Maybe-Maidens Fanblog

Equiping an armor tutorial

The last time I went to vote, the door I usually come through was locked. It was prime voting hours, between 5 and 6pm, when people get off work and are heading to the polls before they close at 7.

Granted, these doors aren't the main doors by the main parking situation, but they are the doors closest to where voting is set up and are functionally the front doors. They should be unlocked, and they always have been when I've voted here before.

I looked through the window on the door. I saw a guy catch sight of me. He walked away.

I called somebody whose voting location is the same as mine. Had it changed again with all the shenanigans and redistricting of the last year? She was also on her way to vote and stopped to look it up: no, it was the same.

I walked around the building - like, fully around. The doors by the main parking situation were open. I walked down a long hallway - and yes, voting was happening here, just like it should have been.

I approached an election official - the guy I'd seen through the doors. Did he know that those doors were locked, and could he change that?

He scoffed condescendingly. "Anyone who can be stopped by that locked door must not want to vote that badly," he said. And then turned around and walked back into the Republican primary.

The security guard I talked to after this unlocked the doors immediately, which, great - but that's not the point.

The point is that they are gerrymandering the fuck out of us in the Southern states because we're here. They are systemically stealing our power because we're here for them to be afraid of. They are casually doing things like locking doors (or at least not unlocking them) during major elections because they're afraid of the votes we are still able to cast despite it all.

I can't prove this guy locked the door. I can't prove this was election interference. But his response to it is absofuckinglutely part of the voter suppression playbook, and I can guarantee that similar situations have been playing out across the South during primary season and will continue to play out during midterms in November.

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.

They explored the effects of PTSD that he would suffer and realistically dealt with how it would affect him mentally to be not allowed to make choices, to be mentally and psychologically abused to that extent and how he would struggle to adjust once he was safe. They even dug into the uglier realities of torture as it exists in real life, showing Bucky as a survivor of sexual violence

Also, lots of fanfics portrayed Bucky as being physically disabled after his time as the Winter Soldier. Like, there were multiple fics I read where he has a feeding tube that described that with realism, and several more where he has various GI tract difficulties after being tube-fed throughout his stint as a living weapon. Multiple fics that describe him having seizures, at least two fics where he is addicted to heroin and suffers withdrawals from that, also fics where the arm is removed and he has to adjust to life as an amputee

And then, when you return to canon, of course they're not interested in the long-term mental and physical effects of The Horrors at all, except for a little bit of Hollywood PTSD.

Not a biologist, but the evolution of mammals is way more granular than you might expect. Humans are the sole surviving species of the genus Homo, which was a real party before the other ones went extinct. You're in for a fun time.

Domestic cats are believed to be domesticated not from tigers, but from the African wildcat:

Which evolved to be small just because it's sometimes more useful to be small.

And no, hamsters are not off-brand rats. They're part of the rodent order, which includes beavers, moles, capybaras, guinea pigs (yes, also wild) and lots of other fun things: