I (late 20s, F) have been working in a pretty shitty research job recently that I was forced to take after my Youtube Ghosthunting channel dissolved. For a variety of reasons, I'm unable to leave this job.
Almost a year ago now, we had a big project due and were able to complete it successfully but it killed one of my coworkers and left my manager (early 30s, M) in hospital in a coma for >6mo. Obviously everyone was very distraught after this and while me and my surviving coworkers got some compassionate leave it still was very hard to deal with. This, coupled with a change to much shittier management for our org, ultimately made it a fairly dangerous place to work. At one point, about 3 mo after the whole shebang, we were visited by some pretty handsy clients and somehow it fell to me to remove them from the premises. Since then I've been having nightmares about that and just the other situations I've been forced into by taking this job which led to my GP prescribing me some heavy sleep medicine.
OK, so go to a few months ago when my manager miraculously wakes up from his coma and comes walzing into work a few days later like nothing happened. My other coworker (30s, F) and I had been managing by ourselves perfectly fine, although we did have to end up living in secret tunnels below our workplace because we were worried about being attacked again, and my manager comes back wanting to act like everything is normal when it clearly isn't. It's definitely not ideal but we couldn't figure out what else to do.
So a couple of nights ago, I was sleeping in my usual cot after hours when I suddenly wake up to a weird numbness in my leg. Believe it or not, my manager and my coworker had thought it been a good idea to stab me with some local anaesthetic and start digging into my leg looking for something that my manager said "was infecting me"??? Obviously, I freak out and grab the scalpel he had been using on me and start swinging it around, because mind you, I've woken up to this mess and can't move one of my legs. I end up stabbing him in the shoulder in a panic before my other coworker drags him out with her.
It's been a couple of days now and while I'm definitely not happy about the hole in my leg, I've noticed some changes that I didn't realise were affecting me beforehand. This led me to wonder if I should at all try to vaguely smooth things out with my manager or just keep on ignoring him, which I've been doing with great success. Should that even be my responsibility? AITA?
NO NO NO TUMBLR I DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES WANT TO SEE WHAT MY MUTUALS LIKED. I WANT TO SEE WHAT THEY’VE REBLOGGED. IF IT WAS WORTH SEEING THEY’LL PUT IT ON MY DASH 37 TIMES
Thank you, everyone, who’s reblogged this 37 or more times in a row and my apologies to your feeds.
[T]he polling found that younger adults are worse than older adults at identifying false headlines, and that the more time someone spent online recreationally, the less likely they were to be able to tell real news from misinformation.
This runs counter to prevailing public attitudes regarding online misinformation spread, say researchers – that older, less digitally-savvy “boomers” are more likely to be taken in by fake news.
I know the lyctors ascended without the benefit of a myriad of necromantic scholarship but it’s still funny to me that even after 10,000 years it took direct evidence for them to go “what?? you can do it both ways??” whereas Palamedes strolled around Canaan House for a few weeks and went ‘hm. seems fucked up. bet I could improve on this’ and then he did while trapped in death with one romance novel for company
I sincerely apologize for what I am about to do to this post.
This is actually INCREDIBLY FASCINATING to me, because of how it interacts with one of my least favourite fantasy tropes and also, simultaneously, the field I work in!!!
So there’s a big and common thing in fantasy that it tends to be backwards facing. You tend to find yourself in the ruins of once great kingdoms, etc, but more importantly, the really juicy knowledge tends to be history. If you want to do a really cool spell, you tend to need to unearth an ancient tome. The reverse, progress from using current knowledge to design your own cool spell is straight up less common and also more likely to be villainous. I hate this.
Where I come to it, is that I work in a very young field, so a lot of the early cringy stuff, is relatively recent. I don’t mean bad, like, stanford prison experiment stuff, just, bad math mostly. When I read the seminal papers in MRI, I’m aware of how important and significant they are… I’m also very aware they suck. They could not be published today, because they’d be bounced back as too inept to publish. Not because they were done by stupid people, they were done by brilliant people who were often having to hand-develop tools I take entirely for granted, or go and find methods from other fields I would never in 1000 years have been able to find, if they weren’t available and prepackaged into helpful tools to run math I barely understand. Its important, for what I’m about to say to know that a lot of what making MRI better has involved is increasing the amount and complexity of our mathematical tools (but not our mathematical training, which is its own kettle fo fish).
And The Locked Tomb is, fascinatingly to me, both of these things at once.
Even through the filter of Gideon “I cannot stand to listen to necro-nonsense” Nav, its made very clear, that necromancy is heavily mathematical. And the necromancers convened at Canaan house are obviously incredibly skilled and at the absolute top of what a modern necromancer can be and on top of that, massively innovative in their own right. So like, they are the peak of modern necromancy, but they are also partly defining the peak of modern necromancy by doing new amazing things no one has done before… and they are sent to canaan house to… dig up a bunch of really old theorums. Its the fantasy ‘ancient tome’ thing all over.
But that’s where it gets interesting.
Unlike the common or garden version of the trope where the ancients were better just sorta because, these theorums have been specifically hidden. They’re not vaguely lost to history, they’re actively classified and hidden in canaan house where no one can get at them.
So of course, when you expose these young, brilliant, very mathematically minded necromancers to the lyctoral theorums, which are brilliant but also crappy and out of date and in dire need of a dead salmon, they don’t obey them, they immediately start modernizing them.
I’ve said this before but Why do people position “themes and analysis” and “shipping” as mutually exclusive opposites. maybe I find two characters thematically interesting and want them to analytically fuck about it.
