#Never gets old.

[theygotlost]

THIS LESBIAN BAR DOESNT HAVE A FIRE EXIT!! ENJOY YOUR DEATH TRAP, LADIES! (what was HER problem?)

[open-wound-poetry]

nobody calls you joe or joseph just

cooper, 'cept your kids who call you

"dad" but murph doesn't say that much

anymore when you cradle her in a

tangled mess of blankets and she

sobs for you to stay, she throws your watch

away, you cannot watch her mourn,

you turn your back and slip out the door.

an' now you are 120 years old.

best case, there is someone back on earth to save

worst case, the last words your daughter said

were ones you didn't get to hear.

for a minute it doesn't matter that you're

a three dimensional thing in five of them

that you slipped into gargantua expecting death.

for a minute all that matters is you see

home for the first time in centuries

not dust and breeze of green leaves and blue sky

but the messy red hair of your little girl and

her big eyes peering curiously at the bookshelf

she can't see you behind.

you can't see her very clear anymore either:

your eyes all blurry with tears and despair and

the wobbling light of the door as your memory slips out of it.

stay, you beg. stay.

you told her you love her forever, that you're coming back:

her whole life is a few hours for you, played out in a tesseract. you leave her your love in a watch hand.

[daresplaining]

Caption: "Plunging the room into darkness, the Man Without Fear instantly takes complete command, darting, leaping, striking like a rampaging wraith...seeming to strike from everyplace at once!"

Daredevil vol. 1 #6 by Stan Lee, Wally Wood, and Sam Rosen

[yume-fanfare]

song of all time also

[bearenjoyers]

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[blenselche]

well it finally happened

so my dad is almost 80, this man's been making Spirk content since Star Trek started airing basically

he never knew ao3 existed, he just thought people stopped writing fanfic when ff.net died, like it was a fad that had outgrown him or smth

he clicked an ao3 link in my pinned last night, realizing that they were in fact clickable

he's mad at me for not telling him earlier. "I don't have a lot of years left in me and there's so much to read"

he's gonna spend his whole retirement reading trek fanfic now jesus christ

[mike-jacque-c-the-world]

09/14/24 - Lago Vista, TX - ANGLED SHOT - This morning, we took a pic of the sunrise from the other end of the pool and got a totally different look: from this angle, the pool appears to be much longer than it really is. That’s interesting. Can’t really explain why. What we do know is that we enjoy taking pics of colorful sunrises and their reflections in the water. It’s one of the main reasons we like to get up early. You never know what you’re going to see and for us, it never gets old. Hope you agree.

[langernameohnebedeutung]

My favourite little x men thing is when someone is like "Give up, Magneto! You stand no chance against this plastic weapon/gun/suit I have built!"

And Magneto is like "I see. Whatever will I do."

and throws the surrounding infrastructure at them.

[kedreeva]

There's some dude (derogatory) on FB who is PISSED people are pricing their farm fresh eggs at $2 and $3 a dozen instead of $4+, saying it's "disrespectful" and "undignified" and "I'm trying to feed my kids" like Sir, you are on a Facebook group page bitching about your neighbors egg prices because your pet chickens aren't earning you a living wage and you think it's your neighbors' fault, you do not have a leg to stand on here wrt dignity.

Also half the answers are like "I give them to friends and family free" or "I donate them to food banks" or "I'm making them affordable to folks who might not otherwise be able to get them now that they're so expensive in the store" and "if you think you're going to turn a profit keeping backyard chickens you have been wildly misled" and so on, and so forth, and I'm so living for it.

and I can tell you right now, he did NOT like my answer of "if you're trying to feed your kids, I hear eggs are edible."

[metamatronic]

William Discovers How Lizzie Died

william not knowing his robots were built to be murder machines is *so* funny to me.

[nemkero]

atla au but nothing changes except sokka is taller and zuko is shorter

[mountainshroom]

Dumb zukka content for my heart

[cozylittleartblog]

not that we didn't already Know belos was full of shit, but it's even funnier knowing the titan was still alive the whole time and probably judging him

[tonia-aaaaa]

You've heard of the Bad Boys as the Heathers... now get ready for: Mean Gills as the Mean Girls!!

[sara-danica-and-other-babes]