The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tucker:

Neon Fox @30: My mother had a hard time dealing with raising a Martian, but she was never malicious; she hurt me, mostly, out of simply not comprehending me.

It can be understandable, and maybe even forgivable, and still leave scars. That was a hard thing for me to learn.

For me it's that nothing I did was right, or enough, or living up to my potential. Not in a "do better or else" way, just "we're disappointed in you." Couple that with moving every few years so that I didn't learn how to form social bonds, and preferring the company of books to other kids in general, and, yeah. Most of what I know of how to interact in close relationships revolves around doing as much as I can to deserve trust and affection, and alternating between not being "needy" with desperation.

My parents had no idea how to raise me. They did what they could, and what they knew how to do. Sometimes I can manage to not blame them for it.

(Raising a military brat, though, should be grounds for a child abuse prosecution.)

Ruby Anon @5: facebook is a wonderful way to stay nominally on speaking terms with people you're not comfortable seeing or phoning

Oh gosh yes. After a particularly bad weekend back in June I actually added my sister on Facebook, specifically so that I wouldn't have to see her in person again.

Dave @2:
This is typically how these studies are done - they "fool" the subject into thinking it's about something (the election) other than what it's actually about (how people think about probability); this helps mostly erase the effects of people over-thinking whatever thing they believe the study is testing them on.

Oh, of course. That makes sense. I didn't really start analyzing it 'til about halfway through, so I guess they'll get useful information out of me for the first fourteen or so questions anyway.

I'm a Virginian, and I had mostly Wisconsin, Ohio, NJ, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Louisiana. Probably not purely state-based, then. Although I expect they leave out your state (and maybe its immediate neighbors).

Huh. That almost seemed like more of a probability skills quiz. "If people assign probability X% to event A and Y% to event B, what probability do they assign to both events occurring, and is that different from (X*Y)%?" kind of thing. Be interesting to see what comes out of it.

The "supposing" questions make it more interesting than that, of course, since the events aren't independent. (If Obama wins Louisiana, I expect there's a far-better-than-even chance he also wins Ohio, for instance.)

Anonymous Three @133: Cool. I'm glad you had / kept that sense of self intact. I went entirely the other way (contra Velma @114, and Lila @152, any time someone questions my perceptions I automatically assume that I'm wrong); it's relieving to know that some things aren't universal.

pericat @134: And that one /can/ ask for help, and that one shouldn't be expected to be perfect at the age of seven. If hugs are appropriate, consider one offered.

Arachne Jericho @138: I keep meaning to pick up a book on PTSD. I suspect I'm afraid that it'll put me out of commission, emotionally, for a week, in the same way that the milbrat book did.

Also, "strong" never seems like the right word. The obvious response is "i'm not strong, i didn't do anything, i just survived." That's no less something to be praised, though.

Kelly @155: The funny things is that if I don't really examine it too deeply I tend to think of my childhood as having been mostly a happy one. It's only when I let the analytical part of my brain loose on the sub-strata and the memories I don't want to look at that I'm reminded of just how much trauma lies beneath the surface. Funny old place the brain.

Defence mechanisms are wonderful things. Or something like that.

Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @128: You're quite welcome. I'm very glad that you and your husband have the chance to put down those roots.

For a long time I thought in terms of not having places, myself. I couldn't make myself think in terms of not having people, because the way to leave all those people is by deliberately /not/ thinking about them. If you don't think about it, it doesn't hurt, so you push the idea of "leaving people" as far in the back of your mind as you can. Or, I did, at least.

What started me thinking that maybe something was wrong and it wasn't just me being somehow broken, was a book called _Military Brats: Legacies of Childhood Inside the Fortress_. (I have an idea that Terry Karney mentioned it at some point on the old Electrolite; a quick Google brings up Marilee, here, in a thread with a lot of comments by Terry. Entirely possible.) It's drawn from interviews with eighty-some brats, from WWII through I think the late seventies. Some of it's out of date; some of it's frighteningly contemporary and relevant. (I use the word "frighteningly" advisedly. For me, this was a scary scary book.)

* * *

Anonymous Three @131: I started plotting my escape around age 8. I didn't actually manage it until I was 20.

Is that the same thing, though? I spent the last three years I was under my parents' roof planning how to get out. I knew it was bad for me, but I thought of that as a problem with /me/, not with my family.

Nancy Lebovitz @109: Did anyone else from a dysfunctional family know there was something wrong from when you were young?

I grew up Army, which. . . I was going to say "isn't the same thing." It is, though. Just in a different way. And still, it wasn't until shortly before I turned thirty that I started thinking just maybe there was something terribly wrong about an environment that repeatedly and deliberately obliterated all social connections beyond "immediate family."

How can you (the nonspecific global you) possibly know it's not right, when it's all you know?

DUCKMAN: I ever tell you the last thing my father said to me?
CORNFED: Mmm. . . "Careful, son, I don't think the safety's on?"
DUCKMAN: Before that!

* * *

Serge@40: "There are three ways to do things: the right way, the Army way, and my way. . . we will do things MY WAY." --Robert Asprin

21, but that's with a combination of "clearly this is italicised and only one of the choices says 'italic'" and "well, that looks like it ought to be a Rosewood/Playbill/Baskerville." I've heard of maybe a quarter of the fonts in question.

Bruce Cohen @27: "Immortal curmudgeon wages guerilla war with blue aliens that want sex with humans, fights a deadly hashhish-smoking assassin and a giant zombie, and ends up owning Earth."

I read that, blinked, and thought "There's no . . . oh, yes there is," at least twice. Three cheers for Guvf Vzzbegny.

I'm told that TV Guide once summarized _The Omen II_ as "Parents send teenaged Antichrist to military school."

"The policeman isn't there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder." --Richard J. Daly

Except in NYC and Rancho Cordova, where the policeman is now there to create disorder.

Fade Manley @15, Syd @20: yes yes yes to the addition of cinnamon to pancakes and waffles. I've been doing them with "three or four taps cinnamon" for so long now that when Dad makes waffles without them I have to remind myself that they're not /bland/, they're just not cinnamon.

Waffles aren't really any more effort than pancakes, are they? I've never found them to be. My electric non-Belgian two-waffle iron is one of the few kitchen implements I genuinely treasure, along with the griddle of pancaking and the one-serving-pasta pot. I have simple pleasures as far as food goes.

Paul Duncanson @ 109: the Latro books were my first thought as well, probably because I just finished the first two a week or so ago. I have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who read them when they came out and had to sit on that cliffhanger.

And poking about online it appears that the story's not done after Sidon, either. Argh.

TexAnne @ 113: Okay. Not a comparison I'd have ever made, but now that you've spelled it out I can see it. Although I guess I still think of Brokedown Palace as more about the importance of doing /anything/ even when etc.

Hrm. Maybe it's time to reread that one.

TexAnne @ 35:
Brokedown Palace is the same story as The Sun etc.

Er. Um. Are you sure you aren't confusing Brokedown Palace with The Gypsy (co-written with Megan "Robin Hobb" Lindholm)? Because, I mean, I guess I can see how you get from SM&S to BP, if I squint a little bit, but Gypsy uses the framing story from SM&S in its own awesome way.

For Latino SF writers there's the aforementioned Borges and Garcia Marquez. Apart from them, a few years ago Ursula Le Guin put out a rather nice translation of Angélica Gorodischer's _Kalpa Imperial_. (Gorodischer being Argentine, like Borges, and _Kalpa_ being subtitled "The greatest empire that never was.")

Caroline @ 11: Firedoglake, maybe? I have a recollection of someone referring to Digby as 'she' during one of their symposia.

It took me longer than it should have to realise that I was assuming Digby was male because of Howard Beale's picture in the blog's sidebar. *headdesk*

Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo

I’ve had three decades of being told that forms I work in can’t possibly do anything that isn’t cliched and juvenile by their nature, and it got old three decades less five minutes ago. Judging an art by its bad examples isn’t criticism; it’s tossing a grenade into the barrel and then complaining that the fish are dead.

I got into this discussion myself about a week and a half ago. That right there sums up about ten minutes of my rambling, and is witty to boot.

Jon Meltzer @29: it's already happened. "In an interview with The Times, Haugh said she knew of no connection between the killer and her roommate. . . . 'I’ve never seen him,' she said. 'I don’t know his name. Emily didn’t know him, as far as I know.'"

Graah. I still can't really get my head around it all.

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