the fact that you can work full time in this country and still not afford to live disgusts me more and more every day
Everyone reblog this because it speaks volumes.
Also please note that it’s not “can’t afford insert thing about middle class here” it’s literally “can’t afford to LIVE.” Food, clean water, a roof, medicine, the basics. That is what that covers.
im here for women who’ve survived trauma and come out of the other end furious and spitting blood and im here for women who’ve survived trauma and ended up softer and smaller and less brave and im here for women who refuse to deal with their trauma, who fuck and fight and run, and im here for women in the middle of dealing with their trauma who cry on the floor one day and feel invincible the next im here for any woman who’s experienced trauma. you’re not handling it wrongly. you’re doing your best
okay, so, an au where your ocs all work shitty retail jobs
Oh dear Christ. Okay, let’s see, I don’t make OC’s for fic as a rule, and my OC’s for my original writing all tend to be really aggressive people, this should be fun. I’ll just pick five at random.
Sam Lightworth, Horseman of Death and unwilling Antichrist and my fave: she’s the best salesperson in the house, no one is disputing this, she could sell light switches to the Amish and matchboxes in Hell so they’re not going to fire her, but she’s also on so much probation always. A short list of highlights from the notes in Sam’s file:
punched a customer in the nose for flicking water at her
found a customer rifling through the shirts she’d just spent an hour folding and almost broke their fingers
responded to a crying child by setting him on a shelf and telling him that if he wasn’t good she’d sell him (in her defense, it worked)
threw a grown man into a wall so hard she knocked him out when he tried to grab her ass (the manager doesn’t know how she managed it and doesn’t WANT to know, okay, he deals with too much shit to ask how she sent someone flying without a finger laid on them)
was found in store at opening with what looked suspiciously like a hellhound (there is a sign, okay, it’s very unambiguous, no pets allowed)
Max, no last name, my spy-slash-technopath from this novel: she used to work on the floor but she’s shit at selling things and only slightly better at giving directions, so they shoved her in a glorified janitor’s closet with the security system and told her to keep it running. She helps make sure there’s never any video evidence of Sam’s antics.
Gwynion, erstwhile Prince of the Unseelie Court and ex-assassination victim, because we need a guy in here somewhere: he’s very polite, which has him one up on Sam, and very efficient, which has him one up on Max, but he’s also…look, the manager isn’t accusing anyone of anything, but no one ever found that one woman who tried to grope Gwynion, okay, the manager’s not saying she disappeared. He’s just saying they never found her. There’s a difference.
Sephie, from this: honestly Sephie doesn’t deserve this, Sephie deserves better than this bullshit and these coworkers, she is a Normal Human trying to pay rent and she needs a drink. Nonetheless, she gets along famously with everyone and doesn’t mind working the register since Sam isn’t trusted to do it and Gwynion seems prone to causing equipment fry-age. Sephie is also gunning for the managerial position when their current boss inevitably caves, and stands to make a tidy sum in the pool given the newest hire.
Angharad “Harry” Ainsel, from this (parts are noted ‘first,’ ‘second,’ ‘third’): the new hire. The manager almost cried when she walked in, because no one who wanders around with that strange bone crown is going to be a good thing. She’s almost as good as Sam at the sales end of things, but she’s also making people sign things that don’t look like receipts and has offered to exchange two return items for changeling children. Also, the bike rack is for bikes, and the no pets allowed thing should cover the bike rack, as far as the manager knows, which means the warhorse is definitely contraindicated.
Bonus sixth headcanon: the manager quits within three weeks of Harry’s hire (with the apparent intent to move to Bangkok or somewhere similarly distant), Harry and Sephie shake hands as soon as Sephie’s signed her new managerial contract, and the Huntsmaster leaves in the middle of her shift and doesn’t come back to work. Sephie, when asked how she knows Harry and could she get Sam one of those nice daggers she carried, shrugs and says that her girlfriend has contacts.
When somebody says that “a man likes to feel like a man,” all I hear is “A man likes to feel superior to you and it’s your job to make him believe it.”
Someone said this to me once, that a man needs to feel like a man, I replied “well I’m not stopping him” and had to watch this fragile creature try to explain to me that my strong personality could demean men.
Like, if I have to pretend you are a strong man and cater to that then clearly you’re not that strong dude.
I’m still watching Liberty’s Kids because REASONS and I watched an episode with Baron von Steuben, and I get why they didn’t include this in a kid’s show, but this dude is THE BEST PART of the winter at Valley Forge.
LET ME TELL YOU WHY, WITH ABUSE OF CAPS LOCK AND BAD LANGUAGE AND IRREVERENCE.
Okay, some background. Baron von Steuben was a Prussian baron who shipped his ass over to America in 1777 in order to help Washington whip the bunch of random farmers, miners, tradesmen, etc who formed the Continental ‘Army’ at the time into shape. He reached Valley Forge in early 1778 (after almost getting his own soldiers ARRESTED IN BOSTON because he accidentally outfitted them in red coats, honestly this dude’s life is just PRIME HISTORICAL COMEDY MATERIAL, someone get the fuck on that) and immediately made a name for himself as a complete–but effective!–wackjob. He would go outside in the middle of winter in full military dress and have all the soldiers (many of whom were lacking a coat and boots at the time, because the goddess of efficiency Martha Washington had not yet made her presence known) run drills from sunup to sundown, whereas most military commanders of the day were Pointedly Uninvolved in the messy day-to-day shit. He also continued the trend of having commanders who were still learning English (Lafayette spoke almost no English upon his arrival, for example), because when von Steuben reached America he spoke zero English and had to write all his orders in French and give them to either HIS aide de camp to translate or the aide Washington periodically lent him (fun fact: Lt. Colonols Hamilton and Laurens were his usual lent-out aides because they both spoke French).
NOW YOU HAVE SOME BACKGROUND AND WE CAN GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
(ALSO. it is possible Alexander Hamilton was there. it is SO possible.)
Actually hell yes, given Alexander Hamilton’s apparent proclivity to hitting on anything that stood still long enough and wasn’t either British or Jefferson, it’s frankly PROBABLE that, not only was he there, he probably dragged anyone who seemed willing with him. (John Laurens. I am saying he probably dragged Laurens. Valley Forge is a veritable cornucopia of delightful historical hypotheses. I hope you’re all braced for me to do my thesis next year and become VERY ANNOYING.)
I have seen a lot of posts on here talking about individual extensions for chrome to help people, but I haven’t seen a place where they’re compiled together. So here you are!
Open Dyslexic: changes the font to Open Dyslexic and makes it larger. Personal favourite.
Dyslexie: changes the font to dyslexie and allows change to font size and colour (blue). Can be turned off. (Doesn’t seem to work on facebook)
Font Changer: Allows you to change the font on specific website or on everything using a Google Font. I believe you can also upload your own, if there’s a specific font you need.
BeeLine Reader: Uses a gradient so your eye follows along one line to the next
i’m absolutely screaming my 6th graders had to write essays about their favorite celebrities and one girl wrote hers about abraham lincoln
please remember that i don’t live in america, this is a 12 year old korean girl and when asked about her favorite celebrity her mind automatically jumped to the 16th president of the united states
when I was in about - third, fourth grade or so, I decided to tell everyone there was a ghost in the auditorium. now, this wasn’t too hard to do - the auditorium back then was huge and a little bit creepy when empty, and I’d been backstage plenty of times for various school things that I knew the layout well enough. also, I was not a very popular person, and ghost stories were the easiest way to get popular in my school.
so I said I saw a ghost. no details, I just said I saw a girl covered in blood at the top of the stairs backstage and ran out like my ass was on fire.
over the next year, the entire thing mutated until everyone was claiming that they’d seen the ghost and that they’d FIGURED OUT HER IDENTITY AND HOW SHE GOT THERE, and I was like, “what.”
which just goes to show that you should prob never underestimate the power of a story bc it’s STILL GOING to this day and made it onto a Facebook post that just crossed my feed.
guys. I made up the auditorium ghost. it’s fine, you can all come out now.
This is a short fiction piece inspired by this post.
#Apocalypse
It wasn’t funny.
But, then again, it kind of
was.
Haley couldn’t stop the
laughter bubbling up in her chest even as she felt a few tears escape and
streak down her dark features as she posted what would probably be her last few
Instagram photos ever.
Haley wondered if things like
Instagram survived the end of the world. She suspected she wouldn’t be around
to find out.
She glanced around the half
destroyed street. No one wanted to die alone. Yet, here she was, her ankle pinned
by wreckage. Even if the creature didn’t make a second sweep, she doubted she
would survive to see search and rescue teams (was that something they even did
after an entire city got destroyed?)
Haley closed her eyes, pretty
convinced this was it. Her friends and family weren’t responding to text
message, so either they were dead already or somewhere without cell service.
She was going die. She resisted the urge to look up how long it takes to die
from dehydration.
That’s when her smartphone
chirped.
Her eyes flew open, unlocking
her screen and glancing down at the likes piling up on Instagram. Her post was
getting attention, people asking if she could take any more photos. Apparently
she was one of the closest people to the giant, tentacle creature rampaging
through New York City.
She shook her head, scrolling
through the comments. Haley almost scrolled past it, but one in all caps caught
her attention.
“EYO GIRL!! WHERE YOU AT???? TOM SAYS BASED ON THE ANGLE OF YOUR PHOTOS
WE ARE CLOSE BY!!!”
WHENEVER YOU SEE THIS POST ON YOUR DASH, STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND WRITE ONE SENTENCE FOR YOUR CURRENT PROJECT.
Just one sentence. Stop blogging for one minute and write a single sentence. It could be dialogue, it could be a nice description of scenery, it could be a metaphor, I don’t care. The point is, do it. Then, when you finish, you can get back to blogging.
If this gets viral, you might just have your novel finished by next Tuesday.
Goddamn it, it’s back.
If it stays back, I might manage to finish a third story this year. Jesus.
I swear, this is now my only writing motivation.
BACK AGAIN??? Sigh.
Okay, sorry if anyone gets sick of this, but it’s the best way for me to get myself to write.
Hamilton and, uh, idk hmm - STAR WARS AU. "pardon me, are you Master Burr, sir?" "that depends, who's asking?"
SHOWTIME.
So
some thirty parsecs past the ass end of the galaxy there’s this tiny nothing planet
that’s mostly ocean, and the planet is called Nevis, and one of its islands is called
Christiansted, and if anyone who didn’t actually
live there was asked to find it on a star map, they definitely couldn’t do
it. This is where Alex is born and this
is where his mother dies of some disease brought in by a trader and this is
where he almost dies with her, almost dies in a hurricane that swallows the
island whole, almost starves when his cousin eats a blaster, before someone
notices that—kriff, but this kid is brilliant.
Another trader gives him work and he proves rapidly that not only is he
a dab hand with numbers, but he can blow through a five hundred page holonovel
in a few hours and learn a language in a couple months.
His
mother always said talking was his strong suit and now he’s proving it, because
Alex has to be the best to survive, so that’s what he’ll do. He’ll talk, and he’ll write, and he’ll get
off this rock if it kills him. He wants
something to do, he wants to change
the galaxy, and there’s something murmuring to him, like a whisper of wind,
that he’ll do it if he can just get off Nevis.
We were lured by the fics ofc. That's totally why. Thanksies darling!
Oh my God, nonny, doll, you’re the cutest. I’m so glad you like my slightly deranged writing, you’re just. So nice. To me. What do I do with such nice people.
One of my favourite anecdotes about the first Golden Age of Piracy is that, at one point, Captain Henry Morgan left England in one ship, and arrived in the Caribbean commanding a completely different ship, and nobody knows why. What happened to the first ship and how he acquired the second one are entirely unrecorded.
At some point in his short career (1715 until 1718), the English pirate Ben Hornigold attacked a sloop near Honduras just to steal all the hats of the crew, because his own crew had gotten drunk the night before and they had tossed every single one of their own hats overboard.
Bartholomew Roberts, arguably the most successful pirate in history by ships captured (a whopping 470 in 3 years), didn’t actually want to be a pirate. His ship was captured and he was forced to join the pirate crew.
If you're still looking for fic prompts what about e/R and a secretly royalty AU? Or just anything with a fairytale type feel?
Okay
I see what you’re saying there but WHAT IF WE DID BOTH??? This got so long, I’m sorry, I got
overexcited about fairy tales and I wrote 5K in like a day. (No for real this is almost 5000 words,
Jesus, self, what are you doing.)
Enjolras is a
wished-for child, and he’s told as much every day by his mother, who bought his
life with a few drops of blood on white silk in a gold embroidery hoop. From the minute he learns to talk, he’s as
fair as the sun and as sharp as her needle, and his country adores their young
prince with their whole heart. His
mother Queen Lamarque is a good ruler and her Prince Consort is nice enough so
all is well, and Enjolras grows up believing passionately in the rights of the people. His tutors despair of him as a monarch but
are delighted with him as a politician—it’s very strange for everyone.
And then the Queen
dies, and everything goes to pieces, because the dowager Prince Regent isn’t a
ruler by nature and Enjolras is still too damned young to take her place and
it’s all quite a mess. Vital government
services are falling through, taxes are going uncollected or over-collected,
the generals of the army are making warning noises about neighboring countries
taking advantage of their weakened state, and everything is teetering on the
edge of chaos.
ffs I was supposed to go to bed 4 hours ago and I got caught up in your writing and your blog... I have no self control...
Oh, dude, I want to say I’m sorry, I really do, but I’m just kind of flustered and smug. I’m really glad you (evidently) liked it, though, and I hope you got some sleep in there, eventually.
I’m still watching Liberty’s Kids because REASONS and I watched an episode with Baron von Steuben, and I get why they didn’t include this in a kid’s show, but this dude is THE BEST PART of the winter at Valley Forge.
LET ME TELL YOU WHY, WITH ABUSE OF CAPS LOCK AND BAD LANGUAGE AND IRREVERENCE.
Okay, some background. Baron von Steuben was a Prussian baron who shipped his ass over to America in 1777 in order to help Washington whip the bunch of random farmers, miners, tradesmen, etc who formed the Continental ‘Army’ at the time into shape. He reached Valley Forge in early 1778 (after almost getting his own soldiers ARRESTED IN BOSTON because he accidentally outfitted them in red coats, honestly this dude’s life is just PRIME HISTORICAL COMEDY MATERIAL, someone get the fuck on that) and immediately made a name for himself as a complete–but effective!–wackjob. He would go outside in the middle of winter in full military dress and have all the soldiers (many of whom were lacking a coat and boots at the time, because the goddess of efficiency Martha Washington had not yet made her presence known) run drills from sunup to sundown, whereas most military commanders of the day were Pointedly Uninvolved in the messy day-to-day shit. He also continued the trend of having commanders who were still learning English (Lafayette spoke almost no English upon his arrival, for example), because when von Steuben reached America he spoke zero English and had to write all his orders in French and give them to either HIS aide de camp to translate or the aide Washington periodically lent him (fun fact: Lt. Colonols Hamilton and Laurens were his usual lent-out aides because they both spoke French).
NOW YOU HAVE SOME BACKGROUND AND WE CAN GET TO THE GOOD STUFF.
Let me tell y'all what my co worker does when her friends go on a date: She takes a picture of the person’s drivers license. She doesn’t delete it until her friend(s) return safely.
Everyone needs to be doing this!
I remember my first time picking my girlfriend up to go on a date, and I met her mom that day. She asked to see my ID to take a picture of it “just incase” I had/have good* intentions so I was cool and went along with it. 😏
Yes!!👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾If someone gives me a hard time about taking a picture of their license, that’s a red flag.
Girl, I take their number, license plate (w flash so there’s no debate on the car color at night) and a last seen wearing photo, smh. All my girls coming back safe or I’m on that ass.
If he doesn’t drive, send your friend the location or address of where you the date is taken place. If you change locations, screenshot where y'all at and send it to them. Stay safe.
There is an app called glympse that will broadcast your location to whomever you choose for I think I max of four hours. It’s a little gps program and as your phone moves a little beacon will move with it on a map
Adding that right now^
Safety is important. This is the first I’ve heard of the taking a pic of his license. I just realized how weird I’d probably act in this situation and apparently it’d be seen as a red flag.
the children these days being like………………what will happen when i grow up………what about fandom……
you will still have fandom! you’ll just check twitter on work breaks and write fic after you unload the dishwasher. you might get older but fandom stays the same age. your propensity to read fic does not vanish with age. where do you think all the best written fics from your fave fandom come from??? old as f*ck people. that’s where
ok but seriously, if something really small happened in your day and it made you really happy, but you don’t want to tell anyone bc you feel that it’s insignificant to everyone else tell me, message me that thing because nothing delights me more than enjoying other people’s tiny happinesses
I always want to hear you talk about your special interests. always. got a thing about Russian politics in the 1700s? tell me about it. know entirely too much about the mating habits of aquatic animals? nice, bro. can literally recite every Star Wars movie line-perfect? that’s fuckin impressive. even if I’m not personally interested in whatever it is you’re infodumping about, I’m happy that you’re interested and excited, and I’m willing to learn about things my loved ones care about
i really am a “text me if you need something” person. like unless i have something specific to talk about, i don’t usually initiate a conversation. if you wanna talk just to talk then im all here but dont take me not hittin you up as me not caring.
Phasma meets Leia somehow and is unmasked during the meeting.
It was a strange quirk of stormtroopers, Leia thought—bury them under flat, white plasticine and all those human tics and weaknesses turned inward, were trapped under the skin; right up until the moment you removed the armor, when it came roiling to the surface, pressurized. She’d noticed it in Finn, a tendency to emote with his whole body and stare too long; drum his fingers on datapads and the edges of tables, move like a blaster shot. The crew of the captured Domitia did it too—she’d been watching them on the monitors for fifteen minutes, and she’d lost count of how many times they stalked the width and length of the cells, restless as animals.
If she had been another sort of woman, Leia might have taken heart that humanity persisted, even in the midst of profound darkness.
Instead, she was wondering whether their meager supplies would feed an extra fifty mouths, and what she was going to do when they wouldn’t.
(There was a voice at the back of her head whispering, do what is necessary do what will keep yours safe, eliminate them—
Leia had a great deal of practice ignoring that voice.)
Leia’s gaze wandered back to Captain Phasma as the woman made another circuit around her cell. There was something different about her—the particular way she held herself, maybe, or the washed-out light on her hair—and it stirred the deep recesses of Leia’s memory. “Buzz me through,” she said suddenly to Lieutenant Luo, who jerked upright in his seat.
“Um,” he answered eloquently. He looked at the door to the cell block as though expecting it to open under its own power. “Ma’am? Shouldn’t we wait for…”
Leia waited, curious as to how he was planning to finish that sentence. No one was coming, except whoever drew the short straw from Intel, and maybe Luke or Rey, when the stormtroopers (inevitably) refused to talk. The Resistance didn’t have interrogators, it barely had prison guards—she hadn’t thought there was a need for them, among her guerrilla hit-and-run pilots and ex-smuggler logisticians. First Order personnel didn’t walk away from a Resistance attack, as a rule; not even into prison cells.
”….someone,” Luo finished in a small voice.
“Buzz me through, Lieutenant,” Leia repeated, not unkindly. She liked Luo. It wasn’t his fault she hadn’t anticipated this, that the sight of all that white armor piled up on the duracrete had made her blood run hot and too-loud in her ears. It had taken Luke quietly nudging a memory at her (aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper) to remember she could breathe at all.
The red rage was still there, of course, thrumming through her blood, whispering eliminate them as it moved in her veins.
Leia breathed.
“Yes, General,” Luo said, and buzzed the door open.
While sick in bed I kept thinking, or rather my brain kept thinking with or without my input, about the sheer overwhelming volume of fiction human beings have produced, like the number of myths, legends, novels, comics, games, movies, plays, original characters and even dreams and imaginary friends felt so vast and all encompassing that it seemed to dwarf all of our other achievements as a species and the sheer immensity and pointlessness of it all felt almost terrifying until suddenly my foggy mind was like “whoa, whoa, wait, WAIT A MINUTE….THAT’S WHAT WE ARE!!!!!! WE’RE THE STORYTELLER PLANET, THAT’S OUR THING IN THE UNIVERSE!”
So that turned into all these scenarios where for whatever reason most other sentience races could have technological power beyond our comprehension but still no knack for concocting even rudimentary child-level fiction and are so easily entertained by any shit we can make up that it’s basically our superpower
Humans end up paying their way across the galaxy just making things up as they go along and even our worst most garbage pieces of media become an almost priceless commodity.
You’re cornered by a tentareaver from the bloodstar or
whatever and she’s all “SO, EARTHBEAST…TELL ME ONE OF THESE FAMOUS FICSHUNS OF YOURS AND I’LL CONSIDER SPARING YOUR LIFE”
*sigh*…okay, once upon a time there was a tentareaver…
“WAS SHE OF THE FLESHRENDER CASTE????”
….Yes, the most beautiful fleshrender in her whole clusterhive.
To all of you writers who produce 5,000 word chapters, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who produce 1,000 word chapters, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who do multi-chapter fics, kudos to you.
To all of you writers who do one shots and dabbles, kudos to you.
Original works? Kudos to you.
Fanfiction? Kudos to you.
Just started writing? Kudos to you.
Been writing for years? Kudos to you.
Write stories that you don’t share but look at fondly because you love it? Kudos to you.
I am a firm believer that no one type of writing is better than another. The love and energy you put into your work is what matters. You all deserve kudos. So just know that if you feel like no one is reading or no one cares that I am, and I do.
