#not that i thought op was lying /gen. thought it meant like for me but then i researched abt the guy and was like wait theyre actually trans

[tired-lamb]

yooo I’m a funky little (well, more like long) creature!! dunno if this was supposed to say anything about ourselves but I’d say this is somewhat accurate, haha. loved being assigned this eel tho. after doing some research turns out they ARE indeed trans :D!

go take my new quiz! :D

[randomstuffhewwo]

Tone Indicators, a Masterlist

Tone indicators are shorthand for words used to convey tone, which the Cambridge Dictionary defines as "a quality in the voice that expresses the speaker's feelings or thoughts". Tone can do so much to change the meaning and implications of a sentence. The intended use of tone indicators is in text, and they are prevalent on social media where miscommunication is rife, and posts and messages are often misinterpreted. Tone can be especially difficult to parse for neurodivergent people. This is not to say that neurotypical people never misunderstand tone through text, or even face-to-face, because they do — but that neurodivergent people may experience and interpret tone differently. They are simply paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. They can also be called written shorthand for the poster’s (OP's) intent and emotion.

It's entirely too easy to use them, simply use them after, or even before, the sentence that you wish to clarify. "Can you explain this for me? /gen"

I'm going to make a masterlist of all the tone indicators I've seen so far, adding some that aren't in popular usage, some I personally use with my friends, some that I believe should exist, under the cut. In some cases, I've seen multiple versions of the tone indicator, in which case I've put the more popular one first (at least by what I've seen).

Tone Indicators I've Seen Popularly Used

/j: joking "i'll have to deactivate my account now /j"

/hj: half-joking "we should definitely date /hj"

/s, /sarc, /sarcasm: sarcasm "i absolutely love being sad /s"

/srs: serious "i'm just so very tired /srs"

/nsrs: not serious "my leg's hurting a little bit but i'm okay /nsrs"

/g: genuine statement "i'm thankful that you're talking to me right now /g"

/lh: light-hearted "isn't is spelled 'unnecessary'? /lh"

/nm: not really mad or upset "i think you got that fact wrong /nm"

/pos, /pc: positive connotation "the movie's back on for tomorrow! /pos"

/neg, /nc: negative connotation "i have work tomorrow /neg"

/ly, /l: lyrics "she's a, she's a lady, and i am just a boy /ly"

/p: platonic "i just want to hug you /p"

/gen: genuine question "are you okay with me talking right now? /gen"

/t: teasing "it seems your sense of humour is horrible /t"

Tone Indicators I Haven't Seen Popularly, but I Have Seen, and Also Sometimes Use

/ref: reference "it's like none pizza with left beef /ref"

/nbh: nobody here, for vague mentioning "i'm just so angry at someone /nbh"

/r: romantic "i really want to cuddle with you right now /r"

/sx, /x: sexual intent (Used for sexual innuendos, or similar hinting)

/nsx, /nx: non-sexual intent (Used to clarify the lack of any such sexual intent in a statement)

/m: metaphorical "i was just swept away by a wave /m"

/li: literal "the fish was as big as my torso /li"

/ij: inside joke "it's a whale on dry land /ij"

/rh, /rt: rhetorical "who even cares? /rh"

/hyp: hyperbole (exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally) "i've told her ten thousand times to stop playing that song /hyp"

/c: copypasta (a block of text which is copied and pasted across the Internet by individuals through online forums and social networking websites)

/f: fake "i saw this post yesterday /f", which could be accompanied by an edited or modified post

/th: threat "i will get you to read that book /th"

/cb: clickbait "this website saved my life! /cb"

Tone Indicators I Use With My Friends, or Believe Should Be Mainstream

/a: affectionate "you're a bitch /a"

/q: quote "get up, get up, there are worlds to conquer /q"

/nf: not forced "do you want to go out with me today? /nf"

/pa: passive-aggressive "looks like someone has been talking to someone else behind my back /pa"

/npa: not passive-aggressive "i think someone has stolen my pen /npa"

[tsarisfanfiction]

Relax (Tales From The Heart)

Fandom: One Piece Rating: Gen Warnings: None Characters: Uni, Law, Shachi, Penguin

There were some perks to having their captain also being their doctor. That is, unless you weren't a fan of doctors in which case the compulsory check-ups were a nightmare. Members of the Heart Pirates very quickly got over any reluctance to see their captain, because with his Scan he could tell if they were hiding anything and corner them anyway. It was far simpler to instigate the meetings.

Every so often, the crew were subjected to various forms of massage as part of the check-ups. Many of them relied on their bodies remaining limber and agile for their techniques, and being trapped inside for days at a time with minimal training opportunities left them often tensing up, which Law saw as something that required additional treatment. While never trained as a masseuse, the combination of his medical knowledge and the Ope Ope no Mi meant he quickly picked up on which muscles needed the most attention to suit that particular nakama's fighting style.

It wasn't until Uni joined the crew that anything changed. Health check-ups, occasional massage, then back to whatever they'd been doing prior to the summons.

"Who treats you?" he asked his captain after his first check up with the crew, slowly sitting up to zip his boiler suit closed.

"I'm the doctor," Law pointed out, busying himself with reorganising the infirmary before he summoned the next member of the crew.

"Yes, but you can't massage your own back," Uni pointed out, only to be struck dumb when Law simply cut off his own hands with his fruit and waved them around, tapping his own back to prove a point.

New to the crew, Uni accepted that his captain's abilities were weird and left, not wanting to do anything out of line, only to be collared by Shachi outside the door.

"He won't let anyone else touch him because none of us know what we're doing," the ginger had told him, sending a fondly exasperated look at the infirmary behind them. "Using his own abilities when it's supposed to be relaxing sounds stupid to me but hey, what can we do. Unless we get hold of a masseuse somewhere that he trusts, he's going to keep contradicting himself." The long-suffering tone of voice implied that Shachi had tried to get hold of someone before, to no avail.

"My Mum suffered from tense muscles a lot," Uni confided, seeing a loophole and determined to exploit it if Shachi, one of the senior members of the crew, would be on his side. "I had to learn."

"Seriously?" Shachi squawked, gripping him by the shoulders and invading his personal space. The peak of his hat nudged at Uni's lower jaw as he looked up at him intently. "You mean, you can…"

"I don't know how to convince him," Uni shrugged. "I'm just new."

"You're nakama," Shachi said firmly, pulling away to grab at a passing crewmate. "Oi, Penguin. Apparently Uni here knows massage stuff. Want to help collar the captain?"

"You even have to ask?" Penguin responded, tilting his head back slightly to look at Uni for himself. "He hasn't let himself relax at all in a week, and even that wasn't great when he did. This is way past due." He barged straight into the infirmary, Shachi hot on his heels. Uni trailed along behind, entering the room just in time to hear his name mentioned.

And that was how Uni found himself under heavy scrutiny of his captain's eyes for the second time that day.

"Shachi is under the impression you can do a better massage job than me," Law commented, sounding amused. Uni gave a helpless shrug, not sure if he was allowed to consider himself more competent at something medical than his doctor-captain. "I suppose there's only one way to find out." The words were hesitant but the tone was inviting as the captain shrugged off his hoodie, revealing numerous tattoos Uni hadn't known he had.

"Go on," Shachi encouraged, giving Uni's back a nudge. Law had positioned himself on the bed, lying on his stomach with his cheek resting on his overlapping hands. He was quick to obey, eyeing the straining muscles dubiously before another encouraging gesture from the ginger had him lightly laying his hands on his captain's back, just above the tattoo of their jolly roger. He felt the muscles briefly seize up further at the touch, and faltered. Even with Shachi and Penguin backing him up, and his captain's consent, he felt as if he was crossing a line that shouldn't be touched.

"It's not too late to change your mind," his captain spoke. For all that his body felt like it was about to bolt, Law's tone was open and relaxed.

"It's fine," Shachi added, perching on the edge of the bed with a hand resting gently on his captain's elbow. Penguin mirrored the action on the other side. "Relax." Uni wasn't entirely certain which of them they were talking to; while Law's muscles didn't budge, after several long seconds he let a stream of air escape his lungs before cocking his head to look back over his shoulder, at Uni. Realising that there was no point hesitating, he finally began to apply the pressure.

As he'd thought, Law was totally tense. It took every trick in his repertoire to work out the kinks in the muscles before soothing them into something far healthier. Shachi moved away from the arm he was touching so that Uni could properly work on the muscles there, followed by the other arm as Penguin did the same. Neither returned to their previous positions, content to watch from the side of the bed, and Uni felt a bit like he'd passed a test.

By the time Uni considered himself almost finished, there was silence in the room, the only sound the friction between his hands and his captain's skin. Muffled groans and sighs from his captain had ceased after a while, and as he eventually stood back, finished, he saw why.

Eyes closed and breathing even, Law had fallen asleep. Shachi and Penguin drew Uni into a triumphant (quiet) high five before pulling a blanket up over their captain and removing his hat to reveal his untamed hair.

"Thanks," Penguin said quietly, guiding him out of the infirmary and leaving Shachi behind, not that the ginger seemed to care as he took a seat by the occupied bed and withdrew a magazine from his suit. "Captain needed that. What say you we make this a habit?"

Uni glanced down at his hands, remembering how tough the muscles had been and how much stress had been piled on those shoulders.

"Sounds good to me."

[hollywoodjuliorivas]

What We’re Fighting For By PHIL KLAYFEB. 10, 2017 Continue reading the main storyShare This Page Share Tweet Email More Save 108 Photo United States Army soldiers transported Iraqi detainees captured during Operation Steel Curtain in 2005. Credit Jehad Nga When his convoy was ambushed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, First Lt. Brian Chontosh ordered his Humvee driver to head straight into the oncoming machine gun fire. They punched through, landing in a trench full of heavily armed Iraqi soldiers. Lieutenant Chontosh and his Marines leapt out and he ran down the trench firing away, dropping one enemy soldier after another. First his rifle jammed, then he ran out of ammunition, so he switched to his pistol. He shot it dry, reloaded, and shot it dry again. So he picked up an AK-47 from a dead Iraqi, fired that dry, picked up another AK, fired that dry, picked up a rocket-propelled grenade, fired it, and led the group back to the Humvee, their attack having almost completely cleared the trench. Almost. One Iraqi was playing dead, fiddling with the pin of a grenade. Lieutenant Chontosh had no ammo, but on the ground were a couple of M-16 rounds from when his rifle had jammed. He grabbed one, loaded, and before the Iraqi could pull the pin, Lieutenant Chontosh locked eyes with him and shot him dead. All told, according to the journalist Phil Zabriskie’s account of the ambush in “The Kill Switch,” Lieutenant Chontosh had killed about two dozen people that day. When I was a new Marine, just entering the Corps, this story from the Iraq invasion defined heroism for me. It’s a perfect image of war for inspiring new officer candidates, right in line with youthful notions of what war is and what kind of courage it takes — physical courage, full stop. We thought it was a shame more Americans didn’t know the story. But after spending 13 months in Iraq, after seeing violence go down not because we managed to increase our lethality but because we improved our ability to work with Iraqis, I became convinced that there were other stories of war equally important for Americans to understand. And as we look at a president who claims that he wants to “fight fire with fire” in the battle against jihadism, I think back to the stories that defined, for me, what it meant to be an American at war, and the reasons I was proud to wear the uniform. Continue reading the main story ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story I was sent to Iraq in January 2007 with a logistics unit, the sort unlikely to engage in Chontosh-style heroics. We managed the key parts of an army people often forget about: truck drivers, engineers, explosive disposal specialists, postal workers — and, crucially, doctors. Midway through my deployment a Marine arrived on base with severe wounds. He’d been shot by an enemy sniper, and the medical staff swarmed around his body, working frantically, skillfully, but it wasn’t enough. He died on the table. Normally, there’d be a moment of silence, of prayer, but the team got word that the man who killed this young Marine, the insurgent sniper, would be arriving a few minutes later. That dead Marine’s squadmates had engaged the sniper in a firefight, shot him a couple of times, patched him up, bandaged him and called for a casualty evacuation to save the life of the man who’d killed their friend. So he arrived at our base. And the medical staff members, still absorbing the blow of losing a Marine, got to work. They stabilized their enemy and pumped him full of American blood, donated from the “walking blood bank” of nearby Marines. The sniper lived. And then they put him on a helicopter to go to a hospital for follow-up care, and one of the Navy nurses was assigned to be his flight nurse. He told me later of the strangeness of sitting in the back of a helicopter, watching over his enemy lying peacefully unconscious, doped up on painkillers, while he kept checking the sniper’s vitals, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, a heartbeat that was steady and strong thanks to the gift of blood from the Americans this insurgent would have liked to kill. This wasn’t just a couple of Marines and sailors making the right decision. These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage in the way Lieutenant Chontosh’s acts were acts of exceptional moral courage. This was standard policy, part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure that their conduct respected what he called “the rights of humanity,” so that their restraint “justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.” Photo American soldiers outside Mosul, Iraq, in 2008. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times From our founding we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldiers. It starts with the oath they swear to support and defend the Constitution, an oath made not to a flag, or to a piece of ground, or to an ethnically distinct people, but to a set of principles established in our founding documents. An oath that demands a commitment to democracy, to liberty, to the rule of law and to the self-evident equality of all men. The Marines I knew fought, and some of them died, for these principles. That’s why those Marines were trained to care for their enemy. That’s why another Marine gave his own blood to an insurgent. Because America is an idea as much as a country, and so those acts defend America as surely as any act of violence, because they embody that idea. That nurse, in the quiet, alone with that insurgent, with no one looking as he cared for his patient. That was an act of war. After I left the Marine Corps, I met a veteran named Eric Fair. He was quiet. He wrote strange and affecting stories about guilt and alienation, and at first he didn’t tell me much about his past. Only over time did I learn that he’d been an Army Arabic linguist before Sept. 11, and then had signed up as a contractor and gone to Abu Ghraib prison in January 2004, all things he would later write about in his memoir “Consequence.” Back then Abu Ghraib was a mess, he told me. Thousands of Iraqis, some of them insurgents, plenty of them innocent civilians caught up in the post-invasion chaos, and far too few qualified interrogators to sort it out. And the information they were seeking — it was literally life or death. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story So Eric began crossing lines. Not legal lines — he followed the rules. But moral lines, personal lines, lines where it was clear that he wasn’t treating the people in his interrogation booth like human beings. One time, it was with a boy captured with car batteries and electronic devices. The boy said his father used the batteries for fishing, an explanation that Eric found absurd. So, he used the approved techniques. Light slaps, stress positions. The boy eventually broke and, weeping, told Eric about a shop where his father delivered the electronics. When a unit was sent to raid the shop, it found half a dozen partly assembled car bombs. “It was an enormous adrenaline rush,” he told me. He’d used techniques he now considers torture and, he thought, saved lives. So, naturally, he kept using them. There were a large number of detainees caught with car batteries, all of them with the same story about fishing. With them, Eric would go right to the techniques designed to humiliate, to degrade, to make people suffer until they tell you what you want to hear. But Eric didn’t get any more results. No more car bomb factories. Just a lot of broken, weeping detainees. Eventually, he told a fellow contractor the ridiculous fishing story, and how he wasn’t falling for it, and the contractor told him: “Of course they fish with car batteries. I used to do it in Georgia.” The electric charge stuns the fish, a simple method for an easy meal. Sign Up for the Opinion Today Newsletter Every weekday, get thought-provoking commentary from Op-Ed columnists, the Times editorial board and contributing writers from around the world. Sign Up Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services. SEE SAMPLE MANAGE EMAIL PREFERENCES PRIVACY POLICY Eric isn’t sure how many innocent Iraqis he hurt. All he knows is how easy it was for him to cross the line. Just as with that wounded insurgent there was a codified set of procedures set in place to help guide Marines and Navy medical personnel to make moral choices, choices they could tell their children and grandchildren about without shame, for Eric, there was a codified set of procedures beckoning him to take actions that he now feels condemn him. He doesn’t even have the consolation of feeling that he saved lives. Sure, they found a car bomb factory, but Abu Ghraib was a turning point. In 2003, thousands of Iraqi soldiers had begun surrendering to the United States, confident they’d be treated well. That’s thousands of soldiers we didn’t have to fight to the death because of the moral reputation of our country. Abu Ghraib changed things. Insurgent attacks increased, support for the sectarian leader Moktada al-Sadr surged, and 92 percent of Iraqis claimed they saw coalition forces as occupiers rather than liberators or peacekeepers. WikiLeaks later released a United States assessment that detainee mistreatment at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo was “the single most important motivating factor” convincing foreign jihadists to wage war, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal said, “In my experience, we found that nearly every first-time jihadist claimed Abu Ghraib had first jolted him to action.” Our moral reputation had started killing American soldiers. ADVERTISEMENT Continue reading the main story So, yeah, they found a car bomb factory. Once. Eric has a relationship to his war that’s much different from mine. Yet we were in the same war. And Eric did what our nation asked of him, used techniques that were vetted and approved and passed down to intelligence operatives and contractors like himself. Lawyers at the highest levels of government had been consulted, asked to bring us to the furthest edge of what the law might allow. To do what it takes, regardless of whether such actions will secure the “attachment of all good men,” or live up to that oath we swear to support and defend the Constitution. What to make of that oath, anyway? The Constitution seems to mean different things at different times and places — whether in my unit’s dusty little combat hospital, or in Eric’s interrogation booth, or in a stadium where a crowd cheers a presidential candidate vowing to torture his nation’s enemies. We live in a democracy, so that document can be bent and twisted and re-formed to mean whatever we want it to. If we choose to believe in a morally diminished America, an America that pursues its narrow selfish interests and no more, we can take that course and see how far it gets us. But if we choose to believe that America is not just a set of borders, but a set of principles, we need to act accordingly. That is the only way we ensure that our founding document, and the principles embedded within, are alive enough, and honorable enough, to be worth fighting for. Which brings me back to Brian Chontosh, that man with such incredible skill at killing for his country. Years after I left the Corps I was surprised to learn that he didn’t really put much stock in his exceptional kill count. He told Mr. Zabriskie this about killing: “It’s ugly, it’s violent, it’s disgusting. I wish it wasn’t part of what we had to do.” When people ask him if he’s proud of what he did, he answers: “I’m not proud of killing a whole lot of people. That doesn’t make sense to me. I’m proud of who I am today because I think I’ve done well. I think I’ve been honorable. I’ve been successful for my men, for the cause, for what’s right.” 108 COMMENTS Brian Chontosh doesn’t dwell on the dead, but he does wonder whether there were times when, perhaps, he need not have killed. One of these is that last soldier in the trench. He’ll remember him, trying to pretend he’s dead but wiggling a bit. “It’s not a haunting image,” he told Mr. Zabriskie. “It’s just — man. I wonder. I wonder if I would have just freaking grabbed the dude. Grabbed his hand, thrown the grenade away or something. I could have got him some medical treatment.” If he had, then that enemy soldier would have ended up with a unit like mine, surrounded by doctors and nurses and Navy corpsmen who would have cared for him in accordance with the rules of law. They would have treated him well, because they’re American soldiers, because they swore an oath, because they have principles, because they have honor. And because without that, there’s nothing worth fighting for. Phil Klay is the author of the short-story collection “Redeployment.” Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion), and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.