conuly

The plot is picking up and I have no idea where it's going!

Also, it is absolutely impossible to track down the music for that show. There was one song I liked, so I tried to look it up. No dice. I eventually gave in and searched up "Killjoys soundtrack" and then, armed with the song title and artist name, tried again. Still no luck. I did find an entirely different song that's apparently written by somebody with no internet presence at all. If it wasn't apparently their only song I'd suspect AI. That picture is AI, though, has "artificial" written all over it, in illegible text. Song's not too uncatchy, but - I honestly don't know why the music in Killjoys is so hard to find.

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If you're actually writing for children, especially young children, then I guess you don't want to scare them off - but if you're writing for adolescents or adults you can afford to be honest.

So here's the thing. Every book or story in which a character gets glasses for the first time - or the second if their first pair is painfully out of date - emphasizes how clear everything is and how they can see so much detail that they had no idea they were missing. And yes, that's a thing. None of them point out that it's a thing that can be less "wondrous" and more "disorienting and distracting" until you've gotten used to seeing that much detail.

None of them mention that if your prescription is strong enough - especially if there's astigmatism involved - your perception will be wonky and you'll have a hard time judging how close and far things are for a day or two.

Definitely none of them mention that you will absolutely get eye strain every time you get a new prescription, and possibly headaches or nausea to accompany it. It goes away, again, in a day or two, but until it does you'll feel like you're cross-eyed at all times. (And with children, every year is a new prescription. They grow, which means their eyeballs grow, and just like that growth is unlikely to suddenly give them perfect vision if they already were nearsighted, it's also unlikely to keep them exactly where they were before.)

Absolutely none of them point out that if you've never worn glasses before you'll have to spend the aforementioned day or two learning how to not see the frames. This is also true if your old frames were much bigger than the new ones, but that, at least, is less likely to apply to children - their faces grow along with the rest of them, necessitating larger frames, so even if they choose a smaller overall style with the new pair the fact that it fits properly may even out.

Moving past the realm of accurate fiction writing, children really should have their first optometrist appointment, at the latest, in the summer before first grade (so, aged 5 or 6 years old). Ideally, they'll have it before they start school, at age 2 or 3, but you can't convince people on that point. They should have a new appointment every year until the age of 20 or so, or every two years if every year really is unfeasible, even if you don't think you see the signs of poor vision. They won't complain that they can't see, because they'll just assume that their vision is normal. This is true even if they wear glasses - you never notice how bad your eyes have gotten until you get a new prescription, and then it's like "whoa".

The screening done at school or at the doctor's office is imperfect at best. You really want the optometrist.

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That is not a sentence I want to read at any time in the morning.

(In celsius terms, it's -10 and feels like death.)

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And posting is rapid. Don't you need a distraction?

I held the bannister and I got it

I sat down to look for it

I took it with me because I could not find it

Damn splinter!

in which two teens independently fall into a toxic mud puddle and develop mind-reading abilities. Spoilers, they're not the only ones!

They're at a family reunion, and one person mentions that there have been a few breakins, how odd, because all the broken-in houses had security systems. And as they mention that, everybody in range automatically thinks their PINs. This, of course, is how the (telepathic!) thief had broken into the houses in the first place.

Ever since then, every time I've had to enter a PIN or a password anywhere, I've carefully also thought some other random letters or numbers. It's a silly habit, which I only developed long after I outgrew poking around closets for Narnia and had nearly outgrown poking around closets for secret passageways, and it wouldn't really deter a mind-reading thief for very long, but I still do it. If there ever is a telepathic malefactor in close proximity to me, at least they'll have to to try a few different codes to use my bank card!

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Well, I meant to post it then, and I guess I'll belatedly post it now - a New Year's Friend Meme!


Click the banner to join us and make some new friends!

when you finally confess your love to the guy you've been pining after for half your life, and it turns out that you have a perfectly aligned and complementary set of kinks? Nobody has to compromise and agree to sometimes do the thing they're not that into or, conversely, never do the thing they're totally into. Nobody's turned off by the mere thought of any of it, every conversation is an ongoing saga of "yes, and".

I guess that's one more advantage of being fictional!

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You'll laugh, it was that weird.

I dreamed that I was going to sleep. I had found a bed - not my actual bed, just a bed! - and snuggled down to sleep. And then I woke up a little (really woke up, not dream woke up) in my own bed, snuggled up nice and cozy, and drifted between the two beds, real and dream, for a little bit before falling back asleep for real.

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Such an open and bald admission that this is about the oil.

1. Signups are now open for purimgifts.

2. If you haven't recently downloaded everything from LJ you might want to back up, you may wish to do so now.

There is no chance of me making this one - I just got off of work at 8, and I need to sleep.

But as soon as I figure out what to say I'll be contacting my... my everyone. My congresscritters and anybody else.

Fingers crossed! I know we can all make it that far!

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I believe the theme of this book is "the road to hell" with a side order of "best laid plans". ( To be fair... )

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ask a detailed question about phonology, such as "Do you really pronounce 'tr' as 'chr'?" (Yes, yes we do. We all do. It's almost impossible not to due to the physiology of those phonemes.)

And this will generate a burst of absolutely, frustratingly useless nonsense, because people just do not know how they talk. They don't know how they talk, they can't analyze their phonetics on the fly, and they are staggeringly unaware of these facts.

I keep telling these people to go to /r/linguistics instead, but thus far, nobody has taken my advice. Which is a pity, because I do give excellent advice, especially in this case.

But seriously - nobody knows how they talk. It's like trying to explain the biomechanics of walking. Sure, you've been doing it since you were a toddler (probably?), but that doesn't mean you have any understanding at all of what the hell you're doing as you propel yourself from place to place. I bet you can't even explain how you adjust for your varying center of balance!

And very heavy on the dudes. I'm not sure if women don't go into this sort of thing, or if they're just too classy when they do it, and thus don't get onto the playlist. Though I guess it would be strange for lesbians to sing an ode to Jingle Bell COCK. (Emphasis all theirs, and totally unnecessary. We know where the song was going.)


Anyway, in honor of this, I'm posting three belated Christmas videos. The last is Boynton and totally SFW.





This one won't let me embed it.

So, I'm reading something about an abusive relationship. So toxic, in every tiny respect. But the commenters! You've got a handful of them happily chirping things like "Oh, Abuser is trying so hard! He's really just controlling because he's worried, but look, he's trying to make Abusee happy!" and we've got another handful saying things like "I don't get why Abusee doesn't just leave. I mean, he's in public, is he scared of getting hit? In public? Like, geez."

Like... do you people know what sort of story you're even reading? Or, in the latter case, do you know anything about humans!?

Some people should not be allowed to comment on anything. WTF.

(Though, that having been said, the very first rule of running away and changing your name is never pick a fake name that has any connection to your real life. And because of this, our protagonist got kidnapped back by his abuser and his goon squad. Again. Well, the plot had to happen somehow, I guess, but still.)

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As we all know - or anyway, as most of us know - words are capitalized like names if they're used like names and titles.

This most commonly applies to kinship terms, of course - "I gave a present to my mom" versus "When she opened her present, Mom cried" and "I have an uncle who is a firefighter" versus "You're a firefighter, aren't you, Uncle John?"

But there's a few people in the comments asserting that they've never seen this before, they would've been marked down at school, and so on.

It does boggle my mind somewhat that they, I guess, never read fiction in which people have parents, or else don't pay much attention when they do read, but I suppose not everybody is lucky enough to have been raised by a proofreader. However, what I'm posting about is that it's surprisingly difficult to find an authoritative source on this subject online.

The MW and Cambridge dictionary entries only cover this in the briefest way, without an explanatory note. I can't find a usage note by looking elsewhere at MW. I see people asserting that the AP and Chicago styles require this - but I can't actually access that, and searches on their respective websites go nowhere.

I can find lots of casual blogs and such discussing this in detail, but understandably people who think they already know are reluctant to accept correction from random sources like that. Can't quite blame them, though they're still very wrong. Or, I mean to say, they're out of step with the norms of Standard English orthography.

Does anybody have any source that's likely to be accepted? I don't even care about telling that handful of people at this point, I'm just annoyed at my inability to find a link on my own.

I don't quite relish the idea of going out in it, and god knows where our shovel went, but gosh, I love looking at the snow!

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Today's temperatures: Started below 20, "feels like" in the single digits. But not to worry, within a week we should be in the 50s!

And they just said that, with no commentary, like it's not absolutely bizarre to go from 19F - 56F within a single week in December.

And it's not just the high temperatures that are bizarre, the low ones are too. I can't speak to the decades before 1990, I guess, but NYC weather used to be temperate - we got more snow, but that's because the winter temperatures were in the snow range - close to the freezing point, not so warm it melted, not so cold that it just didn't happen.

and I had to take a car, which I can not afford. At least the corner store hadn’t shut down and the cashier let me wait inside. Either he’s very friendly and chatty or he’s flirting with me, but the important thing is I still have all my toes.

The goal is to herd all the "What do you call this?" posts into the comments there. It never ever works. However, they do occasionally get comments like "Here are the answers to the questions you asked rhetorically as an example" and "Why do you keep posting this and asking the same questions" and "There is no such thing as a pork burger".

Yes, Virginia, there is a pork burger. This is why I have a picture of pork burger patties on my phone, so I can post it every time somebody says that those don't exist, or that they "really" mean a breakfast sandwich or a pulled pork sandwich or a ham sandwich or a BLT.

I always want to ask these people who, I guess, don't get out much why they're so sure that anything they haven't personally heard of before must not exist. It's a big old world, but apparently, not so much for them.

(I suppose I can be forgiven for being a bit snippy this time around, I mean, given everything.)

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