salvation anew past the banks of the river shore

the longer this ariana grande body talk shit goes on, the angrier I get. the more weight I lose due to my debilitating illness, the more angry the whole "we shouldn't talk about this, because what if she's sick" makes me!

I'm really sick! I have a really limited diet bc of my illness and I have been losing a lot of weight involuntarily! it has gotten to a point where I am looking noticably frail/skeletal and its quite scary, actually! I just had a dietician appointment which was mostly focused on making sure I'm getting the maximum calories and nutrients right now and I'm looking into asking some specialists what they think about supplemental tube feeding bc of how concerned we all are about how thin I am now!

what I'm saying is, my body looks a troubling amount like the kind of body people are expressing concern about being glamorized by celebs right now.

and,

if I was a public figure, it would be my responsibility to make it very clear that I understood the impact that seeing my body glamorized in films and on billboards could have on people. as a public figure, it would be my job to be like, "the size that I am is one that is celebrated and privileged in our society, and it's important to me to make it clear that I don't cosign that and actively oppose it, and that I want all my fans to know I don't want them to look like me. I want them to look like themselves."

or something. I don't know I don't have a PR department. but it's just so fucking galling to respond to this like it's about her specific health rather than the impact that someone with this much fame and glamor and visibility being this size has on the culture and what harmful social issues (that actually hurt people!!) it plays into. I don't think I would be obligated to share my private medical information as a public figure, but I do think it would be my responsibility to refuse to participate in the glamorization of the size of my body.

it sucks. it fucking sucks seeing people use sick people to excuse this going undiscussed. "think about chadwick boseman" don't try to tell me about that shit!!! that was people making racist crackhead memes about a dying black man. this is about a woman who is a white celebrity pop idol whose image is literally everywhere in very idealized and glamorized ways. if you don't know the difference between those two things then you don't know enough about this. I don't care about ariana's health any more or less than I care about the health of any stranger (which is to say, I hope that she is well, and if she is not well then I hope she is able to get effective treatment and recover. because that is how I feel about everyone) and the details of it are not my business. it's not really about her.

pretending to care about sick or disabled people in order to silence necessary conversations about harmful social trends rooted in fatphobia and misogyny and ableism is a shitty look! I don't believe for a second the people who use this argument actually care about people who lose dangerous amounts of weight very quickly for health reasons! because I am one of those people and I THINK WE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS.

Excellent update on year 2 of this program:

Sure, people complain. Rich people are always going to complain about taxes. But they never flee the way they threaten to, largely because whether or not they like to admit it, they prefer to live in the kinds of areas where things are made nicer by the taxes they don’t want to pay.

Point of order.

King of Horses ran 450 fucking miles at almost entirely a gallop, without more than a few minutes rest, in 4 nights and basically was like "wait why are we stopping?" when Gandalf took him into the city and he ended up in a stable.

This was not his top speed, nor did it push any limits on his endurance.

for his war crimes and doesn’t

deserve any sex.

My illustrations the most based poem about tigers by Nael, age 6

Rereading the scene where they talk to Redell in the Auckland prison, Stratt shows such distain for Redell and how his negligence killed 7 people. She doesn’t let him make excuses and try and worm his way out of it. To her, he as the leader of the project has a responsibility toward those people and he failed, and in doing so killed them.

Every other action she takes has purpose. Every death that may be caused by those actions is counterbalanced by thousands of lives it saves. She can live with those decisions, because she knows they had to be made.

The lab explosion never should have happened. It was a mistake on the part of the quartermaster, but if there were additional safety protocols in place, it is a mistake that likely could have been prevented. I don’t think there’s any way that Stratt feels anything other than personally responsible for it.

She was negligent in her duty to ensure the safety of everyone working under her and the project itself, and because of that 14 people died. 14 people who did not need to die, whose deaths did nothing to save humanity.

Not only that, but the events catalysed the need to send the one person she’d let get closer to her to his death.

Ohhhhhh, you're about to go test something extremely dangerous? A cataclysmic failure condition? Sure, let's put both science specialists in a room together while this happens.

The particular outcome that we got -- that they happened to both be present at the point of a terrible accident -- was an unlikely but foreseeable outcome of them spending all their free time hanging out together. Like that was the explicit reasoning for the two teams not taking transport together.

consider harrowhark; in the first book we see her as gideon sees her. she's a hideous ghoul with a flat ass and no tits, she's a delicate sopping wet beauty with a sharp face and angel bow lips, she's a triumphant and awe inspiring master necromancer screaming and fighting drenched in her own blood. the shape and condition of her body is allowed to take on meaning contextually based entirely on the situation and how gideon feels about their relationship in any given moment

she then spends the second book hobbling around with a sword twice her size, ripping apart her body to use as a weapon and passing out in her own vomit, struggling to eat and sleep – she and puts herself through absolute hell and never once thinks anything of it, and we're made to mourn this not as the desecration of a beautiful woman but as a manifestation of a human being's despair and self loathing, and we see this specifically contrasted against the care gideon tries to take when inhabiting her body during the last act

it's jarring, in nona, when we're suddenly made aware that her body could be perceived or valued as a commodity, when pyrrha is assumed to be nona's pimp. it feels strange and horrifying when we learn alecto's form was modeled for a doll, learn that she was given a woman's body as a display of ownership, an alternative to being consumed, and as we're processing this we watch gideon, paul, and ianthe, immediately setting aside their conflict in a desperate scramble to preserve harrow's body for no reason other than because it is harrow's and they love her

feminist fiction often focuses on women's relationship to a body which is valued more than the person within it – and that is a worthy experience to explore – but as a transsexual butch(ish) dyke, i have never really had the privilege of seeing my body as a precious commodity, never felt like it couldn't or shouldn't be a sight of violence and disgust, and as a result the locked tomb books have made me feel seen in a way that few other works of fiction have?

we as an audience are not made aware of how attractive any character would be outside of the context of our lesbian POV characters' perspectives, their relationship to patriarchal beauty standards is an utterly irrelevant detail we're never told and only occasionally glimpse through implication. the women in the locked tomb books are simply free to exist, to have experiences and feelings, to love and hate and grieve and suffer and die like anybody else, and to have those experiences reflected in their physical vessels