Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

saltybiowarefantears:

After Dragon Age 2, the entire fandom shouted in one voice -

“GODDAMMIT, ANDERS!”

After Dragon Age Inquisition/Trespasser, the entire fandom shouted in one voice-

“GODDAMMIT, SOLAS!”

Congratulations, Anders. You are no longer the king of “I fucked up”; that crown has been passed onto a much more experienced, much balder head.

(via amusewithaview)

littlestartopaz:

valeria2067:

neurodivergent-crow:

toastynoneofyourbusiness:

arcadiasilver:

tartapplesauce:

theniftycat:

alex51324:

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

alex51324:

floranna2:

alex51324:

theniftycat:

wtf are bathroom passes

In American schools, if students move from one classroom to another during the day, which is the norm in middle and high schools (roughly age 11 to completion of school), the whole school does so at the same set times during the day.  Being in the hallways at these times is Passing Classes, which is fine; being in the hallways at any other time is Roaming the Halls.  A student who is Roaming the Halls is presumed to be Up To Something, and may be stopped and interrogated by any member of staff who witnesses said Roaming.

Of course, it does occasionally happen that a student has a legitimate reason to be in the hallways outside of designated passing times.  In those situations, the student carries a pass (”hall pass”) which can be presented to any member of staff who stops and interrogates said student.  Usually, the pass is written on a form that is signed by the teacher who authorized the student’s presence in the halls:  at my school, the form had spaces for student’s name, date, time, where the student is going, and from whence the student is leaving.  

Filling out the entire form every time a student wants to go to the toilet is a pain in the ass, so some teachers use some other form of pass.  In my day, it was either just a regular pass that was pre-filled and laminated, or a block of wood with the classroom number and “Bathroom” written on it.  Apparently nowadays, using some cumbersome and humorous object as the bathroom pass is A Thing.  

This is all regarded as completely normal, so much so that I have explained it in what may be a tedious amount of detail, because I’m unsure what part of it strikes you as unusual.  How is this situation handled where you went to school?

By raising your hand, saying you need to use the bathroom, teacher saying okay and you going. Nothing else.

So if another teacher sees you on your way there, they just…mind their own business?  

That would never work here.  

Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?

Over here if a teacher sees you (they’re all in class anyway too so it’s unlikely anyone would be in the hallway during class unless they have a reason) they mind their own business, unless you’re dicking around or actually doing something troublesome or loud, or if they know you and know you’re supposed to be somewhere else, and you’re clearly not going to the bathroom. Or if they’re in a shitty mood and wanna yell at you for sitting on the windowsill which was forbidden in my school but nobody cared anyway.

Otherwise, no, no one’s gonna care. Not in high school, anyway- but in lower grades yeah because the kids are younger, but elementary schools will usually have a custodian walking around the halls. They’re still not gonna question kids going to the loo.

Would it never work there because of actual logistical issues, or do you mean people would not accept it as a safe solution?

Short answer is, the second one.  Long answer is, the American school system is permeated with a sense that teenagers are this chaotic force that must be contained at all costs.  (I’m right now having this very clear sense-memory of a hall monitor * saying “You can’t just roam the halls any time you feel like it!”** in the same sort of tone in which one might say, “You can’t just stab people any time you feel like it!”)  It’s not even so much a matter of what you might do while out in the halls unsupervised; the very idea of teenagers Roaming the Halls (of a school, which is full of both teenagers and halls) is understood as being inherently contradictory to the purpose of a school.  It isn’t even that you might go somewhere you’re not supposed to be; it’s that at any given time, there is only one place any given student is supposed to be.  A hall pass creates a temporary change in your prescribed location, without undercutting the fundamental principle that your location should always be prescribed.  

(*My school had professional hall monitors–grown adults who were paid a salary to keep order in the halls.)

(**At one point one teacher issued me a Permanent Hall Pass, for Reasons, essentially licensing me to roam the halls whenever I felt like it.   I forget how long that lasted, but eventually a hall monitor stopped me with it and was, naturally, convinced it was fake.  They hauled me to the office and were like, “We’re going to call down TeacherName and show her this,” and I was like, “Please do.”  So finally they did, and she was like yes, that’s my signature, yes, I wrote that; what are we doing here?”  I ended up getting detention anyway, “because the policy is that if a hall monitor brings you to the office, you get detention.”  The teacher was also instructed to never issue an open-ended hall pass again.)

Today’s question: is the USA actually a giant prison?

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WHAT THE HELL????????? What if you have no class in the middle of the day? We’d just hang out in the halls. Not everybody went to the library or sth. I probably spent a year of my life in the halls. It was actually kind of a way to socialise with people.

Yeah, there’s even a stock phrase as Gaeilige which is about the first thing you learn in school (my dad taught it to me before I started Big School, i.e. age of five) asking for permission to go to the bathroom.

If a teacher sees a kid hanging around the corridors instead of being in class, they may ask them what they’re doing and wait to see if they head off to where they say they’re going (the usual dodge is “Miss/Sir, I have to get my books out of my locker”) but there’s no Hall Pass or any of the rest of this.

Dear America, why is your education system so strange?  

Well for one, there’s never supposed to be a period where kids aren’t in class. There’s no study hall period, no free period, and you’re carefully monitored when you go to and from class as well as to and from lunch period. The idea is that, if kids are free-roaming, they’re going To Do Something like leave school (truancy) or cause some sort of problem. 

But really, its more about training children for future jobs where their employers will treat them exactly the same way. If you are not in class/working, then you are doing something wrong. 

You’ve also got to understand that, in American schools, not only is there a serious lack of trust between teachers and students, but also that the school systems will try to cram AS MUCH CLASSES into one day at a time to “maximize learning.” This includes having extremely short lunch breaks and hall passing times (I swear lunch breaks in my elementary school were like ten minutes long, which contributed to how fast I wolf down my food to this day. I also distinctly remember passing time being only three minutes at my middle school and having a panic attack on the third day of school because i couldn’t get my locker open and I was that afraid of being caught skipping class).
Oh, and by the way, we watched a documentary in high school that took place in a prison once, and I was shocked at how much the prison in question actually DID look like a high school.

schools operate on the premise that All Teenagers Are Inherently Criminals

Added to this, since the late 90s, teachers and administrators also have to know who is out of their classrooms and why and for approximately how long, so they can make an accounting of which kids might be in the path of a random shooter.

Because it’s more important for adults to have the FREEDOM to amass huge arsenals of guns than it is to protect the physical and emotional safety of children.

My daughter has been in school for six years (she’s 10), and she and her classmates have had to practice hiding in the classroom corner in silence with the lights off about twice a year.

American students and teachers now go about their business every day with the background knowledge that at any moment, a kid with his dad’s guns can show up and try to slaughter them all.

Tell me that doesn’t do something to your psyche.

By the time you hit high school you don’t bat an eye at lock down drills or hall monitors. They’re pretty much part of the scenery. According to my friend who was a grade below me, they stopped letting kids have free periods at all after i graduated. Previously, they would lump your classes together and either you could leave early or come to school late, but it was a steady stream of classes.

American schools are also basically wide open to the public if you come in the front door. So hall passes are supposedly for child safety too.

Anonymous asked: bud bud bud what do you think of river song

Okaaaaaaaaaaaaay

So.

Here is my complicated stance on River Song.  

On the one hand: her whole plot of going rogue against what she was designed to be and living her life backward relative to the proper timeline and fighting for what she believes in and being badass and snarky with the hair and the heels and the guns and the rest?  INTO IT.  INTO IT UP TO MY EYEBALLS ANON.  HERE.  FOR.  IT.  HONESTLY KIND OF BITTER I DIDN’T COME UP WITH THE WHOLE ‘LIVING TIME BACKWARD’ THING MYSELF.

On the other hand: A, I don’t like the way the narrative handles her, B, I don’t like the change toward companions needing to be Special, and C, I’ve never been able to get into her and the Doctor as a thing.  This got long.

Keep reading

lupinatic:

rhodanum:

alarajrogers:

intersex-ionality:

So I’m going to be bitter and old here for a minute.

The absolute refusal to allow anyone to use queer as an umbrella is both novel and regressive (I know, I know). For decades, queer was an accepted and neutral way to concisely refer to a coalition of loosely connected communities and identities. Queer theory, queer film, queer spaces, queer history.

This use came after another few decades of committed work in reclaiming the word from oppressors who flat out stole it from us.

It took a lot of effort to wrestle it back out of their hands, and now I’m expected to just give it over to them because decades of unity and collective action and shared experience don’t matter because a handful of (usually white, almost exclusively american) kids on this godawful website have deicded it’s illegal for me to “force it on others” and that I should instead just let them for LGBT or gay or whatever else on me.

Like, fuck off?

Fuck off.

I am going to refer to my community in the way that I have been doing for an entire lifetime. Not just my specific identity, which is queer as fuck, but the whole fucking shebang.

And I will not hand the word back over to straight people with a nice little ribbon and a coat of polish and say “here, some kids decided it was cool if I let you stab them with this word so here you go” like

Fucking, why would I ever.

Frankly, and I know how people are going to react to this but, frankly?

I damned well will use queer to refer to my community as well as myself, and anyone who wants to take it away from me can take it over my COLD DEAD QUEER LITTLE FINGERS.

I will not sit by and let antsy, nervous kids who don’t know a damn thing about our history talk down to me about how “well, actually” when they can’t even recognize the fact that trans people were still being policed out of here literally three fucking years ago.

The presumption and the ignorance are staggering.

So yeah.

Queer as in fuck you people in particular.

And, to my followers who are made uncomfortable by this, well. I will regret losing you on some level, but not enough to stop.

I fully intend to use queer as the umbrella term it has been for my entire life. LGBT never did my intersex, pansexual ass any favours anyway.

My point is, I’m not going to be referring to the “LGBT” community at all, anymore. It’s going to be 100% queer here, in a more conscious and consistent way than it has been before. Because, you see, even people who do use queer as an identity unashamedly have gotten into this pattern of being apologetic or conditional about it, with a constant, overbearing tone that even when we do use queer as a community term with have to hedge it and gentle it because it’s so dangerous.

but it’s fuckign not.

We spent decades pulling the danger out of it.

And ‘m not going to let it sneak back in.

Every time someone says “queer is a slur, you shouldn’t use it” I feel like they’re trying to fucking gaslight me. Like, I was there when it got reclaimed. I read “Queer Science”, I saw the “Queer Studies Departments” in college and the majors in Queer Theory. Kids do not get to invalidate my life out of ignorance. And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with, because how would the kids who don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about know to invalidate that word?

You go. Reclaim that reclamation. I’ll probably use LGBT+ and queer interchangeably, like I always have, and if some kid tries to lecture my 47-year-old ass on the matter I’m just going to have to look at them over my imaginary librarian glasses and tell them “no. you’re wrong. Go back to school, kid, you need to remember you’re sharing the world with adults and there is a consensual reality you have entered into. You don’t get to make it up from scratch any more than I did.”

@alarajrogers hit the nail on the head with this: 

And I can’t help but think that someone who knows exactly what they are doing was behind it to begin with

Because it’s absolutely surreal to see someone who is fifteen years old speak as if queer’s been used to constantly attack and smear and belittle and insult them, when they’re about twenty years too late, at the very least, to have gone through that as a teenager. I’ve seen it happen so many times, with so many teenagers on here, that it reads honestly like a script – like a Discourse Point someone’s taught them that they need to trot out as an argument, always and forever, amen. I made this connection over a year ago, when the screaming against ‘queer’ started in earnest on here and thought about it more in-depth when a number of very young activists both here and on Twitter told me unironically and with a straight face that they took all of their discourse points from the likes of leftbians and other exclusionists, starting with your garden-variety aphobes and biphobes and ending with outright radfems / TWERFs / SWERFs. 

That was the lightbulb moment for me. Question: 

• what group has managed to spread their posts and their ideas far and wide on Tumblr, because people reblog without checking the source or reading between the lines? 
  
• and what group has had a vicious ideological axe to grind against ‘queer’ as both a self-descriptor and an umbrella-term for decades now?
  

The answer to both is radfems. I was there ten years ago when they were absolutely driving themselves into a frothing lather over the fact that a very large number of LGBTQIAP+ youth were describing ourselves and our communities as queer uncontroversially – seriously, this was so common on the English-speaking queer youth forums I used to frequent back then that no one batted an eyelash, specifically because the work of reclamation had already been done for decades and if, asked, the vast majority of people answered that they preferred queer because it was INCLUSIVE (which is and has always been the kryptonite for groups of people whose ideas revolved around gatekeeping the community and their precious selves being the arbiters of who gets in and who stays out), Radfems quickly realized that they weren’t going to be able to demonize the word in the eyes of Gen Xers or people at the older end of the Gen Y generation in the community, because we’d either contributed to the work of reclamation or spent our whole fucking lives in communities where queer was a badge of pride. 

So, in what is honestly an absolutely brilliant move and which I’d be almost tempted to admire, if I didn’t want to spit everyone involved right between the eyes, radfems and other exclusionists targeted much younger LGBTQIAP+ people, leapfrogging a generation. Tumblr, in this sense, has been absolutely vital, both in giving them access to very young people who were just discovering themselves and whose knowledge of community history was nonexistent and in being built in such a way that radfems could make their posts go viral and attract tens of thousands of reblogs, if not more, if they knew to word them in just the right way (I’ve lost count of the number of what, at a shallow glance, seem like very decent PSAs on consent, but that at a closer reading were actually anti-BDSM screeds, easy to see for anyone who knows the dogwhistles). 

If radfems have managed to mire this place in their ideas intensely enough that they’ve turned their anti-kink crusade into an omnipresent thing in certain progressive communities on Tumblr, it’s not impossible to make the logical leap that they’ve managed to do so with their decades-long anti-queer crusade as well.   

I’d laugh and clap at the ingeniousness of it all, if it didn’t involve obliterating decades of community history, solidarity and reclamation efforts. 

#oh ABSOLUTELY#queer things#the SUDDEN BACKLASH against queer again is 100% from terfs#even back in like 2014 people were using queer on here without anybody batting an eyelash#and then one day all of a sudden in 2015 if you called yourself queer#suddenly you were getting a fucking 15 year old calling you ‘violently lgbtphobic’ like. lol what the fuck#(real thing that happened)#and yeah 100% on the ‘I feel like I’m being gaslit’#I TOOK QUEER THEORY COURSES IN COLLEGE#THEY DON’T FUCKING PUT SLURS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#THEY PUT ACCEPTABLE COMMUNITY TERMS IN THE NAMES OF COLLEGE COURSES#like#oh my god#the rise of 'q slur’ is honestly gaslighting that originated in the terf/radfem corners and spread until people thought it was the norm#it’s not 

Please note this. Regardless of how you personally feel about the word, this backlash against it happened much more recently than many people seem to think. And it’s worth pointing out who benefits from the backlash, and it sure as hell isn’t the people who gave decades of their lives to make the word a sign of inclusivity and acceptance.

werewolfsingles:

I love that hermione’s reaction to finding out hagrid is hatching a dragon in his fireplace is “hagrid you live in a wooden house”

She’s definitely going right to the heart of the problem though.

(via littlestartopaz)

the-meme-monarch:

usnavis-hat:

casper-the-friendly-being:

kabuki-akuma:

dzzjjjtttwubwubwubwub:

mutant-kidzz:

awkwardontheoutside:

adcacai:

acquaintedwithrask:

strawberry-fox:

live-love-laurens:

xxdarkwing:

21st Century AU fic where the founding fathers write the Declaration of Independence using Google Docs

“You guys! Stop deleting everything I write!”

“Unalienable!”
“Inalienable!”

I’M LAUGHING LIKE A MANIAC

“SO HELP ME I WILL LOCK THIS DOCUMENT IF YOU DON"T STOP CHANGING THE FONT SIZE JOHN HANCOCK!!!”

“STOP HIGHLIGHTING EVERYTHING!”

“WHO DELETED THE ENTIRE FUCKING DOCUMENT!”

“FOR THE LAST TIME, WE ARE NOT DECLARING OUR INDEPENDENCE IN COMIC SANS”

“GOUVERNUER MORRIS WILL YOU PLEASE STOP ADDING ‘IN BED’ AFTER EVERY LINE”

ladyhistory

This is a thing of beauty.

I-I found it???? The post???? The post™

imagine one for the new U.S. constitution 

“why is the red line under Pensylvania”

“bc that’s not how it’s spelled alexander”

“I am like, 100% positive I spelled it right”

“Pennsylvania has two n’s”

“No???”

(via lathori)

alchemistique:

literaturc:

kandinskian:

I think it’s really insulting that westerners talk about communism. y'all had it too good and now y'all are being spoiled little brats. let me talk to you about the women and men executed and how their bodies were thrown out of trains and the basic food being rationed so harshly that we actually started black markets for fucking sugar and oil and let me talk to you about how they used to spy on everyone, we had mikes in our homes, how they made kids rat on each other and how controlled the education was. lights went out at 7. my parents used to study by a candle. everything. was. controlled. everyone. was. oppressed.

# DESTROY TUMBLR’S UNAPOLOGETIC ROMANTICISING OF COMMUNISM 2K15 TBH

#the fastest way to make me lose all respect for you is if you’re one of the tumblr shitbabies who romanticizes communism #my grandfather was the only member of his family who survived the russian revolution #he hid in the family crypt and had to listen to the sounds of the bolsheviks slaughtering his whole family #women and children too #all shot execution style because they owned a tiny farm in what is now ukraine #the members of his extended family were all sent to gulags and we only know they were even there because we found records of their deaths #so don’t fucking come in here with your pop communism nonsense #not when my family has suffered under it #not when the families of millions #billions of people #have suffered for something you think is a cute and edgy way to rebel #go fuck yourselves honestly you ignorant pieces of shit #i consider myself a socialist but there is a huge fucking difference between socialist policies as implemented today in sweden etc. #and the utter living horror that was life under communism #stay classy tumblr 

(Source: sapphicsavage, via lupinatic)