#death mention

[prokopetz]

Early cyberpunk has this tension between framing a well-argued skepticism of body modification rooted in concerns about bodily autonomy and corporate ownership of human bodies, and being really shitty about actual disabled people because it was predominantly written by able-bodied folks who knew fuck-all about disability advocacy and treated all that bodily autonomy stuff as a metaphor for the artist's loss of intellectual freedom under the corporate state.

I look at folks on this site pulling the whole "well ACTUALLY having cool robot arms would suck because they'd be based on proprietary technology which would be used to exploit you, and then the owners would stop supporting it and you'd be left to slowly die" routine while clearly intending it purely as an ideological gotcha against cartoons they don't like and neither understanding nor caring that they're literally just describing the daily life of anyone whose chronic medical condition is managed by patented drugs, and I'm thinking "wow, forty years and we haven't learned a damn thing".

[podcastwizard]

ideal ways for me to die

1. old age, peacefully in my sleep

2. after a long and illustrious career i am at a rooftop gala hosted in my honor. i am wearing a beautiful gown, holding a glass of red wine, standing by the railing. a scorned lover approaches and, after a passionate spat, they push me over the edge of the building. the wine glass goes flying, splattering their outfit in red as a visual metaphor for the blood on their hands. as i descend my gown flies around me like two beautiful wings, a bird in flight. a photographer on the street manages to take a photo before i hit the ground and that photo wins the pulitzer. a new york times think piece is released regarding whether or not it's moral to profit off a photo of someone's death. the think piece also wins a pulitzer.

3. sex accident.

[basi1isks]

[earhartsease]

we still get immediately shoved out of our immersion in tv shows or films when The Girl find a dead body and immediately shrieks - we just don't find it realistic because we're pretty confident most people would gasp rather than shriek (i.e. sharp inhale rather than sharp exhale) and it also feels unnecessarily (and predictably) misogynistic too, as men encountering corpses almost never do the same on screen

also of course please do tell us if you've actually encountered a corpse unexpectedly, because tumblr is absolutely a place where some people have done this thing and we love a good anecdote

suddenly imagining "burst into song" as a potential response

edit: since lots of people are still responding to this (we were amazed at the huge response over a just 24 hour poll), we want to make it clearer that we were never saying "of course nobody shrieks", we were railing against how on screen, women always do in an over dramatic way, and when men do it's made fun of like they've emasculated themselves by shrieking (so it's clearly a deliberate misogynistic trope)

meanwhile of course some people do shriek, as clearly demonstrated not just by the nearly 11% in the poll, but by all the tags we got inundated with - the main responses seem to be: gasp, swear loudly, vomit, grunt or make some other kind of other inarticulate noise, and shriek

anyway, thanks for playing

[ribghoul]

my girlfriend is able to take like a 20-min nap and bounce back with full energy. idk how she does that. when i lie down i wake up 12 years later in a hospital bed i rip the IV out of my arm and stumble into the hallway the whole building is littered with bodies, i make my way back to my house but my wife and children are long gone

[thebibliosphere]

Not to keep reliving trauma on main, but I'm getting weird deja vu from where my health was a few years ago and where it's at now. And most of it is revolving around Good Omens.

In May of 2019, we genuinely thought I was dying because I was dying. My organs were in the process of shutting down because my red blood cells were prematurely self-destructing and damaging my kidneys in the process, and I was rapidly coming to terms with the fact that I might not survive much longer. I'd fought the good fight, and I'd lost. Mostly due to medical neglect. And I was mad about a lot of things, but do you know what I remember from the traumatic blur I'm left with?

"I'm going to be so pissed if I die before Good Omens comes out."

I'd waited 20+ years at that point for something like a tv adaptation of Good Omens. Ever since I was a child and my dad read the book to me, and I fell in love with it. And here I was, mere weeks away from the TV release and on the verge of death.

Then like a miracle, a miracle that hinged on human compassion and a doctor being willing to listen to me, I was saved. Dragged back from the jaws of death by a relentless hematology department that refused to give up on me and ultimately saved my life. And a week later, I got to watch Good Omens propped up in my own bed, still weak, still ill, with my heart stuttering in my chest every time I laughed. And I remember thinking, "I did it. I got to see it."

That it's now it's 2023 and my health has tanked again. My organs are rebelling against me and no one seems to know why. But yet again, a few weeks before Good Omens is set to release, I find a doctor who listens to me and is doing all he can to help. Striving with the grim kind of determination that can only come from a place of compassion and care. Like my world is worth saving, and not just his.

Which is rather fitting, I think.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Two people were talking and one went, "That's a funky dead guy on your necklace," to which the other replies, "That's Jesus Christ."

[nerdpoe]

Freak of the week

Danny, in his human form, can take one hell of a punch.

Online he's a well known stuntman, doing absolutely batshit insane stunts that would 100% kill anyone else. He makes a point of flaunting the lack of a meta gene in his genetic tests he took for his audience, and is generally known to be juuuuuust slightly unhinged.

So he's in Metropolis, getting ready to do a stupidly dangerous stunt, when a mind-controlled Superman lands in front of him.

In front of a live stream.

So he can't go Ghost like he wants.

Instead, he turns to the camera and grins, all teeth and feral.

"Who wants to watch me eat a punch from Superman and live?"

[prokopetz]

Movies where the lead actor did their own stunts are always either "the director forced them to stand in freezing water for fourteen hours a day while periodically throwing rocks at their head for the sake of 'authenticity' and they got PTSD and almost died" or "they insisted over the explicit objections of the production's insurance company that they be set on fire for real because it would 'help [them] understand the character's motivation'" – there's absolutely no middle ground.

[awakefor48hours]

If your sapphic ship has never tried to kill each other, or at the very least hated each other, is it really valid?

[phoenixyfriend]

Pro-Palestine music as protest has been a thing for ages but nothing prepared me for "Hind's Hall" by Macklemore, which has both some great lyrics, some great commentary on protests at Columbia, and for which ALL PROCEEDS GO TO UNRWA.

You don't gotta like his music, but damn. Gotta admit Macklemore has been putting his money where his mouth is for months on this issue.

You can donate directly to UNRWA on their website.

It's not yet on streaming platforms but I heard a snippet in Democracy Now, and he posted part of it to Twitter/X.

I will disclaim that I disagree with the "not voting for Biden" thing, due to the fact that I personally believe that the American political system forces a Lesser Evil approach. I understand the intent, but I do disagree on a personal and political level.

[thecorvidforest]

Today (May 5th) is Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons Awareness day.

Native American folks continue to have very high rates of homicide and violence against them. Murder is the 3rd-leading cause of death for Native girls and women. More than 4 in 5 Native American people have experienced violence in their lifetimes, more than 90% of these from non-Native perpetrators. Most of these have not seen justice.

I want to uplift some events near me, and I would encourage fellow non-Native folks to look into the Native American communities in your area to find education, events, and fundraisers.

On May 6th, the MMIP Central Oklahoma Chapter is hosting a memorial walk and relevant speakers at the state capitol.

On May 10th, the CPN House of Hope is hosting a remembrance walk in Shawnee, OK.

On May 11th, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma is hosting a community 5k/1 mile run in Antlers, OK with Choctaw vendor booths.

Here is a list of some other events for MMIP across the nation.

[cheddar-baby]

I wanna be the first corpse on the cover of vogue

[thebibliosphere]

In case you were wondering how deep down the Batfam fixation hole I am, it's something I've actually been talking about in therapy a lot.

Not like, in a worried way, more just when my therapist asks me what I'm doing in my downtime, my answer always used to be either "sleeping" or "I don't have downtime. I have too much work to do."

Now my answer is "playing my Batman game" or "watching Batman show/reading comics/writing unhinged Batman x Muppet fanfic."

And my therapist is delighted. She's fucking ecstatic. She's like, "You have interests again!" and I'm like !!!! Because here's the thing.

Almost dying in 2019 kinda irrevocably fucked up my brain, like, a lot. Like a lot, a lot. And I've been grieving over that for the last few years as well as recovering from the physical aspects of it. And to cope with it, I threw myself into work even though I wasn't physically or mentally well enough, and that made everything worse, and well, if you've been here, you know.

My brain has not been kind to me for a long time. It still isn't. But I do the work. I do multiple types of therapy a week. I piece myself back together on the daily and try to remember what it means to be human and not just this numb static void that sometimes sounds like shrieking if you listen too closely.

And then randomly, a few months ago a friend bought me Gotham Knights on Steam, and it was like a light turned back on. The engine that'd been refusing to turn over for years suddenly sputtered back to life, and something in my brain went, "Hey, I remember this... this is fun?"

And then I started tentatively searching the tags here on Tumblr, and yeah, actually. I remember this. I remember enjoying this. I can dip my toes into this. This is safe. This is a childhood interest from Before the almost-dying-trauma. And besides, it won't get in the way of my work. This isn't going to consume me. Nothing consumes me like it used to. I'm too broken for that.

Except, haha, jokes on me because, for some fucking reason, Brucie fucking Wayne and his gaggle of chaotic crime-fighting children is what reached into my brain, picked up my trauma, and started shaking it loose like a category 7 earthquake.

I actually laughed about that with my therapist a few weeks ago. Of all characters, of all pieces of media, it's Batman that's helping me process a significant chunk of my emotional trauma in a healthy way.

The most emotionally constipated vigilante in superhero existence, and I'm weeping like a child every time I get an achievement in Gotham Knights, and it says some bullshit like this:

ID: a purple steam achievement icon that says: He'd Be So Proud Of You. Reach the maximum level as any member of the Batman Family. 6.3% of players have this achievement. /end ID.

(for context, Batman is dead in this game, and you are playing as his emotionally devastated children trying to keep it together. Wailing, gnashing, crying, throwing up etc, etc.)

And my therapist, who has sat with me through EMDR sessions and a multitude of other shit designed to rewire your brain, just shrugs and says, "Sometimes we need to externalize our emotions through safe media. For you, right now, that safety is Batman having a relationship with the Muppets."

And like... okay, yeah. I'll take the win on that one.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Tumblr introduced a "postmortem" feature, where dead celebrities could blog from the afterlife. Only Terry Pratchett used it.