Because in the darkness, there be dragons

I don't care who you're telling to kill themselves. Firstly, I don't actually think that's okay to say to anyone, and second, they are not the only one who will see it. It doesn't matter who it was addressed to - it still feels like it was addressed to me.

I have chronic suicidality. At any given moment, if you ask me, "Do you want to die?" the answer will be yes. But most of the time I'm not actively thinking about it. Most of the time, I'm distracted. Coming across "kys" is like being asked if I want to die. It reminds me that the answer is yes.

People with chronic or recurrent suicidal thoughts do our best to avoid ruminating on thoughts of suicide. We do our best to avoid things that might trigger a spiral of intensified suicidal ideation.

Every time you tell someone to kill themself, you remind everyone with suicidal thoughts that suicide is an option - and in doing so, you make it more likely that they will take that option.

This is probably the only post I will ever actually ask people to reblog. This is because it's the only post I've ever made with the specific, active intention of changing how people behave. I want people to see this, because I hope it will make some of them reconsider their actions. I hope that in some small way, I can make a dent in an online culture that forces every suicidal person into a constant game of Russian roulette.

What is haluski? The answer, like with many dishes, depends on who you’re asking. 

Different varieties pop up across Eastern Europe, including Slovakia, Romania, Poland and Ukraine, where it’s the national dish. The variations likely stem from the fact that haluski simply means “dumplings.” Just as there are many ways to make a kugel, there are many ways to make a dumpling dish. 

In general, the dumplings are made from a dough of flour and potatoes. Depending on the consistency of your dough, you might roll it out and cut it up before dropping it into boiling water, not unlike a gnocchi. With a wet dough, you’d simply drop small pieces of the batter one by one into boiling water. There’s even a haluski-specific strainer for the task.

The dumplings are commonly accompanied by cabbage, eggs, and/or cheese. The Slovakian version, for instance, called bryndzové halušky, uses fried cabbage and a sheep’s milk cheese (that’s the bryndzové), but no eggs.

When the dish made its ways to the States, likely in the early 20th century, the potato dumplings were ditched in favor of egg noodles. The reason isn’t entirely clear. What’s clearer, though, is that the dish — also known more plainly as cabbage and noodles — at some point found its way into the Hungarian Jewish community. 

Haluski follows the same logic of any classic dish that’s stood the test of time: It’s quick and easy, filling, has few ingredients, and can be served as a side dish or as the main course. 

I found it while exchanging emails with a cousin, Sandy Mott, in search of heritage recipes to better understand what my ancestors were eating.

“My grandmother was a phenomenal cook,” Sandy wrote. “She used to make a dish called haluski, which was basically sautéed cabbage and onions with wide egg noodles mixed in.”

I have a tiny little question. Well, it might be a bit bigger but y'know. I'm currently helping a friend of mine with some coding for ao3 and while most of the things have been going smoothly, I did find one thing I cannot figure out for the life of me.

I've been trying to look into a workskin that would make a "flip page" effect? A part of my friend's fic is written through journals, so we've been looking into something that could make it possible.

I found this workskin through a reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1m9kt9b/htmlcss_coding_for_a_flip_book_effect/

However, trying to change the pages + the cover to look a bit more realistic is breaking my code and the amounts of tabs I currently have open in order to find any sort of answer is just about to break my poor laptop.

So, my question is if there's any possibility to perhaps make it a little bit more, ah, nicer? Maybe?

In case it's not possible, that's also totally fine, but I've decided to at least ask. Thank you in advance! I really do love your work and siteskins a lot!

Hi anon! I've spent the few weeks since you sent this in attempting a work skin myself. Unfortunately, I think I have to admit that this is beyond my current capacity with coding.

#workskin .book .pages > div summary { position: absolute; bottom: 0; right: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; cursor: pointer; text-align: center; color: black !important; background: linear-gradient(to left, #e1ddd8 0%, #fffbf6 100%); box-shadow: inset 0px -1px 2px rgba(50, 50, 50, 0.1), inset -1px 0px 1px rgba(150, 150, 150, 0.2); }

Swap out "background: " (the bolded line) for:

background-image: url(URL of your preferred image);

HOWEVER since then, more book emulating things have come out!

-HTML Experiments + F2U workskins by tonightshannon has an animated book

-A Prayer to the Mother of Yoba (Sarah’s Prayer) by jeeksy has an open layout of pages

-Old Book + Letter workskin by red_mallow has more of a book layout

-And while not technically a tutorial, I made a Minecraft book CYOA with hovering text arrows that I could give you the code for if you wish (dm me)

Welcome to Radio Free Monday for the week of June 1, 2026. RFM posts links to peoples' personal fundraisers asking for community assistance, on Tumblr, Dreamwidth, and the Fediverse.

==== Recurring needs ====

Tumblr user like-the-midnight-sun, who is divorced and cannot receive money since that looks like income, needs assistance to pay for a dental cleaning for her cat. She asks that you please contact the vet at Rogers Park and say you would like the donation to be on behalf of Amaranthe Zinzani.

Tumblr user werevampiwolf is raising funds to pay this month's rent and buy food during the gap between state benefits and paychecks. Read more, reblog, and support the fundraiser here.

Tumblr user fern-mage is raising funds to cover a rent shortfall, and has opened art commissions. Read more, reblog, and support the fundraiser here.

=======================

There used to be thousands of Jews in Iraq. The ancient Talmudic centers of Surah and Pumbedita were in Iraq. Jews in Iraq, and indeed most of the world, had never been treated as equal citizens, being subject to Dhimmi laws, but still the Iraqi Jewish culture flourished.

Today, it is estimated that there are only four Jews left in Iraq. Four Jews.

The Iraqi Jewish community is one of the oldest Jewish communities outside of Israel, and it was razed to the ground.

If you talk about the Holocaust but don't talk about the multiple ethnic cleansings and genocides of Jews in the SWANA region, you are being deliberately ignorant and antisemitic.

My ancestors lived and died and were buried in Iraq but I can't visit their hometowns and gravesites because they're all gone.

Several decades later my sister had an MRI, as a long shot, to try to figure out why she was sick and deteriorating with a number of symptoms that were close to being written off as anxiety. She was sent straight to the hospital for adult onset hydrocephaly. Two days later she had brain surgery to put a shunt down her neck into her stomach and drain the fluid out. (No, you cannot usually get brain surgery that fast. Yes, it was that urgent.) Recovery was long and squiggly but it happened.

I think of that boy every once in a while. The one who died. I have no doubt that treatments developed for people like him, and tested on people like him, saved my sister's life.

I've been type 1 diabetic since I was about one and a half, and was incredibly sick. If my mother hadn't also been type 1 and recognized the signs I likely would have died.

I was born in 1982. Insulin was first given to a patient in 1922, and he survived. Before that, type 1 meant death, often very slow and agonizing. Before insulin, doctors advised a super strict "keto" diet to prolong life, and it could work for awhile - up to a year, I believe. But it was a miserable existence as the body was literally eating itself as the blood turned acidic until the patient eventually died.

60 years. Only 60 years before my birth did that procedure work for the first time. That's absolutely nothing given the span of human history and I think a lot about the people who died from it throughout time.

But yes, people tried. Healers and doctors of all sorts tried all manner of things to allow these (mostly!) kids to live. The fact that it was accomplished at all is nothing short of a miracle. The fact that I've been alive 42 years is fucking insane considering my body doesn't produce a hormone necessary for survival. If you think that doesn't blow me away on a regular basis you have another think coming. It's nothing short of a miracle.

Every medical advancement is. The amount of work that goes into it and the vast amount of luck necessary to get it right even when all the research and information is sound is just astonishing.

If you're someone who wants to be able to find (or avoid) ships while reading on AO3, odds are good that a fan coder out there has created a user script that could help you out.

User scripts are similar to extensions. You add them to your browser to automatically adjust web pages for you. User scripts allow you the opportunity to personalize them, however, which is wonderful for things like AO3 filters.

Here are a few that might be worth a look:

AO3 multishipper saviour - if you want to read about a particular character in a relationship without specifying any other person. The relationships can be specified to be romantic or platonic or both.

AO3: Reorder Ship Tags - Automatically reorders relationship tags on work blurbs so romantic ships (/) always appear before platonic ships (&).

AO3 Relationship/Character Highlighter - highlights the ship/character you’re looking for if they appear in the first two relationship/character tags.

AO3 romantic relationship savior - hides all romantic relationships in sort & filter page that has "/"

AO3 First Relationship Tag Filter - toggle on the script if you're browsing a relationship tag and all the works that don't have that tag as their first tag will be hidden. Works on both romantic (/) and platonic (&) relationships.

AO3 relationship savior - hides works that have too many relationships in them.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing - will hide fics that don't have the designated pairing listed first in the tags.

AO3 Only Show Primary Pairing (Auto) - The difference between this and Neeve's script is that it automatically detects the primary pairing, little to no configuration needed.

AO3 Show every pairing except THAT one - Remove relationship tags from script which you do not want to read.

I don't remember the last time I was quite this excited about a skin that I'm making. I have no idea if all of this will end up in the final version, but I'm just having so much fun with seeing what I can actually do that I wanted to share some work in progress shots.

(honestly? the hardest part has been finding the images. any tips on where to get medieval illuminated artwork would be much appreciated!)

I'm gonna be a bit of a Debbie Downer for a second and point out that it's not just people who use screen readers who have difficulty with those fonts. It's also people with dyslexia, lower reading comprehension, lack of familiarity with cursive or fancy fonts, and non-native speakers.

I myself am none of the above, but I still can't read more than one or two words of either strikethrough or Zalgo text before I can feel a strain in my eyes.

For those who are able to visually read the words, I'll explain what the issue is with screen readers. Fancy Unicode Text isn't actually text. It's letters formed by unicode symbols that were created for use in, for example, mathematical equations. Each of those symbols has a name, and a screen reader will read out each "letter"'s name instead of reading the whole word. I'll put an example below, as an image, to save people who are using screen readers to read this post (there's a brief alt text though).

example courtesy of https://givemefonts.com/blog/accessibility-in-unicode

So, now that everyone is up to speed on the question, I have one question and two possible solutions.

The question: What is the purpose of using the fancy unicode text?

First possible solution: If you just want to be able to differentiate the font and/or colour of text within a fic, you can do that with a work skin and leave the text fully readable by screen readers. Here's one that was created for Undertale and has a whole bunch of web safe fonts you can switch between. There's one for Homestuck as well. And a third workskin that does lots of formatting, including fonts and colours.

Second possible solution: If you're going for a specific look that can only be achieved by fancy unicode text, then you might want to include that as an image and set the image's alt text to be the plain text version.

In most cases cases the snarl of glitch text or long strings of unicode-symbol-names-being-read-aloud is an automatic 'hell no'. Basically either is right up there with overly long ASCII/emoticon dividers in terms of annoyance factor. Also, a lot of the look of unicode-symbols-as-text can be more-or-less replicated by font and style changes such as using bold and italic or a cursive font, which are at least TTS friendly even if not always particularly great for people who sight-read with vision/perception issues. Though I would hope people with those issues are at least using software that ignores document CSS and forces the use of friendly-to-them fonts and formatting (the software I use has such features in addition to TTS, you just have to have enough sight to go through the menus changing things to your particular satisfaction).

So I highly second just using Cool Regular Text instead of unicode text, with maybe an optional skin if you want to be particularly spiffy about it (though note that skins get thrown away when the fic is downloaded, so I and my ereader likely wouldn't even notice any difference... unless the lack of skin causes a bunch of stuff to break in creative ways). So yes, look at the skins linked in the above reply, if you're really ambitious maybe even hit up the W3 Schools site and learn some CSS for ways of affecting text appearance yourself.