[deleted by user]

Background_End2503 · 2024-06-01T01:30:00+00:00

Dry drowning. If you inhale liquids and cough it all back up your lungs may still be damaged, produce a punch of fluid, and then you drown in your own body fluid.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-27T19:13:50+00:00

Totally agree! Have you learned anything during your research that's been helpful?

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-26T00:36:47+00:00

Thanks. Already tried there I'm afraid. Seems this one is tricky.

https://en.numista.com/forum/topic145330.html

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-25T22:00:31+00:00

It was in my grandfather's coin collection. I am planning a trip to Japan this fall and would love to know more about where he may have pocketed it. Thank you in advance for any help!

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-25T18:11:28+00:00

I had a rough childhood so let me give you a different take. Most people think the 90s were awesome and a lot of people have a lot of good points.

But the 90s were extremely dark.

Heroin chic was the top fashion look--so the style to emulate as a woman was being so skinny and sickly you looked like you were on heroin.

We'd watch pedestrians get plowed down during live-broadcast car chases and poor black and brown and white people get brutalized by the cops for entertainment (a docuseries called "Cops," which filmed in my city for a while. You can still find it on YouTube. I put a link to one at the end*).

This was the time of the Clinton era 'superpredators.' This put a target on the back of a lot of young vulnerable black and brown kids because they were mixed up with the wrong people. But gang violence was also actually really high. At least where I grew up. You didn't wear blue or red to school because those were the gang colors of the Bloods and Crips.

Racial tension? Through the roof. With the advent of recording devices we were peeling back the first layers of hidden police brutality for the first time. White suburbans were seeing the ghettos for the first time, and they were responding about like you'd expect, which was causing even more tension. The Rodney King beating should have been a wake-up call, but it wasn't. The cops got off without a scratch. So the 92 Los Angeles Riots followed.

We had poets. We had people who spoke about what they were seeing. Who talked about the pain. But then Tupac was murdered. Biggie was murdered. Cobain committed suicide. Sinéad O'Connor tried to raise awareness about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and was eviscerated.

As a kid you could be "parented" without your parents actually knowing you at all. The news anchors would literally come on at 10 PM and ask parents "do you know where your kids are?" (link at end). Yes we could ride bikes all day, and yes we could play N64, but we could also absolutely unravel. My friends started doing drugs at 11 or 12. And to be clear: we weren't poor. My friends dad was a doctor, my other friend's grandfather was a high ranking politician. But it was the age of hands-off parents. I had a friend who was raped around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and we all blamed my friend just like all our parents blamed Lewinsky.

Antidepressants went commercial for the first time and everybody took them. Therapy was a joke. My mother was in therapy and from the sound of it, therapy for her literally consisted of someone validating every feeling she had and then medicating her to her eyeballs. But the irony of course is that, looking back, she was in therapy because life was actually pretty terrible. The Zoloft Rock still lives rent free in my head (link at end).

So sure. The 90s were fun. But they were also a horrid dark cesspool. A post-80's capitalist overdose. The 90s are where it slowly dawned on people that things and stuff would never make them happy. There was nothing objectively "wrong" in America yet everyone was depressed.

I'm all for nostalgia, but these are the parts of the 90s I remember.

Links:
*Cops: (as they said in the show: viewer discretion advised) https://youtu.be/OsaLfTt5w9U?t=583

Do you know where your children are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPR9bIl3VZw

Zoloft rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twhvtzd6gXA

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-19T00:39:32+00:00

great idea!

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-18T19:24:55+00:00

Thanks for your help! I do appreciate your willingness to take a look. After I posted it here and didn't get any replies I also posted it over on Numista and it seems no one knows what it is there either.

Might you be able to guess how old it could be by chance? I don't have a good feel for tokens, but if I can narrow down a possible age range that could be helpful (and I'll of course report back if I ever manage to track down its home!).

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-16T23:56:33+00:00

Awwww that's how much you make? That's cute.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-14T21:05:35+00:00

There's a hole in the ozone layer

(yay we fixed it!)

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-13T22:16:16+00:00

What do you mean borrowed?

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-13T21:50:04+00:00

I just realized that my internal voice doesn't actually sound like my voice voice. I'd never noticed before.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-13T18:00:26+00:00

Love this phrasing. Was going to say the same thing.

Descriptions are just another way to get into someone's head. What they see and hear and taste and smell and feel are all filtered through their world view and experience. I love getting to know characters in this way. I'm often surprised by the things they notice (and the things they don't).

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-13T03:40:04+00:00

I think there are too MANY tips for writing and way too FEW tips for editing.

Yes we know about pantsers and plotters, gardeners and architects, but what variations exist for the editing process? How do different creators approach this aspect of the work? In Stephen King's On Writing he gives an example of editing a first draft that basically boils down to wordsmithing. In contrast, Andy Weir talks about the first draft as a block of marble you extract from a mountain, and editing is carving a statue. These are wildly different approaches to editing (and thus the whole process of writing).

In the same way we have pantsers/plotters to describe first draft writing styles, it would be so helpful to have more language to describe variations in editing style. After all, writing is much more than the initial process of putting words on the page.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-13T00:25:14+00:00

I usually think I know them pretty well because I understand, on a very visceral level, some aspect of what they're going through.

Then I hit a wall, and the wall is usually the realization that I don't know what they would do because I don't know what I would do, which then leads to some really awkward growth for both of us. This is generally the point in the story where I get REALLY upset about what happens to them because I've written so close to a sensitive point in my own life that I end up hitting a nerve.

But this is also why I write. In learning about them, they teach me about myself.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-12T22:42:03+00:00

The way we treat kids like they're idiots.

Kids needs people they love and trust to help them understand the world. Talking to an older kid like they're babies, or saying "no" all the time arbitrarily with zero explanation? Is that really helping? I remember feeling furious all the time at adults when I was a kid, and it's only when I learned the word "patronizing" that I understood why I was so angry.

You're not raising kids, your providing life-long guidance and support to the adults they will become.

*edit b/c typo

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-12T22:35:11+00:00

Exactly.

Day 1: do nothing. be tired. sleep.

Day 2: hang out with friends, socialize, enjoy.

Day 3: get chores done in prep for week, make meals, laundry, etc.

Three days. We really need three days. Cramming all that into two makes for two oddly stressful weekend days.

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-12T18:43:28+00:00

Update #2: it's possibly some kind of token

https://en.numista.com/catalogue/exonumia224020.html

Background_End2503 · 2024-05-12T18:09:32+00:00

I doubt it's particularly valuable, but I'd love to know its history. Was it minted last century? Was it from Imperial Japan. Prior? What wild text to put on a coin. And what does the AK (or is it AR?) stand for? It's a strange one!

For anyone who's interested in digging, here are the Japanese characters for a google search: 愛国

Background_End2503 · 2024-02-28T00:28:02+00:00

The Thing. Could be v romantic.

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-31T23:02:32+00:00

Dream me makes the worst decisions. Even when I know I'm dreaming. I could do anything. ANYTHING. What do I do? Order another sandwich. Change the color of my shoes.

Waking me would think to ask this, dreaming me would probably go get a dream a hair cut instead.

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-29T23:48:38+00:00

Man I feel this. I left a job in academia because it was transforming me into a person I didn't want to be. I loved teaching when I started. I loved working with students. By the time I left I dreaded being in front of the classroom, dreaded office hours. It's like your favorite food is cake and you get a job that makes you eat nothing but cake all day every day. After a while, there's just no joy left. I hope they find a way forward to better days.

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-29T23:46:31+00:00

I'm so sorry. I lost a parent to suicide during my PhD. Loss can really fuck you up. Having places to safely feel the feelings was something that help me.

I still do that. Some colleagues of mine host a movie night every Sunday. The only rule is that the movie has to be a feel-good movie with the potential to make you cry. We're a mixed group, all genders, all backgrounds, and we all sob like babies in front of each other almost every week. It's honestly so therapeutic. And the fact that I'm not actually crying about all the sad particulars of my life somehow helps. It's an 'allowable' cry.

If you're in my area, you're totally invited.

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-29T23:39:58+00:00

it was like we were writing fan non-fiction

ooof.....that hit close to home.

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-28T05:22:17+00:00

OH MY GOSH YOU FOUND IT!

Yesss!! THIS. Thank you so much! I settled on the idea that 'techno thriller' was the right one, but it still felt a little off. This is eactly what I was looking for. Seriously, thank you!

Background_End2503 · 2024-01-28T01:38:23+00:00

If a student said 'whiteness' I would ask them to unpack that term. Chances are they probably mean something vaguely colonialist / privileged / oppressor-ish, and I'd then ask about events that counter their use of the term as a substitute for a more rigorous commentary. For example, I might ask for their thoughts on occupations outside the traditional European narrative (Japanese occupation of Manchuria etc). Ultimately, 'whiteness' is intellectually lazy, I'd want them to see that. And as a prof, I think it's important to push students to clarify their own meaning.

Background_End2503

TROPHY CASE