#like it’s so validating to see

[stillthesunkenstars]

the latest chapter of and they became monsters the fall of great men had me going ough

[egophiliac]

he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!

PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE

[chloesimaginationthings]

There's doomed yuri... in my FNAF ruin?

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[giantkillerjack]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plain-text version:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[iridescentmirrorsgenshin]

the blocking of the alhaitham and kaveh reveal scene is so funny to me, because the scene shows alhaitham and kaveh getting closer to where candace, the traveller and paimon will be overhearing them but the framing of it is just so... ???

the only reason given for this is that candace overhears a 'private' conversation, and the whole time alhaitham and kaveh are shown talking, they are seen walking farther away from the main streets, to stand behind crates in order to have said private conversation

when describing all the instances of candace's visions, alhaitham says that it's common to see people having a private conversation in a secluded place, meaning that description aligns with what he and kaveh were doing, because, yeah!! It was!!! They were shown walking away from surrounding people to talk behind some crates, out of sight

And when candace and the traveller jump out to approach the potential suspects, it’s framed as them interrupting something, like the shot is so tight, kaveh is visually confused and alhaitham has to turn his head 180 degrees like an owl

to me this is so funny?? kaveh ran into alhaitham by chance in port ormos and they both started walking aimlessly to go to a more secluded place to talk, like they didn’t even have to think about it

when alhaitham goes to leave, he walks in the opposite direction, meaning that he was working but took to aimlessly wandering around with kaveh in order to talk about mehrak and listening to kaveh’s theories of it gaining consciousness, im thinking,,, fond

[drenched-in-sunlight]

mom vs dad incantation class

(also no thought… just Marika with her little daughters)

[cup-o-stars]

Last part for old GF sketches

(Actually, most of these aren't old at all, but their average is brought down by the last picture, which I drew back in August and kept forgetting to post)

[shummthechumm]

NICKELODEON/BACKYARDIGANS OFFICIAL HIRE ME I CAN HELP YOU!!!!

[cube-cumb3r]

while im at it neopronoun opposition is weird to me as a swedish person.. the whole debate is so anglocentric that they assume every language landed on the same solution they did, to reuse a plural pronoun as a gender neutral one and then they think any other solution is absurd or unheard of. what do you mean you just made another pronoun up you cant do that!! etc

coz its like here in the 2014 the swedish academy accepted 3rd person pronoun "hen" (as opposed to hon/han) like officially into our word list after it gained some popularity in the 2010s. like that is a NEOPRONOUN that someone just Came Up With in like the 60s and then people just started using it and now its just a recognized part of our language. sure we could've also reused our plural pronoun "de/dem" as a gender neutral one but we just made up a new one instead. and to like imply that mainstream use of a neopronoun is just UNHEARD OF and that neopronouns is something the mainstream could NEVER GET USED TO EVER!!! is... your perspective is very limited to the english speaking world is all i can say

[hyacinthsdiamonds]

I'm sorry but the irony of Nico calling Max unprofessional is sending me so bad like sir there's an entire garage full of people, who were literally in the trenches trying to survive the Brocedes fallout while just doing their jobs, who might have a few things to say about your (& Lewis') level of professionalism at that time 😭✋️

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[shwarmii]

i just heard one of my favorite youtubers say this meme out loud in a video and the pronounciation FLOORED ME so now i gotta know:

poll is just "which way do you say it"; tags is "which way is right", assuming your answer to "which way is right" is different to "which way do you say it". or i guess tags are also for uhhhhhh if your answer is complicated and if you wanna explain, if you have a diff way of pronouncing (pls tell meeeee), or whatever else you want, im not your parents, idk

[heymacy]

IAN GALLAGHER + his journey with bipolar disorder

╰┈➤ “At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you’re living with this illness and functioning at all, it’s something to be proud of, not ashamed of." - Carrie Fisher

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

not enough discussion about the gavins' complicated relationship with feminine-coded/beauty products, i don't think.

[deimosatellite]

like idk it just seems actually nefarious to take one of the very few widely known instances of queerness in older history being a symbol to show queer people that we've always existed and aren't alone for CENTURIES and taking away the queerness from it. like. i know some people say that ''the queerness isnt important in the book" which i mean in my opinion i could go off for 10k words in an essay as to how basil's love for dorian is integral to the story BUT EVEN APART from that its really just. having a real explicitly queer character in such an old and widely regarded classic novel is HUGE for queer history and this is just. literally like. its 2024. why are you doing queer erasure to DORIAN GRAY