Re:love

One of her family told us that she had given birth yesterday evening, but that Child Protection services had taken her baby away with no warning, claiming that she wasnt prepared to look after him. What had happened, is that she'd literally only just given birth -- hadn't even passed the afterbirth yet, is holding her blood-coated, crying, newborn baby to her chest -- and a nurse asked what her feeding plan was. She was tired from the birth and distracted by the brand new baby in her arms and thrown off by the timing of the question, but still, she managed to answer, and said she planned to breastfeed him whenever he was hungry.

Well apparently that wasn't enough of a plan for the hospital staff, who reported her and claimed that she was unprepared to look after the child, and claimed that had no social supports, and that the baby was at risk if left with her. All because a brand new mother, 30 seconds after giving birth, didn't have a PowerPoint presentation ready to go that cited the timing cycle she would feed her kid on, and instead simply said that she would feed him when he was hungry.

Child Protection services showed up, took her kid, and she was told to show up to court the next day to contest custody if she wanted her baby back.

So a woman who had given birth less than 24 hours prior was forced to rally her family and show up to court to prove that she a) had a feeding plan for the child, and b) had enough social supports to justify reclaiming her baby.

It was one of the most appalling things I'd ever seen. I don't even know if she won her case. They didn't know at the time we saw them, and after that brief interaction on the stairs, i never saw them again. I sincerely hope she got her newborn baby back.

That was about 5 years ago. And the exact same kind of thing is still happening today.

News broke today from a South Australian whistle-blower of the appalling treatment new mothers frequently receive, including hospital staff taking the baby away from the mother "for medical tests," only for the mother to then be told, with absolutely no prior warning, that the baby was not going to be returned to her.

Here's the article, and here are some excerpts:

 @pscentral​ event 37: color challenge (insp • template)

subnautica: u cannot escape the alien ocean planet until you stop being sick

below zero: u came here by choice but out of stubborn grief (game released during/after quarantine)

mini analysis from bluesky below

Of course he’s going to not take anything seriously. Of course he can shoot. The drinking, the skittishness, the recklessness, the sense of ‘keeping your head down’, the scepticism about traditional heroism….

The one with more actual experience of death, carnage and fighting is Jonathan. Not Rick. Not Ardeth Bey. Jonathan.

When Rick says ‘I’ve had worse (situation/odds)’ and Jonathan replies “ Me too”. That’s probably true. 

Drop The Mummy into the real world context and that’s a character who’s going to have seen a lot of his school friends die, along with the myths and tales of heroism they were raised on. Sort of makes the line where Evie’s scolding him for drinking/messing about a lot darker…

Wait a minute. Why is it being assumed that Rick and Ardeth wouldn’t have fought in WWI, as well? Johnathan isn’t that much older than any of them–in fact, there is a good chance that he, Rick, and Ardeth are all of an age. Just because Johnathan’s hair is thinning doesn’t mean he’s a decade older.

It was a LOT easier to lie about your age back in the day. So much easier.

Johnathan is the soldier who fought in WWI and became disillusionsed with pretty much everything except wanting to live (most of the time) and live well–and where is the shame in that? He would have seen some of the darkest shit humanity has to offer, and he kept going. And the thing is, though, archaeological digs at that time were DANGEROUS. Not from curses (usually) but from assholes who would turn up with guns to try and steal anything you discovered. Johnathan never really STOPPED having to deal with dangerous pricks, it was just less dangerous than death raining down from the sky in bomb, bullet, and mustard gas form all the time.

Rick grew up in Egypt as an orphan. What paperwork? He joined the French Foreign Legion, which fought in World War I in some seriously critical battles on the Western Front in Europe. Rick is the soldier who quickly grew disillusioned with everything, but he didn’t know how to stop being a soldier. Johnathan had a career and schooling to fall back on. Rick had guns, the talent of not dying easily, and not much else. When the army finally left him behind because he was literally the only survivor of his last FFL battle, he literally didn’t know what to do. At all. “Looking for a good time” was code for “Please someone give me a fucking purpose.”

Winston: “Is it dangerous?”

Rick: “Well, you probably won’t live through it.”

Winston: “By Jove, do you think so?”

Jonathan is a rich kid who was raised on stories of heroes and the honour of war, shoved knee-deep into the trenches and learned first-hand that his teachers were liars, the stories untrue, and that the honour of war was for the generals not the soldiers in the trenches being taken out by mortar and mustard gas. 

Rick wasn’t raised like Jonathan and knew there were no heroes to start with. No grand stories to share and believe in the wonder of war. Life is a constant battle and if you don’t keep fighting, then you die. So he joined the French Foreign Legion and he kept damned fighting. 

Ardeth is the outlier in that his entire culture differs to Rick and Jonathan’s. He’s an outsider to the world that places Rick and Jonathan as above him because of their skin colour, their nationality, whatever. Ardeth knows that heroes aren’t always easy to find but they’re out there. They just happen to be people who don’t give up, who fight and fight, and do what’s Right even if it means their death. Ardeth and his people saw war and it’s impossible to not be drawn into it somehow, either as victims or allies to one side or the other. He learnt that war has a cost and that the growing industrialisation of the West made that cost So Much Higher. Swords aren’t the primary weapon now, you don’t fight your opponent up close. Now war is distant and bloody and the crack crack crack of broken silence.

None of them have lived easy lives, either from the beginning or through events greater than any of them. But The Mummy shows very damned well that you can cope with what you see, what your experience.

You either try and pretend it didn’t happen, joke and laugh and hide how you really fear (Jonathan). Or you keep going, surviving from day-to-day and fighting because that’s what you know keeps you alive (Rick). Or you put your damage aside and focus on what needs to be done for the Greater Good because you can’t give yourself the time to break because people need you now (Ardeth).

This movie shows the trauma of war and how little support was given post WWI to survivors because the idea of soldiers having trauma was a shameful, alien concept. Not when single rifles and swords, bows, and arrows, were the way of war, coping was known how to be done. But with machine guns, mortars, and gas designed to kill or drive you mad… how do you cope with that when you’ve never really been taught how to cope with weakness? How do you be vulnerable, admit it, and let yourself heal when you’ve never been taught how?

Shows up late to the Jedi Council Chambers with boba tea

been watching the originals for the first time and this was what i thought of when i got to this bit

Like, you're one of the many nameless jedi or clones out fighting in countless wars and your choices affect whether your friends around you survive each battle and stuff, so you grow to love and care about the people you're fighting side by side with as the jedi and clones did in the clone wars and all the while you're remembering that at some point order 66 will happen

And then when it does, you don't realise it's happening, there's no cutscene, no audio that you would hear unless you're paying that close attention, you think you're on a normal mission, you're fighting one of the many battles that you've been in this entire game, and suddenly your friends are firing

Whether you survive or not depends on how you respond and whether you realise they're aiming for you. Also would be so cool that if you die, you get a different end cutscene to if you survive, and that it's not one of those things where if you die it's a 'respawn' thing, just a quiet end of the game where you are just one of the thousands of people who died when Palpatine gave the order

it would also be great if the game randomised it to be at some point in the last act but never the same time so when you play through it again, you're still left in the dark, never knowing when your friends will turn on you