#round 4 would be fucking slenderman again

[cockinator3000]

hey! what does it mean if sometimes when youre trying to fall asleep you keep seeing and hearing things that feel pretty real and most of the time the things in question are just reall scary nightmares but im likee half awake and conscious but also not like if i fall asleep theyll fucking get me and im sitting there thinking what the fuck are you talking ab but every time i close my eyes the if i fall asleep theyll fucking get me thougjts overtake me and suddenly i start hearing little girls saying some sort of variation of "im gonna get youuu 😝👻😝👻👻👻😝😝😝" and then i start jerking my body to wake up because for whatever reason i get PARALYSED??? when the visions come to me???? anyway so i start jerking my body so that they dont get me and then i realise that whatever the hell just happened was just a dream and then i try to fall asleep but it happens AGAIN and i cant fawking sleep unless i do something else first. lile what im doing now. everything that i typed JUST happened and im typing this out to get it ouf of my system in hopes of proper sleep.

the other time this happened some disembodied lady head with a kind of warped oni mask was saying the exact same thing those damn little girls were saying

saying some "im gonna get youuuu😝😝😝👻👻👻👻" shit fuck offff pleaaasseeee 😭😭😭

.....ive been awake since 5 a.m and its 7:30 am now

[thewhovianperson]

It's round six of my doctor who companions with each doctor series, which means we have Ben and Polly, another couple that I absolutely refuse to separate. So without further ado, let's get down to business to defeat... The Faceless Ones?

1: Ben and Polly would have pretty much the same reaction to One as Ian and Barbara did, that is to say bemusement crossed with slight horror occasionally. However as they'd click with Susan I think One would be more amicable to them. Standout story for Ben would be The Reign of Terror, and Polly would be brilliant in Planet of the Giants, purely for her resourcefulness.

2: Hot take but we needed more stories with Ben, Polly, and Jamie because this TARDIS Team had some class A antics. Also they deserve a better goodbye than the one they got (even if The Faceless Ones is an absolute banger). I'd love to see them with later 2, where his mysterious side comes out, and I think the Land of Fiction would be an interesting time for them.

3: Three, Ben and Polly would make strange bedfellows, but I think it could work sometimes. Polly would probably find Three exasperating at times, but Ben would fit right in with the UNIT family, and I think that both would have major respect for Three after their reaction to The Silurians.

4: This would essentially be Two, Ben, and Polly dialed up to eleven (and I don't mean the Doctor's incarnation, okay yes, that too, but one doctor at a time). Honestly this grouping would be pretty cool, and the crazy vibe would be off the charts. Polly would 100% build a crazy weedkiller that saved the world in The Seeds of Doom.

5: Young, (probably) gay (I headcanon Ben as bi and Polly as an ally), but with them on board, the team size would be way too high. They'd get swallowed in the mix, and Polly and Tegan would definitely clash.

6: They would be upset by Sixes arrogance, as they'd have largely avoided 1's, this would be their first pairing with an incredibly arrogant doctor. However as Six mellowed out they'd enjoy their trips and definitely establish a strong rapport together.

7: As soon as Seven put one of them in danger the other would slap the shit out of them. That being said you can't tell me that Ben and Polly wouldn't cause an equal amount of devastation to the Daleks as Ace did in Remembrance. Honestly I'd love to see a "what if" style episode with them in there.

8: "Ben and Polly travel the universe with a romantic queer who teaches them about the beauty of the stars" is a premise I can 100% get behind.

War: I feel like in the early stages of The Time War this duo would do well because of their resourcefulness and ability to work well under duress. They'd definitely help War with some of the more difficult aspects of the Time War, but they're only human. I can't see them surviving after the big players actually pulled out the meaningful weapons.

9: Ben is a post war sailor, who probably fought in Korea, and 100% knows about trauma from battles. Imagine if you would, a scenario in which the Autons are in 1966, and 9 meets these two flatting together. Polly would pull some gymnastics movements out of nowhere, antiplastic would be spilt, and then Ben would offer Nine the journey of a lifetime... to a therapist's office.

10: This has the same vibe as 10 had with Martha and Donna in my head, so essentially fuck yes this would work.

11: Matt literally modelled his character after 2's, and considering they went so well together this grouping would too. 11 occasionally gets a little darker than 2 did when they were with them, but I think they'd vibe for the most part. If they can deal with hypnoBen and giant sentient crabs, they can deal with Slenderman and co.

12: If you can survive 1 you can survive 12 (unless you're Bill), so 12's grumpiness wouldn't hurt them too much. Assuming they were with the end of 11's tenure too, I think that having the Paternoster Gang to help them through the change would be good too. They might clash over Ben's occupation a little bit though.

13: Thirteen seems to need an emotional support family, so hell yeah these two would do well. I would also love the implication that they're technically older than Graham but also younger, I can see that being the butt of one or three jokes between them. Honestly considering their age and time period, this group would be amazing.

Ruth: I've said it before on this post and I'll say it again: Ben and Polly are some of the most resourceful companions The Doctor has ever had. As long as they were alright with a Doc who essentially wakes up and seems to choose violence each morning, I think they'd do well.

[chloemill]

On what I’ve been up to the last nine years

I have always been obsessed with food. It seems silly, honestly, to be obsessed with something that’s a basic human necessity. Food, water, shelter. Too bad there aren’t water disorders or I’d be all over that. Alcoholism, I guess, is a liquid-based disorder? This is getting dark quickly but I guess we should all know what we’re getting into with this one, shouldn’t we.

So, yeah, I’ve always been obsessed with food. I have alarmingly clear memories of food from childhood, and the sad(dest) part is most of it’s not even real fucking food, it’s like, cartoon food. I could probably describe every illustration from the Berenstain Bears installment where the dad bear and the kid bears randomly decide to go balls to the fucking wall and just mainline junk food until the mom bear is like “what the fuck is going on here” and gives them all apples or some shit and then everyone chills the fuck out. The pizza in A Goofy Movie when Goofy and Max randomly stop at a themed motel and the kids eat pizza while Goofy and Pete share what I remember to be a vaguely sexual moment in the hot tub? (There was definitely at LEAST a questionable power dynamic at play.) The kid at school whose weird helicopter mom came at lunch and hand-delivered her McDonald’s nuggets to the playground. Bake sales in the second grade - the cookies and brownies and “nachos” that were just round Tostitos with that terrifying and delicious fake cheese sauce that still honestly casts a spell twenty years later. It wasn’t quite normal, but as a kid, I didn’t think twice. When your parents are feeding you and your brain is the size of a baseball, you just kind of roll with the punches and settle for buying as much crap as possible at the bake sale with the two bucks your mom gave you. Shortly after I finished elementary school, actually, I think they stopped having bake sales as fundraisers because the school was trying to promote healthy eating. Go figure.

In high school we were allowed to go off campus for lunch and once or twice a week my sainted mother would give me money to buy lunch. It very rapidly became the bi-weekly Let’s See How Much Shit We Can Stuff In Our Body For Ten Dollars Challenge, but that’s not at all uncommon for high schoolers. At home we ate healthily, and I have a pretty fast metabolism thanks to my Slenderman of a father so I was more or less the size of a pencil for first few years of school. We’re talking, like, size double zero at Hollister. I actually used to peel the 00 size stickers off my low rise (!!!) jeans whenever I’d get a new pair and stick them on the side of my desk in my bedroom, which, as I became a normal-sized adult with not-normal-sized body image problems, morphed into a very creative form of self-inflicted psychological torment. I have some journal entries from the first few years of high school with “diet and workout plans”, but in teenage girl fashion, most of them were quickly forgotten about or amended with “forgot and ate mac and cheese today - whoops!” Stupid teenage shit. It’s actually kind of hilarious reading it back now until I remember how spectacularly fucked up everything got. ANYWAY!

My first real memory of hating my body was on a school trip to Scotland my junior year. I was fully indoctrinated into the cult of high school musical theatre and we were performing at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, which was an incredibly cool experience that I absolutely did NOT take full advantage of and instead did shit like drink way too much rum (fucking RUM because apparently I was a character in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise), try to climb out the window of the dorms we were staying in to go see my boyfriend in his building, quickly remember I was on like the fucking fourth floor, throw up all over the carpet of my room and then pass out. My room smelled like puke the rest of the trip but that, though tragic in its own right, is not the point of this anecdote. Being both across the pond and left to my own devices, I was eating nothing but beige-colored fried food to the point that I’m certain ketchup and fruit juice used solely as a mixer for alcohol were the only things saving me from full-blown scurvy. My clothes felt tight, and not in the 2010s way that everything was tight, but bad tight. My stomach poked out of my jeans in a way that my stomach wasn’t supposed to poke out of my jeans. Keep in mind - I was probably a size 0 instead of 00 at this point, and most of this change was just a product of being sixteen instead of fourteen and growing, but to me it felt ominous in a way I didn’t know how to explain. During a group trip to some Scottish landmark or another (see how much attention I paid to this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity my parents spent their hard-earned money to give me?) I remember sitting next to my close friend on the bus as we pulled over to stop for food. I was having relationship trouble with the aforementioned boyfriend, one of the first of many Musical Theatre Straight Boys™ that I would lose my fucking mind over, and I was getting emotional - more emotional than I expected. I realized something else was bothering me, and I turned to her and said “On top of everything else, I just feel… fat. I know I’m not fat, but I’m fat, like, for me.”

Two things here: first and foremost, yes, for that I know I am now the recipient of the Most Annoying Sentence Ever Spoken Aloud award and will provide the mailing address for my trophy at a later date. Second, I said that over ten years ago, and I remember it so clearly that I’m entirely sure that’s exactly what I said, verbatim. We got off the bus, and I walked into the restaurant and, after scanning the menu desperately trying to convince myself I should order something “healthy”, I ordered large steak fries and got back on the bus. I think this was the first time I ever really, consciously used food as a coping mechanism - the first time something small but powerful snapped in my head that told me fuck it - who the fuck cares? You’ve done enough damage already, what’s the point of stopping now?

High school ended, I graduated and we sang “Journey On” from Ragtime at the ceremony (baffling choice but the school was doing Ragtime next year and wanted to squeeze a promo out), I got into several of my top-choice musical theatre colleges and was so excited to go to the one I picked, which, you’ll be charmed to hear, was the absolute worst choice I could’ve made. I was 18 and a little bigger now, firmly in size 0/2 instead of 00 territory, had maybe graduated to a 32B bra instead of A, but still very thin by most standards. This was my first summer as a Very Online Person - I would stay up tlil probably 3 or 4 AM most nights blogging and watching Harry Potter movies for the umpteenth time. Because the rest of my family was, how do I put it, fucking normal, they’d go to bed at 11 or whenever and I’d be up alone for hours on the  computer. This is when I started bingeing. We didn’t really keep junk food in my house, nothing legit like Cheetos or Ben and Jerry’s or whatever, but we did have sugar cereal and reduced-fat Oreos and cheese and the occasional box of Triscuts. It became a nightly ritual for me - I’d wait for everyone to go to bed, then tiptoe in to the kitchen and, though I’d eaten dinner hours earlier, start eating again. Stacks of Oreos, multiple bowls of cereal, shredded cheese out of the bag. After a while my mom heard me banging around in the kitchen and told me (in so many words) to shut the fuck up, so my methods changed. I’d bring the box of cereal - Rice Krispies or Cocoa Puffs or whatever - a bowl, and a carton of milk into the bathroom with me. I’d run the sink and open the box and pour the cereal with the water running so no one would hear, and then I’d creep back out to the couch and eat it. Box of Oreos into the bathroom, water on, peel open the plastic, take out the biggest stack I thought I could with no one noticing, eat. Three or four granola bars into the bathroom, water on, wrappers off and hidden behind my bed or the couch or wherever, eat. Rinse and repeat.

I didn’t really know what binge eating was at this point, and some tiny, dark part of my brain buried way in the back told me that this wasn’t normal and it wasn’t good, but I pushed it away because of course I did. I did a few Google searches about it and came across the term “binge eating disorder” but was convinced that could never be me. This was just a thing, just a thing I was doing, and it would go away at the end of the summer when I went away to college because that’s when life was actually starting and it was going to be awesome and I wasn’t going to let this - whatever this was - fuck that up.

But I did, in fact, fuck it up. I fucked it up fast and hard (that’s what she said, ok back to being depressing) and college was not awesome, it was difficult and painful and I was drowning in something I had absolutely no chance of controlling on my own. I accepted very quickly that this thing I was doing had a name, and it was binge eating disorder, and I was all in. I gained weight - not a ton, maybe twenty pounds, and I was never actually overweight, but to me that didn’t matter. I hated how I looked. I overdrew my bank account spending money my mom gave me for groceries on binge food. I spent hours alone in the dining hall eating till I felt physically ill and sometimes threw up involuntarily because my body couldn’t handle what I was doing. One time I stood in the bathroom of my dorm and drank mustard mixed with warm water because I read online that makes you puke and I was so full I wanted to die (it didn’t work, please for the love of GOD don’t drink mustard water or, for that matter, anything else for the express purpose of making yourself vomit). I cancelled plans with friends and skipped classes to stay in and binge, or because I’d binged already that day and could barely move. I stole food from roommates, convincing myself no one would notice, even though of course they fucking noticed. I hid food and packaging and wrappers under my bed, in my closet, in my backpack, wherever I could because I didn’t want anyone to catch on. Lied about why I needed money so my parents would send me some and I could buy more shit. I ate stale food, food from the trash, once I literally ate straight up chocolate sauce (mustard water and chocolate sauce: 10 out of 10 doctors recommend!) because I had nothing else. Waking up for 8 AM ballet classes and seeing my body in a leotard under fluorescent lighting felt like a form of torture Dick Cheney might think was a little too harsh. I saw a therapist over the summers and ate with my parents at home, and things got better, and then I’d go back to school and everything would unravel again. I’m still kind of shocked I made it through.

I’ve been done with school and living in the city for five years now, and I can honestly say that things are better. I mean, not “better”, in the sense that this chapter of the book is still pretty fucking open. But I’m better at dealing with it. The majority of the time now, I eat normally. I still binge, sometimes a lot and sometimes a little, but I carry on and try again the next day. I don’t really restrict to make up for binges anymore. I can eat some foods now that used to send me straight into Eatin’ Town USA, like cheese and bread and maybe even Oreos sometimes. I started enjoying working out, not just logging time on the treadmill as a punishment and feeling like Jean Valjean in the opening number of Les Mis (look down look down you’RE HERE UNTIL YOU DI-IE). 

To be honest, I think I’m writing this mostly because the last couple months have been hard. I’ve fallen into some old stupid shitty habits, and I’ve been plugging along like normal and trying to claw myself out. But it’s not quite working like it normally does, and I don’t know why. I know I’ll make it through, because I always have, and what other option is there? But some days lately, I feel like twenty-year-old me, sobbing (very theatrically, natch) on the floor of my apartment because I should be over this by now - how am I not over this by now? This is my ninth year as a binge eater. Almost a decade! Far and away my longest and most committed relationship. When I hit 10 years strong, I should take myself out to a fancy restaurant or something but I don’t know what I’d order.

When I tell people this, I usually get some kind of “I had no idea”/“I’m sorry I didn’t notice”/“I would’ve never guessed” and the truth is that I didn’t, and still don’t, want anyone to notice. Of course I don’t. You don’t hide candy wrappers and empty pizza boxes in your closet with your winter boots because you want people to notice. It’s a very strange and secretive brand of shame that binge eating disorder brings and no one really get it unless they get it, and that’s not something I’d wish on anyone. (Okay, honestly, I’d wish it on some people, like it’s hard as hell but some people suck ass and probably deserve it? Anyway.) As I’ve grown up, I’ve started talking about this more and more. The first time I went public with all of this shit - I think I made a dramatic Instagram post a few years ago whilst day drunk during National Eating Disorder Awareness Week (absolutely incredible and Very Me start to a sentence) - I was shocked at how many people reached out to me privately and were like, hey, me too, and thank you for saying something. I’m still ashamed, but I’m trying not to be, and the more I talk about it the less alone I feel. “There are dozens of us! DOZENS!”

I guess one nice thing about this whole stupid nightmare is it’s kind of a reason why I am who I am. Not the only reason, but still. I started using jokes to cope with this while I was in school, and my sense of humor, whatever the fuck it is today, grew out of that. Except now I don’t joke about this stupid shit because I’m in denial, I do it because it’s real and I’m staring it in the face and it’s not going away, and the absurdity of something so excruciatingly difficult yet so entirely in my control gets fucking terrifying. I guess laughing at it makes it seem small.