leah george’s Reviews > Stories of Your Life and Others > Status Update

“When you see a smile that’s genuine, you’ll see beauty. When you see an act of courage or generosity, you’ll see beauty. Most of all, when you look at someone you love, you’ll see beauty. All calli does is keep you from being distracted by surfaces. True beauty is what you see with the eyes of love, and that’s something that nothing can obscure.”

“Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance… Being pretty is fundamentally a passive quality; even when you work at it, you’re working at being passive. I wanted Tamara to value herself in terms of what she could do…not in terms of how decorative she was, I didn’t want her to be passive...”

i think i’d choose to send my kid to a school where they don’t perceive looks too

“…you can’t isolate your kids from the world; they live in an image–obsessed culture. it was around then that the legal challenges to calliagnosia were resolved…We saw calli as an opportunity: what if we could live in an environment where people didn’t judge each other on their appearance? What if we could raise our children in such an environment?”

“For decades people have been willing to talk about racism and sexism, but they’re still reluctant to talk about lookism. Yet this prejudice against unattractive people is incredibly pervasive. People do it without even being taught by anyone, which is bad enough, but instead of combating this tendency, modern society actively reinforces it.”

completed story 7/8: “Hell is the Absence of God”
- not entirely sold on the premise of this one tbh a world where the most extreme concepts of Christianity are like actually real and experienced by the general population sounds terrible
- felt like a writing exercise
- for some reason the idea of these angel visitations causing miracles while simultaneously causing catastrophic damage is really funny to me

“But while Neil avoided the pitfall of blaming God, he never made the jump to loving him; nothing in his upbringing or his personality led him to pray to God for strength or for relief. The assorted trials he faced, growing up were accidental or human in origin, and he relied on strictly human resources to counter them.”

i mean if i came out the womb fucked up like Neil id love to blame god but good for Neil

“Their nonchalant cruelty, their instinctive ability to locate the weaknesses in a victim’s emotional armor, the way their own friendships were reinforced by their sadism”

i sometimes wonder how many of the adults in my life were like this growing up. did u ever grow enough as a person to acknowledge and regret ur shittiness? u don’t hear many people who are honest about being a bully when they were younger

completed VERY SHORT story 6/8: “The Evolution of Human Science”
- like an abstract for a larger story
- the premise of genetically modified “metahumans” and the divide in society created by them is a fun sci-fi idea
- read like a news article from the time so this honestly just seemed like a little creative writing exercise for him but it was cool cause we love ted and everything he does

completed short story 5/8 - “Seventy-Two Letters”
- i was bored and confused at first, but it ended up being really interesting
- interesting to consider a reality where science is all qualitative and they’re approaching this big existential crisis
- the whole golem theme reminded me a lot of the aspect of my job manipulating words for LLMs to better perform tasks (prompt engineering)

completed story 4/8: “Story of Your Life” 🥹
- goosebumps reading the last words of this beautifully brilliant story
- second story so far to make my head spinnnn thinking about the way we think
- i wish i’d read this before watching “Arrival” so I wouldn’t have any expectations and just be completely blown away. it’s a very different rendition of this story but so good!!!