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where's that masterpost of quotes that have no right going as hard as they do. I'd like to submit "Protagonism is best left to teens and the insane"

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You show up for your first day at Copyright-Free Magic School. As you're going through orientation, you're informed that all new students get a school-assigned familiar that they are responsible for housing and maintaining. The staff member assures you that your assigned familiar is appropriately chosen and reflects you in some way.

Spin this to find out yours. (Remember, you are responsible for maintaining this familiar in your dorm room.)

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wait do people read first person stories and think they're the ones in the story???

Saw people talking about not liking first person, which is fair, but their reasoning was like "I would not do that" and I don't understand that mindset.

First person stories are still about a character. A character making their own decisions. First person isn't about you???? At least I thought it wasn't. What am I missing? I've always seen first person as just a more in-depth look into a character's mind and stricter POV. Not as a reader stand-in.

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You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.

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Explain yourself.

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Oh that part also happens in October here too.

wishing a very bearable seasonal affective disorder to all who observe

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For four years now, I've thought "weird that it's only affecting you now, in november". It's only this year that I realised SAD hits us differently because Baltimore is at a lower lattitude than Belgium. I looked up hours of daylight, and today will be 10h10m in Baltimore. That daylength happened 17 days ago here. Our days are already shorter than the shortest day in Baltimore will be: 9h10m today.

Baltimore shortest day: 9h24m.

Belgium shortest day: 7h 54m.

Side note, I'm so sorry for my mum, who just landed in Belgium after 6 weeks Morocco, making her lose 1h29m of daily daylight all in one day. No easing into the dark times for her.

wishing a very bearable seasonal affective disorder to all who observe

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What kind of man would put a known criminal in charge of a major branch of government? Apart from, say, the average voter.

--Terry Pratchett, Going Postal

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This is how I know I'm a millennial. I experienced my first smartboard in 2014 when I was in teacher training. In high school, we had chalkboards and beamers. Very very occasionally we had whiteboards with markers, and they sucked cause the markers run out way too quickly.

In elementary school, we had overhead projectors with transparant slides.

That relatable (older) Gen Z memory: when all the projectors and white boards got replaced by Smart Boards™ around like fifth grade and none of the teachers knew how to use them but they Had To Use them otherwise the school just wasted a bunch of money and it was a rlly weird transition

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No marriage required.

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If I have formed a weird parasocial relationship with Phil, delightful blorbo from the Welsh "Where is Wally the Walrus" tumblrite from my dash, does that count as cheating?

I really hope not, cause I think we all need some Phil today.

Currently sitting in a pub with my husband and my friend Phil for the first time in ages and ages and I'm having the best time because Phil is exceptionally charmingly weird

He has opened the bidding as we discuss neurodiversity

"I just get distracted so easily," says Phil. "Like I meant to go to uni the other day. But I ended up playing Uno with some Mormons."

"... sorry?" says Steff.

"Yeah," says Phil. "In the park. No, wait..."

There is a pause

"Witnesses," he says. "Those ones. I told them if I lost I would convert with them, but if I won they had to go drinking with me. So that's what I mean, you know, I get distracted."

"PHIL," says Steff. "OBVIOUSLY, WHO WON."

"Oh yeah," says Phil. "Me. Sorry."

I am having the best time

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My job now is to outlive that man.

I will outlive him. I will be here when he is gone. I will be here when he has been erased. I will be here, telling stories, loving my wife, protecting my friends and family, cherishing joy and kindness and diversity. I will be here. He will not. It is only a matter of time.

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reblog if you need a hug

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If you’re pining you need to stop and pick a different tree. You know, spruce it up a little

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In my second pregnancy at my 7 week scan, there was no heartbeat. We had another scan at 8 weeks, still no heartbeat. It devastated us to hear that this pregnancy was not viable, that miscarriage was inevitable: this was an IVF embryo transfer, we couldn't have been more intentional about conceiving. We could wait for the miscarriage to start naturally, which could be that day or the next or another week or two or three or even more. Or knowing that it was inevitable, we could induce the miscarriage with mifepristone and misoprostol. We did the latter, so we could start to heal. It was the worst experience in my life. I now live in a world where I count myself lucky because that medical termination was a legal option.

First pregnancy of someone in my IVF support group, just shy of 10 years ago, the mom lost her baby somewhere between 22-25 weeks gestation. Premature cervical dilation, premature rupture of membranes, unfortunately there was no way to save her stillborn son. It was the worst experience in her life by a landslide. She now lives in a world where she has to count herself lucky, because she received immediate medical care. The lifesaving interventions she had that day are not a given anymore. In the US, in Poland, in other countries with abortion bans, hers was a scenario where women have died because treatment was withheld too long for fear of litigation.

3 years ago, my friend who conceived through IUI (so again, could not have been any more intentional about conceiving) found out she had an ectopic pregnancy, the zygote had settled in her fallopian tube. This very wanted pregnancy was not viable, and her life was in danger. She had surgery, lost the pregnancy that fallopian tube. It was the worst experience of her life. She lives in a world where she counts herself lucky she was able to get that life-saving intervention at all.

Even if you think that you shouldn't have sex if you don't want a baby, please please please see that a great deal of terminations happen for women who want only one thing more than having a baby, and that is surviving their pregnancy.

If you're in the US: vote like your life depends on it, cause some day it might.

Tonight, the night before Election Day 2024 in the US, I am thinking about my stepkid.

I am thinking about the phone call they made to us earlier this year, the one where they told us they'd gone to the hospital thinking they had appendicitis and found out, instead, that a zygote - a tiny splodge of cells - had taken up residence not in their uterus but in a fallopian tube. The one where our kid said they were waiting for their partner to arrive, hoped that said partner would get there before the docs took our kid back to terminate that pregnancy, & assured us that they'd be okay.

After all, our kid lives in a state with choice measures embedded in state law. That pea-sized blot of tissue doesn't have more right to their health than they do. Nobody is standing between them and their doctors. They made a decision, and that was that.

In this tiny tragedy, the kind that plays out dozens of times a day at minimum across the country, we only had to worry about the small risk of surgery complications. We didn't have to worry about Ken Paxton threatening to charge their doctors with felonies. We didn't have to think, "What if the hospital's legal team doesn't think an ectopic pregnancy - which is never ever viable and must be terminated before it kills our kid - is really that big of a deal?" We didn't have to worry that they live in a state where ob-gyns are fleeing, leaving few experts behind, as has happened in Idaho.

We didn't have to watch our kid vomit up black blood before dying the day after their baby shower the way Neveah's mom did. We didn't have to pray in a waiting room (while doctors took our kid apart until their heart stopped because the doctors waited too long out of fear of anti-choice laws) until a doctor came to tell us we'd have to bury them the way that Amber's mom did. We aren't having to pick up our lives after fully treatable miscarriage-related sepsis took them from us the way that Josseli's husband and daughter must.

I could go on for far, far too long.

Listen. If you are a single-issue non-voter and have already decided that "both parties are the same" or whatever other thing you've told yourself so you can sleep at night, smug and secure, then I can't reach you and I can't help you. But if you genuinely think that your votes don't matter, if you're just suffering from a bout of overwhelm or apathy, if you're too young to remember the 2000 election and can't see that Dobbs is a direct result of that election and every one that's followed, please, I am fucking begging you.

I didn't really talk about this when it happened. I mentioned something briefly, maybe. The posts I've started writing about it are still in my drafts. It was too fresh, too frightening. It's not any less frightening now, honestly - because if this week doesn't end with President Kamala Harris, we're headed for a national abortion ban, at the minimum - but it's not about how fucking frightened I was or how sad and bewildered I was to realize that my kid was going through this crisis in a nation more hostile to them than when I needed a D&C for an abortion at 21, in 1998.

It's about stopping this chapter of this fucking bullshit and at least finding some new fucking bullshit.

Vote, dammit.

Do the other work on Wednesday. Tomorrow, the work is to vote.