the light of stars was in her hair

but what I do care about is comic book writers dying broke and hungry while disney pumps out another $1billion military propaganda MCU film using their characters (labor they were payed comparatively nothing for).

what I care about is Gary Bowser paying nintendo 30% of his income for the rest of his life, just because he was pirating games.

There's something magical about old pictures of stars

As a fellow individual living with stutter, I cannot appreciate enought the quality of representation the community is getting from how Lestat's character is written. The attention and care paid to portraying his stutter and the social trauma resulting from it deserve wider recognition. This includes, amongst other things, the fact that his stutter (in his case) is only present when:

he is in extreme distress or converses with people that wear him out/mock him regularly (contrary to popular belief, most of us don't stutter constantly, certain social situations can exacerbate the frequency of it. When we are with our close friends or family, it can happen that the stutter doesn’t show at all.)

pronouncing certain letter combinations or words (each of us usually has a set of trigger words that we try to substitute with synonyms) – stutter also not only manifests in repeating the first syllabil of a word, also can mean 'strained' pronouncination (not being able to 'get out the words at the right time', often accompanied by 'hissing' sounds).

in his childhood (the severity of stutter can fade over time, leaving most affected individuals with mild to light symptoms when they get older).

Sadly, this kind of basic emotional intelligence and sensitivity is not the norm in the entertainment industry, where mocking people who stutter is usually what we get. Happy to see this change.

This past semester was the first semester where I didn't felt like I was dying all the time.

like, something was DRAMATICALLY different. I had the social stamina to hang out with friends and actually started making friends with my coworkers. No mental breakdowns. I wasn't walking around in agonized suffering anymore. At work I started leading events and actually being comfortable doing the public-facing parts of the job.

Something changed, but what?

So the weird thing is. I think it may have been. The Bucky Barnes fanfiction. I started posting it the day before classes started. I had been in the remotest pit of a depressive episode and as soon as I locked onto this writing project, I felt life return to my body.

Maybe having a creative project to pour myself into that was completely outside of the realm of college gave me the strength to continue. I felt a lot before like I was suffocating because my life had narrowed to this tiny sliver. It felt much better to have something important to me that wasn't part of college.

Or maybe putting the guy through The Horrors helped me to find catharsis with/process some of the shit that was passively hurting me in the day to day? Like, I don't know, I'm aware on some level that I bottled up and locked down my own traumas and horrors for a long time and it Affected Me, and I eventually found my way to, like...a craving to work some of that out creatively. I dunno, it's good. It really helps with the self-compassion thing.

I also took a yoga class, which was really good because it wasn't like an "exercise" class and like "pushing" yourself, but more about like...existing in and noticing your body and how all the parts work together, and where you're holding tension and kinda systematically wringing that out. Very good. Had a couple yoga videos though that triggered the absolute fuck out of me because of the "push through pain" kinda mindset. So be careful with that one.

I will say that some of it probably was building over time. Like. As much as the academic pursuits have beat me with hammers and crushed me with bricks, I have grown in a valuable way from the experience, in the sense that I have learned to just. Choose for myself what I want to give a fuck about. Not play along with the institution's incentives and pressures.

Like. It was almost a problem, but it wasn't? Instead of making rational judgments about whether I could afford to slack off, I slacked off because I just did not fucking care.

And the sense of "omg omg omg shit fuck shit there's a deadline I'm going to be late I have to turn this in aaaaauuughhg" feels very hard to let go of, because it seems to be the thing motivating you to meet those deadlines. It's the thing that keeps you safe from failure. And people will encourage you to hold onto it.

My mom would ask me, "Oh, when's your paper due" and I would be like "Yesterday," and she would be like "omg you have to get that done" and I would be like *shrug* and she would be like "you still have time to work on it tonight" and I would be like "I don't want to work on it tonight."

And it was fine. I made a B+ in the class, actually. If I had spent the weekend grinding to finish that paper as fast as possible it would have done nothing but make me exhausted. Nothing is as serious as you're supposed to feel like it is.

I feel serene, or maybe indomitable, because I do not feel the pressure the world applies to me anymore.

Last year, going through the worst and most grueling gauntlet of horrors, I was sitting there realizing that whatever happened, I was going to wake up tomorrow, in this body that keeps me alive and allows me to feel, in this world where everything is interesting. And if I didn't wake up tomorrow, well, it wouldn't be my problem anymore anyway.

Like...I was just an animal. A creature. I had days where I broke down consciousness to its atoms, noticing myself as a creature reacting to stimuli like I was a paramecium floating around in a drop of pond water. Colors! Light! Interest?? Mystery??? Snacks! Hunger! Snacks! Good! The constructions around me were very flimsy and fake, and pleasures and interesting things were real, and I would wander around just...doing what my body seemed to want to do. I thought of myself as a wildlife, fulfilling my biological needs, investigating novel stimuli.

Sometimes with the biological needs thing you really have to like, throw off all social and external expectations about what behaviors are allowable and go full creature mode to figure out what the fuck your body wants. Sometimes this means eating whatever the fuck you want, whether it seems like a meal or not, and eating it until you genuinely don't want to eat it anymore. Sometimes this means sleeping when you feel like sleeping and not waking up until your body says so. Lay on the floor, roll on the ground, pick a direction and walk as far as you can, run really really fast, sit in your room buck ass naked.

One day last month I legitimately fell asleep at like 5pm and when I woke up again it was 4:45am. I got dressed and went outside and went on a long walk, halfway across town, past the gas station and the apartment buildings, all the way to the pollinator garden at the park. It was dark and I was completely alone and I noticed how the stars became more visible even a short ways outside the lights of the town.

Another time I went downtown to the railroad tracks and decided the follow the railroad tracks as far as I could. I was wearing flip-flops so I got stabbed with a stick very nastily, but I walked over a mile and I passed through a tunnel under an old bridge with cool graffiti on it, and a drip of cold water from the ceiling of the tunnel landed on the back of my neck! and I kept going until I started leaving the town, and then backtracked and climbed through some scrubby bushes and trees and came out onto a small road where there were some kids playing basketball and they all stared at me, but I am unaffected by staring. And then eventually I found my way back to campus.

Aredhel lives canon divergence, but make it worse because she's a kinslayer (maybe twice if you count alqualonde??)

cw: major character death of course because it's the silm

In a clearing of holin and white oak, aided by Amras, Aredhel lifts her son's body onto its funeral pyre. Already the followers of Celegorm, Curufin, and Caranthir have lit the fires for their slain lords and their companions. When Maedhros at last exhausts his search for Dior's twin sons, he comes upon her kneeling beside the flames that lick at her son's corpse. Maedhros falls to his knees beside her. Through the blue smoke-haze, Maglor keens a lament.

From the story:

We repeatedly emphasized that we were aboard a small 8-meter sailboat, but the response was the same each time: "We are a 50-meter three-masted sailboat, and we offer our assistance in towing you to Paimpol." We were perplexed by the size difference between our two boats, as we feared being towed by a boat that was too large and at too fast a speed that could damage our boat. The arrival of the Götheborg on the scene was rapid and surprising, as we did not expect to see a merchant ship from the East India Company of the XVIII century. This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it? The Götheborg approached very close to us to throw the line and pass a large rope. The mooring went well, and our destinies were linked for very long hours, during which we shared the same radio frequency to communicate with each other. The crew of the Götheborg showed great professionalism and kindness towards us. They adapted their speed to the size of our boat and the weather conditions. We felt accompanied by very professional sailors. Every hour, the officer on duty of the Götheborg called us to ensure everything was going well.[...] This adventure, very real, was an incredible experience for us. We were extremely lucky to cross paths with the Götheborg by chance and especially to meet such a caring crew. Dear commander and crew of the Götheborg, your kindness, and generosity have shown that your ship is much more than just a boat. It embodies the noblest values of the sea, and we are honored to have had the chance to cross your path and benefit from your help.

the asala collection (spanning 130 years, 355 albums/items, and more than 30.000 images) is a perfect example

the collection has been exhibited and promoted, & it is clearly an important historical archive. but who gets meaningful access?

a single rare photo album like those in collections such as this can cost thousands, putting them mainly within reach of wealthy collectors, universities, or museums.

these images are records of human history. when our shared visual heritage is locked behind ownership, price, and restricted access, most people lose the chance to see and learn from it.

they should be preserved, digitised & made accessible.