QUARANTINE FIC RECS

For all of you who are quarantined, here are some spideypool fics! Be safe, protect your loved ones and yourself!

I’m Not That Good at Breathing In by Celebrate_the_irony                

Deluge by Macx         

One Reason Why by NotEvenCloseToStraight                         

All About Chemistry by TwiceBakedPotato                      

Peter Parker’s Home for the Wayward Villain   by  BeanieBaby      

Damage by  dontcareajot      

My private life is a secret by Grinedel                

fall out, boy, so i can fall in(to you) by TheMadKatter13                       

Oblivious In Love  by Atsvie        

Petey and Wade and other being punched in the face things by isaDanCurtisproduction 

shake it out by sleeponrooftops     

Hands   by schierlingsbecher     

Peter Swap by Grinedel                  

Another Trip Around the Sun by  isaDanCurtisproduction   

The Body Remembers When the Mind Forgets by TheMadKatter13   

Untethered by Vixen13                

Patron Saint by isaDanCurtisproduction      

Kingdoms by TheStrange_One                

Tale As Old As Time, Song As Old As Rhyme by  Ajayd                      

Lord of Thorns (Beauty and the Beast AU) by NotEvenCloseToStraight    

Dermis by GeminiDerp          

Well by Lafaiette                                

act your age (not your shoe size)   by  cherryvanilla      

Everyone Has A… Plush In Their Closet by  Lafaiette     

Room 418 by Sintero, Staubengel     

Enraged by Vixen13               

Spider Spidey by riventhorn            

Mutation Squared by  MysticMoonhigh      

Weak Spots by ImpassionedWriter     

Rare   by  LunaRaven09040      

It Happened In The Multiverse by TwiceBakedPotato                

Tacos, Spider-suits and Sex   by Castello (orphan_account)    

Villain by Lafaiette                        

Tent City Hero by Wonky_Writer        

Use Me by xxjinchuurikixx              

Two Teachers, One Classroom by MysticMoonhigh    

Could You Stop? by Vixen13       

The Layered Sadness and the Madness it Revolved by sirkusdyret   

i wanna ruin our friendship by  nni           

Spideypool Goes North by Four_Nostril      

A Match of My Own   by beetle      

Saudade by xypeilo           

Say My Name   by  DropTheBeet        

Stop Watch by  Shadow_Assassin     

Spidey-cat by Vixen13         

Taco Meat and Repercussions by  TheGayestpepe     

It Wasn’t Just Sex by icarusforgotten    

The Only One Who Knows by Vixen13        

Pomegranates by NotEvenCloseToStraight         

I need a hero by Kazhiru          

We Don’t Do Normal   by Vixen13        

Take your daughter to work day by TheLadySyk0    

Surprises and Starts   by  Birdie (Nikolai_Knight)    

Yours, Mine, Ours   by LaLunaWritesStuff     

Love Motel   by  vvxxxu (vai_xu)   

Self-Fulfilling Prophesy by rubberbutton        

Crazy Plus One by icexandxcool (fandomvision), lilchicmama       

Birthday Boy by Spideypoolhell                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

consider also

well this was a fucking journey

A CROW TRIED TO GO IN OUR CLASSROOM AND HE HAD A PEN

yes hello i am here to learn geometries

That crow is more prepared than some of my students.

You’ve all just like, completely skipped over the possibility that this crow has seen people using pens in this room, found one, and is trying to return it. There’s been videos of crows picking up sweet wrappers and stuff and placing them in bins after seeing humans put their litter in bins. I really do believe that this crow is trying to return the pen and that is ADORABLE AS HELL. 

THEY ARE SO SMART I LOVE THEM

Crows are thought to be self aware by some scientists. Its perfectly possible the crow wants to return the pen to humans. Knowing it belongs to humans.

Corvids. Who KNOWS. :)

Another cool crow deal: Once, when trying to assess if crows could reason and use tools, scientists had two crows who didn’t know each other each take a wire from a table (one was hooked, one was straight) and try to grab meat from a bottle with it. The crows could see each other, though they had separate bottles. Only the straight wire worked for this, so they hypothesized that if crows could reason, the second trial would have the two crows fighting over the straight wire. The second trial started and, to the surprise of the scientists, the two crows both went for the bent wire, one held it down and the other unbent it. They both got meat out of their bottles. They came to a peaceful solution without verbal communication. Crows are probably smarter than we are.

they still shit all over the place and eat garbage

ok but so do we

@neurodivergent-crow

Cool facts about crows:

1. Crows understand the concept of gifts.

There’s a little girl who started feeding the murder by her house and they started bringing her trinkets (cool pebbles, coins, shiny things, bleached animal bones, etc) as a thank you. 

2. Crows remember who has been kind to them and tell other crows about the nice humans.

There are various examples of people who have helped crows and the crows not only come back to say hi, but also bring friends who need help over for the nice human to help.

3. Crows are the only other animal known to make tools in order to make another tool.

4. Crows have been proven to have a sense of self

If you mark them with a coloured dot that they can see and then show them their reflection in a mirror they soon realize that the reflection is them and not another crow.

5. Crows have regional dialects and accents.

They are also able to copy each other’s dialects and accents to fit in if they move to an area where the accent is different.

6. Crows regularly visit their parents after leaving the nest.

They also regularly live with their parents after reaching adulthood to help with raising their younger siblings for up to five years before moving out.

I love crows so much

Vintage Phantom of the Opera movie poster featuring the cutest version of the Phantom ever.

I’m a bitch I’m a lover

we were all thinking it, so here it is XD

is it just me or

sometimes I think about how red is the first color in the visible light spectrum to be absorbed in ocean water

and how many deep-sea creatures evolved to be red as a stealth adaptation, making them near invisible when there’s little to no light present

and it makes me think. If there’s never any visible light present in these animals’ lifetimes, if no ROV shines a little flashlight in depths that would otherwise not have light, would these animals ever get the opportunity to actually be red? that might be a stupid question.

imagine being a little deep sea creature and having no idea you’re red until something comes along and shines a light on you except you still wouldn’t be able to tell because you’re probably colorblind. anyway. I don’t know where I was going with this post

Is color relative? Or inherent? Or both???

Like is color physiological and determined by the shape of whatever pigment cells that will always absorb certain wavelengths and reflect others?

or is color meaningless if there’s no light to absorb and reflect?

Is it completely relative because the way we percieve color is subjective, how even within our own species there are so many different kinds of ways people can observe color?

makes you think

Red light doesn’t make it to the deep ocean from the sun, but that doesn’t mean red light doesn’t exist at that depth!

The stomiidae, which include the viperfish, dragonfish, and loosejaws, are one example of a deep sea animal that evolved to perceive and produce red light because it isn’t naturally present in their environment and most other organisms never hit on that adaptation. In most of this group, tiny red lights can be switched on and off throughout their skin to communicate with their own kind in secret. More threateningly, some of them have high-powered “floodlights” of pure red just beneath their eyes; almost no other deep sea fish emit actual BEAMS of light to illuminate what they’re looking at because that’d make them a shining beacon to every larger predator in the area, but since it’s red, the only risk ends up coming from their fellow red-light hunters and those remain just uncommon enough to be worth the chance. In many members of this group, most of all the loosejaws (hence the name), almost the entire skull can naturally detach from the rest of the body on specialized stalks at lightning speed so that their long, hooked jaws can grab prey in an instant, almost the same exact motion as the arm of a preying mantis:

If you were a little fish in this scenario you would see absolutely nothing but darkness around you and possibly feel pretty safe, because maybe you’ve evolved to blend in perfectly with the surrounding void and you can’t see any blue or yellow or green lights coming to get you. You have no idea that there’s been a spotlight right on you all along until its owner’s face flies off to impale you and shove you whole into its giant throat all in less than half of a second :)

someone explain why deep sea creatures are so fucking scary like is there a logical reason was god like hey that’s deep and dark so I shall create absolutely terrifying creatures who will haunt humans in their dreams

Think about the predators up here on land; bigger eyes, longer teeth and bigger mouths. We know these things indicate something that can harm us, or stalk us in the dark. Now you multiply that the farther you go down the ocean. If it’s darker, then they need bigger eyes. If it’s a LOT darker, then their eyes need more and more specialized anatomy nothing could ever possibly need up here in the sun, so by necessity they do not have the kind of eyes we know:

And food is so far between, the predators need even longer teeth, to make sure those rare meals they encounter really can’t escape:

And because it’s dark AND food is scarce, they need big, expandable jaws and bodies that are almost all stomach, to guarantee they can take advantage of more meals and don’t have too much more body to have to nourish:

effervescent c:

How are these even real????

Most of these look pretty reasonable imo but I’ve never heard of the loosejaw before and I gotta say, it looks like it has a puppet for a head, which is quite unsettling and seems like it shouldn’t be practical. Also, is that a second mouth behind its skull? Or does it have to reattach its head to swallow, and it’s just coincidence that the biomechanical structures behind its skull look like a mouth?

I’m glad people asked!!! The loosejaw does have extra teeth back there to help keep prey from escaping, and the head structure all folds back together:

The most surprising thing about these features, however, is that they’re already present in many of the fish people are familiar with! The loosejaw pushes it to an extreme, but you can see how these freshwater carp also “unfurl” and “throw” their jaw structure:

The loosejaw just doesn’t have a skin covering this structure, because that allows it to fling the jaw even faster through the water with no resistance! …And it’s also quite normal for all kinds of everyday fish to have additional teeth or a functional secondary set of jaws in the back of the throat:

Deep sea creatures have eyes more powerful than any Tolkien elf

we are already living in the cyberpunk future and i know this because within a span of 3 days we went from this tweet:

to thousands of people making phony images and replying to them with their passionate desire to have them as a tshirt to overload the bots with nonsense and junk and send out warnings to shoppers like this:

and now we even have people replying to pictures of baby yoda with “i want this on a tshirt” knowing how ravenous disney is being with copyright in hopes to get the stores taken down altogether

i dont know what it is about stuff like this and the whole turn mei into a symbol of hk protesters thing but, its really reassuring for some reason

And the next step…

https://teezyli.com/

Holy shit y’all look at the front page of the site right now

Oh my god

Anyway, I just emailed tips@disneyantipiracy.com to report the site for very evilly stealing Disney’s IP! Because obviously that is very evil and bad and shit.

I’ve never seen such a perfect example of fighting fire with fire.

Holy fucking shit

I’m DYING.

More accurately

where is that renaissance painting with those two fellers and a giant fucking random skull on the floor that looks like it was accidentally stretched out in photoshop

THANK YOU

somebody please explain

Someone once told me it’s like that because it was designed to be hung in a stairwell so the skull pops out as you walk past.

…I guess it works but you have to be at a pretty sharp angle

There was a whole trend at one point where artists would include something in their paintings (usually a skull, for whatever reason) that’s super distorted in just the right way so that it looks normal if you hold the painting up to a convex/concave mirror. I have absolutely no idea why. But I think that’s what’s going on here.

In case anyone’s curious, here’s what it looks like when you walk past it irl:

It does have a 3D effect to it! It’s pretty neat, guess it would be even more impressive to people from the 14th century.

honestly, people just looking at the skull are missing the real deal here

You can read any implied text you see in this thing, even the book, that’s how detailed it is. Look at the painting on those letters!

jesus christ you’re just showing off now, Hans!

HANS OH MY GOD

anyway, the skull apparently had some meaning about the transcendence of death, you can only see it clearly when you can’t see the world clearly and vice versa, but man, I’m all about the detail in this guy’s shit

No, I think you’re missing the real deal here

as an art historian, i think this is the best post on tumblr

some fucker: “If you arent paying for a product, you are the product!” 

me using tumblr costing yahoo a billion dollars: 

good

Say what you will about Tumblr but it’s rather punk that capitalism has no power here. That we cannot be turned into products and are free to roam the tundra and scream into the woods about whatever like some primal beings.

I needed this drag. Let’s change guys and not look back

working out your brain is a must!!

• hydrate it by drinking lots of water

• eat dark chocolate and blueberries and walnuts and salmon and other foods high in antioxidants!!

• play little brain games on your phone; I like wordconenct! anything that makes you think!

• read books. It’s simple but necessary. Even better - join a book club, or read with a friend, so you can have discussions after. This will improve your reading comprehension.

• do puzzles - it doesnt have to be sudoku, I love playing Beat Saber on the Oculus Rift because it makes my brain have to match colorful patterns to physical movements very quickly!

• learn a new dance - even a tik tok trendy dance. Learning new dance moves are proven to strengthen synapses!!

• go bird watching, or foraging, or anything outdoors that requires you to explore pattern recognition and visual searching

• watch a movie with the intent of analysis - this is best done with a cinephile friend!! talk about tropes and symbolism and character growth

• cross stitch, or sew, or do anything that requires matching nimble hand movements to patterns

• play or learn an instrument!

• develop a consistent sleep schedule (or as close to consistent as you can get!)

• when eating, try to identify the ingredients and flavors you’re perceiving!

I hope this helps :)

I like how this went from me feeling like “hm why is this attacking me 🤨” at first, but feeling grateful seeing an added guide on a genuine expansion on a “ how to” work out the brain. This genuinely helps a bunch. People find solace in doing activities that get them through life by doing said activities of phone/tv or if that’s all they’ve ever known in their life to get them through things + etc tho. However, this was very impt to point out. Slowly beginning incorporating things to work the brain in ones own time.

We haven’t done it to very many species, and the ones we did it to were of very low-order species such as plants and fungi.  Ethics forbids us from doing it to anything much more complex than that, so instead we taught some chimpanzees to do it in exchange for a variety of differing treats.  Getting simians to perform tasks of varying complexity for varying rewards IS ethical, getting a grant for it is orders of magnitude easier, and most great apes don’t have such developed ethical standards.  So long as we publish the results of their sieve-grinding as a sub-topic of the “work for treats” papers, we can more efficiently gather data while avoiding ethical conundrums.

Oh my goodness

Help. My (37F) morally dubious experiment chimpanzee’s (14F, 18F, 22M, 23F, 36F, 36M) have formed an ethics board.

— Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)

Someone put it into words. I gotta sit down

(Why does this belong on my decidedly not-fan-fiction-related blog, you ask? Because this quote illustrates very well how assuming that anything where people put sex in it is debasing it, objectifying it, or simply ‘sexualizing’ it, etc. often misses a lot of the real picture of why people do that thing.)

idk who needs to hear this but when your english teacher asks you to explain why an author chose to use a specific metaphor or literary device, it’s not because you won’t be able to function in real-world society without the essential knowledge of gatsby’s green light or whatever, it’s because that process develops your abilities to parse a text for meaning and fill in gaps in information by yourself, and if you’re wondering what happens when you DON’T develop an adult level of reading comprehension, look no further than the dizzying array of examples right here on tumblr dot com

this post went from 600 to 2400 notes in the time it took me to write 3 emails. i’m already terrified for what’s going to happen in there

k but also, as an addendum, the reason we study literary analysis is because everything an author writes has meaning, whether it was intentional or not, and their biases and agendas are often reflected in their choice of language and literary devices and so forth! and that ties directly into being able to identify, for example, the racist and antisemitic dogwhistles often employed by the right wing, or the subconscious word choices that can unintentionally illustrate someone’s bias or blind spot. LANGUAGE HAS WEIGHT AND MEANING! the way we communicate is a reflection of our inner selves, and that’s true regardless of whether it’s a short story or a novel or a blog post or a tweet. instead of taking a piece of writing at face value and stopping there, assuming that there is no deeper meaning or thought behind the words on the page, ask yourself these two questions instead:

1. what is the author trying to say? 2. what does the author maybe not realize they’re saying?

because the most interesting reading of any piece of literature, imho, usually occupies the space in between those questions.

All I’m saying is, if a fic refers to characters by their physical attributes instead of their names or pronouns (“he smiled at the older” “the blonde laughed”) when we know who the character is, and ESPECIALLY if the descriptions include “ravenette” or “cyanette” or other ridiculous words–

I’m clicking out of that fic so fast my AO3 history won’t even register I’ve been there.

I am glad you asked. :D

First, if a writer is using the characters’ names every sentence – they’re already off to a bad start. Not every sentence needs to clarify which character it applies to, unless you’re writing a “See Jane Run” book, lol.

Overall a good rule of thumb is a) don’t repeat unnecessary information, and b) only write things that carry the scene.

So for starters, your readers should know who’s in the scene, and you can trust them to have at least a little bit of intuition: not every bit of dialog needs to have a tag (“he said/she whispered” etc.) Now, that established: you do use names when doing otherwise would leave it unclear who’s doing or saying things. Example:

It’s clear who says what, and if we had just used “he” it wouldn’t have been, but we also didn’t have to dialog-tag every line. (ALSO. “Said” is not a bad word. Ignore all advice that tells you never to use “said.” “Said” is an invisible word and unless you’re putting a dialog tag on every line [which you Do Not Need To Do] people won’t even notice it. Unlike “shrieked,” “whispered,” “hissed,” “ranted,” “whined,” etc. Use those words when they’ll have punch and impact. Not every dang line.)

But this isn’t always how it needs to go.

For example. Let’s say I’m writing about a strawberry-blonde elf named Diana and a human bard with black hair named Jerome. I could say:

Okay there are…. several issues here. First off, we don’t need to clarify that Diana said the thing after we had her doing an action. Trust your readers! They’ll know that a “she” here logically refers to Diane, as they know that “he replied” refers to Jerome.

Next, please strike “referring to characters by eye or hair color” from any lists. This is not good. It’s not relevant 99% of the time (we’ll get to exceptions in a moment) and also, pet peeve: “ravenette” does not mean black-haired. If you’ve gotta say it, just say black-haired. Ravenette means “a raven, diminuative” or maaaaaaybe “like a raven.” Unless you’re imitating an 1800s gothic poet, don’t do this.

Physical descriptions used as character indicators/pseudo pronouns are clunky and take up space without telling us anything new. They distance the reader from the character by taking us out of the story and back into exposition land, and they generally repeat information we already know. We can tell our readers in chapter one that Diana has strawberry-blonde hair, and then we don’t need to refer to her as “the strawberry-blonde” a hundred more times because our readers already know this. Just call her Diana. Or “she.” (Unless it’s relevant to the moment – if she’s not our POV character and we need to contrast her to, say, a black-haired beauty at the ball through someone else’s eyes, that’s one thing. But still, don’t continually refer to her by something as shallow as her hair color.)

Exception: visual descriptions are valid to use as character-indicators when we or the characters do not know who that person is. For example, if Diana had been kidnapped by bandits.

Ooooh look! Now we know the boss-man’s name. From here on out, we probably should refer to him as either “Gorm” or “the bandit leader” – not “the tall man” (and never just “the taller.” Or “the older,” “the younger,” etc. That’s a side note, but a lot of fics do that too. If you’re going to use a comparative adjective, you at least still have to tell us what noun it refers to.)

Also – did you notice how we never said Diana’s name there either? She’s the viewpoint character, so unless another person comes along that we need to clarify with, we can usually get away with just saying “she.” The reader knows who they’re reading about.

When you DO have two or more characters with the same pronouns in a scene, you gotta get creative. Again, readers are intuitive – they can follow pretty well who’s doing what as long as you make it clear. Generally speaking, if you establish which character is doing the thing, you can then use just the pronoun until you switch to a new character. For example:

There’s never a confusion that Peony offers Diana her own hand – not somehow Diana’s hand. We don’t question that Diana is the one wrinkling her nose, or that they’re her pants and not Peony’s. Or that Peony sweeps her own hair out of her own eyes. Sometimes you’ll have lines where it’s a little more confusing, but if it feels awkward in the sentence, always consider if you can re-structure it another way. Like,

Okay, that last line there? That one gets confusing, with all those “her"s. We COULD change it to “Diana reached for her, grabbing the back of Peony’s tunic and yanking her down onto the horse.” That takes care of a lot of them. Or, we could improve things even further by breaking apart the action, elaborating on things, and just generally stretching out the words so that it’s clearer which “she/her” is being referenced at any given time. It’s your story! Take advantage of all the room you’ve got – there will never be a time when you simply cannot rearrange things to make it clearer for your readers.

It does takes effort. And sometimes a bit of verbal slight of hand. You may have to restructure sentences to avoid repetitive phrases and give yourself a good pace. (That’s a large part of rewriting and editing.)

However, like the word “said,” pronouns are invisible words. Names are not – they jump out and say HI THIS IS ME. Use them sparingly – they have power.

One final exception! Fantasy race and job titles. Again, you don’t do this with your POV characters unless you’re trying to remind the readers of something, but it IS acceptable to sometimes refer to, say, “the elf,” or “the detective,” or “the werewolf,” or “the duke.” Use them sparingly, but this is one exception – mainly because it tells/reminds us of an important fact about the character. (You might also use, say, “her older sister,” or “his father,” etc, because that also communicates information about the characters and who they are to each other. But. Again. Use sparingly.)

…okay, I’ve rambled enough, but hopefully this is somewhat useful/helpful to someone out there.

Again! Read good books! Watch how professional writers do it! Imitate, imitate, imitate! The best writing teachers in the world are good writers.

Happy writing!

wait okay no hold up this says it so much faster and clearer than any of my rambling above: identifying characters by their visual attributes tells us WHAT they are, but not WHO they are.

There. Boom. Short answer. Much clearer, much better. Thank you, tumblr user djtangerine.

yea this is why your exceptions work too! if the narrator only knows a character as “that blond guy” then calling them “the blond guy” isn’t jarring to the reader.

One way to remember this/avoid the problem: A character who apparently thinks of their close friend as “the taller girl”? Their romantic partner as just “the blonde”? That tells us something about the character, and it’s that they’re a fucking asshole. 

That’s WHY it’s jarring! It’s not just an arbitrary This Is How Good Writing Works rule to memorize. It’s jarring because, like….Have you ever spoken to a business major someone who just…blatantly viewed you as an interchangeable NPC stock model in a story that was clearly about Them, The Protagonist? This inappropriate use of stilted descriptions accomplishes the same effect.  Since their actions and story presumably are meant to show that they’re not an asshole, it’s jarring and off-putting because it doesn’t match what we already know about them.

At best, it just highlights the awkward and tonally inappropriate writing and wrenches the reader out of immersion. At worst, especially if it’s overused, it makes the whole piece unreadable because the character comes across as such an insincere and shallow cardboard cutout that we don’t care about them anymore!

When you first meet someone, or your relationship is such that not remembering or caring about their names is appropriate, descriptive tags aren’t jarring because that’s what they’re for–they’re the kind of shallow, surface-level details that we use to differentiate people we don’t know yet or whose identities are realistically just not that relevant to us. Like in the excellent bandit example above–even if the protagonist knows Gorm’s name at that point, it would make complete sense for her not to be on mental “first name terms” with the creepy bandit captain who has her tied up in the woods!

But if a character is thinking about someone they personally know, and they are mentally referring to that person as “the blonde” or “the taller one”, that tells us a lot about the level of respect they have for that person. It’s probably not the message you wanted to send.

Also when you use comparatives, it always reads as there being something IMPORTANT being communicated

Like “he looked over at the younger man knowingly” insinuates that he knows something the other man does because he’s older. If he DOESNT know more because he’s older, than it doesn’t matter that he’s older, so don’t point it out!

facts

ahhh honey, people lie about being sick

Oh illiterate honey that isn’t the topic of discussion

always be suspicious when someone tries to derail a conversation by talking about people taking ‘advantage’ of a social safety net. brings this to mind:

You know what, no, I’m adding to this:

@unaenanasinamor

“People lie about being sick” is practically verbatim what the management at my old factory job told me when I expressed concern back at the start of the COVID pandemic, that their staunch refusal to change or allow leniency to their attendance policy was going to result in a lot of people getting sick because it would make people still come into work while symptomatic and then start passing the virus around like a damn football. And these were concerned expressed right after we had made it through a flu season where that very thing fucking happened.

So I quit that job because I wasn’t going to get sick off of their refusal to grant any wiggle room for employees that started showing symptoms, and you know what happened?

A month later, they shut down, because they were overrun with positive cases, and one of their employees fucking died.

So. Your comment may be 4 years old and predate COVID by 2 years but uhhhh. Shut the fuck up, actually. Even prior to COVID I suffered every time I had to spend nearly an entire check just to get the proof I needed to not be fired. I never earned that money back. I missed a week of work due to a massive STAPH infection and came back to a boss desperate to push me out of the job because it was her shitty working conditions that made me sick in the first place.

People should be able to go to the doctor without it bleeding them dry and people should be able to take time to rest without fear of reprisals. Asshole.

I always wonder if people’s minds would change if they know how differently higher status/paid jobs handle this?

I’m sick and the entire process to taking a week off was canceling a bunch of meetings and chatting my boss, “I’m sick, I’ll be out.” His entire response? “Rest up! :)”

I took two weeks off this spring and applied for family medical leave, and he told me if it didn’t come through, to just take the time and not worry about it. I really do not say this to brag, I say it to highlight how deeply unjust it is that the people with the best healthcare and wages are also assumed to be trustworthy. Are you really angrier about somebody in retail cheating Marshall’s than about that?

Welfare Trolley Problem: You could pull the lever to save all six people from being killed by the train, but it’s possible that one of them might be faking it.

also … doctors will lie too. Because they fucking hate writing sick notes.

My father is a retired doctor of internal medicine, and he hates that shit so much. For one thing, it means some shitty manager has turned my dad into his student hall monitor, handing out passes instead of helping heal people. It’s a waste of time and resources, and it’s insulting.

But the main thing is, a policy like that endangers people.

Say you have the flu. Fever, cough, sore throat. First of all, he can’t help you. The doctor is just going to tell you to drink a lot of fluids and sleep and stay home. Many many illnesses are like that, all you can really do is stay hydrated and let your body do its thing. But you knew to do that already. 

Since you’re there already, he’s going to recommend some over the counter medicine, and if you are a loud enough asshole and your doctor works for a shitty enough hospital, he’ll cave and prescribe you antibiotics that won’t work because the flu is a virus not a bacteria, but that’s a whole other post. 

The thing is, he has other patients. And some of them are immuno-compromised, and some of them have conditions that make lung illnesses or fevers particularly risky for them, and you just brought your extra-contagious self into the same waiting room they sit in. Touched a bunch of doorknobs, rode the elevator with a couple nurses, leaned in to hear what the receptionist was saying… all so that he can tell you the best thing you can do is not leave your house for any reason, which you knew already but your fucking job made you do it.

my father was so angry about it he used to offer any amount of time for any reason. Like, you’d come in and say, like, my shoulder is too sore to lift things at my lifting job, note for two days please, and my dad would literally just say “how long do you actually want off work?” as in, if you had the money to take six months off and wanted to, he’d write the note for six months. As far as he was concerned, the more it screwed over the business making both of you do this bullshit, the better.

So. It’s not like forcing people to get a doctor’s note prevents lying about it, if that was your main reason for thinking it’s a good policy.

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.

Natsu going from "you can go home" to "I'm not going anywhere without Lucy and Lucy isn't going anywhere without me" is something that can be so personal to me

Spoiler warning for across the spider-verse:

For anyone who’s seen this movie, you know how masterful the scene is of Gwen confronting her father. The audio, visuals, everything about it is executed expertly. Most of the time, the color design of this scene is praised for being representative of Gwen being transgender, which is awesome, but I’d like to discuss another instance:

This is the moment when Gwen has just revisited her home and is attempting to sneak back out, only for her dad to notice and follow her to the window. At first, she plans on ignoring him, before he starts stammering and asks her to look at him. This shot, of her sitting in the window as her father tries to talk with her lasts only about two seconds, but represents a fundamental change in Gwen’s character, indicated by that fact that her costume has changed colors to look exactly like Miles’.

For most of this movie, Gwen Stacy has ran away. From her past, her father, her dimension, her mistakes, and even from Miles. Miles, meanwhile, has spent that same time running towards something: towards Gwen, the clubhouse, Spot, and his father and dimension.

The film has a general theme of rewarding those that seek and punishing those that flee. At the film’s start, Miles runs away from the Spot for his meeting, acting as the catalyst of all of the following misfortune. Spot, meanwhile, never stops seeking self betterment, and the narrative rewards this with his huge power increase.

It is in this moment that Gwen decides, perhaps against her own wishes, to act like Miles and engage with her father. She would have left, she can and wants to leave, but she doesn’t. Because running away is what got her in this situation. She chooses to do as Miles would, run forward, and the narrative rewards her. She gets her father back, who quits the police and saves himself from being Gwen’s canon event, and he gives her Hobie’s bracelet, allowing her to help Miles.

Gwen decides, in the space of two seconds, to be like Miles and turn towards something, and because of these two seconds, Gwen has secured herself a happy ending.