All right kiddies, this is an announcement that my fucking hard drive crashed yesterday and my computer is officially KIA. The rest of Deorum will be posted when I have a new computer, which could take like two weeks, so…yep. Also I am very annoyed, I’m probably going to crawl out of my skin without my writing to work on.
Sometimes it blows my mind that there are people that don’t wear glasses/contacts. Like they can literally see with no aid. Like they wake up and just be out here seeing. What a wild concept.
And people say stuff like ‘lol don’t you hate it when you look up in the middle of the night and see a spider on your ceiling’ like bitch (!!) i could have Nicholas II last czar of Russia hangin from my ceiling fan and i would be none the wiser
Okay, first of all: ASKDSFHIGH THANK YOU for writing me fic! I absolutely LOVED it (as another hopeless person who loves Eliot and has an inclination to whump him in fics). But just, everything was amazing? I really liked how you portrayed Eliot's analytical thought processes with parentheses. And other little things too: Hardison tracing his hand over Eliot's at the end, Eliot fooling the bad guys on the coms, Parker in general, EVERY LAST BIT of dialogue, I can't even. Thank you again!! <3
I’m so glad you liked it, oh my god! It was a blast to write, I live for Eliot being protective. I’m really pleased that you think the analyses in his thoughts came out well, I’ve never tried that before and it was kind of a fun experiment. Thank you so much!
i just realized something: think about padme amidala’s public image. nobody knew she was married. nobody knew who anakin skywalker was at all–he was just some random jedi trainee, and by the time anybody would have started paying attention to him in the public eye, they would have known him as darth vader. to the public, anakin became a faceless villain who always was who he was, no fall from grace needed.
so, padme. i’m sure she had supporters across the republic. i’m sure her time as queen of naboo was EXTREMELY well-documented, and honestly, based on her rotation of outfits, she was probably a full-on celebrity. she was young and brilliant and a passionate defender of her people, and even though the empire seized power in the end, i wouldn’t be surprised if the rebellion decades later directly descended from the ideals of her followers.
but think about the circumstances of her death from the outside. people probably knew she was pregnant by some unknown father, of course, but this is a universe with robot doctors–saying “she died in childbirth” would probably be like saying “she died of the common cold” today. not something that happens, especially for a celebrity politician with unlimited resources. and there must have been a child, but what happened to it? did it die too? as a media narrative, it’s flimsy at best, ESPECIALLY considering the timing of her death.
padme amidala, the woman who ruled a planet at 14 and sat stony-faced while every other senator cheered on palpatine’s rise to power, died under mysterious circumstances just as the government she’d defended crumbled. from the outside, it seems pretty obvious that she was assassinated.
if this was a universe that at all made sense, padme amidala would have been a household name among republic loyalists. her tragically short life, her noble self-sacrifice for the ideals she believed in, would have been LEGENDARY. when the rebellion rose, she would have been the name on everybody’s mind–do it in her honor, people would have said. finish the fight she started.
i know we can’t go back in time and change the original trilogy, but the sequel movies? come on. don’t tell me darth vader is the only looming icon in this franchise.
To make it extra tragic - in the EU it mentions that the coroner used some kind of hologram technology to make it look like she was still pregnant at the time of her death, to protect the twins from the emperor and Anakin by telling everyone that the children had never been born. Padme Amidala’s death would have been the tragedy of the century, the face of the lost democracy.
Okay but what if that celebrity factor got used? By, like, everybody.
To the Naboo people, she’s their beloved Queen. To much of the galaxy, she’s a loved and admired public figure and stateswoman. To the Republic loyalists, she’s their martyred supporter, the vanquished—murdered, they think—face of Democracy. To the Empire, she’s a useful idol, the Emperor’s colleague, murdered, they say, by Separatist forces or by Jedi, tragically dead and conveniently silent, beautiful and glamorous and perfect for starting a cult of personality on her behalf.
And here and there, among the various cultures, there are religious concepts like sainthood, ancestor worship, legends of dead protectors coming to life again to fight when they’re needed. And conspiracy theories, and wishful thinking turned speculation, and the Star Wars equivalent of tabloid newspapers.
The result? Padmé is the most popular and famous woman in the galaxy, a combination of Princess Diana, Mother Teresa, Che Guevara, Joan of Arc, Elvis Presley, Arthur Pendragon, Chuck Norris, and the Virgin Mary.
One of the most important Imperial holidays is Amidala Day, devoted to celebrating service to the Empire, the official story of the Empire’s birth, the Emperor’s home world, and the heroic Queen and Senator whom Palpatine claims as his staunch supporter. People paint their faces and make elaborate hairstyles or headdresses and put on their fanciest clothes; there are plays, and parties, and traditional Naboo dances and foods.
Vader hates it. This is about 60% of why the Emperor has made such a production of it.
Among Republic loyalists, a different story is told: a Queen Amidala who loved peace and democracy, who opposed war and worked tirelessly for ceasefires and peace treaties, who stood silently or wept as all around her cheered the newborn Empire; a Queen Amidala who was murdered by the Empire so he could create the fiction of her support.
Vader hates this too. It feels uncomfortably true, and threatens to undermine his resolve that she would have been at his side had she lived.
Rebels paint images of her on their fighters, hang holos of her on their walls, wear icons of her as good-luck talismans. There are exhortations, penned semi-anonymously by people who knew her, that she would have wanted people to join and support the Rebellion. The minimalist image of eyes, cheek dots, and paint-split lips are graffiti’d onto public monuments accompanied by words from her speeches. “Amidala Needs You” is a common phrase on Rebel recruitment posters.
Vader hates this most of all.
Statues and icons of her are made in a hundred different artistic styles and adorn the altars of a thousand worlds’ faiths. Mythologies are written about her: she stopped a Separatist advance with words once, appeared in a dream to a slave telling her where her transmitter was hidden, shot five destroyer droids with pinpoint accuracy before they got their shields up, stormed her own palace to take it back from the Trade Federation, cheated death at the hands of the Empire’s assassin, escaped with the help of the last of the Jedi, is still out there somewhere, mourning for the Republic on some uninhabited planet somewhere, training in secret lost Jedi arts to kill the Emperor, working as a Rebel agent or a disguised vigilante.
Vader dislikes this. But he also seeks them out and reads them, when he’s in a certain mood.
The tabloids regularly claim that she’s been seen working as a roast-traladon restaurant in some backwater suburb of Corellia, or navigating a spice freighter to and from Kessel, or singing at a nightclub on Nar Shadda.
Vader dislikes this too. He has to talk himself out of keeping an agent or three just to visit the places in question and make sure.
He isn’t often in a position to see teenage girls with Padmé’s face emblazoned across their tunics, or walls with familiar face paint next to “So this is how liberty dies: to thunderous applause” printed next to it. When he hunts down Rebels with her image on a chain around their necks for luck, he can tear them apart with the Force: a quick death, which is, ironically, the luckiest outcome available to them. Tabloids and legends can be read and dismissed, and he’s never had the opportunity to happen upon the fanfiction.
But when the Emperor commands, Vader stands at his side through parades and parties and celebratory addresses to the Senate, with Padme’s image on banners and holos, with Padmé’s image on stage saying words Padmé never said, with all the women and half the men wearing Naboo royal face paint, and accepts the pain of memory almost like a form of self-harm.
And when the newly-elected Junior Senator from Alderaan with a quiet grace that reminds him of her and a fire in her eyes that reminds him of himself asks him, at some interminable party, if he knew what she was like, he troubles himself to answer honestly.
From this ancient prompt list, because I am the worst and it took me forever to get around to this. I just want everyone to be proud of me because I almost
went somewhere REALLY terrible with this prompt. Because the last episode of Leverage fucked
me all the way up and I remain vengeful about that. That near miss will be obvious.
The con had unraveled at light speed. Things had gone south almost as quickly as the
time Leverage Incorporated had stolen the maquettes
of the David, leaving Parker scrambling to adapt their plan and salvage as much
as possible. They’d managed to get the
files that would prove their target responsible a fistful of deaths revolving
around tainted eggs, but now Eliot’s earbud was fried.
Well.
He thought it was fried—admittedly he hadn’t devoted a lot of time to
checking in more detail. Between the
black eye swelling on his face (bone undamaged, bruising unlikely to occlude
vision), the blood seeping into his jeans from a nasty knife cut to his thigh
(missed the artery, unlikely to prove lethal, would inhibit full range of
motion) and the four cracked-hopefully-not-broken ribs impeding his breathing
(another hit would shatter them along the fissures) and, naturally, the fact
that he was tied to a chair (efficiently, they had practice), the earbud had
taken low priority. If it was fried, he
was going to murder Hardison with his bare hands, assuming he got out of this
with both hands intact.
Also assuming that the others got out of this
to be murdered, of course, which was
never a certainty when someone had the forethought to take their hitter out of
the equation. Eliot almost would have
been reassured if the target’s hired muscle (most of them half-decent, with a
small command structure of better trained mercs) was busy torturing him,
because if they were occupied with him, the others would have time to get
out. Instead, they had managed to knock
him out with a hard blow to the head (mild concussion, vertigo manageable for
motion) and left him here alone, tied up and out of play. But he was trying not to think about that,
because if he thought too hard about the kind of disaster that could befall
Hardison and Parker when he wasn’t there to take the hit for them, he got a
little lightheaded (possibly the concussion, more probably a mild anxiety
response). So the dead earbud had to
take a back burner to getting the fuck out of here and finding the other
sixty-seven percent of Leverage International.
My TI-83 Plus calculator is almost 15 years old and works just as well as it did on the first day. Its outlasted every other piece of technology I’ve ever purchased for a similar price or greater.
also, i want to apologize to people whose messages were ever ignored by me or took me ages to reply to. i have no excuses, i’m just shit at communicating and a lot of time get stuck in my own head, postpone replying and then either forget about it or think that it is too late to reply. i’m sorry if i’ve ever made someone feel bad bc of this - honestly, it’s never personal, it’s just me and my inner problems. i will try harder to work on it. thank you for ever initiating conversations with me
When you say I hate men, it reminds me of a line from Men in Black: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. A man is not judgmental, oppressive, sexist, homophobic or misogynistic. Men are. You do not hate an individual, random man for the sake of hating them, unless of course that man turns out to be a dickhead. You hate MEN as a social group. Because let's face it, the MEN social group are a bunch of assholes. And just to shut people up, I am a man.
You know, it’s funny - I used to just support Hillary by merit of “Not Donald Trump” (or, honestly, “Not a Republican”). I was feeling the Bern pretty hard during the primary elections, and I just was really concerned that she wasn’t liberal enough, wasn’t honest enough, was offput by the Debbie Wasserman Schultz stuff, etc., etc.
So then I started rethinking things. And around this time, I got a call, actually, from my local Democratic party organizing group - not strictly “for Hillary” so much as generally trying to organize the disparate Democratic groups in the area, which is something I’d wanted for a while. So obviously, I went in, and at first we met once alongside some others from my family, but it became quickly apparent that he was really, really interested in meeting later to discuss social media strategies. Like, that was clearly the biggest thing he was interested in. Simultaneously, it became apparent that he’d organized for Hillary in the primaries. I agreed to meet for a coffee later to discuss strategies, but at the meeting, I went ahead and made it pretty clear up front that I’d been a Bernie supporter but I thought unity was important, etc., etc. And he was just…
I guess I’d sort of expected to have to fight for things a little bit? That I’d have to be holding my ground, that he’d be sort of smug or whatever, but it wasn’t like that at all. He was just immediately welcoming, talking about how glad he was to have me aboard, how important he thought it was to address Bernie supporter’s concerns, how much great work Bernie had done and how eager they were to integrate it into the campaign. But the moment that really stuck with me was when he made a casual reference to abortion rights as “women’s rights” and I stopped him and went “That’s trans exclusionary, I don’t like to call them that.” (Grade A Tumblr discourse, right?) And he didn’t get defensive or anything, just immediately went “Oh, I’m sorry, what should I be calling them?” I was a little taken aback and immediately checked back into the conversation, explaining that “reproductive rights” was more inclusive, etc.
He immediately thanked me and explained that this was why he was so excited to have me and people like me in the campaign, to make sure everyone was included.
I left the conversation feeling a lot more optimistic about this whole thing, feeling like maybe I wasn’t just chipping in to stave off a worst case scenario and was actually fighting fo a cause that was actively including me.
But the real tipping point was… embarrassingly recent, if I’m honest, and came about through a Spotify ad of all things. You may have heard it a zillion times - “millions of jobs”, yada yada yada, but with the stinger at the end that you should go onto her site and read The Plan. “You know, maybe I should actually read that whole ‘Plan’ thing,” I said, and did.
And uh, guys. Do you… has anyone else actually read this? I won’t say I agree on every single point, but there is so much that I’m actually really excited about??
I knew that Hillary was opposed to voter ID laws and probably vaguely supported early voting, but did you also know that she plans to do automatic voter registration at the age of 18 like we’ve wanted to happen for ages? I knew that Hillary had talked about “mending trust between the police and Black communities”, but did you know that her platform explicitly includes body cameras? Did you know that it specifically calls out the school to prison pipeline and her plan to end it? Did you know that it specifically calls out ending private prisons? Did you know that it specifically calls out ending violence against trans women of color with a crosslink to her LGBT rights platform? Did you know that it talks about defending Puerto Rican rights, something even a lot of the mainstream Tumblr SJ discourse tends to overlook?
And I’m still barely touching on all of this, Jesus Christ - we could be here all day discussing all the policies I looked at and went “Oh, wow, that’s actually pretty in line with why I liked Bernie.”
So yeah, okay. You win this round, Hillary. I wanted Bernie to be our candidate, but you know what? Maybe sometimes, primaries are just choosing between two candidates who are actually both pretty great. And maybe you’ve proved that you’re actually willing to listen. And all it took to win me over was, uh, me actually reading your campaign page.
But hey, better late than never, right? It was a slow path to get here, but a worthwhile one, and dammit, at least now I can say without reservation that #imwithher
Sorry for the delay, and here is Part III. Parts I and II are here and here, respectively. Since this one is pretty short, I might post Part IV later tonight. Also, since not all of these are obvious in terms of timeline, this one takes place the morning immediately following Part II, which is a couple of days after Part I.
The knock on Jack’s door woke him up
and he immediately regretted continuing to allow Thursday nights to happen to
him, as he did every Friday morning. Thursdays
had been happening to him for several years now, since before he was legal to
drink, and he had expected to build up a tolerance eventually, but there was no
sign of such a thing. It probably had
something to do with Thor’s insistence on having them be strictly Bring Your
Own Alcohol, which usually ended with divine-strength mead from the Norse, sake
from the Japanese, and beer from the Egyptians, among others. Dionysus had brought wine exactly once before
being strictly barred from ever doing so again—possibly because it had almost
landed Jack in the hospital after a glass of the stuff, more likely because
there had been a lot of wounded pride going around among the gods.
Do you ever wonder how much you exist in other people’s lives? I’m always curious if people think of me when a certain song comes on, or when they pass through a certain town. I wonder how many stories I’ve been a part of that I may have forgotten. I wonder if I still I exist in the minds of people that I don’t speak to anymore. I wonder how many times a day I pass through someone’s head.
Oh oh oh, I saw you ship Damerons, could you write something ridiculously fluffy with Finn being badass, while Rey and Poe are all starry-eyed over it? This fandom needs more Finn love. (And I need all of the fluff)
Okay I’m so sorry for the delay but
HERE. Also, bear with me, there is in
fact some fluff here, but this kind of turned into a crash course in my favorite
tropes, so the fluff is…at the end.
We’ve got dramatic rescues! We’ve
got canon references! We’ve got
hurt/comfort after interrogation! We’ve
got the Damerons being stupid in love with each other! We’ve got Rey being deadly as fuck even
severely compromised! We’ve got Finn the
patron saint of revolution! We’ve got
disguises and drugs and sweary droids! And
eventually we’ve got fluff. Also this is like…twelve pages, pushing 6K, I have no excuse. I’ve also decided that Shinedown’s Cut The Cord is the new theme song for the Stormtrooper revolution.
Poe wasn’t sure how long they had been there—definitely
days, but probably not more than a dozen.
Probably. It was hard to tell,
with irregular ration schedules, and there were no other prisoners in their dark
cell to ask. The brig was far from the
hull of the vast First Order battlecruiser, too, and although the impenetrable
black wouldn’t have helped with timekeeping, he wished they could at least see
the stars.
They didn’t seem interested in him, but they had taken
Rey from him three times since they were first captured—all his injuries were
from trying to keep them from taking her, against her direct orders. The first time, she had walked, as graceful
and serene as a dead moon, between the Stormtroopers. She had been weak with the cuffs on her
wrists, cutting her off from the Force, clean and crisp as a lightsaber slash,
but she was strong. They had returned
her to him bruised and exhausted, wilted with it, and she had bared all her
teeth at him proudly and snarled that they would never get answers out of
her.
Humans quickly get a reputation among the interplanetry alliance and the reputation is this: when going somewhere dangerous, take a human.
Humans are tough. Humans can last days without food. Humans heal so fast they pierce holes in themselves or inject ink for fun. Humans will walk for days on broken bones in order to make it to safety. Humans will literally cut off bits of themselves if trapped by a disaster.
You would be amazed what humans will do to survive. Or to ensure the survival of others they feel responsible for.
That’s the other thing. Humans pack-bond, and they spill their pack-bonding instincts everywhere. Sure it’s weird when they talk sympathetically to broken spaceships or try to pet every lifeform that scans as non-toxic. It’s even a little weird that just existing in the same place as them for long enough seems to make them care about you. But if you’re hurt, if you’re trapped, if you need someone to fetch help?
You really want a human.
you know fantasy dragon soulbonding fic i want more of that where the humans are the dragons, like, we’re huge, we’re old, we’re scrappy as hell, and if you are small and cute enough we would be delighted to carry you around on our back
Oh god, now I’m imagining sapient species with lifetimes of, like, a year, and there’s one family that’s been attached to, like, a pirate since she rescued the doll-sized matriarch. She was 23 and just getting command of her first space cruiser, and because she rescued the matriach, the entire family regards her as their protector, they literally live in her bedroom until they reproduce too much (They have a litter every month), then they start traveling around her ship, and there’s entire societies all throughout the ship after, like, 5 years.
She goes down to the engine room for the first time in a decade because she has to find the head engineer for reasons, and there are literal little beasties down there who hail her as the “First guardian” and are so astonished to see her, and they want to come with her to the promised land, and she’s just like “Where?” They describe a luxurious land of softness, and she realizes they mean her bedroom.
So she starts making a habit of visiting every place on her ship multiple times a year, bringing the little buggers to see her room and bringing them home, and her legit crew thinks these guys are hilarious and adorable, and anyone with one of them in attendance has permission to visit her room, and long story short, after 20 years, she’s like a crazy cat lady, but with hundreds and hundreds of doll-sized little aliens who literally worship her.
Alternatively, what about the story where we’re the equivalent of the sentient cats? Like we’re small and kinda funny-looking and our lifespan isn’t that great, but we bond with other species like whoa, so most starships have a human as a mascot (the long haul freighters have an entire family, maybe even a village)
And mostly we’re just seen as the cute mascot. But then every now and then the shit hits the impeller. And that’s when you get stories like “he jammed our sonar, and he had a gun on us and we thought we were done for! But, I guess he’d forgotten how flexible humans are. Our ship’s human had crawled out of her nest and behind the console, you know, in that wiring gap? She jumped on his back and ripped his antennae out! With her bare hands! He threw her into the console and she just got right back up and kept fighting, smashed her upper joints into his flaps over and over again, and she didn’t stop until he quit moving, even though she was leaking everywhere and we could see a piece of her inner skeleton! We rushed her to the med techs but we were sure she was done for. But, did you know, humans can reattach their skeleton parts?? She gets around just fine now, says it doesn’t bother her. She saved all of us. She could have just stayed in her nest and been fine, but she defended us and saved the ship. I’m never serving on a crew without a human ever again.”
“Yeah, did you hear about the crew from over Ktl'ree way? They had a gas leak in the middle of that awful nebula they’ve got, took out everyone but their humans. Turns out, their humans rewired their wormhole drive so they could get the ship home in time to get everyone medical attention. Said they figured they’d either all survive or they’d all go together. Now that’s loyalty. Can you imagine?”
“I’ve heard they’re even more fierce about defending the ship if you have a bonded pair. We’ve just had the one, since we’re short haul, but we’re looking for another one after that incident. It’s hard to find one the right age who doesn’t have a ship, though, never mind one she likes. There was one attached to another ship, they actually did bond for a bit, and the other ship offered to pay for our search for a new pair if she’d come with them. We talked to her about it—but she refused to leave us. She said ‘girlfriends come and go but we’re family.’ Can you believe that?”
“They’re amazing. I don’t understand ships who don’t have at least one. I served on a luxury cruiser that had a whole bunch, five or six families. Have you seen their young? They’re so adorable!”
“I know, right? Ours has offspring-from-the-same-parents she talks to whenever we’re in port, and she shows us pictures of their young. We’d find the room if she wanted some, but she says no, she’s not ready—but maybe if we find another one she can bond with. We’re kind of hoping.”
Yesssssssssssssss. This is awesomeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!! I am INSPIRED.
… have you guys not read @seananmcguire’s stories featuring The Mice?
CHEESE AND CAKE! CHEESE AND CAKE!
In the same vein as other ‘things humans do that aliens might be weirded out by’ what if human pattern recognition skills were the thing? Like the ability to see a cloud resolve into a dog, or faces in wall patterns. Stuff that evolved from predators having camouflaging abilities, or let’s face it, bugs that can look basicaly like a leaf to prey ON.
Imagine an alien being super confounded by a human being like ‘oh, that control board looks like a face’ and it’s just this big grouping of random lights and line but no ALL the humans on board think it looks like a FACE and theyve started NAMING it. And it just seems so confusing- is there anything on this flat painted wall? ‘No of course not’ HOW IS THERE AN OF COURSE NOT. What about in that galaxy? And the human squints and stares at it and says ‘yeah, it looks like a cat.’
And they an draw out what they’re recognizing in the lines but it’s just so strange.
And then an enemy develops ‘cloaking technology’ that’s based on camouflaging and are so angry that every single human is able to point it out because it’s a completely obvious moving shape to them.
or: alien species are introduced to leaf insects, tigers, and that one octopus that imitates a coconut and freak the heck out.
god I love this kind of post
Human: Sometimes there’s a thing, and sometimes there’s not really a thing. In both cases my ancestors did not get eaten by a thing.
1. “you died and left me your children, even though they’re only a few years younger then me”
2. “you died and left me a haunted house”
3. “you died and left me an obscure magical object, I’m not sure what it does, and your instruction sheet just says ‘have fun storming the castle!’”
4. “you died and left me a fanatically loyal warrior order”
5. “you died and left me a bunch of money and a pile of really weird IOUs?! why did someone owe you a free body disposal. why did someone owe you two brides and a goat. why did someone owe you an island. WHY”
6. “you died and left me to repay a bunch of really weird IOUs”
7. “you died and left me a small country”
8. “you died and left me six research labs that operate in international waters and I’m kind of scared to find out why keeping them out there was a stipulation of the will”
9. “you died and left me a menagerie of animals that are supposed to be extinct? and some that aren’t supposed to be real??? where did you get unicorns. where did you get gryphons. where did you get pegasi???”
10. “you died and left me on the hook for a hereditary marriage contract”
11. “you died and left me as the genetic key to a safe that some crazy people are really determined to open, and i would like to keep all of my fingers”
12. “you died and you left me your kid, the problem being that there is no way this is your kid and i think that it might be a fairy changing??!?”
13. “you died and i now have to clean out your house and why the hell did you have a sex dungeon? Oh god, someone has been living down here.”
14. “you died and now aliens have come for me because you were their earth contact and now they’ve dragged me into their war with the government to allow the world to know about them.”
15, “you died and you had all of these contracts that you had put my name on and so now i now employee a small fleet of butlers and i have to have them for five years.”
16. “you died and left your demon contract to me, so now i have to figure out a loophole in your shit legal jargon contract written in blood so that i also don’t go to hell.”
17. “you died and WHY DID YOU HAVE SOME MANY DOGS.”
18. “You died and all of your money went to me, but now your gold-digging former spouse is hitting on me and i can’t make them leave because of a stipulation in the will.”
All right, here is Part II of Deorum. Part I is here, I hope you guys enjoy!
“Jackie, you look terrible,” the
girl at the counter said, alarmed. She
had delicate features, with an upturned nose and a light scattering of freckles
over her cheeks, and her long brown hair was bound up into a neat crown of
braids. She looked about sixteen,
dressed in a pearly grey shirt and a black apron that said simply Idunn’s Coffee. “What’s wrong?”
“Wish you wouldn’t call me that,
Idunn,” he said, and she smiled at him fondly, flashing a slim line of teeth. She had conceded to the Anglicized version of
her name with more grace than some of her other counterparts, which Jack
appreciated. He found the ‘eth’ letter rather
difficult, and she despaired of his pronunciation.
“You’ve mentioned,” she said, brushing
one hand over her forehead in the habitual movement of one checking for stray
hairs. A pair of stacked gold rings
glinted on her index finger, with a third on her thumb. Her entire family dripped with the things,
Jack knew—a scant three was downright restrained. “You do look exhausted, though. Everything okay?”
i love how protective deadshot was over harley, he saw right past how she acted but never tried to change her
Surrounded by blob monsters and assassins and metahumans, it’s not surprising that Deadshot/Floyd Lawton (or anyone in the Squad, really) might want to protect Harley–she’s barely 5′6″, and a girl. But Floyd’s (surprisingly well-developed) relationship with her is neither as sexist nor as simplistic as that.
Though you might expect him to, Floyd doesn’t protect Harley from the blob monsters. Firstly, there’s no need – they’re both killers. Secondly, she would probably shoot him for trying. Floyd trusts Harley to handle herself, which means he takes care of her, but only when she needs it. More importantly, he trusts Harley to take care of Rick Flag, not once, but twice – the importance of which cannot be overstated, given that his death means the immediate execution of each and every one of them. What Floyd protects Harley from is herself–when she’s distracted by the dead blob thing in the middle of a firefight, when she has a flashback on the stairwell, when she runs straight towards the enchantress without thinking. They’ve barely known each other a day, but Floyd already knows her. He can distinguish between what Harley needs to be protected from (her bad habits) and what she can handle on her own (pretty much everything else) because he sees her as a partner and treats her as such.
Even knowing what she’s capable of, Floyd never makes the mistake of seeing Harley as a ticking time bomb. Everyone else on the Squad (Boomerang in particular) seems to treat her like she’s radioactive–pretty to look at, but hazardous to your health. Floyd is the only person who treats her like a human being, instead of just a pretty weapon. Harley’s even guilty of this herself – hiding her relationship with Joker, masking her vulnerabilities, running headfirst into danger – and she does it mostly with words, her second-deadliest weapon. What Floyd does in Suicide Squad is bypass her words entirely. Whether they’re speaking with words (in the stairwell, during shootouts), through glances (on the helicopter, or on the roof), or through touch (on the car, fighting the Enchantress), Floyd can always tell what Harley’s really saying, which allows her to be her truest self with him. It’s like they operate on a level of understanding that no one else in the Squad can touch, which is why their relationship becomes tactile halfway through the film–they don’t need words anymore.
Wow that got long. ANYWAYS Floyd and Harley are sweet and lovely and perfect and wonderful together (and Will Smith better be in the freaking Harley movie or I’m fighting someone).
dream au: padme goes into labor as mace windu dies. anakin feels it, through the force, and runs to her instead of kneeling before palpatine - enraged, palpatine orders the execution of order 66, with a small addendum: kill padme amidala. take her children.
bail organa, present for padme’s delivery, fights off the soldiers trying to kill her but one blaster isn’t much against seventy - until, by sheer chance and the ripples of a disturbance in the force, ahsoka tano saves them both and they stowaway on ship towards alderaan. the nurse hands the twins to the clone troopers.
clone troopers catch anakin in the steets, and his death-by-grenade is seen by hundreds - except, he didn’t die. he dropped into coruscant’s underworld, chasing the signatures of his children, and he force chokes the soldier holding them. he takes them, and he runs, bolting to the nearest shipyard so he can steal a ship and escape -
palpatine is there, and he says, “she’s dead,” and tries to lure anakin back to the dark side - but anakin and his children escape by the skin of their teeth and shaak ti’s lightsaber.
padme spearheads the rebellion. she burns palpatine’s empire down, bit by bit, and repeats, “for my family,” like a war cry - she is unstoppable. the empire will fall.
anakin lands on the doorstep of the larses, says, “i need a favor.” beru and owen take him in. there’s more money with a mechanic in the family, and anakin builds the scanner he always dreamed about, and the slaves start to disappear.
until, of course, he’s outed as a jedi, taken prisoner by the empire, and stationed on the death star. luke and leia skywalker are not leaving their father behind, so they hitch a ride with han solo, break into the death star, and - come face-to-face with general kenobi and commander tano?
All right, so, I hit 400 followers and as promised, here is Deorum! This is just the first part, obviously, because…uh…I’m me, so naturally this is pushing 30 pages. Also: Deorum is Latin for ‘of (the) gods,’ Jack is…not the Christian god, nor is he Jesus. I thought that was apparent, but there was much confusion in my writing class so
¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And for once, the curtains are not just blue, everything has a meaning, EVERYTHING. Feel free to hit me up if you want a detailed breakdown.
“A woman I don’t know is boiling tea
the Indian way in my kitchen,” Jack Deorum hissed into his phone, keeping one
eye on the red-lipped woman at his counter.
He was as far away as he could manage while staying within visual range,
taking care to keep his voice down, and the woman seemed unperturbed. Her hands were graceful, flashing quick and
lovely about the white porcelain of his favorite mug and the black-brushed
steel of his electric kettle. Her masses
of coiling black hair spilled down her back, stark as paint against the drape
of her rose and gold sari, cut in a South Indian style. Her feet were bare and delicate.
Okay, my queer little heart is almost hilariously into your swole af Diana (and also I laughed until my chest hurt too much to breathe at your hc about how she carried Bruce that one time, it made my life so much better) and I was wondering if you had any further headcanons to share about Wonder Woman.
idk about headcanons but here are some ideas that either already have made it into fics or probably will in the future (have I posted some of these before?? i feel like i did but i can’t find it, fuck):
Historically Amazons were probably Iranian or the historical equivalent so ayyyyyyy
Despite my temptation to make her swole but tiny I kept her 5′10″ which is the exact same height as Dick Grayson and four inches shorter than Bruce Wayne and eight inches taller than I am jesus christ how is that not tall enough for some people that is so fucking tall and she wears heels sometimes goddamn
She’s like three hundred years old but she spent most of her life in her techno-utopia home so lots of things are still totally new to her and she keeps getting confused by all the stuff that isn’t a thing anymore (sometimes her slang… is so old…)
Everyone in modern comics wants Themyscira to blow up and go to war and shit?? what gives??? Sorry but I want a badass techno-utopia island of immortal women whose primary conflicts are philosophical and essentially boil down to “but what about the prime directive”
The flag motif for costumes started in WW2 because it was a convenient way to let people know she was there to punch Nazis and chew bubblegum and she still had plenty of bubblegum but she’s a good multitasker here comes bazooka joe motherfucker
The most costumes of any superhero in the League because she’s old and doesn’t have a secret identity to protect so she can just do all sorts of shit, she’s strayed from the original designs of her costumes which is to say they are no longer meant to be as unmanly as possible out of spite
Wouldn’t it be great if she picked Prince as a surname to use in Man’s World because she didn’t understand that the word was gendered and just wanted to convey Diana, Next For The Throne
She figured it out obviously but Princess isn’t really a surname anyway so she kept it, fuck it, gendered words are weird
I know most of the time she has a secret identity but I like it better if she’s THE PRINCESS DIANA OF THEMYSCIRA, WOMAN OF WONDER AND AMBASSADOR TO THE WORLD OF MEN but as long as she wears normal clothes and introduces herself as Diana Prince most people let her go about her business without making the connection. It’s not a secret it’s just like if David Bowie went somewhere in the 80s wearing flannel and introduced himself as David Jones. Bowie fans would go HOLY SHIT and everyone else would go ‘someone please feed that man and take his cocaine away’
“Amazons are resurrected murder victims” what where did this even come from this is depressing as hell, why can’t they just be an island of badass Middle-Eastern women blessed by Goddesses who went out and made their own island and started accepting female refugees from Man’s World who could make it to their shores (sometimes they help people make it to their shores)
Wonder Woman and Aquaman as old friends with adjacent kingdoms hell yeah hell yeah
She’s really bad at dick jokes. ‘Balls’ is a weird word for testicles, for one thing. Plus it’s a matter of culture when it comes to genitalia. There are Amazons with dicks, sure, but there aren’t Amazons who refuse to shut up about how huge their dicks are or how small someone else’s dick is. That’s a weird cultural thing and ya’ll need Artemis.
Everyone has abandoned “an amazon who allows herself to be bound by a man loses her powers” but I’m bringing it back and making changes okay. How about just “an amazon who allows herself to be bound loses her powers” and instead of gender being the important part, the important part is “allowed” as in “she has to consent to it” as in “an amazon can only really be hurt by someone that she’s trusted”
She’s all about the power of love but also she’s competitive as hell
Tomorrow is September 11th. If you see somebody being Islamophobic toward Muslims or non-Muslim Arabs and Sikhs, don't stand by and do nothing. Shut that shit down!
like, during season 4, not after when everything went terribly wrong
- Padme, 6-9 months pregnant, rushes into combat all the time. Anakin has an aneurysm. “YOU ARE A SENATOR. HOW DO YOU GET SHOT AT ALL THE TIME???” and yet she never actually takes damage because she is ~flawless~
- officially, Padme’s children have no father. In an interview with the press, she said “I wanted a baby, so I acquired one” and that’s that. unofficially, anyone with the Force knows Anakin is the father. Honestly, anyone with eyes knows Anakin is the father.
- because you know how Anakin and Padme are the least subtle secret couple? Yeah, that goes out the window when she gets pregnant. Anakin kisses her mid-battle and smooches her back at camp and watches her with stars in his eyes and professes his love for her all the time. When Padme asks about this, he just shrugs and says “well they haven’t kicked me out of the order yet!”
- which is mostly because of Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan is deliberately pretending he didn’t see his former padawan makeout with a senator. it’s like, okay, he knows he’s supposed to do something about this, but they are in the middle of a war, and if they have to kick Anakin out of the Order right now for knocking up a senator then they will lose this war. Obi-Wan has more important things to worry about than Anakin’s libido.
- KIX
👐 TELLS
👐 PADME
👐 THERE
👐 ARE
👐 TWIN
👐 BABIES
👐 IN
👐 THERE
👐
- speaking of the clones, oh man, they are so fiercely protective of Padme. She is their general’s lady and their senator and they would gladly die before letting her or her babies get hurt.
- (but also, preggars Padme makes them sad, because will any of them ever get that for themselves? probably not–they were made to die, and with the rapid aging…but maybe one day…)
- Rex has absolutely had to go get weird food combinations in the middle of the night for his general’s wife. absolutely. that is in Rex’s job description.
- also you thought Padme gave effective speeches before? Imagine pregnant Padme giving speeches about needing to end the war for peace for the future. 110% approval rating comes from soft pregnancy glow.
- the twins are born on a battlefield in a camp where there’s blasterfire and smoke not two feet away. Obi-Wan is there, and he intends to tell Anakin and Padme both that he’s sorry, that they’ll get the twins for a little while, but they’ll have to go to the temple, they’ll have to be raised in the creche–
- but then luke is born, and the Force screams at Obi-Wan this is your padawan and obi-wan goes “oh” softly.
- also, Leia comes into the world and Ahsoka watches and goes “oh look it’s my padawan. I mean I’m a padawan myself but that girl is going to be my padawan some day this is rad.”
- so Anakin relaxes a bit, ‘cause the Force is going to take care of its grandchildren okay, it wants it’s favorite son to be happy.
- which means Palpatine has lost any and all chance of converting Anakin to the dark side. It will never happen now.
- i’m not saying that after they are born, Anakin and Padme strap a twin each to their back and then head out into battle, but Luke and Leia’s first lullaby is the sound of blasterfire and lightsabers
This past weekend, several friends and I got to talking about the King Arthur police precedural
that Fox is allegedly developing. I only mention this because over the
course of this conversation we realized that the ONLY modern-King-Arthur
television show that Fox should really be developing is a
hilarious reincarnation-based office sitcom, and now I can’t stop
thinking about it, so I am going to tell you all about this imaginary
sitcom in EXCRUCIATING DETAIL.
My imaginary workplace sitcom is about a struggling nonprofit organization and is probably written by the people who wrote Parks and Rec and Brooklyn 99. Accordingly, it stars Retta and Melissa Fumero:
External image
as Alice and Pam, OFFICE NEMESIS battling nonprofit burnout! and each other!
….UNTIL,
in the first episode, they start having flashbacks and eventually
realize: they are the reincarnations of, respectively, King Arthur and
Lancelot, they are destined to fight evil while being devoted to each
other in an epic and legendary way, and weekly budget meetings just got
really weird!
Every episode alternates between flashbacks to
Round Table efforts to fight evil, provide justice, build a better and
more stable society, etc., and current-day office hijinks as the
nonprofit attempts to do the same, but with much more paperwork.
As
a sidenote, all the flashbacks initially have placeholder white guy
actors doing ye olde British accents and speaking forsoothly, except for
the person having the flashback, who plays themselves. Once Alice and
Pam recognize each other at the end of the first episode, however, every
flashback features Retta and Melissa Fumero talking exactly like they
would in the office while wearing shining armor.
The rest of the placeholder actors gradually get replaced by actual cast members as further reincarnation reveals occur,
including:
-
Donald Glover as the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, ladies’ man and
too-cool-for-school tech bro, who’s the only person who knows how to
keep the website running!
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-
Rahul Kohli as the noble reincarnation of King Pellinore, the
development manager who is constantly questing after very worthy but
COMPLETELY UNATTAINABLE grants!
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-
Yael Grobglas as the reincarnation of Sir Kay, the long-suffering and
sarcastic office business manager who must always be the one to point
out they don’t have enough money for their pet project!
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-
Sandra Oh as the director’s PA, the only person who knows where
everything is and keeps the office running and everybody from murdering
each other; she of course turns out to be Guinevere!
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-
and, of course, Jaime Camil as Merlin, the director of the nonprofit,
who has been gathering all the Round Table reincarnations together for
world-saving purposes all this while!
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Merlin
is not reincarnated, for the record. Merlin is just Merlin. This is why
Merlin is very good at magic and WILDLY INCOMPETENT at being the
director of a nonprofit organization.
Sample episodes include:
- the episode where everyone is rushing to meet a grant deadline, with flashbacks to PREPARING FOR BATTLE AGAINST THE ROMANS
-
the team retreat episode in which Merlin insists everybody do trust falls;
in flashbacks, Merlin also insists everybody do trust falls
- the
episode in which Donald Glover has to go through ludicrous hoops to
install a new open-source software, intercut with the story of Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight
- the mid-season love triangle episode,
in which a.) the reveal of who is Guinevere, b.) the reveal that
Lancelot and Arthur were way more than good buddies, and c.) THE MOST
AWKWARD OFFICE MEETINGS YET, FOR EVERYONE
i really want steve, when asked in an interview or something about what he’s going to do now, responding “maybe i’ll go to college, i’m only thirty one, i’ve got plenty of time to work it out”
and the reporter just. staring at him like he’s grown another head
so steve repeats, “i’m thirty one, by my count.” he doesn’t mention the whole not aging thing. doesn’t want to blow their minds any more. “I was twenty six when i boarded the valkyrie.”
“thirty one” the reporter repeats. “you had the fate of the entire world on your shoulders and you were younger than me when i got married.”
and steve just nods. “i’m guessing you don’t want to hear how much tactical experience i actually had before the battle of new york, huh,” and the reporter flips their shit
Okay but to build on my previous space ideas - there is no good reason why aliens from different planets would all be similar sizes. Imagine 6″ tall aliens being in the general vicinity of lots of other alien worlds but never bothering to get spaceflight together to meet them bc they’d just get stepped on
But they still GalaxySkype with them all the time and do friendly knowledge transfers, and the Smols are very friendly and happy to upload info on all the unique flora on their homeworld
And some Larges discover that the Smols are having problems because there’s not much of some certain element on their planet and they’re running out and… “a lot” to them is so little, the Larges offer to send over like a storage pod’s worth and the Smols are like “:OOO WE CANNOT AFFORD”
The Larges would be like “no no it is okay, it is not much to us. It can maybe be written off on our Space Taxes? Do not worry about it”
And the Larges insist on sending the storage pod to a large flat area like half a day’s travel outside of the nearest Smol city because they are so worried that if they did their landing calculations wrong they will incite a small quake that will cause tiny buildings to topple
The Smols trek out and are overjoyed at the enormous metal box full of conveniently-small bars of metal. They empty it out and transform it into a multi-level museum dedicated to interplanetary unity and their special friends the Larges. They take and send pictures of tiny Smols in school groups wandering through the halls and learning about the nice space giants that made their prosthetic tentacles possible
You know, in all those “humans are the creepy/fucked up alien species” posts I can’t believe we haven’t touched on organ donation yet.
When they heard that the human general had fallen ill to a disease of the organ known as the liver the troops began to hope that it might turn the tide of the war. Research indicated that such diseases could be fatal after all. The organ did something similar to the flagulaxin in that it filtered out toxins so when it stopped functioning the human would slowly be poisoned to death by his own body. Or so they believed.
But then he came back.
A foot soldier was captured and answers demanded. Was it a medication? Had the sickeness been a ruse to fool them?
“Nah, man. This kid on a motorcycle wiped out on the I9 freeway so they gave the general his liver since they were a match.”
“They…what?”
“They gave him his liver. The kid was dead, and he was an organ donor. And he was a genetic match to the general.”
“They…cut the liver out of one of your young and placed it in an elder and it…worked?”
“I mean, he wasn’t that young. Mid twenties or something. But yeah, that’s essentially it.”
The interrogator and his assistant both regurgitated their most recent meal and ran from the room. Living in places like the “Australia” were one thing, but taking the organs of dead bodies and placing them in the living? What was WRONG with this species?
My favorite part about 1931 Dracula is that there are armadillos running around Dracula’s castle.
Look at this it’s like they couldn’t find any rats so they just were like “eh close enough no one will notice”. But I noticed. I noticed.
“WE NAILED IT BOYS”
Apparently in the 20s and 30s, armadillos weren’t very commonly known, so moviemakers would use them wherever they needed some creepy, ‘demonic’ animal running around. So there were a lot of armadillos in early filmmaking, and it was often people’s only source of reference for armadillos.
Fast forward twenty years to when the father of the biology professor who told me this is driving out from the east coast to see his son in California. Crossing the southwest at night.
An armadillo runs across the road.
He comes to a screeching halt and the Thing Of Evil, which he never knew was actually a real animal, trots the rest of the way across the road and vanishes into the desert.
All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical). And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again! But! I have…a lot of original fiction. A lot of original fiction. So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see! To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way. For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages. Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.
Polaris:the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete). Like. There’s more detail, obviously. But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there. There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel. Tag is here if you want more detail.
Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist. This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words. I’m editing it down. Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there. First of a trilogy.
Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete). Yep. That’s here, and there is exactly one post.
Stories From the Second War:a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim. Um…they’re dark. The Nephilim are monstrous. But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done. They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner. I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.
Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated. Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods. Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well…. I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun. This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.
So…yeah. Anyone have a preference?
OKAY KIDS.
I have reached 400 followers, but I have a tie, which means that this is SUDDEN DEATH.
Polaris (AKA “revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers”) and Deorum (AKA “Please let Jack sleep”) are tied for the top voted piece. Please vote for your preference, summaries are above.
The votes are in! I will begin posting Deorum today.
All right, so, those of you who’ve been around long enough may or may not recall that my practice when I hit a round number of followers is to post some original writing (see: Methods of Inheritance and Sabbatical). And I’m coming up on 400, so I’ll be doing that again! But! I have…a lot of original fiction. A lot of original fiction. So I’m going to offer a list of options, and you lot can tell me which one you’d like to see! To vote, you can reply to this post or reblog it, or send me a message, although I’d prefer the ask box over a private message just because it’ll be easier to collate the answers that way. For the novels, obviously, you’d be getting an excerpt, probably 2-5 pages. Any short stories, though, you’d get all of.
Polaris:the revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel (as yet incomplete). Like. There’s more detail, obviously. But that’s pretty much what we’re dealing with there. There are a bunch of LGBT characters and a few superpowers and a revolution, thus: revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers novel. Tag is here if you want more detail.
Falls the Shadow: my best beloved novel about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, led by Sam, the Horseman of Death and Antichrist. This one’s complete, but it is H E F T Y at 250K words. I’m editing it down. Tag is here, but no one asks me about it, so there’s not much there. First of a trilogy.
Battalion: the novel where angels happened and fucked everything up, and humans have been fucking them over in response for about 70 years (incomplete). Yep. That’s here, and there is exactly one post.
Stories From the Second War:a triad of short stories technically set in the FtS universe, about Heaven’s war against the Nephilim. Um…they’re dark. The Nephilim are monstrous. But I think they might be some of my favorite writing I’ve done. They are Tell All the Truth (But Tell It Slant) and To Fight Aloud, Is Very Brave (Uniforms of Snow), both from the perspective of the leader of the Nephilim, and The Stillness in the Air (Between Heaves of Storm), from the perspective of her hunting partner. I’d put all three on here as a set, because I think they work best that way.
Deorum (Of Gods): a short story I wrote for that writing class I hated. Jack, the main character, lives in a city populated partly by mortals and partly by the gods of the world’s pantheons–Idunn owns a coffee shop, Apollo teaches art at an elementary school, Ninkasi runs a bar, and dark things live in the woods. Jack attracts more gods than he’s strictly comfortable with, and they all seem to know him remarkably well…. I don’t know if it’s my best work in terms of quality, but I definitely think it’s up there as the most fun. This is about forty pages, so I’d have to post it piecemeal.
So…yeah. Anyone have a preference?
OKAY KIDS.
I have reached 400 followers, but I have a tie, which means that this is SUDDEN DEATH.
Polaris (AKA “revolutionary girlfriends with superpowers”) and Deorum (AKA “Please let Jack sleep”) are tied for the top voted piece. Please vote for your preference, summaries are above.
Hey. Sorry to bother you, I see your post about healthcare in POC and women. I'm a med student and I struggle to find resources about that (specially in my language -french-). My school book dont say anything about that. Do you have any tips ? Thanks
Mmmmkay, I don’t really have time right this second to do an appropriately thorough scouring of the internet to find some books or resources for you–which I will do when I’m not writing a thesis, because I should have some resources to reference–and I’m not supremely comfortable giving out how-to-medicine advice, but I will tell you a couple things that have helped me.
The only thing that really works: ask someone. Just do it. Find a doctor or an EMT or whoever is on hand who you trust to answer you, and ask them outright. It works best if you have a justified starting point, something like “Okay, so if that’s how I check for cyanosis on a fair-skinned person, how would I check for cyanosis on a person with dark skin?” (You check the inside of the lip, by the way.) Or “How should this intake procedure be different if my patient is trans?” Or “Should I ask any additional questions about vaccinations/previous illness if my patient is a traveler or immigrant?” Or “What if my patient has a pre-existing disability?” Or “Does this chest examination need to be conducted differently if my patient is a large-chested woman?”
Be polite while you’re doing the asking. More often than not, it’s a problem the other person has noticed too, and it’s not that individual’s fault that humanity has spent 2000+ years screwing itself over on this subject. Also, these questions make people uncomfortable, and being rude will decrease your odds of getting an answer.
Listen to non-doctors in the affected populations. If a woman you know has a laundry list of complaints about not being listened to by a doctor, assume she’s not being histrionic. If you know a black guy who says he was fucked over by the EMTs after he was sideswiped by a car or fell from a ladder or spiked a 105 F fever (40.5 C), he doesn’t need an MD to know he wasn’t treated as well as he should have been. If you know a trans woman who was repeatedly referred to as ‘he’ in the hospital, take note. Decide not to be that kind of doctor, and then pay attention to how you act.
Listen to the nurses around you. First of all, that’s a good general rule, the nurses probably know more than you and nurses are treated terribly by a lot of doctors. Behind every successful doctor is a whole host of nurses who probably haven’t been thanked.
But moreover, nurses spend a lot of time with the patients, and they’re the ones who field complaints about the doctors. They’ll know who gets fucked over and who doesn’t, and they know all the secrets to the medical trade.
Be attentive to your patient (unfortunately this is the ‘learn on the job’ part of the answer). If a woman expresses discomfort with the normal proceedings of an examination, listen to her. If a patient prefers name and pronouns not matching those on their legal documentation, adhere to their request. Be aware that there are some conditions which are more common in people of specific ethnicities–for example, black women have a higher incidence of breast cancer and a lower statistical chance of having it caught by a doctor than a white woman.
Ultimately, I’d say decide what kind of doctor you want to be. If you’re already asking this question, that’s a good start, and telling about how you’ll act as a doctor. Be self-aware of how you act with patients of various genders, ethnicities, etc. In a perfect world, it would be the responsibility of the medical school to teach that behavior and ensure that all the students were able to treat people other than the cis white able-bodied male ‘standard patient.’ This is not a perfect world, and that means it’s on you.
I…feel like this was pretty unhelpful and round-about, but I hope it at least gave you a starting place? I think you’re doing great because it occurred to you to ask this question, keep it up.
Before entering, ensure that someone not entering knows you are going in, and when you expect to be out
Before entering, determine the cause of your mission- your mission objective. Bookcase? Couch? Oven? Meatballs? Figure it out
Upon entering, locate The Path
Do not disengage from The Path until you have reached your mission destination. Many have been lost forever to the wilds of IKEA by not obeying this. Very few are ever located again by the sparse store employees.
Upon reaching your mission destination, you may disengage from The Path ONLY when accompanied by your partner (physical contact should be maintained- ie, holding hands, holding shirt sleeve, both holding an end of a rope, etc)
When you disengage from The Path to acquire the data for your mission objective (ie, the item number for the bookcase, couch, meatballs, etc), it becomes your partner’s responsibility to maintain visual contact with The Path. Much like weeping angel statues, The Path will move if not actively being watched. This will strand you and your partner in the wilds of IKEA, so ensure you choose a partner wisely.
Upon acquiring the mission objective data (ie the item number), navigate back to The Path. You may disengage physical contact with your partner once you have safely returned to The Path
Do not leave The Path again. It will naturally end at the warehouse/stock section. This is a long, huge hall with many branches.
At the entrance of the warehouse section, acquire a cart if necessary. Using your item coordinates, locate your mission objective. Do not leave the main hallway except for the branch where your item is located. Like The Path, the wilds of IKEA sometimes sneak up on travelers that wander the warehouse section
Once your item has been loaded, head to the check out section. Do not touch anything in the boxes along the way. They appear to be full of candles or stuffed animals or useful kitchenware; it is a ruse. They are carnivorous.
After checking out, exit to the loading area. Load your item, and leave.
Do not look in your rearview mirror as you leave. It shouldn’t pursue you if you don’t look back.
I think my favorite panic-fueled response to a petitioner was when someone came up to me in Union Square and said “Hi, would you care to sign our petition for LGBT rights?” and I just blurted out “I’m already gay” and the person, taken aback, said “Well, that’s… nice.” and I said “It really is. Goodbye.” and just walked into the closest store to escape.
one time I was on my way to a final and this clipboard person was aggressively trying to stand in my way and saying “excuse me sir, can you take just one minute?” and I was like “I’m sorry I’m on my way to a final” and they said “just takes a minute to save a mountain” and I panicked because clearly the truth of why I had to go wasn’t working so I just said the first thing that came to mind which was “Sorry I hate mountains”
This is maybe my favorite response to this post, holy shit.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
I want to talk about my twinswap AU right now but I can’t feel assed to ramble about the whole thing. God dammit. I guess I will just mention a few things Tori can do in it. He can dance to utilize master runes. So fire-leaping techniques can lead to suddenly EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE. Life in the Master’s house has made him somewhat more accepting of what he can do and so he solves a lot of problems via sleeping. The world is on fire around him and no sorry the Highlord’s “sister” needs a nap. Goodnight. As That-Which-Creates’ avatar on Rathilien he is creating a tradition of Highborn ladies who know Senethar. Lyra Lackwit was his first student. He knows the intricate stitch based language of the Women’s World and in general is far more successful at being a lady than his sister is in canon.
