So while I was getting my haircut, the lady asked me if I had other plans for the day and I said:
“I’m just going to pick up the boy from daycare and then it’s date night.”
And the lady says “Oh! How old is he?”
“He’s three.”
“Mine too! Where are you registering him for kindergarten it’s such a hassle-”
And that’s when I realized I said “boy” and not “dog” because I always think of Charlie as “good boy” but this slip up has lead to a miscommunication.
The lady is now 6 minutes into a clearly needed rant about how unnecessarily complex shopping for schools is, esp when you have a neurodivergent child, so I can’t just tell her that Charlie is a dog because then she’ll feel awkward for unloading on me and she clearly has enough going on.
So the rest of the haircut became a game of “how much can I say about Charlie without revealing that he is not a human child?” And the answer is “enough to cover a half hour hair appointment, quite possibly several hours worth if I’m specific enough”
“is he very verbal?”
“It really depends on who he’s with. He’s very quiet at he but won’t shut up if he’s at the park or has a friend over.”
“was it hard to potty-train him?”
“he’s adopted, but I was genuinely amazed at how good he already was with hygene and potty stuff.”
“mine’s just obsessed with paw patrol and Frozen, drives me crazy!”
“I imagine. Charlie is colorblind so he’s not as into tv, but he always wants a toy if I take him anywhere with them.”
“oh gosh the toys! And the kids are so rough on them!”
“yeah Charlie can destroy a stuffed animal in about 2 minutes, so I only buy him the really cheap ones.”
“Does he throw tantrums when they break?”
“Not really. It’s meditative, really, taking them apart. He has hysterics if the cat takes his toys though. Runs downstairs and cries at me until I retrieve it because he’s not tall enough to get it out of the cat tree.”
So I thought this was commonly known internet navigation (but apparently it might just be those of us who have been using the internet since the 90’s who still know it). Or so it seems based on… a grumpy comment I got.
When you see an arrow like this:
It means you click it to expand out a hidden section.
It’s an accordion section/menu! It’s useful in web design to hide information that may be overwhelming under specific headers so people can only see what they need.
Here I’m using it for people who need the content warnings to be able to check, but for those who don’t need them and don’t want to be spoiled to just move right past without accidentally reading anything.
It’s still the user’s responsibility to click the arrow and read things as they need! But it is all warned. (And, yes, the all encompassing issues are already a tag on the fic, I’m just providing additonal warnings per chapter.)
Ah, sorry yes! For those who want the html, it’s the details and summary tags!
okay but if you ever see a male creative who had a string of great work and then everything else he did was dogshit, go to the “personal life” part of his wikipedia and look at his relationships. you’ll either find a major tragedy he didn’t recover from (completely understandable) or, more likely, there was a woman in his life doing uncredited shit editing his stuff or contributing generally and she’s not there anymore.
I told a friend about this phenomenon in literature and he called me weeks later like, I remembered what you said about women doing uncredited work when tim burton came up. he made a string of bangers then everything else just was nowhere near as good. the timeline matches perfectly to when he was with this german visual artist (lena gieseke). he’s done some good work in collaboration, but if things were dug into I suspect we would find she did a lot more than people realise.
so yeah whenever you look around like wow women didn’t work in history, or, women aren’t auteurs, or, there just aren’t as many great female writers - societal reasons for that aside, half the time they absolutely did.
Fun fact, on top of being staunchly against genAI, ellipsus literally has an Export To AO3 button. I do the majority of my writing in LibreOffice, but I’ve been moving all my GDocs over to ellipsus for a bit and I really love the interface. If you’re looking for an alternative to GDocs, this is The One.
moment of unspeakable beauty today when one of my coworkers called another coworker “judas” for not splitting a can of white monster with her, and i got to watch the guy who sits next to me open a new google tab, type in “jeudis,” and say quietly to himself “french thursday…?”
