But you are responsible for your own safe spaces. You can block tags, block words, block people.

“But i thought fandom was supposed to be a safe space” —yeah you have to curate it.

Unfortunately one persons’s safe space may be another persons’ trigger. That’s ok. Simply block them, block the tag, block the word etc. They can do the same for you.

I don’t know who said it first, but “I need to be able to express my anger without shame” and “I need to be away from yelling and loud noises” are both valid needs people can have for a safe space that really aren’t compatible with each other.

So are “I need to process my trauma” and “I need to not meet any trauma.”

Or “I want a safe space to tell/read the stories that speak to me” and “those stories are distressing to me.”

Insisting that your needs are the only needs anyone should have is not a safe space, it’s its own act of violence.

Mitch McConnell is reportedly brain dead. The journalist who broke his cardiac arrest is at the hospital waiting for them to move his body. Her name is Desirée Townsend.

She's the independent reporter who obtained the EMS scanner audio confirming paramedics performed CPR at McConnell's D.C. home on June 14. NBC and CBS spent a week catching up to her.

Yesterday she tweeted that she's physically at the hospital, that multiple sources have told her the 84-year-old senator has been declared brain dead, and that his Capitol Police detail was still there as of 3:39pm ET.

Laura Loomer posted the same claim, citing a White House source. McConnell's office will not confirm or deny. They insist he is "continuing to improve."

The brain-death claim is not yet verified. Here's what is.

McConnell has been hospitalized for three straight weeks with no public explanation.

His office has never said why he was admitted. His last vote was June 11.

His wife Elaine Chao was photographed in Beijing meeting the Chinese vice president three days after her husband collapsed. She has not come home.

His daughter deactivated her X account.

Neighbors of his D.C. townhouse say no one has come or gone since the ambulance took him away. Not family. Not staff.

Kentucky's Democratic Governor Andy Beshear says McConnell's office is not returning his calls.

Now the politics.

Kentucky Republicans quietly rewrote the state's succession law in 2024. If McConnell's seat opens, Beshear cannot appoint a replacement. A special election gets triggered instead.

And the timing matters. If he can't finish his term after August 3, the special election just rolls into November. Before August 3, the GOP has to hold a standalone race.

They’re watching the calendar.

The election they're trying to avoid is the GOP's nightmare. Thomas Massie, the Republican congressman who has become one of Trump's loudest critics, would be a heavy favorite to run and split the red vote wide open.

Every day they hide McConnell's condition is a day they don't have to hold that race.

Whatever is actually happening in that hospital room, this is the picture from outside it: a senator who has not been seen in three weeks, a wife who left the country, a family that has gone dark, a governor being frozen out, and a party racing the clock on a succession law they wrote themselves.

Townsend is still at the hospital.

BESHEAR SHOULD SHOW UP AT THE HOSPITAL AND DEMAND TO SEE HIM - OR HIS BODY!!!

Schrödinger’s turtle

He’s a public servant, the public have a right to know his condition.

Savior of three clans is an elderly Baleen who spent her youth fighting against a tyrannical baleen whose goal was to take over several groups. He'd kill the young and elderly of villages while the travelers were away if they dared disobey his order to surrender and pay tribute.

This lead to many capitulating, out of fear for their loved ones and for the fact they couldn't be in the villages and our traveling for food and trade. Stay and protect, but starve? Or leave and risk a raid? Not really an option.

Savior had a small sibling and one elderly grandparent, and refused to allow them to be caught in that trap. She and a group of others around her age worked together, picking off the Tyrant's forces with hit and run attacks.

Finally, she challenged him to an open fight. He being older and almost twice her size, was certain of victory.

He was very, very wrong.

The Baleens are, generally, a peaceful community with the odd small fights between groups. Rarely do they have the resources or desire to engage in bigger incidents like this.

are u guys hearing this

Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.

Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.

Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.

Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.

- Oh you're precious. I'm keeping you.

- Bulma no.

Left anonymous because, I'm just gonna say it, sounds like you care. Regardless, I will help you out regardless.

Yes, a lot of life sucks here right now. But the general cultural vibe is one of earnesty and being there for each other. One lovely older white lady paid for my groceries the other day just because she wanted to. I was once crying my heart out at a grocery store and a man said he was gonna keep me in his prayers. Those people are as american as the voters who think my existence is a crime.

It is impossible to boil America down to being good or bad; it's a wonderful mess of contradictions of things that are great, and things that are terrible. We're the home of Star Wars, a franchise whose entire thesis is fighting back against fascism, and Star Trek, the birth of modern yaoi. But we're also the place that gave you scientology and billionaires. We're the country that voted for a guy who overturned our fundamental right to abortion, but we're also the country that fights like hell to keep that right in our state constitutions and will fully drop everything to get someone they know across state lines to get the medical procedure they need.

All of that is american. None of it cancels the other stuff out. Remember that the worst of us exists, but it is not all of us.

And if I had to distill America down to one sound, it would not be the braying voice of Velveeta Voldemort screaming about how much they hate windmills. It would be this:

nature is healing

Side note: polonium-210 is a very dangerous isotope, however it "does not pose a radiation hazard when kept outside the body", as the alpha particle it emits have very little penetration power and cannot pierce even the outer layers of dead skin. It has still killed countless people, though, not because of children's rings, but because of tobacco. Polonium latches onto and concentrates in tobacco leaves, leading to heavy smokers being exposed to more radiation than survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.