Critically Distracted By The Question Of Whether Any Option Would Have Any Chance Of Success. Do You

Critically distracted by the question of whether any option would have any chance of success. Do you have time to choose? Do you have presence of mind enough to abort (!) your deeply ingrained muscle memory instead of swinging? Can that pitcher get a baby over the plate? Do you really believe following through will get the baby out of the park?

Most importantly of all, is there time to parse whatever social marker is letting you know in that fractured second that this is specifically a Christian baby and thus for you - being an atheist - a mortal(!) enemy?

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Top Baby Names of the Post-Apocalypse Hellscape

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Baby name: Alara

Gender: Any

Origin: America That Was

Meaning: safe as possible, safety in dangerous place/situation; literally “as low radiation as reasonably achievable”

Etymology:

English (American)

Government Institutional Acronym for the practice of mitigating human exposure to sources of radiation above background level wherever feasible.

First recorded during the Late Was as increasing amounts of testing and leakage began to intrude on public awareness of the Heat. The name became popular almost a century into the After with the return of the first surface dwellings.

Similar to Old Was names like Prudence (English; Christian) and Temperence (English; Christian)

"ALARA" sounds like it should be a name for a baby girl. Her birthstone is uranium dioxide and her star sign is ☢️.

What they don’t tell you about storytelling is that it becomes an instinct over time. You learn how to kind of … intuitively chain events together over time. That doesn’t mean it’s a cakewalk, or that you never get stuck on plotbeats, but you have a better time walking yourself out of corners that you as a less experienced writer would have been tempted to abandon your story over. Because you’ve been stuck in similar corners before; you know how you get out now.

I know its frustrating to keep hitting dead ends, but you got this. You’ll learn a little from every roadblock you hit.

Some spins on the "mostly male team with a token woman" trope:

The woman is trans and stayed in her old circle of bros even after transition

The woman is the only one in her circle of "girls" who didn't turn out to be a trans man

yknow theres a lot of pressure to be successful, particularly on artsy kids whose professions are seen as useless unless theyre famous, but life is fucking hard and sometimes things dont turn out

but i think thats not bad. my dad has wanted to be a musician forever, and hes rly pretty good. but then he joined the military to get away from an abusive family, and then he got married, and then he got divorced, and a lot of horrible shit HAPPENED. he has ptsd and severe anxiety and he could never really get back on the horse. and he never made it as a musician, and now hes 53

but i grew up in a house full of instruments, and he can play all of them, and some of my earliest memories are of him playing guitar on the front porch and me thinking there wasnt a better musician in the world. so. even if you dont get to the stars, exactly, what you do isnt worthless. its not a waste of time if life is difficult and you cant make it, or if you arent famous, or if your work doesn’t influence thousands of people. it will influence someone

there are a million ways to be happy and a million ways to be a successful artist. we create what we do to enhance the human experience and relate to each other and improve ourselves. theres something to be said for just doing that,,,for the sake of doing it, yknow