Ask yourself, what would a rat do?
Updates
A short one up top this week as I am (yet again) up against it deadline-wise.
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I’ve got a non-fic piece to get started and finish up in the next few weeks which I’m incredibly excited to dig into. It touches on at least three of subjects I love writing about - architectural design, power structures and video games!
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I’m starting on a draft of a new short story (horror) about the hidden means of production in late stage capitalism. Shenanigans and bottomless nihilistic dread abound!
Links
1) What Your Draft (and Its Problems) Says About You
LitHub on the problems that may face writers between drafts, and what it says about you as a writer. Nifty.
2) How Late Nights Are Killing You and Your Writing
LitReactor argues (correctly) that late nights are having a detrimental effect on your writing and creativity.
3) “When We Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?”: Billie Eilish Conjures Up Nightmares With Her Art
Noah Levine at Bloody Disgusting on the nightmarish qualities of Billie Eilish’s music videos. Case in point:
4) Hopepunk and the New Science of Stress
“I was curious about the underlying reasons behind this surge in interest for tales of hope and resilience—especially framed as resistance to the premise of “grimdark,” where people’s belief in justice and community is often viewed as a fatal flaw (looking at you, Batman). And while there are certainly various cultural factors driving this movement, it’s also helpful to look at what science can tell us about our need for hope and empathy.”
5) Rats are us & Deb Olin Unferth Didn’t Expect to Be Writing From the Point of View of a Chicken
Two pieces from Aeon and LitHub respectively that both touch on the same subject, asking us to be empathetic to creatures we normally pass by when it comes to investing emotion - the rat and the chicken. The Aeon essay in particular is striking and heart warming in its description of such fascinating creatures.
“While this sort of skepticism is usually praiseworthy in scientists, it has been bad news for rats. Since that 2011 experiment, there has been an explosion of different studies that continue to place rats in harmful situations to see if others will help them. They find the same pattern: rats are more likely and quicker to help a drowning rat when they themselves have experienced being drenched, suggesting that they understand how the drowning rat feels. Rats will also help a trapped rat even when they can escape and avoid the situation, something many humans fail to do. The results of these studies are compelling, but they don’t show us much more than what we already suspected from the work done in the 1950s and ’60s – that rats are empathic; meanwhile, the studies have inflicted, and continue to inflict, significant fear and distress on the rats.”
Let that paragraph sink in. Rats are capable of showing more empathy and understanding than a lot of humans do. But still, they continue to be used as test subjects.
“We now know that rats don’t live merely in the present, but are capable of reliving memories of past experiences and mentally planning ahead the navigation route they will later follow. They reciprocally trade different kinds of goods with each other – and understand not only when they owe a favour to another rat, but also that the favour can be paid back in a different currency.”
The LitHub piece is by Deb Olin Unferth and details her efforts to delve into the psyche of the chicken for her latest novel, Barn 8.
“In many ways chickens aren’t terribly different from us. They’re brave, not “chicken,” fierce in defense of their chicks. They’re gregarious and social, inventive. They have all sorts of individual personalities. Chickens were evolving long before we were. Their ancestor, the Gallus, ran though the forests of South-East Asia for 50 million years. They slept in trees, climbing the bark. They passed their wisdom on through the generations. When the glaciers divided them, new species formed. Civilizations of chickens rose and fell. Even today in their stunted, destroyed communities, they have 30 categories of conversation. They have close friendships, creative games, a culture of rituals. They teach their children. Hens sing to their eggs and the embryos twitter back through their shells.”
It’s another perfect example of humanity ignoring or brutalising a species due to its lack of “human” characteristics. However, when we do find evidence of such characteristics we either bury them or choose to willfully ignore them. One can easily extend this notion out into the wider natural world, explaining just how we find ourselves in our current climate predicament.
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I’m off to write, write, write! See you in two.