthright protection, so Dumbledore took the baby to the safest place he knew: Hogwarts.

The applicable staff (mostly just… not Snape) took Harry in on a rotating schedule as he grew from baby to toddler to child. They traded extra credit for babysitting among the older students, and Harry grew up knowing a few dozen different laps that were safe and warm to nap in.

This was a Harry who grew up among books, among old transient walls and learned professors. They gave Binns night duty sometimes, and let him talk young Harry to sleep. This was a Harry whose world changed, on principle, daily. The stairs moved. The walls became doors. You had to keep your eyes open–you had to pay attention. So he did.

He grew up in a school. Knowledge was power, but knowledge was also joy. This was his sanctuary. There was magic in his world from birth.

“The castle will keep him safe,” said Dumbledore, when McGonagall came into his office to complain for the eighth time about Albus’s rather cavalier take on child-rearing. “That’s what it does.”

“Then why do we bother with chaperones ever,” McGonagall said, tempted to shriek it. “Should we let all the children run about willy-nilly at all hours, or just the orphan waifs?!”

“He’s not a student. He’s a ward of Hogwarts. It will take care of him, Minerva.”

McGonagall walked off fuming. A cat with spectacle markings followed Harry almost constantly from ages three through four. At some point McGonagall was far enough behind on her paperwork, and had seen enough suits of armor carry the kid back to his room, enough draperies lift off the wall and tug Harry away from edges, and enough stairs creakingly shift their slope for his tiny toddler legs. She gave a grumpy sigh, stole some of Albus’s lemon drops, and resigned herself to a magical world.

The Grey Lady, the ghost of Ravenclaw Tower, didn’t really like boys but she liked children. She especially liked patience, and politeness, and Harry had been raised by McGonagall’s stern table manners, by Victorian portraiture and quite a few House Elves. He said please, thank you, and ma’am, and as a child he was very cunning in how he got bedtime stories and bedtime snacks out of most every adult he met.

The Grey Lady told the best stories, you see, the ones with riddles in them. You had to think and ask questions to get all the way through them. So he hunted her down with big patient eyes and plates of very smelly cheese, and she told him stories that made him think.

When Harry was stable enough on his feet to walk, and then to run, Sir Cadogan would race him through the castle, the knight scattering banquet tables and galloping across landscapes, twisting through the abstract gallery up on the seventh and a half floor. Harry stumbled and sprinted up stairways and didn’t notice for years the way Cadogan waited at the end of corridors for him to catch up.

Harry was a chubby-legged toddler, in this world–cute cheeks and stubby limbs. It’s a cute image, yes– but this is important. He was a chubby kid. He ate in a high chair on the teacher’s dais, getting peas and mashed potatoes on the adults beside him– Sprout laughed. Snape didn’t.

But this is important–Harry filled his plate. He wobbled up on little legs and grabbed biscuits from the table, slurped his soup, got marinara sauce on his chin and forehead and somehow behind his ear. When he was hungry, he ate. If he snuck down to the kitchens at night, it was for the adventure of it and nothing else. When he was hungry, he ate.

When he was four, they started letting him go sit down with the students. Bill Weasley, on route to be a prefect next year, took him under his wing and scrubbed his face down after meals. Harry was passed around the Hufflepuff table; theirs was the House Common Room he most liked sneaking into, with its barrels and cozy warmth. Nymphadora Tonks turned her nose a dozen different shapes to make Harry laugh, gurgling, as a toddler (and then a child) (and then for the rest of her life, honestly–it never stopped being funny).

The whole Ravenclaw table got distracted from meals, trying to solve riddles from a book one of their Muggleborns had smuggled in.Harry pushed his fork through his gravy, trying to draw out his thoughts but only making squiggles.

It was years before Harry sat at the Slytherin table for the first time–no one had ever set him down there, like they had with the others. But he liked green–it was the color of Professor Sprout’s greenhouses, where he went and napped sometimes in winter. It was the color of his mother’s eyes, from the little book of moving pictures Hagrid had given him when he was three.

All the Slytherin kids seemed big, but everyone Harry ever met seemed big–except for Flitwick, who was seeming smaller with every growth spurt. He leaned forward, teetering on the bench, and grabbed a chicken drumstick. “Hi,” he said, because he’d had a childhood full of tea parties with high portrait society– the French nobility and the tired housewife from the third floor and an old witch with her sleeve on fire but very particular table manners. “I’m Harry. What’s your name?”

By the end of the meal, they were flicking peas across the table with their spoons, like catapult projectiles. Harry had been unwelcome in so few places in his life, after he’d left 4 Privet Drive, that he simply didn’t expect it. He asked Warrington, a Slytherin with shoulders like a bulldog’s, to help him with the juice, which was too unwieldy for his kid-sized wrists. Harry sat there blinking, smiling, until Warrington took the jug and poured him a brimming glass.

Keep reading

Tags:

#Harry Potter #fanfic #recs #dear god #forty minutes well spent

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nonternary:

responsible-reanimation:

nonternary:

Strange but memetically-fit, Tumblr posts written solely in iambs are easy to find;

Metacontrarian cultural signalling rules out those played-out Shakespearian feet.

Self-referentially, yours-truly cleverly writes with a less-boring meter in mind,

Thinking of Virgil (and Romans uncountable), shrewdly selects a dactylic conceit.

original post

This is beautiful, but the first bit either scans awkwardly or I’m missing something.

…it scans awkwardly :P

Tags:

#yeah but still #poetry

Anonymous asked: Discalculia and prosopagnosia might be worth adding to the list

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

sothatswhatthatis:

Dyscalculia:  Dyscalculia is difficulty in learning or comprehending arithmetic, such as difficulty in understanding numbers, learning how to manipulate numbers, and learning facts in mathematics. It is generally seen as a specific developmental disorder. 

Prosopagnosia: an inability to recognize the faces of familiar people, typically as a result of damage to the brain. (”face blindness”)

Alexithymia:  an inability to identify and understand emotions and their subtleties and textures. (”emotional blindness”)

Alexithymia added by me!

~James

Actually, most prosopagnosics are born with it. (I know that study’s pretty small, but I knew of it off the top of my head, and it is proof of concept.) I’m not sure whether the crossover point has happened yet, but certainly early on most people known to have prosopagnosia got it from brain damage; however, that’s because those people had memories of not being faceblind to compare their current state to, so they knew what they were missing. Congenital prosopagnosics are far more likely than acquired ones to have a “so that’s what that is!” moment.

Also, it’s not all-or-nothing. Only the most severe prosopagnosia causes a total inability to recognise faces; the rest of us “just” take months or years of exposure to learn a given face as well as normal people would learn it immediately, and have a much greater tendency to forget faces over time.

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #the more you know #tales from the prosopagnosia tag

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

cinder-ember:

During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gaston’s introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?

Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.

The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.

Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.

Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.

Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.

Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.

Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.

Sunday Night: Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise – apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.

Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesn’t notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.

I think you meant The Best Prop.

Tags:

#Beauty and the Beast #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog