#and it is bumming me out

[alliswyattonthewesternfront]

i don't talk about my mom's anti-vax/anti-doctor phase a lot because it's not something she's proud of, and because some of the medical trauma from that time is hard to make silly hahas about. but. y'all. i gotta.

i was diagnosed with scarlet fever when i was very young as part of a gauntlet of illnesses that had me largely bedridden from ages 7 to 9. i never really thought anything of it, but i am reading about strep throat (currently recovering from an infection) and apparently, scarlet fever develops in a small number of patients with strep whose infection goes untreated.

i would get strep minimum twice a year as a kid. i never got antibiotics. not once. of course i was going to eventually get scarlet fever! my god!

and if y'all are curious, no, i did not get antibiotics for the scarlet fever either :) and now that i'm reading about how untreated strep and/or scarlet fever can result in rheumatic fever, the symptoms of RF sound an awful lot like how i would feel for weeks and weeks after each strep infection :)) but was always told to stop being a dramatic whiny faker because nobody else was still sick so how could i possibly be :)))))))))))))

wonder if that is a contributing factor in the weird heart shit i have always experienced but has lately been getting worse! who knows! each day is an exciting new adventure over here!

[leupagus]

It's really fucked up when you treat characters like people and people like characters.

[backstepping]

bye to a real one… add your favourite smash mouth tweet

[mawklee]

jerma plays l.a. noire

[officialmiintee]

nail polish trend with furin trio

[vtkuu]

absolutely love how early on in the Oregon Parks promo campaign everyone was under the tweets being like "alex what is this" "alex we know it's you" "what are you plotting alex" and now everyone is screaming and crying in the replies for Park Ranger Gus Burnside and asking if he's okay

he got the fandom invested in his twitter roleplay character in the span of ~a week. i'm afraid there's nobody doing it like him— anyone who thinks they can pull off a Gravity Falls revival hoax/troll/etc should quit while they're ahead, truly

[feathernotes]

I was writing up a post to help encourage folks who’ve always wanted to start a webcomic to dive in- and that they shouldnt have to fear ‘being perfect’ to start one And as I was going along, it made me sad to realise that.. there is an expectation now in the webcomic sphere, as much as I want to deny it (and that it should NOT stop folks from creating!!! please keep creating, no matter your level) I’m bummed out about the changes in the webcomic sphere over the past 5 years, i’m disappointed that there has been changes to this medium that was KNOWN for all of the different skill levels and flavours of so many different creators. I want to combat that. I want to see more beginner art, I want to see that excitment and embracing of growth. I want to see what made webcomics so accessible to so many creators and readers flourish again. Hopefully, if you see this post, and you’ve always wanted to make a webcomic but felt you weren’t ‘good enough’ : Make one anyways. Have fun even if you don’t know all the ‘ins and outs’ of comics. Make one because you’re obsessed with your characters and you wanna share them with the world. Make one just because you can, and not because it has to fit in some impossible standard we’ve forced onto ourselves because of the changing landscape. Start one, and have fun doing it for YOU!

[formulanni]

The exit

Tag list: @st-leclerc @rubywingsracing @saviour-of-lord @three-days-time @the-wall-is-my-goal @albonoooo @ch3rubd0lls

[azuneekun]

March, Juniper, and Celine

❤️💜🩵

My three favorites

[who-is-the-barest-of-them-all]

of course, there isn't actually anything in it.

[canisalbus]

Can we hear more about the gay dogs, or ideally see more of them? They live rent-free in my brain.

Have a little sketch then!

[a-memory-a-distant-echo]

i feel like people forget that sometimes characters in fic are written like that because it's a reflection of real life.

people have sex without setting boundaries. people have unprotected sex without talking about their sexual histories or producing recent sti tests. people play with kink without discussing it ahead of time or establishing a safeword. they have anal without 'enough' prep or lube—they may even prefer it like that.

and none of this is really a fantasy. it's all pretty normal. you can feel that it's inappropriately normalised, and you'd probably be right! but it is normalised: one study found that 58% of female undergraduate students on the campus studied had been choked during sex. 20% of those students said that they'd never been asked if it was ok; another 30% said they'd only sometimes been asked if they consented. fully half! (non-paywalled journal article on choking during sex here, including these numbers.) despite a rise in stis of all sorts, condom use is declining. (pdf link to the full text of this study about declining condom use in the us; aidsmap article about an australian study with similar results.)

even when people do talk about things—sex or anything else—they communicate imperfectly. 'yeah, but don't go too far' is consenting and setting a boundary, and also relying that the person you're talking to has the same metric for 'too far' that you do. for some people, 'the trash needs to go out' is a neutral, factual observation; for others, it's a request that the person they're speaking to take out the trash.

even when people understand each other perfectly, people react unpredictably to things sometimes! we behave irrationally! people laugh uncontrollably at funerals, or get angry at the straw that broke their back rather than the enormous load they were already carrying. they get scared and lash out at people trying to help them. when hurt, most people do not instinctively reach for therapy-approved grounding exercises and 'i feel' statements.

pretty much any bad choice that characters could conceivably make is a choice that people make in real life, on purpose, all the time. people do things that can have catastrophic, life-changing effects because it felt like a good idea at the time, or they're leaning into the vibe, or they just didn't think about it all that much, or an infinite number of other reasons.

fiction isn't intended as a guide on the best, safest, and most responsible ways to live your life, and fanfic isn't any different. it's not a narrative flaw to let characters do things that are messy or harmful or downright stupid—it's a reflection of what people are actually like, and not something that authors should feel they have to apologise for.

[peteneems]

[kilometresrufflefuck]

the fan translation and official localisation can coexist. they can live together as brothers. no need to pit two bad bitches against each other. time to embrace tradition and collect ten different copies of the iliad i mean miles edgeworth investigations 2

[myoonmii]

I think the downright most horrific and brutal detail in the show is that Kilgharrah actually used Merlin to make sure Arthur's death happened with the pretence of protecting him