#the Drug's fault

[3knecrotic]

Yknow my girlfriend asked me If I was addicted to dxm and honestly that shit is so god damn nuanced I probably wouldn't say yes until I've like. Fucked for it or puked taking too much quite frankly

[faeriekit]

Writing the Occult: quick notes for non-practicing hobby authors and other nerds🕯️

Hey. Real talk. If you're writing about occult rituals, magic, the works, whatever, there are some great ways to clean up your act and get some better, more aware accuracy in there. A lot of stuff in the wider consciousness of pop culture is kind of...not correct, or, uh. Should be something you're aware of. For instance:

G*psy is still a slur! No, Romani people aren't more likely to be fortune tellers than anyone else. Quit it with the weird stereotypes. The "g*psy fortune teller" thing hasnt even been on trend since the early 1900s. Move on.

"Voodoo" dolls are a racist perspective of an African-derived traditional religious practice. Vodun is a religion. It's not even a gone or far away religion either; Vodun and Santería have followers and priests all over the US, as do other ATRs. Since. You know. Slavery. The word you're probably looking for is "poppet", which is the term for the tool itself (tiny cloth doll for magical use) as opposed to, like, a whole religion.

A wendigo isn't a catch-all cannibalistic creature; it's part of a wider religious worldview of the Algonquian peoples. Native people have requested that you Stop Talking Abou That— yes, even asking that one YouTuber to Stop That, not that he seems to care. White people seem to cannibalize other people all the time anyway, so I don't see why there's a huge need for a Native scapegoat... There are other supernatural creatures and shapeshifters that eat humans. Pick anything else.

A lot of higher-level occult rituals as writ are just. Straight up antisemitic! If you're writing rituals and your magical language of choice is in Hebrew...hey. Stop that. Same thing goes for "elites who eat babies/drink blood." A some of it is a clumsily handled metaphor for the cannibalistic nature of having an upper class in a society, but a lot of it really is just dressed-up antisemitism in a trench coat. If you're looking up real rituals for worldbuilding...FYI, you may want to glance again before adding it to your work.

Just because ten dudes are standing next to each other in order to do a weird ritual doesn't make them a cult. That's just a ritual. Cults have more specific requirements; ie, whether or not there's religious abuse going on. You can make your weird spooky org have religious abuse, but if they're just, like, high schoolers, they're probably just novice occultists who occasionally hang out together.

I haven't seen anyone use "spirit animal" in a couple years, so that's great! Native people have also requested that we Stop That. Spirit Animal is a specific religious concept we don't have to tread on. Think of a synonym for the concept you're trying to convey; don't steal a word that's already in use for a religious practice. (Same thing goes for totem FYI.)

Hallucinogens often make you throw up. Like. A lot. People do certainly attribute religious visions to them, but also like drink a lot of water and keep a bucket nearby, because the whole scenario is just super disorienting. Most spiritual circles who utilize similar substances will have a trip sitter (someone sober to call 911 if there's an emergency) if they've got the resources.

Making up rituals for your story is totally cool. People invent new rituals all the time. There isn't a standard to be held to on that front unless you outright name a real life religious or occult group they're meant to be part of; THEN people will want standards. Until then, though, you're probably good.

Most TYPES of rituals have, like, a label, though. A ward prevents something from entering a protected space, an invocation brings something forth from within you, a banishment pushes something away from you, a consecration makes something sacred...A lot of these may be obvious to you from pop culture, but if you're going to try and make a character an expert on magic, adding the vocabulary to their lexicon makes their expertise more believable.

There are a ton of ways to exorcise ghosts! Basically every religion has, like, ten of them. If you want to add a little extra flavor on banishing/preventing evil spirits, google [character's religion/culture] [ghosts/spirits] to see what sort of flavor you can add to their specific person.

Occultists and witches and wizards and priests who do magic argue all the time. ALL the time. Interpersonal drama is real and it can Get You.

It's traditional to do certain specific rituals naked. Just FYI. It's not required. Just traditional. Utilize this knowledge for narrative potential... or don't. I'm not your boss.

Yeah, sometimes there's blood; your mileage may vary narratively. Most people don't go for the whole knife thing —you can get lancets at any drug store—but maybe your character is especially dumb or otherwise desperate. Palms and fingers hurt the most knife-wise; if your character knows what they're doing, it won't be their hands.

The keeping skulls around thing is real too, if legally and financially difficult to arrange in many cases. It's usually animal though. Human remains have a lot of laws in the states and, obviously, relatives want to keep their family close to their family �� still, narratively, your mileage may vary.

The "White magic" and "Black magic" dichotomy is racialized. No, seriously. The things people demonize about dark magic— soul magic, necromancy, zombies, love/control spells, etc— are all really warped versions of Ancestor worship and other spiritual practices from African Traditional Religious beliefs. Well, the whole Zombie thing is actually a holdover from slavery and it's more about forcing ex-slaved peoples into performing more labor even after their death while White people are afraid of traditional Black spiritual resistance against colonial religious oppression— I'm going too deep into this, just trust me that if a dichotomy says that White is good and Black is bad, there's probably something hinky going on.

And, finally:

Ouija boards are sold at Barnes and Noble by Hasbro for $25, and a tarot deck can retail for as little as $20 from Spirit Halloween or Spencer's. No, they can't summon demons from the astral into your house. Can they talk to ghosts? Up to you; it's your story. Are cheap paper board and plastic planchette powerful enough to murder people, though...? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ My magic 8 ball says that the odds are unlikely.

Obviously, you can do whatever you want with your work— I'm not your dad and I can't stop you, but if you're the kind of person who's like, hey, maybe I do want to prune out accidental racial slurs from my vocabulary...hey! This list is for you! Halloween is a time to get spooky! Get scary! Get booped, even; still, if you want to have an underlying thread of what the occult looks like in practice, you might want to dust off a couple of mid Magic/Witchcraft/Spiritual/Occult books from your local library and flip through 'em for ideas. There's some fun stuff in there.

Like the sacred blowtorch ;)

Happy Halloween, everyone! 👻

[cruelplatonic]

my personal headcanon is the vees were unremarkable nobodies when they were alive. i just love it as a thematic throughline for them. they love to let the public of hell speculate on them being famed and acclaimed since before death, but the the truth is they were a d-list failed influencer that got by on cheap controversey and scamming, a broke junkie who burned every shaky bridge he ever had, and a worn-out broadcast production assistant with more rejected auditions and tossed out script pitches than he could count. nobody missed them when they were gone, nobody cared who they were until they were dead.

[discountsoysauce]

Obsessed with the fact that pre-EOs Victor is just a wannabe edge lord and Eli has literally committed murder

[bamboo-bees]

Where were you on that one, John 🤷

[foreverchangingfandomsao3]

Six Sentence Sunday

This is from another of my Codywan week works @codywanweek and I'm enjoying writing crack for once!

It seemed pointless. They were stuck in a gunship, barely close enough to the planet’s surface to be considered out of orbit and the Separatists were in a bunker with a single entrance. They had no intel, no time to prepare, and no knowledge about Obi-Wan’s condition. “You know, that truly is an awful beard,” Obi-Wan said, his voice coming through the unit almost perfectly clear, the words ever so slightly slurred which made him suspect a sedative, but also free of pain. It was also the same tone that he used in the med bay when he eventually got straight answers out of the man, polite but also a little exasperated. “You’re doing no favours to yourself by letting it grow.” “I did not bring you here to discuss my beard.” “You should have.”

[roseworth]

Wait ok I'm not knowledgeable on anything Wilson family. Slade drugs Rose???

yeah <///3 before tt03 they had met like once ever (and it went poorly) so to get rose on his side slade injected her with a super soldier serum

in #0.5 he kidnaps her after buying a hit on her (many such cases) and goes "cmon rose we can be a family lets be a family <3333" and she agrees (because shes angry and slade is the one handing her a weapon to kill the man that killed her mother)

then theyre on the same side for a while! the first time we hear about the serum (and iirc only time its specifically mentioned while shes being drugged) is in #12 (BART 🥺)

we also see some flashbacks in fresh hell of slade giving her the serum too

anyways then she joins the team and everything is alright (lie). this is the first confirmation that she was being drugged, plus also showing that shes staying on the team just bc shes afraid slade will get her again :(

in any story that takes place from 2003-2006 that includes rose & slade (bg #63-64, nightwing #112-115, etc), rose is being drugged :(

basically the writers needed an explanation for why she would choose to work with slade and wanted an excuse for why she would be able to join the titans later on and honestly? rare johns banger. this plotline fucks to me. completely defines rose's relationship with slade and gives her a concrete reason to hate him but also have very complicated feelings about her place in his life ouuughhhh

but in conclusion slade sucks so heres some panels of rose beating him up

[weirdly-specific-but-ok]

Pt I wash it down but i've never watched it... and neither have you.

Well, hello there, remember when you guys tried to explain Goncharov to me and I said I wanted to create a fake movie/show? Have it, beautiful maggots. Wash It Down the TV show, mostly accurately explained. Kind of. You know me by now.

Everything is a metaphor, except for the things that are subtext.

The rich blonde girl Carla turns into a deranged psychopath, but in a way that is vaguely inspiring. In the year of our lord and damner 2024, any kind of character development is vaguely inspiring. Especially when it's done by Saoirse Ronan.

Purple hearts this RWRB that, you guys are SLEEPING on Nicholas Galitzine's role in Wash It Down. Which is mostly being disappointingly straight, until he isn't, and inspiringly revolutionary, until he isn't. Dan is honestly just a whole neurotic mess, and we at tumblr do love us a good neurotic mess.

It's a tale as old as time, really. Girl meets boy, girl falls for boy, girl meets girl, boy betrays girl, girl falls for girl, boy falls for girl. Just your average love story.

American cops being shits, just another day on planet earth. The DARE program failing miserably, just another day on planet earth.

Yasmin Finney the gorgeous as Talitha, who is very gay, very angry, and disturbingly obsessed with making paper dolls. Which I'm sure will not come into play later in the s--nvm it's another metaphor for the paper-thin veneer of civilised society in a world on fire with rage.

There is a lot of alcohol. Mostly wine. White wine. Which isn't significant, until it is because it is now also a metaphor.

Inappropriately timed renditions of the Mary Poppins 1964 soundtrack, that are guaranteed to slowly ruin your childhood until the word sugar inspires the inner arsonist in all of us.

First-Twilight-movie-levels of intense blue saturation of, well, everything. It's for the metaphor, guys, I'm sure the filmmakers knew what they were doing.

Carla and Dan are absolute OTP, until they aren't, and Carla and Talitha are absolute OTP, until Carla pulls a gun on Talitha and sings a lullaby to her. I am no longer sure the filmmakers knew what they were doing.

The world is Bad Bad Very Bad. Which I'm sure none of us can relate to.

Love is complicated and unstable, but like, in a shippy way. Mostly.

An oddly specific ring of imagery that becomes so convoluted that it starts to parody itself until the show is a metaphor for the show itself and even Christopher Nolan is raising his glass in reluctant admiration.

Senseless cliffhangers that are an interesting directing choice for sure. Bold, but interesting.

More Mary Poppins. Your childhood is entirely ruined. You become an arsonist.

The paper dolls catch fire. You are now part of the metaphor.

Very cute romance with a lot of attempted murder and societal rebellion thrown in. Hallmark is shaking.

Accurate? Who knows. Not you. Not me. Not anyone... yet.

@queermarzipan @madfangirlontheloose tagged for no suspicious reason.

[pinkmandias]

walt’s contempt for jesse & his addiction is soo wild to me given that this is the same man who gets extremely drunk & takes more than his prescribed dosage of pills to cope when his life is at its worst (his own doing) on multiple occasions… like he has absolutely zero empathy whenever jesse relapses & makes absolutely sure to throw it in his face as much as possible that he doesn’t think that jesse will ever be anything but an addict & that he’s weak willed & stupid for something that he literally cannot help.

the shit he says when he’s trying to convince jesse to stay and work with him in s5 is all pretty vile (even though he tries like. three different methods of manipulation. none of which work bc jesse is all too familiar with walt’s bs at this point) but when he goes from telling jesse he has no one in his life (his doing, again) & nothing but video games & go karts to saying that jesse will relapse again because he’ll be too bored & lonely?? when he says that jesse won’t believe he’s upset about drew sharp unless he curls up in a ball and cries and gets high? like jesse does? like walt does not also abuse substances to cope??? ohh that man is burning in hell fr

[anitalianfrie]

Ate too much semolino dolce and now I'm feeling sick

[yuri-for-businesswomen]

someone has never lived with a coke addict. lmao

no but for real i see these posts a lot and while the basic idea is 100 % correct (drug addiction and homelessness are not personal or moral failures and people affected deserve respect and dignity), they usually take a direction or have implications i dont agree with.

first off, drug addiction is not a class issue. people of all backgrounds are drug addicts. ceos too. so i dont know what this has to do with leftism? as someone who struggles with substance abuse and for that reason has lived with and been around addicts, there are good reasons for people to be biased against them. in active addiction, many people are erratic, unpredictable, and egoistic. being wary of active addicts is self-preservation, not „bourgeois“ or whatever the reference to leftism is supposed to imply. this is also partly a gendered issue because men tend to exhibit addiction, egoism, and aggression at higher rates than women.

secondly, especially at the intersection of homelessness and drug addiction - i see a lot of these posts taking the direction of „mind your business if a homeless man is next to you mumbling to himself“ etc - it seems these people also romanticise what drug addiction with nothing to lose can do to a person. a friend of mine was hit in the face by a homeless man walking by, someone else i know was stabbed by a homeless man after they took him in. just because someone is underprivileged you dont have to stop listening to your insticts and keeping your distance to erratic and intoxicated men who seem like they might do something unpredictable. this doesnt just mean homeless men by the way, i dont trust any men exhibiting this behavior, and yeah would possibly call the cops if someone like that hung around my home or work (never have though).

on the other hand, when a homeless woman was hanging out in the hallway i let her be. my neighbor wanted to call the cops but i told her not to. personally i dont even care if she shoots up there, but if i had kids i might not want her around either.

are homeless drug addicts vulnerable and more likely to be harmed than harm someone else? yeah. do cops and doctors treat homeless people like shit? yeah. these are important conversations to have, but i wish they would happen without romantisation.

talk to any woman who has worked with homeless men, myself included - marginalisation is not virtue. many still harrass and even assault women. and these posts never take a gendered perspective: how most homeless and drug addicted women land in prostitution, how they are not safe in homeless shelters because of the men, etc.

im not saying op here said all of this but from the tone (and the tags and reblogs) it struck me as one of those posts that shames people for being alert around drug addicts and alcoholics when there is ample reason to, especially if youre a woman and theyre a man. and they never take a gendered perspective which is really important in this context, as it usually is.

[kara-zor-els]

The way some people in this fandom talk about Catherine Todd is just like... just say you don't understand addiction and go

[bomberqueen17]

another sewing diary: bike shorts

ok i'm only doing this sewing diary because it's funny.

so i'm still working on dialing in my ADHD meds, right? and I trialed Ritalin and it went poorly because i had a cold and was on vacation and could not establish a routine and could not master taking them on an empty stomach and just. generally could not get any meaningful data. but i took some and eventually ran out of pills and finally, well off-schedule, managed to get another three minute, $300 telehealth appointment to get more pills. And he was like well, let's try a higher dose. Wellllll the same dose but more of it. Take two of them, one first thing in the morning and the second before lunch or in early afternoon.

heh. heh heh. i did look it up and the research suggests you don't really have to take the pills half an hour before eating, so i have managed to take at least one every day. I can never remember the second dose though. I just can't do it. It's absolutely not happening. I'd hoped the pills would give me the executive function to remember them but it is not happening.

But I did manage the second dose, today. And. Well.

Here's how it went, sewing these bike shorts. it's the Wickham Shorts/Skort/Skirt pattern, and I had already cut out the pieces.

Firstly I'd made an error in cutting when I did it on Wednesday. I'd cut the gusset twice, instead of the pocket piece. You only need one gusset, but I'd cut four. So I had to go back to the fabric and cut two pocket pieces. I managed that, though. No problem. I have spare gussets now, maybe I'll use them for lining the gusset in future versions? Why not. Can't hurt. It is nice soft cotton mesh.

I paused, and watched the sewalong, because I had a suspicion I was going to need all the help I could get. The written directions just... weren't clear to me, and I couldn't tell if it was the directions or me or what but. Watching the video helped. I thought. It seemed clearer, anyway.

First I sewed the fronts and backs together along the crotch curve. Then I assembled the side panels with pockets. I triple-checked that I had the slanted pocket panels mirror-imaged before I finished their upper hem with elastic. When I was done, I'd made two identical ones, and they were not in fact mirror imaged. D'oh. Oh well it's a wearable muslin so whatever. I did manage to assemble two different side panels with pockets, at least, so they could each go on a different side of my body. This took like, everything I had, but i got it done.

Then I was meant to match the side panels up to the front panel. The notches were wildly misaligned, and I was like ok that is Not right. So i hauled out the paper pattern piece, and was like..... ...... ......

ok so I had sewn the front panels together upside-down. i'd connected the seams of what were supposed to be the legs, instead of the crotch. Wrong side of the crotch curve. Fuck. So I cut the seam off and sewed it the other way, and set the fixed panel aside and then... picked up... the front panel

what had I just been working on????????

Oh I'd just cut apart and re-sewed the back panel. Well shit. I redid the front panel, genuinely not sure how the back panel had wound up in my hands-- I hadn't checked it yet, I don't know if I'd sewn it together upside down, I might have to cut the seam off (I was using a serger so no way was I unpicking shit and do it yet again.

But then I looked at the back panel and compared it to the paper pattern and it was correct. So it had been wrong, and I had fixed it purely on accident. OK cool. ???? sure whatever, we're good now, onward.

So now. Now I could attach the side panels to the front panel. Okay. I lined one side up and checked and re-checked and re-re-checked that it was right sides to right sides, so the seam would be on the wrong side, so it would be correct. I sewed it and

nope it was on the wrong side I had to cut the side panel back off the front. At least this was the opposite side from the earlier error, so I wasn't cutting off the same seam allowance.

Tried again. Got it all lined up and was about to sew it, presser foot down. Looked one last time and no. It was upside-down. Wrong way up entirely. I'd cut the notches off and had only remarked them feebly, so. Hang on. Backed out. Triple-checked again.

This time I got the side panel on correctly. Then the other side panel. Wait-- no it was right. I got it on right. This was now two seams in a row I'd been correct on, so this was a new record for the day. I rejoiced briefly.

(I had considered giving up and going to do something else, but I should specify, I wasn't really mad about any of this. For some reason I thought it was funny. So I was like, I hadn't thought it was possible fuck up in some of those ways I fucked up, so I should keep going to see if I can violate space time in any new exciting ways. This could be how we make some major mathematical breakthrough in this world, after all.)

Now I had to attach the side panels to the back panel, and I took my sweet time checking that over and over again. And sure enough, I managed to get that right sides together after all. I fucked up one of the seams and had to redo a bunch of it but like it was the right direction, the needle just drifted off the seam allowance. That's not abnormal at all, and I got it fixed and it worked fine.

Then I had to attach the gusset, and the directions seemed like they were going to help me, but then they failed to specify how I was going to orient the gusset in any meaningful way, so. I muddled through, almost fucked it up, didn't. Hurrah! And then I got the gusset attached on the other side. And I didn't fuck it up either!!!!

Then Chita came and sat on my work, as I was attempting to figure out the waistband elastic.

caaaat taaaaax

[image description: my beautiful elderly gray cat is sitting with all four paws daintily planted atop the white bunched-up fabric of my work in front of my sewing machine and next to my serger, very squarely so that I cannot do anything with it and must pay attention to and pet her. She looks unimpressed, but I happen to know that her ears cocked and eyes half shut is actually a happy face for her. She is purring. And shedding. A lot.]

Eventually she was satisfied, and moved on, so I got the waistband elastic sort of wonkily sewed on as per directions. And i tried the shorts on and they do fit. My first try-on before the elastic wasn't impressive but with the elastic they did snug up and look correct, and I could throw my phone in the pocket and not have them fall down or even really sag. So. Bueno!

Pattern approved, I'll make more in nicer fabric (this cotton mesh from dharma was cheap but sort of a nightmare, very insubstantial, too stretchy, obsessed with rolling, really difficult to corral) and I will try harder with the elastic so it's not wonky and then I will have some very nice bike shorts. I also feel confident that I could attach the skirt if I wanted, so I'll make one of those at some point too. That part of the pattern is dead simple so I don't feel the need to muslin it.

But boy that was a real wild ride of Fucking Everything Up. I'm not sure whether the Ritalin is to blame or what, I just genuinely could not actually wrangle my attention span enough to actually focus enough to tell the difference between right sides together and wrong sides together. To be fair there was no discernible right or wrong side to this fabric, but I don't think that would have saved me, I genuinely could not tell which way the thing should go so it didn't matter how many times I checked. I'm never great at it, to be fair. But I do manage it more times than not, usually. Except today I guess.

It was an adventure, for sure. Really idk what role the Ritalin is playing in this. I can tell you it's no miracle drug for me, alas. It doesn't make me jittery or keep me from sleeping or do any of the things it says are side effects, it just has not made me discernably less absent-minded or easily-confused or scatterbrained. So I'm not sure what it's supposed to be doing but. That was what I wanted it to do, unfortunately.

[celestialvoyeur]

I was updating my reading log and worked out that in January I've averaged reading around 62,000 words per day. I think I might have just figured out why I have trouble keeping on top of the laundry and dusting 😂🤣

[wayward-sherlock]

just thinking about how will COULD have turned to drugs like jonathan (or something worse) to deal with the fact that mike was so distant from him but he instead chose to paint mike a picture that reminded him of a childhood that he wasn’t even sure mike wanted anymore and will byers chose to hope and. i just think that says a lot about his character

[badlydrawnkankri]

Lol latula is never gonna talk to you again