math-crimes

Latest Posts by math-crimes

I wouldn't call Pratchett's writing unhorny. He's just a tease. He absolutely loves to imply that horny things are happening just offstage where you can't see. Discworld is soaked in love and sex, but the books are about one guy trying to solve a dwarf murder.

I think one of my favorite jokes he ever makes is the timeskip where it's implied that Carrot learns what sex is.

100000 likes!

Marvel movies have completely eliminated the concept of practical effects from the movie-watching public’s consciousness

😭😭😭😭😭

thinking abt this tweet again

a story with that cyberpunk theme of “are you really human if you modify your body to gain power“, except the body modification is just strength training.

You know those "if this gets 50k notes I'll xyz"? I don't believe in those. Because I could say something crazy like: if this gets 20k notes, I'll write my next book. And then it'll get zero notes. I do not believe.

I fear misha collins will have to stay in europe from here on out because I'm not convinced the CW won't shoot him the minute he steps foot on US soil

ITS GREAT LAKES AWARENESS DAY!!!!!

On this excellent day, be aware that this is the largest group of freshwater lakes in the world, covering over 95,000 square miles and reaching depths of over a thousand feet. They are beautiful freshwater seas.

Also when you die in these lakes, the very cold, oxygen-poor conditions at the bottom preserves you perfectly for all eternity. You will not rot and nothing will eat you. You will exist for as long as the Great Lakes do. Many shipwrecks still have the crew on board. Be Aware.

I must not mock Gen Alpha. Mocking Gen Alpha is the mind killer. Mocking Gen Alpha is the little-death that brings total generational solidarity obliteration. I will engage with Gen Alpha lovingly. I will permit them to be cringe. And when they grow up I will turn my eye to their accomplishments. Where mocking has gone there will be nothing. Only generational solidarity remains

BIG fan of this design choice

If Technoblade is tiny enough can he live in a carved potato house?

Tiny Techno can be as tiny as he needs to be

For the most part, my approach to prescribing hormones is “sure,” but I will note that the one thing I lean HARD on patients about is smoking. If you’re transgender, and you’re on hormones, the number one thing we want to protect is your cardiovascular health. That’s frankly the number one thing I want to protect in all my patients, but anyone taking exogenous hormones is at higher baseline risk. And the best thing you can do for your heart is DON’T SMOKE. It’s a bitch to quit, and I didn’t even smoke much or long before I quit in my late teens, and I STILL didn’t enjoy quitting and had smoking dreams for years. It’s harder to quit than just about anything else up to and including crack and heroin, and that’s coming from a patient of mine who recently passed in her early 60s who’d done all of those things—for years and years—but eventually was able to quit everything except smoking. And that killed her. She developed severe COPD and eventually called to say her blood oxygen saturation was dipping into the 70s, which is incompatible with life. She was lucid enough to decline medical care, including refusing to call 911 or go to the ER. A week later, after both I and one of our outreach nurses had contacted her to ask her to please go to the ER, I got a notification that she’d been found dead. She had been so frustrated that she wasn’t a candidate for a lung transplant.

One of my oldest trans patients is in her late 50s. She’s had blood clots that went to the lungs. Repeatedly. Smoking raises that risk. Estrogen raises that risk. She’s a veteran with PTSD; of course she smoked.

These aren’t theoretical. These are humans I’ve cared for over years of their lives. I have been rooting for them—my beloved former addict, who spoke without shame about her years of homelessness and drug use in the city; my queer elders, who are slowly trading in their motorcycles for power scooters. I want everyone to live their fullest, best life.

Smoking doesn’t fit into that. Please don’t smoke. I don’t want you to die like that—not now and not later. I want you to have the future that you may not be able to see yet, but exists.

Since I moved home as an out queer, word got out, and there’s a whole apartment complex of lesbians in their 60s to their 80s who come see me—sitting next to their wives in the office, nagging about blood pressure meds, tattling about not having gotten the shingles shot they said they would. To be clear, when I was growing up in town, I knew no lesbians. Not one. I knew one gay kid in my class, which eventually turned into two. We were it. To see these women living decades with their wives and being able to squabble like any couple in my office over who was supposed to bring their home blood pressure cuff in for us to check it… it means the world to me.

it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that

you're gonna get tired very quickly

tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—

you're not gonna be as composed as you expect

humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)

DO NOT GET STABBED (generally good life advice)

DO GET A SPEAR

knights are faster than you think

Tobey Maguire Spider-Man "it's a hard knock life" fancam hours

i like to pretend i already died and asked god to send me back to earth so i can swim in lakes again and see mountains and get my heart broken and love my friends and cry so hard in the bathroom and go grocery shopping 1,000 more times. and that i promised i would never forget the miracle of being here

could you imagine being a man, a sis gender man, who is really into sounding other men. It's just the only way for you to get off really. But one day you meet a man that you really like, and you just connect with him on a whole other level. And you guys finally get to the point where not only are you in the bedroom with each other, but you're starting to get more open with each other too. About all the things like. The only issue is, is that this man is transgender. He does not have a penis he has never pursued any sort of bottom surgery. So he still has the whole set, the labia menorah menorah the majora Little China adequate Torres. And he also has a urethra. Now he's willing to indulge in your special weird little thing. You're sounding. And you guys finally get to the bedroom and you have your little sounding pole or whatever it is they use. But you realize some thing very quickly. Do you know where the clitorises you know where the clitoris is, but where… Is the urethra? Riddle me this Batman

i've tried answering this ask in three different ways and each time it deleted whatever i added. labia menorah menorah the majora Little China adequate Torres. Every time i try to find a new angle to work on this answer with i read another sentence that makes me wince so hard i forget 3/7ths of the english language. labia menorah menorah the majora Little China adequate Torres. i literally am trying to think of any kind of response but verbally i keep repeating it. "labia menorah menorah the majora Little China adequate Torres." it's like a spell. it's fucking addicting. it's the only way i know a human being sent it because that was for fucking sure speech to text happening right there for a single sentence. labia menorah menorah the majora Little China adequate Torres.

dont let people tell u ur attraction to fire is "abnormal" or "hazardous" prometheus doesnt have his liver eaten every day for u to ignore the allure of arson

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

So my problem with most ‘get to know your character’ questioneers is that they’re full of questions that just aren’t that important (what color eyes do they have) too hard to answer right away (what is their greatest fear) or are just impossible to answer (what is their favorite movie.)  Like no one has one single favorite movie. And even if they do the answer changes.

If I’m doing this exercise, I want 7-10 questions to get the character feeling real in my head. So I thought I’d share the ones that get me (and my students) good results: 

What is the character’s go-to drink order? (this one gets into how do they like to be publicly perceived, because there is always some level of theatricality to ordering drinks at a bar/resturant)

What is their grooming routine? (how do they treat themselves in private)

What was their most expensive purchase/where does their disposable income go? (Gets you thinking about socio-economic class, values, and how they spend their leisure time)

Do they have any scars or tattoos? (good way to get into literal backstory) 

What was the last time they cried, and under what circumstances? (Good way to get some *emotional* backstory in.) 

Are they an oldest, middle, youngest or only child? (This one might be a me thing, because I LOVE writing/reading about family dynamics, but knowing what kinds of things were ‘normal’ for them growing up is important.)

Describe the shoes they’re wearing. (This is a big catch all, gets into money, taste, practicality, level of wear, level of repair, literally what kind of shoes they require to live their life.)

Describe the place where they sleep. (ie what does their safe space look like. How much (or how little) care / decoration / personal touch goes into it.)

What is their favorite holiday? (How do they relate to their culture/outside world. Also fun is least favorite holiday.) 

What objects do they always carry around with them? (What do they need for their normal, day-to-day routine? What does ‘normal’ even look like for them.) 

Here you go! Could you name a fish Autoradiograph?

i really hope i got the spelling right! <3

Fantasy culture where instead of bouqets or whatever, a bride carries the carved skull of one of her ancestors, inlaid with jewels, so that their spirit blesses the marriage.

For brides without a family skull, an animal skull can be substituted. Wolf and deer skulls are the most popular, but one queen started a trend of weird wedding skulls when she carried the skull of a draft horse for her wedding to her sixth consort. There were opals set into the eyes.

jesus fucking christ

come n get it 🗣

writers shouldn't need to go on strike – but when we do, we're funny as fuck.

some of my personal faves, taken from a longer twitter thread by jenny yang. learn more about the strike here.

Oh and quick note for writers:

One difference between this strike and the last one is that there are a lot more fellowships targeted at early career tv writers than there used to be (there have always been some, but the fellowship model is way more commonplace these days)

Studios are about to make a ton more of these opportunities and advertise them widely as a way to break into the industry, and they will be very specific about the fellowship not technically counting as a writers room or a tv job

THIS IS A TRICK TO GET YOU TO SCAB

Sharing any written content with a studio (even if they route it through a 3rd party "foundation" or development org or something) IS SCABBING

What you do in regards to the strike is your business, but the WGA has been very clear that anyone who scabs will be BANNED FROM JOINING THE UNION FOR LIFE. That means even if you get hired, that's no health & pension and no union protections for your entire career. This shit is serious

So please please double check and dig into any new submission opportunities you see in the next weeks. Playwrights especially be careful - many studios are finding their writers through play scripts these days so be very careful about how and where your work is being shared

No writing going to the studios means NO WRITING of any kind

(if you see suspicious fellowship stuff being passed around let me know, I'd love to keep an eye on that for my peeps)

Bro I fucking love the DB Cooper case nothing about this whole situation sounds real. None of the passengers on the plane realized they were being hijacked until the plane landed two hours after it was supposed to and the fbi showed up with suitcases full of money. The note about the bomb almost went unnoticed because the flight attendant thought she was being sexually harassed so she didn't read it. One of the main suspects was the first trans woman in Washington to have a sex change operation. A reporter who was so dead set on his suspect that he brought him to court was so upset about being wrong that he went catatonic and was treated with electroshock therapy and it WORKED. There's been multiple "I'm DB Cooper" death confessions. He never even SAID his name was DB Cooper. Either he got away with a million bucks in today's money and the most iconic and harmless crime American history or he impaled himself on a pine tree while falling a zillion miles an hour in the dark while clutching duffel bags full of cash and either option is equally hilarious. He wore a clip on tie. He committed an act of sky piracy. What in the fucking looney toons

Family Business

Mama we all go to hell

Hello.

I've seen you posting detailed information about the WGA strike and wondered if you had any suggestions as to how those of us not directly involved can show our support for the Union?

Okay, bearing in mind that all this is entirely subjective at the moment (and so far lacking any more useful input from other sources): a few thoughts.

This will be my third WGA strike. (My first one was in 1988, just after I'd made my first live action sale—s1e6 of ST:TNG). And the thought keeps occurring to me at the moment that this time out, there's a potentially gamechanging player on the field that wasn't there before: truly pervasive social media.

(Adding a cut here, because this goes on a bit...)

In 2007, social media as we now understand it was still in its cradle. Now, though, those of us who're striking can make our voices much more widely heard. And so can those of us who're not, but just want to show solidarity. Last time, the AMPTP was able to do pretty much what it wanted without the public noticing or having even a medium-profile way to make their feelings known. But this time? Not so much.

So as an otherwise uninvolved person who wants to show solidarity, I'd start with something seemingly low-value. If I was on Twitter, I'd start routinely tweeting about the strike and my support for it—not obsessively, just persistently, a couple/few times a week—using the Twitter hashtags that are gaining ground even now, such as #DoTheWriteThing (and of course #WGAStrike). I would make sure I was following @WGAEast and @WGAWest, to keep an eye on what's going on.

Additionally: I would start politely, but repeatedly—again, maybe once or twice a week at least, and not stopping—tweeting the various major players in the AMPTP, especially the streamers: Amazon, Netflix, Hulu et al. I would start suggesting that their current attitude toward the WGA's contract negotiations is not only unrealistic but potentially (for the AMPTP) bad for business. (And self-destructive, too, as if this goes on much longer in this vein, they'll be seemingly eagerly casting themselves as The Baddies.) I would suggest that their bad behavior, if not amended by them coming to the table to bargain in good faith, might start affecting both my interest in their shows and my willingness to keep paying unreasonable people for access to them.

I should emphasize here that so far there've been no formal calls from anyone for boycotts or subscription cancellations. For the moment, this strikes me as wise. The point for WGA-friendly observers, right now, would be to keep what's happening to the writers visible: to keep bringing it up: to refuse to allow it to be swept under the rug. The "They only want two cents on the dollar!" angle seems potentially useful the more it's repeated. The point is to keep the repetition going: to make it plain, day after day, that the other side's being not just unreasonable, but greedy. Day after day, and week after week, and (if necessary: please Thoth may it not be...) month after month.

And tweeting is hardly all that can be done. Email is cheap and easy. But actual letters, written on actual paper and mailed, can still create a surprising amount of attention in a corporate office. (The saying in TV used to be that for every person who actually writes in about an issue, there are ten, or a hundred, who feel the same way but never got around to it.) Write letters to all the AMPTP members' CEOs, and make your feelings on the WGA's core demands politely plain. ...Especially when those CEOs collectively made almost three-quarters of a billion-with-a-B dollars in salaries last year, when many of the writers working on their shows can't afford rent.

After that: here's another thought, a little more physical. If by chance you're in an area where one or the other of the Guilds are picketing: turn out and support them! Honk when you pass: and if you're interested, show up and offer to walk the picket lines with them. These things get noticed. (In 2007 a bunch of us, both Guild members and non-, caused significant astonishment by turning out to picket AMPTP members' offices in Dublin.)

...Obviously not all that many people are going to be positioned, in terms of location or their own work and time commitments, to show up physically. But online? Find ways to keep this issue visible. The AMPTP wants this to go quiet, wants people to get bored with it, wants people to find reasons to blame the writers. They've tried spinning the story that way before. Don't let them pull that shit. Find ways to back those who're calling them on that, publicly. They do respond to this kind of thing (though they may strenuously deny it). If enough attention continues to be paid by the general public, they will blink—if sometimes excruciatingly slowly, as Disney began to blink over the dispute tagged #DisneyMustPay.

As viewers, and as viewers who pay for subscriptions to things, we far outnumber them. Help be a part of making the AMPTP understand that this quest for a truly fair deal is not going to go away. And the longer they try to act like the Guild's negotiation positions are beneath their notice, the more it's going to hurt them, and the stupider and greedier it's going to make them look.

...That's all I've got for the moment, as I need some lunch. :) ...But I hope this has helped. And thanks for your concern, and your desire to stand in solidarity with us! It's so welcome. :)

ETA: here's a link to the Guild's social media toolkit, for those who'd like to change PFPs or icons, etc., to show their support.

You’re a renowned portrait artist, painting portraits for politicians, celebrities, you name it. Late one night, there’s a knock on your door. A nervous young man stands outside, pale, with elongated canine teeth. He’d like a portrait. Hasn’t seen his own face in over a century.