Dignity. Always Dignity.

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'JK Rowling posted upskirt photos of a woman on Twitter' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

No one doing this should be allowed to call themselves a feminist.

Interplanetary Journal of Cultural Studies Volume 16, Issue 3, Pages 322-340

Abstract

The recently decoded Internet Archive includes the digital artifact called “Archive of Our Own” (AO3) from early third millennium Earth.  AO3 is unusually well backed up and therefore is presumed to contain some of the most significant -- perhaps even sacred -- texts of the time.  In this paper we present our preliminary analysis of AO3 metadata, including new insights about the literature, gender and sexuality, religion, and scientific understanding of this historical era: 

I. LITERATURE. We describe the cultural centrality of figures such as the Winchesters and Reader.  We explore how they featured heavily in every dominant literature genre of the era, including Fluff, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, and Oral Sex.  

II. GENDER AND SEXUALITY. We review the overwhelming evidence that male-male relationships were the most culturally significant sexual and romantic relationships, but we also show that it was a culture with an unusually broad set of sexual and gender roles.  In particular, we highlight the unusual tripartite conceptualization of gender as including alpha, beta, and omega roles; we note the apparent prejudice against betas, illustrated in the prevalence of “no beta we die like men” and similar protest slogans. 

III. RELIGION. We describe a newly discovered religious taboo: doves were a common sacrificial animal of the time, but they were forbidden from being eaten.  

IV. SCIENCE. Finally, we present new insight about alternate universes.  While previous scholars hypothesized that the scientists of Earth may have developed a correct early theory of the multiverse by the late second millennium, our analysis of AO3 presents evidence to the contrary.  As late as the early third millennium, prevailing theories postulated highly specific universes, such as a universe in which everyone is in high school, or a universe contained within a coffee shop.  

My therapist almost sent me to a juvenile detention center. The only reason that she didn't was because having six months of therapy was a requirement before I could go to the center, and my mom and I moved away before the six months could be completed. What do you think could've happened to me if I went to a juvenile detention center? Would I have ever had access to a lawyer at any point in the process? 

And this is why Oppositional Defiant Disorder is fake fake fake!! It depends on reports from adults, and adults are eager to portray themselves as entirely reasonable and teenagers as just crazy idiots.

When the ODD label gets slapped on a child, parents have no responsibility apparently for when a child habitually responds badly to authoritarian control. Nor do teachers, or systems; disabilities are suddenly irrelevant or their very existence is doubted.

ODD: fuck that child, in particular, but like clinically.

Okay, if you were in America, your therapist could not have just sent you to a juvenile detention center. There are a couple things that could have been happening here that you misunderstood or that were not explained to you. (People also tend to stop explaining things to kids diagnosed with ODD.)

Your therapist could have been referring to a youth mental health facility. Some of these are locked and do look and feel a lot like juvenile detention centers, and the locked facilities also do a lot of work with kids that are involved with the juvenile justice system.

Your therapist could have been threatening/offering to file something in court that could have ended up with you in detention. This could either be criminal charges (how dare you assault your mother);

Or it could have been an alternative civil type of case that's very common but called many different things in many different states. The civil charge is basically "hello I would like a judge to help me parent my child" and historically involved determinations of "incorrigibility." Now it's usually something involving determining if the child is at risk or in need of services or something.

Youth Mental Health Facility: this would have been undoubtedly the potential worst and also the potential best of the three options, depending utterly on how garbage your mom was going to be and what facility you ended up in. Those mental health facilities are rife with horror and abuse, as you might expect from anywhere containing a whole population of people who are habitually not believed and who have extremely limited legal rights.

Depending entirely on who is staffing the place and how vigilant and focused they are, their leadership, their ability to set goals and keep the kids first, some of those facilities... actually... are pretty good. I actually think architecture might have an influence on this too: if it looks more like a prison, it's going to end up with the staff acting more like it's a prison. I toured one of our higher-security locked youth facilities before, and they were super eager to show me their classrooms, their counseling rooms, and then... a blank hallway painted friendly colors, with a room coming off of it that had padded walls. I was like "wtf is this" and they were like, this is actually the pacing hallway! If kids are having a meltdown, they can come here any time with a staff member and yell and punch the wall and have a talk about it!

Court Filing: If you got a criminal charge, you would have gotten someone like me (ideally; the access to decent lawyers for youth is. spotty at best) and (ideally) a guardian ad litem, an attorney to look out for your best interests. This would be because your parent was the "victim" of the charge and so might not be looking out for your best interests. I actually ask for a GAL to be appointed on any case where I suspect the parents might be doing some Fuckery.

If the case was criminal, you also possibly would have gone to detention very briefly on arrest but whether you stayed there would have depended on the jurisdiction, the judge, and the lawyers. My experience overwhelmingly would say: probably you would not be staying in detention for a push unless your mom refused to have you back at home.

If you got a civil case, you would have gotten an attorney who's not quite like me. As a public defender, I specialize in criminal defense and I have the backing of my office and lots of training. Attorneys for civil cases for kids (which can still end up with them in detention) vary wildly in experience, commitment, general intelligence, and whether I have ever low-key wanted to throttle them.

Either way, you probably would have gotten stuck going back to court pretty regularly for a while to prove that you could shape up and be better (TM). During this process, you would have to behave orders of magnitude better than, just for a random example, the President of the United States, under constant provocation, with no right to privacy or autonomy, and the penalty of detention if you failed.

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

"Subtract twice the last digit from the rest, check if it gives a multiple of 7. Repeat until it's a small enough multiple for you to recognise."

Example:

92911: 9291 - 2 = 9289

-> 9289: 928 - 18 = 910

-> 910: 91 - 0 = 91

-> 91: 9 - 2 = 7

MST3K is the show where they insult American colonialism and take the piss out of Donald Trump repeatedly in the first season in 1989 and then, do racist Asian accents for joke because they do accents for EVERY character so it takes seasons for them to realize that maybe that's not okay. Joel spends several seasons being kind of a hard-core feminist and then when Mike shows up, they do too many transphobic jokes even though Mike will dress in drag in the same episode.

Tom and Crow almost get married and Dr Forrester officiates while wearing rainbows and Mike ONLY disapproves because they jump into it too quickly but then they'll fetishize two women characters who do something queer coded. You have GPC, whose name in the first 12 seasons is literally a slur and is kind of a goofy female character for the sake of having "the girl" and then they slowly add Mary Jo Pehl to the cast of supporters and then have her play Pearl fcking Forrester - a fat, intelligent, devious, commanding badass evil scientist who I kind of want to be when I grow up. They use "Inuit" in a great joke and then in the second joke in the SAME EPISODE which is about how Indigenous culture is valuable, they use the e-slur. How?!

And yet, there's an episode with a movie that merges what is clearly actual stock footage of somewhere in Africa and white people in blackface dancing around and the writers and crew not only point out which is which, but carefully determine which is which so that they're careful not to make fun of the actual footage - just the racist caricatures. Like..??? In 1997???

MST3K is like this beautiful smorgasbord of political takes of the time, of flawed advocacy and allyship, a snapshot of a small group of people who - despite their shortcomings in some ideas - would be shunned as "woke" today by the jokes and criticisms they were making back in 89. And that's not including the changes still being made with Jonah and Emily - and who knows what else when Mike comes back.

and in the one hand, did i enjoy spending hours researching housing regulations in my state? not especially. drafting this email was stressful. but on the other hand, did i learn a lot by doing that research? yeah, i did. i’m more prepared for my current and future leases. i used some of that info to make decisions about a new renter’s insurance policy. i already told three different people about things i learned that are relevant to their leases that they didn’t know yet. (pro tip: see if you’re supposed to be getting annual interest payments on your security deposit! also look up what specific appliances your landlords must legally provide as of 2026.) i also got to reconnect with my cousin for a bit because her job gave her specific insight on part of the situation, and i’d much rather do that than have a chatbot make shit up for me.

also, i drafted that email with the power of friendship (friends angry on our behalf) and spite (from landlords telling me not to do my research). chatgpt could never.

Anne Frank was killed by Nazis.

Fuck censorship. Because it feels like censoring the word "kill" undermines the fact that they were killed.

Killed by the State in both cases.

I don't think that's necessarily the intent of whoever censored the image. But if we can't *talk* about death like this, we can't talk about who and why those people were killed. And that's a really goddamn important thing to talk about.

Especially when the US is gathering immigrants in converted warehouses where some of them die, and the rest are living in horrendous conditions.

Especially when the US has murdered citizens in the streets.

We have to talk about those killings.

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

Vampirism. Lycanthropy. Cheap spells gone wrong. A woman brought in for her prenatal has to be told her baby is a lindworm. Someone is literally being followed by the anthropomorphic personification of the Black Death.

I haven’t previously looked at fic creators vs fic readers. However, using the public dataset release I can see that 747/9127 = 8.2% of people who chose to answer questions about works they had created identify their sexuality as “Heterosexual or Straight” only, vs 702/7003 = 10.0% of respondents who chose not to answer questions about creating works.

So today I tripped. Fell flat on my face, it was awful but ultimately harmless. My service dog, however, is trained to go get an adult if I have a seizure, and he assumed this was a seizure (were training him to do more to care for me, but we didn’t learn I had epilepsy until a year after we got him)

I went after him after I had dusten off my jeans and my ego, and I found him trying to get the attention of a very annoyed woman. She was swatting him away and telling him to go away. So I feel like I need to make this heads up

If a service dog without a person approaches you, it means the person is down and in need of help