Jim C. Hines's Blog, page 24
May 24, 2019
Cool Stuff Friday
Friday is starting a petition to rewrite Monday.
Cat shaming
Melodramatic cats
Majestic llamas and alpacas
May 23, 2019
Geese! (And one not-a-goose)
Last night, I took the camera and visited the ponds by our high school, where the geese have been raising a new crop of cute little poop-monsters.
I posted a few of these pics on Facebook and Twitter, but wanted to share more of them here.
I think somebody spotted me.
Snacking on some yummy dandelion.
I love this family photo.
Just hanging out with the bigger birds…
May 19, 2019
Pregnancy and Biology 101
I originally titled this “Pregnancy 101 for Guys,” but given the state of sex education in the U.S., I suspect many of us need some additional learning regardless of gender. But I’m mostly looking at my fellow guys with this thing, especially with all of the recent debate and discussion. Some of this is information I wish I’d learned sooner. Hopefully it will be helpful to others.
This is a very incomplete list. Factual corrections are appreciated. And if you’ve encountered additional myths that need busting, feel free to add them to the comments. (I considered just turning comments off, but I’ll leave them open for now and we’ll see what happens.)
Periods can’t be turned on and off like a tap.
I don’t even know what to say to this one, which came from a Twitter thread. But, um…
Periods happen when the uterus sheds its lining, resulting in bleeding from the vagina.
Periods generally happen about once a month, and last for about 5 days. Neither of these numbers are exact.
For some people, periods are relatively regular and predictable. For others, not so much.
No, it’s not like peeing. You can’t just “hold it.” WTF is wrong with you, man?
Fertility is cyclical.
About halfway through the menstrual cycle, the ovary releases an egg into the fallopian tube. That egg lives about 12-24 hours after leaving the ovary. If it’s not fertilized, the egg dissolves, and the cycle continues.
This doesn’t mean there’s only a 12-24 hour window when sex can result in pregnancy. Sperm can survive up to five days in the fallopian tubes. If you and your partner have sex, and your partner ovulates two days later, that’s when sperm and egg would potentially meet. In other words, fertilization would occur two days after you had sex.
(This should also help explain why some emergency contraception works by preventing ovulation after sex.)
Conception isn’t instantaneous.
“It can take anything from 45 minutes to 12 hours for a sperm to reach your fallopian tubes, which is where conception usually happens.” (Source)
And once the sperm reaches the egg, “it takes about 24 hours for a sperm cell to fertilize an egg.” (Source)
“X Weeks Pregnant” isn’t the number of weeks from conception.
“Gestational age is the common term used during pregnancy to describe how far along the pregnancy is. It is measured in weeks, from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual cycle to the current date. A normal pregnancy can range from 38 to 42 weeks.” (Source)
In other words, someone who is “six weeks pregnant” has not actually been pregnant for six weeks.
Pregnancy tests don’t work instantly after conception.
“If you are pregnant, your body needs time to develop detectable levels of [human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG)]. This typically takes seven to 12 days after successful implantation of an egg.” (Source)
Healthline advises waiting until the week after your missed period for an accurate pregnancy test result.
If the average menstrual cycle is 28, and gestational age is measured from the first day of the last menstrual cycle, this means you’re already considered to be a minimum of five to six weeks pregnant by the time you get an accurate result from your pregnancy test.
Conception =/= Pregnant.
“Conception doesn’t always mean that a pregnancy will occur and be carried to full term.” (Source)
The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes, “Fertilization, the union of an egg and a sperm into a single cell, is the first step in a complex series of events that leads to pregnancy.” (Source, Emphasis added)
It takes around a week, give or take, for the fertilized egg to implant in the uterine lining.
Whether you agree or disagree — and I have no doubt people will continue to argue this one — the ACOG has stated that “pregnancy begins upon the implantation of a fertilized egg into the lining of a woman’s uterus. This typically takes place, if at all, between 5 and 9 days after fertilization of the egg – which itself can take place over the course of several days following sexual intercourse.”
What is ectopic pregnancy?
In some cases, the fertilized egg implants outside of the uterus, most often in the fallopian tube. “The fertilized egg can’t survive, and the growing tissue may cause life-threatening bleeding, if left untreated.” (Source)
The incidence of ectopic pregnancy is 1-2% in developed countries. (Source)
Ectopic pregnancy is treated with either medication or surgery to prevent the development of the fertilized, implanted egg, in essence terminating the pregnancy.
Pregnancy can be dangerous. Especially in the U.S.
“With an estimated 26.4 deaths for every 100,000 live births in 2015, America has the highest maternal mortality rate of all industrialized countries—by several times over.” (Source)
“African-American, Native American and Alaska Native women are about three times more likely to die from causes related to pregnancy, compared to white women.” (Source)
We have got to do better with health care, people…
May 17, 2019
Cool Stuff Friday
Friday is not throwing away their shot.
Beware of these dogs!
Bird snapchats
Author Chuck Wendig’s recent Instagram feed is > 50% baby foxes!
May 15, 2019
In Other News, Cancer Still Sucks
We found out yesterday that a friend of Amy’s passed away last week from complications of leukemia/lymphoma. From everything Amy says, this was an incredibly good-hearted and compassionate person. So we’ve got the grief over losing a good person, as well as all of the fear this stirs up for our own situation.
Not much has really changed since last month. Amy finished up another round of chemo on Monday, so she’s pretty wiped out. There are some cumulative effects, so the exhaustion and stuff gets a little harder each time, but she’s getting through it.
The next step is another round of scans to see if she’s in remission and decide whether we can move on to the bone marrow transplant. We had a consult with the bone marrow transplant director in Detroit a week or two back. There are still a fair number of unknowns — not only the scan results, but whether her bone marrow is healthy enough for an autologous transplant. That’s where they use the patient’s own stem cells rather than getting a donor, which is what we’re hoping for. (Faster recovery, no rejection issues.) But her younger brother will be getting tested to see if he’s a match, just in case.
We meet with the oncologist again tomorrow. Hopefully we’ll get things scheduled soon, because all this waiting and uncertainty sucks.
I’ve been continuing to work to get the house ready. Chemo suppresses the immune system, and bone marrow transplant does the same, so there’s a lot of worry about potential infections and such. We’ve got people ripping out the gross carpet in the basement today, replacing it with vinyl laminate that should be a lot more sanitary. I’ve done a lot of dusting and cleaning and decluttering. It’s never going to be hospital-level sanitary, but we’re making progress.
I think we’re all feeling a bit burnt out by everything, but we’re getting through.
May 10, 2019
May 7, 2019
Obligatory Endgame Post, Mostly About Thor
I managed to make it out to see Endgame on Sunday 98% spoiler-free! Good timing, too. Later that night, I stumbled across at least three different spoilers on Twitter and Facebook.
General impression: I liked it better than Infinity War. Nothing about Endgame really shocked me, but I had fun, and it’s an impressive capstone to a decade of storytelling over 22 movies.
All right, spoiler stuff beyond the cut tag…
My first thought while watching was that Endgame had more emotion in the first two minutes than I had throughout the dustpocalypse at the end of Infinity War. For some reason, watching all those heroes vanish and knowing it was a cliffhanger and they’d be coming back, it just didn’t do much for me. But seeing Clint and his family, knowing what was about to happen… Ouch.
There’s a lot more I could talk about. Loved Captain America getting some hammer time. Disappointed by how little Captain Marvel was utilized. Mixed feelings about the existence of “rebooted” Loki and Gamora running around with much of their character development erased.
But like I said, I mostly want to focus on how the writers and directors chose to portray Thor: fat, drunk, and hopeless. It’s a choice that could have been so powerful…
I appreciate stories that don’t shy away from consequences. I loved that Iron Man 3 addressed Tony Stark’s PTSD after the events of Avengers.
Of all the Avengers, Thor has arguably suffered the most by the time of that five-year jump in Endgame. His entire world was destroyed. Most of his Asgardian friends were killed by his sister. Only two ships’ worth of Asgardians escaped, and half of those survivors were then slaughtered by Thanos…who also murdered Thor’s brother in front of him.
After all that, Thor nearly dies to get a weapon that would allow him vengeance for everything Thanos took. Once again, he fails. Thanos lives, and half the universe dies an instant later as a result.
When the Avengers find Thanos and learn the stones are gone, it breaks Thor. His one last chance at redemption, gone. “I aimed for the head.” It’s one of the most painful, powerful lines in the movie. (Major props to Hemsworth for his delivery.)
Five years later, Thor is still broken. He doesn’t go out, doesn’t interact with the world. He hides in food and drink — both indulgences he’s demonstrated plenty in the past, though not to this extent. He lives with Korg and Miek, seemingly be the only two characters who don’t pressure him to be Thor the God and Hero.
And how does the movie handle Thor’s pain and trauma? With quips about Cheez Whiz. By doubling down on the “fat slob” stereotype. By falling back on the same tired, unfunny fat jokes that get recycled again and again by sitcom writers too lazy to reach for anything but bottom-shelf cruelty.
Screw that. I would love to see Thor both heroic and fat, assuming we see him in any future Marvel films. Why should he need to have the same cookie-cutter pecs and abs as every other male comic book hero? He’s Asgardian. Volstagg was one of the mightiest warriors on Asgard, and he was even heavier than Thor. Thor’s the God of Thunder. You think thunder and lightning give a flying spark what your BMI is?
(Side note: BMI is crap.)
In some ways, it felt like Endgame was trying to continue some of the humor we saw in Thor: Ragnarok without understanding that humor. Ragnarok didn’t make Thor into a joke. There are moments when he’s the butt of the humor, sure — flinging a ball into the window, only to have it bounce back and knock him on his ass. Going from Angry God to frightened man when Stan Lee gets ready to cut his hair.
But there are at least two important differences. The first is that Ragnarok did more than just go for laughs at Thor’s expense. Thor was a fully-fleshed character. He grieved. He fought. He played the trickster almost as well as Loki a time or two. Whereas Endgame Thor feels, if not one-dimensional, then definitely much flatter than before.
The second difference is that the humor in Ragnarok wasn’t about making fun of Thor; it was about undercutting arrogance. Pretty much every time any character in that movie gets too full of themselves, something happens to undermine them. Bruce Banner makes his dramatic proclamation to Valkyrie, “You know who I am,” and steps dramatically from the ship…only to land like a discarded rag doll. Valkyrie’s own introduction shows her as a badass for five whole seconds before she topples over sideways.
Thor has always had an arrogance about him — often justifiably so, perhaps — but it’s that arrogance and pride Ragnarok pierced with such delightful fun and precision. A continuation of Thor’s journey from the very first movie, when he was first forced to learn humility.
Endgame‘s Thor humor has none of that depth. It undercuts the character instead of developing him.
Like I said, I liked this movie. I thought it did a lot of things well, and I’m enough of a fanboy to enjoy the moments that were clearly fanservice. (Though I really don’t think they needed to squeeze every last character from every Marvel movie into it.)
But the mishandling of Thor? That was disappointing. We deserve better.
May 3, 2019
Cool Stuff Friday
Friday only needs to dodge spoilers for another two days!
Northern Lights pics
This week, in cats
Sleeping puppers
April 26, 2019
April 23, 2019
The Umbrella Academy (Spoilers)
I finally got around to watching The Umbrella Academy on Netflix, after hearing lots of mostly-positive comments and reviews. Naturally, I must now share ALL OF MY OWN COMMENTS AND REVIEWS. Such is the nature of the internet…
I mostly enjoyed it, though the ending felt empty and unsatisfying.
Details behind the spoiler cut…
All right, let’s start with:
Stuff That I Liked
Klaus. It took a couple of episodes for him to grow on me, but by the end, Klaus had become one of my favorite characters. I loved his fear and his vulnerability — not to mention his fashion sense. He struggles so hard to face up to his demons, and I loved the payoff at the end where he starts to discover new aspects to his powers.
Family Dysfunction. Not that I like dysfunctional families, per se, but I thought the show did a better job than most in its portrayal. In the very first episode, after the children are lashing out at each other and so obviously hurt and angry and broken, having Luther turn on the music and seeing everyone dancing — alone, but also together in one home — felt like such a great image of a messed-up family. They’ve all suffered under an abusive father. They’ve all coped in their own ways. They care about each other, but their coping mechanisms clash hard, and they’ve hurt each other a lot. I thought the show pulled it off better than most.
Five. I’m really impressed with Aidan Gallagher’s acting skills. I thought he did a great job portraying an old, bitter, broken killer trapped in a kid’s body. Watching him, I never lost the suspension of disbelief and thought, “Oh, he’s just a kid.” Five may be a jerk with no compunctions about killing, but he’s a jerk determined to save his family (and the world, if he can).
Other Miscellaneous Stuff…
Allison using her powers on her daughter. Totally not okay, but it felt real and honest, and Allison had to face the consequences for that choice.
The musical choices were generally wonderful, from the older pop stuff to Vanya’s violin performances.
I appreciated that we got minimal backstory and pretty much just jumped into the weirdness. It might make it harder for some people to get into the story, but I liked it.
Hargreeves’ suicide. He killed himself to bring the kids back together? Okay, Hargreeves was an asshole, but I didn’t see that coming.
The relationship between Hazel and Cha-Cha. So messed up.
The Not So Good
Too-Powerful Women Should be Suppressed, Lest They Destroy the World. Vanya’s story felt like a play-by-play retread of X-Men 3, watching an older man suppress and erase any memory of a young girl’s abilities because she’s “too powerful.” There are so many other choices they could have made to tell this story, and this one both annoys and bores me.
That Ending. Basically, it didn’t feel like an ending to me. There was very little resolution or emotional satisfaction. After everything they set up this season, how much of it is now going to be undone? Season one ends up feeling more like backstory and prologue to the “real” story.
Luther. His character just didn’t work for me. I didn’t get a real sense of why he was chosen to be Number One, or why he wanted to be a leader, or why he was so loyal to Professor Hargreeves, or pretty much anything. And why the heck was he on the moon? I wish the show had developed his character more.
Other…
“The Day That Wasn’t.” I dislike this kind of story, where we show you the good stuff the characters could have, then magically erase it all via time jumps or whatever. It just feels empty to me.
Leonard Peabody. Aka, Syndrome, redux. Slimy dude happens to find Hargreeves’ notebook and uses it to … what was his big plan? To create a supervillain? Kill the other siblings? Like Luther, he just felt bland.
The Extra
I did read the first two Umbrella Academy collections after I finished watching. That adds a whole new layer of surreal WTF to the story. Some of it probably wouldn’t have worked with the Netflix format, but I’m curious how many details they plan to bring in later. Hargreeves as an alien? Superintelligent goldfish? Reality-revealing monocle?
#
Anyway, those are my semi-organized thoughts. I did enjoy it, and I’ll be watching season two when it comes out.
What did you think?
