To my beautiful motherland, to my India and her people, HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY.

Most of us here, I know, are disillusioned by this country, the petty politics and fights, by poverty and illiteracy, by the unemployment and overpopulation. Many of us are weary of her sorrows, and of people who cannot uphold the values we stand for.

Today is the day we remind ourselves that this is our home. India is our mother. She is not a goddess. She is not a Queen. She is the oppressed peasant woman standing in the fields with her child in her arms. She is the soldier in the lonely borders, and she is their family clinging onto hope. She is the tribal, fighting against injustice.

She lives in the cold of the Himalayas and the long coast by the sea. She is the summer sun and monsoon wind, autumn leaves and winter rain, the shopkeeper by the street, the officers in their cars.

She is, in the end, what we will come back to, time and again, the wet scent of earth, the rousing tune of the National Anthem, the proud Tricolour fluttering in the breeze, the three lions of the Ashok Stambh, the chants of "Jay Hind."

She is what we will love, no matter what, because she is our mother. Her lands are wet with the blood of our noble ancestors, of our freedom fighters, and when we stand barefoot, we will hear the distant echo of Netaji and Bapu rallying our people towards glory.

Today, this we shall remember.

🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳JAI HIND 🇮🇳🇮🇳🇮🇳

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

Obsessed with characters who portray themselves as worse than they are. Who are lying to everyone including themselves about it. People generally assume if someone's lying about themselves they're trying to look better but sometimes they're trying to look worse. They attribute agency to where they had none, add intent to accidents, try to convince everyone that this is something they did instead of something that happened to them.

the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"

just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible

That time in ancient Greece when Aziraphale needed a speedy horse and accidentally invented the pegasus

VS.

Whatever Crowley had going on in medieval times

One of my biggest nitpicks in fiction concerns the feeding of babies. Mothers dying during/shortly after childbirth or the baby being separated form the mother shortly after birth is pretty common in fiction. It is/was also common enough in real life, which is why I think a lot of writers/readers don't think too hard about this. however. Historically, the only reason the vast majority of babies survived being separated from their mother was because there was at least one other woman around to breastfeed them. Before modern formula, yes, people did use other substitutes, but they were rarely, if ever, nutritionally sufficient.

Newborns can't eat adult food. They can't really survive on animal milk. If your story takes place in a world before/without formula, a baby separated from its mother is going to either be nursed by someone else, or starve.

It doesn't have to be a huge plot point, but idk at least don't explicitly describe the situation as excluding the possibility of a wetnurse. "The father or the great grandmother or the neighbor man or the older sibling took and raised the baby completely alone in a cave for a year." Nope. That baby is dead I'm sorry. "The baby was kidnapped shortly after birth by a wizard and hidden away in a secret tower" um quick question was the wizard lactating? "The mother refused to see or touch her child after birth so the baby was left to the care of the ailing grandfather" the grandfather who made the necessary arrangements with women in the neighborhood, right? right? OR THAT GREAT OFFENDER "A newborn baby was left on the doorstep and they brought it in and took care of it no issues" What Are You Going to Feed That Baby. Hello?

Like. It's not impossible, but arrangements are going to have to be made. There are some logistics.

senshi fans: learning how to make nutritious meals for themselves

laios fans: down bad

marcille fans: lesbianism

chilchuck fans: putting that man in situations

Leah Jeffries is playing Annabeth like she's one thousand years old in the body of a twelve-year-old and she is so correct.

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

im full of an untamable rage that constantly seethes beneath my skin but im a real laid back dude dont worry about that

Nelson Mandela addressing Palestinians in Gaza:

Choose peace rather than confrontation. Except in cases where we cannot get, where we cannot proceed, where we cannot move forward. Then if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.

girls and the inherent loneliness they have felt all their lives

I'm not certain as to how many people checked the description of the new hbomberguy video but he linked a playlist to queer creators on youtube!

Your New Favorite YouTubers - Queer YouTubers you should check out, meticulously compiled by Kat.

It's worth a look! Please don't forget to support your fellow queer creators on YouTube whilst spreading memes and jokes about James Somerton and discussing the hbomberguy video!!

EDIT: @cursedgamerchild pointed out THIS REDDIT THREAD made by Kat

Which is a thread to share more discoveries of plagiarism and also to share more queer creators who could use some love! There's also a link to a google form if you don't have reddit and want to share said information.

queen of diamonds, upright + reversed 💎

I've redone this like eighty times, I have to just be done with it now and stop staring at all my mistakes oh no 🫠

if i were a fantasy protagonist i would NOT be seduced by promises of power but i WOULD be seduced by an illusory life of peace and tranquility. an evil wizard would go like "give up on trying to kill me and you can chill in this beautiful magic meadow for the rest of eternity" and i'm already nodding yes. "IT'S NOT REAL!" my companions would scream, but i don't care. i'm in the wizard mind prison eating grapes, soaking up a sunbeam. someone else can fight a dragon. it's literally not my business anymore.

Today my therapist introduced me to a concept surrounding disability that she called "hLep".

Which is when you - in this case, you are a disabled person - ask someone for help ("I can't drink almond milk so can you get me some whole milk?", or "Please call Donna and ask her to pick up the car for me."), and they say yes, and then they do something that is not what you asked for but is what they think you should have asked for ("I know you said you wanted whole, but I got you skim milk because it's better for you!", "I didn't want to ruin Donna's day by asking her that, so I spent your money on an expensive towing service!") And then if you get annoyed at them for ignoring what you actually asked for - and often it has already happened repeatedly - they get angry because they "were just helping you! You should be grateful!!"

And my therapist pointed out that this is not "help", it's "hLep".

Sure, it looks like help; it kind of sounds like help too; and if it was adjusted just a little bit, it could be help. But it's not help. It's hLep.

At its best, it is patronizing and makes a person feel unvalued and un-listened-to. Always, it reinforces the false idea that disabled people can't be trusted with our own care. And at its worst, it results in disabled people losing our freedom and control over our lives, and also being unable to actually access what we need to survive.

So please, when a disabled person asks you for help on something, don't be a hLeper, be a helper! In other words: they know better than you what they need, and the best way you can honor the trust they've put in you is to believe that!

Also, I want to be very clear that the "getting angry at a disabled person's attempts to point out harmful behavior" part of this makes the whole thing WAY worse. Like it'd be one thing if my roommate bought me some passive-aggressive skim milk, but then they heard what I had to say, and they apologized and did better in the future - our relationship could bounce back from that. But it is very much another thing to have a crying shouting match with someone who is furious at you for saying something they did was ableist. Like, Christ, Jessica, remind me to never ask for your support ever again! You make me feel like if I asked you to call 911, you'd order a pizza because you know I'll feel better once I eat something!!

Edit: crediting my therapist by name with her permission - this term was coined by Nahime Aguirre Mtanous!

Edit again: I made an optional follow-up to this post after seeing the responses. Might help somebody. CW for me frankly talking about how dangerous hLep really is.