People like to say things like, “It’s so inspiring you got through XYZ! I could never do that!” The news sites run a lot on that sentiment.
But if you look through history, people of all stripes actually are good at surviving through stuff, simply because there’s no choice. You just go forward. You see this in action in war-torn countries…everyone, of all different stripes and different personalities, surviving in one way or another. It’s not all that unusual to survive shitty things.
So I feel like the worth is in what you learned from those experiences, as some people survive them but don’t learn much from it, while others wring the crappy experience of every scrap of knowledge it can possibly offer.
But you can wring experience from good experiences just as well as bad ones, so wouldn’t it be nice if nobody had to have bad experiences?
Basically, I don’t think suffering brings any sort of grace, but if you are forced to suffer, it seems important to wring any scrap of knowledge from it you can. Tear the silver lining out with your fingernails if you have to, haha.
I’m glad you’re healing well. I broke my foot earlier in the year in July…lis franc injury, but mild enough that they decided not to do surgery for fear of fucking up with the tiny foot bones (I got a lot of little breaks at the end of the bones which are nigh-impossible to put screws through without making it worse), which seems to have been the right call as I’m walking on it 4 months later.
I absolutely loved the doctors that got all excited and doctory talking about stuff! With me, I ended up with some of the history of lis franc injuries, which used to be common for soldiers on horseback, as they’d fall from their horse and get the midfoot stuck in the stirrup, breaking it.
I also had an unrelated small skin biopsy, and my surgeon was happily chattering away about doing it by hand so I don’t get weird skin flaps by the punch, and how the little cauterization tool worked. You know, as I lay there with bits of my flesh burning, lol.
Are you sure about that? Wizard’s First Rule was great, and they slowly (then quickly) started to unravel.
Richard being a white savior showing the mud people how to make tile roofs seems like it’d be nigh-unfilmable/unwatchable if it were rendered book-accurately cuz boy is it chock-full of veiled racism!
I forgot about the kid’s shoes trick. It can be hit or miss…sometimes kid’s shoes aren’t made as well as they’re expected to be outgrown. But sometimes the toe boxes are bigger, which I appreciate because it sucks looking for 5 wide women’s. (And size 3 men’s isn’t always available.)
The topographical features of the cave walls could also have inspired the artists’ imagination. Cave dwellers may have experienced pareidolia, the psychological phenomenon of seeing unintentional forms in nature, like seeing shapes in clouds. If a bulge of rock looks a little like a horse’s head, the artist might imagine the complete form, filling in the rest of the details.
For example, one newly discovered horse image measures around 460 x 300mm and is painted in red using variably spaced dots. It depicts the head with the corner of the mouth, an eye, an ear, and the beginning of the cervico-dorsal line. The figure makes use of natural features of the cave wall, with cracks in the rock incorporated into the outlines of the head and chest. The cervical-dorsal line adapts to a concave area of the wall.
I guess previously scientists were looking at the art like how you or I might look at a horse drawn on a piece of paper, but some of the art was more like going up to a funny rock sort of shaped like a horse, and adding onto it/altering it in order to show others how much like a horse (or whatever) the funny looking rock is.
Which kind of crossing between artistic mediums, from 2D painting to something more like sculpture.
Anyway, this is cool. I didn’t really consider that someone might do that with their art before reading this article.
In the past, I probably wouldn’t be found out, but I’d probably also die more easily. I’d have to be in Tudor England to even have a chance of speaking the language. If it was a dice roll of going to where “my ancestors” lived, I could end up anywhere in Europe, and parts of western asia and north africa.
In the future, they might find me out, but I’d also probably have a much better time of surviving. I’d prefer to go to the future.
A translator app on a phone could probably make heads and tails of my English dialect (I mean, they can do that today), and travel would be as fast as modern travel or faster, so once I identified a locale that I thought I’d like I could try to get to it. Basically, more opportunity would mean more options to be safe, and to survive.
They’re only trivial to separate if you think the only “real” sci-fi is hard sci-fi. Star Wars, Star Trek, and plenty of other beloved sci-fi series that blur the lines would get lost in the infighting.
I mean, the “war” between sci-fi and fantasy has been going on for decades, and it’s always been ridiculous.
For me, what’s way scarier is, it isn’t that everyone is being quiet, it’s that there isn’t any one else out there, and we’re one of the first civilizations to develop.
Why would you find that scary?
Is it because of the ‘great filter’ stuff, that there must therefore be something ahead of us in time that wipes us out (like self-inflicted climate change)? Or is it something like humans being awfully flawed to go down in universal history as the “first” intelligent and technologically advanced species? Or something else?
I imagine if you took two seconds to contemplate how too many small businesses are run, you could figure out it’s shit management from your local companies and not this particular kiln operator.
I suspect the big thing that’s always held Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan series back from being made into a movie or television show is Miles being disabled. Peter Dinklage could’ve played him, but he’s too old at this point for young Miles. And there’s probably not a lot of acting talent with dwarfism AND the manic charisma that playing a proper Miles needs.
I wonder if it’d work as an anime though? Lois McMaster Bujold reviews a lot of manga on Goodreads so I imagine she might at least entertain the idea if anyone ever approached her.
I think her Chalion series would work as an excellent series of shows, either live action or animated. Penric is, personality-wise, a lot like Miles, but easier to cast.