procyongaaay - Tumblr blog

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Did anyone else who grew up using the girls bathroom regularly get cornered in there by people trying to pressure them to dress more girly or was that just me

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Iris agate is a truly stunning variety of agate that displays a rainbow of colors when held up to light. Photo: Yanzz_Crystals

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AHEM. *leans on doorway* I would like to know about that time you led a strike in preschool.

Okay, storytime. Both of my parents worked full time, and the woman who ran the family daycare across the street “went away for her health”- a charming euphemism for her family having her institutionalised because they couldn’t cope with her schizophrenia, but that’s another story for another time- so I went to preschool for two years. The preschool I went to was a good one. Still is, actually. My brother and his wife have their little sprout on the waiting list already, and he’s not two yet. It’s built onto the side of an ex-church, and it has great play areas, a sandpit, ducks, the works. Nice. We did all the usual preschool stuff; craft activities, storytime, naptime, playing with toys. To help us learn to be responsible and cooperative human beings, we were expected to clean up after ourselves, and put things away when we were done with them. Being small children, this had mixed results, so at the end of every day, there’d be a big group cleanup, where we went through and picked all the toys and books up off the floor of the main room and put everything in order.

All very nice, right? Trouble was, about half of the kids got picked up at 5, 5:30ish, and the other half, whose parents worked later hours, would be there till 6 or 6:30. The cleanup usually happened around 6, so the kids whose parents could pick them up early never had to clean up, and I noticed pretty quickly that the kids who never had to clean up at the end of the day didn’t seem to pick up after themselves during the day, either. They knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it, so they didn’t care.

I feel I should mention that my mother was, at the time, the secretary of a large public sector union. She’d been a unionist for some time (we’ve got a great picture somewhere of baby me on her lap at a Women In Leadership conference) and sometimes she had people over for dinner, and they’d talk about union business. I knew what was going on, here. This was a discriminatory practice. It targeted kids whose parents couldn’t afford for one of them to stay home with the kids. It encouraged unfair behaviour in the kids who didn’t have to clean up. This had to stop.

I went to the staff first. Mostly they laughed at me- in their defense, please picture a tiny blonde four-year-old in a princess dress squaring up to you about “dithcriminatory practitheth”- and told me I should set an example for the other kids by being tidy. Well. That wasn’t going to change anything. Having been knocked back by the administration, I took the struggle to the people. While we were cleaning up, I talked to the other kids who had to stay late, and we came to a consensus that things had to change. Look, to be honest, I don’t remember this happening with any kind of clarity. I was very small. Mum has told this story with great pride for some years, though, and most of the details come from her retelling. I don’t know if it was me who first suggested strike action, but I know it was me who led the sit-in protests; I’m told it was me who made an inspiring speech about fairness and division of labour, and it was definitely me whose parents got called.

Upshot was, we went over to a system of shorter clean-up sessions throughout the day- one before lunch, one after naptime, and one at the end of the day- and my mother has never let me forget that four-year-old me was a rabble-rousing monster child.

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Basically republicans want to make it so your ID has to match your birth certificate which affects everyone from trans people to married women to immigrants.

Meanwhile, in GA, they're going to force all ballots to be hand counted, which could make it difficult to meet the deadline to certify the vote, and thus potentially allow them to give the state to Trump regardless of the outcome.

In many states, such as Ohio, Florida, Texas and North Carolina, they've been purging voters from the rolls by the millions.

If voting didn't matter, why are they trying so damn hard to stop us?

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I have issues with memory loss from prior head injuries, that have been worsened by parent of a baby sleep deprivation. Some of it can be around events, but most of it is just not being able to hold my train of thought for long and constantly forgetting normal words. And it's really annoying cuz like.... The other day I could remember the word "paradolia" but I forgot the word "dishes" and tried saying "hard laundry" instead. It can be very frustrating but my life's not over. My spouse just has to try to translate my batshit attempts at speaking sometimes that's all.

seeing people my age talk about how scared they are of memory loss, which they only associate with old age, is so surreal to see as a 24 year old who has actively experienced memory loss for a long time now

there are causes for memory loss besides dementia and alzheimer’s, i hope y’all know that. dissociative disorders, trauma, brain injuries, thyroid problems, even just stress and lack of sleep can fuck up your ability to store, process, and access memory. and that’s just a few of the many causes i can think of off the top of my head right now.

please stop treating disabled people like some scary “other” that you might become only in the distant, decades-away future. we are your age, too. you may become one of us sooner than you know. stop acting like memory loss marks the end of a life, when so many of us have so much living left to do!

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i saw a post recently that was really good, it was something like “no one is automatically allowed to touch you, not your partner, not your family, no one” and this has both literal and sexual connotations

one thing i thought was missing from it was the mention of “do not touch disabled people or their aids, whatever they may be” because i’ve seen so many horror stories of this around. it’s really saddening.

i would really love it if people could review how they view disabled people, and in turn how they view their aids.

an example of this is perhaps the most commonly thought of aid when talking of disability: the wheelchair.

what people usually see is person + wheelchair. they see the two things as separate, perhaps without realising it. (both physically and mentally, do not start on “~i don’t see disability~” shh stop please for a moment, stop) which means, sometimes, they feel it is okay to then touch (or even worse, push/move) the wheelchair. 

that is still a part of that person. that is one whole being, not two separate ones. and in this case, you are wholly physically manoeuvring another person.

gonna take a punt here, but i am guessing, the world over, it’s not a typically common thing where you just tackle a random able-bodied person and move them around without their permission, and/or touch random parts of their body (this is more common for very saddening reasons. still not excusable, still a major no). 

so why would you do that with a disabled person? 

this goes for so much more than wheelchairs by the way. service dogs, crutches, hearing aids, any form of mobility aid, any form of aid whatsoever actually - not acceptable to touch without permission. end of. if i may, these things are intrinsic things disabled people depend upon, so don’t be an asshole.

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hey sorry i can't come to that thing on saturday. yeah im being executed on friday. yeah it's because i made a joke but it came off as way meaner than i expected. if you want we could grab coffee thursday though. huh? oh a million billion explosions. yeah seemed a little much to me too but whatever.

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Humans are weird: The one who returns

(A continuation of: Humans are weird: They sing going to war)

Though my comrades laughed I continued the human tradition, and to my relief I was rewarded by what gods of theirs were listening.

On my first drop after I started to sing an anti-air shell punctured straight through my dropship. It tore a hole the size of my torso through the hull, reducing the squad mate who had been sitting their laughing at me into a red mist, and then out through the other side before detonating. The craft rocked and lurched but it held together long enough for us to reach the surface.

In my first battle I was pinned down in the ruins of a structure trading fire with a squad of enemy soldiers on the opposite street. We’d been stuck in that firefight for almost an hour trading fire; neither side daring to race across the dead land between us. I had just ducked back to slap in a fresh clip when a shredder grenade was flung through the window and landed at my feet. I had seen what they could due and knew my time had come as there was no chance for me to escape the room before it detonated. Yet as I kept my voice strong in song a stray blaster bolt struck the ceiling above me loosening a chunk of masonry. The piece came loose and fell directly on to the grenade causing the ground beneath it to crumble and continue falling into the floor below before it detonated leaving me unharmed.

What truly astounded me though is when my squad was assigned to capture a metal recycling facility on the outskirts of the city. Reports had identified the complex as a rallying point for scattered enemy squads looking to regroup so we were sent in to neutralize the threat. We arrived in good order and began investigating the factory when the machinery suddenly came to life. A metallic sheering blade the size of my body swung at me from the gloom and would have nearly chopped my head off had I not noticed the red glow it began to emit as it powered up. My comrades were not as lucky and three of them were cleaved like bloody paper. From above I saw the operator of the machinery at what had once been a foreman control post and let loose a barrage of blaster fire. He fell quickly enough and in the confusion of battle between the enemy forces now flooding onto the facility floor I made my way up to the control post. It took a minute to unravel the nature of the controls but in short order I had redirected our would-be machine adversaries to turn on their former compatriots. The facility was ours within the hour with myself once more remaining the only one untouched from harm.

As my squad began shuffling off to wait for a medvac I found myself drawn to the machinery. The giant blades now stood silent and powered down and I ran a hand against them. Even powered off they were sharper than anything I had ever come across and when on had so easily cut through armor meant to deflect raw energy discharges. I’m not sure if it was from the shellshock of battle or from my recent time spent with the human warriors, but I felt something calling to me from the blade. It took some time to dismantle but by the time the medvac transport arrived I had freed it from its housing and dragged in onboard. If my squad had anything to say about it those that could still speak kept their own council.

Back in orbit I dragged the metallic blade to the human’s section of the ship. I had found myself in their company more and more when time permitted between deployments. Their talk of ancient gods and wards of protection were what interested me at first, but they were but the first steps into the depth of my fascination of their culture. I showed them the giant blade and told them of how it had slain my comrades. Some of them spoke how it reminded them of the blade of Surtr which heralded Ragnarök, while others insisted that it was more akin Skofnung, a king’s blade imbued with the spirts of his most loyal warriors.

The debate went on from friendly disagreements into an open brawl between the opposing factions, but their engineers remained focused on the material itself and asked what I wished to do with it. I had heard many of the legends of the humans by now and knew many of them carried great weapons, so I wished them to fashion me one from this blade as well. They were hesitant at first as the work alone would be immense and they had other duties to attend to, so I offered them whatever material of the giant blade would be theirs to do with as they pleased. With such an offer made their eyes went wide and they barely had time to agree to the terms as they snatched the giant factory tool and carried it off between the still brawling throngs.

Three days passed and I heard nothing from them. My next deployment was on the fourth and just before I was to embark on the transport the engineers came before me. With great glee they presented me with my new weapon.

Now a fraction of its former size, the blade could easily be wielded with one of my hands. I took several swings of it and I could feel the very air itself around it buzzing as it sliced through it. To add to the moment the human engineers directed my attention to a bright red button on the hilt of the weapon. No sooner had I pressed it did the blade coursing with power. A soft orange glow began to emit from the blade as it once more became as powerful as the first time I saw it in the facility. As if to emphasize its keenness they had me hold the blade up then swung one of their own rifles at it like a club. The blade sliced through the body of the rifle and it fell to the floor with a loud clutter.

Impressed by their work I nodded my thanks and joined my comrades on the dropship. It would be the last time anyone on the ship would call me by my name. When I returned I would be known by other names but the one that most stuck was Ne’ya Ruel, which in my people’s tongue translated to “The one who Returns”  

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I'm a big fan of wizards-as-programmers, but I think it's so much better when you lean into programming tropes.

A spell the wizard uses to light the group's campfire has an error somewhere in its depths, and sometimes it doesn't work at all. The wizard spends a lot of his time trying to track down the exact conditions that cause the failure.

The wizard is attempting to create a new spell that marries two older spells together, but while they were both written within the context of Zephyrus the Starweaver's foundational work, they each used a slightly different version, and untangling the collisions make a short project take months of work.

The wizard has grown too comfortable reusing old spells, and in particular, his teleportation spell keeps finding its components rearranged and remixed, its parts copied into a dozen different places in the spellbook. This is overall not actually a problem per se, but the party's rogue grows a bit concerned when the wizard's "drying spell" seems to just be a special case of teleportation where you teleport five feet to the left and leave the wetness behind.

A wizard is constantly fiddling with his spells, making minor tweaks and changes, getting them easier to cast, with better effects, adding bells and whistles. The "shelter for the night" spell includes a tea kettle that brings itself to a boil at dawn, which the wizard is inordinately pleased with. He reports on efficiency improvements to the indifference of anyone listening.

A different wizard immediately forgets all details of his spells after he's written them. He could not begin to tell you how any of it works, at least not without sitting down for a few hours or days to figure out how he set things up. The point is that it works, and once it does, the wizard can safely stop thinking about it.

Wizards enjoy each other's company, but you must be circumspect about spellwork. Having another wizard look through your spellbook makes you aware of every minor flaw, and you might not be able to answer questions about why a spell was written in a certain way, if you remember at all.

Wizards all have their own preferences as far as which scripts they write in, the formatting of their spellbook, its dimensions and material quality, and of course which famous wizards they've taken the most foundational knowledge from. The enlightened view is that all approaches have their strengths and weaknesses, but this has never stopped anyone from getting into a protracted argument.

Sometimes a wizard will sit down with an ancient tome attempting to find answers to a complicated problem, and finally find someone from across time who was trying to do the same thing, only for the final note to be "nevermind, fixed it".

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> “mannish features”

> look inside

> literally just common physical traits among women of colour

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“The number of women in Texas who died while pregnant, during labor or soon after childbirth skyrocketed following the state’s 2021 ban on abortion care — far outpacing a slower rise in maternal mortality across the nation, a new investigation of federal public health data finds. From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.”

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Pregnancy deaths rose by 56% in Texas after 2021 abortion ban, analysis finds

Republicans hate women. Vote blue.

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Sherlock and dungeon meshi/Maasverse? Either way, absolute chaos

combine your first real fandom with your current one to create a terrible, terrible au

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You see it's quite simple: if they call the earth Gaia, it's fantasy. If they call it Terra, that's sci-fi