Alright nerds, today we are going to discuss headphone etiquette.
You walk into your favorite hang out joint and you see a dear friend. How grand! However, you see their headphones are in use and you have not the slightest clue how to approach them. Here is a helpful guide on how to decipher the code.
Both headphones on/earbuds in: Leave them alone, especially if they are hunched over a laptop, a book or their phone. This means they do not want to be disturbed. It is okay to give a small wave, head tilt or smile as acknowledgement.
One earbud is out: This means said person is listening out for something and not fully engaged with what is being listened to. You may approach, but watch for body language that says ‘leave me alone’. Examples are: crossed arms, little to no eye contact, short one word answers.
Headphones/earbuds out: You may approach! This one is not enjoying music/audio books on their device currently, and it is deemed okay to talk to said person.
Note: If someone sees you, and takes off their music delivering device from their head, that means they desire to talk to you! Smile, and enjoy a lovely conversation.
You taking off my headphones/earbuds: Run. Because no jury will convict me.
I see you trying to trip me up and all I have to say is:
I hope this is as weird as you expected it to be. I feel like it fits the tone of the song. Two OTP’s, even though only half of each
pairing is present, and I guess this is more like…the start of plot than just an OTP thing.
“Once upon a time, there was a girl,” the
girl with the long hair murmurs, “and what no one knew was that the King of the
Goblins had fallen in love with the girl, and he had given her certain
powers. Which I thought included a sense of direction, but clearly not,” she adds
with a scowl, her helmet tucked under one arm and her hip propped against the
motorcycle behind her. “Snickers, where
are we?”
The goblin in question peers out of her pack—where
she firmly stuffed him out of sight because wow
she is not explaining that to any cops who happen to pull her over—and stares,
wide-eyed, up at the town in front of them.
It looks…odd. The town, not the
goblin, Snickers looks pretty much how he normally does except slightly less
chocolate-smeared, because it’s been a good six hours since their last stop at
a gas station and his beloved candy bars have since run out. But the town…
Well.
Sarah’s not going to call the Arbys with the glowing lights overhead,
the park in the distance surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with barbed
wire (helpfully labeled ‘Dog Park: Do Not Enter, Look At, or Think About’ to
Sarah’s unusually good eyes), or the house apparently under a pillar of divine
light the weirdest thing she’s ever seen.
But she’s maybe considering adding it to the list.
AU where Grantaire is a hugely famous and successful fashion designer aged thirty (like, Alexander McQueen famous), who owns this international multi-billion dollar fashion house, but is also hugely famous for the fact that he’s anonymous, like, only ten trusted people at the top know his real name (one of them is probably Eponine, no, its definitely Eponine, she is his PA), everyone else knows him just as R, most of the people working for him have never even seen him. Outside of his fashion house he lives with Joly, Bossuet and Musichetta (he also owns their building which is why the rent is so low but shush they don’t know), who just think he’s their little cynic artist, like, they have no clue what he does because he’s just so vague when asked, ‘sell art shit’ is his usual response. And they keep asking him to come to Les Amis meetings but he just refuses every time.
And so one day he’s working on this really big collection that’s based on the Greek Gods and Eponine rings him one day and is like ‘we’ve found Apollo’, and texts him pictures of Enjolras (whose parents cut him off as usually happens in fanfic, and who Courfeyrac pushed into modelling part time because ‘you are the most beautiful human to exist you’ll make enough doing a week to retire for life’) and Grantaire’s just like ‘Eponine how much photoshop was used no one is that beautiful’ ‘Well see if he lives up to the photos yourself he’s over to your office’ ‘I’m not even at my office’ ‘well get the fuck over there’. And of course Enjolras doesn’t really want to be there because, even though R’s house is really famously progressive and actually does plus-sized stuff it’s still the fashion industry, it’s still a steaming pile of elitist shit. So they get arguing and it gets incredibly heated and after half an hour of outright yelling Grantaire just plays a klaxon noise on his computer and shouts ‘you are hired’, pressing the intercom ‘Eponine I’ve hired the guy, go show him the ropes’.
So begins a month of sexual tension, incredibly argumentative flirting, or flirty arguing, clothes designing and angst. (Grantaire also just keeps gifting Enjolras clothes and Courfeyrac just whines that its not fair that Enjolras gets all that couture when he doesn’t even appreciate it ‘look at this leather jacket Enj, it is one of a kind, it has been perfectly tailored for you, this is the bespoke of bespoke, we do not leave it on the floor!’)
And finally one day after the Joly-Bossuet-Musichetta trio have wheedled and whined and poked and prodded Grantaire for a week he finally throws up his hands and says ‘if it’s at a bar and I can drink I will come to your stupid activist meeting’. So they head off and its all nice and the leader isn’t there yet so they introduce him to everyone and they all chat and make friends and Grantaire thinks ‘this isn’t bad, I may enjoy myself’. Then Courfeyrac looks towards the door and says brightly ‘ah here comes our fearless leader’. And Grantaire looks over as well and the fearless leader is, of course, Enjolras and Grantaire just thinks ‘of all the activist groups in France my friends frequent the same one that my crush and employee who I argue with on a daily basis runs, of course’. And Enjolras comes over and stops still, Combeferre starts to introduce him and Enjolras just stops him and is like ‘R what are you doing here!?’ and everyone’s like ‘you know each other?’ and Enjolras turns to Combeferre and Courfeyrac and says ‘this is my boss’.
Everything goes to shit for an hour.
The meeting never actually happens.
They’re too busy interrogating Grantaire.
‘You own R? You’re R! We’ve lived with you since college and you never told us!’
‘You’re R! Your clothes are works of art I am not worthy!’
‘How did you keep this secret for ten years!’
‘I am going to kill Eponine I can’t believe she never told us!’
*Courfeyrac is cannot evening*
‘Grantaire I am legitimately impressed by your ability to maintain a double life, have you ever considered fighting crime?’
‘How did you not know I ran this activist group! How!’
‘You own our fucking building! You give us rent money every month! You pay yourself to live in your own flat!’
Eventually things calm down. Eponine is not allowed to live down the fact that she knew everything and never told anyone.
Everyone begins operation ‘get E and R together’. Chaos ensues, Enjolras and Grantaire get together, life is good.
Grantaire ends up hooking Courf up with clothing that hasn’t even reached the stores yet.
Courf also models part time because Of course Courf always puts on his best clothes and practically poses whenever Grantaire comes in a room and eventually he just sighs and is just
“If I let you model my new line, will you please stop acting like a tool?”
*excited Courf noises*
Chetta convinces R to make a sexy sleep wear for both men and woman AND OF COURSE HE HAS THE TRUSTY POLY TRIO MODEL DOWN THE RUNWAY IN IT BECAUSE FUCK IT //Enjolras also models, but he ends up not wearing it long after he gets off the catwalk//
He gifts feuilly so many different kinds of comfortable and stylish work clothes.
He also makes Bahorel fitted and high quality work out gear
Marius gets socks as an inside joke, but does end up giving him the occasional suit for dates
Cosette gets dresses. All the dresses.
Entertainingly someone asked me for more headcanons (yours are awesome btw) when I originally made this post, so I came up with the story of how Cosette managed to blackmail Grantaire into designing her a wedding dress for free.
And this is like, the most beautiful Disney princess dress.
It is something along these lines:
But definitely once Grantaire is outed as the fashion designer R he just throws clothes at everyone.
Especially Jehan.
He has been holding back on it for so long but Jehan needs someone who can actually fashion to do his clothes.
Grantaire doesn’t particularly care that Jehan dresses in an outlandish, loud and ridiculously flamboyant manner, he just cares that Jehan has the fashion sense of a blind raccoon, so designs an extensive, coherent wardrobe of snazzy, flowy, loud and flamboyant clothes.
It also explains several things, such as ‘I knew the van Gogh in the hall was real! Grantaire you little shit you convinced me it was a copy for four years!’ for the trusty poly trio.
Life with them is just ridiculous for R for several weeks after the big reveal.
Because they keep just asking him shit ‘what else didn’t we know!’ ‘Do you have a long lost twin?’ ‘Are you married?’ ‘Is Grantaire even your real name?’ ‘If you own the building why don’t we live in one of the biggest flats, Mrs. Simplice from No. 55 has a motherfucking ballroom, why can’t we have a ballroom!’ ‘What do you even do with all your money!’ You lied to us for ten years, how can we ever trust you again!’ *Joly looks at his coffee* ‘I don’t even know if this is actually decaf, I don’t know anything anymore, my best friend has been lying to me for all these years!’
They are so melodramatic and R is so done with their shit.
Once they come out, Jack starts wearing a tshirt that reads “My boyfriend is a hockey player”
Okay but just imagine with me…Jack comes out but doesn’t introduce Bitty to the public at large. And when he wears the t-shirt…like oh my god, the gossip and speculation! People are throwing out all kinds of names! Crosby, Seguin, Mashkov, and even Parson! Every day it’s some one new! (The Falconers, who are very familiar with Bitty, take great delight in informing Jack as to who the media thinks his boyfriend is that day).
snowy: yo Zimmboni, you didn’t happen to have dinner with Malkin last night, did you?
Jack: yeah, Geno and I were catching up, it’s been a while
Tater: why you not invite me? I thought I was your sexy Russian boyfriend
poots: hold on guys the wifi won’t connect and we need to see who’s in the top boyfriend spot today
snowy: i got 4G, how the hell am I not ahead of ovechkin he’s ancient and I have most of my teeth
Tater gets “I am Zimmermann’s boyfriend” t-shirts made and raises a LOT of money for charity, because a bunch of very famous NHL players all wear them at once in an I am Spartacus situation that brings Instagram to a grinding halt for three days.
i don’t understand what people don’t understand about harry becoming an auror. he spent his whole adolescence not being able to trust the ministry to do their jobs properly and having no power to change things for the better. do you really think he’d just be able to kick back and live a normal life, putting his trust in the government after all he went through? do you think there are any lengths he wouldn’t go to to make sure his friends and family were safe? if you want things done right, do them yourself. did you all read the same books as me? because i’m pretty sure that the harry potter who i read about would never just stand back and watch other people run things when he could be directly involves in making positive changes for making the world a safer place.
He’s always been a doer, not a speaker - he’s got a saving people thing - he hates being stared at (unless he’s playing Quidditch) - he would want to actively help take down evil, not stand in a classroom every day. It’s so obvious to me, IDK.
Ghostbusters villain:
I WAS A SOCIAL OUTCAST! NO ONE RESPECTED ME OR ADMIRED ME! THEY SAID I WAS WEIRD! THEY SAID I WAS CRAZY! THEY SAID I DIDN'T FIT IN! THEY TREATED ME LIKE I WASN'T WORTH ANYTHING!
Erin:
Uh. Hi. I'm a woman working in a STEM field...
Abby:
...likewise and not stick-thin enough for some people.
Holtzmann:
STEM too and kinda gay.
Patty:
I'd be here all day.
Ghostbusters villain:
NO ONE HAS SUFFERED AS I HAVE SUFFERED!
Due to a typo, your local store/mall/etc. put out a request for an appearance by Satan instead of Santa. He follows through with the request.
He shows up and reads through the entire job contract, notes the spelling ‘Santa’ and just corrects each one with a red pen. He eyes the mall representative, who is sweating bullets, but says nothing about the fact that the contracts he’s making are with children, or that they don’t involve souls of any kind. He signs on the bottom line in a strange, bony quill. There’s a strange red flash, and the mall rep is super reluctant to ask. Or touch the contract.
Satan wears the red suit and the hat and the boots, if awkwardly (those cloven hooves, don'tchaknow).
The elves stand well away, but he’s hardly bothered by that, casually waiting on a throne that’s far more cheerful and composed of significantly less bone than the one he’s used to.
The children are hesitant at first, until a little girl marches up, sans-parents, and plops herself on his knee, looking up at him with the set jaw of someone who isn’t interested in this farce.
“I want a pony,” she says with a roll of her eyes. She’s no more than nine. He arches an eyebrow
“Do you?” he asks. She scoffs.
“Tch, no, but you’re just a man in a suit, it’s not like you can’t get me what I want.”
He smiles at her assertiveness and steeples his fingers, careful not to jostle her from her perch.
“Try me.”
She narrows her eyes at him, studying his inscrutable face before folding her arms.
“There’s a bully at my school, and I want him to go away,” she said. His eyebrow arched a little higher and he tilted his head.
“And if I do this, I believe the standard contract is that you will be a ‘good girl’ and behave appropriately towards your most favored parent?’ he replied. The child rolls her eyes.
“Yeah, sure,” she says. He nods and holds out his hand, which curls around hers entirely when she puts hers out.
“It will be done.”
After that, the children are a lot less hesitant, although several adults attempt to leave. Several hundred bargains are made. For toys. For new family. For present family to suffer. For puppies. And kittens. For understanding. For acceptance.
He declines anything borne of pettiness - of momentary squabbles between jealous children - and redirects them towards more productive desires.
He turns away anyone over the age of eighteen, though several adults attempt to approach. Later they are plagued with horrible nightmares.
At the end of each day, he returns to the underworld and assembles teams of demons, handing out assignments to each of them, to be researched heavily and then executed the night of December 24th. The demons are confused, but do as they’re told, because the dark lord’s edicts are undeniable. His secretary gives him an odd look, but Satan is immune to searching looks, and says nothing, just retires to his room, gets up in the morning, has his coffee, and returns to the mall, donning the suit and heading for the chair.
At the end of the week, he has made more than a thousand deals. The demon hordes are scurrying back and forth between hell and the physical plane.
There are many confused parents, come Christmas morning. Some find themselves with various pets they don’t remember registering for. Others with children. Others still find that their children have undergone some sort of personality shift, to the delight of their siblings.
The first girl is bitter in her heart as she opens gifts, until a letter is personally delivered by a strange mailman, detailing the removal of a teacher from the school she attends. She reads and rereads the letter after her parents finish with it, heart beating strangely lighter in her chest. Her parents are bemused and delighted about the hugs she gives them, and about the enthusiasm with which she ravages her other presents.
They are far less bemused by the black, hellfire-maned pony that is left on their doorstep, a tag attached to the pommel of the saddle that reads, ‘To Katie, Regards, Satan’
if you give me a task with no deadline i will literally never do it but if you give me a deadline i will get it done exactly 1 hour before the deadline even if the deadline is in six years
god dammit my tags got cut off AGAIN I’m hitting the tag limit on like every post lately, I really need to work on that
Anyway I went on to say that there are 5 major executive functions of the human brain. These are the ‘higher functions’ that really distinguish between a human brain and that of any other animal. We have added intelligence on top of that, but these are the functional abilities our brains have that the rest of the animal kingdom does not have on a a structural level. There are 5 of them. ADHD affects all 5. And none of them are actually ‘attention’ (the closest function to anything that can reasonably be called ‘attention’ is what’s called Working Memory, which is your brain’s ability to hold a specific task in mind to come back to it; distractions are inevitable, but a healthy brain will hear a phone ring, look up, and remember to go back to what it was doing before. An ADHD brain will hear the phone riBANG ALL MEMORY OF THE CURRENT TASK IS GONE. ADHD brain looks up, sees the name on the caller id, oh it’s an unknown number, oh it’s probably some political pollster, oh man this year’s election is just awful I can’t believe people are supporting that angry cheeto. Oh cheetos I’m hungry I should go make a snack. What kind of snacks do we have? Did I remember to buy cereal at the store the other day? What about dog food? Oh my god I forgot to let the dog back in the house this is why I should have gotten a cat. Oh my friend sent me a great cat video earlier I should watch that. AND GUESS WHAT YOU NEVER GO BACK TO WHAT YOU WERE DOING BECAUSE THE STRUCTURE IN YOUR BRAIN THAT SUPPORTS RETURNING TO A PARTIALLY COMPETED TASK DOES NOT EXIST THE WAY IT DOES FOR A NORMAL HEALTHY BRAIN. This is why even if you start a task well before a deadline you can’t keep to it until it’s been completed; the consequences of it being done MUST be more compelling than everything else in the immediate environment for the brain to see it. No matter how much time you give yourself to complete the task, if you have ADHD it will take you 100% of that time, every time, which is why having ADHD actually TEACHES YOU to put things off, because it’s the only way to shorten the total time actually spent completing the task – the disorder rewards you for self-destructive behavior because it’s the only way you can get things done at all, and you end up living in a permanent state of extreme stress, hopping from one emergency deadline to the next even though you hate yourself for it every single time). The disorder has been horribly named in a way that trivializes just how serious and life-ruining it actually is.
ADHD is a very, very serious disorder and the pop psych/common understanding of it makes it seem HORRIBLY trivial compared to the real damage it actually does to people’s lives.
…
…
…ohhh…
This is both fascinating and… possibly slightly alarming.
Yeah, so, I’m on break and I have like All The Prompts to work on and I’m writing a Hanukkah fic for the Scarlet Witch and I have a chapter of a WIP to work on, but also my aunt outed me to my grandparents and I am so fucking tired of my family. So I’m a little drunk, I’m watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and I do what
I want. Crossposted to AO3.
The witches were always so careful to tie
Hansel up. Apparently, it was something
about the height, and the leather, and possibly the attempting-to-murder them. Hell if Hansel cared what their logic was. It was uncomfortable—his wrists aching in
their shackles, every muscle in his shoulders screaming at the constraint, the
muscles in his legs spasming as he struggled to rest his weight on his toes—but
he had been uncomfortable before. This
didn’t even make the list of the most discomfort he’d ever been in. Ben was coming unglued beside him, locked
tidily into a cell with his hands shackled as he shook and tried to bargain
with the witch as she sharpened a knife.
They’d barely been here an hour, for the love of God, and she’d only managed
to snag half of them—Gretel and Edward were still out and about.
“You’re not going to get anywhere, kid,”
Hansel sighed, and Ben whipped around to look at him.
“I’m not—aren’t you concerned about this?” Ben demanded, voice cracking.
so the thing about my family is that we have two ancestors on my dad’s side who were buried in france, where I currently live. one died in the spanish civil war, and one died prior doing…we don’t know what. but he somehow managed to get buried in père lachaise.
so anyhow, my gran sends me a message like “pls put flowers on ur uncle samuel’s grave because he’s gone over a century with none and it will make the ghost mad if he hasn’t already” because my family spends time in europe but never long enough to go all the way to père lachaise and give ya boy samuel jr. his death rites. so im like “ok gran I can do that” bc im a good grandson and you do not fuck with gran she doesn’t DESERVE THAT
i figure out which plot he’s on and ask someone specifically where you can find uncle samuel jr. and they tell me where and so I arrive at the junction and.
HE GONE.
WHERE DID YOU GO UNCLE SAMUEL.
*celine dion’s smash hit “my heart will go on” playing in the distance*
in other words either someone stole my entire great great uncle samuel or he has risen again, ready to party in paris for all of eternity.
You’re pretty chill about a corpse disappearing.
My guy, my dude, he’s been dead since 1851. He could be anywhere. He does what he wants.
You know that soulmate AU trope where the first thing your soulmate(s) says to you is some how magically engraved on your wrist? Why are those stories set in worlds that are otherwise socially normal?
I mean really. If everything was exactly the same except for this trope think of how many people would have hello written on their wrist. Think of how many people would meet the wrong person but hit it off anyway and think well this must be my soulmate(s) because we get along more or less. Think of how many people would get married and have a life and a dog and like start up some kind of artisanal meat market or something and then find out that they married the “wrong” person. Like, people wouldn’t be signing prenups, this is your soulmate it should last forever. So now you’re stuck in this crazy legal battle with your fake soulmate while your real soulmate is like trying to fend off people who also have hello on their wrist and think they’re making the wrong choice. Divorce lawyers would probably make it big in this hypothetical world.
But. I don’t think the above is actually all that likely when you consider that this would be a world where everyone knows that the first thing you say to your soulmate(s) is on your wrist. I think a whole world of this trope would basically teach people that you don’t say hello to strangers.
Instead you blurt out something very original. Last thursday I ate a live worm! I own a collection of glass eyes! I’m secretly a super villain and this is my android body! You know. Distinctive. Something that isn’t likely to be ambiguous.
Think of the possibilities. Think of a society that celebrates truly unique first words. People could see someone and spend hours agonizing over what ridiculous thing they want their first words to be. An unusual metaphor for your undying love? A declaration about how much you like snails? A compliment no one could have ever possibly said to them before? Your nose is a glorious rendition of the Summer Triangle.
Kids would grow up being encouraged to say outlandish things. You wouldn’t be told to stop saying silly things. You would be told to make sure not to copy the silly things your friend said. Think of how careful parents would be about introducing very young children to new people. Kids that are too young might meet their soulmate and not realize it. They could miss their one chance because they were too busy fighting over a little mermaid eraser.
What about people who can’t read? What about people who are blind?
You wouldn’t say sorry if you bumped into someone on the street. You’d either stay silent or shout something oddball out first, I shove lilacs up my nose. and only then do you say sorry.
Imagine “speed meets”. Groups that organize meetups between complete strangers. You’re in a room with a hundred other people. Line up and start saying outrageous things. I am actually a hippopotamus. No? Okay next. I wish to own seven hundred thirty one and a half dalmatian mice. No? Alright. Next. One day I will travel to Europa in the fanciest of hats. And then the other person grins, Well captain it’s not naked if you’re wearing a hat. And damn they have been waiting years to say that line.
The real irony of the people who make jokes about being triggered is that they tend to idolize the military/veterans as if combat related PTSD isn’t a real thing that also has triggers. Y’all make fun of the people you call hero’s when you’re making fun of the teenagers with PTSD from non-combat related issues, you can’t separate the two.
Most of the people making fun of triggers are making fun of all the bullshit “”“triggers”“”, as in the people calling a mild uncomfortable feelings triggers.
The problem with making fun of a trigger is you genuinely do not know whether they are ‘mildly uncomfortable’ or if that is a thing that is genuinely causing severe anxiety, depressive episodes, or stress responses. Most of the “““““bullshit”““““ triggers I’ve seen being made fun of are actual trauma survivors who have their trauma associated with something unusual or strange. Because the thing that triggers their PTSD or panic is odd, people, not unlike yourself, are writing them off as “whiny babies” or “triggered sjws” or call their trigger bullshit because they cannot understand the association.
For examples: Sirens are one of my triggers. When I hear sirens I get an immediate panic response. This was due to being in an active war zone as a child (The response is significantly worse if it is an air raid siren or sounds too similar to an air raid siren.). If you didn’t know I was in an active war zone though, it might seem silly to see an adult panic and attempt to get to a safe place because an ambulance, fire truck, or police car went past them.
I have a manager who is triggered by the presence of police. Specifically police, other uniforms are fine (i.e. security in the mall does not set off her panic response). Her trigger is severe, if a police officer talks to her, she starts panicking and sobbing and cannot control it. This is because when she was young, two police officers threatened her repeatedly and psychologically abused her for 6 hours while they tried to find out where her brother was (yes, this was illegal. Her parents were not home at the time, and were unaware she was alone as the brother in question was meant to be watching her). If you didn’t know that story though, it might seem silly to see an adult woman burst into tears and have a panic attack because a cop said ‘hi’ to her.
I have seen posts by an abuse survivor talking about how the sound of a garage door triggered them, due to abuse by a parent. They associated that sound with the abuser returning home and the abuse beginning. The sound became a trigger because their mind associated it to that. I saw another post by a rape survivor talking about how she was triggered by the sight of eggs because she made eggs for her rapist after he’d raped her. Her mind associated eggs with the trauma due to the two being connected at least in her mind.
Brains are weird. Trauma doesn’t make sense. The point is, YOU do not know if someone is ““““bullshitting”“““ or not. You do not know how someones trauma associated itself with something odd, which is something trauma really does all the time and making fun of trauma survivors because you don’tunderstand the association between their trauma and the item that triggers their ptsd or anxiety is absolutely wrong and absolutely hypocritical if you think any other form of trigger is acceptable or okay. You don’t get to decide other peoples trauma triggers. They didn’t even get to decide them, and to tell someone that you’re okay to make fun of them because what upsets them doesn’t make sense to you is absolutely not okay.
I should note too: Phobia’s are real triggers too. People have panic attacks when exposed to their phobia’s in the wrong way. I need certain pictures tagged because I am absolutely terrified of heights, which is a pretty common phobia. People can have serious phobia’s to everything and anything though, and there are things I am not afraid of that others are that may seem strange to me, but to them are very real and very frightening. Just because it seems odd to you, doesn’t mean it isn’t still real to the person experiencing it.
This post needs a zillion more notes. As a Complex PTSD sufferer I truly hope that people will someday stop policing others’ triggers and health problems as if they have a single clue.
Just BACK OFF and let people LIVE.
And PTSD has ALWAYS had odd triggers, this isn’t just a modern thing. My grandmother couldn’t do anything with the reservoir on the back of a toilet because when she was nine, she was gangraped. When her attackers were in their stupor, she took all of their guns and put them in the reservoir of their toilet, and ran through the street naked until someone helped her. Having to put the weapons she KNEW they were going to use on her behind the toilet stuck in her mind, that was what became a trigger for her brain- along with being unable to go outside in her bare feet ever again.
One of my closest friends is triggered by someone touching his hair, because one of his stepfathers swung him around by his hair and smashed him into things. Now any time someone touches his hair, he gets so badly panicked he just vomits on the spot.
And then you have people with conventional ptsd triggers like me- it’s hard for me to see blood and violence in certain contexts. Oddly, it’s fine in video games, but in movies or TV shows- ESPECIALLY if it’s suicide- it triggers me. Because through my suicide prevention work, I’ve WITNESSED suicides, so as a result it triggers my ptsd.
Brains are strange and unpredictable in what they associate a situation to, and what becomes a symbol of trauma. But it’s not anyone’s job to gatekeep the subject, because it does absolutely no one any good. When someone says something triggers them, you need to respect it. And you also need to respect that triggers can generate different responses. My grandmother would get quiet and skittish when triggers. My friend vomits when triggered. I get enraged and frustrated when triggered- an unconventional response to a conventional trigger.
Some people cope so well that they only get ‘uncomfortable’. I’ve even seen one person who would get a ‘high’ because their body would try to release a shitload of dopamine in response to it, and then they’d crash. Shit’s weird, and all you can do is respect what someone says about their own boundaries.
Also, there’s a common misconception that trigger warnings are always about avoiding the trigger. That’s just not the case. A lot of times, a person is able to view a trigger and be perfectly fine if they were warned beforehand and allowed to mentally prepare. I’ve heard it compared to the fact that people can get used to and tune out a noise like a smoke detector beeping if it happens in a regular and predictable way. But random, unpredictable beeps cause immense psychological distress to almost anyone if you are forced to listen to them long enough. Letting people know a trigger is coming often helps mitigate the reaction.
I was once asked to please tag cats. And I was like “Oookay, bud, I’ll try, but like, ¾ of my life IS cats, so I can’t promise anything…?” Because that just seemed really weird to me.
And then, even though they didn’t have to, they actually wrote back and said, basically, “Hey, the reason I’m asking is because I had to witness people torturing cats in a situation I couldn’t escape, and now I just … can’t.”
Oh shit.
So I said “Hey, holy fuck, I’m sorry. Do you need me to tag all cats, or just housecats? What about cartoon cats? I just want to help you out, friend.”
And again, even though they didn’t have to, they came back and said “Cartoon cats aren’t too bad, but what I really can’t handle is seeing kittens.”
Fucking … fuck.
And I’m not gonna lie, that fucking hurt and chilled me to read. Just … the story there. I don’t want to know it. It makes me sick just imagining it. So I now tag for cats.
It’d be easy to say “It’s stupid to be triggered by kittens.”
But, uhh, I really don’t think that situation is “stupid” at all. I think it’s fucking tragic. And that person had the guts to ask, knowing that they might get made fun of for it, and then they were even kind enough to explain, and I’m grateful to them because it taught me something I intellectually but did not yet viscerally understand.
A healthy person, or even just someone with different triggers, can’t understand the significance behind triggers. And triggers can be really fucking weird or even seemingly inappropriate.
So I got to make a choice. I could say “If you can’t handle cats, seriously, I’m not the blog for you.” Understandable, I suppose. Or I could say “JFC that sucks, and the rest of the goddamn internet is flooded with untagged cats. Maybe … maybe I can do this one thing so that they will feel safe reading my blog? Maybe I have the power to actually … help a little?”
And obviously, I made the latter choice.
Here’s another thing.
Recovery is a process, and eventually a lot of people move away from needing trigger warnings. They are a helpful tool to protect yourself during a certain stage of healing. That healing might take a really long time, and it might never be complete … or … it might only be necessary for a few months or years.
So you aren’t “coddling” people by tagging for [x thing you think shouldn’t be a trigger], you’re enabling them to engage on their terms. Engaging on your own terms is literally the only way to make progress, therapeutically, so asserting that trigger warnings hinder progress is just not factually a correct statement at all.
You personally may choose not to tag for anything, and that’s fine. You are absolutely allowed to run your personal space however you want, and people shouldn’t bug you about it.
But what you don’t get to do is decide what a “stupid” trigger is (hint: there isn’t one, there’s only fucked up situations that leave fucked up scars) and whether or not someone is experiencing severe or mild discomfort. You can’t know that. Their reaction isn’t even a good guide to how they are feeling inside. They may seem only mildly uncomfortable. You don’t see them losing their shit later because something hit them way worse than they thought it would, and they thought they were okay at the time but … hahaha, nope.
I guess … a lot of people seem to think that there’s this whole category of “special snowflake” people wandering around saying “I know how to get sympathy and validation: I’ll ask a total stranger to tag for cookware because I’m ‘triggered’ by spatulas!” Just as if that’s liable to elicit the kind of validation truly lonely and desperate people need.
Or maybe … maybe they think there’s all these people who are so unacquainted with “real” pain or fear that they think their mildly uncomfortable feelings about Furbys compare to, and this is so often the example used and I think that is so wrong, combat vets who can’t handle fireworks.
What it comes down to, it seems like, is trying to extrapolate a story from the trigger so that you can say “Stop crying, you don’t have it that bad!” Which is ridiculous. As someone above pointed out, triggers can seem nonsensical even within the context of the instigating trauma. I remember the eggs post. The things that stick with you about trauma are not always just the things you expect. You can’t actually guess anything about a trauma from a seemingly inexplicable trigger beyond “Wow, fear of paintbrushes, plastic cups, and raisins … I bet that’s a story.”
And if that story that they imagine doesn’t match what they think is a “valid” trauma narrative, then they feel justified in dismissing it. Completely missing the fact that there’s no such thing as a “valid” or “invalid” trauma narrative, because trauma is a really strange and subjective thing. Also completely missing the fact that it’s not okay to try to make that judgment to begin with.
A lot of people seem unwilling, for some reason totally alien to me, to make that empathetic leap and say “Okay. I don’t need to know more. I believe you.” They want to police other people’s experiences. And that’s just one of the worst impulses of humanity. It’s really nasty, and it gets applied in so many horrible ways to mental illness of all kinds. It needs to stop.
Ultimately, it costs you nothing to be cool about it. It costs you nothing to take what people say at face value, or to believe strangers and not comment on their mental health issues. It costs you nothing to say nothing, even if you don’t believe them. Because you are inevitably going to be wrong, and why risk making yourself look like a clueless, deliberately oafish asshole?
I’m really confused as to why this is an issue, except certain segments of the online community take great pleasure in being critical of other people’s attempts to cope, because they have invested a lot of their self-image in being “smart” and “discerning” and “no-nonsense” and “not gonna be fooled” … and they really enjoy tearing down people who are saying “these things are unfair” or “these things are hard for me.”
“You aren’t really hurt/traumatized/oppressed!” is a truly unpleasantly common thing to hear these people say. Often they will even say it outright. Other times, it comes across indirectly.
It’s not at all surprising for anti-feminists to also be anti-trigger-warning, and I think this is probably why. I know it was the case for me for a very long time. Then I kind of … grew up, I guess? Enough bad shit happened to me and to people I know that I acquired sympathy. And realized that, actually, my own traumas have left me with some pretty weird issues, things that make me uncomfortable but which other people are unlikely to consider inherently threatening. So I had no room to judge.
It’s sad, because it’s actually a whole lot less effort to believe people when they talk about their experiences than it is to sit there, smoldering with disdain and resentment over the person who really can’t abide milk, of all things, and asks that it be tagged for.
If you’re angry about trigger warnings and are lashing out about it, just … go ask a mutual friend for a hug or something. Go do something self-affirming. Because the trigger warning thing is not about you or for you. You might as well spend your energy doing something nice for yourself. You’re lucky not to have to wrestle with a fear you very well know is ridiculous. Enjoy that and move on. Don’t waste your time thinking about how many people are wrong to feel the way they feel. Just let it go.
I also want to emphasize something said above:
A lot of times, a person is able to view a trigger and be perfectly fine if they were warned beforehand and allowed to mentally prepare.
This is huge.
I can engage with my triggers.
I can do it voluntarily on my own terms, and the effects can, depending on circumstance, be pretty minimal.
I can do it with warning on someone else’s terms, and depending on circumstance I can be mostly okay to messed up but still mostly functional.
Or I can do it without warning at all, and depending on circumstance, fall apart a little, or a lot.
If given control of the situation, I can get away with a “yuck” feeling and then move on. If not, I may need medication to bring me down. It can fuck me up for a couple of days if I was not allowed to choose when/how/whether to engage. If I am, hey, wow, look at that, I’m mostly all right.
This is not evidence that it’s not that bad. Like with a lot of illness, disability, and mental health stuff, just because I can do it sometimes doesn’t mean it’s okay all the time.
This is how these things work. Period. This is actually what recovery from trauma looks like, this is how it works, this is what you have to accept if you want to accept that any trauma at all is valid.
It really is a useless endeavor to try to draw conclusions about someone’s trauma from whether or not they ask for, use, or need trigger warnings.
And tbh, even if they come right out and say “I don’t have PTSD, I just hate seeing pictures of dogs, I’m so triggered lol”, that’s them being horrendously disrespectful of mentally ill people. It’s not an excuse to then be even more disrespectful by using that to draw conclusions that allow you to dismiss the very concept of trigger warnings as stupid.
There are people who fake entire illnesses, okay? Who lie about having cancer or whatever. But we don’t take those people as evidence that people who have, you know, actual cancer must be lying and pretending to be special snowflakes.
And, just for the record, sometimes people can’t move past a trigger.
I have fairly bad PTSD about dentists. Nothing helps. I don’t look to get trigger warnings because it doesn’t help. I can barely walk into a dentist’s office–I’m 19 and my mom still has to hold my hand and probably always will. I never make my own appointments, someone else has to do it. I can barely speak in a dentist’s chair, and I get flashbacks from the lights.
I’ve been working on getting past this for 12 years, I’ve tried every technique in the book to get through an appointment without this stuff including all available forms of sedation, and I’ve literally reached the point where my therapist went “Yeah, you might want to just get drunk afterward” when I told her that’s what I was going to do.
So… barring a miracle, this is as good as it’s going to get. That’s a trigger I’m never going to get rid of. If trigger warnings helped, I’d need them for the rest of my life. And it’s not because I or anyone else in that position is weak. It’s just because some wounds heal, and others still leave you limping.
high key can u give me a rundown of ur fav wacky wwii shenanigans
Okay friends today we are gonna learn
about the GHOST ARMY, which, disappointingly, was not actually an
army made of ghosts
pictured: the unit patch for the
Ghost Army, which is DOPE AS FUCK
see one of the things that made WWII so
fucking nuts was the totally bizarre level of technology. Like wow we
invented the first real computer and radar but also if you wanted to
see how many troops were hanging out somewhere you had to send a dude
to fly over and take pictures manually??? this left A LOT of room for
shenanigans
so the normal method of dealing with
aerial surveillance was to cover shit with camouflage netting. Say
you’ve got an nice air base that you really don’t want any bombs
dropped on- you literally just cover that with a ludicrous amount of
netting and some fake trees and BAM now it looks like just an empty
field from the air
there’s a building under that weird
lump
that’s cool! That’s
really cool! But not cool enough
At some point
somebody sat down and went “hey wait. What if…what if instead of
disguising buildings and units as fields, we disguise fields as
units”
holy fucking
shit!!!
the British had
used a bunch of fake tanks and like, boxes of provisions stacked up
in tank shape and then covered with a tarp in 1942 during Operation
Bertram and it worked really well, but they didn’t have a special
unit devoted to just clowning on the Germans like that.
so the US military
decides they do want a designated clowning unit and goes out and
recruits a bunch of fucking nerds from all the art schools and makes
them into the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops aka THE
GHOST ARMY, WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE ANY OTHER NAME LIKE SERIOUSLY
the ghost army’s
job was basically to go in, sidle up to a real unit, and then
basically set up a fake version of that unit while the actual unit
sneaked away to go dunk on Nazis where the Nazis weren’t expecting
them
okay time to get
into the really cool part of this story, which is HOW the ghost army
faked being a real unit:
step 1: INFLATABLE
TANKS AND AIRCRAFT OH MY GOD
that’s a big ol balloon!!!
the ghost army had
a stockpile of inflatable tanks, aircraft, artillery, cars, whatever,
that they would set up and then poorly cover with camouflage
netting so from the air it looked like someone had just done a
real shit job of hiding actual materiel. They even had dummy soldiers
that they would set up to make the scene look populated, since the
ghost army itself was about 1,000 dudes regularly imitating units of
30,000 men
what’s really cool
is that visual deception was more than just the inflatable stuff
itself. If the ghost army plopped down a balloon tank, they then also
had to go out with shovels and rakes and shit to make a fake track
that a real tank would have left, because it turns out tanks are
really hard on your landscaping
step 2: “spoof
radio”
the last couple of
days before the real unit moved out, the radio operators of the ghost
army would move in. see, radio transmissions were done in Morse code,
and it turns out every radio operator has a slightly different “fist”
when typing Morse. A “fist” is basically typing style- some
people would take longer to type out certain letters or would have
pauses between groups or anything like. Anybody listening to the
radio transmissions who was skilled enough could tell different radio
operators apart from just their fist
anyway the ghost
army operators would move in and basically listen to all the real
unit’s radio transmissions until they had learned the real operators’
fists. Then they would take over radio traffic, imitating that fist
so it seemed like the real operator had never left. I forgot to make
this section funny because I was too caught up in how rad it is SORRY
step 3: making a
lot of noise
the ghost army had
special trucks fitted with huge fuck off speakers and a whole library
of stock sound effects. Once the real unit left and the fake unit
inflated, the sound trucks would come in, select a combination of
sound effects that matched the unit they were impersonating, and then
played everyone in the 15 mile radius of the speakers their fire mix
tape
step 4: fuckin
partying!!!
see the thing about
impersonating your own units is that other allied units would know
about it and might talk about it where enemy collaborators could
hear. So the ghost army had to fool the Germans but they also had to
fool their own army. Every time they impersonated a new unit,
the ghost soldiers would paint that unit’s insignia on all the fake
materiel, make fake signs with the unit’s name and colors, and sew
the unit’s patches on their own uniforms
once they were
dressed up as soldiers from the impersonated unit, the ghost army
dudes would go into town and mingle with other soldiers from actual
fighting units nearby and hang out in bars while loudly saying things
like “YES HELLO I AM DEFINITELY A REAL SOLDIER FROM THE WHATEVER
DIVISION, ABSOLUTELY FOR REAL STATIONED ON THAT HILL OVER THERE”
so anyway this
bunch of weedy American art nerds staged 20+ battlefield deceptions
between 1944 and the end of the war, sometimes fooling that Germans
so successfully that they actually got shelled
I'mma leave you
with this quote from the book “The Ghost Army of World War II” by
Rick Beyer and Elizabeth Sayles, because it’s a quote from an actual
member of the Ghost Army and that alone makes it funnier than
anything I could ever write:
On another
occasion, two Frenchmen on bicycles somehow got through the security
perimeter. Shilstone managed to halt them, but not before they had
seen more than they should. “What they thought they saw was four
GIs picking up a forty-ton Sherman tank and turning it around. They
looked at me, and they were looking for answers, and I finally said
‘The Americans are very strong.‘”
maybe i have a faulty understanding about how this works but like. i never understood the whole “one of us only tells the truth, the other only lies” like…. just ask them a question you know the answer to. what days christmas. the fucker over here going “april 7th” is the liar. problem solved
Because I’m me and kind of a pedant…
The critical third rule to this game is “You can only ask one question total.” So you have the one who always lies in front of one door, for example, and the one who always tells the truth in front of the other door, say, and then you can ask ONE question that has to tell you everything you need to know. Generally, if you can get the answer you need, finding out if you’ve asked the liar is a nonissue.
Exempli gratia: in Labyrinth, when Sarah is faced with the situation, she asks one of the two “would the other one tell me that this door leads to the castle.” When the answer is yes, she knows that the other door leads to the castle and the one she’s facing leads to certain death. This is because, if the guard she asked was the liar, she knows the other guard would tell her no, this door does not lead to the castle. If the guard she asked was not the liar, she knows that the other guard would tell her yes, this door would lead to the castle, and it would be a lie. QED, the other door leads to the castle. The fact that Sarah falls down a hole does not change this, because she does eventually reach the castle and Jareth is kind of a cheat. A faerie cheat, but still.
Werewolves and vampires are still around, long after most humans have been enslaved or eliminated by the AI uprising. Now it’s time to give those robots something they weren’t calculating for.
Vampire: It took me 100 years but I managed to figure out how their coding kept changing. Once you upload this into the mainframe it should reduce their functional capacity and enable you to free the humans from the compound.
Werewolf: Reduce them to what?
Vampire: A toaster on legs.
Werewolf: Nice. What about the humans, how do we help them after this?
Vampire: Pft, please give them a few decades to reproduce and they’ll be fine. Bubonic plague didn’t wipe those motherfuckers out. Humans are the evolutionary equivalent of toddlers: they bounce.
@ 2017 bitch before u even think about fuckin us over just please…….. think abt what that hoe 2016 did to us,, you don’t have to stoop to their level, you can be great, you can be the bitch everyone loves, the bitch everyone appreciates, the bitch everyone thanks for being giving us a good year, you are capable of being That Bitch™
Yeah, so, I’m on break and I have like All The Prompts to work on and I’m writing a Hanukkah fic for the Scarlet Witch and I have a chapter of a WIP to work on, but also my aunt outed me to my grandparents and I am so fucking tired of my family. So I’m a little drunk, I’m watching Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, and I do what
I want. Crossposted to AO3.
The witches were always so careful to tie
Hansel up. Apparently, it was something
about the height, and the leather, and possibly the attempting-to-murder them. Hell if Hansel cared what their logic was. It was uncomfortable—his wrists aching in
their shackles, every muscle in his shoulders screaming at the constraint, the
muscles in his legs spasming as he struggled to rest his weight on his toes—but
he had been uncomfortable before. This
didn’t even make the list of the most discomfort he’d ever been in. Ben was coming unglued beside him, locked
tidily into a cell with his hands shackled as he shook and tried to bargain
with the witch as she sharpened a knife.
They’d barely been here an hour, for the love of God, and she’d only managed
to snag half of them—Gretel and Edward were still out and about.
“You’re not going to get anywhere, kid,”
Hansel sighed, and Ben whipped around to look at him.
“I’m not—aren’t you concerned about this?” Ben demanded, voice cracking.
When you write Avengers fics about Christmas, that Pietro and Wanda are JEWISH meaning that they more than likely would celebrate Hanukkah. Please respect the fact that they are in fact another religion than Christianity and that not everyone celebrates Christmas
my favorite d&d thing is when someone flubs like a really obvious perception roll or something and the dm gets to be like, “well, you’re pretty sure you’re in a room but you could be wrong”
it is either really wet or really dry, you’re not entirely sure
One time a guy in our party rolled a nat 20 on a perception check, but there was nothing around he didnt already see, so the DM said “You’re not quite sure, but for a few seconds it seems like you’re standing on a giant’s table, surrounded by 5 Giants. Your party seems to look stiff and fake, and Large papers and Dice are strewn around you. Then, everything goes back to normal.”
