#thinking about this tweet i saw the other day

[anistarrose]

Saw a post that I do agree with — about how moving your activism primarily offline and engaging with people in real life is so much more impactful than angrily riding your horse into another round of online discourse, especially now. But at the same time, I want people — especially disabled people, and otherwise involuntarily isolated-feeling people — to know that there is activism you can do online, or otherwise from your home, that's different from reblogging a snarky post, and more impactful too.

The example I'm always obligated to talk about is online accessibility, and especially, writing image descriptions — an act that both directly makes posts more accessible to blind and low-vision screen reader users, and raises awareness of image descriptions to promote accessibility indirectly but in the long-term. This is disability activism; it is making a previously inaccessible space accessible and implanting disability accommodations at the forefront of people's brains.

As a chronically ill autistic person, the barriers to getting involved IRL are hopefully surmountable in my personal case, but not easily or quickly surmountable. However, the barriers to me writing image descriptions are much lower — and in fact, as a disabled person myself, I'm passionate about the topic, and that makes it easier for me to focus on. I subscribe to the burnout-prevention advice to make a list of a very few issues, tailored to your strengths, that you pledge to put your whole ass into, with a less selective list of issues you can pledge to do a little bit about when you have the resources.

Image descriptions are my personal Whole Ass Into It issue. They are, quite simply, the action I am personally best-equipped to take to make the world a tiny bit less shit.

And it might not be that kind of issue for you! I desperately want people to be aware of the possibility, but it may not play to your strengths — or, it may fit better as an issue you can make occasional contributions to without focusing on. (What might occasional contributions look like? Maybe just describing your own posts, and getting in the habit of checking the notes for IDs when you're on Tumblr. Or maybe just choosing one type of image to always describe that feels manageable for you — screenshotted tweets, maybe.)

But maybe you're not the best at interpreting images, and it would better play to your strengths to write transcripts! Maybe typing is tiring for you, or social media is bad for your mental health, but leaving the house still has barriers, so you find an opportunity to phone bank for a particular issue! Maybe you volunteer with a voter registration help line, next election. Maybe you stay on Tumblr but you adopt a fundraiser, or join a charity zine. Maybe you need to garden very slowly and steadily, to take care of your body, but you can grow some native plants, and strike up conversations with your neighbors about it, if you get the chance.

At the end of the day, I think two things can be simultaneously true: getting involved offline can be contextually much more plausible than a lot of people realize, and it can still have barriers for people with certain disabilities or other circumstances, while people lacking those circumstances may not notice. Luckily, there's no one mold for what activism looks like. Analyze your strengths, treat your limitations with compassion, and get creative about how to help.

[xinganhao]

hi!! i'm so in love with your work, thank you so much for putting out all of this for us 🌺 this might seem like a weird question, but if you had to choose five of your current work that you would want people to read the most, which do you think it would be?~ i think all of them are nice tbh, i'm just curious which of your works you like the most 🦋

you're so lovely, anon! this was one of the sweetest asks i've gotten aaah (ᗒᗨᗕ) my five recos (in no particular order)

svt checking in on an overworked!reader. just some soft hours all around, and i think the texts & headcanons balance each other out really well. :) i enjoyed the little 'see also's after each member heh!

svt detective x thief au. oh man, i'll never shut up about this... i loved getting to do something outside the usual! and the drabbles under the cut ｡^‿^｡ i still think of this one a lot LOL. u/purple-eustoma's mind has to be Studied for this request.

fake dating seungkwan. this one is formatted differently from a number of my smaus, mostly because i think i might expand on this as a fic so i'm holding back hehe,, but the format!!! so so so fun!!! i think this is where i started thinking i can get away with some experimenting. <3

chan x fansite!reader. this plot is so very dear to me,, fun fact: i didn't know which member to pair with the fansite!reader character, but then i saw this tweet about dino & his fansite (trans: 'he's like a boyfriend indulging his girlfriend') and i was SOLDDD.

🥁🥁🥁 and, of course— maybeee a cheat because it's a series atp lol but vernon dates rockstar!reader ??? if i will have any legacy at all, i hope it's that one. still wholly indebted to the anon who requested it in the first place, but this one makes me super soft because i'm a dolly first & foremost, and vernon has been so fun to explore in this verse. i'm a sucker for experimental formats [as i've mentioned], and so the format for part three (the 'vernhow' section) was a dream. can't wait to wrap this up in two. <3

thank you anon for letting me yap ab myself for a bit! i hope you're having a good day (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

[otaku-babu-vibes]

why isn't it OK to call a bi character, gay? like, you gotta be a little gay to be bi... I've even see that lesbian was added to not calling them gay... it doesn't make sense to me

[cyberphos]

Post 5 new to fully unlocked demon instincts Nero unaware he's performing courting displays towards Dante and Vergil when they get back from the underworld send post

[bookshelfdreams]

.

[rimouskis]

song of the night!!

[unproduciblesmackdown]

another day another "applying the concept 'disposability' to 'someone withdraws from a personal relationship, & that wasn't signed off on by the other'" kill me

[crossbackpoke-check]

nosy anon again making a return because i think what my brain did was read that i helped find some kind of writing and then did not fully process what the writing was?? but upon rereading i am very intrigued if you ever get the urge to share i will be all eyes/ears/senses required to enjoy things!!

I GET TO DO WIP WEDNESDAYYYYYY!!! the writing exists mostly in the form of a tag (fantastic! 'verse) and also a thirty-two page doc of snippets and planning, so the sense you will be using most is imagination:

don't think i have ever actually formally written out anything about fantastic! 'verse but! the tl;dr of it is that it's a semi-college au: joel is still a hockey player for the lv phantoms, but morgan is a college student-athlete. it's incredibly relevant to the plot that joel falls in love with morgan in the check-out line of a wegman's, lies a little bit, and ends up going back to get his degree.

most of it is just good fun about college kids growing up, but i think there's a lot of parallels between making your way through a development system where traditional "success" isn't always guaranteed (ahl -> nhl, completion of higher education -> pursuit of a career) because that development system isn't always designed for you to "succeed" or have opportunities. heavy quotation marks around success because part of that struggle is learning what you want in life and how you define success. are your dreams achievable? are they still the same dreams you always used to have? it's infinite branching universes of would you still love me if i was a worm (ahl player forever) (a college dropout) (a college graduate) (older) (realizing the fallibility of your body) (uncertain of the future) (human).

silly little snippet:

[deepestbluesky]

hanwenzhou thought of the day: zhou zishu is some kind of fantastical creature along the lines of a siren, where he can appear to people as what they want to see. it’s a very handy quality for a spy, especially when he has such good control over how he appears that he can do it voluntarily and he can adjust the degree to which it changes him. (is he mostly him but a little altered to appeal to who he needs to get information from, or is he completely unrecognizable because he needs to sneak past a guard who is hoping to get through his shift without trouble?)

it makes it easy once zzs leaves tianchuang. no one really wants to look at a beggar at all, they practically make him invisible, leaving zzs free to do what he wants. except then he starts getting entangled in the jianghu machinations (they want to see a wandering hero) and involved with chengling (he wants to see a father figure) and followed by wen kexing (who knows exactly what he wants to see, zzs certainly pretends he doesn’t), and by the time han ying shows up in ep8, zzs is back to tailoring his appearance to whoever he’s performing for. because the thing is, he’s always performing. it’s instinct to him.

wen kexing sees his face clearly, but zzs can barely help it: of course his eyes look bigger and softer when he needs wkx to go along with what he’s asking, of course he looks taller and stronger when chengling is looking to him for guidance, of course he seems visibly sick when yby is examining him.

and i just think. what if there’s a moment. post-canon, everyone lives, etc etc, where hy and wkx are looking at him and zzs nearly breaks down because he can’t be what both of them want at the same time, he can’t be hy’s zhuangzhu and wkx’s a-xu at once, and the idea of of just being himself is genuinely terrifying for him. when was the last time he did it? does he even know how anymore? and wkx and hy are also having a Time because they didn’t realize that zzs compulsively, automatically tries to shift to match what they want from him, and they all know that they love each other truly but. that there’s always been this level of performance from zzs is painful.

[thatonecrookedsmile]

I know that at this point the release of the third novel is practically around the corner (and I know I'm also very late to talk about this) so there's really no need to post about it. But I haven't seen anyone commenting on this on Tumblr before, which is kind of surprising, I'm not going to lie. (And I checked the tags and I used the search bar, I didn't find a soul who posted this before. Either that, or they posted it and I didn't see it (words/tag filters working maybe))

Anyway.

SO,for those who are excited for the new book and didn't already know this (either because you don't use Twitter, haven't seen this here on Tumblr before or are behind on the news) a new extended preview for Bendy: Fade to Black was released a while ago!

The first preview had already been shared here back in June, and it only had the first chapter of the book + the first page of the second chapter. This extended preview has the prologue of the book, chapter 1 and more extra pages for chapter 2 (I don't think it's the entire chapter,tho)

(Also, the book has 33 chapters in total. Nice)

Again,I know it's too late to be able to talk about this at this point (I got busy in September and was prevented from talking about it before), especially since this book is coming out like. This week lol. There's not much point to talk about this now. But repeating myself, I didn't see anyone commenting about this here on Tumblr. I checked the tags and used the search bar, and nope, nobody. Which is surprising considering the other official (I think?) things people decided to share here. And hey, maybe there really is someone out there who doesn't know that this preview hasn't been released (because I'm sure at this point some of you reading this will have already seen this preview before I posted it here) so consider this post as a helping hand/a reminder perhaps.

And just so this isn't just *a* post sharing the preview, here's a reminder for everyone to remember to tag your spoilers if you're going to talk about the new book! And for those who won't be able to read this book anytime soon (Me), remember to mute/block tags and words so as not to be spoiled! I have to definitely do that after posting this.

But yeah, that's all, have a good night everybody! (or day, whatever time you are reading this)

[oldmyths]

Okay first of all i remember a couple years ago when a twitter thread was going around about artists that made really fucked up paintings and were huge horror iconography and everyone was sharing their favorite horror artists like goya and when i was scrolling through replies someone linked (?) to a thread where someone painted these detailed pieces but there was always at least one person looking directly at the viewer. like the concept was so fucking scary to me that i forgot to bookmark/like the tweet and i lost that thread forever and i really want to know who the artist was

[baphofemme]

yet more strangely vivid dreams i had the other day (yesterday and the day before), this time it's a twofer

[littlestarxmilkyway]

Kind of makes me sick that they skipped any new Styles this past week just so they could do a stream this upcoming week to announce more Stage collab Styles. All this as a way to skip White Day.

I'm looking forward to a new Bert Style, but that's all. And really, we could have had Bert for White Day. So there's that bullshit.

[lizeon]

man i'm so smart

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[poorlittlevampire]

is it too late to say that i genuinely feel bad for dream