Mishell Baker merrily

You know that the shingles vaccine not only keeps you from getting shingles, it reduces your dementia risk? Yeah. That's a thing. I am practically counting the days to get mine.
med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

Wet, drenched through, and shivering cold, despairing of ship or boat, we lifted up our eyes as the dawn came on.

I saw it, now you have to see it too. 😄🫣

Delivered what? Fought how?

Last I checked, we're still living under an authoritarian dictator who is unraveling all the civil rights we took for granted all our lives. Did you somehow not notice?

Oh no! I hope they figure it out soon.

Signed, "Yours, turning up the bunsen burner flame under the stoppered test tube full of my regards"

You don't want to live in that world because the present world is made specifically to make you feel safe and comfortable everywhere. It's all designed around your ideology, gender, and ethnicity, so you have no need for relief from it.

I LOVE detach quote. It's such a perfect way to signal "Have this conversation without involving my post, thanks".

THERE IS NO BACON IN THEM!

I Bee-lieve in you - oh no, that was terrible, please unfollow me immediately, I will not hold it against you

I physically held my breath reading this.

♥️ “ICE looked at that school, saw a community standing up for families, and decided it wasn’t worth it.”

There's a better than even chance that your life is not nearly as bad as you think it is.

There are so many things that happen to us every day that we simply do not mark, do not record, do not acknowledge, because they go as we expect and cause us no trouble. Our mind sticks on the sticky places.

You know where I'm going with this, don't you? I'll make it mercifully concise:

When I blindly reach into the box, naturally I am most likely to draw out the loose single pad that's on the top of the row, and use it, without thinking.

But every time I have to stop, tear them apart, and put one back, I remember. It's not all the pads, it's all my MEMORIES.

I'll tell you what is happening.

The human brain is what's happening.

Finally it confounded me so sharply that I actually looked into the box to see where all the singles were slipping off to.

To my shock, there were NONE. None in the box whatsoever. Every single one in there had a mate.

ALCOHOL PAD THIEF? SECRET ALCOHOL PAD DATING SERVICE??? WHAT IS HAPPENING?

Maybe not *every* single time, but so much more often than fifty percent of the time that it makes no logical sense, even allowing for the whole Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern scene with the coin coming up heads over and over.

Especially when you consider that the singles are always loose ON TOP.

The box is located so that I end up groping blindly and pulling out the first one I touch. If it's two, I pull them apart, set one back on top of the whole row, and use the other.

So why, I have often found myself wondering in some soft-focus area of my mind, do I *always* seem to grab a pair?

As a person who is obsessive about germs I go through a lot of alcohol prep pads. The paper packets of mine, for some unfathomable reason, come packaged in sets of two that have to be torn apart before you open one. Possibly because it makes them easy to line up in their long box like index cards.

It's Navel Gaze o'Clock - time for Shell to turn a trivial anecdote into reason for a rambling thread on something Super Deep.

Today it's the mystery of why my alcohol prep pads defied not only statistics but the laws of physics as we know them.

Yes, already, and brutal and tense and kinetic - and this is two pages in.

I am obsessed with the nyckelharpa!!!

I bought @wtalabi.bsky.social's SHIGIDI on a gut impulse when I saw the paperback's cover, and it has just arrived. I had to interrupt my reading of the first two pages to post here that my instincts have once again served me exactly right.

YouTube video by Myrkur Scandinavian folk on Nyckelharpa by Myrkur

Every time I rewatch this, I feel compelled to post it again. This video is the inspiration for a bard's performance early in the second half of my current novel:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7sK...

Okay, Shell, not having a *lot* of work to do on the book right now does not mean that you should do *none* of it.

I'm good! One thing about me is that I am quick to annoyance and then it flares out rapidly once my higher thought processes kick in. 🤣

Eventually I'll learn not to make words during that small gap in between.

99.99% of the language we "know" is from context, and people aren't always precise. You can "know" what a word means, and even have used it yourself hundreds of times, and then you can look it up in a dictionary and go... oh. Whoops.

So anyway, this whole thread is really Why We Need Dictionaries.

Only two specific types of animal were listed in the dictionary definition, and so I could not *confidently* use it for harpies. But given how different bats are from sea birds, other than flying and being kind of unhygenic, I decided it fit just fine for harpies, who also fit that description.

I knew I'd heard it used to mean bat poo. I was 80% sure I'd also heard it used to mean bird poo. I'd never needed to know exactly how broad a scope the word had until I was considering nonexistent flying creatures. I looked it up, and saw "bats and sea birds." Not "Flying creatures."