Call me B

Azune Nayar is someone whose childhood and youth were marked by adults who, faced with bad choices, made the less-worse one because they cared about him.

His parents starved themselves to give him and his sister the chance of being recruited as child soldiers by a mercenary group, because that was the only way to protect him from starvation.

Thjazi Fang saw a child abandoned by the roadside, desperately, determinedly, and implausibly claiming he could fight. Thazi Fang was in the middle of waging a rebellion against the powers of Araman. That rebellion wasn’t the best place for a child of twelve. But it was a better place than abandoned by the roadside or picked up by another mercenary group, and Thjazi cared, so Thjazi took him in and assigned him to noncombat work away from the front lines.

By 15 Azune was fighting on the front lines. (In an earlier war, the same was true of Thazi at that age.)

Thjazi’s rebellion failed. He asked his brother Hal to look out for the teenage Azune. Hal did so, treating Azune as part of his family. Hal did the same for other people who needed it. Being like family wasn’t the same as being Hal’s kid.

The tragedy of Azune isn’t that he was failed or abandoned or uncared for or used. The tragedy of Azune is that the best that people who cared about him could give him still wasn’t the same as what he needed, because being an adult doesn’t make you all-powerful. Azune’s problems weren’t created by those who loved him. They were created by the world he lives in.

Azune lived his adult life for the Torn Banner because it was the life he knew; or out of loyalty; or because they were the ones trying to change that world into something different.

He offers understanding and empathy to enemies (Julien) and strangers (Vaelus). He learned that somewhere.

Start taking a daily antihistamine, it can help. Neti pot saline nasal rinse twice a day (please twice boil water and let it cool before using it inside your nose) this can help reduce the viral load in your sinuses if it's present there. Also gargling the same kind of rinse for reducing load in your throat. If you are the type to be sick for longer than others it's worth trying to get paxlovid, although current research is showing it's not as effective as it was previously in 2024 (bc of new mutations).

The biggest thing to help you avoid getting Long COVID is 1) try to access metformin if you can, it reduces your chances of LC by 50% (doesn't do anything if you already have LC tho) 2) practice radical rest for at least a month post acute phase. And please take it super seriously. Absolutely no cardio or anything that makes your heart rate high for a long time. No exercise, no weight lifting, no running.

The biggest thing to help you avoid getting Long COVID is 1) try to access metformin if you can, it reduces your chances of LC by 50% (doesn't do anything if you already have LC tho) 2) practice radical rest for at least a month post acute phase. And please take it super seriously. Absolutely no cardio or anything that makes your heart rate high for a long time. No exercise, no weight lifting, no running.

Treat your body like as if you already have MECFS and rest more than you think is necessary. This is the biggest factor that can determine if you end up with LC or not.

Reason to take antihistamine (H1 and H2 blockers) https:// pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9903129/

Now, somehow, their entire mental health is based on the continued life and happiness of this fairground goldfish that they picked up.

Neither of you know the first thing about how to care for even a healthy fish. This fish has been poorly cared for, has multiple diseases and the person who handed it over explicitly didn't expect it to live nearly as long as it already has.

You're frantically googling how to set up a fish tank, where to buy fish food, can you even take a fish to the vet? Your partner wants you to know that they're happy they made it home and survived their horrific ordeal, but also that if anything happens to the fish then they're going to kill everyone on this planet and then themself.

You're honestly wondering if you're even helping the fish, or just prolonging its suffering, but your partner will only accept medical help for their many injuries or engage in basic self-care once they're confident that the fish is being looked after.

So you get a tank. You set up a filter and all that stuff. You learn way more than you ever wanted to know about water temperature and ph and nitrate levels. The fish is safe. You start to develop some affection for the little guy. Your partner begins to recover. The fish begins to recover.

Which is when you learn that in its 'healthy' state, the fish regularly refuses to sleep when tired, keeps begging for food that is obviously unhealthy for it (and struggling to eat the food that you do provide because “it tastes gross”), and continually tries to persuade your partner to take it out of its nice safe tank so it can go explore the wonderful world of Outside, where the slightest mishap will kill it instantly.

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TRAP CARD ACTIVATED

No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.

This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".

This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.

But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.

As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.

I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.

It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.

It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.

But I could not learn to read.

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.

Since you have a portable AC, choose one room to keep it in and try and keep that room sealed. The best way to do that is if your door opens into that room, put a blanket on the outside of the door frame so that way when you open the door there's another barrier to help keep that cold air in.

Sometimes it's easier to cool one room and live in that room during a heatwave. Then it is to try and cool and enter a house/e apartment.

If you have it in your living room, put a blanket on the doorway leading out of the living room, if it's possible.

Another way to help survive this heatwave is hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. And if you work outside sip water throughout the day, not just when you're thirsty. As soon as you get home, take a shower to bring your temperature down.

Make sure that anything that might give off heat is turned off or used at a bare minimum, such as light bulbs, stoves/ ovens, and sometimes yes even fans.

Likewise Bruce is terrified for Nightwing even though he's an extremely skilled experienced vigilante and an adult, so he can't explain it away as easily as his fear for Robin. And when he questions himself about it he thinks "I'll always worry, he's my little boy" in a mental voice deeper than his own but not quite the bat's growl

Exactly!!!!! Because you cannot split Bruce Wayne from Batman or Batman from Bruce Wayne! They’re intrinsic parts of either person. Neither is the “mask.”

[Middle of an argument]

Batman: YOU SHOULD'VE BEEN SHOT IN THAT ALLEY!!!

Bruce: WELL, YOU SHOULD RUN A BIRD CEMETARY!!!

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Batman: I vow to save every single life I possibly can

Batman: Except for Wayne's. You can have at 'im

Bruce, currently being hostaged: Oh, fuck you

This is hilarious and I don’t want to take away from it by being angsty, but now I’m thinking of a situation where they’re split in half and think they’re separate people but something just doesn’t add up.

Bruce Wayne knows how to move in ways he shouldn’t. Batman keeps thinking of things only Bruce Wayne would know or care about (his kids, his butler, etc) and they both slowly come to the realization that the split wasn’t a split. There is no Batman without Bruce Wayne, and vice versa.