Friday

Charles Francis Hall who was one of the first searches to head to the arctic in search of franklins crew in 1859, recorded his anger at the Inuit only supplying the surviving members with seal meat as they walked south, leaving the crews to die and abandoning their please, saying quote “These 4 families could have saved Crozier's life & that of his company had they been so disposed... But no, though noble Crozier pleaded with them, they would not stop even a day to try & catch seals - but early in the morning abandoned what they knew to be a large starving company of white men.”

He failed to mention those four families were on the verge of starving themselves, and had given probably more than they had to share before continuing on.

In 1854 John Rae brought the first reports of cannibalism back to England, it was fiercely rejected and shunned as even being a remote possibility, writers toting that the crewmen would rather starve to death then do such a thing, a thing that we know now occurred as an act of pure desperation, by men who had no other option. This did not stop Charles Dickens from writing this to defame the Inuit, who were the source of the information: “they are covetous, treacherous and cruel.. With a domesticity of blood and blubber'.”

Charles Dickens was world renowned, as was Hall as an explorer, by toting these lies about the Inuit being liars, forging stories to disparage the legacies of the brave white men they had allowed to starve to death, they destroyed the already tenuous trust white searchers had in the indigenous people who only had their best at heart. If they hadn’t done this, and if the men they influenced had taken the Inuit at their word, there is a chance we could have found infinitely more information, remains, and artifacts of the crews during the late nineteenth century.

I cannot possibly understate how the ego of these men destroyed our chances of fully understanding what occurred in the final march south towards backsfish river, but there is a lesson to be learned. There were contemporary reports from Inuit who had gone aboard the still floating terror years after the last of the men died at starvation cove, and they claim that there were multiple men dead aboard the boat. It is worth the effort to believe these accounts and do more dives to the wreck of the terror with the hopes of recovering human remains, rather than leaving them at the bottom of the ocean to be lost along with their stories.

WHO IS USING THIS

AN APP??? THEY HAVE A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

super excited, and was

not disappointed

Look at me.

Look at me right now.

AO3 protects you.

AO3 protects you and your works. 

It protects your works from copyright strikes and DCMA takedowns.

It protects your work from advertisers.

It protects your work from overzealous legal challenges.

It protects your right to post adult content.

AO3 is non-profit and AO3 will never try to use you or your work to make a profit for themselves and AO3 will go to bat for you if someone tries to legally challenge you or your works.

Mastercard has no reason to mess with AO3. Visa doesn't. PayPal doesn't. Stripe doesn't. There's no compensation-for-porn exchange happening. By design. BY DESIGN.

AO3's founders knew that AO3 needed to be set up to protect us from any and all avenues of attack on fanworks. They've managed it quite successfully.

I'm sorry Tumblr isn't set up for me to reply privately to Anons. But I wanted to say a few things.

My first impulse was to congratulate you on how much you have achieved in your 20s that I could not until my 30s and 40s. I was a mess for a long time.

But this isn't about comparing life milestones. It's about enjoying the present and seeing a future through grief.

Most of us are not going to get the future we thought we were going to have. It's been violently taken from us. And that is absolutely something deserving of grief.

Unfortunately, the grief will never go away. I'm not here to tell you to move on from it. You will need to learn to live with it as a constant companion.

Learning to live with that grief to where you can find joy in your present is hard. It will take different forms. Some days, you will find joy through the new relationships you are building. Other days, you will choose to hang on out of spite. And still others, you will hide and lick your wounds to fight again another day.

Grieve the future you thought you would have while you build a new one. Acknowledge it is going to be different. Trust it will likely be surprisingly better in some ways, even while it's predictably worse in others.

I know it's hard to see your future when your present already feels uncertain. Do what you can to make tomorrow a little better. Then work your way up to next week, next month. Your only milestone right now is resisting intertia and its accepting of the status quo.

It may take some radical changes to give yourself a breather, but sometimes all we need is a chance to get our second wind. Brainstorm what those changes could potentially be - a roommate, a job you hadn't considered, changing spending habits, etc. Maybe it's as straightforward as taking a big social media / news break in favor of a "slow", offline hobby so your brain and body can relax. Stupid little walks for one's mental health and all that.

Community is the best way through this. Build up your network, both in-person and online, so you can lean on each other. Becaus so often, one person's success means new opportunities for everyone. We are always stronger together. Give when you can and ask for help when you need it.

Do what oppressed people have always done -- share food together, sing songs, remember our history, make art. Do the work of planting trees (real and metaphorical) that will grow to bear fruit you will not live to eat. But future generations might get to enjoy.

I developed chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia right when I finished university. Which was just an unlucky coincidence, but it hit me HARD because I had been just about to take the next step in my life journey and suddenly the ground I was standing on dropped away, and the “next step” was out of my reach.

And OP may not have been looking specifically at me when he said “grieve the future you thought you would have while you build a new one”. But nonetheless I felt incredibly seen.

(More accurately I felt incredibly seen by the whole thing, but that line in particular stood out as really encapsulating the ‘Things Have Changed’ experience.)

The compassion and acceptance in this message are so important. The advice is a wonderful mix of small and large things that we can do, and things to think about, that lets us feel both like there are things small enough that we can control them and actually achieve something, AND that there is a ‘big picture’ that we can look at, and make an impact upon.

Personally I’ve always struggled with that balance - small things feel “pointless” because they don’t (DIRECTLY) change the big things, but big picture thinking is overwhelming, with too much that I can’t control or influence. This advice has, somehow, managed to reframe that for me a bit.

I hope that the anon who messaged OP feels better. I hope they get something out of this. And I hope that anyone else who sees it does too.

At 27, I was my father's caretaker and death advocate when he was dying of a rare cancer. It was the first time in my life I had run into a problem that could not be solved. There was nothing I could do to fix things - he was going to die, and rather soon. I felt utterly hopeless.

But it turned out I could still give comfort to my father, and ease the burden of caretaking from my mother. Every day, there were dozens of little things I could do, from helping make dinner, to picking out a movie for the 3 of us to watch, to doing estate paperwork, to simply being there when my father wanted to talk about his life.

The hospice experience was mainly a collection of little decisions, which helped prepare me for some of the final big ones.

My last memories of my father do include the heartbreak of watching him take his last breath. But I also remember the hours before, sharing food with the other families who were keeping vigil for their own loved ones, and partaking in the tired, but joyful laughter floating around the room as we told stories.

You will feel tempted by FOMO, you will feel bullied by Discord. You will be peer pressured to the ends of the earth. Do not do it. Do not allow them full access to you, and do not let them normalize this utter horseshit. We deserve anon spaces. We deserve the internet, it's ours.

Like this shit is TERRIFYING.