everbecomesreal

[everbecomesreal]

There’s an episode of Who We Are Now, which is the podcast Richard and Izzy Hammond host that focuses on ADHD, and in it Richard talks about going for a private ADHD diagnosis, and while he was in the borderline category, he didn’t meet the criteria.

do you ever get scared of how similar you are to someone,, cuz i just rewatched the hour long youtube video of james may and richard hammond getting drunk while playing chess (hilarious video to watch when you're enjoying a nice evening at home) and the drunker hammond gets, the more i see myself in him and his chaotic yapping and behaviour.

he goes all over the place, i swear that man might just be short (hah) on an adhd diagnosis.

and opposite him is may and his dry, calm demeanor, who is coincidentally a LOT like a good friend of mine. it's uncanny to watch. literally just the average hangout sesh of my friend and i

[everbecomesreal]

About ten, fifteen years ago I wrote a story about a guy living in a Capitalist dystopia. His walls, furniture, and tableware are all covered in smart displays. Basically animated wallpaper. It's sold as being able to turn your room or objects into anything - A nice forest view, outer space, a fantasy realm... but the companies that run this stuff keep sneaking ads in.

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

And google's going around freaking out about ad-blockers.

[everbecomesreal]

9. Pressing their face into the other’s neck, hiding from the world

Clint and Nat

@adorationamy and @agentsofpuppies both asked for #9. So two short drabbles for day 6 and 7 and yes I know how off I am in days. Maybe I’ll catch up or maybe we will keep running until we have 24 gifts.

And yes - that’s 3 asks for the same prompt :) <3 haha we all love some buried faces from the world huh?

1/

The explosion is bigger than Natasha thought. Heat warms her face, as she stands by Clint.

“And that’s the end of…”

But the words get caught as a second explosion gets triggered.

“Shit,” he breathes, Natasha hiding her face in his neck as he squints against the blast.

“What…”

“Shit!”

A third explosion and the world and aftershock reach them.

“Run,” Natasha coughs, taking off and dragging Clint behind her.

“I don’t understand!”

His words are lost to the wind, as they run through the forest.

Sirens, dogs barking and men shouting all the cacophony of sounds as the make their way back to the car.

“I don’t know!” Natasha calls back, “we only set enough C4 for the first.”

“I know!”

She trips on a tree root, and Clint grabs her by the arm pit.

“No time to fall!”

The dogs feel hot on their heels, as they reach the car, barking louder, moving through the scrub.

“Go! Go!”

Clint reverses, then guns the car faster.

“They’re gonna be shitty,” he groans, looking at the sat phone as Natasha calls Coulson.

“They’re gonna want answers that we don’t have.”

“Well, we need exfil, so they’re just gonna have to wait.”

Clint finds the path they came down, and Natasha swallows hard.

“Calling now,” she sighs.

.

2/

3am, Clint squints and sighs.

Natasha’s absent from the bed again.

The nightmares, the time of year, both weren’t kind.

He pads out of the room to find her sitting by the lights of the Christmas tree.

“Come back to bed,” he whispers loudly.

“I feel like I’m losing time,” Natasha replies.

It’s too early for Clint to give a coherent, thought out answer.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m wasting the life they gave me.”

Clint needs coffee.

Her words don’t make sense.

3am words rarely do.

“You’re losing me.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

She stands, and moves closer to him.

“It matters,” he assures, “I just need more… context.”

Wrong words, he chastises himself.

She shakes her head.

“It’s late.”

“Early,” he half smiles.

She takes his hand and leads the way back, the hallway half lit by the glowing lights of the tree.

They climb into bed and he feels he needs to ask, at least once more, just to probe.

Laying his head on her chest, he burrows into her neck, her hands coming up to the hair on his neck.

“Tell me what you mean,” he prompts, eyes closed, breathing her in.

She smells of sweat and her shampoo, tell tale signs of a bad night.

“It’s okay,” she whispers, “you can sleep.”

He wishes he wasn’t tired, to stay up with her, but nestled in, the sound of her heart and the familiarity of her close, Clint drifts to sleep.

[everbecomesreal]

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[everbecomesreal]

[everbecomesreal]

America has a weird relationship with cults where they’re terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)

[everbecomesreal]

[everbecomesreal]

Saw a tiktok of a guy saying he doesn’t feel comfortable talking to minors because he’s 19. And it’s just. I’m so fucking tired of this.

And like to be clear, I’m speaking as a victim of pedophilia when I say: We need to get over this collective fear of endangering children. Because holy shit, this stuff is getting out of hand.

The average person is not a threat to a child.

And also!!! It is actually really really good for kids to have friendships with adults that aren’t their family.

Having friendships with adults when you’re younger prepares you for adult life in a better way then only interacting with adults that are family members or teacher as well.

And also if there’s any sort of weird behavior happening with adults or teachers, it’s very helpful to have unrelated adults, you can go to, and also have a model for what normal adults are supposed to look like.

And also! You’re just making it way easier for pedophiles to prey on children when you completely avoid interacting with them as an adult. Because kids are naturally inquisitive and curious. They are going to want to interact with adults and they are going to want to ask questions. And if the only adult adults that are willing to interact and speak with them or adults who have ulterior motivations. Guess what’s gonna happen.

Also on a more general note. Having a model for what a normal healthy adult is supposed to look like makes it way easier for kids to be able to recognize and identify when adults in their personal life are being weird.

[everbecomesreal]

[everbecomesreal]

They're his children of course. Richard still recognizes them; it's only been two years.

And yet...

Peter is a man. Still six months shy of his draft papers, but he stands, walks, sounds like a man. He always has a pocket knife, he tips his hat to all the females, he sings in a baritone that will only get deeper and richer. The tea he makes is decent, but sometimes he drinks coffee now. He talks about horses and crops and reads Augustine. He can drive a car. He gives orders, and expects them to be followed.

They all look to him, to Peter. Helen calls him to open a jar, Susan questions how her hair looks, Lucy runs to him in tears. As for Edmund, he and Peter are curiously joined, they turn to each other with their laughter, their thoughts, their books and newspapers and letters. As often as his family swirls around him, Richard sees them swirl around Peter, a habit, he knows, born of necessity, but that doesn't prevent it from being strange. Even painful.

Peter moves to take the head of table, catches himself. They both start to say grace, stop, glance at each other. Peter takes the newspaper over breakfast, and is a page in before he remembers. And every time he apologises. Each time he smiles at his father, and it is warm, glad, even benevolent.

One of the first nights, shortly after Christmas, Peter finds him sitting in his old armchair, staring into the fire, after everyone else has gone up to bed. "Dad?" comes the question, and he looks up blinking at the tall man, lamplight crowning him in gold, blue eyes deep and dark with knowledge and certainty.

"I'm not who I was," Richard says, a confession, the kind a father shouldn't burden his son with he thinks immediately, but then Peter is down on one knee, reaching for the mangled hand, tender with the three fingers as he clasps strong calloused palms around them.

"Neither am I, Dad. None of us are." Peter's gaze is earnest, bright. "But you are still my father. And I will always be your son. I am forever grateful for that."

It is as if a great burden rolls off of his shoulders, and he finds no shame in leaning on Peter's hand to rise.

When the holidays end, and the four go back to school, Peter says I love you to each of them at the station.

If Peter is a man now, Susan is a lady.

She sits straight, she walks gracefully, she can cook anything as well or better than her mother. She reads the newspapers with Peter, she scolds Lucy for coming home with twigs in her hair and a tear in her stocking and wet shoes.

She talks less than her father remembers, and there is a woman's sadness in her gazing out the window or into the fire. She is also very admiring of the boys in uniforms, and Richard requests her arm on the way out of church with a father's righteous sense of protection.

But she is also gentler than he recalls, she does not shy away from his injured hand, she takes care of him without making him feel as if he needs care. She sits on a cushion by his feet as she braids her hair in the evenings, leans on his knee as she reads aloud, and Richard thinks, Not my little princess, but a queen now.

At the train station, she kisses him goodbye, and he hugs her close, and there are tears in her eyes as she says I love you.

Edmund is the closest to unrecognizable, the once-obvious four year span between he and Peter seemingly halved. He greets his father wordlessly, all shining eyes and bright smile, and his face is so close to Richard's own it makes his heart break a little.

Ed is no more little boy, he is tall, slim, oddly graceful, but his handclasp is strong. He holds himself the same way Peter does, with squared shoulders and lifted head, but he wears that nobility in a quieter fashion. He's quick to see, quick to hear, quick with a wisecrack that makes Peter laugh out loud. He plays the violin now. He returns the family Bible to the living room with an apology for having kept it since the summer holidays. He reads Agatha Christie as a personal challenge, whispers to Susan in French, and his chess games with Peter are fierce battles of strategy that Richard cannot keep pace with.

In discussions of the war and its movements, he is sober and considerate, he meets each of Peter's moods with a balancing counter, he has a way of phrasing questions that pull out stories Richard had never planned to tell.

A few nights before the children return to school, Richard sits up in bed, certain he has heard a faint cry, and he slips away from his exhausted wife to check on his children, remembering how Edmund had suffered from night terrors as a child, imagining little Lucy inflicted with some dark dream.

But all he finds is shadows in the boys' room, and quiet whispers—Peter's apologies, Edmund's reassurance, and allusions to things Richard has no context for. He lingers by the door, an outsider in his home, until silence falls, and he returns with morning light to find them curled together in Peter's bed, Pete with an arm over Ed, and the father's love is bittersweet.

They have fought their own battle over here, on the home ground, Richard reminds himself. In their own way they have each faced terror and learned to conquer or be conquered, but perhaps he can meet them somewhere in between. Only time will tell.

On the train platform, Ed hugs his father tightly, gives him a smile, tells him to keep out of trouble.

Lucy is the least changed, though she too is taller and stronger, and her eyes are deeper. She still sings, still dances, still tries to make friends with all the animals, still smiles and speaks kind and stares dreaming at the Christmas tree.

She still gives fierce hugs, still climbs into her father's lap, though her head comes up higher on his chest, on his shoulder.

But then he finds gaps in his library, and Lucy returns the medical books with a winsome apology, she asks questions about his practices in the field, she winces but does not shy away from the blood and broken things he speaks of.

Then she recites long poems, words spinning off her tongue until they become half song; she dances swift and graceful, she and Peter laughing and stepping and clapping and spinning in intricate patterns to the swing song on the radio; and it is she who, breathless, quotes Byron: "On with the dance! Let joy be unconfined!"

Her comfort is both generous and thoughtful, and she strokes her father's hair with a motherly hand that makes his eyes sting, and he kisses her fingers, looks up at her to whisper, "Don't- don't grow up quite so fast, my darling."

When she hugs him on the platform, Susan waiting for her, the boys already gone, she doesn't want to let go, and there are tears on her cheek, that he wipes away gently. "Be careful, Daddy," she whispers. "Get strong. Take care of Mummy."

"Yes, little mother," he smiles back.

And then they are all gone, and he takes a cab home, weary of his still-recovering body.

He will have to learn his children all over again, he thinks. But he is proud of them still. That has not changed.

[everbecomesreal]

ao3 turns 15 today

reblog if youre older than ao3

(there's a lot of people asking about this, but the legal age to use social media is 13, except in few countries. so yes, there are people here under 15)

[everbecomesreal]

There were probably some medieval asexuals that were absolutely insufferable on their moral high horse about it. Like "this modesty shit easy - I haven't lusted over any man ever in my life and only fuck my husband out of duty from God and only so that we have children. I am so much better than any of you hoes."

And some other local goodwife would get sick of this and go "well obviously you don't have time for cock, Maergaret, since you're always too fucking busy choking on your own vanity and pride!" and have a smackfight that progresses into a full-on two-woman brawl in the town square. People gather around to watch this until a clergyman shows up to remind everyone that not only is this kind of brawl between good christians definitely a sin, it's also a sin for everyone who's watching to place bets on who's going to win.

[everbecomesreal]

Papillon de nuit, papillon de feu, Donne-moi tes ailes pour que je vole Vers les étoiles, vers les plus hauts cieux. Mon cœur ne veut plus demeurer au sol. Ma maison est là où les oiseaux chantent, Où les nuages et le vent s'embrassent. Lorsque la Terre est lourde et accablante, Je sais que j'ai ma place dans l'espace. Sur tous les murs de l'univers, les astres Sont posés comme de la mosaïque. Dépose mes pieds là où le désastre Devient couleur et le chaos, musique. Là, lumière, amour, rêve et beauté dansent Avec ivresse sur le toit du monde. Vers l'ardent soleil, la lune s'élance Pour caresser sa chevelure blonde. Là, mon corps usé tombe avec les feuilles En automne, mais mon âme s'élève. La vie s’en rit et enterre ses deuils; Du gouffre fatal, pourtant, je me lève. Là où je n'ai plus le moindre repère, Je découvre ce qu'est l'infinité. Je me transforme, mais rien ne se perd. Je trouve, en créant, la joie d'exister. Papillon de nuit, papillon du jour, Laisse-moi rentrer au plus tôt chez moi. Aujourd'hui semble durer pour toujours, Hier n'est plus et demain est sans voix. -Poésie: "Papillon de nuit", à lire dans "Genèse d'une femme" par Marine Mariposa, disponible gratuitement sur https://sites.google.com/view/papillondusublime/gen%C3%A8se-dune-femme -Image: un collage réalisé par Eugenia Loli

[everbecomesreal]

This makes me ache with grief, just reading James’ experience even though I know they are both fine now and still making bits of YouTube content together

“Hammond bins it” from “Carbolics: A Personal Motoring Disinfectant” by James May

What I saw, as I passed the finish line, was a car, on its roof, way down the steep slope on the grass below. It was burning ever more furiously. What was it? It was impossible to equate that blazing and charred heap with the exquisite, pearl-white electrical delicacy that had sat in front of my Honda, at the start line, less than two minutes ago.

But I knew, in the blossoming, white-hot ball of pure, sickening horror forming in my heart, that it must be Hammond’s Rimac. The next thing I registered, as I stopped and scrambled from the car, was a pair of marshals dragging a limp body by the wrists, away from the wreck and down to a gravel path at the bottom of the hill. And I knew that must be Richard Hammond.

I cannot remember experiencing such a debilitating sense of shock and pure incomprehension as this. There we were, at the start line of this good-humoured family motor sport event, swapping insults with each other and our director over our radios, awaiting our turns for a run up the hill.

Hammond was first and disappeared like some weird antimatter-powered javelin, almost silently. Twenty seconds later I was waved away to be met, three turns before the end, with a flurry of yellow flags and then a world unutterably changed. Hammond was dead.

However, the window of opportunity for believing that Hammond was dead was quite brief. I happened to have driven through the middle of it. Maybe fifteen seconds earlier, and I would have seen a dazed but intact Hammond extracting himself from his lunched but not yet burning car. About a minute after I went into a blue funk, one of our sound men ran over to tell me that he still had ‘ears’ on Hammond’s microphone, and that he was talking perfect sense to the paramedics. I happened to arrive as the marshals pulled him hurriedly away from the newly burning car because they thought it might explode. But what I saw was the remains of Hammond being hauled from the burning wreckage, like some hideous vintage film clip from Formula 1. It’s important to see the whole scenario and not rely on a snapshot. I thought he’d bought the farm, but he’d actually broken a bone in his knee and needed a small pin putting in it; in Switzerland, the world centre of skiing injuries and doing things properly. Far from being dead, he even came home slightly improved over the Brummie original.

[everbecomesreal]

A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

[everbecomesreal]

I had a weird experience the other day. I’ve just started a new job over Christmas and I give a couple of coworkers in a lift as we live in the same town and the job is nearly an hour’s drive away but a few hours on the bus. Both use she/her pronouns as do I. Let’s call them coworker A and coworker B

Just after we arrived I was speaking with coworker A about coworker B, who had seemed really off the whole drive just to see if coworker A knew any more than I did about what was going on. (Coworker B is okay, it just turned out they were unwell and as it was their first job anxiety got in the way of them calling in, so they went home and will be back next week)

As we were talking coworker A repeatedly used they/them pronouns for coworker B and I corrected them saying that coworker B used she/her pronouns and then clarifying the three members of our team who used they/them, or he/they pronouns, in case coworker A had forgotten, but she said in response:

“Oh, I always use they/them pronouns just to be safe”.

This jarred with me a bit but I didn’t stop to reflect on it or push back in the moment. When I got home I thought about it more, and I think it’s because I’m not a they/them, I’m a she/her and it bothers me that coworker A might be using they/them pronouns about me. I don’t think I’d care if a stranger used they/them pronouns, but I’ve had several long chats with coworker A and I hope we’re on the way to becoming friends. She does know I use she/her pronouns, but as far as I was aware she was no less friendly with coworker b.

I always do my best to get pronouns right, it’s an important part of someone’s identity. As a cis woman I am less likely to experience it. This was not my first experience hearing someone misgender someone I know, but it was the first time I realised that person had probably misgendered me to other people and it really makes me uncomfortable that coworker a might be doing this.

In the scheme of things it’s something small, but I do wonder if I should say something to coworker a? What do people think?

[everbecomesreal]

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