#it takes a lot more energy to be disabled and it requires you to study but you can survive if you fight

[modernpygmalion]

Actually, this is slightly inaccurate. Unless you're not reporting wages and you're specifically on SSI, not SSDI, which is "social security disability insurance" aka early retirement. SSDI has different rules regarding income, working, insurance and everything.

On SSI, the program in question, that has an resource limitation, as long as you spend down whatever the amount is by the end of the month. You'll be fine. Disability (SSDI) has no income or asset limits because it's used after someone has worked 40 credits, and have been determined to no longer be able to work. It's an entirely different program and shouldn't be used interchangeably because confusion makes it more difficult for people to make informed decisions that benefit them.

The rates also change if you're married. A married couple can have 3000 dollars saved for instance. While this isn't a great rule when it comes for stability, I've personally received lumpsums throughout the year ranging from 4-6k (thru sources of income SSI cant count against me) and spent it down before the end of the month. I usually pay my bills.

For example last year I applied for SSI for my daughter. I've been on SSI since I was a kid. During the application, my local office had to do an audit because my rent is 1140, and my check was 933. They were going to CUT my check because I hadn't been evicted and thus was paying rent and utilities (which are several hundred more than the check)

The way I got out of this situation is by declaring child support, showing them my financial aid, my LIHEAP benefits awards, my bank accounts for like 4 months, my ABLE account, and the payment from the jobs I worked last year. When it was all said and done, I had an 850 overpayment, because I had worked in the summer, but I got to keep my check.

Last year I received 39k through various means, but all in disconnected chunks. Which makes life harder because when you DO have to spend down 4 thousand dollars and your bills are paid for the next few months, you arent able to create good savings habits.

I'm typing all of this up because knowledge is power, and while theres extreme limitations the more disabled people actually know about the programs theyre on, the easier it is for them to survive. These people are trained to take advantage of your ignorance, and hope that you tell on yourself so they can deny you.

Being disabled/chronically ill is expensive!

I don't know if people realize how freaking expensive it is to be disabled. I have a complex medical history, which includes two rare genetic illnesses, comorbidities associated with those two illnesses, and several mental health conditions. Just to give an idea of how expensive it is (USA-centric):

I'm forced into living in a specific city, since that's where the medical specialists for my illnesses are located in. On top of that, sometimes the specific specialists I need aren’t covered by my insurance, so I have to pay out-of-pocket. Each medical specialist (when covered by insurance) costs me $40/visit. I average 2-3 visits per month.

Wheelchairs and everything related to wheelchairs are ridiculously priced! If you’re a regular manual wheelchair user, for example, you likely need what’s referred to as a “custom ultra-lightweight wheelchair”. The main companies known for making these wheelchairs are TiLite, Quickie, RGK, Kuschall, and Ki Mobility. If you go on the websites for these manufacturers, you’ll see that just the frame will start you at $2,000+. Need titanium instead of aluminum to make the chair lighter? Extra $1,000. Need to add a seat cushion? More $$. Need to add a power assist device like a SmartDrive? Extra $6-7,000

Seriously, wheelchair parts are expensive. Manual wheelchair wheels will run you about $500 to $800 each (take a look at websites like Spinergy to see what I mean). Wheelchair tires will run at about $300 for the pair.

Mental healthcare! Competent psychiatric care is difficult to come by, at least where I live. Most psychiatrists are not contracted with any insurance companies. My own psychiatrist is $200 per visit, and that’s considered cheap in my area. Then, add on the cost of weekly therapy. My therapist is $150/session. Again, typical price for the area. Need residential treatment? As an example, my insurance quoted me $750 per day until the out-of-pocket max of $6,500 was met.

The monthly cost of medications! I take 7 medications. Even if each medication was “only” $10/month, that would total to $70/month.

The cost of specialized diets. Many chronic illnesses require special foods, supplements, and overall diets. A lot of these diets require extra time and expenses beyond what the average non-disabled person spends.

I wanted to spread some awareness on this issue because, even among my friend group, I regularly get surprised reactions on this topic. Disabled people are often low-income due to being unable to work consistently or at all, while also having some of the highest expenses—with many of those expenses having to be paid for completely out-of-pocket. While a lot of the examples I used above were specific to the US healthcare system, I’m aware that it’s still similarly expensive to be disabled in other countries as well.

A lot of this wasn’t even taking into consideration the cost of more expensive medical equipment, like power chairs, as well as irregular medical costs that occur more frequently among disabled people—like surgeries, hospitalizations, and the cost of diagnostic testing (MRIs, X-Rays, bloodwork, etc.).

Disabled people are taken advantage of when it comes to the price of medical equipment and medications because we don’t have a choice if we want to live and/or have any quality of life. We pay it, or we suffer.

[my-autism-adhd-blog]

Hello everyone,

I’m feeling better today and I found an article about Spoon Theory. I think it could help a lot of people. Here is an excerpt from the article:

Spoon theory is an analogy that describes what it's like to live with a fatiguing chronic illness. It can help you explain to others your limits and boundaries around what you do each day.

Everything you do requires energy, from brushing your teeth to having a deep conversation. Spoon theory uses spoons to demonstrate how much energy such tasks require.

Getting dressed, taking medication, or watching television may use one spoon. Running errands, working, or visiting a relative may take four or more.

According to spoon theory, people without a disability or chronic health condition wake with enough spoons to tackle the expectations of their day. They can tend to their body, home, job or studies, and social plans and not worry that they’ll run out of energy.

But a person with a chronic health condition or disability may wake with a limited number of spoons. Symptoms like brain fog, confusion, pain, and headaches can use up those spoons throughout their day.

If they try to use more spoons than they have, they may collapse, exhausted and unable to do anything more. Or they may pay for the overuse by having even worse symptoms and fewer spoons the next day.

I found this very interesting and helpful, so I hope all of you do as well. The full article will be down below for anyone who wants to read it.

Spoon Theory 🥄

[deramin2]

Charts For Assessing Pain And Fatigue

As a person with chronic pain and chronic fatigue, I often find it helpful to use scales to communicate how I'm doing, both for myself to contextualize it and so others have an idea how I'm doing. It's especially helpful for doctors who take you more seriously when you have data.

But I'm really bad at just assessing it in my head, especially consistently. Internalized ableism means I always feel like I'm just being a wimp and I really minimize my pain. So assessment scales that make me look at my behaviors really help break me out of that and be more honest. They also keep me more consistent so the days is more useable.

Both scales in a spreadsheet

Pain Scale

This scale was given to me in a hospital with no indication of where it came from in a really basic badly formatted table. This is my cleaned up version formatted to be saved on a phone or printed.

0 - No Pain - Pain free

2 - Minimal - Pain is barely noticeable; tightness

3 - Mild - Feel a low level of pain entering awareness only when my attention is devoted to it

4 - Uncomfortable - Pain is troubling but can be ignored most of the time; am able to continue activities

5 - Moderate - Moderate pain but no break in activity or concentration; guarded movement patterns

6 - Distracting - Pain is troubling and breaks through concentration but is tolerable; activity level changes.

7 - Distressing - Pain is intense and preoccupies my thinking; can complete tasks but it is difficult and must cease some demanding activities; considering pain medication or other pain reducing agent.

8 - Intense - Severe pain that makes concentration difficult; can do only non-demanding activities; taking pain medication, etc. Can't carry on a conversation well, pacing , etc.

9 - Severe - Cannot concentrate on anything else; sweating, unsteady breathing, can do almost nothing. Can barely talk.

10 - Immobilizing - Excruciating pain, constant; unable to move.

Fatigue Scale

This was floating around Tumblr in the colorful version. I can't print it, I can't read it with the colors when I'm tired, and I wanted the scales to normalized going the same direction so here's my formatting version:

0 - Not tired at all.

1 - Slightly tired, but still able to carry on as normal with little to no difficulty.

2 - Finding everything more effort than usual, but still able to carry on.

3 - Tiredness makes it hard to enjoy activities that are usually fun, but still able to work or study (with some difficulty).

4 - Possibly able to do some work or studying, depending on how much effort it takes. May choose to work or study from home. Avoiding activities that take a lot of energy.

5 - Mostly unable to work or study (except low effort tasks that can be done from home) can go out (for example to buy food) but only if essential.

6 - Too tired to go out, but still able to move around the house and do activities that require little energy and focus. Preparing a meal is difficult. Can't work or study.

7 - Doesn't need to lie down and can walk around the house, but can't stand for more than a few minutes without resting. Finding it hard to eat some foods. Can't focus on anything easily.

8 - Able to sit up for a while and walk around the house if absolutely necessary. Unable to eat most food. Holding a conversation is difficult.

9 - Able to sit up for a short time and can walk short distances (with difficulty), e.g. to get a drink or go to the toilet. Can't eat.

10 - Can barely sit up. Needs assistance getting out of bed.

Sources

I don't know where either of these came from originally or who to credit, but I'd like to. (Normally I wouldn't repost people's work but the public benefit here outweighs those concerns for me.) Please reblog if you do and I'll edit it in. I just want them available to more disabled people.

[sirfrancisvarney]

So after learning that the alleged UHC shooter had read the Unabomber’s manifesto and that he, like many other people online, thought Kaczynski had some good ideas, I figured I might as well sit down and read this supposedly brilliant work.

Having finished the whole thing, I have to say, giving it 4/5 stars was overly generous.

Usually when I see people praise Kaczynski's work, they'll say he had some good ideas, but rarely go into specifics about what those ideas are. This is probably because what he actually writes is that technology has made our lives too easy, and that rather than trying to find fulfillment through “fake” goals like pursuing art or studying marine biology (which is somehow bad), we’d be much happier if the bulk of our time and energy was spent on not fucking dying.

This is stupid.

He also states that modern society forces us to change to support the greater socio-political-economic-whatever system, and that because the system doesn't allow for a lot of autonomy in our jobs, we're all frustrated and miserable (unless we can latch onto surrogate activities, like studying science, which is, again, somehow bad). Logical enough, I guess, but I don't see how living as a hunter-gatherer or subsistence farmer (or whatever he had in mind by "primitive societies") really gives a person any more freedom or sense of control than being pushed into tech jobs. In both you’re going to subject to forces that are more powerful than you and are probably beyond your understanding. Does it really matter that the forces in one are “natural” and the forces in the other are man-made? And why would the former be better? If you try to rebel against the life chosen for you, you are way likely to end up dead in the hunter-gatherer world than the tech job one.

And exactly what kind of freedoms does he want, anyway? Take paragraph 24, for example:

Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice “safe sex”)[emphasis mine]. We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior.

Does he think he should be allowed to spread chlamydia to his sexual partners or something?

At the end of the day, I just cannot agree with him on a fundamental level. Yeah, to live in modern society, with all its technological development, does put limits on what you can do as an individual. You can’t just live for yourself. You live in a society or whatever.

So fucking what?

All societies require tradeoffs, and the limitations he whines about in his manifesto aren't worth sacrificing the lives of people with diabetes or disabilities (which he does call for in paragraph 28. He writes that advances in medicine allowing people with genetic diseases like diabetes will allow them to spread their genes, “resulting in massive genetic degradation of the population”. This will, according to him, lead to genetic engineering to fix the problem. He’d rather let people with diabetes or other medical problems die horrible and entirely preventable deaths, and so get weeded out via natural selection. This is somehow better.) They aren't worth the countless child deaths that his utopia would necessarily cause. None of the actual examples he gives are worth fighting for. What's so great about being able to make noise at all hours? If we get rid of cars and public transportation so we have the freedom to walk anywhere, going anywhere suddenly becomes a much bigger deal. I might be forced to use public roads in the modern day, but I can also travel to the other side of the world and back. And why is he so obsessed with spanking?

And I’m sorry to the redditors and tech bros and people worrying about becoming npcs or whoever, but I don’t see how undoing the effects of the industrial revolution is going to make you happier. If you struggle with today’s world, there’s a pretty good chance you’d struggle in a pre-industrial world. Except the pre-industrial world is a hell of a lot harder to live in, so you’d probably just be dead, whether it’s from disease, starvation, exposure, accident, or murder. It doesn't matter how resilient or self-sufficient or capable (or special) you think you are. None of that is going to save you from dying of a fever at the age of three. You exist today because technology made it possible for you to exist. It’s hubris to think otherwise.

Ted Kaczynski thinks the pursuit of subjects like science or art is fake and bad. I don’t believe that. He doesn’t think people should devote their lives to something bigger than themselves. I disagree. I don’t want to live at the level of an animal. I don’t want to watch my children and the people around me die of diseases that were once preventable. I don’t need to go live in the woods and fend off bear attacks to feel a sense of control over my life. I’m not going to pretend there aren’t huge problems with modern society and the direction it’s going, but he’s not the one with a solution.

[nothorses]

How can I advocate for disabled students to get a better education than I did, as someone who doesn't plan to going into education professionally or having kids? I've had experiences ranging from amazing to miserable in public school, special ed, and private parochial schools alike. One of the main problems in all of those schools was how little I was listened to as a kid when I knew what my needs were. I've looked back at my IEPs (which were rarely followed) and the majority of it was common sense bodily autonomy stuff that I take for granted as an adult. When I look up materials on special education and advocacy it's all directed at parents who don't necessarily have the time or energy or their children's best interest in mind. I'd love to read more on special education theory and best practices as well as learning what sort of regulatory bodies there even are for special education programs.

This is for sure not my area of expertise, but:

I would say that "special education" is going to often be a lot less fruitful than you want it to be. My experience with- and what I have heard from others about- SpEd is that professionals in the field tend to be abled/neurotypical people who have... a certain kind of mindset when it comes to disabled students that you are probably already familiar with.

The class I took on SpEd for undergrad was specifically oriented around the legal requirements for accommodation, and the class itself was set up to be more hostile to disabled students than any of my regular education classes were (one of the other students emailed the prof about it & got her to change her late work policy for that reason, too).

If you want to read into theory, I would really suggest you look into "disability studies" rather than special ed specifically. That tends to be oriented more towards disability justice, and centers disabled voices, a lot more than SpEd- which is often more about how abled teachers "deal with" disabled students. Disability Studies will also very often engage in education specifically, but even outside of that, the theory is pretty relevant.

And if you just want some stuff to read ASAP, I def invite you to search "disability" in my ed library folder, and just look at whatever pops out to you!

As far as more concrete action goes, I'll be honest in that I do not know a lot of ways to interact with education from outside the system. What does come to mind for me is:

Look into, and keep tabs on, legislation regarding disabled students and education more broadly. I don't know where you're at, but from a US perspective: city, county, state, and even federal- but you will likely have more of an impact on a smaller scale.

Figure out if meetings are happening, or if comments are being taken, and get people you know to do those with you if you can.

Call relevant representatives & let them know how you want them to vote. Pretend you're one of their voters already, even if you're not.

Look into local schools and districts; they may have ways to get involved listed on their websites, and they may also have events/meetings/conferences that you can attend and make yourself heard at. Bring people to those, too! (The school I student-taught at has had changes shot down bc people- not even parents of students there- showed up at meetings to vote against them).

Talk to people! Make connections, form relationships, etc.- bring these things into conversation with them. Even if they aren't people who have a direct impact on decisions being made, you can influence the culture of your community & potentially make a much broader, much longer-lasting change than a single vote would make.

I would love more ideas in the notes of this post, if anyone has any!

[indigostudies]

18, 36 and 46 for the university asks

18: What’s your least favourite thing about academia?

honestly i would say the way professors act towards disabled students or students who need an accommodation for whatever reason in general. at the community college i recently graduated from, a lot of professors would have "absolutely no late work" policies, with a couple even saying that if you had an emergency, you needed to figure out how to schedule your coursework around it, and if you tried to contact them to get clarification about confusing wording on an assignment, they would tell you to go back and read their announcement/rubric/etc rather than answer. for multiple classes i took, i wound up with a lower score than i really should have due to the above :/

36: How did your attitude towards studying and school change between high school and university?

i would say that i really began to appreciate studying once i started college. in the public schooling i did, the expectations were very low, so i rarely had to take notes to remember things, and only did so for the topics that specifically interested me. however, since starting college, i've come to not only see more reason to take notes and study, but genuinely come to enjoy and value the time i spend studying—probably tied into the fact that i've developed a special interest in studying and learning things (especially languages/linguistic and mathematics, which are going to be my majors as soon as i fulfill the requirements and can declare them).

46: How do you study?

typically when i study, i put on my youtube playlist and open up my textbook(s) for whichever subject i'm studying for, and go through and find the parts that are particularly important in that chapter or section, and write them down in my own words in the notebook i have set aside for that subject. i tend to then add examples below the summary, so that i can go back later on and review things quickly, and if it's an actual class rather than self-study, i'll go back and rewatch the lecture and note down things the professor says that i feel like i'll forget if i don't write it down, often with small illustrations—which is especially useful for quizzes and exams! this is a method i came up with when i was taking calculus i, and i find it works really well for me. typically i study for about an hour at a time, and keep a water bottle on hand so i don't get dehydrated. for chinese, i also have a couple apps on my phone (dot languages, ankiapp, TOFU, duolingo) which make it possible for me to study while i'm out and about or don't have motivation or energy for a full study session.

[panleukopenia]

SHOUT OUT 2 BEING A SYSTEM YAAYYYYY I HAVEN'T BEEN HERE IN AGES N I CAN DRAW MY OCS WAAAAAAAAAAAY BETTERRR!!!!!!!!!!!! Shout out to my mlp pony oc Autumn Bounty she means everything to me. i really like the song slow jam 1 by king gizzard because it reminds me of her.

i like autumn because shes a huge asshole and she fucks over her family and gets away with it but it just sits in here stomach her whole life. shes the daughter of applejack and rainbow dash but they divorced because of edddgggyyy reasons and stuff. (IDK YET!!!!!!) in my universe, all ponies have magic that allows them to change their hooves in more flexible 'paw-like' things as well doing other stuff like lightening their bodies enough to fly (is their a pegesus) but Autumn Bounty has a disablity where her bodys 'base magic' is super duper low/nonexistant so she can't make her hooves into paws or use her wings, but her bones are very light/near hollow since she's still a pegesus. she has a hard time doing things everyone else can do (imagine trying to open anything when your hands are just stubs.) she lives in a world where everything is built for paws. everyone just assumes you have paws even though ponies complain about getting hoof-stuck (a sickness or defect that effects yourr base magic can cause this, where a pony cannot change their paw or hoof to one form.) but no one understands autumn...you don't realize right away that she's disabled because she can run and talk like everyone else: but then you ask her, "Hey, can you pick that up for her?" and she tells you she can't, she doesn't have paws, but you can see she has hooves? so she does have paws. but she doesn't. so no, she can't really play with dolls or video games or open the door or paint in the same way everyone else can. she also can't fly, since she needs additonal magic to levitate her body in order for her undersized wings to actually lift her body (all pegesi need base magic).

basically, she's disabled, cus she can't easily do anything that requires hands and she also can't fly, even though ponies assume she can. everyone tells her they love her and will accommodate her, but it follows her throughout her entire life. applejack lets her work on the farm, where a lot of pre-paw equipment is still being made (pony scientists are always studying what type of magic Base Magic can substain). Autumn takes to farming greatly; its one of the only times where she feels "normal". where she not only is able to Keep Up with her peers, but actually do better than them. she has to work extra hard and careful with her hollow bones.

its just that, autumn will never have paws. theres not a cure. and for her friends, theyjust don't always "Have the energy" or "THe time" or whatever to "accommodate" her. when she went to school, the only ponies would go and draw with crayons and shit, and their teacher didn't have the time to get the hoof-painting kits out and clean the mess, so autumn sat out. her friends got together to write valentines cards together, but they didn't have time to figure out a way for autumn to join, so they didn't invite her. she watched her friends and her family make their excuses. she frequently stayed home to watch the cattle or buck extra apples. her sisters and cousins got to learn how to bake and draw and cook while autumn bucked apples, pulled the farm equipment, and herded the sheep. apple jack said she asked autumn because she was so good at it. but autumn doesn't get her cutie mark while she stagnates doing the same endless tasks over and over. she grows quiet, bitter, lonesome. shes either working or on her own. she feels like shes loved but not cared for. they didn't make her start farm work early because she was good at it - no, it was because they didn't want her to see what she was always missing. all the things she wasn't invited to.

she works with her cousin, gala apple, who is big mac and like cherry somethings daughter. shes an earth pony and far bigger than autumn. she and autumn are bound to take over the farm when AJ and big mac retire. Gala is beautiful, friendly, and sociable -everyone assumes that her cutie mark, a shining apple, is because of her strength kicking down apples, but its actually for her charismatic selling abilities. she knows apple varieties down to a tee, and can identify any apple you show her by taste or smell alone. if she knows your favorite food, she can recommend your nexxt favorite apple.

but who will inherit the farm?

perhaps foolishly, AJ suggests a friendly competition between the two...she was probably drinking that night (in my edgy verison, aj and big mac are pretty heavy drinkers) but regardless, gala and autumn were teammates but also competitors.

Gala was a skilled sales pony, great with a schedule and organization, paying attention to the little things. she was friendly and everyone got along with her. but, she was a bit of a wandering spirit: she wasn't very responsible to sticking to those schedules or actually following through her plans. her interest in different apple varieties sometimes led to her adventuring off to find a new apple type or spending A LOT of money on a rare apple. shes made some dumbass choices. and...well, no one wants to say it...but shes transgender, and although big mac and AJ swear that they're okay with it and celestia loves everyone, they worry that not everyone will be progressive enough to support a locally owned business if a trans mare runs it....(transmisogny exists in my pony world. big mac is a closested trans mare who knows she would be happier as a mare, but never gets the courage to transistion. the apple family is accepting...but not exactly welcoming.)

on the other hoof, autumn was a great worker. it was basically all she did. she was punctional, efficent, and responsibel and i dind't spell even One of those words Correctly. she was like a machine, she could get any job done, no matter what....even if it took a long time. but...no one wanted to say it...but shes disabled. there were some things she just couldnt do, or would be far more difficult or time-consuming for her.

of course, they could share the farm. but someone needed to be the head of apple family eventually.

and by fucking god.

its gonna be autumn.

autumn and gala are best friends. they work together every day. autumn drops out of school at 15 to work at the farm full time. but as gala views it as a joke their parents made one drunken night, autumn takes it as a promise. gala doesn't always realize, thinking herself forgetful, stupid, lazy...but autumn does what she can to sabatodge gala's work whenever possible, espesically if she can make herself the hero or be the one to call out the mistake. gala has a big heart...it doesn't even cross her mind that her cousin Autumn would ever be vindictive of her. gala watches with concern as autumn grows more isolated, but, struggling with her own problems, gala can't do much other than watch as autumn works more and stops smiling.

well, there's one thing that makes autumn smile...her good friend, Pumpkin Pie, mr. and mrs. cakes daughter. they met when they just fillies, and pumpkin pie, a few years older than autumn, was asked to watch her while autumn sat out of a school activity. pumpkin intitally complained, not wanting to be stuck with some kid, but she found that they got along super well. autumn was sarcastic and grumpy, even as a filly, but pumpkin actually thought autumn's independence and fierce reaction to being demeaned was awesome.

pumpkin can remember the first thing autumn said to her. the teacher had just trotted off and left them with their shitty wooden blocks (autumn couldnt even pick them up) and random assortment of 'accessible' toys (it was a rubber ball). autumn was a head shorter than her, hair spiky and wild as though it had never been brushed (She stopped letting her parents brush her hair and fur when she was 6), glaring up at pumpkin like she'd already pissed her off. "we are not becoming friends so i'm not going to say anything to you."

they were best friends ever since. they would meet at recess and pumpkin would always make sure that autumn stayed out of the sidelines. they played every hoof-only game pumpkin could think of and create herself, she would snap at her friends who complained about autumn's extra-help stuff. she would walk alongside autumn while she tirelessly toiled in the fields. when she quit school, pumpkin showed up in the field, calling for her and carrying her schoolwork for the new year. "but i'll miss you!" she complained when autumn told her she wasn't doing school anymore. autumn knew that pumpkin was the only one who truly cared for about her...more than anyone else.

autumn gets a super big crush on pumpkin as they grow up. but pumpkin likes someone else. i literally listened to heather by conan gray so much at this point and so pumpkins best friend/crush is named Heather Feather. she's a mail pony and she's a rare result of a draft horse and a pegesus. she's beautiful, with a long silky mane, a wingspan three times the size of anyone else, with dazzling blue and pink feathers that look like the sky at dawn. shes a gentle giant. i imagine that tons of ponies have a crush on her, but she's just a quiet girl from the mountains, who grew up alongside gryphons. she's a mail pony who works for the pony express of the sky, and shes always flying up mountains and where its cold and dangerous. basically she's so hot and beautiful and covered in scars and shes like mysterious and unreachable, so basically the perfect pony for an emo teenage pumpkin pie to latch onto the first time heather feather landed at her door and delievered her parents bakery a package. pumpkin enlisted autumn to help her find out who this beautiful horse was, and together they were able to get her to deliver a new package just to talk to pumpkin, scott pilgram style. they end up hitting off and heather feather comes and visits pumpkin whenever shes in town.

this makes autumn so mad, basically. she wants to be supportive. she likes how cute pumpkin is when she's blushy and talking about heather feather. autumn likes heather: they hang out together all the time, the three of them, but pumpkin says its always gonna be autumn and pumpkin. "you can't have autumn without pumpkins." she'd tell bounty. "no matter what, the seasons will change. but it'll always come back to me and you." no, this isn't romantic. pumpkin loved autumn with her whole heart, but she wanted heather. and she could have both! autumn was just being autumn, she complains about everything...she supposes its what she loves about her, she shouldn't be surpirsed.

autumn hears this. no autumn without pumpkins. idk how to word this part but like she knows pumpkin wants to mean it but she knows she Doesnt......all the times she's heard heather say "i'm sorry, autumn, it might be best for you to stay home this time." as she and pumpkin did their paw-bearing activities. the amount of times pumpkin, ever briefly, just wanted to skip the brainstorming phase. "why can't you just watch this time?" more and more, pumpkin chose heather, and autumn chose going to work.

theres like a lot of shit going on where autumns life just keeps getting more and more her being in life bc shes got a big family and everyones oding their own thing and shit. her story isnt even "That" big in the whole scheme of things shes like a backgrounder who is just always working and on her own unless shes with her special buddy. idk what happens in what order but the next things that happen is that an ABLEISM occurs.

idk what its goinna be but basically the time frameis knida like, right before trains were invented. theres another storyline ALLLLL about trains because trains are JUST getting invented and it doesn't make sense if you think about it but i don't need it to make sense. theres starting to be progression into automating some tasks, and this new plow comes in with steel blades thats way more efficent than the normal regula plow (might be wrong idfk okay idc about plows its just a who cares moment) BUT.

Its far larger and heavier. autumn wouldn't even be able to push it, despite her years of farm work: she can't change that her bones will never not be hollow. maybe she could pull it...but the blades make it dangerous for her to work it that way. this would put a huge disadvantage on autumn for "deserving" the farm since all the sudden, she's cut off from an entire half of their business and can only meaningfully interact with the harvest apples aspect. she argues agaisnt it, but her family thinks its unreasonable to keep it harder for THEM just so one pony can participate...why can't she just sit this one out?

autumn wants to scream. because i sit EVERYTHING out! and now you want to take away the only thing i CAN do?! so much of her time was just sowing and tilling and plowing the fields with the few modified farming equiptment they had and the old-fashioned tools. and now they were replacing them. replacing her.

gala is put in charge on managing their repair room and shit, maintaing and caring for their new equiptment. autumn is stuck with the only thing she really can do: buck apples. but she has to watch as gala gets more and more work to do, taking on more and more of the business, and autumn CAN'T EVEN OPEN THE DOOR!! her anger kindles and festers as more and more, shes just put away. she knows SO MUCH about farming practices, shes logical and level-headed, she can look at any problem and know how to fix it -but she doesn't have paws. so what does she know? she leaves in the early morning to care for their crops and feed the animals. when she comes back, she eats dinner alone, after she asks someone to help her get a plate from the cabinet and take it out of the fridge...her eldest sister, cookie thimble, tells her about their day at home and updates about the farm buisness and whatever, and it pisses autumn off. because....they spend all day struggling to fix a problem that autumn knew how to fix right away. but whenever she gets close to the farm, she gets shooed away to do the work she "was good at".....

eventually it grows too much. one night, autumn goes on a nightly walk where she notices a lamp on in the farm. gala is working late making repairs to their fancy new plow. she and autumn have a conversation that leads to an argument. autumn accuses gala of having it easy, of having everything laid out for her. gala is defensive and points out that autumn knows literally nothing about her life, about how other ponies treat her. but autumn does know.

she knows enough to take advantage of it.

so that night when a fire sparks in the farm house, its no doubt that it was at galas mistake, forgetting to blow out the gaslamp after working on the repairs.

autumn is no where close to the scene, the night of the fire. she admits that she saw gala in the farm last, where the fire broke out. she has an aliabi: she spent the night with pumpkin. she told pumpkin that night, that the smoky smell must have been another one of Pound Cake's burnt creations.

its a pretty shitty night for her. high on emotions, she confesses her feelings to pumpkin, who tearfully admits that she and heather feather are going to go away together...that autumn could come if she wanted. "why do you care about the farm?" she asked, "you're never going to get the farm, bounty, the competition wasn't fair. you can work as hard as you want. why, why make yourself so miserable, when you can come live with us? with me? there'll always be a space for you. even if you can't, like, make some stupid cider or whatever, i'll always open the door for you."

of course autumn wanted that.

but she was going to get that farm. the competition wasn't fair, but now...it was unfair in her favor. just...more than she hoped.

that fire killed apple jack. autumn never admitted to it. big mac was broken without his sister. gala apple took the blame. she spent hours recounting that night, thinking about whether or not she remembers blowing out the tiny little fire on her lamp. news spread, of course, Tidbit could never keep anything to his damn self (that's Sweetie Bell's adoptive son, a reporter. this was before he mysteriously went missing) and ponies were whispering...." i always thought gala apple had something off about her...."

so, autumn bounty got the farm, and gala apple moved away to live with her mother Cherry Jubilee. before she left, gala told autumn that she was sorry for killing her mother. autumn told her she should be.

pumpkin pie stays a while to support autumn but autumn doesn't accept her help as she begins to run the farm herself. big mac retires. i can't remember how many siblings she has. she takes on employees. she works every day. she doesn't talk about pumpkin or gala or apple jack. she has the farm. she got what she wanted.

later on, she develops a passion for baking pizza, which she eventually gets her cutie mark in her thirties (ponies live around 50-70 years on average). she never apologies for what she did, and no one ever apologizes to her, either. she dies pretty young, her lack of base magic making her more likely to get diseases/infections that a regular ponies base magic would easily prevent.

her life is very shitty and she spends most of it on the sidelines. she dies pretty uneventfully without any kids or anything: some ponies called her inspiration for working so hard despite her disablity, but in the end, its what kills her after she gets sick from overwork and never recovers.

i like making really depressing stories that i think are true to life and she has a physical disablity that just makes everything Harder for her. like yeah She's Just Like Everyone Else! but ....shes not. ages ago i saw someone talk about how Having a Carer puts a lot of power onto your care giver because even if it isn't intentional, if they don't feel like feeding their charge...their charge might not be able to feed themselves. autumn can't open the fridge or the cabinet herself: she can try to use her mouth or balance on her hind legs enough to mess around with her clunky hooves, but it could take her like twenty minutes just to OPEN THE CABINET. Fridges apparently don't exist yet lol. her everyday life is just draining and difficult: either she struggles to do everything alone, or she has to relay on someone to help her. after being repeatedly left behind growing up, she finds it better to struggle alone than Wait for someone else to finally pity her enough to fucking help. she gets tired of having to thank her family for the priveldge of Fucking Existing. like no onethinks about the little things that she can't DO, like wipe her eyes or brush her own mane. she has a hard time complaining since she can't pin down a single bad moment where her whole family was BAD and NEGLECTFUL and whatever....but just many small moments that collected inside her like burrs and made her grow more prickily.

the nice ending to this story is like, she sells her farm to gala apple and runs away to live with pumpkin and heather, shes doesn't have to work herself to death just to prove that she's worthy of being disabled and alive at the same time.

but she doesn't. just like in real life, where this scenario plays out with people with invisible disabilities or chronic problems or whatever who spend their whole lives pushing themselves past their limits and than die young. it happens in real life!! and it sucks!! and it happens in PONY WORLD! and it sucks there too. but sometimes life just sucks, and when you die, you wish that it was different, but it isn't. there's just problems that don't get better and no one ever says it. its always One Day. One Day, it'll get Better. but sometimes it doesn't.

autumn bounty lived her whole life unable to wipe away the gunk from her eyes. when she was little, rarity would take her head very gently and rub a hot clothe across her eyes, which were crusty from allergies. when autumn was 15, rarity said "oh darling, you can't do this yourself yet?"

no bitch. i don't have fucking hands

she also canonically has four eyes btw. like she has two more functional eyes than the average pony. (two eyes on both sides of her head)

[hardynwa]

INSIGHT BEYOND SIGHT: THE INSPIRING JOURNEY OF A VISUALLY IMPAIRED DOCTORAL STUDENT OF UNN

Ugochinyere Angelic Okereke is a visually impaired Doctoral student of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and also the coordinator of Post-graduate Students with Disabilities at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN). It is pertinent to state that the scholar's visual impairment did not start from birth. With sight, she had her primary and secondary education, and with the aid of reading glasses obtained the Nigeria Certificate in Education (NCE) in English Language and Christian Religious Studies at the College of Education, Ebonyi State where she hails from. Without sight, she continued her first Degree in the Department of Arts Education, UNN. She is an academic enthusiast with lots of research publications to her credit. Deborah Uzoma engages her on her educational challenges and advocacy in this interview. Please, tell us about yourself? My name is Ugochinyere Angelic Okereke. I am currently running a Ph.D. program in the Department of Arts Education, at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. My Area of specialization is English Education and my research interest is Inclusive Language Teaching and Learning. I am also the Coordinator of Post-graduate Students with Disabilities at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. Thank you. What barriers do you face as a visually impaired scholar? As a visually impaired student, I face lots of barriers. First, the nature of visual impairment demands that we read with either our sense of hearing or our sense of touch. With the help of technology, various software applications and hardware devices, persons like me who are visually impaired are able study. However, when these technologies are not easily accessed, it becomes disheartening. For instance, to carry out my research, I need to use my laptop, and make use of the screen reading software. When the Laptop battery is low and there is no electricity supply, it becomes a problem. The reading stops until the power supply is restored. With the way the power supply fluctuates in this part of the world, it becomes frustrating. Furthermore, I find it challenging accessing reading materials, this is because some lecturers do not fully understand what inclusive education means, especially as regards including persons with visual impairment. Some lecturers do not make provision for soft copies for visually impaired students. They give illustrations on the board without minding the need to describe the illustrations. Again, most of them do not know that persons with visual impairments require extra time to perform class activities- submission of assignments and writing examinations. As someone with visual impairment, a lot of diligence is required to stand out in one’s field of study; I barely sleep up to four hours in a day, as I study almost all through the night just to meet up. All of these are to ensure I meet with the academic demands and any available scholarship. Another big challenge is the financial demand that comes with the education of persons with visual impairment. Training a visually impaired student is capital intensive. Our gadgets are expensive, and you must have all of them to enable you meet up with the academic demands. Undoubtedly, you must have a laptop with a screen reading software, meaning that the Laptop's specifications must be relatively high. You can imagine how much that would cost. You also need scanners to convert hard copies to soft copies. It takes time, energy, and money. Personally, I don't have the resources to get all the gadgets needed. To scan a hard copy, I sometimes take my work to an NGO that scans works free for persons with disabilities and this may take a whole lot of time. I also face environmental barriers: Most times, there are lots of noise coming from students and noisy generator sets from nearby business centers, offices and houses. That is why I chose to read more at night than in the day to overcome the distractions. As the coordinator of Post-graduate Students with disabilities, what other scholarly activities and advocacy do you carry out for your group? I devote my time to ensure that the educational needs of persons with disabilities are met, such as the smooth processing of their admissions and accommodation on campus.At the University level, the Dean of Students’ Affairs in UNN has accepted our proposal to include students with disabilities in Odili Post Graduate Hall Government. Also, we were assured that every 25th November will be marked as Disability Day in UNN. We hope that all these will be implemented. What would you like to tell the general public concerning education, job procurement, scholarships, political participation, and grants to persons with Disabilities? First, there is a need for training and sensitization of the general public on the rights of persons with disability. Respects to these rights ensures equal access to education, employment, job procurement, scholarships, political participation amongst other things. Scholarships, and Research/business grants, job offers, leadership positions should be made available by both Government and Non-Government bodies in such a way that it is easily accessible for persons with disabilities. School environment, teaching methods and materials should be modified to suit learning needs of persons with disabilities without compromising qualities. Read the full article

[adobe-outdesign]

Pokemon Worldbuilding Headcanons, Part 2

Part 2 of this. Some are based on the game, some on the anime, and some directly contradict both because the Pokemon lore is made up and your feelings don’t matter.

Intelligence

Pokemon are generally sentient and sapient, and most have strong cognitive abilities.

They don’t know the names of their moves innately, but will quickly learn what words correlate to what moves once they’ve started training.

They’re also quite good at picking up tone of voice and will learn their trainer’s body language as they work together, making it relatively easy for trainers to understand their Pokemon and vice versa.

Some Pokemon can learn to speak English if they have vocal cords capable of mimicking human speech, but this isn’t common. More commonly, many psychic types can communicate with telepathy, and many Pokemon can learn sign language.

There are many Pokemon-specific types of sign language that have been modified to accommodate for different numbers of fingers.

Pokemon therapists (therapists that help Pokemon, not Pokemon that are therapists) exist. In addition to helping with human-Pokemon relations (like helping trainers better understand their Pokemon), they also help Pokemon recover from mental trauma and help diagnose various mental illnesses. They usually work with translators.

Occasionally, a psychic human will be able to understand Pokemon via a specific type of telepathy. They commonly work as professional translators, and will commonly pick up jobs as nurses, therapists, rehabilitators, and more.

Highly intelligent Pokemon will occasionally become Pokemon trainers themselves--there’s no laws against it, though many object to it on principle.

A famous example was an Alakazam that eventually got fed up with its abusive trainer and, realizing no trainer could ever be smarter than them, became a trainer themselves. They eventually made it to gym leader status.

Some intelligent Pokemon form their own mini-societies out in the wilderness. These are designated as no-catch zones, though the Pokemon that live there can always choose to leave if they want to find a trainer to partner with.

Pokemon Centers

Pokemon nurses work at Pokemon Centers. They deal with day-to-day healings, checkups, and other small medical issues. More serious issues are handled by Pokemon doctors at hospitals.

Pokemon nurses treat all species of Pokemon, as they know some degree of standard medical care that’s near-universal.

Pokemon doctors, meanwhile, are trained in specific types and phylogenies, making them experts but only for a small amount of Pokemon.

Pokemon can instantly be teleported to various hospitals for treatment if the issue is too severe or specific for the Center to treat. Pokemon that know teleport are used to move medicine and Pokemon that won’t go in Pokeballs. 

Pokemon can be instantly healed by adding small amounts of energy to them while they’re in their Pokeballs, which helps them recover from minor injuries such as cuts, bruises, small burns, ect.

This process does not help heal severe injuries (illness, broken bones, internal issues, ect.). Instead, these injuries are treated over time using more traditional methods.

Sleep powder is used on Pokemon when they first are released inside of the center/hospital, so nurses/doctors don’t have to worry about getting attacked while looking them over. (Pokemon that are immune to sleep powder are usually paralyzed with stun spore or have disable used on them instead, depending on what needs to be done.)

Pokeballs can be life-saving, as the Pokemon’s energy form means that while it can still become weak and faint, it won’t take severe bodily damage from injuries. This gives trainers more time to get their Pokemon to a medical center and the doctors more time to prepare treatments.

Pokerus is a mutualistic virus; the virus lives in the body and produces energy as a waste product, which is then absorbed by Pokemon. This has a lot of positive health benefits for them, such as faster evolution rates. The only effects are mild fever and cough, which go away as the virus becomes dormant after about 4 days.

However, the reason people don’t actively try to spread it around constantly is that Pokerus can spread to humans, and the effects are much more dangerous than in Pokemon (with no additional benefits to boot). Ergo, most Pokemon that catch it are quarantined, and many trainers get Pokerus vaccinations to be safe. 

Tech

Cars exist, but aren’t used often as many Pokemon view them as threats and will attack them on sight. They’re not really commercially viable anyway when you can just saddle up a large Pokemon you caught instead.

Pokeballs have trackers built into them, so they can be easily relocated if lost. Most Pokemon Centers will have at least one Pokemon that knows teleport that can retrieve the ball as well.

Pokemon Storage Systems are relatively new. They work by teleporting a Pokeball into a large designated storage space, usually a warehouse or an underground area. When a person’s license is scanned, a machine finds and teleports back the Pokeball based on an automated grid system.

The warehouses are heavily guarded at all times, and because the contents of the Pokeballs aren’t labeled poachers are usually deterred from trying to steal from them directly.

The trays that the balls are stored in are known as “boxes”, hence why its referred to as “boxing your Pokemon”.

The energy of a Pokemon is slowed when in storage, effectively putting them to sleep. This allows them to remain in their Pokeballs for longer periods of time. Legally, Pokemon cannot be stored for more than a month for their well-being.

TMs are CDs that are inserted into a cube-like device that the Pokeball is then placed into. These change the simulation inside a Pokeball, creating scenarios that help the Pokemon to learn the new move. They work most of the time, but there’s no guarantee that your Pokemon will figure it out.

Teleportation technology is still being developed. Small objects can be teleported effortlessly; teleportation of living creatures and larger objects is a more recent, hence why warp tiles aren’t used everywhere.

Teleportation was figured out by studying psychic-types who know the move. Catching or renting a psychic-type is still one of the fastest ways to get around.

Food

People used to hunt Pokemon a few thousand years ago out of necessity, though they stuck to common, lower-intelligence Pokemon like Margikarp and Farfetch'd (which is how they became rare). However, this has fallen out of practice over time as humans and Pokemon have gotten closer.

There are many ways to ethically source meat and dairy products. Miltank produce milk, Chansey produce infertile eggs, and Slowpoke and Crabrawler naturally drop and regenerate body parts that can be farmed without harming them (tails and claws, respectively). Other than that, humans rely on plant-based food/synthetic meat in order to get by.

Carnivore Pokemon will hunt and kill other Pokemon in the wild; in captivity, they eat the aforementioned ethically sourced meat.

Pokemon don’t really have “hunting instincts”, in the sense that they won’t blindly maim other prey Pokemon. Indeed, Pokemon in captivity understand that their trainers will feed them, and thus won’t risk harming other Pokemon less they get attacked themselves.

With that said, it’s generally recommended to not put your Corsola and Mareanie on the same team, solely because there’ll likely always be tension between two rival Pokemon and they’re unlikely to get along (though predator/prey friendships aren’t unheard of).

Some intelligent Pokemon have been known to farm both plants and other Pokemon out in the wild, in order to have a continuous food source.

Intelligent Pokemon also understand how to cook and mix ingredients. There are quite a few commonplace recipes in the Pokemon world that originated from Pokemon themselves.

Laws and Regulations

It is illegal to catch immature baby Pokemon, as they’re still too young to leave their parents at that stage (so you couldn’t catch a one-tailed baby Vulpix, for example).

Vintage Pokeballs have to be retrofitted with modern tech. This is because modern tech has things like the aforementioned tracking devices that make them safer to use.

Rare species of Pokemon, legendaries, and shinies are frequently moved onto preserves for protection against poachers. While people are welcome to visit these spaces, they are no-catch zones and rangers enforce this law strictly.

There are several different types of Pokemon licenses, with varying difficulties in obtaining them.

The default licenses can be obtained by anyone 8 years or older, and allows for Pokemon to live in a domestic setting. This requires passing a variety of tests covering basic Pokemon laws and welfare, and is easy to obtain.

Trainer licenses (10+ years) allow for Pokemon to be battled with, entered in contests, ect. This requires having a default license, passing a test regarding safe battling methods, and passing a test battle with a rental Pokemon (doesn’t matter if you win; it’s more about technique, caring for the Pokemon, ect.)

It is only legal to batte without a trainer license if it’s an act of self-defense.

There are also separate licenses for medical and commercial use of Pokemon. These are only obtainable by adults and regulated by the government.

Technically speaking, there’s a permit needed in order to ride Pokemon to make sure that traffic laws are obeyed. Few people with rideable Pokemon actually bother getting one however.

Licenses can be revoked for a number of reasons. Whether or not a licenses is revoked is determined by the local authorities or a judge, if necessary.

Guns and weaponry technically exist, but are almost never used. The reason for this is that a bullet is highly unlikely to kill any given Pokemon, and that Pokemon can and will outright kill someone if they harm their trainer. Ergo, it’s easier to just battle and knock out a person’s Pokemon legally in a battle.

Pokemon that commit crimes are usually judged based on whether or not they were acting of their own accord or being psychology manipulated or abused into performing the act. Most Pokemon are put into rehabilitation programs and may be rehomed or released if the rehab is successful.

If it’s not sucessful, the Pokemon has a tracker placed on them and they’re released into private, sanctioned-off wild areas where they can’t hurt other Pokemon or people.

Wild areas have official ratings regarding how dangerous they are to be in, which is based on factors like the kind of wild Pokemon living there. This helps trainers pick out areas that are relatively safe for catching (or not, if they’ve got a strong team already and want something more powerful).

Funerals

A Pokemon’s body deteriorates into energy after 1-2 weeks or so, depending on size.

There are a variety of funeral options for a deceased Pokemon. Funeral services are almost always a given, which can be small ceremonies for friends or larger events for more well-known Pokemon (such as those belonging to gym leaders). Burials, cremations, and more are all options.

One option that’s been rising in popularity is to return the Pokemon’s body to their Pokeball, then breaking the capture mechanism to prevent stealing of higher-end balls. The Pokeball is then placed on a pillow in a “cubby” with a glass door, which can be filled with belongings, favored items, or photographs.

The Pokeballs can be kept as-is, polished and shined to look like new, or even decorated in things like gold leaf, depending on the trainer’s preferences.

A Pokemon can only stay in its ball for 1-3 years straight without eventually dying from energy atrophy (thankfully, this is painless). Because Pokemon can leave their balls whenever they want, deaths like this are virtually unheard of.

Ghost-type Pokemon can sometimes be spirits of the deceased (both humans and Pokemon), but they can also be just random collections of energy. There are also regular ghosts, which are different from ghost-types and cannot be caught.

Catching ghost-types is illegal around most burial grounds, as many of them are just visiting their former trainers as they come by to mourn.

Pokemon that are ghosts retain their memories of their past lives, and can still use attacks that they knew previously.

Ghost-types don’t usually remember their previous lives, but it isn’t unheard of for them to remember one or two former attacks despite this. This means that ghost-types can potentially know any type of attack outside of the ones they know naturally or learn from TMs.

[ipaaciir]

How do I get good grades?

[ID: A banner that reads "Study tips" in all caps in pale green color, with pale yellow background and a geometric pattern in pale green in the corners. End ID].

If there's something I've learned from getting straight A's at school and university is that it's less about what you know and more about what your habits and skills are.

Look, I have this classmate who is always reading advanced books, listening to podcasts, and watching conferences. She knows A LOT. But this adorable person doesn't do homework, when she does, it's late or poorly done. Her comments in class are lacking coherence and her essays are badly referenced. All of this just lower her grades.

So what can she do? How do I get good grades?

[Disclaimer: these tips are based on my own experiences and observations as I study a social science and some of the things that worked for my in high school, I've also helped my classmate but these tips might not apply to you].

1. Strengthen your language four basic skills.

If you study languages you know we have to practice four skills: reading, writing, listening and speaking. Well, it's not very different for your native language. After all, is with language that we're able to communicate, share ideas and knowledge. You know... like, everything we learn at school (and more).

a. Reading: If you don't know a word, underline it, search the meaning and write it at the margin of the text, on a post it, or in your notebook. Underline main ideas and take notes or write a summary. This will help you not only for better understanding or studying, but also to participate during class. If you need to, read out loud and/or try to explain each paragraph. This is helpful for very complex text. Doing a diagram works too!

b. Writing: Learning how to express our ideas in the written form is... weird. I seriously don't understand why on earth we can't write just like we speak. Why do we must write differently? Is it such a crime? (I mean, I know why, I just find it so interesting and funny). Anyway, must teachers' corrections are like "uSe sYnOnYmS", "bReAk YoUr PaRaGrApHs", "cOnNeCt YoUr IdEaS", "aRgUmEnT mOrE", "UsE aPa CiTaTiOn". So, yeah, follow those comments... I'll try to make a post on how to improve your writing.

c. Listening: Pay. Attention. To. Your. Teacher. I know it's hard, I know some people have a lot of difficulties because of ADHD or other learning disabilities. I can't speak for that, but what works for me is to doodle or embroider, sometimes being on Pinterest works too. Just doing something that requires low cognitive effort while I listen to the teacher keeps me on the class without getting lost in my mind. Even if you didn't do the reading, if you listen to your teacher (and classmates) you'll be able to participate.

d. Speaking. I think many people can imagine how frustrating it is to watch a presentation by your classmates and that they just... don't know how to present?? (it's even more frustrating when you know this people want to become teachers). Practice in the mirror, practice with your pet, practice in the shower, practice everyday. Remember the "explain each paragraph from the reading"? Yeah. When you can explain something it means you understand it. So try to explain everything you learn, everything you understand. Even just chatting with your friends, family, about it. This will also help you to participate in class. The other day a friend of mine just randomly shared her screen and started explaining the bacteria that causes tuberculosis to me... I don't know anything about medicine but I still learned a lot because she knows how to lower her knowledge. Practice. Practice 40hrs a day.

2. Organization.

a. Have a schedule. Set alarms for everything if you must. Look, I forget to eat, literally. I focus so much on what I'm doing that I tell my stomach to stop being annoying and he just... listens to me?? He's like "oh, okay, finish what you're doing and when you're done just tell me and we can go to grab some food". So, I set an alarm to eat, to shower, to have dinner, etc.

b. Color code!! Color coding is my best friend since I was in preschool. Assign a color to each subject. My notebooks or folders are classified by color. My schedule has the corresponding colors. My Trello has tags by color. My folders on the cloud and on my computer have colors. This way I don't mess up things.

c. Agenda. Write all of your assignments (with color code if you can) and everything on an agenda, to-do list, calendar, etc. Whatever works for you, but be conscious of all of your assignments. There was a point when I was in high school that I no longer used the agenda. I would write the homework and never look at it again, I just memorized (by accident) all of my assignments. I seriously don't get how no one noticed I had a big problem called anxiety. Before the modern plague I used a regular week by week agenda and it's what best works for me. I switched to a day by day agenda for a while... A nightmare. Fortnight by fortnight... Anxiety trigger. Now I use Trello since I have to do almost everything on digital.

d. Digital files. You must have well organized digital files on the cloud. I use my color code and my folders go like "university -> semester -> subject". I add a folder for each unit when I have many files. So inside "subject" or inside each "unit" folder I have "readings" and "homework". File names go like "1. Author - Title" for readings and "1. Type of homework (aka essay, diagram, synthesis, etc.) - Author/Title".

3. Discipline

If you don't do what you must when you must... It doesn't work, no matter how organized you are or how smart you are. As I said, my classmate learns a lot outside of school but she doesn't do her homework. I read just the absolute necessary (which I know is not ideal) but I have straight A's. To build habits is complicated, it will be hard but not impossible. Doing a bit is better than nothing. But keep doing stuff.

I have this friend who's very smart but procrastinates a lot, and she still gets straight A's. How? She does things when she needs to. Even 4 hours before the due date but she gets things done because she knows don't completing an assignment will lower her grades.

4. I don't want to do this specific assignment

When I don't find the energy or just want to avoid to do a specific assignment or advance on my projects, I... you're gonna call me nerd and you'll be on the right... I do other homework. Specially on finals. I just don't want to do a certain project and I go "well, what else do I have to do... Okay, this seems easy". And there you got me three days before the important due date with all of my homework for the day after done and the important thing just laying there... BUT, it does help!

That's it for now, I hope they help!

[orossii]

i think morality should come primarily from a desire for social equilibrium. like, the resolution of dysfunctional contradictions and inequalities at a pace the masses can keep up with and are based in a dialectical materialist study of the truth that comes from the rigorous democratic participation of the masses ourselves. i think if you approach the subject even from a very blunt, analytical framework that’s not particularly moralistic justice will emerge, because injustice, cruelty, and exploitation are a source of disequilibrium that has to be artificially maintained for the benefit of the few while keeping a healthy, stable society from producing and distributing resources appropriately and maintaining longterm political stability. the destructive political consequences of exploitation are why the US is no more than 25-50 years from societal collapse, if even that, and Western Europe even sooner than that

it’s a mistake to view the goal of socialism as the pursuit of a more moral society first and foremost, I think. objectively that’s what happens, the optimal society is one in which workers (and their disabled/elderly dependents and children) are able to directly benefit from the fruits of their labor and be supported by the collective they labor for, but if you view abstract progressive morality as the leading force behind socialism vs it being a rational system for the optimization of human society and the only way for us to go forward as a species, you end up with some very confused hardline ideological stances that take precedence over having an actual winning strategy. blind idealism is the ultimate sin and where revolutionary energy goes to die, in my opinion. i think that’s why anarchists, democratic socialists, and western red liberal ‘communists’ are completely and utterly useless despite having lots of very flowery ideals and a knee jerk enthusiasm for discarding any and all successful revolutionary projects for making the difficult, high stakes decisions the armchair revolutionary can’t even begin to understand the depth of. socialism (and ultimately, communism) is a materially moral system of governance, but ideological morals don’t mean shit if you can’t be flexible when figuring out how to address the day to day requirements of administering resources, re-structuring the culture, and achieving the revolution and then defending it from counter-revolutionary violence

[deadpresidents]

Unfinished: April 12, 1945

As March 1945 drew to a close, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was exhausted. At the beginning of February, Roosevelt had attended the Yalta Conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin -- a meeting which required the American President to undertake a physically punishing and extraordinarily dangerous trip halfway around the world to the Crimean Peninsula in the middle of a raging world war. At Yalta, Roosevelt’s appearance had shocked the foreign leaders and their aides. In his last face-to-face meeting with Churchill, on February 18, 1945, FDR was seen as a dead man walking. Churchill’s personal doctor, Lord Moran, told a friend that Roosevelt had “only a few months to live”.

Being President of the United States for just one term is taxing enough on a young man or a healthy man. Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been President for twelve years. He had campaigned for the Presidency and been victorious in four national elections. His Administration faced one of the greatest domestic crises in American History -- the Great Depression -- and the greatest crisis and bloodiest conflict in world history -- World War II. FDR had attacked these problems (and other issues that arose during his terms) with energy, creativity, and a relentless pursuit of victory.

A healthy and athletic man who stood nearly 6′2″ and weighed about 200 lbs. as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt had been stricken by polio in 1921. The disease robbed him of his ability to walk and, at the time, looked as if it had robbed him of a political future. He rebounded politically but physically he was never the same. Confined to a wheelchair, the muscles in his legs withered like the branches of a tree in winter. Although he could not walk under his own power, FDR taught himself to stand while wearing heavy steel braces around his shins. He needed the assistance of a muscular partner -- sometimes one of his sons, sometimes a military aide -- in order to feign the appearance of walking. Through sheer will, however, Roosevelt learned to take a few steps without anyone’s help -- a handy skill that he would show off at important campaign rallies. But as he began his unprecedented fourth term in the White House in the early months of 1945, FDR no longer had the energy to show off.

Roosevelt was as gravely ill as Lord Moran suggested. The successful 1944 Presidential campaign had severely drained his already tapped-out reservoirs of energy and stamina. His fourth inauguration was low-key, partly because it took place in the midst of war and partly due to the President’s failing health. Instead of the traditional inaugural ceremonies at the U.S. Capitol, Roosevelt took the Oath of Office at the White House and gave his brief fourth Inaugural Address from a balcony at the Executive Mansion. The famously verbose Roosevelt gave the second-shortest Inaugural Address in American History. By the time the crowd realized that he was talking he had already finished. Only George Washington’s four-sentence-long second Inaugural Address in 1793 was shorter than the address given by FDR on January 20, 1945.

FDR now looked entirely different than the man who had told the nation that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself” in 1933. Dark circles surrounded his eyes, which seemed sunken into his skull. Since his first Inauguration, Roosevelt had lost 40-50 pounds. His hands shook so violently at times that some observers wondered how he was able to eat. He smoked constantly, but rarely finished his cigarettes. Most shocking of all, FDR no longer went to great lengths to conceal his disability. Frail and tired, he found it almost impossible to wear the heavy braces that he long wore on his crippled legs. On March 1, 1945, Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress on the results of his Yalta Conference with Churchill and Stalin. In an unprecedented move, the President sat in a chair on the floor of the House of Representatives and apologized to Congress, beginning his speech by saying, “I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs.” It was the first time that President Roosevelt had ever publicly acknowledged his physical disability.

Twelve years of the Presidency, economic depression and war had strained Roosevelt’s health, but the 14,000-mile trip to the Yalta Conference on the Black Sea had pushed FDR to the limit. On March 30, 1945, Roosevelt arrived in Warm Springs, Georgia for a few weeks of relaxation and, hopefully, recuperation. Roosevelt loved Warm Springs. He had started visiting the small town in western Georgia in the 1920s, hoping that the warm waters from the natural mineral springs nearby would help him regain the use of his legs. When he was Governor of New York, FDR purchased a small house that he used when he visited Warm Springs. As President, the home was called the “Little White House” and although FDR only visited it sixteen times during his Presidency, many of those trips were for 2-3 weeks each. When his train pulled into Warm Springs at about 1:30 PM on March 30, 1945, many longtime residents said that things seemed different. Roosevelt looked terrible and while he waved to onlookers, it was with noticeable weakness.

The first few days in Georgia were tough. FDR was obviously ill and seemed to struggle making it through a church service on Easter Sunday. Roosevelt also avoided his beloved Warm Springs pools. Instead, the President rested, caught up on sleep, and visited with guests. The goal was for FDR to regain enough of his health to make a trip to San Francisco for the charter meeting of what would become the United Nations. At the Little White House with Roosevelt were some personal aides, military attaches, and cousins Daisy Suckley and Polly Delano. During his first week at Warm Springs, Roosevelt did very little work, dictating a few letters and reading briefings, stronger and more animated in the mornings and evenings but completely drained in the afternoon. Another goal for Roosevelt was to gain weight -- by the time he left Warm Springs, he hoped to be up to 170 lbs.

Still, there was no noticeable improvement in FDR’s health or spirits. Then, on April 9th, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd arrived. As President Wilson’s Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had become involved in a passionate love affair with his wife’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer. It was 1918 when Eleanor Roosevelt discovered the affair between Franklin and Lucy and threatened to divorce him unless he promised never to see or speak to Lucy again. FDR agreed to the ultimatum -- an ultimatum that was strengthened by his mother’s threat to cut off his inheritance if he and Eleanor were divorced, as well as the fact that Franklin’s budding political career would be crushed if the affair was revealed. The relationship between FDR and Eleanor was never again passionate or loving after the discovery of the affair, but Eleanor kept her word and remained married to Franklin. Franklin, however, didn’t keep his word to Eleanor.

The Franklin-Lucy affair probably resumed shortly after Roosevelt’s first Inauguration in 1933.  By that time, FDR and Eleanor had more of a professional relationship than a personal one. He respected the First Lady’s political viewpoints, supported her activism, used her as a sounding board, and tried to act on many of her suggestions. Personally, however, there was no passion or tenderness or intimacy between the First Couple. It was FDR and Eleanor’s daughter, Anna, who helped rekindle Franklin’s relationship with Lucy. She arranged for Lucy to visit the President in the White House when Eleanor was out of town. And on April 9, 1945, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd was in Warm Springs, Georgia visiting President Roosevelt due to Anna Roosevelt’s invitation.

FDR was so excited to see Lucy that he didn’t wait for Lucy to make the drive all the way from Aiken, South Carolina to Warm Springs. The President and his cousin Daisy decided to meet Lucy’s car en route. At Manchester, Georgia, 85 miles away from Warm Springs, the highway rendezvous took place. FDR looked happier than he had in months as Lucy got into FDR’s car along with her friend, painter Elizabeth Shoumatoff. Lucy had brought Shoumatoff along to paint a portrait of the President -- a portrait that she hoped would be an improvement on the recent photographs that had made Roosevelt look “ghastly”.

For the next two days, Roosevelt and Lucy enjoyed their time together, going on small drives, eating happy meals, and sitting together while Shoumatoff prepared to paint the President’s portrait, studying photographs and making preliminary drawings. Daisy Suckley had the opportunity to observe the unique relationship between FDR and Lucy Mercer and also had some private conversations with the President’s longtime mistress. In her diary, Daisy recorded her thoughts about the two after she accompanied them on an automobile drive that they took: “Lucy is so sweet with F(ranklin) -- No wonder he loves to have her around -- Toward the end of the drive, it began to be chilly and she put her sweater over his knees -- I can imagine just how she took care of her husband -- She would think of little things which make so much difference to a semi-invalid, or even a person who is just tired, like F(ranklin).”

On April 12th, President Roosevelt woke up and ate a light breakfast. He had a slight chill despite the warm, humid weather that day and wore his cape draped over his shoulders throughout the early afternoon. Roosevelt did a little bit of work, reading the Atlanta newspapers and dictating some correspondence. Elizabeth Shoumatoff had set up her easel in the living room where the President worked behind a card table that served as his makeshift desk. As Shoumatoff painted, FDR continued reading, and at about 1:00 PM, Roosevelt said, “We have got just about fifteen minutes more to work.”

In the quiet of the room, Daisy Suckley thought that the President had dropped his cigarette and was searching for it because his head slumped forward suddenly. Roosevelt could barely lift his head when Daisy asked what was wrong. He placed his left hand gently against the back of his head and, in a barely audible voice, told Daisy, “I have a terrific pain in the back of my head!”

Roosevelt quickly slipped into unconsciousness as the women in the room summoned help. They called for a doctor who was staying in a cottage close to the Little White House and they helped two of FDR’s valets carry the President into the bedroom. Roosevelt’s hands and feet were ice cold, but he was still breathing. Smelling salts were administered but FDR was unresponsive. As the doctor and aides tried to help the President, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd and Elizabeth Shoumatoff recognized the hopelessness of the situation. They also recognized the potential scandal that was possible if it was learned that the President collapsed in the presence of his longtime mistress.

Shoumatoff packed up all of her paints and the unfinished portrait she had been working on. Lucy Mercer grabbed her belongings and took one last look at her beloved Franklin. He was still alive when they left, but he was breathing laboriously and his eyes no longer recognized Lucy. Lucy and Elizabeth Shoumatoff had been on the highway back to Aiken, South Carolina for an hour when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died in Warm Springs at 3:35 PM. The official cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage. FDR was 63 years old.

Eleanor Roosevelt was notified of her husband’s death a few minutes after 4:00 PM. She summoned Vice President Harry Truman to the White House while he was having a drink at the U.S. Capitol with House Speaker Sam Rayburn. Truman wasn’t told why he needed to hastily come to the White House, but he knew it sounded urgent. As Truman left the Capitol, he ran into a young Congressman who questioned the Vice President about his speedy exit -- a young Congressman named Lyndon Johnson.

At the White House at 5:30 PM, Eleanor Roosevelt broke the news to the Vice President simply a directly: “Harry, the President is dead.” Truman was stunned and asked what he could do for the widowed First Lady. Eleanor smiled sadly and asked, “Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now.” At 7:00 PM, Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone administered the Oath of Office to Truman as the 33rd President of the United States.

By that time, Eleanor was on her way to Warm Springs to claim her husband’s body. At about midnight, she arrived at the Little White House in Georgia where she asked about her husband’s last hours. It was then that she learned news almost as shocking as the President’s death. Eleanor found out that FDR had been with his former mistress Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd when he was stricken. She spent 45 minutes alone with his body, picked out the clothing for his burial, but never lost her composure despite the shocks that she experienced that day.

A funeral train returned FDR’s body to Washington, D.C. the next day. Roosevelt was embalmed by morticians who found that the President’s arteries were so hardened that they could barely inject the embalming fluid into his body. FDR’s body laid in state in the East Room of the White House almost 80 years to the day that Abraham Lincoln’s body rested in the very same place following his assassination. On the 80th anniversary of Lincoln’s death -- April 15, 1945 -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt was buried in the garden of his beloved estate Hyde Park on the Hudson River in New York. Upon his death, the New York Times wrote of the deceased President:

“Men will thank God on their knees a hundred years from now that Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the White House. It was his hand, more than that of any other single man, that built the great coalition of the United Nations. It was his leadership which inspired free men in every part of the world to fight with greater hope and courage. Gone is the fresh and spontaneous interest which this man took, as naturally as he breathed air, in the troubled and the hardships and the disappointments and the hopes of little men and humble people.” 

Elizabeth Shoumatoff’s Unfinished Portrait of President Roosevelt -- which she was working on when he died -- now hangs in the Little White House in Warm Springs, Georgia.

[ask-spider-man-61610]

The Infiltration: Part Two of Three

In the ten years he had been a vigilante, Peter Parker had become very good at sneaking into places he shouldn't have been.

Air vents were useless. The vast majority of them were far too narrow for anybody to slip through without becoming amorphous, and even when the ducts were large enough it was impossible to move inside one without making enough noise to alert the entire block. The subceiling--the space above the ceiling tiles, but below the actual architectural structure--was a far better bet, but that was similarly cramped--and besides, only some buildings had gaps in the walls to allow for movement like that.

Using a disguise to sneak in was better all around, but it required a lot of skill and care. You couldn't disguise yourself as a scientist unless you were genuinely an expert in the field you were pretending to study. Nor, in this particular case, could you just dress up as any old agent--they had security levels. Executives were out, reporters were only viable if the people you were trying to fool had reason to believe a reporter was going to be there, and the less said about solicitors the better. The key was to attract as little scrutiny as possible, to not raise any questions you'd have trouble answering; because the second someone grew suspicious of you, your cover was all but blown.

Janitors, then, were perfect.

Nobody pays attention to a janitor. It's practically one of the perks of the job. Beneath notice means beneath scrutiny, and people only give custodians the slightest thought when a place needs cleaned. Even then it's just an assertion that a custodian needs to be there. Nobody questions what a janitor is doing in a room, even in the dead of night. Nobody questions why a janitor is wearing gloves, or where they got their ring of keys. There's no better disguise for going somewhere that people generally can't go.

Peter had been pretending to be a janitor in the main headquarters of the Cape Code Authority for several days now. He had listened intently as he'd mopped the floors, mapped out the layout in his head, figured out where the labs were and who had access to what while keeping his head down. He'd owned this coverall for years now, for infiltrations exactly like this, and now with the security cameras disabled he hooked his cart on the handle of his mop and dragged it towards the door the three agents had just left.

The door had locked automatically. Of course it had, all laboratory doors locked automatically around here, and even the custodians needed special permissions to get them unlocked. But as the door had swung closed, Peter had pressed the trigger in his palm under the guise of adjusting his grip on his mop, and now the door's latch was glued down beneath a small splatter of webbing. Pulling on a latex glove, Peter tugged the door open a crack and slipped into the lab.

He adjusted his hat as he glanced around the lab, the hat that had blond curls sewn to the inside to disguise his brown hair, and scratched at his false nose. The hologram table sat in the center of the room, still softly glowing even after its deactivation--an enormous waste of energy, but apparently nobody cared. Ignoring it entirely, Peter headed straight for the computer monitors against the far wall, grabbing a chair without breaking stride and only stopping to climb on top of it and crouch on the seat like a gargoyle on a rooftop.

Like everything Reed Richards ever touched, the computers were encrypted. But Peter had dated Johnny Storm for five months once, and he didn't spend so much time nearby his fellow supergenius without taking some time to figure out how to bypass their usual security. It took him just over five minutes to get through the firewalls, and then he stuck a translucent plastic sticky note to the screen and began to browse.

The sticky note was, of course, a data drive. Peter had learned about these only recently, but he was fast growing to like them; they were easy to conceal on his person and, unlike a USB stick, didn't require a specific size of port. As he opened up the computer's files, the drive pinged off of the computer's software and integrated itself into the system without leaving a trace. Cracking his knuckles, Peter typed a few cursory searches into the file browser and tapped Enter.

Perpetual Holographic Avatar/Nano-Tech Offensive Monsters had been a thorn in his side for over two years now. They didn't move like humans; their range of motion didn't have the limits that their skeletal shape implied; their systems adapted and learned and coordinated in ways that he'd never seen before in artificial intelligence. Even Octavius, permanently on the cutting edge of AI and biorobotics development, wasn't sure what the hell was going on with them. Last year, in the middle of beating the multi-armed megalomaniac's face in, Spider-Man had asked for Otto's thoughts on the Phantoms; the technology, both of them suspected, wasn't exactly beyond Otto's work so much as to the side of it. The systems were hyperspecialized: they had no connection to neural networks of old, and were practically useless for advancing them in the future. They were, in a word, alien.

Peter suspected Chitauri tech. The War of the Worlds had left countless remnants of the Chitauri on Earth; some of them still remained, like the Leviathan rotting in Maine, but far too many of them had seemed to simply vanish. Anyone who gave it more than ten seconds of thought could realize that governments of the world had squirreled the stuff away to study and reverse-engineer. Now, as Peter's eyes darted back and forth across the screen, he skimmed through the blueprints and models that he found in the folder and tried to see if any of it matched the distinctive look of the Chitauri.

Some of it did, he found as he kept searching, but not a huge amount. Reed had done some work with Chitauri tech in the past; traces of its influence were obvious in the composition of the Phantoms' gun barrels, and in the way their hard-light armor projected itself over the skeleton. Kid stuff, nothing that explained the problems he'd had with them. Peter's brow furrowed as he copied the files he found to his data drive and peered over his shoulder at the hologram table behind him.

What had Reed been saying to Flint in here only a few minutes ago? Peter had a spiderlike hypersensitivity to vibration; he could feel footsteps on the other side of the building rumbling through the floor, and the variations in air pressure caused by the fly drifting around the ceiling. But it didn't work like hearing did, nor was it interpreted by the same part of the brain. Though he had felt Reed talking in here, it just felt like a continuous drone of vibration against his skin--he hadn't heard him, and so couldn't interpret the words. And, like an idiot, he hadn't thought to bug the room beforehand.

He pushed his tongue against his upper lip in thought. Had it had something to do with why Flint had registered with the CCA in the first place?

Kicking a foot against the bottom of the desk, Peter rolled his chair over to the hologram table and set to work getting past the security there too. This took even less time than it had with the computer, now that Peter knew how Reed had updated his security measures over the last few years. Within three minutes of typing so fast an observer would have seen his fingers as blurs he was browsing through the most recently accessed files.

The image lifted out of the table and filled the room with its soft light, and Peter frowned at the image of the Phantom he saw. How on earth was this related to Flint's desire to Be A Real Boy? He typed a few commands into the table and watched the Phantom's white shell disappear to reveal the mechanical skeleton beneath. A few notes by Reed appeared to highlight key points, and Peter read through each with steadily rising concern.

Very little of the Sandman's mass was actually Flint Marko. When he had been disintegrated all those years ago, most of his body had become just plain old sand--only his nervous system had become anything different. Over the years, he had gained entire truckloads worth of sand and lost enough to fill beaches, but the gallon or so of milky white silica that had once been his brain and nerve cells had remained, scattered evenly through every shape and sculpture he made himself into. They assimilated granules of a similar composition through static cling, arranging them with an intricate electric charge that neither Flint nor Peter had ever fully understood, and now it looked like Reed wanted to apply that same static charge to the Phantom project.

Looking through the notes, Peter could already see that Reed wasn't putting much effort into following through on his promise. The conjectures and theories put forth in them were ludicrous--ideas that Peter had discarded years ago in his various scrambles to stop one of Marko's rampages. But he read between the lines, read ideas that Reed had intended for his own eyes only, and his blood grew steadily colder in his veins.

It wouldn't take much modification to turn a Phantom into a suitable chassis for Flint's nerve granules, so went Reed's idea. The skeleton already contained organic elements, and they already received commands from a biological source rather than a computer. This flew in the face of Peter's assumptions about the Phantoms.

They were only partially robots. They were like Octobots; their processing units were very much alive.

Peter waved a shaky hand over the table. The hologram deactivated, which wasn't his intent at all, but he was too taken aback to care.

Deep in the bowels of the building, ignored by Peter until now but always scratching at the back of his mind, the vibrations of mechanical footsteps rumbled through the walls and floor. The central hub of manufacturing and deploying Phantoms was located fifty feet under the foundation--a fact he'd known all along, but which he had to investigate now. Now, when he knew that within those robotic skeletons were living and thinking beings. Now, when he knew that the drills whirring and 3D printing that he felt even from here were working tirelessly to imprison and enslave something. Jumping off the chair, he retrieved his data drive from the computer and took barely a minute to wipe all evidence of his presence from the room. Then, readjusting his disguise and checking for the presence of witnesses, he slipped out of the room and finally allowed the door to lock.

The route to the underground hub was a circuitous one. As the operations were almost entirely automated, not even the janitors were given clearance to enter that level; maybe four people had access, and Peter wasn't one of them. No matter. There were more ways to sneak around than just throwing on a coverall and mopping a floor. If Peter's disguise only took him this far and no farther, it was time to drop it. Some places you could only reach as the wall-crawler.

Had the security cameras not mysteriously lost power earlier that afternoon, they would've seen a janitor shedding his hat, kicking off his shoes, and beginning to unbutton his coverall. Without breaking stride, he snatched a small bag from where he'd hidden it in his cart before and pulled on a mask; whatever features, real or fake, a witness might have noticed, they were now hidden by dark red fabric and two gleaming grey bug eyes. In short order the coverall and hat were gone--wrapped up into a web-knapsack that he slung onto his back even as he swapped his shoes out for red spandex boots. Pulling on his gloves right as he reached the elevator, Spider-Man stopped to politely tap the call button beside the sliding metal doors.

With a ding, the elevator doors slid open, and Spider-Man immediately smashed straight through the emergency hatch at the top of the lift.

Elevator shafts were always a bit more complicated than one expected. Even Peter, who could feel the constant motion of the metal boxes through the building and their cables sliding against pullies, always needed a moment to figure out how to squeeze through the systems that controlled its rise and fall. He paused as he examined the mechanism of this particular elevator before he sucked in his stomach and crawled around the box with a few inches to spare. Then, once he was beneath it, he released his grip on the elevator shaft and let himself fall.

He caught himself fifty feet later, his fingertips sticking instantly to the concrete as he touched it. Just across the shaft from him was a set of elevator doors, which he hopped onto and began to pry apart. It was slow going. Like everything in the CCA headquarters, these doors were made with superhumans in mind, and they had a magnetic lock that Spider-Man found himself straining to overpower. He pulled on them for a few seconds, changed his mind, and crawled two feet to the left to begin messing with the wiring that controlled the lock. There was a moment of silence, a low, hollow ding, and the doors slid open.

With one hand still stuck to the wall Spider-Man lowered himself into the unlit chamber, dropping to the floor and landing there in a crouch. What little light had made it down with him reflected off his mask's glaring eyes. For a moment he was still, one hand pressed to the metal beneath him and his attention fully on the vibrations of the environment. Then, mentally sorting through the sea of threats that his spider-sense whispered and squirmed at, he rose to his feet and nonchalantly slapped the lightswitch on the wall behind him. Sparse florescent lights flickered on above him, and he blinked and furrowed his brow as he adjusted.

Now that he was down here the vibrations were sharper, like a the world coming into focus as you come up from underwater. They travelled through the air, through the concrete, and through a metal catwalk that served as a floor, branching into pathways and situated above buzzing, whirring machinery. No wonder it had been so difficult to discern what was going on up above, Spider-Man reflected as he glanced over the guardrail and watched robotic limbs carry a Phantom chassis through a gap in the wall and to another room. He turned his attention ahead of him, where similar chasses were held in racks upon racks that spanned nearly wall to wall across the room, black robotic skeletons awaiting deployment.

But there was a difference between these Phantoms and the ones he so often encountered on the battlefield. Frowning under the mask, Spider-Man stepped forward, leaned over the catwalk's railing, and set a finger against the nearest collection of servos and solid-light projectors. Yes. There it was, the constant, ambient tremor of air in motion; the chasses were hollow like the frame of a bicycle. Whenever he'd fought them, they hadn't displayed any such emptiness.

Right. Mechanical systems supported by biological processing. He took his attention away from the chasses, looking instead at that hole in the wall that one of them had vanished into as he'd come in here. He could feel the Phantom in the next room over being hooked up to--to something, metal vibrating on contact with metal and stabilizing with a little pop. His eyes narrowed. His fingers twitching nervously, his breath held, he began to pace down the catwalk towards the door to that room.

A window on one side greeted him as he stepped through, displaying the Phantom under maintenance. Screens embedded into the window offered diagnostics and schematics, all of which Spider-Man ignored. He turned instead to the far wall, where what looked like a large cabinet was anchored in place and had a hundred or so pipes no wider than test tubes leading into and out of it. A quick ripping of metal, and he tossed a mangled padlock over his shoulder as he threw the cabinet doors open. The interior was poorly organized, and called to mind a prototype rather than anything intended for widespread implementation: a screen with a series of codes flashing across it, a mess of piping and tubing, and in carefully arranged racks hundreds upon hundreds of test tubes, most full of some amorphous fluid.

Spider-Man's brow furrowed as he selected a vial at random. Working carefully, he unscrewed the valve that connected it to the mess of piping and slid it out of the vial's stopper--without it, the test tube's lid sealed airtight again. He held it above eye level and turned to see the light filter through from overhead. The fluid inside surrounded what looked almost like a pipe cleaner, thousands of copper wires branching out from a central silicon rod. As he tilted it one way, an air bubble slid up the glass wall, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw--

--a tendril, as black as the rest of the liquid, squirming in that air pocket in a bid for freedom.

Spider-Man's eyes widened behind the mask. Oh my god.

Dead Leviathans and alien technology hadn't been the only things the Chitauri had brought to Earth. It had taken the terrestrial armies, and the remnants of SHIELD that Spider-Man had fought alongside, far too long to realize that the shape-shifting battlesuits that their enemies had used were themselves a separate species. Earth hadn't been the only planet to face invasion under the Chitauri; centuries ago, those invaders had conquered and enslaved a species called Klyntar. Amorphous, shapeshifting, symbiotic creatures, the Klyntar had the distinction of being able to use every single cell as musculature, digestive system, armoring, and neurons. Nobody was sure how long the Chitauri had been selectively breeding and brainwashing their symbiote slaves into battle armor, and until now Spider-Man had assumed that practice had stopped with the aliens' defeat.

The little vial of Klyntar sample in his hand was far from his first experience with the species. He had, for six months during and after the war, worn a stolen symbiote as a battlesuit of his own, and even after he and Vee had separated he'd been up close and personal with the species many, many times. But he had believed that Vee's defection from the Chitauri had been a fluke; that they had been the only Klyntar to be recovered from the Chitarui alive.

But now Spider-Man stood in the basement of the Cape Code Authority, holding a vial that contained another member of that species, and right next to him were over a hundred identical vials. All at once, the control systems of the Phantoms became obvious to him.

Without hesitation he turned back to the cabinet and began yanking the tubes out of their holders. The brush-like machinery in each vial, he figured as he worked, must have been some kind of brainwashing system; the copper wires made contact with as many of the Klyntar's neurons as possible, with controlled electric shocks frying out whatever thoughts the aliens tried to form and replacing them with--with whatever programming was necessary to get the Phantoms working. As he pulled each tube out, he killed the electrical charge, but for now he didn't release the Klyntar within from their cells. Where would they go down here? Did they even remember what they were? At best they'd die, at worst the CCA would collect them again and make it even harder to get to them again. No, for now he stuck the vials together with webbing, bundling them together in a padded sack of sorts--he could keep them safe until he knew what else to do, but for now--

--for now, he could feel footsteps vibrating through the concrete fifty feet above. Could feel the elevator starting to move, and the frantic tingling in his head suddenly concentrated all its alarm on the man upstairs. He paused, but only for the smallest fraction of a second; then he worked even faster, his hands becoming blurs again. Grab, break, thwip, grab, break, thwip. The bundle of vials and webbing in his arms was becoming untenably large. He kept at it anyway, always careful not to smash the vials, always careful to separate them from their neighbors with a carefully padded layer of webbing. Even as he webbed up the last one, he wove backpack straps onto the sack and pulled them onto his shoulders. Then he turned on his heel and darted out the door, ready to make an escape.

But as the elevator began its slow descent towards him, he paced around the room and realized that there was no escape to be found. No windows or doors, because he was in a basement, and the air ducts were of course far too small to crawl through. If he didn't have the Klyntar vials, he would've been able to crawl past the elevator, but with that bundle on his back there was no room. If he wanted to save these Klyntar, he was trapped down here with them.

Well, decided Spider-Man as his pacing came to a stop directly in front of the elevator. If he was about to be discovered down here, he certainly wasn't going to let whoever was about to discover him get a dramatic moment about it. There would be no voice booming out from behind him as he frantically looked for a hiding place, there would be no cat and mouse as the person looked for him in this increasingly exposed room. He folded his arms and leaned against the guardrail right in front of the elevator, glaring at the doors. Waiting.

When the doors dinged open, Scrier momentarily hesitated, not having expected to see Spider-Man so out in the open. He blinked behind those blank white eyes, far more awkward than a supervillain wanted to be, before he lamely managed, "I thought that was you, Spider-Man."

[whentherewerebicycles]

hi! i wanted to say i love reading your reflections on teaching, and in general i really look up to/am inspired by your thoughts regarding education and academia. if it's not too much to ask (completely understandable if it is, in that case please disregard!) i would love to get your advice on college related things?

i had pretty significant academic struggles throughout grade school, and ended up dropping out of college after a year. i would've graduated this may, so lately i've been considering going back and finishing my bachelor's. but i've been waffling on this decision because of 1) anxiety about having to drop out again, and 2) some confusion about what i actually want to study. i guess i'm wondering, is it worth it to start from scratch? my struggles were mostly about mental health stuff & difficulty keeping up with coursework—i loved being in the classroom, working with professors, learning from other students. i like being challenged intellectually, but if i have issues with followthrough, is there a way to work on that??? i know these are Big Questions, lol--whether they are answerable or not, cheers and thank you and i hope you are doing well these days. <3

hey! happy to give my thoughts, for what they're worth. you know your situation better than i do so the specifics may or may not be relevant, but i can give some advice just based on seeing lots of students pass through four-year programs!

i've worked with a number of students who took time away from college and came back to finish later. i took a year off myself in the middle of college for mental health reasons, though my school allowed you to take a two-semester leave of absence for any reason (so i always had the safety net of knowing i could come back without having to reapply or start over). in my experience, time away is almost always a good thing. sometimes people just really need that break from the stressors of the college environment! but more importantly, i think people benefit from having a few years' experience living and working in the world.

even though it can be intimidating to come back to college as an older student, i think older students or nontraditional students who took time off and came back tend to underestimate how much more confident and assured in themselves they'll be once they're back in the classroom. working out in the world for a while, even if it's not a job that you especially love or feel is relevant to your long-term goals, tends to help you build more trust in your own ability to get stuff done, manage responsibilities, and be an adult person in the world. in your time away, you've probably grown more than you think, and you may find that some of the things you struggled with at 18 just don't feel as daunting anymore. or they might feel daunting, but you also have more experience talking and working with other people, and you may feel more confident in seeking out & using your college's various academic success resources.

have you considered a two-year college as a possible next step? one of my advisees this year was an adult student who went to college for a year, dropped out, served in the military for four years, came back to do an associate's degree, and decided he liked school enough that he wanted to transfer to our university and finish his degree. (now he's going on to do a phd next fall!!!!) he's one of the most passionate advocates for community colleges i've ever met, and he's stayed actively involved in our local CC community & now mentors recent transfer students at our university. he's talked at length about how CCs are this amazing way for students to explore their interests without having to take on the huge price tag of a four-year degree, within a learning community that's much warmer, more responsive to student needs, and more accepting of the diverse paths that lead people to & through higher education. i wonder if you might consider taking a semester or a year of courses at your local CC, to dip your toes back in and see if you're still feeling energized by the experience.

you might find that some of the courses aren't intellectually challenging enough, but this might also be a wonderful opportunity to create the kind of learning experience you want to have. i was a full-time community college student for a year during my year away from yale, and while i'm sure i was just INSUFFERABLE in many ways, i had a prof in my Western Civ course who was really generous with his time/energy and met with me outside of class to help me figure out how to make the papers into something that i found really exciting and challenging to write. so the class kind of became what i made of it, and i got to read some stuff (dostoevsky!!!) that sent me down all kinds of interesting unexpected rabbitholes. the former CC grad i mentioned above was an extraordinarily bright student who would always go to office hours and ask his profs for more recommended readings, and he ended up becoming a TA for one of his courses and helped them redesign basically their entire intro humanities curriculum as a student advisor. so your CC experience can absolutely be what you make of it. and even if your profs can't give you that kind of support, you could practice doing it for yourself, setting little challenges for yourself either focused on the intellectual aspects ('I'm going to read and cite two scholarly sources in this paper, even though it's not required') or on developing strategies for effectively managing the workload ('I'm going to schedule a writing center appointment on Thurs, so I have to finish this paper two days before the deadline—and then I can devote my weekend study time to practicing for my Spanish test').

CC would be a slightly lower stakes environment for you to try out college again— lower-stakes both in the sense that it's cheaper (so if you decide you don't want to continue, you're not out as much money / don't feel compelled to go on to justify the debt you've taken on) and in the sense that the workload might be more manageable for you as you readjust to academic life and build systems & structures that work for you. as you probably have gathered from this blog, i am a HUGE believer in doing lower-stakes things many times over to build your own confidence and your trust in yourself, and then gradually scaling up the difficulty. by the time you reach the hard thing, you've already built up this strong image of yourself as a person who can handle challenges (and you've also had the chance to identify areas where you struggle & experiment with developing workable solutions).

if a two-year college isn't something you're especially interested in, i think it's definitely possible to start a four-year degree again. if that's the path you choose, i would strongly recommend reaching out to students in some of the degree programs you're tentatively interested in. people are almost always happy to share their ~wisdom~ (see: this ask response, lol) and most people love being asked for their thoughts on the pros and cons of something they know well. so you could get an honest sense from students of what the program is like, what the workload is like, and how useful or engaging people find the required courses for the degree. but also know that it's pretty normal to take courses all over in your first year or two (you have the advantage of having done a freshman year before, so you probably know this!), so you might just want to plan to try out a bunch of different things, with the goal of narrowing your focus by the end of your first year, or midway through your second.

i would also HIGHLY recommend spending lots of time familiarizing yourself with the resources your university has to offer. learn everything you can about the kind of mental health counseling and support they offer to students, and see if there are things you can set up in advance for yourself before you even step foot on campus. for instance, our university offers individual counseling, but they also have free groups that meet every week or two around different topics (coping with stress, students in recovery, etc) that are led by a counselor. check out your university's writing center or peer tutoring centers, too, and set up a standing appointment once a month or once a week or whatever, to bring in something you're working on—so that you know that every week, you're going to talk with someone about what's going well and what you're struggling with in your assignments.

you might also want to look into your university's services for students with disabilities office, as they can help you figure out if you are eligible for various kinds of accommodations or additional support (extra time on exams, notetaking services, recorded lectures, etc). i know you mentioned that you've dealt with academic struggles in grade school, too. if you think it's possible that there may be underlying learning differences that are affecting your academic work, it might be worth seeing if they can help you find lower-cost testing, so you can get a diagnosis that qualifies you for additional accommodations and university support.

many schools, esp large public universities, also have resource centers and mentoring programs for students from specific demographics who may benefit from additional structure and support in their early years of college. my university has a variety of resource centers and programs for students from low-income backgrounds, first-gen students, students who transferred from community college, etc. you don't have to take advantage of ALL of these resources, but proactively establishing a support network long before you need it is a really good way to set yourself up for success. and even just doing the research will probably help you feel more confident in your capacity to 'follow through', since you'll know that you're going into this with your eyes wide open AND with a detailed plan for what to do if you run into some of the same obstacles you encountered the first time around.

speaking of detailed plans: i find it helpful sometimes to do IF-THEN exercises with students when they're stressed about something on the horizon or unsure about whether they can handle some new challenge. IF-THEN is just what it sounds like: 'IF this thing I'm nervous about happens, THEN I'm going to do X, Y, or Z.' what i like about this exercise (i use it with myself too aha) is that it acknowledges that sometimes the thing you're dreading DOES happen. sometimes the professor you emailed for an extension says no. sometimes the TA doesn't understand why you're confused about the assignment. sometimes you don't have time to finish the reading before class. sometimes you overschedule yourself and you have to pull an all-nighter to finish two papers on the same night. scary things, confidence-shaking things, happen all the time, but they are rarely fatal! and there can be something really powerful about acknowledging and naming the thing you're concerned about, and then generating a few next steps you could take, should the thing you're dreading come to pass. i could see you doing something like this as you start thinking about the things that tripped you up last time, or made it difficult for you to balance the workload. if X happens, then what could you try next? giving yourself a few options means that you already have backup plans, too, which can make the whole situation less terrifying. if this happens, i might have to try this, or this, or this, and those things might not be the most fun or the easiest to do or the 'best' thing academically, but they'll get me through this difficult moment mostly in one piece, and once i'm through it i can look back on it and learn from it, or adjust the structures i've built for myself moving forward, to reduce the chance that X happens again.

PHEW!!! sorry this got so long but that is just the RISK YOU TAKE when sending me anons 😅 i hope that some of this is helpful to you, or at least sparks some useful thinking for you, even if it's not all directly applicable to your situation. i would say that if you love learning and find being in the classroom exhilarating, then you should absolutely go back to college! but that doesn't mean you have to go back right away, or that you have to go back and do it exactly the same way you did the first time. there are lots of possible paths to higher ed, and there's no particular rush—college will always be there, if it's something you decide you want now or at some future point in your life. i would also just reiterate again one of the core Themes of This Blog, which is that the brain is NEUROPLASTIC, and that humans have a truly astounding amazing capacity to change, grow, and learn new things (including new ways of getting around old obstacles or working through old challenges). just because you struggled the first time doesn't mean you are doomed to repeat that pattern. if you can spend some time thoughtfully reflecting on what you found most difficult to manage the first time through, you are better equipped to make plans, design new structures for yourself, and build the support networks that will help you thrive in college.

[queenofallwitches]

an update and primer:

so the last winter was weird. I had a complete breakdown, went into psychiatric hospital for 40 days in total. two seperate times.

learnt a heap of new things, met a tonne of cool people and had amazing conversations and few fights but overcome my own demons by that.

brain speaking-I have a scarred brain stem and neurological disorder is not a mental diagnosis, but a neurological disorder, proven by MRI scan, ADHD.

also damage to my basal ganglia, and prefrontal cortex.

neurological diagnosis means ADHD is not a "mental" health issue, as some believe, rather a neurodevelopment disorder caused by structural differences in the ADHD brain.

other neurodevelopment disorders include: Tourettes, Autism, Cerebal Palsy, Dyslexia and other Motor and Intellectual Disabilities. (Which recieve, in my view, a lot of insight, media information and stigma reduction by the advocacy networks surrounding these types of disability).

Over the last few years Autism has been over everything, I've seen mainstream media cover Tourettes and yet ADHD is still HUGELY misunderstood, misconceived and misrepresented in media, be in from the angle of documentaries, personal insight of a "typical" case, films, tv, and other media.

one of the first things my dr told me was "in females it rarely presents as hyperactive red-cordial OD child"

which is what my mother BELIEVES, that is because I have an adopted cousin with the ADHD dx who was that growing up, but the representation I'm told is also divergent for women with a higher IQ score than the average IQ. I come in around 142 and tested 123 at age 3 when I was unable to focus, pay attention and had severe trauma. I tested 142 in grade 8.

I'll share my experience as a female who is intellectually gifted, with higher IQ than average, and an adhd brain:

I've been told gifted and talented "genius" children are harder to diagnose because the symptoms present differently, we hide it better (camouflage) and our focusing can be "faked" by mediocre efforts of academic success.. this is true, I would do the assignment the Sunday night hours deadline, last minute, or have my parents half do it for me, plagiarise it (fuck I've killed my whole academic career now) copied but changed my words

from old 1970s encyclopaedias I KNEW they couldn't cross reference (I went through 15 years of school never studying doing homework or assignments and still had top grades).

I literally did not listen, and spent my classes planning the end of the world survival strategies with my GT friend who, basically helped me with my calculus and hard fucking maths, which was the ONLY 50 minutes of the day I put attention into my work.

now I'm going to be heading back to full-time study in the coming months, I get anxious as the pressure of a Bachelor level degree, and the pressure it takes me to perform, is enough to break me down. I've been advised it might be wise to start light (like a basic vet style diploma) and then build up, which is logical, but I keep thinking I'm meant to be doing my thesis by now. which is the kind of pressure one gets as a kid who is told repeatedly, "your intelligence is exceedingly the average and you can do ANYTHING you want"

I wanted to be an astronaut, a storm chaser, and an architect, a town planner and then a journalist. I always held to being a "FBI agent" or spy (I wonder why). so when I found psychology is really a blend of all these things, I kinda found a niche in a psych and social science double degree. but I'm thinking my academic career is LIFELONG, and due to the fact I also want to work in my field alongside my many written thesis coming, I'll be in academics for a long time. I may fail a few things, which I have to come to terms with. I do not fail easily, or readily, but I'm a perfectionist type-a academic who will put my whole life on the line to achieve "merit". I get exams, I get assessments, I read journals super-easy, I talk the talk and walk the walk so well psychologists who are at masters level compliment me on my "knowledge".

when it comes to mental health and trauma, I will always have the personal attachment, called lived experience, which will make failure and burnout, 100 percent realistic. I have to boundary up, bootstraps on, and prepare that yes, my personal "bias" will probably be entwined in this.

which is why I'm looking at the social science for the statistics and thesis writing side of things, and the counselling for the trained therapist side. either way, the degree of counselling requires so much self-insight, and then the social-science will back me away from personifying it. the other choice is criminology, which leads to forensic psychology, which is eternally fascinating. my main concern is the pro-pedophile content Ill be up against, which will look at the anatomy of a shoplifter akin to the devil, and leave the pedophile in the DSM-5 dx "paraphilia" box.

I'm not joining or jumping to anything.

either way I've got 2 year of credit, a heap of pathways and a lot of "academic momentum" from all my life being aimed to be "academic powerhouse". I went through my files and found a lot of awards I'd won in my high school, and top place in the competitions we would be entering in. I remember feeling so sad if I had a "credit" vs a distinction or high distinction, only to see now, a credit in university maths in year 9 is a skillset I don't have anymore so, good on me. or a credit in English, or Science at that age was pretty impressive, considering these tests were random and not studied for.

just a general skills assessment only the top 30 kids in the year were to take on a year by year basis and put out to vet from the top universities and taken by other kids in the same grade around the state.

it puts so much focus on my intelligence, because it's primed to be that way, I know that is true. I know I feel good being academically successful and it gives me a feeling of "achievement" but is it really for me?

I also found 2 letters from my local politicians offering me job placement, work experience and I was 1/4 kids in my 10th grade graduation tom get the letter, and due to my behaviour I pissed ALL the idiots who bullied me off. I was "too pretty to be a nerd" "too smart to be pOpUlAr".

so I made a group of misfits, who are all highly intelligent, creative and my group had the ONLY gay male in the school AND THIS IS BEFORE YOU FUCKING RETARDS MADE IT "COOL". he was bullied badly, so fuck you, you fucks claim "liberalism" but I bet you were the type of idiot who bullied guys like him in high school while you pretended to like my chemical romance and fake cut yourselves. I hate you all, forever.

my grade was full of idiots who were fake emo, who left the scene the moment the scene changed to dub-step and club music. I was there, watching you all, like sonny Moore, went from FFTL to that dubstep skrillex shit he started in 2009.

I dated you, hooked up with you and I went to your gigs. I know who was real and who was fake. I met some of you years later and realised the more emotive ones were the less "alternative appearing".

I can say 1/10000 emo guys from the 00s were genuinely Into the music and scene for the right reasons based on my dating history and this can and will be analysed statistically using SPSS one day to prove a lot. I've had too many relationships from each sub-culture and I have had 4-11 males at a time per public "output" of my energy pursue me over life.

I'm not being cocky when I say I have a long line of "suitors" and its banked back about 50 men. it's been a thing I've avoided as it seems to grow based on my body shape, attitude, appearance, so I am currently out of touch with dating scenes, no interest to try that ANYWAY, given the fact that I have had so many LONG TERM relationships ANYWAY. I can't see another one going well, and at this case, I'm living with an ex but we never went on conventional and now our families label this 3 things: "asexual", "polyamorous" and "open relationship". I'm also "bisexual" but this all to humans outside, looks ridiculous on paper. (wild orgies and lots of swinging or some stupid sex magick probably is what J brother literally thinks we do).

bc humans are intrinsically designed to need to label things they don't understand. we share a lease, not a relationship, and fucking polyamorous, I WISH. there are no girl-girl-guy 3 some, or orgies, or sex magic parties.

this has changed the attitude and perception of this "relation' which Is non-romantic, non-sexual. he can date and likely, will, as can I , and I likely won't date.

I would say 14/15 have had ADHD, or other mental illness and or trauma. which means to me, nothing at all.

I think this "open book" non romantic relationship style of "friends and roommates" not sexual.

attachment is misunderstood by others but works well fro my adhd, meaning I'm not expected to marry, or be a wife in any capacity. he is free to do what he wants, as I am, and open communication is a novel frontier I brought into this in the start, and stayed with for the duration. we fight, but I fight with a lot of people in my life over many petty things. also down to my adhd, I believe, I have rejection sensitive dysphoria, which makes me hypersensitive to rejection, perceived or real.

im not sure if this is trauma or adhd or both. but

I have used sexuality as a weapon in many relationships but it cannot or will not be used here, so I have had to resort to uncovering parts of myself which I never knew, which will stay with me even if he decided to marry and wife up in 5 years, which I'm okay and expecting him to do, and I would much rather that then be trapped in a situation where I cannot be that "wife/mother archetype" as I'm too "femme fatal/other-woman/sex-laced seductress and siren" a "FWB, unicorn, drug buddy, hook-up where im a therapist" or "intellectual and cognitive mind-bender work-study obsessed woman".

both at once and many types of human, including one who is a full-time ceremonial magician of 7 years. I will drink, drug, fuck, fight like males and still be more feminine and high maintenance than 89% of women. I grew up a tomboy and don't mind getting into fun, adventure based situations, like hiking, or anything adrenaline, I would only be reluctant to eat weird shit.

I also have many "neurological" issues including ADHD, and trauma which causes a rupture in the average human and I dating.

I'll tell you how many men have said "you are the unicorn" and then realised what that means, I went as far as canvasing the PUA world back in 2014 after reading the game, a book on PUA, which is essentially, pick up artistry, based on NLP and hypnosis. I did this after reading the copy my ex in 2008 handed me before we dated saying "I gave this up for you". it took me years to open the book, buy when I did I truly believed the only way I would fall in love again, was through PUA. that failed in so many ways but gave me a training foundation for men who were candidates for that, I have trained up J, and the way that sounds is BAD. I know, but I got a lot of value myself, I just don't see it how I wanted to see it.

but that was my original intent, and I achieved this he knows that, knew it was happening and evolved for the best self.

I am thinking we can modulate this into a business model for how I was operating in the BDSM world was mainly psychological, not physical.

I get told all of is incredibly intimidating (I am told) to women and men.

I don't really care anymore, because people have always seen this part of me in the wrong way ANYWAY, but I own who I am NOW. which is what I needed ANYWAY. so it cannot be stolen again, and sexual healing has come from abstinence ironically.

I also don't care what or who is trying to tear up my relations, toxic or not toxic, all people around me will be on a healing journey by default, or cut out of my life, for I am radiating that energy so brightly its impossible NOT to feel that pull.

I will drag your shadows into the light, and make your secrets spin from your lips into my consciousness. its not what I do but its what is design.

I make your weaknesses mountains to climb over. you cannot hide from these in my presence, I won't be this controlling or obsessive female who wants 24-7 attention as I have a life full of meaning without love or sex. I don't want to be wined, dined or expensively gifted, unless specially requested.

I don't want love letters or romantic declarations, this isn't some femnazi bullshit, but it triggers me. I appreciate the efforts and won't make you feel bad about your insecurities, for mine are probably 30 x more pronounced.

I appreciate small things, that most males won't or don't know how to do. like remembering things I've said and being thoughtful. or knowing my silence isn't personal, or a game, but a protective wall. I've had songs sung too me, guitars played, songs written, or things made in ways that are heartfelt. but I've always had them used against me too. so it is the context. I value time, energy, conversations of depth and reciprocal exchange. I also value trauma understanding, my alters and fragments being accepted and valued as me as a whole and a person who is not afraid, or scared of stupid stuff like sensitivity, emotions, feelings as raw as my own. men feel intensely too, lol.

but will only give oral sex 100 times before I don't recieve it, I can communicate now so that wouldn't happen.

but I won't be a bitch about this stuff. I am extremely feminine and care in ways other people, do not, I forget nothing people tell me, so it can be a reward or reverse uno card pull in a fight, but I am not evil or deviant in my relations. I react, depending on how you treat me. I don't need your money, or providing source of income to be okay as I am my own queen, however sharing resources is okay to build something. I don't need to be seduced, but will need to be shown a person is trustworthy.

few cross that.

that will always be time-endurance and testing. there are ground rules I don't play with, or play games. or like being forced or forged into something I'm not. I know abusive and I know safe, and I am a psychology expert, trained psychotherapist and study humans for fun, so I'll always be analysing things.

and I know red flags and I know ego, I know how to placate and please and pleasure, but will only do so, for a bigger and better reason than the mere act of seduction. which is without value and transactional to someone like me, I won't lie.

and I know every tactic in the book, for the book was written by someone like me, many lives ago, and my karma is being burnt for that book.

in terms of walls, I have many, may it be called a maze. or labrnyth.

I will teach you things you never thought you'd know, and change your life in ways you won't ever be able to go back to before. I will blow your mind, sexually, emotionally, intellectually, on all levels, and I'll make your friends and family love me.

I'll bring your walls down and you won't be able to understand this, because you don't understand me, and thats ok.

but I'll always understanding you and make your life better because thats what I do anyway, and people talk to me about things I will never share, as I keep secrets. I am jealous, of everything but, only because I am attached in a disorganised way, and working on that.(I won't even mention how man women or men don't know basic psychology of themselves). I also am a therapist , for my friends and family too.i should not be , but I am. I care, I listen, If you think I'm not listening, I'm still listening. sometimes I interrupt, because I have ADHD and I am horrible at resolute planning, or being "normal". but I don't want to be normal anyway. I need you to recognise and understand my shit, for that is what I do for everyone in my life, and I have helped more than I receive.

I'll probably accidentally give you therapy, but thats fine, because you will uncover your depths and find meaning in this. it's not something that goes bad unless you are fundamentally, evil, even the most abusive relationship I was in, was benefited from this process. yes he's still narcissistic, but he is self-aware. and did I benefit, never, just know the anatomy of self-proclaimed narc and I still can't hate him. will get my civil claim one day.

I will fuck your mind without meaning too. but thats because I fuck my own mind. but the meaning is made in the man- some find this highly offensive or personal (its not). I fuck minds by my own overthinking, or over perception on many levels of reality. so join the ride, or don't come along at all. because once the rollercoaster is in motion, I have no control of what may or may not happen. it's purely experimental.

I am experimental.

and the women who are judging me, are not any better.

look within, and shut the fuck up. self-improve and quit this jealous divide and conquer bitchiness. I HATE gossip, bitches, snitches and fakers.

I look to other women who are intellectually, physically and spiritually "individual". and find value in superior status to my own, which is something my narcissistic ex taught me.

I look for mentors, and teachers and people who will teach me how to improve myself, which I am fearful to reconnect after something is amazing and I can't give anything back of positive value. I am sorry I am working on that.

I won't devalue those below me, but I also need to be mutually benefiting from a relationship.

I dont drag people down, I may disappear if I feel I am doing this by mistake. I am flakey as fuck, and sorry for that. its anxiety and lack of perfectionism, so I am wrong and bad for this. I can change. will change.

if you can find value with my relation, personal professional or romantic, we can move into a symbiotic beneficial agreement based on mutual "terms". but many won't or cannot see this, nor do I impose my bullshit into the lives of randoms at this age.

I don't care if this is cruel, it's real.

I value loyalty, compassion, self-insight/awareness, someone who understands all parts-spirituality, metaphysics while still having intellectual & logical & analytical brain-sight.

I enjoy music, magick and learning new things.

I do not care about appearances I dont think ive dated based on one time. I do value connections and chemistry which is far-few between, I hate fakers. I smell insincerity miles away. but I do respect women who are well-presented, or beautiful, with hair beauty and makeup, I can't do this shit well, so I look up to those who are in professions who do it like art. I find them to be genius level queens who scare me.

I call out bad behaviour and make people uncomfortable if they are repressed. I will change you without even meaning too, I don't even need to date you. its just my presence, over time, amplified by the intensity of the dynamics.

I don't want simplicity, but I also don't need over complexity.

I value passion, independence, creativity, curiosity, problem-solving, deep-disscussions, shared adventures and some occasional risk-taking (lol), sensuality and sexuality for a common cause beyond physical pleasure. I like being taught but not micromanaged. I need my own independence, and need to be trusted with that. I hate being scolded for that like a child, or being pushed to change my ways to conform to societal values. which I will push back and refuse to do. which is not healthy. I don't adult like many others do, but I try to proceed in other ways. and learn to adult like normal people, accept me.

I also value myself, and how I can be celebrated, enhanced and improved vs. the opposite.

I give space, and have boundaries, and understand human psychology, sexuality and relationships in ways few others unless they are trained, can do.

I value MY time. so you can have space to value YOURS. I dont need to be in anyones pocket for a long time. I love being alone, and being around people who are stimulating, but draining people will be drained out of my life quicker than I intend. I am sorry for the people who felt I disappeared, when I was only trying to be 'fair', if I feel I'm a bad influence, I will work on myself until I'm not. I'm still working on it.

I also use this psychology awareness, to enhance communication, connection. you may or may not become an accidental guinea pig. I will be upfront that I am experimental, but that is part of the buy ticket and take the ride. lets work together. not apart.

I am coming from a place of love, and love is what I feel for my animals, which you will be adopting as children.which I want to stop experiments being done on. I love love, in all ways, but hate cruelty of animals and children, violence and suffering. I dont advocate justice, because I find life is fucking cruel, unfair and unjust. by default, so I focus on myself. what can be changed, and what I am able to do in my own locus on control. I will always find myself drawn to the outsiders, the misfits, the vagabonds, the misunderstood. I want to help people who are society, or socially, disadvantaged by trauma and mental illness, but only when I have ability to help myself.

it's a journey.

I will not date anyone who is cruel to animals, outside of specify magical sacrifice, there is not any place for that. nor will I date or fraternise with anything or anyone linked or associated with pedophilia. I won't judge anyone on anything that are outside animal cruelty and pedophilia. I don't and haven't. I keep on good terms with every ex, bar 1 whom I only apologised too this year. it felt good to do that. I change my behaviour.

I am open, but also highly attuned to both logical, factual, empirical , scientific worlds, and spiritual, intuitive, psychic and the "collective unconscious". I walk in both these realms, and I am "conventionally attractive". which puts a lot of pressure on me, to be "stupid". I am always dumbing myself down to fit into normality, but I look ridiculous if I do that so I peacock my intellect.

only to be misconceived.

I give up because I no longer care how anyone but MYSELF can see ME. I won't dumb myself down , but I can enhance you UP. prepare yourself for graded education, evolution and self-growth on mass scales.sorry not sorry.

that sucks for the people who want to be living vicariously through me, for making up to lost trauma years, for family who sold me out for the success I'd bring home, or fake trauma enmeshed friends, or whatever they want or need from me. I value my time and energy, and have given that in abundance, and if you want to be with nut only "one part of me that is alters". I can't provide that now. not sorry.

I have to work on something or not be in a dynamic at all.

I no longer can switch on demand to adapt for you, it will not be effective and that upsets a lot of people. especially now I'm sober. harder to handle this, as I see the world for its ways and why it is, more vividly. I haven't had alcohol for almost 2 months, although, I could drink, I haven't.

I can't do it, anymore. it, being, faking, my selves fronting to impress. I can't. I have no more left to give, and I'm expected by everyone to be a way I can't do it in the way they want.

I will go to another year long outpatient DBT, followed by 10 weeks of A-C-T therapy, and however many ECT OR TMS may or may not help. I'm told it won't (ect) work. but TMS, is something I am open too. but I am telling you, none of this psychotherapy, that will be based on dbt skills, day therapy, intensive skills training, recommencing my studying, and resuming "life worth living" will or can wipe the traumas I've "recovered" memories for.

I will also shut the fuck up, and tell nobody about this if you leave me alone, I told that to my family, and this is open letter to the watchers, stalkers and perps who read this openly as I track the hits on here and have 200+ visits a day every day for the last month. globally. no idea how or who you are but I think its the same people who called the police for the "ayreon song lyrics" seen to be a suicide not last October.

thanks for that wake up call, I have shut the fuck up, since December, more so now. I will burn the journals, or lock them up.

my recovery is not linear, not yet fully integrated and I trust nobody so I don't think my psychotherapy will be deep, I focus on things like ADHD AND my EDNOS. and dbt skills. I won't be talking about sexual traumas.

enjoy the update, and thanks for the "attention".

I have my goals, my work, my meaning and what my life should and could and will look like, but I will not share that with anyone. that means everyone right now.

I've been tested, traumatised and terrorised to the point of not-tolerant of anyone who may bring that back, and banish the fuck out of my sphere every moment I need.

take me as I am, or watch me as I go, which I will go, where I am not wanted I will remove myself, but I will find where I am celebrated because I create that.

I will rise up against all adversity every time but that is survival and that created a resilient and brave woman, in me. who will not be destroyed or decomposed by humans who are fundamentally fucking evil.

I gift you my truth, in progression, and give up the pain of the past.

[storytime-with-moth]

Modern Sokka character breakdown - use how you like!

Sokka - a himbo jock with a heart of gold. The smartest idiot you will ever meet. Is a dog person obvi.

Sokka is a problem solver/macgyver type person, probably has ADHD or Dyslexia or both. He gets hyper focused on things and easily frustrated with others. Gifted with learning disabilities always makes for interesting and wild people.

He would probably study engineering or bio engineering (making better prosthetics probably, working with his buddy Teo) Loves school, tests poorly. He used to get horrible stage fright for presentation but over time has gotten a bit better. (He still freaks out a little before every one)

He is a mad genius but also a young person with attention deficit so that excess energy has to go somewhere. (so SPORTS!) Hockey, Water polo, or Rugby seem like his kind of sports. They are all battle field sports that involving fighting and strategy. And Sokka is a genuinely good guy. He had to grow up early because of his mothers death so he sincerely cares about his team and looks after their safety. But if the other team ever starts to play dirty and hurts his team, (his family) “the gloves” are off.

He would be one of those people doing stupid shit at a party very drunk one minute and the second someone gets hurt or there is an emergency of any kind he sobers up and handles it with all the seriousness required. He’s the guy with the plan after all. The guy who switches very quickly from a goofball charmer to the fierce protector.

He would refuse to join a frat because of the house attitude towards women and in his later years he would live off campus maybe rooming with his sister or a certain brooding prince with a scar. Is the guy who walks/drives the girls and the gays home from parties. He probably refers to Katara, Aang and Toph as his ducklings or "the kids” and would go to freshmen parties (even though he’s over it) just to make sure they never got into too much trouble.

Suki re taught him sex ed when they were dating (including all the fun LGBT stuff that high school left out) she also took him to his first pride parade (which he loved) after they split because friends made more sense when making out wasn’t as fun as it used to be, he started to explore his sexuality figuring out that he was Bi.

He would still have some hangups about not being enough to protect those he loves Yue (whatever tragic Yue past enter here) and his Mom. More so than physically protect, his biggest flaw in a relationship would be trying to make everything okay, trying to shield his partner from mental turmoil and negative people. But that can be overbearing and at the end of the day impossible. He will have to learn how to listen to his partner for their needs and support as asked instead of trying to stop things before they happen. The world is not on fire Sokka just hasn’t caught on.

In this world Sokka probably deals with GAD (generalized anxiety) his coping mechanisms (including unleahty ones) would be

Running/working out

Hyper focusing on a project (even an unimportant one like painting the house or hanging up frame, not just school stuff)

Making lists and schedules

Re checking that things are in order and the oven is off or their plane hasn’t left yet

Ignoring and procrastinating on things he doesn’t like

Doodling and drawing

He doodles haikus to subtlety settle his brain in public when panicking (the counting of the syllables is calming)

He would have panic or anxiety attacks but not nearly as much as when he was 18 and young.

Would be the type of guy comfortable with his masculinity that he would wear a crop top and a skirt while skateboarding. One to make the homophobes uncomfortable and two because he just likes how he looks.

People assume he’s a bit of a player and must sleep around a lot so people looking for a fling or hook-up are drawn towards him and people looking for something serious never take him seriously.

He always makes the first move (dive in head first mothertruckers) is a flirt who really just wants to fall in love.