At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.
At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”
This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?
“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.
Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.
I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”
At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.
Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”
Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.
So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.
But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”
“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.
Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.
Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.
Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.
So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.
REBLOGGING FOR THE FUCKING COMMENTARY
“when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.”
I don’t care about how much you agree with a post, if it’s made by a nazi, a terf, a racist or anything gross- don’t fucking reblog it.
Also, if you see someone otherwise really cool reblogging something with a gross source, let them know. Sometimes a person has no idea what the OP’s beliefs are and will gladly delete the post once they find out.
I always welcome it when people tell me that I’ve reblogged something by someone creepy. I’d rather know and take it down than unknowingly support creepy awful people.
I think the most plausible The Force Awakens headcanon I’ve ever run into is that the galactic media started holding Ben up as the face of the nascent New Jedi Order from a very young age, and everything that’s happened since then is basically the equivalent of a former child star meltdown.
Just, you know, instead of getting drunk and trashing his hotel room, he shivs his dad and blows up the sun, because Skywalkers never do anything small.
you know when you read a piece of writing so effortless, so graceful and unpretentious that you are both a) thrilled to the point that you have to put it down and walk in a quick circle to make it last longer but also b) PHYSICALLY INCAPACITATED with snarling jealousy and rage
Youre looking for short writing prompts right? What about a character making a meal or something? I think I saw marvel in the tags so, uh, what about Steve cooking/figuring out how to work a microwave, since they were apparently made after ww2..?
All right all right all right, Steve with cooking implements, I am very here for this. We’re going to assume that, somewhere between the movies, the Avengers DID actually cohabitate in the Tower, because I’m having trouble letting go of that part of comic canon. This is probably right after the first movie, before Ultron and Winter Soldier. Unfortunately that means no Sam, which I am sad about, fortunately that means I am not within my rights to wallow in the pain that is Bucky Barnes. And awaaaaaay we go.
“All right, and that button does what again?” Steve asked, frowning.
Tony huffed a sigh and drummed his fingers against the counter, agitated. “C’mon, Cap, we’ve done this like twelve times, how do you not have this yet?”
I still think Parker and Hardison is one of the cutest couples ever created on screen. In lots of tv shows and movies, there’s the cliche that everyone knows the characters love each other…except the characters themselves. It works pretty well, which is why it happens so often.
But what works better with Parker and Hardison is exactly what the show did. Everyone does know that they care dearly for one another and eventually love one other INCLUDING Parker and Hardison.
Parker just wasn’t ready to give that part of herself to him. She was still discovering herself and the new feelings she was feeling. The fact that Hardison knew exactly how she felt and waited for her without pushing her while still letting her know he was interested was honestly beautiful and very developed of them as characters.
So while doing some pirate research for the play I’m writing I stumbled upon one of the most amazing things I’ve ever read. In the 5th century A.D. there was a Scandinavian princess called Alwilda who’s father tried to set her up to marry Alf, the Prince of Denmark. Alwilda wasn’t cool with this so she and some female companions dressed as men, stole a ship, and sailed away. Eventually they met a company of pirates who were in need of a new captain and they were so captivated by her that they elected her as their new leader. Her crew became so infamous that Prince Alf was sent out to stop them. When their ships met he took Alwilda prisoner and she was so impressed by Alf’s skill that she agreed to marry him after all and eventually became the Queen of Denmark.
I stopped caring whether this was factually accurate about halfway through because it’s completely AWESOME.
Medievalist here for triumphant fact-checking: this story is, if not true, at least true according to the history of the Danes (Gesta Danorum) written in the 12th century by Saxo Grammaticus. You can read his account of Alwilda’s story in the original Latin here, or in English translation here. Highlights include:
She exchanged woman’s for man’s attire, and, no longer the most modest of maidens, began the life of a warlike rover. Enrolling in her service many maidens who were of the same mind, she happened to come to a spot where a band of rovers were lamenting the death of their captain, who had been lost in war; they made her their rover captain.
I love the implication that there were lots of Danish maidens just WAITING for the opportunity of a life of piracy…
En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.
Prompt: Finn/Poe taking Rey to a green planet bc she loves that shit but they're not flora/fauna experts so when she starts trying weird stuff (running through the bush, trying to figure out what's edible, etc) they don't know what to do
Yes, absolutely, Rey on green planets is my new favorite thing. Also, if you didn’t expect this to be pre-OT3, you should have. Also, this is my first time writing these three, so be gentle with me.
“Oh, Force,” Rey breathed, turning on her heel, neck craned back and mouth open in delight. The trees towered over the Falcon, the sunlight filtering green-gold through the leaves and dappling the ship and its passengers in faint shadows. Poe watched her spin, her arms out and her head thrown back, and tried not to think too much. “Look at them! How do they get so big without falling over?” she asked, looking at Poe with wide, curious eyes.
He grinned, hands stuffed in the pockets of his new jacket–he’d gotten his old one repaired while Finn was in a coma, and the swathe of red material replacing the lightsaber damage had made the ex-Trooper beam at him. “Hey, I’m a flyboy, not a botanist. I don’t pay attention to trees unless they’re in my way.”
often times my mouth doesn’t move as fast as my brain does, so I either end up pausing to think for long periods of time in the middle of a sentence or I end up jumbling words and stuttering as a result (this is a common symptom of ADHD)
and I want people with and without ADHD to understand this
so shout out to all my fellow peeps with ADHD or ADD
you’re not stupid
you’re not weird
just take a breath and know your brain is literally so full and smart and working that your body just has a hard time keeping up sometimes.
Is this what happens to me when I turn into a broken record, and I’m talking about something, and then I get caught on a word that I can’t get past?
Like, “I’m talking about something I’m really excited about and I really wanted to tell you, tell you, tell you, tell you–” and then I have to start over. Is that an ADHD thing? I just figured I was a train wreck.
Minimum wage is meant as a stepping stone to earning more later on in life.
I see minimum wage for teens, undergraduate students, elderly, and those living with a disability.
Let’s see what President FDR had to say about the minimum wage:
“No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages
to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (1933, Statement on
National Industrial Recovery Act)
“By living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level — I mean the
wages of a decent living.” (1933, Statement on National Industrial Recovery
Act)
Also, ahahaha “It shouldn’t be a living wage. It’s for people with disabilities and old folks” who…apparently don’t deserve to live.
I couldn’t find a job that paid me a living wage when I was an undergrad. So I got two. And I still ended up maxing out two credit cards and regularly over drafting. And since I was working so much I also started getting Ds and Cs so I lost my small honors scholarship. So I had to drop out of college and keep working low wage jobs.
My credit is still a mess almost a decade later, I still haven’t been able to get back to school. And I’m still paying off the student loans I took out trying to survive my two years in college.
But yeah totally undergrads don’t need to make a living wage. Take a fucking seat OP. Only someone extremely privilege enough to not need a living wage during those times has the luxury of believing the bullshit you’re spewing.
woah wait why do people with a disability not need to make a living??
Because ableist douchebags like the OP think we don’t deserve to live.
So…just to recap…according to the OP…
Elderly people: don’t deserve to live, even though…they’re people.
Disabled people: don’t deserve to live, even though…they’re people.
Teens and undergrads who might be supporting themselves completely because either their family doesn’t have the money to help or won’t help: don’t deserve to live, even though…they’re people.
being a female means needing to see 10 different doctors to get a proper diagnosis because they always think you’re exaggerating and/or lying
define proper diagnosis. I mean, does that just mean the diagnosis you want?
no :) it means going to 10 different doctors who disbelieved your symptoms until the 11th found cysts on your ovaries :) which may mean infertility :) sit on a cactus :)
I call bullshit
Of course you do. Like the first 10 doctors. 😒
I call bullshit on the story. If you think you have an issue you should see a specialist not just your PCP.
Like the 4 “specialists” I saw for the crippling numbness in my face and legs I had for over a year while they told me it was “stress”? When it was finally found that I had scars on my brain and spine? Those “specialists” we’re male neurologist who wouldn’t give me an MRI because “women stress too much”. Go fuck yourself.
MY SPINE WAS BROKEN FOR 2 YEARS BECAUSE MY DOCTORS TOLD ME I JUST HAD BAD CRAMPS AND REFUSED TO TAKE XRAYS. FUCK YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. WHEN WILL BOYS REALIZE THEIR EXPERIENCES ARENT STANDARD???? I ALSO LOVE THIS IDEA THAT YOU CAN JUST GO TO A SPECIALIST WHENEVER YOU WANT LOL IF OUR PCP DOESNT BELIEVE US WHEN WE TELL THEM OUR SYMPTOMS THEY ARENT GONNA REFER US TO A SPECIALIST YOU FUCKING MOLDY WALNUT
My parents began noticing something large in my throat, saw a specialist….Guess what? Told me to lose some weight..even though I wasn’t overweight. I would have my period for weeks at a time. Was told that it was teenage hormones and stress.
Two fucking years later I attempted suicide they ran a battery of tests as required and bam! They find out that I have untreated Hashimoto’s. The “thing” was a goiter. Possible symptoms of an untreated thyroid disease is the goiter, unexplained weight gain, and depression. All they had to do was test my blood, but they said young people don’t have thyroid problems. 😒
-Allie
Ten years ago, my mother—who is a pretty tough cookie—started feeling both ridiculously wired, anxious, and incredibly emotional. Every doctor she saw told her she was going through early menopause, even though she was still menstruating. Her health declined to point where she was barely sleeping, losing weight, and crying constantly, which was a huge red flag because my mother never cries. Finally, she went to see another doctor 2.5 hours away who referred her to an endocrinologist. And what did the endocrinologist say? He diagnosed her with one of the most advanced cases of Grave’s Disease he had even seen, and said if she had gone just a few more months without being treated, she could have FUCKING DIED.
Also, it turned out that her thyroid levels had been moving out of the normal range in a progressive pattern for years, but nobody bothered to look at her past test results until after the diagnosis. They would just do a test, see that it was “in the normal range” and leave it at that. She could have caught it before she even had symptoms, instead of basically being accused of having hysteria.
i had a brain aneurysm/hemorrhage ten years ago, doctors still tell me im faking my disability BECAUSE YOU CAN TOTALLY FAKE LIMITED MOVEMENT OF THE LEFT SIDE
My sister had intercranial hypertension which was causing headaches, dizzy spells and loss of vision, and you know what the hospital told her? She was being a hysterical girl and making it up. A few weeks later she spent roughly a month in hospital and had several lumbar punctures to relieve her RECORD HIGH spinal pressure that was causing so much strain on her brain and optic nerves she was being sent blind.
Everytime I see this post (and it’s been a good 5/6 times), it has different stories and experiences of women who have been horribly mistreated by doctors and it just blows my mind that this is so big. It’s absolutely disgusting how terribly women are treated in the medical world and something needs to be done about that.
my friend lea had back pain, then pain in her legs and feet, and then numbness. despite seeing 7 different doctors over 2 years, by the time they found the cancer it was inoperable. chemo and radiation didn’t work. the cancer spread. she died and left behind a 5 year old daughter.
A few years ago I would go through spells where I literally could not stand on my own and I couldn’t get out of bed. I would be freezing and too weak to eat. I would keep having heart palpitations as well. I got up the money to go to a clinic and they told me it was just stress and to basically just work on chilling out. I saved up money for a few weeks to do this and I pretty much get a “chill out” from them.
As time went on it got worse, most noticeably the heart palpitations were happening almost constantly. I went again to a different clinic and was told it was normal and that it was probably stress. They did no tests, and they told me it would “just go away”.
Two weeks later I ended up collapsing going down some stairs, and at the hospital it was discovered that I had such severe anemia that my heart could barely keep up with trying to get enough oxygen to my body. I had developed left ventricular hypertrophy (my heart muscle is too big) and because of them ignoring me and dismissing me I’m at a much higher risk of heart attacks and stroke now.
I went to the doctor with severe intermittent pain in my upper right stomach area that was so bad I had to miss school. Despite the fact that my period has been on a regular 3 month cycle for years, and I still had two months left until my period, my doctor told me it was period related cramps and or indigestion. 2 months later I’m in the hospital getting my gallbladder removed. It was so obstructed that there was gangrene developing my my system.
So…everyone who’s given me shit for that one post (about medicine and equal treatment and shit) can just read this because I’m sick of defending my case.
I’d like to take a second to list all the people I wish had known more about dyscalculia growing up:
My first grade teacher, who noticed when on a verbal counting test that I went from 99 to 100 to 200 and told my parents I just needed a little practice
My third grade teacher, who couldn’t understand why I would turn in a timed multiplication table test with absolutely nothing written on it, or burst into tears when asked to bring it home and have it signed by my parents
My school corporation, who placed me in advanced mathematics for two excruciating years based on aptitude tests, apparently unaware that aptitude and ability are not one and the same
My fifth grade teacher, who privately admonished me for “laziness” because I couldn’t stop making “silly mistakes”—like switching multiplication and addition, or flipping numbers like three and eight, or failing to follow every step of a math problem
My sixth grade math teacher, who publicly called me out for writing the formula for the Pythagorean Theorem on my hand, claiming I didn’t study, though I had spent five hours the night before preparing
My parents, who grounded me every time my report card came out, trying their best to discipline what they thought was laziness
My family doctor, who, once told about my math troubles, prescribed me ADD medication without any running any kind of diagnostic
My Algebra teacher senior year after I was diagnosed, who claimed that giving me extra time on my test would be “unfair to the other students”
Every teacher who ever laughed and pointed at the clock when I asked them what time it was
The boy in my band class that said I was the “stupidest smart person he’d ever met”
My former boss, who when I told I had dyscalculia told me “I probably have it too, I am always mixing things up!” (she was an accounting major and ran the accounting portion of that place of business)
But you know who would have really benefited from knowing about dyscalculia? Me. I wish I had known. I wish I could go back and tell my ten year old self that it wasn’t my fault, that I am extraordinary in the best way. I wish someone, somewhere along the way could have seen what was really going on.
That’s why dyscalculia awareness is so important.
oh my god.
I. had no idea this was a thing. looked up the symptoms and
‘inability to tell, at a glance, how many objects are in a small group’
THIS. THIS IS A THING? THAT OTHER PEOPLE HAVE?
‘struggles with directions, anxious about moving from one location to another’
I memorized the route to all my classes in high school and yet if I didn’t have COMPLETE AND UTTER FOCUS I would STILL GET LOST it was so unbelievably stressful
‘is constantly late because struggles with understanding the passage of time’
‘struggles to read analog clocks’
‘moves too fast or too slow’
‘struggles with basic math/memorizing math facts like times tables and formulas’
GOD. I spent MONTHS on those times table tests; long after everyone else had gotten theirs done, I was still taking and retaking those awful, awful tests.
And I still have to turn everything into addition to get it to make sense. 10-7? count up from 7 to 10, on my fingers. do it again to make sure I’ve done it right. 4x6? that’s 6+6+6+6. keep track of it on my fingers. do it again to be sure. 18/3? start adding threes together, keeping track of how many it takes, on my fingers. do it again to be sure. STILL SOMETIMES GET IT WRONG because even addition is hard.
just.
dyscalculia.
is a thing.
thank you for this post.
Oh my god, Set.
I do the counting up thing on my fingers, the sets of sixes… I have the worst time with clocks and times tables…
Can’t NOT count what is on the table instead of being able to guess right away… I am always early, always. Because I have no idea what time I’ll be able to get there by. I cannot “get” analog clocks!
And perhaps this isn’t part of it but as soon as a number is no longer 100% necessary I forget it. Which is awful when I figure it out, do what needs doing and someone asks me the number.
Estimating cost of items in cart? Lord what??? People can do this without a calculator? I have no judgement of time either. Has it been a minute? An hour? Idk man. Wow. Woooooow. I should look into this more…
right?!?
god, ESTIMATING I HATE ESTIMATING prices and rounding and estimating
do you remember those standardized testing questions that were like ‘guess how many cubes are in this pile of cubes’ or ‘guess how many olives are in this olive jar’ I was always like BUT HOW?? ugh I hated those.
and yes! the forgetting the numbers mid-problem thing!
man, tipping causes me great anxiety, because tipping is IMPORTANT and I have to use a calculator or write it down and then I feel like people are judging me and the ABSOLUTE WORST is when you have to figure out the tip, add it to your bill, select a suitable amount of money, and then TELL THEM HOW MUCH MONEY YOU WANT BACK nooooooo please no
I was going through my emails and one of my online orders has been dispatched and when I ordered it I had to put in a state but New Zealand doesn’t have states and I was annoyed so I put “New Zealand doesnt have states you fuckass” and now in the dispatch email under delivery addess it totally has “New Zealand doesnt have states you fuckass” as part of it woops.
I write. I swear to God. I actually love writing fanfic. BUT, and here’s the catch, I have a ton of trouble coming up with short fic ideas. Short anything ideas, really. The most memorable example is that one time I decided to write how I thought someone being able to see the future would pan out, just a few pages of character study, dicking around with super powers, nothing fancy. Smash cut to a year and a half later, I’m wrapping up my 350 page novel and staring dismally at my 200 additional pages of worldbuilding. And it’s always like that, it gets so out of hand.
SO. My solution to that is this. If you have a craving for a specific pairing that you know I ship, shoot me a prompt and I’ll throw together a short fic for you and post it. I’m trying to unwind after finals, so it’ll be good for me, and you’ll get fic, so it’ll be good for you.
Hit me up.
This is your reminder that I’m bored and open for prompts.
*banging my fists on a table* LET CASHIERS HAVE CHAIRS
Every time I see a cashier with a chair I’m like “I support this business”, no joke. That shit shows me that a company actually CARES about it’s employees. Quit making people stand on their feet for 8 hours straight that shit is torture.
Wait, do cashiers not have chairs in the US?
No, we don’t. At least not where I’m at. We need to stand on our feet so we don’t look “lazy” to the customer
Okay, this might be a stupid question but how do checkouts in big grocery stores and such work in the US? In Germany they look like this:
you put your stuff on the belt thing and the cashier checks it but that doesn’t really work when they’re standing - at least it wouldn’t be as comfortable for the cashier or the customer
It’s just like that, except the cashier is standing
in sixth grade my homeroom teacher caught this kid stephen saying, “that’s so gay.”
so he told the class that for the rest of the week, anytime you wanted to express something negatively, you could say, “that’s so stephen.”
and it started out as a joke, where even this stephen kid was going around using it, laughing at it, not really caring. it was funny, i guess.
but then one of his friends got a bad mark on a test and said, “that’s so stephen.”
we had a blacktop recess and everyone kept saying, “that’s so stephen.”
and when we got too loud doing groupwork and had to separate and work silently, everyone in the class kept muttering, “that’s so stephen.”
and the weirdest part was that even though it was just a word we were using, even though it had nothing to do with stephen, we all sort of blamed stephen.
and as everyone kept using “that’s so stephen,” all week, you could see stephen himself finding it less and less funny. we played a game called “pamplemousse” in french class and everyone got stephen out right away if they could. someone literally went and found one of stephen’s art projects when nobody else was around and ruined it so he had to start over.
and when my homeroom teacher found out about it, he sat everyone down and told us that it wasn’t okay to say “that’s so stephen” anymore. that the things we’d been blaming him for weren’t his fault and the things we’d been doing to him weren’t fair.
he told us that stephen couldn’t help it that he was stephen. he didn’t choose to be stephen. he was born stephen.
and that’s when it clicked.
we all felt pretty stupid, i think, for sort of falling for it, but i’ll be damned if i’ve ever had a teacher get a lesson across so utterly and completely as mr. bernard did.
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.
My personal fave is Sam Bellamy. His life story reads like a tragic epic novel - poor sailor boy, becomes one of the youngest/wealthiest/most generous (“Robin Hood of the Sea”) pirate captains, hangs out being a pirate with his other dudebro pirate captains, left a mysterious love back from his days of poor sailor boyitude, tragically and abruptly dies at 28 in a storm alongside his closest dudebro pirate captain (possibly whilst on his way to revisit his mysterious love).
These are all great but I think there are two things in particular we really need to talk about:
1. Attacking a ship simply to steal the crews hats has never happened in a movie at that is a travesty.
2. What I’m getting from this is that Bartholomew Roberts is quite literally the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Today I got a reply to a comment saying that the author had been so discouraged by the lack of response on the last two chapters that they had decided not to finish it, but that they had changed their mind and were now thinking of finishing. Just because I took 30 seconds to comment on each chapter.
It doesn’t matter if the fic is years old
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what to say (“I loved this” is always music to an author’s ears, no matter how many times we hear it)
The author will not think you’re a creeper if you’re commenting on every single one of their fics
The author WILL cuddle your comments close to their hearts like the precious gems that they are, even if they’re only one word.
Comments and feedback matter. I’ve written in fandoms and for pairings that have very active, vocal fans who comment a lot, and I’ve written for ships that are not terribly popular and don’t get much reaction. The difference in my attitude is incredible.
Your feedback matters to authors. Click the kudos button, but please, take the time to leave a comment. Even if it’s just one word. If you like the writing and want to see more, let the author know
/rant
yes yes yes yes yes yes
Comments are very motivational.
Kudos is wonderful and I want to thank everyone who’s ever clicked that little heart on AO3 but I have to admit, getting a comment would be even nicer :)
I live for comments. Every time I get one, my confidence and happiness goes through the roof. As an amateur writer, knowing that someone out there reads and likes my stuff - and likes it enough to spend time writing in response - is probably the greatest feeling in the world.
I look at ever single reblog to see if they put tags saying they like it, it honestly means so much to get something saying you enjoyed & if you say it directly to me I will legit thankyou so many times bc it honestly keeps me going
also that whole tale of aragorn and arwen thing where he saw her in the woods at twenty and fell instantly in love and it’s very beren and luthien? lies.
aragorn decided he was going to marry arwen when he was like, six.
and everyone thought it was just the cutest thing, baby estel with his little crush on the great immortal evenstar, and everyone would tease him about it relentlessly and he would get so mad, and pout, because how dare they doubt his word.
(arwen spent a lot of time biting back smiles and nodding very seriously when aragorn brings this up with her. no, estel, I do not know why they are laughing perhaps they have remembered a particularly funny joke.)
and then aragorn grows into this gangly teen and oh my god can you imagine being a pimply greasy teenager around fucking elves it’s a wonder he has any self-image left. His voice breaks every other word and the laundresses are beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the sheets because estel keeps washing them himself and aragorn wants to die, god, arwen is never going to marry him if he stays all elbows and skinny knees and he can’t even look her in the eye anymore without blushing, eye contact is probably something to look for in a husband–
(arwen, who never had to go through puberty because elves don’t do anything so undignified, tries to comfort him by saying she likes his blemishes. aragorn gives her a look of such utter, miserable despair that she starts laughing.)
(this is a mistake. he spends the next three weeks nursing his wounded ego and refusing to see her.)
estel is twenty when he asks for her hand. he is lean, slender and fair as a new tree, and so arwen does not feel guilt in kissing his cheek and gently refusing. he is still green, he will weather greater storms than this–and he takes it as he should, clasping her hand and swearing to ever be her loyal friend.
they write to each other–when she is in lorien, when he wanders with the rangers of the north, fights alongside gondor, travels to distant lands. it is an inconstant tie–he is rarely afforded time enough to put pen to paper; she is reserved so as not to encourage what may not be. (she signs her letters always, your friend. She likes him too well to be cruel in this.)
the years pass. his weariness and strife creeps onto the page, and she sends him tokens to fend off the darkness–leaves from lothlorien, the ribbon from her hair, snippets of poems. it is not enough it is never enough I am sorry, she writes.
his reply is gentle: you are enough. do not stop writing.
(she carries that letter tucked inside her sleeve for a long while, like a talisman–though against what evil, she does not know.)
she is in the house of her grandmother when a familiar voice calls out to her: my lady luthien!
this is when arwen looks up, sees aragorn–broad of chest and rugged, still wearing his battered mail, with one hand balanced lazily on the pommel of his sword. All the trees of caras galadhon are gold but he is shadow and silver, kingliness resting lightly on his shoulders–
I’m on very strict orders to put out the third section today, so here, this is the last section of this story. Murder happens, if blood is an issue for you. If you haven’t read them yet, here are Parts the First and Second.
Here are the things that everyone
knows about Harry Ainsel.
One.
Harry is short for Angharad, a nickname taken after years of mangled
pronunciations and never shrugged off.
(Fact: ‘Angharad’ means ‘more love,’ which Harry has always found funny,
in a bitter and ironic sort of way.
‘Harry’ means nothing at all, and she is easier behind the armor of it.)
Two.
Harry was born at the last stroke of sundown on the spring equinox. (Fact: this information could not be hidden
from her cousin, and they could not be convinced to hide such a prime weapon
from the rest of the world. Harry has
borne up under the hisses of ‘half-folk’ and ‘shadow-girl’ for nineteen years,
with teeth and fists clenched tight.)
you know. sometimes i think. in the face of tony’s obvious trauma and ptsd. in the face of the more obvious pain that bucky has suffered. we forget that steve’s motivation in the film isn’t just his tendency to hold stubbornly fast to his ideals, to do what he feels is right and damn the rest.
steve’s hurting too.
like. guys. we are so ready to give weight to tony’s emotional boiling over point at the end of the film, to say “this is why he tried to kill bucky, and it’s not right but it’s understandable.” we are so ready to acknowledge the fact that bucky was a victim and motivated to run by his fear of further persecution and hurt from nefarious forces. what about steve, though? when do we acknowledge that steve’s not just acting with righteous arrogance, but a deep anger, isolation, fear, loneliness, sadness, and hope?
steve died. like, his last memory before waking up seventy years in the future is a few days after watching his best friend fall from a train and he was unable to stop it he willingly flies a plane into the fucking Arctic, ostensibly to his death.
guys. guys. tony was fucked up for years because of untreated ptsd after falling from space and thinking he was dead. why is it so hard to remember that steve probably is fucked up, too?
this dude, he wakes up seventy years in the future and he has to make his way without really anyone or anything familiar, and the only person who is familiar is suffering from memory loss, and he’s now operating under the thumb of shadowy organization that he’s not 100 percent does good things and that continuously lies to him. there’s no war to fight, but that’s all this body is good for. it’s all he knows.
he doesn’t know what makes him happy. guys.
and so he goes through another trauma when he discovers this villain who is trying to kill him is in fact the dead best friend who—surprise!—was actually captured after falling and losing an arm and his brains were scrambled to turn him into a murder assassin. we know for a fact steve feels tremendous guilt over this. but imagine beyond guilt, the sorrow, the nightmarish possibilities, that are turning over in steve’s head. the idea of what his friend suffered. remember when rhodey fell from the sky and tony blasted sam in the chest? imagine the anger in steve’s heart at the idea of what bucky’s suffered and the unwillingness to let that go unchecked and unsaved.
oh, plus. that shadowy organization he’s been fighting for? the people he’s been taking orders from? the top dog in the neat little hierarchy that’s arranged his world? yeah. hydra. everything steve has known turns upside down. he can’t trust anything. imagine the paranoia. the suspicion. imagine the fear that must take seed at that betrayal.
and then! of course, then he begins fighting these battles with the avengers where the collateral damage is on such a bigger scale than it was at war. where there are aliens. aliens, you guys. and he’s tasked with leading this motley crew of superheroes in a world he’s still getting used to and people die, lots of people die, and we know that even if it doesnt visibly affect him like it affects tony (who always seems shocked when he’s confronted with loss, because it’s presented to him on a personal, individual level) it does affect him. that steve feels the guilt of lives lost. imagine that burden. imagine the weight of the shield, the mask, the responsibility. imagine the loneliness. the fear.
so then. then. in the space of a few days. steve deals with more guilt from the deaths in lagos. he shoulders that burden. then he deals with the moral quandary of signing the accords. he wrestles with that decision. peggy dies. he grieves, oh goodness does he grieve. vienna fuckin blows up and that elusive best friend is now the suspect. so steve is grieving, he is confused and conflicted, and now he feels doubly guilty—that’s the person he has been looking for, should he have already caught him? did he do it? he couldn’t have. does he bring him in? does he shoulder this responsibility too? what will they make him do when he catches up to bucky? what should he do? steve might act like he always knows what’s right, but a decision like this isn’t easy. it messes with a person. and when you’re dealing with all that mess in your head, sometimes you don’t think. sometimes…you act.
like when bucky is triggered, when steve stops a helicopter with his bare fucking hands, you can feel the desperation. that’s not ordinary heroics. that’s not steve just trying to stop bucky from escaping and possibly hurting others. it’s steve fighting for bucky. for this piece of his past. for the possibility of an end to loneliness. for the possibility of redemption for letting him fall.
and when they go on the run, when they know they have to stop the supersoldiers, when they clash with tony’s team, can you imagine steve’s sheer frustration that no one gets what is at stake? that no one is willing to listen? and yes, he didn’t even try—but why is that, you think? is it possibly because steve is used to institutions and those in power ignoring what he thinks is right and causing disaster anyway?
when steve says, “pal, so are we.” when steve acknowledges to natasha that he’s 90 not dead, when he openly references the fact that he and bucky are 100, can you imagine knowing that? adjusting to that? being 20-something in body and memory but 100 in actuality? living in a body that people perceive as a weapon so strongly that you’ve become a weapon when you are still longing to rediscover the man you were? steve’s not just cap. steve’s steve, and he doesn’t know what makes him happy you guys. he’s a guy, he’s a human, and he’s dealing with A Lot.
i get that he makes some bad calls in the movie. so does tony. my beef is that while tony’s decisions are often supported by his very obvious trauma and emotional burden, we rarely seem to give enough weight to the very real and very similar turmoil that is going on inside of steve.
when tony is fighting him in siberia. when steve says, “he’s my friend,” so simply, so sadly, without any righteousness, just clean tired truth, that’s steve as steve. when he hid the truth from tony, that’s steve as steve. when he drops the shield, that’s steve reclaiming himself as steve. we expect cap all the time, because often, steve is cap. it’s easy to see him as the moral police that way, if reductionist.
but we forget to see steve as steve. that he is a kid, in some ways. and a grieving, lost, lonely kid with a lot of anger, sadness, confusion, and power boiling under the placid-seeming surface.
I saw you were doing mini fics for Marvel and I thought you mentioned something about being a huge X-Men nerd in the past. Any chance you could write something short and fluffy for Kitty and Colossus? If not I totally understand but!!! Yeah!!!
All right, let’s fucking GO, Kitty/Piotr is everything to me, the dearth of fic is painful. Pertinent details are as follows. Movie-verse (and honestly FUCK the whole Kitty/Bobby plot, I do what I want) because otherwise this is gonna be obscure as shit. Timeline: right after the mansion is stormed by Stryker in the second movie, after Logan orders Piotr to get as many kids out as possible. For reference, he does, and takes as many students as he can get his hands on out into the forest, per the novelization. We’re going to pretend that they actually cast someone Russian for Piotr. Canon ages, so Kitty’s 16, Piotr’s 20.
Kitty sighed and leaned back against the tree, wishing that she could slide down to the ground. It was dark outside, especially almost a mile into the forest behind the mansion, and the adrenaline was making her hands tremble. She just…wanted to sit for a while, or go back to sleep and wake up from this nightmare. But, of the ten students she’d managed to get out, she was the only one who was a full member of the team, and the others needed her to be an X-Man.
“Shadowcat?” Rahne asked, tugging gently on her sleeve. Her eyes flashed in the moonlight, tossing back the glow like something wild. “Are you a'right?”
IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT KIND OF WRITER YOU ARE YOU CAN BE WRITING: POEMS, FANFICS, IDK NORMAL FICS, NOVELS, SHORT STORIES, IDK ANYTHING!! JUST REBLOG!!!
But what about vampire history teachers. Vampires who read something from a text book then proceed to light the book on fire and throw it out the window because “No. that’s not even close to what really happened. Listen up nerds I’m about to teach you what really happened in France during the revolution”
I need this as a series
Vampires sharing the recipe for Greek fire.
Vampires speaking in dead languages.
Vampires being able to translate untranslatable scripts.
Vampires who react to straightwashing historical figures like “Are you kidding me everyone knew that man was queer!”
Vampires from cultures who were once antagonistic towards each other stubbornly maintaining a friendship that’s lasted longer than their civilizations.
Vampires who honour forgotten deities you won’t find in mythology books.
Also, vampires who secretly saved stuff from the Library of Alexandra.
A vampire show that does not revolve all around sex and eternal cursed love.
nerd vampire whose knowledge of current events is terrible but they can always remember everything that’s considered “history” so they have a super-detailed knowledge of everything up to about thirty years ago and then ?????
vampire who couldn’t tell you what caravaggio was known for but duelled with him at least three times and slept with him at least ten. “cara-who OH YOU MEAN MICHAEL yeah he was cool”
vampire who spent 100 years in a convent and is still so bitter that in all that time they never made her mother superior “GODDAMMIT I HAD SENIORITY! I HAD SENIORITY!” “okay so first off janet, that was six hundred years ago, but more importantly, maybe if you didn’t always start those complaints off with blasphemy…”
vampire professor who just sort of showed up at oxford when it was founded and is still there (and nobody’s noticed because he still never actually shows up to his lectures)
vampire politician who lifts all their campaign speeches wholesale from speeches given 200 years ago and just waits for someone to catch them out (nobody ever does they’re prime minister and their approval ratings are through the roof)
WAIT I HAVE MORE
queer vampire who constantly talks about the fashion for straightness and you need to be really careful because if you tell them straight is default they WILL scream at you for five days straight about what a modern concept heterosexuality is
vampire hoarder who has an entire town where they just kept having to buy new houses to keep their stuff in and some of it’s probably worth tens of millions by now but you’ll never find it in among the 1950s kitschy kitten sculptures and boxes of newspaper (the newspaper is a wonderful mix of yesterday’s guardian and daily courants from 1725)
vampire sailor from manderville’s time who just has so many stories and some of them might even be true
vampire bluestocking girl who took to the internet like a fish to water and spends her whole unlife engaging reddit antifeminists about women’s rights because that’s one fight she’s determined to see through. also with the advent of cheap dyes she literally wears blue socks every day and hopes one day someone gets the joke
vampire doctor who just gets SO CONFUSED about the literature because do you know how hard it is to keep up with medicine kevin? when i got my doctorate we thought leeches were good and then they were bad and now they’re good again? i was published in issue one of the lancet kevin that is 387 lancets kevin how the hell am i meant to remember which one’s current kevin why are they saying cannabis is good for pain like this is news??? (but also lives in a state of wonderment every day in hospital because wow look at all this stuff we can do now look at it kevin!)
entire coven of vampires constantly quibbling over manners because they’re all from different periods: “HATS OFF AT TABLE” “SCREW YOU LEONARD ONLY PEASANTS EAT BAREHEADED” “TABITHA THAT HASN’T BEEN GOOD MANNERS SINCE THE 1500S NOBODY HAS LICE ANY MORE” “IT ISN’T ABOUT LICE LEONARD IT’S ABOUT GOOD MANNERS YOU NEED TO HAVE GOOD MANNERS WHEN YOU HAVE PEOPLE OVER FOR DINNER” “I SWEAR TO GOD TABITHA IF YOU MAKE THAT PUN ONE MORE TIME I WILL SHOVE YOUR STUPID HAT DOWN YOUR THROAT”
Everybody I meet that’s not from Flint is always like “is it really that bad?”
It’s so much more than bad water. Its your children having seizures from lead poisoning. It’s the fear of contracting Legionnaires. It’s not being able to pay the hospital bills for your sick elderly and children. It’s not being able to bathe. It’s not being able to cook. It’s paying some of the highest water bills in the United States despite Flint being largely in poverty. It’s the fear of losing your house because you can’t afford to keep the water on. It’s the fear of losing your children because you lost the house.
Do you mean doctors who spent years learning about abled white cis men’s bodies
do you know anything about the world besides what you read on tumblr
Okay but this is true?? Shut up with your bullshit, the medical industry for a very very long time has used the able bodied white cis male as their standard and that has very real healthcare consequences for a lot of people.
Do you know why most women don’t know when they’re having heart attacks? Why heart attacks kill more women than men? Because symptoms of a heart attack are different for women and the ones that doctors usually recognize and publicize are the symptoms experienced by men. Do you know why it’s so difficult for Black and Brown people to get diagnosed if they have skin cancer? Because doctors have been taught to recognize it on white people. People of size are constantly told that their problems are entirely because of their weight and doctors don’t even bother to look beyond that to be sure that’s the case. So those people have medical conditions go undiagnosed properly for years, and die in the process. Fuck, even just the fact that people think it’s okay to charge women more for healthcare because “they have extra parts” (?????) is indicative of the way the male body has been considered the standard for fucking ever. And the healthcare needs of disabled people or trans people? Forget about it.
OP is 1000% right. The medical industry has used the able cis white male body as their standard of care for CENTURIES and that has real consequences for the rest of us today. It’s getting better but it’s not where it should be. So fuck off with your snarky commentary, you’re wrong. The healthcare industry is not equipped to handle the needs of people with disabilities, women, PoC, trans people, people of size, etc. and that’s in large part due to the fact that the established body of medical knowledge was created by studying able, cis, white male bodies almost exclusively.
Hey there folks, speaking as a trained EMT and a pre-med student, I can confirm that the above person is approximately 7000% accurate. In my EMT training, I would repeatedly ask ‘’but what if my patent is a woman” or “what is my patient is a person of color” and at first all I got was shock. Then I got confused bumbling. I got some answers–basic symptoms of a heart attack in women, how to recognize cyanosis in someone of color, the basics of how to work with an autistic patient or someone who for whatever reason can’t communicate well with you. In fact, EMTs and other EMS workers are getting a lot better at learning the differences between the health care for a person of color or someone disabled. We were even told that we would need to ask our patients for their biological sex (I know, I’m really sorry, I know that there are people who find this intensely uncomfortable or even harmful, but there are real medical reasons for this and most decent EMTs will use whatever pronouns you ask them to). But most if not all of the answers we were given about women were directly related to gynecological issues. The guys teaching me? They were good guys. Nice. Funny. Smart. Devoted to caring for patients. Impassioned about protecting people, especially women and teenaged girls, from assault. Largely not sexist toward me or their coworkers. Hell, they were even smart enough to say “listen, boys, the women in this class have a higher pain tolerance than you, they just do, and as a rule if a women says their pain is a 5 on a scale of 1-10, assume it’s somewhere around an 8” when a kid laughed during the gyno unit. But they just didn’t know what to say when I asked “so if you’re supposed to palpate the patient’s chest, what do you do if your patient’s a triple-D” or when I asked “so if your patient gets menstrual migraines, how do you know if this headache is a stroke or not.” They had never been taught. This is a real problem, one that many medical professionals work hard to remedy once they start practicing. But this is not bullshit. At all. The standard patient is a cis white guy with no disabilities or chronic illnesses. It’s a huge fucking problem and I’m going to need you to step down with your bullshit, there, friend.
This is an issue with mental health too, where people of color (black and Hispanic people especially) are less likely to be taken seriously with mental issues, and where community outreach for these groups is very very different from the kinds of programs that might be effective for white people.
Autism is rarely diagnosed in women because the symptoms doctors look for are all specific to men. Doctors used to blame depression and other mental illnesses in women on a misbehaving uterus, and it’s still a struggle for women to get their symptoms taken seriously enough to merit proper treatment.
Mental health for LGBT people has a long history of being an oppressive shitshow, given how long it took the medical community to stop pathologizing sexuality and gender identity. (Conversion therapy is still legal!)
As well as autism rarely being diagnosed in women, it’s also harder for a person of colour to be diagnosed, as it’s perceived as being a middle-class+ white man’s disease.
And! We didn’t know how large the clitoris was until THE NINETIES because no-one thought it was worth investigating. Thanks to a female researcher in Melbourne, Australia, we know that it’s roughly a wishbone shape, and has two ‘legs’ that extend down under the labia majora.
SHOCKER!! Turns out that small and vulnerable children being physically attacked by the large and strong adults they most love and trust in this world has negative effects. Who knew?
I’m adding onto this by providing the PDF of the actual study (thanks to still being able to access the journal post-graduation) and uploaded it to google docs here
So if you want the exact source, it is there (and without paying a dime and you can download it as well!!
