its another writing blog

ao3 cross

pairing: machine!connor/reader

warnings: canon-typical violence

ao3 cross

pairing: connor rk800/reader

Simple statements like “hang in there, it gets better” are met with comments like “does it though, does it really” and things like “yea maybe if you’re neurotypical”, and here’s the thing: yes the fuck it does, and I’m sorry that you can’t see that right now, but please don’t assume that just because I’m not drowning in active nihilism, doesn’t mean I’m not struggling.

I’m not spouting false platitudes. I’m not trying to undermine your depression. What I am doing is trying to circumvent my own depression and suicidal thoughts by not giving them a foothold.

You don’t know this, but my own internal soundtrack is pretty bleak. The words “I want to die” float across my brain pretty often. It’s not even a conscious thought, it’s just there, like background noise in a cacophony of all the other shit that’d tear me apart if I’d let it.

I’m a chronically ill being with mental health issues, a worsening pain disorder and a history of childhood trauma.

So yes, I do understand what you’re feeling in context. I understand the maw of bleakness where life ought to be.

But I also understand that in order to get better you have to challenge it.

I don’t make jokes about suicide. I don’t jokingly say things like “I want to die”, because it is a slippery slope towards validating what my illness wants me to believe. So I take steps, not to avoid it because I cant avoid it, but to adjust my way of thinking.

And I do this, by telling myself out loud over and over, that it gets better. One day at a time, every day I’m still alive is a good day.

And fuck you for trying to take that from me. Hope is a survival mechanism. It keeps us going when there’s nothing else left. And sometimes we have to create our own.

Get help. I’m serious. Get the help you need and deserve, because that desire to convince others the world is dark and awful? It’s not healthy. And it’s not the only way life has to be.

You deserve to get better. Start telling yourself that. Every day for the rest of your life if you have to. And if you can’t tell yourself that right now, I’m here to do it for you.

So for me it’s necessary and healthy to say “yes I feel like shit today, yes my brain is full of angry weasels, yes i want to die sometimes.” And for that to not be a moral failing, ya know?

And then I look at the emotion, admit it, and sort of go “that is not a helpful response, so here’s what we’re going to do instead.” I basically pull a nick fury on them - “I acknowledge that my brain has made a decision, but…..”

It’s a profoundly important part of recovery.

What is not part of recovery is stopping short at “I want to die” which is what so many fucking people post on my posts.

Someone this morning literally left the message “cool story OP but I still want to die” Yea? Well guess what, me too. But I acknowledge it’s not a healthy thought and I make steps to work through my shit, instead of attempting to undermine the recovery of others. And tumblr has such a toxic mentality towards recovery. It’s almost like if you dare to get better, you weren’t sick to begin with, and that is adamantly not true.

I was at our local bakery recently and came across a loaf of bread quaintly branded as a “Peasant Loaf”. It was selling for over $6—the irony of this was not lost on me. 

In retaliation I have decided to post what I actually think of as a peasant loaf, but with the luxury of finely ground modern flour which is less likely to break your teeth because actual peasant loaf bread is like chewing rocks unless you’re soaking it in soup or stew. 

This is a very simple loaf, it requires no special tools and is a fairly forgiving dough for beginners to work with. Also it has the added bonus of looking like an expensive artisan loaf, but costs literal pennies to make once you invest in the basic ingredients.

So what do you need?

Ingredients:

Plain flour (or wholewheat if you prefer)

One sachet of active dry yeast.

Salt.

Water.

Tools:

Bowl

Mug

Prep and bake time total: 2 hours 45 minutes.

Yep, that’s it. You’ll notice that there’s no quantities listed up there, and that’s because you’ll be using the mug to measure everything. This helps to make sure your quantities are consistent, and means that so long as you have a mug and your ingredients, you can make bread. Heck you don’t even need a bowl, it just makes clean up easier.

Again I had Elusive Tumblr Dad help me take the photos so be warned this is going to be fairly image heavy under the cut :D

Step One: Gather your stuff.

[Patreon]

TERF - Trans Excluding/Erasing Radical Feminist:

Someone who believes that trans women are not women and don’t belong in women’s spaces. They believe that trans women are predatory cis men pretending to be women in order to have sex with lesbians.

SWERF - Sex Worker Excluding/Erasing Radical Feminist:

Someone who believes that sex workers (those who make money from pornography or prostitution) are not feminist / not valuable / should not be welcome in feminist / women’s spaces. They believe that women participating in pornography or prostitution are upholding patriarchy and damaging the feminist movement.

Truscum aka transmedicalists:

Someone who believes that you must experience body dysphoria in order to be trans. They also tend to be attached to the gender binary and erase or exclude anyone who does not conform to a male / female gender identity (genderfluid, non-binary, agender, bi-gender, etc)

Ace exclusionists:

Someone who believes that ace-spectrum people are not inherently LGBTQ+ and do not belong in LGBTQ+ spaces. They see ace people as secretly cis/straight invaders and leeches to LGBTQ+ programs and resources. They also tend to believe that the definition of LGBTQ+ centres around those who experience discrimination for same-sex attraction, and therefore ace folk do not belong.

Trans women are women. Non-medical trnas people are trans. Ace people are LGBTQIA+.

*prolonged silence* “oh my…”

“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”

Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:

That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.

I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.

legolas despite literally being in a council about the fate of the world with the most important people alive:

legolas, despite the fact they’re surrounded on all sides by men with big spears:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bakla

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathoey

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muxe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-Spirit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fa%27afafine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81h%C5%AB

http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1820633,00.html

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/05/30/153990125/in-mexico-mixed-genders-and-muxes

http://www.nativepeoples.com/Native-Peoples/May-June-2014/Two-Spirit-The-Story-of-a-Movement-Unfolds/

http://theculturetrip.com/pacific/samoa/articles/fa-afafines-the-third-gender/

THE WESTERN IDEA OF TWO GENDERS IS EXACTLY THAT

WESTERN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_and_Judaism

SIX.

JUDAISM.

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

This is more relevant than ever. Anti-immigration fearmongering is only and only a racism problem.