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tomorrowusa · 9 months

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For anybody still desperately clinging to Twitter/X in the empty hope that it may soon return to its glory days: IT WON'T. It's just getting worse.

The recent terror attack on Israel and the Israeli response have highlighted the continuing descent of Twitter.

[T]he platform now called X has become a vortex of false claims and doctored footage. It’s a fog-of-war machine. That’s been the unmistakable reality in the days after Hamas’ deadly terrorist attack on Israeli civilians—a land, air, and sea operation that has killed at least 1,200 people in Israel and led to another 900 deaths in Gaza following Israel’s military retaliation. Musk’s changes to the foundation of how Twitter works have not only rendered Twitter useless as a means of making sense of the conflict as (or even hours after) it unfolds, but made it actively counterproductive for users trying to figure out what’s going on. As Musk and Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino have rolled back the platform’s rules of engagement and rid their ranks of the content-moderation teams and tools that actually keep X trustworthy, they’ve also put in place a system that fundamentally incentivizes the spread of misinformation during times of mass panic and confusion, in part because X is now a platform that pays for viral content. The end result is that Twitter, more so than any other platform right now, is fertile ground for a new kind of war profiteering.

A few debunkings – relatively minor ones. It would be an exhausting effort for somebody to keep up with them all. A problem with debunkings is that they can sometimes continue to spread the lies which are debunked. But here are some which don't do that.

On Oct. 8, the day after the initial Hamas attack, an account called @AGCast4 posted a video supposedly showing a Hamas rocket attack in Israel. The BBC journalist and fact-checker Shayan Sardarizadeh debunked it: The footage wasn’t from the ongoing conflict or any real-life war but from the video game Arma 3. The account was—and still is—verified with a blue check mark. Two days later, the investigative outfit Bellingcat, known for its visual forensics work, had to debunk some fake news … about itself. A doctored “BBC” video was circulating on social media, claiming that Bellingcat’s journalists had confirmed Ukrainian weapon sales to Hamas. “We’ve reached no such conclusions or made any such claims,” Bellingcat’s official account wrote on Twitter. In a screenshot, Bellingcat showed that a Twitter account called Geopoliitics & Empire had shared the video. Like the account that posted video game footage, this account was also verified with a blue check mark. (The account owner deleted the post and called it an “honest mistake,” simultaneously posting a meme captioned “We are going to be famous.”)

Those blue check marks have lost all meaning.

But now anyone who pays for Twitter Blue—recently renamed X Premium—can just buy a blue check mark for $8 a month, along with the veneer that they are a notable person or a legitimate source of information. Just last week, X removed headlines from linked news articles, making the site exponentially more confusing to scroll through.

“There is a difference between platforms that take steps to mitigate harm, platforms that have not yet started taking these steps, and platforms that take steps to undo processes that mitigated harm,” Chinmayi Arun, the executive director of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, told me. “Users who are accustomed to a different version of X may not know how to process or understand what they are seeing now.” It’s been mere days since the war broke out, but European regulators are already peeved with what they’ve seen. In a posted letter to Musk, European commissioner Thierry Breton asked the X owner to comply with the continent’s sweeping Digital Services Act. He urged the billionaire to respond within 24 hours with assurances that he’s taking the spread of “illegal content and disinformation” seriously or face legal penalties.

I wish the European regulators luck. But the best move is for people to abandon Twitter/X. You feed the trolls and the disinformation machine by remaining there.

Musk may want to prioritize “free speech” and being “open source,” but millions of people rely on his platform for reliable information. And, as it’s played out time after time, there are often very scary real-world consequences when conspiracy theories and fraudulent stories are allowed to run rampant. The only thing that’s transparent is the owner’s inattention.

Seriously, those people need to stop treating Twitter/X as a news source. The best way to do so is to simply leave. Get the word out!

#social media #twitter #x #elon musk #disinformation #fake news #israel #terror attack on israel #gaza #debunking twitter claims #thierry breton #leave twitter #quit twitter #delete twitter

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talenlee · 6 months

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Game Pile: Puzzmo

I was not at all prepared for the onslaught of time here.

Hey, have you heard of Puzzmo? It’s a website that does a bunch of engaging, carefully cultivated and constructed puzzle games, you know, like like the page from a newspaper, oh okay, okay, so a newspaper was, like, okay, back in the day, to inform you of things like mustache wax sales and the latest asbestos explosions, a company would take a tree, and, rice, slice it very thin, then press that flat, and then they’d roll it up and throw it at your house. At some point in this exchange, people made money doing this, and that the media ecosystem in which sample bridge hand games flourished, alongside crosswords and the entire Garfield media empire.

Anyway, Puzzmo is like that, as a reference frame, except, like, really good.

Puzzmo is a website. You can go to Puzzmo, and it will show you a crossword, a chess puzzle, a jumbled up word puzzle, and a type of game called Spelltower. Oh wait, I guess I can’t just treat Spelltower like everyone knows Spelltower.

Okay, then, if you don’t know Spelltower, you can just go to the google store and download Spelltower onto your phone and play it right there. It’s a word finder game with gravity. Long words are worth more points, but they destroy letters around them, and those letters get you points, but there’s a big bonus for getting rid of all the letters by the end of the game, and that puts you in tension with long and short words. When you play Spelltower, you don’t want to thoughtlessly blow up the middle of the tower and leave long, unuseful stacks on the sides, because doing that leaves you with a bunch of little nubbins at the bottom that literally cannot connect to anything. If you do know Spelltower, Puzzmo’s version does this cool flashy rainbow animation when you clear it, and that’s really cool feeling when you get to see it. Further complicating Puzzmo is that some challenging letters (X, Q, Z and J) give you a bonus for using them in a word – they blow up their entire row – and three letters every tower will have a star on them, which multiply the score of the word.

These bonuses stack.

If you get two stars in one word, its score triples. If you get two stars and a challenging letter, it triples the letters in the word but also everything in that big blow up. And when one of those challenging letters is part of that, it’ll triple all the letters in that row as well, and if you think ‘wow, I guess I should try and learn all the words that can use Q without a U,’ then you have a brain like mine and that’s how I learned the Arabic word وَقْف, and its romanisation Waqf, which yes, can be pluralised, and that means you can have Waqfs, which crosses the four-letter long line and becomes a five letter word and will blow up larger groups of letters around it and when I pulled that out, and yes, I’m kind of just excited about Waqf and getting to use it.

Oh, and it’s timed.

Puzzmo is a weird kind of speed game to consider in this, the week of GDQ, but bear with me. The crosswords are timed. There’s a leaderboard where you can see how quickly you do your crossword compared to other people. There’s a timer system, but also, you can hide the timer, so you don’t have to operate any kind of pressure. And yeah, that was how I kinda got pulled to talk about Puzzmo. It’s a speed game but the only person you’re racing is yourself, and the game is deliberately broken up so you can’t grind yourself out and become exhausted by it, right? It’s a place to play with the idea of speed, but you could also focus on trying to maximise your score, and it’s also very satisfying.

I had no intention, at first, to ever write a Game Pile about Puzzmo. Then I saw, looking at my statistics with Fox one night that I’ve played twenty five hours of four minute word puzzles.

The first time I heard about Puzzmo, it was a toot on Mastodon that described itself as making ‘thoughtful puzzle games.’ This is for a website I have paid exactly zero dollars into and which tempted me to check it out by making sure that I had to solve a puzzle and then solve another puzzle to get the URL to get into Puzzmo, and then every day, Fox and I set up the TV and we’d do things like Spelltower and the Crossword puzzle together. It’s kind of hard to escape how good Puzzmo is at being what it is, a unit of fun puzzles to play with with high quality varied presentation and just the right kind of crossword puzzles to leave us, Australians, really mad at how centralised they are to America. Twenty five hours of this – when I write this but I’m confident it’ll be a lot higher by the time this goes up – is a good sign that the thing is itself, a really good thing.

And it’s free. It doesn’t have to be, you could pay a subscription cost and in the process, get access to an archive of puzzles and even more puzzles every day. At first, as presented, it looked like this was the whole model for how Puzzmo made money at all: a good service where the top tier of interest would pay money to the maintenance of the website, and all I was going to expect was a modest ongoing addition of game modes and that’s all I needed it to be. Simply put, I thought Puzzmo was a beautiful little niche of Nice Internet Material that reminded me of a better day of internet stuff.

Anyway, the second time I heard about Puzzmo, it was on Checkpoint, explaining that not only had Puzzmo been financed by the Hearst Group, it was now being bought by the Hearst Group, and was now attached, free, to a bunch of newspaper subscription and news services. It’s not like it’s a bad thing for a game to, as it were, aquire ye bag. There isn’t anything about Puzzmo that necessitates it being bad that it’s currently owned by a company that’s owned things like major controlling interests in Verizon.

What does matter is trust.

Right now, every single time I’ve been playing an online game, a corporate — like, impersonal and organisational and profit-driven — host has a consistent trend towards getting worse. You might have heard of this as enshittification. It probably came up with a conversation about paywalls, or maybe even Wordle. I’m not saying Wordle is bad now — but Wordle is a thing a newspaper owns so they can encourage me to engage with their newspaper, and that newspaper has some really weird opinions. And you know, take what you want out of systems like that, gold from dragons, I don’t have a problem with that.

It just makes me pause.

I was very close, before the door closed, to buying a lifetime subscription to Puzzmo. After all, it was a game I was playing every day with Fox. Money choices and best practices meant that I opted against doing it, but there were times I might have done it, if I was more flush with Patreon coinage.

And now, I don’t know if I’ll ever pay into Puzzmo. Not because it’s bad or even because it might be bad, though I absolutely am convinced now that over time, Puzzmo is going to get worse. Just the natural byproduct of the enshittification of the internet, as companies enclose around the things we use and care about.

You should go try out Puzzmo. It might be the best, today, it’ll ever be.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Game Pile #Games

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alltheselights · 1 year

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To continue on the previous anon. I entered the fandom last fall, I absolutely adore him as a person and the music he makes. I love fitf, I’ll blast that record full volume any moment of the day. I want to see it live, I want to see him succeed. But, I am getting exhausted already of the drama and of the ways his things are dealt with? I’m really looking at the Niall fans enjoying themselves, no lama no drama etc etc. And I can’t help ask, in 2023, why it’s gotta be like this?

Even if he’s dealing with whatever it is that led to this cancellation, if he’s trying to fix it or whatnot, he could at least say so? Like just tell us you’re dealing with some shit, trying to fix new dates to be there or whatever and that you’ll brb. What’s the matter? This kind of vague posting and odd silence around the matter just raises more questions.

I feel he ought to engage with fans a litte more in general, it’s a smart way to do promo and hype up the crowd. It costs him a minute or two of his week to post a short tweet/video/pic of what’s up. Niall’s killin’ it on tiktok/insta, Lewis is beyond amazing. I know H and L both have this brand of being off socials and kind of aloof but I’m not sure if it’s working in Louis favour…

Sorry for the delayed response, bub! Yeah, I really wish that Louis had handled things differently and I was really disappointed. I will say though that the fact that he's been lurking on social media but not saying anything over the last few days (he's been liking things on Twitter and Instagram) suggests to me that he has been lurking, which means he's seen the backlash from fans. And I hope that he's taken that to heart and will act differently going forward.

I don't see him getting rid of his useless team, but it'd be nice if he makes more of an effort to hold them accountable. Touring seems to be the most important thing to him and his team's lack of professionalism and competence in planning and executing the tour should be a massive problem for him. Also, their refusal to work to expand his fanbase should also worry him if he wants to continue touring worldwide. It's expensive to tour places in a lot of the places around the world that he wants to go and for him to do it, he's going to need to start making sure that his team is planning properly, promoting the tour properly, and both maintaining and growing his fanbase. It's amazing that he wants to tour places that most artists don't tour, but he really needs to realize that he and his team need to start putting in work if that's going to be possible for him long-term.

I'd really love for him to wait a few months and then announce tour dates early next year in Asia and Latin America. I'd like for it to be properly planned and announced. I'd like for those fans to be reassured that it will happen. I'd like for the ticket sales to be organized and for there to be verified pre-sale so the tickets aren't being plucked up by scalpers. I want them to go with smaller venues with the option to move to larger venues or to add dates so the shows are selling out early, which will also be reassuring to fans. I want the dates to be properly promoted. This is probably a dream that won't be realized, but those fans really deserve it.

#asks

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soworthloving · 9 months

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Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow. - Melody Beattie

Have you ever found yourself completely overwhelmed by the season of life you are in? Maybe you feel a little abandoned by some friendships that are not showing up or you may feel like your second guessing your job. Maybe you feel like you are way in over your head and the circumstance is far from seeing any glimmer of improvement.

I have one word for you and it might produce an eye roll, or two… you might think this is cheesy but hang in there with me and try it...

– G R A T I T U D E –

I remember a time where my circumstances felt too big of an emotion that finding gratitude in anything felt like a hopeless attempt, but after exhausting all my other attempts I tried a few disciplines and it got me through the waves of grief. (that can still show up)

Gratitude is truly a powerful mindset that can improve your overall

well-being and outlook on your life. I promise.

HERE ARE THE TOP FIVE THINGS THAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP YOU BECOME MORE GRATEFUL:

Gratitude Journaling

Keeping a gratitude journal involves regularly writing down things you are grateful for. Do this in the morning and on the bad days, end your day a small list. This practice encourages you to focus on the positive aspects of your life, even the small things, and helps shift your perspective towards the things that gave you life.

Acts of Kindness Engaging in acts of kindness for others can increase your feelings of gratitude. Buy someone's lunch in the drive through line, insta cart a friend their favorite snacks. Be on the look out for how you can serve your friends and community. To think outside of yourself. Helping others and witnessing their positive reactions can make you more appreciative of the connections you have and the impact you can make on others' lives.

Limit Media Consumption

Reducing your exposure to negative news and social media can help you become more grateful. Constant exposure to negativity can distort your perspective and make it harder to appreciate the positive aspects of life.

Reflect on Challenges Reflecting on past challenges and how you overcame them can increase your gratitude. Recognizing your own strength and resilience can help you appreciate the lessons and growth that difficult experiences have brought you.

Remember, cultivating gratitude is an ongoing practice and a discipline that takes time and effort. A lot of it. Becoming more grateful for the little things and the bigs will not fix your feeling of overwhelm but it will help boost endorphins when you need them most. Incorporating these habits into your daily routine can gradually shift your mindset and help you see the world through a more grateful lens.

#swlfamily #so worth loving #loveyoulovepeople #self awareness #self help #self care #self worth #self improvement #value #worth #journaling #insecurity #anxiety #depression

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rialikesbts · 2 months

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Useless rant ahead so you guys can skip if u want <3

Soooo basically my only three friends from university cut me off :(

Two of them are a couple and they initiated it because i wasn't participating in group projects with them.

Now I am kind of an overachiever and i have good grades and i work really hard ! I tried working with them into 3-4 projects but all 3 of them never put the effort in so at the end of the day it was always just me doing all the work.So another group asked me if i wanted to work with them since they knew that i was someone who puts in effort and i agreed ( Already had worked with them in the past and got a 4.0 gpa that semester!)

Now i already did tell all 3 of them that things weren't working out since I was the one getting exhausted and two of them cut me off and they told the third one that I'm useless to them since I only want to hang out with them and not do projects with them.(I honestly felt so sad hearing this because even after i changed groups I was still trying my best to help them out like sharing my notes etc)

The third one didn't want to but no one else was taking her in for the group projects we have each semester since everyone in the class knows that those 3 do not do any work (I'm a software engineering student so it's very competitive).So she told me that she would only talk to me on WhatsApp and social media but not engage with me in class.I was devastated and told her it's better not to do it half heartedly.

So noww I am basically alone.

And it hurts a lot.

Like what is so wrong with changing your group if you're current group members aren't putting any work !!

I just feel so frustrated and alone.

Need some hugs 🫂

Thank you for those who read till the last line

#rant post #personal rant #i just need a hug #was i wrong

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queeriboh · 5 months

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You know, I think you need to rethink that approach. You’re getting 3 likes? That means 3 people cared. They did read it. Those 3 people wanted to know. I know it’s like pulling teeth, trying to get any single one of them to say so though. Unless you spend the time to befriend them. But it is worth trying to befriend them. If you have people who regularly like your posts, it’s not a far shot that maybe you’ll also get along when you talk in DMs.

You’ll just have to make the first move. And with some it might not work. But if it does work, you made a friend who cares. Good engagement (especially on OCs) so rarely comes from the void, you can’t ask the void for that. The void literally doesn’t care, and it’s only been getting worse with the way social media is set up nowadays.

But you can ask friends. And I know making friends is hard and exhausting and terrifying at times, but it’s really the only way. Chat them up. Most of us are lonely on the internet now, and would love a chat. (We’re also all extremely socially awkward but that’s just something that needs braving and dealing with.)

it could just as easily mean 3 people saw me bitching and begging and just wanted me to shut up and pity liked it. even though I begged for any and all questions about what I wrote bc I wanted prompts to continue gushing, not one person even said "yes, please go on!" or showed any real interest.

and it isn't like I haven't tried to make the first move. Arling's replied to more than a handful of posts and selfies, and been completely ignored. Yugi's been getting ignored the same way, even when I do try to make the first move.

and I only have the same handful of followers on all my accounts. I do talk to some of them in dms. but when I voice my frustrations I ALWAYS get these same kind of responses. "well keep trying! I mean I'm not interested, but hey, somebody will be." just like this.

I have friends I chat with ooc every day. they still don't ask me any questions about my characters or lore. I've straight up asked friends on numerous occasions to join my TLs, and I get told no thanks every single time.

I'm not exaggerating when I say this has been happening for 10 years. I begged and pleaded and even tried to PAY people to join Demi and Angel's tl back in like 2016. I wrote their entire story from start to finish playing every single character by myself.

I don't know what to do. I can't just go into the ask boxes of people who don't like my posts or even acknowledge my comments and replies on their posts

#answers

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hospitalterrorizer · 9 months

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diary25

9/29-30/2023

late night, tonight.

i was out super late after this very bad poetry reading here for some of these creative writing majors. i don't have a lot to say about it, it was bad and the writers make some people close to me miserable because they fail at being kind basically. kind in a real way, the kindness that lets you have some give for meanness when you actually articulate/show effort put towards anyone else, people who are utterly shallow, you know. i believe it must be the case that we all know of people like that essentially.

i didn't get to work on music today really, that's kind of good, tomorrow i will try to write some stuff, i did work on music actually i guess, i wrote a riff, and i'll see where that can take me, or less writing the riff, i wrote some chords to mess with. a fun shape that has a good sound, disso and freaky when inverted.

anyways tonight was good, or like, half good. it's given me a lot to think about, with people who do certain things (like 'ethical' nonmonogamy and if that can exist when the presupposition is monogamy in the first place). i met new people who i like, who are really nice and fun to be around, who got drunk and told me dirt about some old people i knew. or really, one person. that doofus from the noise band, actually. i don't mind saying that. i won't discuss the dirt. it just kind of makes me feel something sad, about people like that, and i guess at large people who in some sense resemble the poets, shallow engagement and deeply troubled ideas of what being an artist means leading to difficult lives, miseries that begin loud and only grow quieter, never actually dissipating.

my gf really wanted to take me to this, the reading and the afterparty, she and a friend really wanted to hear my thoughts on these people because supposedly i'm very funny about that kind of thing, she forgot i guess the bore of the poetry, and the fact that as time goes on, the ruin of these lives is exposed more and more, rich (really i don't actually know, it's the impression i get) developing bad habits and using people, and the drama, while never uninteresting to someone like me (maybe it makes me evil to want to hear), is always sad.

sometimes i am like a child and i just wish everyone could be okay and fine, i'd sometimes light myself on fire to make that possible, but someone i used to be obsessed with told me that me wanting to be jesus or buddha (he said both) so bad wouldn't do anything for anyone except feed how badly i like to see myself hurt. he's right. i guess that's what knowing things does too.

maybe my whole life i'm just going to be hurting myself in new ways.

so i made 3 new friends, or 4, let me count, yeah, 4, i think. and i actually saw 2 friends i knew before tonight, and i was with my one girl friend. so 7 people, i'm gonna see some tomorrow at a gay bar to see a drag show, super exciting stuff. hopefully there won't be any pangs of sadness over the fact we are living in hell sort of.

i guess everybody has really unpleasant fascinations sometimes.

one conversation tonight, one of the new friends told me about her research topic, modern apocalyptic media and its convergence with evangelical christianity, just talking about all that stuff and its evolving state, the dwindling numbers of evangelicals and their panic, her past, and stuff. i liked that. i liked all of tonight, even the sadder parts.

i'm listening to the song theory on sex as an art form, by camera obscura, on repeat. a really great track, it's just so perfect, i love the synth-y punky part especially, but i guess it's also perfect next to a perfect melodic release, this movement that recalls something tumbling downhill, or leaves off petals, while the first part is this total mania.

anyways i am exhausted now, and tomorrow is another day of socializing and stuff.

had an awful thought, or not awful, i dunno. someone posted the song absent friend by bark psychosis, a song that takes me to two specific moments in my life. one was when i'd listen to this song, thinking about the man i loved who would disappear without a word because he was awful, and i'd lay in bed without anyone to talk to, and the second place, is years later, when a friend who loved this record to bits, killed himself, and the song was so pointed, it felt like it said something. the night i found out i walked around and listened to this song.

both times, the lyric "that's the biggest joke of all" took on pretty different meanings. right now it means something else i guess.

the awful thought was about my dead friend rather than the friend who is dead to me. my dead friend, the thought was: the most meaningful thing he'd ever do for himself was kill his own self, that's where all the force of his life would end up, and missing him, and not wanting to forget him and wanting other people to know him, all i am left being able to do is revive the corpse he made of himself and tell others, this is what he did, this is his monument and it's an awful one but it is his. i don't know what else to say about it, i'm staving off the wish to tell a stranger in a server about him because they posted this song, all i can say is i guess, beautiful song, one of the best ever, and they won't know how much i mean that. maybe i mean it less because it means such particular things to me, and rather than thinking it's the best song ever, it's just clusters of memory and feeling forever tied to it. whatever, though, that's fine.

anyways, byebye!!!

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mess-of-contradictions · 9 months

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Have been MIA for the last 6 weeks because life is chaotic and exhausting and I haven’t had the bandwidth to engage with anything or anyone.

I took a two week vacation with my family mid-August, which I realize is a privilege to be able to do, and was honestly enjoyable in many ways but there were also several ways in which it was not. The two weeks leading up to it, work-wise, were horrible because I work 24hr shifts and I had to get all 7 shifts for the month out of the way in the two weeks before, so I went into vacay already kind of depleted. On top of that it’s been 5+ years since our last family vacay and between Covid and just getting older I didn’t realize how much more introverted I’ve become. Two weeks of constant socialization with no time to myself went way past the limits of my social battery and I was just DONE by the end of it. Plus, we took a cruise (which we’ve done before but will never do again in this post-covid era) and of course it was during this lovely Covid surge we’ve been having and people have just forgotten any lessons learned at the start of the pandemic. So many people were obviously sick and determined to go about their vacation despite that and there was SO much coughing and sneezing and sniffling that progressively got worse and it was just so so gross.

Then, to pile onto all of that, once we got home my dad became critically ill as a result of our trip and ended up hospitalized and on a ventilator for several days. I hadn’t realized how difficult being the medically literate person in the family could be until that happened. Everyone looked to me to translate what the doctors were saying and what was happening, and on the day he had to be intubated I unfortunately was not at the hospital so my mom put his doctor on the phone to explain what was happening and essentially give the okay to do it. It’s a whole other level of exhausting to go back and forth to the hospital for 3.5 weeks and be the optimistic one for the family while trying to hide the fact that I’m internally panicking over the very real possibility that he might not make it. Being in healthcare can be traumatizing in lots of different ways but that was not one that I was prepared for.

Anyway, things have finally started to calm down. Thankfully my dad is almost back to his normal self and was discharged from the hospital today. I’m trying to find my way back to enjoying and engaging in social media again, let alone life outside of work and going back and forth to a hospital. In all honesty I really just want to sleep through the rest of the year and wake up once it’s 2024 but I’m hoping that some decent rest and time to myself will help that too. We’ll see. I just need life to not throw any curveballs at me for like a solid month and I think I’ll be good.

#tl:dr life is chaotic #and i’m exhausted #personal ramblings

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sounmashnews · 2 years

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[ad_1] Last night time’s Filmfare Awards 2022 premiere was actually an leisure extravaganza. B-Town stars descended on the crimson carpet placing their finest style foot ahead and whereas probably the most distinctive abilities of Bollywood have been recognised and felicitated on the gala occasion, there have been additionally scintillating performances from the likes of Ranveer Singh, Varun Dhawan, Disha Patani, Vicky Kaushal, Kiara Advani and others that took the leisure quotient a notch larger. Glamorous crimson carpet appearances of celebs like Ranveer Singh, Rakul Preet Singh, Vicky Kaushal, Katrina Kaif, Malaika Arora, Arjun Kapoor, Shehnaaz Gill, Mouni Roy, Tejasswi Prakash and plenty of extra grew to become the speak of the city. But let’s take a second to acknowledge the efforts of the workforce of stylists who work exhausting to place collectively such spectacular appears for the celebs. As Mouni Roy advised ETimes on the awards night time, all credit score goes to her designer Mohit Rai for styling her for the crimson carpet. “The styling industry today is a kind of a revolution. Our stylists have made our lives so much easier than before. You just make one call and the next day or 2-3 days later you are trying on your outfits and then it's done! There's a hair and make-up team to make you look so presentable and pretty,” she quipped. Gone are the times when celebs struggled to resolve on their crimson carpet appears. They now have a devoted workforce of stylists at their beck and name to place collectively a surprising search for any occasion. Red carpet appearances have grow to be a factor and are most talked about on social media. It is a star’s time to shine and make an announcement, and styling thus turns into a colossal accountability. In right this moment’s #BigStory, we take you behind the scenes of celebs’ crimson carpet statements and decode what goes on earlier than and after the occasion, how a stylist places collectively a glance, how lengthy it takes, what occurs to the outfit after the gala night time and extra. Read on. The mutual understanding Red carpet appearances have grow to be loads about self expression. Every celeb has a definite character they usually know effectively how they wish to mission themselves and make a method assertion. It is the character of the star that the stylists and designers are engaged on. There are a number of components to contemplate - developments, likes and dislikes of the star, consolation, theme, climate, quirks and preferences and much more. It is thus important that a stylist has a terrific mutual understanding with the celeb. Maneka Harisinghani has been styling crimson carpet queen Malaika Arora for a couple of decade. “We don’t really discuss stuff,” she says. “Malaika is a woman of very few words. It’s strange but there’s never really a brief. I am just told what the event is and as per that whatever I think can work best for the occasion, we pull some options and we just head for trials. There is an implicit trust.” Maneka has additionally labored with new era actresses like Janhvi Kapoor, Nora Fatehi and plenty of others. “Some people do tend to give a brief and they are very specific about what they want. I feel it works well for the artist if they go with the stylist’s vision. If you impose your vision on every stylist, you will just circle in the same orbit and you will get the same stuff back,” she provides. Known for styling Ranveer Singh, Nitasha Gaurav agrees that the connection between any artiste and a stylist is a really shut one. "You perceive what their mindset is, what their likes and dislikes are. On the opposite hand, you additionally assist them develop. You introduce them to new issues, new concepts and so forth. And since you are educated, you understand what works and what doesn't, what one ought to have a look at. It’s an amalgamation of all this stuff. You have an understanding of the particular person however you might be additionally bringing in your skilled skills.

It’s quite a lot of belief between two folks,” she says. Deciding on a glance is a two approach avenue and Nitasha says you may’t drive any person to put on what they aren't snug with. “I have worked with Ranveer for almost 10 years. He is an outgoing person, he does like to experiment and do fun things and all of that. Because he is that kind of person, it is possible to explore that kind of styling with him, push the envelope in unusual ways. I can’t think of any other artiste this can be done with. Everybody has their own sensibility and style,” she provides. Having labored with stars like Katrina Kaif, Bhumi Pednekar, Sara Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor and plenty of others for years, Tanya Ghavri thinks it’s nearly constructing that connection to know what sort of human beings these stars are, what their likes and dislikes are, what their consolation is. “Someone like Kareena with whom I have been working with for 15 years, I feel like my work with her has gotten better. When we started, she was also figuring, I was also figuring her style. When I first started working with Sara, and the way it is now are very different. Earlier she was kind of rebelling but now she is very trusting and she will let the person take a call on what will work on her. So as we work with people, it tends to get better with time,” she says. Mohit Rai has labored with the likes of Kareena Kapoor, Sonam Kapoor, Priyanka Chopra, Janhvi Kapoor and plenty of others. He believes all actors do have a definite fashion and character that stylists have to bear in mind. “Their body type, comfort, what colours they like... Many a times we have to suggest and come up with ideas to build an image. The large part of the fantasy of being a star is the way you look.” Mohit additionally shares how he styled Mouni Roy for Filmfare Awards night time. “We had something grand in mind. She’s got a great body, a great physique. She works out a lot. We wanted to flaunt that and make it as chic as possible. On the basis of the brief, I reached out to designers and we finalised the red corset gown from an international designer Gaby Charbachy,” he says. Actress Tamannaah Bhatia’s crimson carpet fashion has advanced through the years. She credit this to her workforce of stylists. “I think I got my dose of education from my stylists who worked with me at different points of time. Ami Patel helped me define what are the things that flatter my body, what I would look best in. But largely it has been an internal journey of first figuring out who you are, what are your basics as a person. The stylists bring to your access the best possible brands that are available in the market. There have been few stylists who have helped me channel my best and have given me an insight into what my sense of style is,” she says. The briefs While there's a mutual understanding between the celebs and their stylists, there are sometimes a set of particular dos and don’ts that the stylists are made conscious of. Different stars have totally different preferences, however they are often majorly narrowed down to 1 issue - consolation. “The major criteria is comfort,” says Malaika. “I should feel comfortable and confident in what I am wearing. I am not afraid of experimenting, so colours or a specific style only are never in my specifications.” Boyfriend Arjun Kapoor too likes to be snug, reveals designer Kunal Rawal. “We always take that into account when we design for him,” he says. “When it comes to colours, Arjun loves his blues – it’s his favourite colour, so he does gravitate towards it a lot when we dress him.” Mouni Roy chooses to be very concerned with the stylist when selecting a crimson carpet outfit. “We either speak on the phone or meet up and we go over what we feel like doing on the red carpet. We decide upon what kind of outfit we are going with, that’s the only specification. I have been working with them for many years now, so they know what would and wouldn’t work on me. I don’t take too many trials, during my first trial itself I would know what I want to wear.

If not first then the second one definitely. I am very solid when it comes to my decision making with an outfit. If I like something we do a trial, check for alterations. It’s pretty fast and simple,” she says. Tejasswi Prakash has all the time been fascinated with style and likes to become involved at each alternative she will get. “I try and put forth my ideas and the stylists help materialise them. I've always felt my style is an expression of who I am and the point of my outfit is to get that across and the team always helps me get that across. I wholly trust my stylists. They are professionals, they know better. I don't have any major qualms except maybe that I want to feel comfortable but all in all I trust their judgment,” she shares. Raveena Tandon too has her dos and don’ts for her stylist. “I don’t want to be wearing something that’s too complicated or I always have the fear of tripping and falling on stage or while walking up on stage. I like to be wearing something that I am comfortable in and I can manage well,” she says. While Isha Koppikar has her standards and floor guidelines laid for her stylists, she lets them check out their creativity after which makes modifications in response to her style. “I like to be comfortable in what I wear and it has to be subtle but glam,” she says. Tanya Ghavri says Kareena Kapoor’s alternative could be very basic, and Sara is extra experimental. “She’s trying out many different things, she loves colours, prints. Kareena is very monochromatic. She likes more solid colours, she’s more of a classic. She knows what works on her and what doesn’t. She’s figured herself out while Sara is still figuring,” she notes. Sourcing the outfits Once the look and imaginative and prescient is set upon, the sourcing begins. The stylists method designers each in India and overseas relying upon the timeline and the budgets. Tanya Ghavri breaks down the method, “When I get a call for an event, I start looking online. I check out look books of designers, and contact them. Whatever I think will be good for the actor, I send it to them. We have a discussion and then whatever the actor ends up liking and is available with the designer, we call for it and do trials and fittings. We then try the fittings and discuss the hair and makeup. Collectively, we have 2-3 options and then we shortlist the one we like the most. It could take upto three weeks to finalise a look.” Sourcing outfits from worldwide designers will be fairly a process, to not point out time consuming as effectively. “Most designers are keen to collaborate with actors who have a certain kind of following so that they get a good exposure to market their designs from the barter,” says Mohit Rai. Maneka outlines particulars of the outfit sourcing course of. “We first research brands from different countries, we touch base with them. The conversion rate of people showing interest in an Indian artiste is - if we approach 200 people, 1 person will show interest. That’s the ratio. Then we have to figure out the shipping cost because most artistes are not willing to pay that. And customs in India is 77 percent of the value of the garment. Many a times the package is not cleared even after the event is over. It is a lot of administrative work. There are also instances of one artiste feeling that you are dressing the other artiste better. But that’s not on us, but the designer who wants to collaborate. Because it’s a social media barter and it depends on their social media page. It eventually boils down to how many followers celebs have and how their page looks,” she explains. The challenges While the stylists make an artiste’s life simple, it’s not all the time really easy for them to take action. “It seems like a fun job, but it’s not,” cautions Maneka. “Back to the day when it was domestic sourcing, life was very different, till about eight years back when we started sourcing internationally. What managers and artistes don’t understand is that

to get one international piece, it will take about two months of negotiation with the designer. It will be held up for customs for over a month. That’s the kind of coordination we have to do everyday. Sometimes it takes months and months of planning for a look. There is a lot of pre-planning and investment involved even before being booked for a job.” “Sometimes the celebs are not even sure if they are going to attend an event or not till the last minute. So we still have to keep stuff ready in case they call last minute. 99 percent of my sourcing is international. So I have to pre-empt what my next few months are going to be like, what are the kinds of events that I have, and I have to pre-order. Sometimes stuff is used, sometimes it’s wasted and we send it back. We spend all that money and it’s wasted,” she additional explains. Another problem that Maneka level out is to crack a social media barter with worldwide designers. “What most artistes don’t understand is that at the end of the day we are just agents in between, with an aesthetic sense. They need to have a decent amount of following, they need to invest in a good photoshoot that will benefit the designer. For the international designers to part with their pieces for a few months needs to have some tangible benefits for them. That is the struggle,” she explains. Fashion fake pas In the world of glamour, a style fake pas is sort of a sartorial sin. From one thing as small as an undesirable crease to an surprising slip up, a style fake pas can damage an in any other case good crimson carpet second. It’s all the time higher to be ready and stylists additionally be sure of that. “When we dress stars for an event, we make sure that all the bases are covered. If there is a possibility of something peeking and showing, all that is covered in advance. We test on camera after the artiste has tried the outfit under harsh light, whether the outfit is becoming too transparent. Sometimes we even do the dummy trials on our assistants and we test it under harsh lights, how it looks, whether it creases and such other factors,” says Maneka. “We work as one unit, so of course all kinds of discussions happen between me and my stylist that takes care of all the aspects - seen or unforeseen,” says Malaika. “Apart from that, I have been in this industry for far too long to not be able to handle/ avoid or let faux pas affect me.” Mouni Roy is all the time the cautious one on the crimson carpet to keep away from a pretend pas. “I make sure everything is fitted properly, stitched up, and all alterations are done. I may do one trial, but I do multiple fittings so there is no tension on the red carpet. It’s better to invest some good time in fittings and then you are sorted. If after all this also a faux pas happens, then it just happens. One has to accept it and feel embarrassed and move on,” she says. Tejasswi believes style will be fragile generally. “As much as I adore statement outfits, they don't always keep the way you'd want. Not all pieces move with your body. The key is to be graceful about it. No one causes a faux pas on purpose and all we can really do is be aware of how you handle yourself. But most times my stylists emphasise on comfort and care so I don't end up in a situation like that,” she says. Nitasha feels grateful no such factor ever occurred with Ranveer. “But stylists are usually prepared for faux pas moments," she says. "They don’t just have one outfit. There will be backup options in case something doesn’t work out. We take several options for trials also. So by chance if something is not working out then there is a backup option.” What occurs to the outfits after the occasion? Compared to 10 years in the past, styling has grow to be a really organised business. “Stylists curate a look that an actor can carry at an event. The actors don’t pay at all for their red carpet outfits. They collaborate with designers who get spoken about, and get the publicity they need. Thereafter the outfits are returned to the designers,” explains designer Rohit Chaturvedi.

“I never keep my outfits after my appearance,” says Mouni. “Artistes and people in the fashion industry have no space left at home to hoard so many outfits. And red carpet outfits are pretty heavy. So mostly they are returned.” Tejasswi, however, tends to wish to preserve the enduring ones. “Each outfit has its own story from creation, so it's hard to discard them right away. But at the same time, I don't want to hoard. I know there's plenty more outfits that I'd like to keep later,” she concludes. [ad_2] Source link

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solena2 · 2 years

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Saw a post about which books the batfam would read that was Wrong so I’m throwing my hat into the ring

So first, Bruce. Bruce has No Life aside from the whole “pretending to be an entirely different person in public” thing, and as such he reads precisely three things. 1: shitty romance novels. He says it’s because they’re the kind of thing his persona would read so he needs to be able to talk about them if asked but he secretly likes them. 2: anything nonfiction. Put literally any nonfiction book in front of him and he will have finished it within an hour, regardless of length. 3: Agatha Christie. He’s read all of her books multiple times and got all of his kids into her work as well.

Next is Dick. Dick doesn’t read much, because this man has absolutely no free time ever. Like, day job as a cop, night job as a vigilante, and a social life? He doesn’t sleep and he definitely doesn’t have hobbies. He does really like comics though. He owns pretty much every Calvin and Hobbes collection ever published, along with a respectable amount of Foxtrot and some Dilbert stuff he regretted buying after doing some research into the author. He also has a semi-secret pulp fiction addiction, especially the weird horror thinkpiece ones that you always regret reading when you try to sleep.

Jason, unlike Dick, reads constantly. He loves books, he is a massive literature nerd. Since he lives on his own, he gets a lot more alone time than the others, and he spends most of it reading. Jane Austen is his favorite, but he also likes other romance novels of that era more than he’ll readily admit. He also loves Frankenstein, partially because he projects on the monster and partially because he finds the fact that Mary Shelley started writing it in order to avoid having to talk to Oscar Wilde hilarious. He mostly reads classics, but he’s got a soft spot for more recent coming of age stories. He read The Girl Who Could Fly when he was like 12 and it’s stuck with him since.

Barbara really likes sci-fi/fantasy novels with heavy worldbuilding and intricate plotlines. Any time she hears about a series that’s five books in and still hasn’t fully revealed the main plot, her eyes go wide because she knows what she’s doing until 3 AM that night. Because of this, she’s also recently gotten into plot heavy isekai series, though she slightly regrets it due to how exhausting all the harem bullshit can get in a lot of them. She can’t read any book with hacking in it because the inaccuracies kill her inside. She also loved The Martian, but like, who in the batfam wouldn’t, honestly.

Tim, being a heathen, Doesn’t Read. He’ll pick up a book on something if it’s the only way to get the information, but he mostly engages with media by watching video essays and/or reading the sparknotes. He just doesn’t focus well on books. If Jason every successfully bullies him into giving audiobooks a chance, though, he’ll probably get into them a lot more, since it’s just the format he has trouble with.

Steph is one of those people who specifically seeks out terribly written stories because she thinks they’re hilarious. The worse a book is, the more she loves it. She mostly goes for bad YA dystopia novels, since they’re easy to find, but anything that manages to be so bad it’s good is up her alley. She also reads vigilante rpf, mostly because of the faces people make when she forces them to read fanfiction of themselves. Wattpad is her favorite site in the whole world.

Cass has trouble with reading, on account of her whole Thing, so when she wants to read something she’ll bully someone else into reading it to her. She likes fantasy novels, with a noticeable trend toward anything remotely similar in vibe to The Last Unicorn. Jason introduced her to The Chronicles of Narnia and she loved it.

Damian reads horse girl books. He pretends it’s because he’s mocking the “infantile characters” and “plebeian obsession with friendship” but everyone knows the real reason is that he’s pissed he didn’t grow up in a time when riding a horse everywhere was practical. He’s also read just about everything by Tamora Pierce or Anne Mccaffrey, though he won’t admit to it because he’s ashamed of genuinely enjoying stories with predominate messages of love, hope, and caring for each other. Recently he’s gotten into Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series and he’s completely addicted.

Alfred, if asked, will profess that he’s read every butler’s handbook every created. This is probably true, but his real interest lies in bodice rippers. No one knows this except for Bruce, who found one of his stashes on accident when he was 9 and almost ending up reading some extremely steamy porn before Alfred caught him and moved his secret cache off the property.

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my-darling-boy · 3 years

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Genuinely asking, isn't self-diagnose with a condition kind of dangerous? Because legitimizing self-diagnosing opens a door to many malicious people who would want to exploit the fact they can self-diagnose? And in turn, make the space of autistic people worse?

Was going to skip this, but I’m writing a LONG response because I’m VERY exhausted with the amount of misinformation I see on this “self dx is dangerous” take, so buckle up and allow me to info dump.

Recently, authentic_autism_advocacy, an Instagram account run by a supposed medically diagnosed autistic woman was discovered to be a non-autistic woman, Connie Manning, posing as a medically diagnosed autistic person to spread hate and anti-self diagnosing speech. In reality, she is a neurotypical mother who regularly uses her autistic son for clout; she also turned out to have a hand behind CalmWear, a brand of sensory compression products designed for disabled people. Not only had she been spewing hatred towards other autistic people, she had been accusing well known AFAB autistic tiktokers like beckspectrum of faking being autistic and threatening self diagnosed autistics and saying they are a danger to the community, and engaging in other incredibly discriminating behaviour. Yes, she herself was a neurotypical person posing as a medically diagnosed autistic to perpetuate hateful rhetoric about self diagnosed people and used her voice to speak OVER autistic folk for financial gain and exploitation of autistic people, including her own son. If you want to read this roller coaster of a story, an autistic person wrote an entire article on it with tons of screenshots and sources.

So let me make one thing clear to you.

The purpose of actually, genuinely self diagnosing is not done to attract attention or to parade around and exploit other autistic people. Self diagnosed autistic individuals have recognised due to difficult life circumstances, financial hardship, bigotry and stigma within the medical/legal world, being a minor, lack of insurance, lack of proper access to safe care facilities, being denied assessment due to incompetent or biased practitioners, and/or any other obstacle that they may temporarily or permanently be barred from diagnosis. Self diagnosis does NOT instantly mean a person is posing for clout, nor does it indicate a person is trying to wring money from assistance services or exploit other autistics. And nts who use self diagnose with intentions of harming the community? That’s NOT self diagnosis, that’s abuse of something meant to aid people blocked from medical care or financial means to that care. All we can do for autistic people, no matter who we perceive them to be, is treat them the same way we would any other autistic person. Because the moment you start deciding by your own book who deserves respect and who doesn’t, you’ll be on a slippery slope to locking out thousands of autistic people from the community. If it’s discovered a person like Connie is literally abusing the system of self dx to intentionally mislead the community, by all means, we must hold them accountable. But you cannot simply go about granting and revoking access from people just because someone lacks a diagnosis or doesn’t fit your idea of what being autistic looks like, especially if it’s based on stereotypes.

Moral of the story? Isn’t it ironic how anti-self dx people will 100% believe a user who claims to be medically diagnosed but shows no “written proof” of it, yet always demand written proof from a self dx person? It’s almost like even anti-self dx people can’t tell the difference between someone who is medically diagnosed autistic and someone who isn’t. Well, that’s because they can’t. While there might be common traits, autism has no set model, it is a spectrum, no autistic person is alike; Policing self diagnosed people about their self diagnosis isn’t a form of protecting the community. It’s a form of gatekeeping. If you find yourself granting instant acceptance, without asking for proof, to a person insisting they are medically diagnosed like this neurotyical mother, but then prohibit self dx people from entry entirely on the grounds of not showing proof of medical assessment, you are upholding a double standard. This is why policing autistic people’s diagnosis, self or not, is inherently useless.

So here’s the thing... instead of asking people to stop self diagnosing, what you should instead be asking yourself is, “Why do people self diagnose? What kind of medical system could possibly be in place where people feel they need to resort to self diagnosis rather than get an actual diagnosis?”

Well, it’s mainly common knowledge among most of the autistic community that diagnosis is NOT easy to come by.

One of the main reasons why people cannot get a diagnosis is due to financial/insurance reasons. It’s reasonable to estimate that by the end of 2020 almost 30 million Americans alone were without health insurance. I’ve heard costs out of pocket for an autism diagnosis are between $500-$6000. If a person or a family cannot afford health insurance—which by the way on average is around $5,400 a year for a single person and $13,800 for a family here—where are they supposed to pull out $6,000 to get screened?

You might be asking, “Well aren’t insurances supposed to cover disability?” Sure, there are options for disability care through health insurance—not even going to get into that—but like a lot of things in the US, this is a severely flawed system. A lot of private health insurance will stop or limit coverage for an autism diagnosis or assistance services once a person reaches 18 to 21 years old. In most states, coverage has a higher chance of being denied to autistic adults coming with the added age cap or ONLY covering ABA, an abusive, manipulative “therapy” used to force social compliance and trait suppression on autistic people. The fact that ABA, a conversion therapy, is covered, but little else, shows exactly what insurance companies think of autistic people: they’ll only cover us if we want to learn to be “normal”. This can leave many undiagnosed autistic adults who cannot afford analysis, insurance, or safe assistance services with nowhere to turn. If I was not on my parents’ insurance, there is NO WAY I would EVER be able to afford a diagnosis. I don’t have $2,000 lying around. The MONEY ALONE would prohibit me from getting a diagnosis, no matter how many autistic traits I presented.

When I was going through this system years ago to start a diagnosis, I was shocked to find no therapist within three hours of me was accepting adult patients. “Up to 18 only” their websites would say. And in the event I had found one (1) that accepted me as a then 20 year old with X insurance, and that person refused me diagnosis, I would be out of options unless I planned a 5 hour drive which may have also led me to another biased screener. A person seeking self financed assessment can waste thousands of dollars therapist hopping.

People will say, “Well I live in X place, and where I come from, it’s covered!” Well the reality is that everyone in the world does not live where you live. It’s not realistic to assume everyone is in the same position as you or your family to afford care or access the same resources as you. When you say, “Just go out and get a diagnosis! It’s not that hard!”, understand you are speaking from your personal vantage point where screening may be easily accessed or easily covered/is free OR you have no personal knowledge of what that process is like yourself.

The second thing that bars a ton of people from being diagnosed is the fact that when autism was first discovered, its research was HEAVILY centered on white, cis, heterosexual men. The idea that autistic people are ONLY cis, white, heterosexual men carries on to this day. If you are an outlier to this stereotype, your chances of being misdiagnosed with something else or refused diagnosis skyrocket because so-called “professionals” don’t know how to observe traits in any other person besides a cis, white, heterosexual man, and refuse/fail to recognise the endless ways in which a person can be autistic. ALL the time I hear how AFAB people will go in to get screened only to find out their screener does not believe AFAB people can be autistic, because yes, sexism and anti-lgbtq+ ideas play a huge role in the incredibly outdated diagnostic process, because autism is still believed to be an “AMAB only” thing. People report going into a therapists office and being asked questions like, “Do you like going outside? Do you like having friends?” and being told that if you agree with either of these, you cannot be autistic because criteria at some places is so backwards, you can’t even say you enjoy conversation without failing the test. Other things commonly heard during the analysis are screeners telling someone they are too smart/articulate to be autistic, gas lighting them by saying they are mistaking their symptoms for something else/making them up, telling a person they seem normal, dismissing clear autistic traits by saying they’re unique “superpowers”, or intentionally misdiagnosing a person as ADHD INSTEAD of autistic. People on social media have also pointed out what influences racism has on the diagnostic process as well and how lack of research and understanding of autistic POC contributes to under-diagnosis and stigma has only contributed to refusal of care and under-representation of POC in the disabled community, as one autistic Black woman points out on Instagram, “I found excellent articles that support and validate my feelings and experiences, but I could find no research on autistic Black people.” Additionally, because research has primarily been done on young men, this means anyone who is not a cis man and is over the age of 18 and is seeking a diagnosis has a much higher chance of not receiving one because screeners don’t understand how autistic traits may present differently in adults, especially since adults are very likely to mask. Some autism screeners are so against autism they have told clients they would only diagnosis a person autistic if it was their last resort to avoid “placing a burden on their shoulders”. These reasons are largely responsible for why autism is incredibly mis/under-diagnosed. This ask would be the length of a novel if I included every single type of discrimination and mistreatment during the evaluation process alone, but understand it can be incredibly biased, sexist, transphobic, racist, or just flat out ableist. And guess what? Though this process can take as little as a month to get sorted, that is rare. The assessment SHOULD be very short. But a lot of autistic people have reported their diagnosis took more than 2-4 years because of having to waste time, energy, and money hopping from therapist to therapist looking for someone to take them seriously, as many autistic people compiled on the actuallyautistictiktoks page on Instagram point out.

The last thing I want to touch on is this idea that people have that self diagnosing is dangerous. “What if someone self diagnoses and they take advantage of services that are meant for autistic people?” ...The Big Things you think I am going to take advantage of as a self diagnosed autistic person, like scholarship money for instance or SSDI, I do not have legal access to without a formal diagnosis. I cannot waltz into a law firm and ask for a $5,000 scholarship for autistic people without a diagnosis, because they WILL NOT give it to me!

Let me tell you some of things I’ve “cruelly taken advantage of” as a self diagnosed autistic person. I bought glasses with blue light protection, because screen and fluorescent lighting at work and even natural blue toned light from the sky lowers my threshold for some sensory input like noise and social interaction; wearing them to work everyday has improved my sensory thresholds incredibly. I’ve talked to my manager and told him I’m autistic and that I have a hard time understanding vague direction and may need to step away briefly on occasion to tend to a shutdown before a meltdown comes on at work; he had no problem with this. I use subtitles; sometimes I have trouble processing audio or reading facial expressions and tone, and being able to see the words displayed on the screen gives me a significantly better understanding of what I watch. All my life, I have been having meltdowns which I had mistaken for mental breakdowns or panic attacks and having access to resources that walked me through preventative methods and tips on what to do if I have one has been ENORMOUSLY helpful to me. All my life, I was trying to deal with them thinking they were something else; becoming aware of this and accepting that they are in fact autistic meltdowns has helped me not only go through them, but has helped me redirect stims which at their worst previously had me hitting and clawing my arms, slapping my face, and even hitting my head. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to wait 4 years for a diagnosis to use resources I could be using to make my life more accessible right now!

People will say, “Oh well yeah, I don’t mean You are one of Those Types of self diagnosed autistic people, you clearly sound/look autistic, I’m talking about other people.” The thing is, there is no broad “sounding/looking autistic”, that’s stereotyping, and you can’t demand everyone who interacts with you show you their Autistic Card, because again, not everyone is able to be diagnosed, especially given the mistreatment and stigma present towards autistic people in the medical field! And what made you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “don’t seem autistic” to you? Why didn’t you ask for their diagnosis? Because they “seemed autistic” to you? By denying anyone who doesn’t have a diagnosis resources they may very well need, you are denying assistance to thousands of people who are without means to be diagnosed. And I am SO tired of seeing comments online on self diagnosis posts that “people don’t know what they’re taking about” as if they know us personally, like are you me? Are you my doctor I’ve consulted? Did you watch me academically research and consult with other autistic people about being autistic for over 3 years? I’m tired of “well, one time a self diagnosed person laughed at my actually autistic diagnosed friend...so all self dx people are evil” because there is ZERO correlation between a person being self assessed and their behavior towards a non self assessed person. The fact both those arguments are in use whenever self dx comes up is yet another form of gatekeeping.

Self diagnosing autism is not begging for attention or Evil Criminal Money Funneling Schemes. It is a result of a deeply flawed medical and insurance system that has failed to give proper attention and care to those who need it, it is a result of resources not made available, of safe support systems not there for kids and adults alike. You want to talk about what’s truly dangerous? How the hate group Autism Speaks has been parading itself around since 2005 as an advocacy group for autistic people and has been misusing millions of dollars worth of donation money and promoting stigma and hatred around autistic people; no autistic members are present on their board. How Sia and her new film Music was nominated for 2 Golden Globes despite it replacing the original autistic actor with a neurotypical actor, using offensive stereotypes, and using the main autistic character as a prop, and featured an extremely dangerous bodily restraint scene on an autistic person having a meltdown in public and featured very insensitive content due to Sia’s lack of consulting with autistic people to make the film (spoilers in that article).

Instead of policing autistic people, whether they fit your idea of what an autistic person is or not, redirect your efforts and your energy to dismantling systems and holding others accountable for perpetuating harmful stereotypes about autistic people that are legitimately dangerous on such a scale that they have created insurmountable damage to the autistic community. But I guarantee you, worrying over whether your classmate is “faking it” will not do any justice to the decades worth of discrimination autistic people face still today.

I understand. You care about the community, you don’t want autistic people to be exploited or taken advantage of. I don’t want to be exploited and taken advantage of as an autistic person, and I don’t want that for others! But I also understand that when we self proclaim ourselves as judges of random autistic strangers on the internet or start accusing people of faking or demanding to see medical paperwork from people when the basis of our suspicions is “this person doesn’t look like my stereotyped view on how I think an autistic person should act”, THAT is when you really run into trouble. Because if you are allowed to deny self dx people entrance into the autistic community, what’s stopping you from thinking you have the power to deny ANYONE entrance into that community?

And there is power in self diagnosis for many autistic people. When the evaluation system is literally rigged to set you up for failure and put you through unnecessary hardship, self dx is a self affirming, empowering tool to take back control from a process designed to gaslight and crush you. The evaluation process was NOT formulated by an autistic person, nor was it made to be inclusive of all autistic people. Until the evaluation system in place for autistic people is safe, accessible, and free to ALL, you have EVERY right to self diagnose.

#like this isn’t even half of what I want to say #but I’m gonna stop cos this is So Long #no clowns in my inbox pls #long post #ableism #autism #actually autistic #ok to rb

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qqueenofhades · 3 years

Note

Hi. I’m curious. What did you mean by “women who read fiction might get Bad Ideas!!!” has just reached its latest and stupidest form via tumblr purity culture.? I haven’t seen any of this but I’m new to tumblr.

Oh man. You really want to get me into trouble on, like, my first day back, don’t you?

Pretty much all of this has been explained elsewhere by people much smarter than me, so this isn’t necessarily going to say anything new, but I’ll do my best to synthesize and summarize it. As ever, it comes with the caveat that it is my personal interpretation, and is not intended as the be-all, end-all. You’ll definitely run across it if you spend any time on Tumblr (or social media in general, including Twitter, and any other fandom-related spaces). This will get long.

In short: in the nineteenth century, when Gothic/romantic literature became popular and women were increasingly able to read these kinds of novels for fun, there was an attendant moral panic over whether they, with their weak female brains, would be able to distinguish fiction from reality, and that they might start making immoral or inappropriate choices in their real life as a result. Obviously, there was a huge sexist and misogynistic component to this, and it would be nice to write it off entirely as just hysterical Victorian pearl-clutching, but that feeds into the “lol people in the past were all much stupider than we are today” kind of historical fallacy that I often and vigorously shut down. (Honestly, I’m not sure how anyone can ever write the “omg medieval people believed such weird things about medicine!” nonsense again after what we’ve gone through with COVID, but that is a whole other rant.) The thinking ran that women shouldn’t read novels for fear of corrupting their impressionable brains, or if they had to read novels at all, they should only be the Right Ones: i.e., those that came with a side of heavy-handed and explicit moralizing so that they wouldn’t be tempted to transgress. Of course, books trying to hammer their readers over the head with their Moral Point aren’t often much fun to read, and that’s not the point of fiction anyway. Or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Fast-forward to today, and the entire generation of young, otherwise well-meaning people who have come to believe that being a moral person involves only consuming the “right” kind of fictional content, and being outrageously mean to strangers on the internet who do not agree with that choice. There are a lot of factors contributing to this. First, the advent of social media and being subject to the judgment of people across the world at all times has made it imperative that you demonstrate the “right” opinions to fit in with your peer-group, and on fandom websites, that often falls into a twisted, hyper-critical, so-called “progressivism” that diligently knows all the social justice buzzwords, but has trouble applying them in nuance, context, and complicated real life. To some extent, this obviously is not a bad thing. People need to be critical of the media they engage with, to know what narratives the creator(s) are promoting, the tropes they are using, the conclusions that they are supporting, and to be able to recognize and push back against genuinely harmful content when it is produced – and this distinction is critical – by professional mainstream creators. Amateur, individual fan content is another kettle of fish. There is a difference between critiquing a professional creator (though social media has also made it incredibly easy to atrociously abuse them) and attacking your fellow fan and peer, who is on the exact same footing as you as a consumer of that content.

Obviously, again, this doesn’t mean that you can’t call out people who are engaging in actually toxic or abusive behavior, fans or otherwise. But certain segments of Tumblr culture have drained both those words (along with “gaslighting”) of almost all critical meaning, until they’re applied indiscriminately to “any fictional content that I don’t like, don’t agree with, or which doesn’t seem to model healthy behavior in real life” and “anyone who likes or engages with this content.” Somewhere along the line, a reactionary mindset has been formed in which the only fictional narratives or relationships are those which would be “acceptable” in real life, to which I say…. what? If I only wanted real life, I would watch the news and only read non-fiction. Once again, the underlying fear, even if it’s framed in different terms, is that the people (often women) enjoying this content can’t be trusted to tell the difference between fiction and reality, and if they like “problematic” fictional content, they will proceed to seek it out in their real life and personal relationships. And this is just… not true.

As I said above, critical media studies and thoughtful consumption of entertainment are both great things! There have been some great metas written on, say, the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how it is increasingly relying on villains who have outwardly admirable motives (see: the Flag Smashers in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) who are then stigmatized by their anti-social, violent behavior and attacks on innocent people, which is bad even as the heroes also rely on violence to achieve their ends. This is a clever way to acknowledge social anxieties – to say that people who identify with the Flag Smashers are right, to an extent, but then the instant they cross the line into violence, they’re upsetting the status quo and need to be put down by the heroes. I watched TFATWS and obviously enjoyed it. I have gone on a Marvel re-watching binge recently as well. I like the MCU! I like the characters and the madcap sci-fi adventures! But I can also recognize it as a flawed piece of media that I don’t have to accept whole-cloth, and to be able to criticize some of the ancillary messages that come with it. It doesn’t have to be black and white.

When it comes to shipping, moreover, the toxic culture of “my ship is better than your ship because it’s Better in Real Life” ™ is both well-known and in my opinion, exhausting and pointless. As also noted, the whole point of fiction is that it allows us to create and experience realities that we don’t always want in real life. I certainly enjoy plenty of things in fiction that I would definitely not want in reality: apocalyptic space operas, violent adventures, and yes, garbage men. A large number of my ships over the years have been labeled “unhealthy” for one reason or another, presumably because they don’t adhere to the stereotype of the coffee-shop AU where there’s no tension and nobody ever makes mistakes or is allowed to have serious flaws. And I’m not even bagging on coffee-shop AUs! Some people want to remove characters from a violent situation and give them that fluff and release from the nonstop trauma that TV writers merrily inflict on them without ever thinking about the consequences. Fanfiction often focuses on the psychology and healing of characters who have been through too much, and since that’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s a very powerful exercise. As a transformative and interpretive tool, fanfic is pretty awesome.

The problem, again, comes when people think that fic/fandom can only be used in this way, and that going the other direction, and exploring darker or complicated or messy dynamics and relationships, is morally bad. As has been said before: shipping is not activism. You don’t get brownie points for only having “healthy” ships (and just my personal opinion as a queer person, these often tend to be heterosexual white ships engaging in notably heteronormative behavior) and only supporting behavior in fiction that you think is acceptable in real life. As we’ve said, there is a systematic problem in identifying what that is. Ironically, for people worried about Women Getting Ideas by confusing fiction and reality, they’re doing the same thing, and treating fiction like reality. Fiction is fiction. Nobody actually dies. Nobody actually gets hurt. These people are not real. We need to normalize the idea of characters as figments of a creator’s imagination, not actual people with their own agency. They exist as they are written, and by the choice of people whose motives can be scrutinized and questioned, but they themselves are not real. Nor do characters reflect the author’s personal views. Period.

This feeds into the fact that the internet, and fandom culture, is not intended as a “safe space” in the sense that no questionable or triggering content can ever be posted. Archive of Our Own, with its reams of scrupulous tagging and requests for you to explicitly click and confirm that you are of age to see M or E-rated content, is a constant target of the purity cultists for hosting fictional material that they see as “immoral.” But it repeatedly, unmistakably, directly asks you for your consent to see this material, and if you then act unfairly victimized, well… that’s on you. You agreed to look at this, and there are very few cases where you didn’t know what it entailed. Fandom involves adults creating contents for adults, and while teenagers and younger people can and do participate, they need to understand this fact, rather than expecting everything to be a PG Disney movie.

When I do write my “dark” ships with garbage men, moreover, they always involve a lot of the man being an idiot, being bluntly called out for an idiot, and learning healthier patterns of behavior, which is one of the fundamental patterns of romance novels. But they also involve an element of the woman realizing that societal standards are, in fact, bullshit, and she can go feral every so often, as a treat. But even if I wrote them another way, that would still be okay! There are plenty of ships and dynamics that I don’t care for and don’t express in my fic and fandom writing, but that doesn’t mean I seek out the people who do like them and reprimand them for it. I know plenty of people who use fiction, including dark fiction, in a cathartic way to process real-life trauma, and that’s exactly the role – one of them, at least – that fiction needs to be able to fulfill. It would be terribly boring and limited if we were only ever allowed to write about Real Life and nothing else. It needs to be complicated, dark, escapist, unreal, twisted, and whatever else. This means absolutely zilch about what the consumers of this fiction believe, act, or do in their real lives.

Once more, I do note the misogyny underlying this. Nobody, after all, seems to care what kind of books or fictional narratives men read, and there’s no reflection on whether this is teaching them unhealthy patterns of behavior, or whether it predicts how they’ll act in real life. (There was some of that with the “do video games cause mass shootings?”, but it was a straw man to distract from the actual issues of toxic masculinity and gun culture.) Certain kinds of fiction, especially historical fiction, romance novels, and fanfic, are intensely gendered and viewed as being “women’s fiction” and therefore hyper-criticized, while nobody’s asking if all the macho-man potboiler military-intrigue tough-guy stereotypical “men’s fiction” is teaching them bad things. So the panic about whether your average woman on the internet is reading dark fanfic with an Unhealthy Ship (zomgz) is, in my opinion, misguided at best, and actively destructive at worst.

#long post #anonymous #ask

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homoose · 4 years

Text

Weird is Good

Summary: A story about two people tryna make it through the age of COVID-19 in a country where people are fucking dumb lmao. My hc is that Spencer would be like wtf at all these science-denying anti-maskers. Also, two teachers just tryna make it through quarantine and remote teaching in a one bedroom apartment (this is taking place during a mandatory leave/lecture cycle).

Pairing: Spencer Reid x fem!reader

Category: fluff

Warnings/Includes: no warnings. reader is both a kindergarten teacher and a bruh girl with a pirate’s mouth. lots of Spencer x factz.

Word count: 3.1k

———

“We’re home for the next two weeks. ”

Spencer looked up from his desk to see Y/N kicking off her shoes, dropping her bag, and walking directly to the sink. “Starting when?”

“We get to go in on Monday to say goodbye to the kids and get any materials we might need. Then we’re home for two weeks. They’re calling it an early, extended spring break.” Y/N began her hand washing routine. As a kindergarten teacher, she’d always been a strict hand-washer. In the time of COVID, she had only become more zealous. She looked at Spencer. “Have you heard anything?”

“Since we’re so close to the end of the semester, the department head thinks they’ll try to finish out the year as normal.” He set down his pen. “I honestly don’t know. It will all depend on whether people follow the CDC guidelines. The spread of any virus is deducible mathematically, and SARS-COV2 is no different. Based on the outbreak in Italy prior to their lockdown, we can accurately describe its reproductive number, or Rt, to between 2.43 – 3.10.”

Y/N shut off the water and dried her hands on a paper towel. “In layman's terms, Dr. Reid.”

“The Rt tells how many people are infected by the contagious host,” he explained. “In the case of this strain, each infected person is infecting between two and three others. For comparison, the standard seasonal flu has an average Rt between 1.4 and 1.7.”

“So in other words, fucking yikes,” Y/N groaned. She moved to perch on the edge of Spencer’s desk.

“Indeed,” Spencer agreed. “We know how fast the flu can travel through an office or a classroom, so imagine if it was two times as transmissible. But it's also really important to understand that this number changes depending on the mitigations in place. Even prior to full lockdown, mask wearing and social distancing was somewhat common in Italy, so it’s likely the uncontrolled Rt is higher.”

“Jesus Christ.” Y/N scrubbed a hand over her face. “We’ll probably never go back.”

Spencer rubbed his hand up from her ankle to the inside of her knee. “The good news is there’s nothing special about this virus compared to others in terms of how it spreads— it’s just aerosols. So if everyone wears their mask, we’ll be able to keep the spread low.”

⧭⧭⧭

“It’s safe to say that everyone did not wear their fucking masks,” Y/N snapped. She watched from the couch as Mayor Bowser delivered the news that DC Public Schools would remain closed for the remainder of the year. “This is crazy. I mean, I knew it was coming because people in this country are absolute buffoons.” She looked at Spencer, fingers pressed to her temple. “But holy shit, are we ever going to be able to go outside again?”

“With schools and universities closed, people working remotely, and lockdown orders in place, the Rt in the US could stay low. But masks have to be worn at all times, and social distancing has to be strictly followed.” Spencer pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I just— I can’t believe people are refusing to wear masks. The empirical, peer-reviewed data clearly shows—”

“This is ‘Murica, boy.” Y/N mocked. “Ain’t no tyrannical government gonna tell me what to do!” She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, your choice to abstain from social media is paying dividends to your sanity right now.”

Spencer looked truly dumbfounded, setting his newspaper down in his lap. “But that’s just it. It’s not just in social media circles.” He gestured to the article in front of him. “This economist just argued for ‘reopening’ the economy using the justification of herd immunity. Herd immunity can be a plausible option for less lethal diseases. But this virus is not like varicella—the chickenpox,” he clarified at Y/N’s raised eyebrow. He waved his hands around in exasperation. “Putting aside the fact that one facet of herd immunity is vaccinating as many people as possible, its success completely hinges on the Rt of a disease. If you model a population based on an Rt of 2.5, herd immunity wouldn’t be achieved until approximately sixty percent of the population has been infected. Consider that the US population is currently 328 million, and sixty percent of that is 196.8 million. The current mortality rate for SARS-COV2 is 3.06 percent. 196,800,000 multiplied by 0.0306 is 6,022,080. Over six million people would die. It's simple mathematics.”

Y/N let out an exasperated breath. “It used to be that simple math and facts were enough. Now you’ve got basement scientists who think they know better than actual, literal scientists who’ve spent their entire lives studying these things.” She ran a hand over her face and gestured at the news conference still playing. “How long do you think it’ll be before we’re both trying to teach from this tiny ass living room?”

⧭⧭⧭

“Goooooooood morning, kindergarten! It’s Friday, and no Friday is a bad Friday!” Spencer smiled. As he poured his first cup of coffee, he hummed along with Y/N and 23 six-year-olds as they sang their morning song. Observing fourteen days of remote kindergarten from across the living room had given Spencer a new appreciation for elementary school teachers, particularly Y/N. She sang, danced, conducted science experiments, held puppet shows, read stories, led art projects, and fielded questions for four hours a day— three hours less than when they were in the school building. He was exhausted by proxy.

But he was also grateful for the opportunity to watch Y/N in her element. Even though they were at home, she still got dressed every day in bright, patterned sweaters and dresses— her Ms. Frizzle attire, she’d told him once. She was able to channel her personality into a kid-friendly version that her students clearly adored, never afraid to be silly or strange to get their attention and keep them engaged during the long days. He worked from home whenever possible, strangely happy to have the background noise of kindergarten over his quiet university office.

...

“Okay, but where do I put the biiiiiiiiiiiig number?” Y/N made a wide gesture with her arms. “Ariah, where should I put it? In the big box, yes! But oh no, my small number needs a friend. My three is soooooo lonely!” Y/N drew her mouth into a pout. “DJ, how can I help my three not be so sad? You’re absolutely right, let’s put that two right next to him in our number bond.”

…

“I’ve been waitin’ for a girl to mute,” Y/N sang into the gold karaoke mic. “I said, muuuuuuuuuute, I’m blinded by loud sounds. No, I can’t hear the friend who’s tryin’ to talk.”

…

“Oh boy. Kev, honey, we can— we can see you. Kevin, Kevin, Kevin. We can see all of you. I can’t turn your camera off, buddy. You gotta— there we go.”

…

“Mute please, I need— I need everybody to mute, please. Oh my goodness where is that music coming from?” Y/N frantically searched for her index card with the picture of the mute icon, as the sounds of a highly inappropriate song blared through the computer speaker. “I know it’s so loud, guys. Why is my mute power gone?! This is why we need to make sure we keep our mute button on, kindergarten.”

…

“No sweetie, it’s not time to log off yet. I’m sorry, I know it’s such a long day. We have about an hour left. Do you guys wanna do a countdown? It’s the fin-al count-down! Do-do doo dooooo. Do-do-d-do-dooo…”

…

“Annnnnd, I should see all my friends on mute. William, hang on just a second. All my friends need to look at my picture, it’s an oval with a line through it… Okay, William, what did you bring to show us?” Y/N leaned toward the computer screen. “Grandma Kathy? O-oh, she’s— she’s in the—“ Y/N’s eyes widened. “Is that— is that an urn? Oh wow. Um, well, wow. It’s beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, William. Grandma Kathy, may she rest in peace.”

⧭⧭⧭

A week into Y/N teaching kindergarten from their living room, the university had announced its transition to online coursework for the remainder of the academic year. Spencer had to host his first zoom lecture, and he was absolutely dreading it.

“Spence, it’s going to be fine. It’s not like you’ve never been on a video conference,” Y/N assured him. She sat cross-legged on the couch, waiting for him to let her in to his practice zoom.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t running those meetings. I just showed up.” He squinted at the computer screen. “Are you in?”

Y/N barely resisted the urge to make a joke, knowing that Spencer probably wouldn’t appreciate the innuendo. “No, you have to admit me.”

“What do you mean? How do I do that?”

“There should be a box with a button that says admit.”

Spencer gestured at the computer. “Well there’s a bunch of boxes— which one should I be looking at?”

Y/N sighed and got up from the couch. “IQ of 187 and can’t find the box.”

Spencer dragged a hand through his hair. “I know I shouldn’t find this so difficult. I’m sorry you have to waste your time on this.”

“Hey, it was a joke.” Y/N grabbed his hand from where he was frustratedly pulling on his frazzled curls. “I’m sorry. That was mean and you’re already stressed enough.” She used her free hand to smooth his hair back into place. She scrunched her nose. “I love you and your limited technology skills. And honestly it’s kind of nice to have one thing I can actually teach you about.” She squeezed his hand, leaning over him to peer at his computer screen. “All right, let’s find that elusive admit button.”

When the day of his lecture rolled around, Spencer thanked all the atoms in the observable universe that Y/N had a break during his class. Within the first ten minutes, he’d managed to accidentally kick himself out of his own meeting and then somehow lose track of the screenshare button.

“No one can see me and I don’t know what happened to the screenshare option. It was there and now it’s just… gone,” he told Y/N.

She leaned over his desk, eyes tracking over the screen and mouse clicking around the desktop. “How in the world did you manage to block your camera?”

“I don’t know! I didn’t even touch it!” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “I don’t understand how it’s even possible to be this bad at this.”

Y/N bumped his knee with her own, pulling up his camera settings and preferences. “Relax. You can’t be good at everything. It’s a refreshing reminder that you’re a mere mortal like the rest of us.” With a few rapid clicks, Y/N unblocked his camera and located the screenshare bar. “There. Crisis averted. I’m just going to share your whole screen in case you want to toggle between application windows. So just be aware that they’ll be able to see everything. And then you just click here when you’re ready to stop sharing.”

When Y/N turned her head toward him to check that he understood, Spencer grabbed the side of her face and caught her lips in a kiss. Y/N smiled against his mouth, heart speeding up as he traced the seam of her mouth with his tongue.

“Um, Dr. Reid? Your um— your camera’s working now.”

Spencer nearly fell out of his chair, his cheeks about the color of the Leave Meeting icon. Y/N dropped her head, debating whether she wanted to laugh or let the earth open up and swallow her whole. She ultimately decided to compose herself, stepping back and giving a little wave to the sea of tiny, grinning zoom faces before slinking out of frame, miming sorry to one very mortified professor.

⧭⧭⧭

“Would you want to be our mystery reader next week?” Y/N asked, bookmarking the page of her novel and reclining back in bed. “You just have to pick a story to read. Oh, and think of four clues about your identity to give the kiddos.”

Spencer raised his eyebrow, continuing to read. “Any story?”

Y/N laughed. “Well they’re six, so maybe hold off on the Chaucer and Bradbury for now. A picture book would be preferable.”

“Did you know that the first picture book, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, or Visible World in Pictures, was published in 1658?” He looked up from his own book. “Czech educator John Amos Comenius wanted to create a book that would be accessible to children of all levels of ability. The educational theories he explored are actually still in practice in the field of early childhood education.” He turned toward her from his spot under the covers. “For example, when you have your students make a hissing sound and slither their arms when they produce the sound represented by the letter s? Comenius included an alphabet chart with various animal and human sounds representing each letter. He wanted to demonstrate that the incorporation of multiple senses could help increase learning.”

“I guess you don’t fix what isn’t broken,” Y/N mused. “300 years later, and we’re still using the same methods.”

“362, actually,” Spencer corrected.

She gave him a look. “Maybe we can save the Comenius for another time.”

“The genre of children’s literature encompasses some of the most profound and philosophical story telling of all time.” Spencer returned his attention to his reading.

“...So is that a yes?”

Spencer smiled. “I’ve got a book in mind.”

“And clues,” Y/N reminded him, snuggling down under the covers and reopening her book. “We need some fun clues, mystery reader.”

…

“Kindergarten, we have a very special mystery reader this week. Oh man, are you ready for the first clue? The mystery reader loves jell-o! Raise your little hand if you love jell-o, too. Okay, kindergarten, I see you! Lots of jell-o lovers in the house.”

…

“Okay, clue number two! Our mystery reader works as a community helper— remember we learned about all different kinds of community helpers; firefighters, nurses, police officers. But if the mystery reader could be anything, they’d want to be a cowboy! How cool is that?”

...

“Clue number three for our mystery reader!” Y/N sucked in a gasp. “You guys. The mystery reader can do magic. Oh my goodness, I am so excited for Friday,” she sing-songed. “Will they show us a trick? Hmmm, I don’t know. Maybe if you ask nicely.”

…

“Okay, my friends, the last clue. The mystery reader loves reading. They read every day, and they’ve been reading since 1983! Yes, that was a very long time ago.”

⧭⧭⧭

“Okay, any last guesses about who our mystery reader might be?” Y/N questioned.

“I think it’s your dad,” a little voice called out.

Spencer made a choking noise from where he sat, slightly off camera. Y/N laughed. “The mystery reader is decidedly not my dad, Keyshon. Remember I showed you guys the picture of him— my dad’s a farmer, so he’s kind of already a cowboy.” She clapped her hands together. “Okay, without further ado, drumroll please... Our mystery reader is…” Y/N pushed her desk chair out of frame to allow Spencer to roll in, holding her hands out. “Spencer!”

He gave a little wave, smoothing his hair, suddenly painfully self-aware and nervous about the opinions of two dozen six-year-olds. “Hi guys.”

“You’re the boy on Ms. Y/L/N’s phone.”

“Your hair is so fluffy!”

“Do you have a cowboy hat?”

“I like your sweater.”

“Can you really do magic?”

“What’s your favorite jell-o?”

“Whoa, okay, let’s remember our mute button,” Y/N, holding up her index card. “I promise you’ll get to ask Spencer all your questions after he reads the story.”

Spencer smiled at the excited faces beaming through the screen. “Yes, I’m on Ms. Y/L/N’s phone; I don’t own a cowboy hat, yet; yes, I really can do magic; and the red jell-o is my favorite.”

Y/N watched with interest as Spencer pulled out his book. He’d been secretive about his choice, so she was as curious as her students.

“This is one of my favorite stories. It’s written by Munro Leaf, and illustrated by Robert Lawson. It’s The Story of Ferdinand.” Spencer held the cover up to the camera. “Ferdinand is the bull here on the cover. This story was written in 1935, which was a long time ago! Okay are you ready?” Spencer looked out on a sea of thumbs up, turning the page to the beginning of the story. “Once upon a time in Spain, there was a bull, and his name was Ferdinand.”

Y/N smiled as she listened to Spencer read each page, recounting the story of the peaceful bull. He was an excellent storyteller, changing the inflection and expression of his voice to match each sentence. He held each page up for just the right amount of time, panning it so her students could see each detail of the black and white pictures. He added his own wonderings and exclamations here and there, and her students were decidedly enthralled. Her heart ached at how comfortable he was, how natural this was for him. She rested her chin in her hand, trying to keep her mind in the present— ignoring the persistent little mental image of Spencer as a dad.

“So they had to take Ferdinand home. And for all I know, he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy… And that’s The Story of Ferdinand.” Spencer closed the book with a soft smile. “I love this story. Ferdinand is a very special bull. What do you think makes him so special?”

“Ferdinand didn’t fight,” a little voice piped up.

“Yes!” Spencer agreed. “He practiced pacifism in the face of the persistent, ingrained militarism of his country’s culture.”

Y/N placed a hand on Spencer’s knee and gave a quick squeeze. “Right, Ferdinand chose not to fight, even though everybody else he knew wanted to.” Y/N winked at him before turning back to the screen full of kids. “All his friends thought he was kind of weird, but he just really wanted to hang out in the shade and smell the flowers, huh? Sounds pretty good to me.”

“He wasn’t bothered that the other bulls thought he was strange for wanting to be peaceful,” Spencer added. “Sometimes being different can be a good thing. The Story of Ferdinand reminds me that it’s okay to be yourself, even if other people think you’re weird.” His eyes met Y/N’s. “Because there will always be people who love and appreciate you for who you are.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid x y/n #spencer reid imagine #spencer reid x you #criminal minds fanfiction #criminal minds imagine #spencer reid fanfiction #criminals minds self insert #dr spencer reid #professor spencer reid #spencer reid fanfic #criminal minds #homoose writes

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young-dumb-and-vaccinated · 3 years

Text

The Cult Girl (Hannibal x Female!Reader) pt. 6

Hannibal sits in on a regular conversation between y/n and her family. Y/n insists it could have gone worse.

⚠️Bigass trigger warning⚠️: Verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, blood, mention of alcohol abuse and suicide

Anna lived her life believing that she was the main character, constantly denying personhood to everyone around her. She was the romantic hero, and everyone else existed to forward her plot.

This metaphor was imperfect, however, because in all the books you'd read, the main character must overcome some kind of challenge. Nobody ever said no to Anna. Nobody ever criticized Anna. Nobody but you. So you were pigeonholed into the role of antagonist for it. You had to give her credit; growing up on the receiving end of her and Theresa's torture was a compelling villain origin story.

It was obvious that she only wanted you at her wedding to present her with an obstacle. Heaven forbid her story progress without some semblance of petty drama out of her control. She'd cornered you into a painful catch-22; you wanted vengeance, but you couldn't give her the satisfaction of having her special day ruined. What was your play? Ruin it just a little? Walk away?

These thoughts passed through your mind as you sat through the boring ceremony. You wanted to lean over and whisper everything to Hannibal, but he seemed lost in his own thoughts. The vows seemed to drag on forever. Liam's English accent grated on your ears and you wished that he would just shut the hell up.

The ceremony concluded and you hoped to skip out on the reception with a purse full of mini cannolis, but fate had other plans. In a last-minute reach for some kind of scene, the blushing bride waved you over to the head table.

"[F/N]!" Anna shouted, with a big smile across her face. "Come on!"

You fought the urge to feel endeared by this. She looked too happy to be harmful. Your guard was all the way up as you and Hannibal approached the table.

Hannibal pulled a seat out for you while you studied Anna's expression. She fixed her doe eyes on Hannibal. You knew from experience that Anna had the same powerlust as grandma and Theresa. She was just better at keeping a lid on it.

"[F/N], you remember Liam?" Anna said, her voice brimming with excitement.

"Yeah." You nodded, scooting your chair up. "Nice to see you again, Liam."

"Good to see you again, too [F/N]."

"Liam is from Birmingham." She bragged, her smile somehow growing wider.

"Alabama?" You piped up before taking a drink from your water glass.

Every time you were forced to interact with Liam, she reminded you that the man with the strong and unmistakable English accent, was in fact from England. And every time, you slipped in the Alabama comment. It was never not funny.

"Liam, Anna," you said. "This is my fiance, Dr. Hannibal Lecter."

"Many congratulations to you two." Hannibal offered.

"Dr. Lecter, thank you so much for coming." Anna returned. "And thank you for taking such good care of our precious [F/N]. I hope she's not giving you too much trouble. She was quite a handful growing up, but we made it work."

"Don't flatter yourself, you're only four years older than me." You hide your passive-aggressive jab beneath a smile. "You can't take credit for a job you didn't do."

Grandma always thought Anna's protective, borderline maternal behavior towards you was adorable. Of course, it disgusted you. You were little more than an accessory to her. A baby doll she could simulate motherhood with. But, in fairness to her, that was all you were to the adult in the house too. Monkey see, monkey do.

"So have you two set a date yet?" Grandma interrupted your thoughts, just trying to keep the tension down.

"Goodness, no." Hannibal answered. "Ours is a long-term engagement."

"Yeah." You added. "Not until I finish school."

"Well, it's not my fault you aren't expected to graduate on time." Grandma said into her wine.

You tightened your grip on your water glass. "Well, changing your major halfway through will do that."

"I'm just saying," Grandma continued. Whenever she was 'just saying' anything, you knew she was raring to stir things up. "If you had just stayed the engineering track, you wouldn't have to keep Hannibal waiting."

"Well!" Anna cut in, offended that the attention was off her for more than a minute. "Liam and I waited until after college."

"Yes, Anna," Grandma said dismissively, before turning back to you. "Y'know, Dr. Lecter here could probably tell you that psychologically speaking, women are more likely to drop out of college and become strippers when they change their majors?"

Now it was Hannibal's turn to down his entire glass of wine. "Ms. [L/N], where did you get that information?"

"Oh, it was an article I found on Facebook." Grandma answered. "I'll have [F/N] send you a link."

"Ms. [L/N]," Hannibal cleared his throat. "Are you familiar with the concept of misinformation?"

"Of course." She looked offended at the implication that she could possibly not know something.

"See, social media websites like Facebook are inundated with misinformation campaigns." Hannibal explained. "Your claim is not rooted in any psychological fact."

"Yeah, also," You cut in. You scanned the area for escape routes if your attempt to change the subject went awry. "There's a wonderful documentary about how Facebook misinformation campaigns targeted rural counties in England leading up to the Brexit vote."

"Oh, we have a funny story about Brexit." Anna interrupted, taking the bait, hook line and sinker.

Before she could recount the same boring anecdote about being at some regional chain restaurant when the vote was cast, Theresa and her husband joined the table.

"Sorry we're late," Theresa sat down. "Damage control is a twenty-four hour job. What were we talking about?"

"Misinformation." Liam said.

"Perfect timing." You muttered.

"Finally, all three of my girls are together again." Grandma threw her head back and rejoiced. "When was the last time we all got together? Just us four girls, huh?"

"Remember the day before prom, we all went out go get manicures?" Anna reminisced. "And we took pictures of us all dressed up?"

"Oh I remember." You scanned the area for any alcohol to ingest.

"Oh, this is so funny." Grandma laughed hysterically. "Dr. Lecter, did you hear this story? [F/N] went to the prom with a boy who had all along been using her to get close to Theresa! They got together that night! Dated for two whole years after that."

"I've heard an iteration of it." He said, looking over his shoulder. He flagged down a waiter who was holding a bottle of champagne. "Leave the bottle, please."

"Don't drink too much, [F/N]." Anna scolded. "Save some alcohol for the rest of us."

You made sure to maintain eye contact with her as you filled your flute to capacity. "Grandma's paying, isn't she?"

"Anna, baby," Grandma said, rubbing her temples. "It's fine. Let [F/N] drink herself silly. It's a party, right?"

"Wow," Theresa sneered. You knew exactly what she was going to say next. "Like mother, like daughter."

Everyone at the table had enough decorum to recognize that Theresa went too far. You crushed the champagne flute in your grip, letting shards of glass dig into your skin. You glared at Theresa, blood oozing from your palm and dripping onto the white tablecloth.

Wordlessly, Hannibal removed the offending glass from your hand and swaddled the affected area in a napkin. He put pressure on the cut, letting the blood absorb into the cloth.

"Is this the famed '[L/N] woman telepathy'?" Liam whispered to Anna.

"No, [F/N] is just mad because her mother was a drunk who killed herself." Anna thought she was being inconspicuous.

"This has been fun." You stand up from the table. "Really. Great way to spend a Saturday."

"[F/N], sit down..." Grandma ordered, sounding exhausted. "You know Theresa didn't mean that."

"No." You said, each syllable out of her mouth pushing you a step closer to your breaking point. "Y'know what? No. I don't have to put up with this anymore. Anna, congratulations. I hope you and Liam have many long years together."

You turned around to exit as quietly as you could, Hannibal at your side. Your grandmother, who somehow hadn't hit her daily allotted dose of confrontation, wouldn't have it.

"Dr. Lecter, tell [F/N] she's being unreasonable." Grandma pleaded.

Hannibal raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise. In his long-spanning career, he'd never once met a person as tone-deaf as Beatrice [L/N]. He kept his quiet composure as he slowly approached the table.

"Beatrice," he said, beckoning her to lean in. He whispered something into her ear that left her stunned and quaking.

You could hear your grandmother's hysterical sobs growing softer as Hannibal hurried you out.

"Keep pressure on that cut, love." He instructed, talking over the increasingly loud shouts of agony from the head table. "You'll need a few stitches."

Once you were far enough from the venue, you had to ask. "What on earth did you say to her?"

"Nothing that you don't already know." He answered, facing forward.

#hannibal lecter #hannibal x reader #hannibal nbc #hannibal x you #tw blood #tw emotional manipulation #cult girl

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