Emily Wilde — the pitch for literary people

Emily Wilde — the pitch for literary people

1. What kind of book it really is
   Not merely fantasy.
   It is simultaneously:
   
1. A mock academic field journal
   Emily treats faeries as an anthropologist might treat an isolated human culture: observing customs, collecting stories, making dangerous mistakes, and revising her theories.
2. A novel about knowledge
   Can folklore be classified without killing what makes it alive? Can an outsider ever truly understand another culture? What happens when the thing being studied knows it is being studied?
3. A comedy of academia
   Professional rivalry, publication anxiety, obscure scholarly disputes, territorial colleagues, fieldwork disasters—and the magnificent absurdity of believing that correct citation practices will protect you from monsters.
4. A study of narration
   Emily is extraordinarily perceptive about faeries and comically unreliable about human beings, especially herself. The reader understands her emotional life long before she does.
5. A romance between intellectual equals
   Not “brooding man overwhelms shy heroine.” It is affection expressed through argument, collaboration, irritation, rescue, and competing interpretations of evidence.
6. An encounter with genuinely alien minds
   The faeries are not decorative humans with wings. They operate according to beauty, cruelty, bargains, names, hospitality, hierarchy, and story logic rather than ordinary morality.
7. A meditation on scholarship and possession
   Emily wants to record, organize, and explain the Folk—but the book quietly asks whether understanding something also becomes a way of claiming it.
8. A beautifully controlled voice
   Much of the pleasure comes from the gap between Emily’s precise, sober prose and the increasingly impossible events she records as though submitting them for peer review.
2. What might pique their curiosity
   The intellectual hook is:
   Imagine an emotionally repressed Victorian folklorist conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a society where the myths are alive, the research subjects can manipulate reality, and a footnote may be the only thing separating scholarship from catastrophe.
3. A few words for the resisters

Forget “fantasy novel.”

It is an academic comedy, an ethnography of the impossible, and a wonderfully dry character study disguised as a fairy tale. Its heroine can decode the social structure of an inhuman species while remaining almost completely unable to recognize friendship, love, or her own loneliness.

The faeries are not whimsical. They are beautiful, alien, political, cruel, and governed by the logic of stories.

Read twenty pages for the voice. You will know.

Why song recommendations are harder

Yes. Both of those are major reasons. And there are a few more.

Why song recommendations are harder

1. Songs are tiny

A novel gives you hours of signal:

• plot

• prose

• characters

• ideas

• humor

• pacing

• payoff

A song gives you 3–5 minutes.

So a book has many more dimensions available to discriminate taste. A song can be “great” yet still miss because one tiny thing is wrong: vocal timbre, production sheen, chorus shape, lyric phrasing, etc.

2. Repetition changes the object

Books are usually consumed once, maybe reread occasionally.

Songs are consumed:

• once

• 10 times

• 100 times

• for decades

So liking a song is not just:

“Was this good?”

It is also:

“Did this survive repetition?”

That’s a very different target.

3. Songs become autobiographical

This may be the biggest difference.

A song can acquire value from:

• a girlfriend

• a car

• senior year

• a concert

• a TV scene

• a movie

• a bar

• a specific summer

That context can become half the song.

A newly recommended song has none of that history yet.

4. Familiarity itself is pleasurable

There’s a huge mere-exposure / recognition component.

That’s why the “big Billboard songs” experiment suddenly worked better. Even when you didn’t love them, they often had a glimmer.

The obscure recommendations had no foothold.

5. Song taste is more discontinuous

You can love:

• one Cyndi Lauper song

• reject another

• love one Def Leppard-era rock song

• hate Pour Some Sugar on Me

• love one REO song much more than another

So artist/genre-level similarity is weaker.

6. The positive target is rarer

With books, “this is probably a 7–8/10 for Peter” is useful.

With songs, you’re hunting:

the one that becomes part of your life

That is a much narrower target.

7. Your negatives are easier

This is why our PASS model got good quickly.

It’s easier to identify:

• novelty

• lightweight

• certain MOR

• groove without enough substance

• culturally wrong era

• emotionally empty-for-you

than to predict:

“This specific song will become top tier.”

So the real target isn’t “song quality”

It’s closer to:

Intrinsic fit × familiarity × attachability × repetition durability × emotional context

That is way harder than “will Peter enjoy this novel?”

And the funny part is: once we have your iTunes plays/ratings + YouTube list + explicit YES/PASS examples, we actually have enough data to start modeling those factors separately.

🧂

Salt went from strategic commodity → taxed necessity → industrial bulk mineral → almost free food additive.

Core timeline

Era	World pop.	Salt production	Price / scarcity status	Breakpoint
Hunter-gatherer	~1–10M	no “industry”	usually not a trade good	Meat/blood supplied more sodium; salt licks mattered locally.
Early farming, 10k–3k BCE	~5–20M	tiny, local	valuable inland	Grain diet lowered sodium intake; inland humans needed salt sources/trade. Census historical estimates put world population around 5–20M by 5000 BCE.
Bronze/Iron Age	~20–100M	salt pans, brine, mines	high-value trade good	Cities, armies, livestock, cheese, fish/meat preservation.
Rome / Classical	~200–300M	organized regional production	important, but not literally gold	Salt routes mattered; “soldiers paid in salt” is mostly myth. Diocletian’s 301 CE price edict gives salt as an ordinary controlled commodity, not a luxury.
Medieval	~250–500M	bigger coastal/brine works	regionally expensive	Transport + monopoly + taxes dominate price.
Early modern Europe	~500–900M	large saltworks	politically explosive	French gabelle made salt artificially expensive; in 1784 a 49 kg unit reportedly cost 31 sous in Brittany but 591–611 sous in heavily taxed regions — ~20× difference.
1800s	~1B → 1.6B	industrial mines/brine	price collapses	Deep mining, drilling, canals/rail, coal-fired boiling, chemical industry. This is when salt becomes broadly cheap.
1900	~1.6B	tens of millions tons/year	bulk commodity	USGS says in 1900 the U.S. was the world’s largest producer at ~23% of world output; major uses were food, animals, leather, fish/meat preservation, with chemical use beginning.
2000	~6.1B	~200M+ tons/year	very cheap	By 2000, food use was only ~3% of U.S. salt consumption; chemical industry dominated.
2025	~8.1B	~270M tons/year	insanely cheap	USGS estimates 2025 world salt production at 270 million metric tons; U.S. rock salt averaged about $54/metric ton, brine about $11/metric ton at mine/plant.

The big inflection points

1.

Farming made salt more necessary

Hunter diets with meat/blood/organs gave more sodium. Grain-heavy diets made salt a thing you had to seek. Inland farming = problem.

2.

Preservation made salt civilization-scale

Before refrigeration, salt meant:

• fish
• meat
• cheese
• pickles/ferments
• hides/leather
• livestock

So it was not just “seasoning.” It was food storage infrastructure.

3.

Governments made it expensive

Salt was perfect for taxation:

• everyone needed it
• hard to substitute
• easy to monopolize
• easy to inspect/impound

France’s gabelle is the canonical example: not “salt is rare,” but the state turned salt into a tollbooth.

4.

Industrial extraction killed the old price

The real “salt becomes cheap” breakpoint is roughly:

late 1700s → late 1800s

Because of:

• rock-salt mining
• brine pumping
• coal-powered evaporation
• canals/railroads
• steam machinery
• later: chlor-alkali chemical demand

After that, salt becomes a bulk industrial mineral, not a precious foodstuff.

So, when was salt “common enough”?

Best rough answer:

• Coastal people: always relatively available, but labor-intensive.
• Inland premodern people: available through trade, but sometimes expensive.
• Urban medieval/early modern Europe: common, but heavily taxed/monopolized.
• By late 1800s: common and cheap in industrializing countries.
• By 1900–1950: basically modern-cheap.
• Today: absurdly cheap; the expensive part is packaging, branding, transport, and grocery markup — not NaCl itself.

One-line model

Salt was never uniformly “worth its weight in gold”; it was cheap at the source, expensive inland, politically exploitable, then crushed by industrial mining and transport.

ChatGPT on why I love andor

So I have a great recommender trained on what I like. 

So I asked it about andor. 

10/10

2026 - 04 - 30 - IRF and next steps

So john is being moved to IRF - inpatient rehab facility.
I asked my AI to give me the whats next. (it has been trained to give me info in ordered, terse form, aka, a nice simple easy to scan outline) 
Additional details can be found by searching ...

I dont "know" his deficits.  I know that his brain doesn't have full control of his legs, but clearly he's holding a CUP. SO YAY!!  And that alone will help with a walker and a cane and etc etc etc 

My understanding of IRF is that the goal is to get him home. 
Which might be even if he cant do stairs ... he can sleep in the living room while doing outpatient therapy etc etc 

🎉 IRF Day 1–3 (what actually happens)

🧠 Intake + baseline evals

• Neuro check: alertness, memory, attention, orientation

• Speech eval: understanding, speaking, swallowing

• Mood/behavior: motivation, confusion, impulsivity

• Functional cognition: can he follow steps, make decisions

---

💪 Physical eval

• Strength (each limb)

• Balance / sitting / standing

• Walking (if possible)

• Coordination

• Transfer ability (bed ↔ chair 🚶)

---

🧰 Therapy assessments (3 disciplines)

• PT (physical therapy): walking, stairs, endurance

• OT (occupational therapy): dressing, bathroom, hands, daily tasks

• SLP (speech therapy): speech + cognition + swallow

---

🍽️ Swallow + diet

• Test for choking risk

• Set diet: normal / soft / thick liquids / tube support

---

🗺️ Plan + goals

• Team builds a weekly plan

• Typical: 3 hrs/day therapy (split across PT/OT/SLP)

• Set clear targets (e.g., walk 50 ft, speak basic needs, dress self)

---

🏥 Medical stabilization

• Adjust meds (BP, blood thinners, etc.)

• Sleep, pain, bowel/bladder routines

• Prevent complications (clots, falls, pneumonia)

---

⚡ Day-by-day feel

• Day 1: mostly evaluations + light activity

• Day 2–3: full therapy starts, schedule locks in

---

🎯 What matters

• How much he can participate

• How fast he improves day-to-day

• Whether he can tolerate the 3 hrs/day

If you want, tell me his current deficits and I’ll predict his IRF trajectory.
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