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☆ metropolis kid!

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there are two competing sects on this website - one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "neurodivergent" and one that uses the word "spicy" to mean "sexual content." i do not like either of them

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And the same people who act like crying is inherently manipulative will think of yelling as totally normal and neutral like have you considered lowering your voice? That might help you have more productive disagreements with people, maybe lower your fucking voice.

One of us is definitely using a tactic to try to win this argument but you’ll never guess who because anger has been rebranded as Not An Emotion and now you don’t know how to talk to people properly

Y'know, some people do have a strong crying response to stress, and they might cry (even against their own will) when faced with an upsetting situation and that doesnt mean they are "gaslighting" or "manipulating" you.

There are people who use crying as a manipulation tactic? Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that every person that cries during a heated argument is trying to get under your skin. They have their own emotions and issues, and frankly, not everything other people do is a personal attack on you.

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Do you think the other dragon riders - and like... any adults at all - ever learned about how reckless Hiccup was when learning how to fly with Toothless?

Like yeah, some danger is expected on Burke. But fighting a dragon in a supervised training session in a contained area is one thing. The shit Hiccup was getting up to in his free time? A whole different level of risky.

Hiccup could have died multiple times. And he would have just disappeared. No one would have known what happened.

Do you think Stoick ever wakes up from a nightmare where Hiccup and Toothless crashed into the sea-stacks and died on impact? Do you think it ever hits Stoick how easily Hiccup could have fallen off Toothless, sending them both to their deaths? Do you think he ever finds himself overwhelmed with panic, realizing the way he saw them fall after the battle with the Red Death could have happened on any random sunny afternoon?

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I feel like there's a really interesting way to interpret Toothless and Hiccup's relationship where Hiccup, to a certain extent, sees himself as a part of Toothless's prosthetic.

Like, Hiccup did not set out to be a dragon rider. He set out to give Toothless a way to fly again.

The very first time Hiccup attaches Toothless's tailfin, he sits on Toothless's tail - but he only does so to keep the tail still while he's fitting the prosthetic. Toothless was wriggling around, Hiccup needed the tail to be still, and so Hiccup sat on the tail.

Then Toothless launches off with Hiccup still sitting on the tail, and it absolutely takes Hiccup by surprise. I don't think, before that moment, Hiccup had even thought of dragon riding as a possibility.

And then the flight fails. Toothless jumps into the air but doesn't get the proper height, and they go careening towards the sides of the cliffs that have been keeping Toothless trapped. During these few seconds, Hiccup realizes that a basic leather mimicry of the working tailfin isn't enough. The prosthetic needs to be able to flare and tilt depending on what Toothless wants to do.

Hiccup realizes that, if the fin is going to work, it needs to have an active control mechanism - aka, a rider.

So Hiccup starts learning how to be a rider. He takes some time to figure out how the positioning of the tailfin works, testing it out with Toothless close to the ground and then during the sea-stacks scene - and then he gives control of flying back to Toothless completely.

When they snatch Astrid, Hiccup pleads with Toothless multiple times to slow down, fly straight, stop with the spinning, etc. But Toothless doesn't listen, and Toothless doesn't have to listen, because it's not Hiccup giving the cues for how they're going to move. Hiccup is the one following Toothless's body language, moving the prosthetic into position according to how Toothless wants to fly. And Hiccup doesn't even attempt to wrest that control away, even when Hiccup has immense personal reason to - if Astrid remained terrified of Toothless, she wouldn't have kept Toothless a secret, and her telling the village everything would have destroyed Hiccup's life.

So yeah. Hiccup didn't become a dragon rider to be a dragon rider. He became a dragon rider because a dragon rider is a necessary part of Toothless's prosthetic.

(I also think this interpretation of how Hiccup sees their relationship makes for a great angst prompt, but that's a separate essay.)

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It is canon that at some point, while Hiccup was still in a coma, Gobber went through his room and workshop to find the schematics for Toothless's tail. I cannot imagine that Stoick did not join him.

What must it have felt like, seeing all of Hiccup's drawings and models of Toothless? There is so much to unpack about what they would have thought.

They must have been struck by how little Hiccup hid his things (a canon detail!), because Hiccup knew they didn't care enough to notice. He left drawings of Toothless out ON HIS DESK and never worried about it.

Can you imagine? Your child loves something so deeply that it has become intrinsic to who they are, and you know they knew you would hate that thing if you found out, and you realize that they felt like they didn't even really need to hide it because you never looked at them enough to notice. And they were right.

And, also, Stoick and Gobber must have appreciated for the first time how incredible Hiccup's inventions are. Gobber had to break down the tail schematics to recreate it, which meant he had to fully confront how the tail control mechanism was light-years beyond any other piece of technology on the island.

They would have found, too, Hiccup's first few attempts at the tail. They would have been confronted with the fact that when given the space to test things, to try things and iron out the flaws, Hiccup is a genius. All those old inventions that almost worked but malfunctioned in some way? Yeah, if the village hadn't stopped Hiccup, if they had let him take notes and try again, those inventions probably would have worked.

Can you imagine what they felt, realizing how badly they had stifled and mistreated Hiccup? Realizing that if they had given him space to be himself, he would have been creating miracles his entire life?

ALSO, Stoick and Gobber must have truly understood for the first time how deeply Hiccup cared for Toothless. Hiccup made technical drawings for the tailfin, yes. But he also canonically drew a lot of art of Toothless just. Being Toothless. In the Live Action he even made a wooden carving with articulated wings! It is so evident from his space how much he loved Toothless. What do you think Stoick felt, seeing that, knowing how he himself treated Toothless after the arena fight?

There is just so much that comes from that small detail of Gobber making a new tailfin, and I desperately want, like, a novella from Stoick and Gobber's POV of that time period.

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They wrote their TOS and privacy policies with normal human words too.

Hey horny writer lil heads up for you guys, the “ai” google is forcing into docs to “scan for grammar errors” has been proved to also be scanning for spicy content and multiple ppl have already got notifs saying like “we’re sorry, there was a system error and some of your work was lost” and it was only the horny stuff so uh

Pleeeeease back up your files !!!! Don’t lose your horny to a robot, that’s Doc’s job, not Docs’…

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Post on my dash about medical debt reminded me of the time tumblr saved me two grand. I don't think I told y'all about it because I am out of the habit of posting everything I do on tumblr lol

So. Last December, I had a bad cavity filled, and about a week later, I woke up with half of my face paralyzed. Which, as I'm sure you can imagine, freaked me the fuck out. Fortunately I had some level-headed Discord friends who a) told me what Bell's palsy was so I could look it up and b) reminded me to call my dentist for an emergency appointment. Dentist was also pretty sure it was Bell's palsy, but urged me to go to the emergency room to get checked out, because one-sided facial paralysis is also a possible indicator of a stroke. And you don't fuck around with strokes.

Bell's palsy, if you, like me of 6 months ago, don't know, is a harmless paralysis/muscle weakness on one side of the face that can be caused by a variety of things. It usually goes away on its own after a few weeks but also you can speed up the process with steroids.

I was pretty sure I was not having a stroke, because I'm Red Cross first aid certified and I know the symptoms of a stroke, and while one-sided facial paralysis is one of them, I didn't have any of the others. Also, I had quit my shitty job in October, which meant I had a shiny new marketplace health insurance plan and hadn't even touched my deductible. But I called my parents from the car and they urged me to get checked out and promised to help me pay off the emergency room bill if I needed it, because they're good people and they love me even if they drive me crazy sometimes. So off I went to the nearest emergency room.

Emergency room staff also didn't think I was having a stroke, because I waited ALL AFTERNOON, periodically having a new person come up to me and ask me to smile, hold both arms out to the side, press down on their hands, and tell them what month and year it was. (They don't ask who the president is anymore. Hmm, I wonder why.) One guy had me drink a cup of water while he watched. I cannot stress enough that I did not have any medical tests other than a physical examination: no CT scans or MRIs, no IV drugs or blood draws, nothing.

I get diagnosed with Bell's palsy and given a prescription for Prednisone. And then they give me a phone number and tell me to talk to this person about administrative stuff. So I call, and the dude on the phone verifies my name and date of birth and insurance information, and then he says, "It looks like your copay today is going to be $2400. How would you like to pay?"

I am, to this day, kind of impressed that he didn't even stutter over that number, but I assume working in a medical call center drains your entire soul. At this point, it's about 7pm, and I've been in the hospital since 2pm, and I'm stressed because half my face doesn't work, and I know that I can't afford $2400 because I quit my shitty job with nothing lined up back in October. But, I still remember every tumblr post I've ever read about health insurance and the medical system and how you can negotiate down a bill. I am not looking forward to this process, it sounds like a pain in the ass, but the alternative is paying $2400, so I say the magic words: "Send me an itemized bill."

I kinda expected the guy to try and get me to pay up front, but he just says "Ok" and finishes up the process. I get discharged, go to the only open pharmacy at that time of night to get my Prednisone, have the pharmacist tell me the prescription isn't written right and he can't fill it, go home, and have a screaming sobbing meltdown because I have used up every single milligram of cope in my entire body. (I got my steroids eventually, and the Bell's palsy cleared up in a couple weeks.)

A few weeks later, I get the bill in the mail. I brace myself and open it...

$300.

Turns out, after going through insurance and processing and everything, they couldn't actually find $2400 worth of stuff to charge me for. Shocking! Who could have predicted!

I might have been able to argue it down even more, but I was fed up with entire thing, so I paid the $300 just to be fucking done with it. Sometimes the cheapest way to pay is with money.

What if I had paid that $2400 up front? Do I think they would have been like, "Oh, oops!" and refunded me $2k? Well, possibly, but I am not optimistic.

So, thank you to everyone who has ever posted about navigating the US healthcare system on tumblr. Because of you, I knew how to handle this situation even when I was tired and stressed.

Don't forget to ask for an itemized bill, folks.

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kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3

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non-writers will never understand the mental illness of writing an entire conversation in your head while doing dishes and then forgetting every word the second you open a blank doc

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Reading about harmful things is one of the safest ways to experience/learn about harmful things, fun fact

pro censorship people are always like “actually I’m living proof that books can be really harmful to kids! when I was a child I read a book that upset me and of course I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they would throw rocks at me whenever I confessed to reading anything but the Bible, so as you can see, that book was the source of my trauma and warped ideas about right and wrong”

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should be able to leave kudos on scientific studies. i liked your paper dude keep at it

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Guys I love Bobby so much