Mistakes were made

What white people hear: never use sage ever, don’t ever buy it, don’t own it, don’t even look at it.

Look, y’all. There’s a couple of facets to my talk today.

1) Yes! You can buy sage! You really, truly can! Buy it from either native sellers (go to a powwow! Eat our food, buy our stuff, watch some dancing!) Or buy it from a seller who sources the sage from native people. Pick one. And no, buying it from 5 Below doesn’t count.

2) you CANNOT smudge. This isn’t just you “shouldn’t”— this is a YOU ARE INCAPABLE OF SMUDGING. Waving a sage stick around your doorways IS NOT SMUDGING. It is smoke clensing. Smudging, depending on the tradition and tribe, could easily have dancing and drums involved. You, as a white person, do not have the cultural BACKGROUND to even know how it works. At all. Period.

3) please, for FUCKS SAKE, stop making posts here on tumblr where you tell other white people about cultural appropriation and what they can and cannot do. Please stop, your license has been revoked because none of you bother to get the facts right. We native people are FULLY CAPABLE OF DOING IT OURSELVES. Consider instead: a) reblogging our posts where we talk about it! We’re here! We have made posts!! b) Making a post that states what we said and then LINKS BACK TO US. Screenshot with a link if you must. Stop centering your own voices in these conversations. You are already centered in everything, stop centering yourselves in a native space.

I’m tired of this nonsense, y’all.

Thanks for coming to my TedTalk ™

——

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THE LOOK ON TOMS FACE WHEN PRATT CALLED THOR NOT THAT GOOD LOOKING...

Because I, like most ficauthors, have gotten both of these comments many times. One of them I love, the other fills me with frothing unholy rage.

There is a huge difference between 

“I never liked this character in canon/never understood what people saw in this character until I read your fic, and I totally get it now” 

and 

“Oh I like this character when YOU write them, unlike in CANON where they SUCK ASS [optional rambling haterant about the writers or the source material in general].”

The first of those things? That’s a compliment! It genuinely is. Some ficauthors have a knee-jerk reaction to it because we get the SECOND kind so fucking often, but frankly….that is a mistake on our part, if we have it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with not liking or connecting with a character until you find a fic where they’re in-character and lovingly explored in an interesting way. There’s nothing wrong with not “getting” a character, and then seeing fanwork that sparks an understanding of why other people like the character so much that totally opens your eyes. 

That’s WHY we write fanfiction, to explore the characters and the setting, to pour what we love about them into our work.

If you’re thinking about saying ANYTHING THAT EVEN REMOTELY RESEMBLES the second one, though?

Don’t.

Fuck you

Fuck off

Fuck your grandma

I hate you

So does everyone else

You fucking asshole

Unless the author has made it explicitly clear that they’re writing a spitefic–a “fixit” isn’t enough, because writing “fixit fics” does not inherently mean the author hates the direction taken by the source material, you can want to write a “fixit” where your favorite character is alive but still believe that their death was narratively appropriate–unless they’ve said IN WORDS, in the tags or an A/N or in a reply to previous comments, that they HATE an aspect of the show?

If you can’t say something nice, shut your fucking mouth.

People don’t generally dedicate hours of their lives to crafting 300k epics, marinated in lore and worldbuilding and character interactions, about media in which they hate the lore and worldbuilding and characters. People don’t write character-study fics about characters they think suck.

People who write AUs? Unless they’ve explicitly stated that they’re doing it because fuck canon (the poor, poor GoT fandom, man. And hey, I myself have a running WoW fic where the tags make it very clear that I’m writing this fic the way it’s written because Battle for Azeroth can eat my entire ass, so it’s totally fine to come into my comments and go “oh, this is so much better than BfA”)…There are a LOT OF REASONS people write alternate universes and universe alterations.

It is VERY RARE ACTUALLY that the reason is “fuck canon”. Most of the time, we’re telling a story because we think it’s an interesting story. Not the only interesting story, not a story that is more interesting and also better than the one told by canon and is the story canon should have told instead. An interesting story, one of many. 

Odds are, the thing you’re about to “””compliment””” us on? That’s sooooo much better than that stupid icky canon version of the world or the character you think sucks so hard? We didn’t just make that shit up. We’re portraying accurately what we actually saw onscreen.

We’re not gonna get mad at you for not noticing it was there until we pointed it out. That’s not just a compliment, it makes us happy! I LOVE when something I created helps another person see something in the thing I love that makes me love it! But insulting something that we clearly care about enough to dedicate hours of our free time to writing about it? And insulting our own reading comprehension by acting as if we’re just…delusional, that this is just wishful thinking, that the things we dedicated time and energy to picking apart so we could accurately reproduce them, are just shit we made up?

Don’t do that. Shit’s rude as fuck.

Instead of using fanfiction that makes a character speak to you as an excuse to ruin a ficauthor’s afternoon by being a hateful snot, maybe try approaching it as an opportunity to better understand what made us care enough to write the fic in the first place.

As far as I know sort of both? I assume you mean white Norwegians as an ethnicity (as in like, say descendants of Vikings) as opposed to Indigenous Norwegians (Saami, who are also Indigenous to Finland and Russia and Sweden), and not the Nationality “Norwegian”, which can just apply to anybody who lives in Norway (which includes Saami). Saami are Indigenous to Norway because they were the first peoples there in that area, and for a long time were the only people there. Other people (like, a lot of people showed up during the migration people for example) showed up in the Southern part later, and if I remember correctly, Saami people (like, as a culture specifically) were in Norway some 3,500 years before anybody else was. Vikings as a culture were descendants of people from the migration period, as well as the proto-Viking culture that was already there but came after Saami people did, and then in turn modern-day White Norwegians are descendants of Vikings (and anybody they might’ve brought back or people who moved there depending on personal family history etc). Some people (ie racists & white people) try to claim that Norwegians descended from Vikings also count as “Indigenous” and this is usually to discount specific anti-Indigenous racism Saami face as invalid, but also: culturally there are no Vikings. There are people descended from that, and there are the Indigenous Saami.

(This also lends to said poor treatment of Sámi as many white Norwegians (and also the nazis) considered Sámi is much more inferior to them)

Norwegian/Vikings culture and origins are Germanic, you can even seem similarities between their pantheons, with some gods even being in both. Sámi are not Germanic and our languages aren't even Indo-European. The Sámi could've been in Sápmi as early as 10,000 years ago, so obviously completely different cultures and origins to white Norwegians.

And it is the case that Vikings/the ancestors of current white Norwegians who aren't Sámi (also Swedes, Finns, and Russians) did colonize Sápmi. Subjecting Sámi to the rules of their kingdoms, raiding their villages, forcing Sámi to be Christian, and many other things.

every week there's another news item that immediately tops the list of real life events that sound like an overwrought politics SNL sketch and every week all i can do is laugh because otherwise i'd be resorting to arson

Food extract is the flavoring of something cooked down into a carrier oil or alcohol that is safe for human ingestion.

Essential oil is the pure extract of the plant refined down and distilled for concentrated medicinal purposes to a significantly higher strength than simply adding ground up mint leaves to your water. The two are not comparable in any way.

Cinnamon extract and cinnamon essential oil are not the same thing.

One is about 100 times the strength of the other and can also cause acute organ failure. I’ll give you a hint, it’s not the food extract.

Yeah.

I’ll never forget the look on her face.

So to reiterate, children under the age of ten should not be directly exposed to things like eucalyptus oil, peppermint or wintergreen. If you are using such things in your house and your child starts to complain of headaches, lethargy and general “feel worse”, don’t just assume it’s the cold/flu. Those are all signs of menthol sensitivity and they only get worse with increased exposure. Ventilate the room, take them outside if you can until the air clears. Do not apply again.

Rapid onset wheezing may be a sign of allergic reaction or possible asthma attack triggered by the menthol too. If they tell you their chest is warm or fuzzy when you use it, that’s another sign it’s not going down well with them. Again, ventilate the area or remove anything you applied to them. Administer inhalers if necessary. Watch for any more labored breathing or if they suddenly go limp or you can’t wake them up. If they do call 911.

This can also apply to people with allergies and asthma who are otherwise healthy.

Irish is the native language of Irish people. It’s an ancient language that is on the brink of extinction as a direct result of colonialism and cultural and physical genocide.

Names like Saoirse (freedom), Áine (radiant), Aoife (beautiful) etc are traditional Irish names. They’re spelt “funny” because Irish is a different language from English, and has some sounds that aren’t found in the English language.

There are villages in Wales that speak only Welsh as well, I grew up in one that was mixed language but pretty much everyone bar a few immigrant parents spoke Welsh.

Here a some example names

Efnision, Branwen, Iown, Rhys, Nerys, Ceridwen, Sian, Taliesin

A few example names are from the Mabinogion which is the Welsh book of fables and includes some of the first stories about King Arthur.

This language is dying, but it's fighting to stay alive, and a lot of White Americans don't understand the history and significance of Welsh names.

I know that another fish might eat this bullfrog right after I spend months rehabilitating it.

I know that turning a beetle back onto its legs won’t save it from falling over again when I walk away.

I know that there is no cosmic reward waiting for my soul based on how many worms I pick off a hot sidewalk to put into the mud, or how many times I’ve helped a a raccoon climb out of a too-deep trashcan. 

I know things suffer, and things struggle, and things die uselessly all day long. I’m young and idealistic, but I’m not literally a child. I would never judge another person for walking by an injured bird, for ignoring a worm, or for not really caring about the fate of a frog in a pond full of, y’know, plenty of other frogs.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But I cannot cannot cannot look at something struggling and ignore it if I may have the power to help.

There is so much bad stuff in this world so far beyond my control, that I take comfort in the smallest, most thankless tasks. It’s a relief to say “I can help you in this moment,” even though they don’t understand.

I don’t need a devil’s advocate to tell me another fish probably ate that frog when I let it go, or that the raccoon probably ended up trapped in another dumpster the next night.

I know!!!! I know!!!!!!! But today I had the power to help! So I did! And it made me happy!

There was a big storm and a ton of starfish were washed onto the beach, stranded much further up than they could get back and beginning to bake in the post-storm sunshine. A little girl was walking down the beach, picking up starfish and throwing them back into the sea. Some guy comes up and asks her what she’s doing. “Saving the starfish,” she says.

He looks around at the huge beach and the hundreds of starfish, and says “You can’t possibly save them all. I’m afraid you’re not gonna make much of a difference.”

Kindness is not weakness.

Kindness is brave. Especially when you also know that your kindness might not be returned, may even be met with anger or cruelty. It’s reaching out with an open hand, knowing that it’s just as likely to be bitten as it is to be held. 

I’ve seen one person pay for the car behind them, then the next person pay for the person behind them, and it has gone on for 10 cars before someone didn’t pass it on. That first person doesn’t know how far it goes, they were just being generous.

One time, a girl handed our manager $20 to divide amongst the crew that night. There were only four, so each of us got $5. That girl didn’t get to see it, but everyone was excitedly talking about how we’re going to spend that $5. One guy said it was going to be his gas for the next three days until we get paid. She didn’t see it, but she made all of our nights so much better.

Another time, a girl complimented my name when I handed her food to her. She probably didn’t think much of it, but it was my chosen name, and I’d never been complimented on it, and was very stressed about being out at work.