peopleareaproblem

[peopleareaproblem]

it fucking sucks being a disabled person who can't work and having to see these fuckass posts where someone's like "ahaha jobless people have no life and that's why everyone shitty online has No Job" and everyone and their mother reblogs it joyfully onto my dash for me to see. yes unemployed and unemployable people are truly without exception dogshit people with no hobbies and no redeeming qualities. you're so right. anyway if you'll excuse me i have to start my shift at the I'll Never Be Employed Because Of Permanent Disability And I Love Knowing How You Really See Me store

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Big day for deranged evangelical freaks

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why do you and others like vaccines so much?

not dying of preventable diseases is actually one of my favorite hobbies

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sometimes someone will casually mention using chatgpt or some other generative ai thing and I can actually feel the little

above my head

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sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute

[peopleareaproblem]

I know for a fact that my stepmother loves me.

I know it for a fact because the vaccine for the sleeping sickness came out when I was ten, and she cried. When she was a kid, parents would have Sleep Overs whenever someone caught it, in the hopes of spread it around - children were statistically more likely to be woken up by "True Love's Kiss" from a parent or family member, after all, whereas if you caught it when you were older, things got more complicated and if you were old, you might be the last one in your family left.

(There’s more to it than that, I know, I've tried reading the papers, but I barely passed biocurse with a C+, and don't even get me started on organic curses. Those two classes were enough to kill any hope I had of becoming a fairy godperson.)

So, when the vaccine against the sleeping sickness came out, my stepmother cried, and my father got me on the list right away; I wasn't high priority, after all; I was young, there wasn't an active outbreak in my school district, and I was otherwise healthy. But they put me on the backup list anyway, so if there was one, just one available, I could get it.

When the fairy godperson's office called, my dad was at work, but my stepmother bundled me up and drove there so fast I thought we were going to be pulled over. (Later, I found out that she'd gotten an automated ticket from one of the red light cameras, a fact that she hid from both me and my dad.) They called my dad, of course, and he left work, but he also gave the okay for my stepmother to be my medical proxy in case he was delayed.

Vaccines don't last forever, and it was decided that I would be given it without him there. At 100 minutes, my stepmother would try kissing my forehead, and if it didn't work, the office would set me up for the 100 hours it would take before my dad could try.

Magic can't be ignored, but it can be tricked.

It didn't matter. At 100 minutes post-vaccine, my stepmother kissed my forehead and I woke up.

So. I know she loves me.

My mom would have been there, if she could, but she died when I was five. She'd gotten Rapunzelean cancer in high school, but she'd beaten it! She was one of the successes!

...Until it came back.

I don't remember much about her, but I remember that she loved me. Even as the golden tumors grew from her bare scalp and sucked the life out of her, she would sing to me, and she wrote me a series of letters for me as I grew up, just in case.

My stepmother took me to her grave sometimes. My dad does too, but it's nice that my stepmother is willing, you know? I had a breakdown one year when I couldn't find my mom's favorite flowers to take to her burial site, and my stepmom drove me all over town until we found one store that had them in the right color. (My dad was at the fairy godperson's office to get some pre-wards before we went to the cemetery. I found out later that his father had caught a curse shortly after my grandmother passed away, specifically geriatric onset donkeyskin, and my father was paranoid of following in his footsteps.)

My dad and my stepmom shuffled their shifts, so that one of them was with me in the morning before school, and one of them was there after, and then both were home for dinner. When I told them I wanted to study to be a fairy godperson, they took me seriously, even though I had wanted to be a pilot and a vet, and and a lawyer and and and - they always supported me, and soon I was being gifted books on the history of magicomedicine and cursebreaking. Some of them gave me nightmares - siren's disease freaked me out for a long time; something about the tongue swelling so much you would suffocate, and the agonizing images of ancient "cures" where the victim had to get their tongue cut out so they could breathe. I don't even know why! There were much worse ones! But something about that was so visceral to me. For the next month, any time my feet hurt even a little was convinced I was coming down with siren's disease.

I worried my parent's so much that they took me to Fairy Elena, my PCFP, and asked if she would be willing to go over how siren's is treated now. She gave me a quick rundown on intubation, pain medication, and told me about Prince's Blood Donations.

It was the first time I learned that magic can be tricked; according to legend, siren's disease could be cured by killing someone's true love and smearing their blood over the patient's legs. At least, that was one line of thought; another line of thought argued that it had to be the blood of royalty. Some fairy godpersons and magicoresearchers got together in the '80s and decided to research it methodically, going through every known case of siren's disease & what worked and what didn't. It turned out royalty was the key, but then it became a question of ethics. I didn't care too much at the time, that was all boring, grown-up stuff, but finally one researcher decided to just make a blood bank company, call it Prince's and see if that worked.    

And it did.

Magic can be tricked, and my mind was blown.

I also asked my dad if we could put that book away for a little, because it was too scary. He agreed, and we put it on the top shelf, where all the scary books went. I reread it recently, and honestly? I don't remember what I was so afraid of.

Things started changing when I turned 16.

For one, my hair, which had always been brown, started darkening to black. For another, I stopped being able to tan. It was like a light switch went off; magic was determined to turn me into something, and I hated it. My PCFP really went to bat for me, getting insurance to cover the cost of cosmetic glamours and professional tanning sprays. She wanted me to tell my parents, but I didn't want to, not yet, and she was bound by her oath to protect my privacy.   

She was right. But... I wanted to ignore it. I wanted to pretend everything was fine.

I didn't want to lose another mom.

And it worked for a while; managed to get to my senior year of high school before the world broke.

Stepmothers don't have the best reputation.

It fucking sucks, and it's not fair, but enough stories have been told about them that magic took an interest, and began manifesting curses that warp stepmothers until they follow the story.

We thought we were safe. My stepmother didn't bring any children into the marriage, so she was safe from the ash-girl curse variant, and I was a tanned brunette, so we were safe from the snow-daughter variant.

And she loved me.

She hid it too, I think. Not intentionally, but some of the symptoms are paranoia and anxiety.

I've done a lot of research. I don't think I'll ever be able to be a fairy godperson, but that doesn't mean I had to stop caring. I swapped my focus to researching curses from the history and literature side of things. I still work with researchers, we just come from different angles now.

Anyway, no one realized anything was wrong until she was french braiding my hair and the next thing I knew, she had locked herself in the bathroom sobbing while EMTs took me to the hospital for overnight observation. I don't actually know what happened. She turned herself over to the cops as soon I was loaded onto the ambulance, and she was taken to a hospital herself. She was sedated at first, as she was so wound up that she was hurting herself, and the hospital couldn't scan her for curses. Once she came out of sedation, she immediately called my dad and offered a divorce, he could take everything, she would leave immediately.

But we'd gotten the results of the scans, and I was fine. As best that the fairy godperson's could tell, the magic was frustrated that we didn't want to go down the snow-daughter route, and had lashed out in an attempt to force it. That was apparently what knocked me unconscious; magic poisoned the comb my stepmother was using in my hair.

That didn't mean she didn't feel guilty - but so did I. If I had told them earlier, would things have changed? If I hadn't tried to hide the signs that magic was fucking with us?

They don't blame me, and I don't blame her.  

She loves me. I know she does. We still talk, as best as we can. She can only hear my voice for ten minutes before the curse starts taking over. We can email, though, as long as the orderlies can prescreen the email for any curse triggers. She also can't hear about me directly, but my dad will go and visit her, and tell me how she's doing. He refused to divorce her. His insurance still covers her hospital stay. He says he's married, and wears his ring.

When I applied to college, I wrote about all three of my parents, and how much they had all taught me.

How much they all loved me.

Someday, my stepmother will get her curse lifted, I have to believe that. I've joined a multidisciplinary group of researchers based in the EU. Some of us are looking at ways to trick magic, some of us are looking at ways to rewrite the stories of the wicked stepmothers, and create a new path for the magic to follow. One group of researchers is looking into ways of simulating the punishments that stepmothers receive at the end of tales to see if "punishing" stepmothers would break the curse. Actually going through the punishments would cause any ethical review board to remove someone's license, and there's no way I would want my stepmom to dance in red hot metal shoes.

But lately she's been getting hot stone foot massages before I call her; that's how we got to ten minutes before the curse took hold, and next week we're going to see if holding her feet in a hot bath lets us video call. Maybe someday we'll be able to see each other in person again. Maybe I'll be able to take her home where dad and I can cook dinner for her, and we can be a family again. My family has an apple pie recipe, and we never made it - I understand why, now, but maybe someday we can laugh at this and all make it together. To make your own apple pie, you'll need...

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🐇🫀~

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GOING TO THE DOCTOR

Expectations: I’m Sorry You Have Going To Die Disease You Are. Going To Die

Reality: The Doctor Says I Don’t Know

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(so mad i can’t see straight) Yeah i just don’t think chat gpt is a good classroom tool

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every piece of ""autistic representation"" in hollywood sucks not just because of the infantalization and inspiration porn but because movie executives always fail to realize the real universal autistic experience: spending your childhood slowly and unfalteringly realizing all of your friends not so secretly hated and/or merely tolerated you at best and you've missed every social signal about it ever

[peopleareaproblem]

The Good Place (2016 - 2020) I 3.05

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What no one warned me about when I got into Discworld is that Terry Pratchett would completely ruin all my future footnote experiences. Now, whenever I read a book (even if it is an academic text!!) and see a superscripted number, my monkey brain makes my eyes drop to the bottom of the page asap, expecting a funny, poignant, memorable, and potentially life-altering little treat, and instead I get hit every time with the soul-crushing disappointment of McFarthy, G. et al. (1997)

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More favourite numerical memes:

Implicit or implicit enumeration of uncountable things (example: taking inventory of the fucks which one gives)

Suggesting the divisibility of things which are not customarily thought of as able to be subdivided (example: "six whole people")

Using words that aren't numbers as numbers (example: "one William dollars")

Technically correct but contextually misleading estimates (example: looking at a group of several thousand things and observing that there are "at least three")

Incongruous qualifiers for apparently simple sums or tallies (example: she was twenty-seven years old, not counting 2014)

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Kristin Chenoweth as Olive Snook in Pushing Daisies (2007—2009)

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listen up chucklefucks, i just gotta say. I'm not defending zir, but I'm sad zie deactivated. Like, i get that trauma lasts a long time and the good stuff is maybe easy to forget?? so maybe it's just like that. And my beloved mutual @/pompeyspuppygirl made a post about zir clout chasing behavior, which is pretty shitty behavior if it's true (and if we're canceling someone it had better be pretty severe). anyways now that zie's gone pompeyspuppygirl said it was okay to make this post (again, thanks ppg everyone go follow her --really everyone in this whole drama is worth a follow)

ANYways yeah zie was my mutual and like, reblogged a lot my smaller posts. (that isn't to discredit what my mutual pompeyspuppygirl is saying about zie clout chasing ofc). AND idk zie was always reblogging art from new and undiscovered artists and reblogging donation posts (which if you don't know is really bad if you're trying to clout chase...) (again, though, ppg is my mutual i believe her.) and like, remember on valentines day i tried to blaze zir posts and zie told me to stop because zie didn't want the posts to go viral? (but again ppg is my mutual and has a lot of proof in the Google doc I'm not trying to disprove that I'm just saying what else I know)

Idk, like i feel like a lot of people loved zir's blog a while back, bc like zie DID make some good posts?? So idk why everybody's acting like they aren't even a little bit sad.,. like ngl this feels like maybe all the reasonable people left to Twitter and all the Twitter refugees who love drama came here??? shdfhhdhdhdhdh haha but idk...look idk, i just, julie i do miss you. idk. more thoughts later sorry I'm getting worked up shshs

[peopleareaproblem]

I’m starting to sound like a nutcase at work because upper management keeps trying to implement AI programs and AI assistants and Chat GPT and my middle-of-the-road, don’t-infodump, don’t-engage response has been “I don’t like AI”, “I prefer to remain in control of my own tasks”, “I’d rather make my own mistakes”, and “I don’t trust any machine smarter than a toaster”

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Too tired to draw but I still need everyone to be aware of this bizarre interaction I had at work this morning