Haybitch Abersnatchy
Bio
I'm just a poor girl, from a poor family; spare me this life of millennial absurdity. I also sometimes write steamy romances under the pen name Michaela Kay such as "To Wake A Walker."Stories (45/0)
Apples and Oranges
The first instance of the word “orange” in the English language was in 1512. Contrary to the clever quip you’d heard before, the English language did have words for the color orange before that—saffron and yellow—saffron used to refer to yellowish hues, and red-yellow used to discuss redder hues. Of course, many of the colors we traditionally think of as orange were simply categorized as red, giving us the strange phenomenon of red deer, robin redbreast, and red hair.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Filthy
Same Ol' Skinjobs
I have to preface all of this by admitting that I am a huge Phillip K. Dick fan. I’m often ambivalent or angry about adaptations to his work, largely because surrealist science fiction usually doesn’t survive the Hollywood turnstile without being stripped down to wacky technology and action scenes. The original Blade Runner is no exception, but of the many adaptations of Dick’s stories, it is one of the few that attempts to impart the tone of the original. The cynical noir surrealism is a perfect fit for a story that explores what it means to be human in a dehumanizing society.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Geeks
Guns Among Us
I wish I could say I’d been blindsided by the most recent shooting, but I’m old enough to remember Columbine and frankly, the horror has become mundane. Sometimes I wonder if this was the way New Yorkers felt in the 80s, when muggings were so commonplace as to be a running joke. I could quote statistics about gun crime and domestic terror to fill a thousand articles, but we have all already seen the data. We know that there is something wrong about the rate of gun crimes in America, we don’t need depersonalized numbers to bring that home.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in The Swamp
Will Boys Be Boys?
I have a male friend who paints his toenails. He prefers glitter polish, usually in blues or purples. He is meticulous about his nails, refusing to wear sandals if his polish is chipped or grown out. He prefers shirts with beautiful abstract patterns and bright colors. He would really like to dye his hair a bright color - neon green would be his ideal. Since by now you have a good mental image of this 6’2” 250 lb guy, I feel like I need to clarify that he is straight.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Humans
Where the Body Ends and the Self Begins
In a few months we will be able to see the first human head transplant. After years of preparation and planning, surgeons hope that the procedure, successful or not, will lead to new treatments for the severely disabled. The procedure itself will be a grueling thirty six hours, and if the early tests on mice are any indication, the volunteer patient might only have a few hours to enjoy his new body. Other researchers point to other dangers that might arise, including a real possibility that the severely damaged spinal cord nerves might trigger unimaginable, permanent pain. Regardless, the surgeons are moving forward in what they hope will be a great leap for science.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Futurism
- Top Story - August 2017
All Hail The Robot OverlordsTop Story - August 2017
Elon Musk thinks that we are on the brink of a Robopocalypse. With machine learning making leaps and bounds, it is easy to understand his fear. We’ve had warnings enough since Asimov’s day that as artificial intelligence outpaces our own ability to learn, it will become increasingly hard for us to control it. In the same way that our motivations are foreign and incomprehensible to the dogs and cats that we keep as pets, an artificial intelligence would desire things that we cannot begin to understand.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Futurism
White Shock in the Face of Racism
Growing up in suburban Utah, I didn’t give much thought to race. I didn’t think of my whiteness as a luxury or think about the fact that despite attending a school that was in a primarily Hispanic neighborhood, I didn’t have any Hispanic friends. Although the Mormon church had a rocky and troubled history with black members, that was in the past—during the civil rights movement, church policy had been changed to be more welcoming. It was over. Civil rights had solved racism. It was important to be polite to people, but it wasn’t like those few suburban black kids I knew had experienced a dramatically different life than I had. Though I had relatives who complained about those “immigrants” who wouldn’t learn English, obviously their complaint had nothing to do with skin color.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in The Swamp
Poor Girl's Guide to Side Gigs That Work
Side hustles are the millennial way of life, and reporters are eager to point it out. Of course, back when I first started my first “side hustle” it was just called a second job, and everyone felt sorry for the fact that I needed two jobs to pay the bills. At the time I had a part time job that I desperately needed to be full time. So, instead of one full time job, I had two 30 hour jobs. It was hectic, but it worked. It’s a story we all know pretty well.
By Haybitch Abersnatchy7 years ago in Journal