#FRIENDS how many of us have them FRIENDS

[giantkillerjack]

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

[plain-text version of this post can be found under the cut]

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

Plain-text version:

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

P.S. Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.

[obsidianbit]

I love this gay ass show with its literally life ending injuries that heal immediately, but only when convenient to the plot, and its ridiculous use of modern phrases, and its laughing in the face of historical accuracy, and its kissing the face of the fans instead of trying to outwit them, and the way everyone involved in the show seem to go 'I KNOW RIGHT! I'M EXCITED TOO!' instead of mocking the fans

[itsaceokay]

I feel like people don't often fully appreciate how hard dating can be for demisexuals.

It just hit me the other day when I found out that most people are kissing by the first date and having sex by the third and to me that is just wild. And apparently, some people wait up to three months before having sex and that's seen as like a really long time and I'm sorry but is everyone okay???

After three dates a person is still a stranger and after three months they're at most an acquaintance - and people are not willing to wait longer and you'll be seen as unreasonable if you want to wait for a year or more??

[khaotunq]

shitty Sand appreciation

[watmalik]

this is what they were doing in the honda odyssey 😭

[menlove]

one crazy thing about the "male loneliness epidemic" to me is that romantic/sexual love and companionship is not the be all end all. for many women, straight & queer, their friendships with other women are the most important ones in their lives. and yet somehow men not being able to make friends they can open up with and find emotional fulfillment from is women's fault lmfao. like no I'm sorry that you're lonely, but there's a lot at play here including the way men treat male friendships. go figure yourselves out and treat each other better before whining and stomping your foot that you're not getting pussy like cmon man 😭

[whatudottu]

Welcome one and all to my version of the party's loopified designs, featuring my many broken bones and blood stains I especially put into Odile who I tackled second unlike the alphabetical order that I have presented here! I'll have in-depth discussions on each designs and matching practice portraits under the cut but before that-

Siffrin 'barely taller than a preteen' no middle name no last name Loop is still barely taller than a preteen but now that preteen can claim fire to their height!

Alphabetical order GO!

Bonnie, who I've been calling Bonfire (which if that ends up being their name I can imagine Bonnie calling them 'Fire' while they call Bonnie 'Face' to match), was the last of my designs because frankly I knew from the start what their design was going to take influence from and also knew I was going to draw fire :P They were based on bonfires (of course) and also specifically the Burning Man effigies just for a humanoid figure, plus being a chef cooker and a campfire and also a very heated expressive person.

Their flames are hot but not actual wood burning so the Favour Tree (and Mirabelle in the height chart) are not at risk of combusting, they're just incredibly bright-

Isabeau my first design, with influences from @basilpaste 's Lock (with a dressform body) and @nullapophenia 's original version of Husk (the faceless identityless sketch), I have combined them both to make a mannequin it/its loopified design that finally gets to be capital T Tall all for the low low price of being Changed against its will and suffering another bout of body dysphoria that it can't fix anymore :) :) :) When I was referencing mannequins I actually noticed how long their legs actually were let alone how they were perma-stuck in that Barbie-like highheel pose and thought why don't I just curse Isa with something he previously wanted :P

Something something Isabeau actively Changed not only his body but his personality to become someone he wouldn't be ashamed of, yada yada Loopsabeau is back to hating itself and has started to become a person it despises to match (also like a mannequin it's head and arms are technically painlessly removeable :P)

Third in order and third in design is Mirabelle, who technically is the only loopified design with technically hair and clothes, but the hair are the tangled roots of the Favour Tree and the clothes are like the carved hardstone statues of religious figures :P Initially my Idea for Mirabelle was to make her kinda like her statue, with the wonky expression of someone who made it without much mastery over details, not to pit anything against Mira, no, no. Thought about maybe abstract statue design but I couldn't find a version I liked but I did always imagine her statue being weathered in some way, there was a reason why I saved her for third I couldn't pick what I wanted. But then I remembered the broken Change God statues, thought about the 'blessing' that ended up being a curse, and then thought about overgrown weathering and gave her the roots.

I actually looked up Black hairstyles and mostly wondered what specific hair texture Mirabelle had (she wears it in a fro of course, but she has flyaways that aren't coils, but she described her own hair as kinky and :P) so that if I were to mimic hair with tree roots I can get an appropriate matching hairstyle (settled on megatwists). Hah, if Mira has 4C hair, considering how long her hair actually looks, if she to wear her hair in twists she might actually have elbow length hair :P

I spent 8 non-consecutive hours on Odile can you tell? Can you see my hands bleeding my wrist breaking my eyes drooping? Yeah so Odile was again, my second design and it took me a week to recover, and she's a combination of gem and mirror suit with all the little fragments floating around her the 'diamonds' that represent all her family members party plus the ones she originally had in sets of 2. I also put geodes where parts of her body have broken off (inspired by how when the King strikes she can't move, plus also being a glass canon) where when I was actually drawing those geodes that they kinda use the Change symbol?

Circle within a circle within a circle, regardless of how wiggly it is, and at the centre is a cluster of crystals. That was an accidental reference to Odile's mixed heritage but hoo boy what a connection! Her missing pieces are a combination of 'being too old for this' fragility and also 'i didn't want to render more mirrors sue me'

Anyway I am going to put my wrist in a cast and imagine loopified party members with their pre-wish counterparts :P

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 275

Pokemon crossover? Indeed. Because there’s so many ghost pokemon, and many that are specifically stated to be dead children that I bet? They would absolutely adore the Dannies. In fact? They adore the entire Team Phantom. 

Who are in fact on vacation, taking a summer to not have to deal with ghosts. Do they know what Fright Knight is doing back home? No, but they’re on vacation and don’t care. Look at these lil guys! Tucker, don’t steal the rotom- oh they’ve adopted you? Okay. Fair enough. 

Now their world? Pokemon doesn’t exist. And by that I mean not even as a game or series or anything. So it is new and fun and like exploring the zone all over again! 

They’re having fun, making friends with people and pokemon alike. Danny has discovered that pokepuffs don’t become violent if revived and many of his new friends love having snacks they can chase after. Dan absolutely delights in taking care of more than a couple of the evil organizations- and there might have been a cult form, no one asked. 

They had to drag Tucker away from several bits of technology, quite literally drag him. And they had to carefully drag several pokemon away from Valerie because they adore her and her suit. Sam- erm, where did Sam and Ellie- oh there they are. Oh Ellie found a clone friend and Sam. Sam that’s a legendary. 

…

That’s so cool! But like, they do have to go back home- oh, oh they’re coming with. That’s a lot of pokemon. Oh well, it’s fine. They brought souvenirs for their friends and family and plenty of plants- like Sam would let them not do so. 

So now they’re home and with… okay that’s way more friends than they thought, but it’s fine! Let’s go see- oh hey Frighty, erm, what do you mean heroes arrived?? We don’t have much of an issue anymore???

Fright, teacher of theirs, where are the heroes, did you toss them out- FRIGHT-

[ksksksrahrah]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Council of lovefools.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[starry-bi-sky]

okay so i was thinking of a joke earlier about how in DPDC Amity Park's slogan "a great place to live" is not only city propaganda but also the city lording it over the rest of America for being normal. But then I remembered that, despite how many DCU Cities with heroes in it there are, the amount of cities in America without heroes still far outnumber the amount of cities in America WITH heroes.

So I did a little digging so the joke would still land. Something most heroes have in common is that they operate in major cities. What makes a major city? I found that the general consensus is that the population is roughly over or around a million. THEN I looked up the populations of cities in the DCU that I thought of off the top of my head. So Gotham, Metropolis, Starling City, Central City, Jump City. All of them ranked up to millions in population (most of them were in the tens of millions).

Amity Park's wikipedia describes it as being similar to specifically Philadelphia, Chicago, and San Francisco.

Philadelphia's Population: 1.576 million as of 2021 Chicago's Population: 2.697 million as of 2021 San Francisco: 815,201 as of 2021

Whiiich means that Amity Park if we take that from canon, is probably a major city. There are approximately 19,000 cities in America with probably less than a hundred that are major cities. Adding the DCU major cities wouldn't skew the data too much.

Which MEANS that I can make the joke that Amity Park's "great place to live" is not only just typical city propaganda, but also its Amity Park lording it over the other major cities for being one of the only major cities that doesn't have problems bad enough to warrant a superhero or a vigilante. Cue stage left the Fentons and Phantom :)

Amity Parkers were probably SO proud that they didn't need a superhero. They didn't have to worry about things like 'world ending threats' and 'super-powered individuals' and 'staggering property damage'. And then enter Fentons.

It also could be used as an excuse for why nobody took notice to Amity Park getting ghosts if folks like me aren't huge fans of the notion of a media blackout via Tucker, Technus, or the US Government. Or if you want to keep Amity Park as its urban city self. Amity Park's news on ghosts gets drowned out in a week because there's news on more popular, well-known cities going on every other day. The shit going on in Amity Park is every other major city's regular Tuesday and it gets filtered as such.

[crustyfloor]

Luka is very good at keeping himself composed on stage, mostly with the help of maintaining track of his heart rate, but during Mizi's attack in ROMH he seemed to slip up, not only was the red background a tell-tale sign of Mizi's violent intentions but it was a more symbolic way of showing Luka in quite visceral fear. Even if for only a second.

I'm not convinced Luka will be as continuously calculated as he normally comes off, it all seems too fake to me. Because it is. It’s a similar case to Ivan who can't feel, isn't normal, isn't human enough so he makes a persona to blend in. So Luka, whoever he is, makes this version of himself to cope with what he has to live through, pretending like he's on top of it all to survive in this world.

So in round 7, I think something drastic will happen to make him 'snap' in a way.

It's safe to say that we don't know Luka. We don't know who he really is. We don't know his real desires. But we do know one thing--he is scared. he is afraid of the aliens. That's why he appeases them--being their trophy. He's only kept around for his purpose as an entertainer and nothing else and he's very aware of that. He knows very well that a dented trophy will be discarded; with that mindset, he's been able to get so far, and he's scared of losing. That's why he holds any little thing he can get his hands on close. And an important extension of that fear is his fear of losing power.

Till should be the more likely in this position, given he's such a rebel. But isn't that just too predictable? Keep in mind, that Till is a strong person. Even after all he's been through, even after he's been beaten into something more manageable for the aliens--He still hasn't lost his spark. Till is a raging storm. subdued but nonetheless a force to be reckoned with.

Round 6's effect on Till is greatly ambiguous for now but at this point when the time for round 7 comes, Till has been put through so much hell. Whatever Luka does to provoke him probably won't work, he and Luka are equally talented individuals and will make for an intense battle, and at the end of the day, the numbers won't lie. Exactly that is what Luka is ready for but scared of--a worthy opponent for the throne. Someone capable of stripping him of his power. (Is fear what makes Luka so dismissive?)

It would be so aggravating that this 'pest'. who is so indignant, so rebellious (in a way Luka envies.), could so easily destroy everything Luka has worked for, disregard every pain Luka has been through to get to this point, and Till doesn't value this throne as much as Luka does, and Luka doesn't want to feel the pain of death anymore. If his facade is as destructible as I think it is, that will be what ultimately brings out Luka.

This idea may be flawed. Luka is so perfect, too perfect and confident and experienced for something as little as that to break him, just think of all the training Luka went through to get to this point. I'm positive he's very aware of what playing unfairly will lead to. But isn't there always room for a wild card?

Just remember what happened to Hyun-woo.

What happened here isn't fully explained (and probably will be in round 7) but imagine Luka: "Trophy child, goody two shoes" Luka possibly killing another human. Whether by accident or not, what happened?--what and how did Luka feel in the moment for the repercussions of whatever happened to be that bad?

A Luka that is secretly greatly insecure, pliable, and defensive enough that in a spur of emotions, he can’t help but lose his cool in a way he hasn’t in a while because he’s afraid—just to try and prove he is still valuable. That is the type of character I theorize we'll come to see in round 7.

[kinokoshoujoart]

the coolest kids in forgotten valley!!☆

(…it seems there may have been a stretch of time where rock and lumina were the only kids in forgotten valley…🥲)

poseref

[kaiiscottage]

JUST WHEN THE WERE STARTING TO GET ALONG AGAIN IT'S SO OVER I'M GONNA LOSE IT

[backpackingspace]

Do we think odysseus's thoughts are almost stuck in quick thought from how often Athena popped up into his head? Because I absolutely do