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A trainwreck beauty queen

@athenadark / athenadark.tumblr.com

The tumblr dumping ground of the author Seraphim_Grace, aka DarkAthena if you are here only for the meta (of which there is copious amounts) go to nemetonisevilpassiton.tumblr.com for the meta archive got to www.twmeta.livejournal.com

Damian's new classmate was what most people would deem as strange, Damian however could not see him as anything other than suspicious. Daniel Knight had joined in the midst of the school year, claiming to have moved here with his father Fredric Knight (first area of suspicion, a parent willingly moving both them and their child to Gotham) for a new start following his fathers divorce. The boy was reclusive when not spoken to directly, however he would not stop talking when a topic of his interest would come up. After searching further into his past (as he does with all his classmates) Damian found a relatively normal past, the only outstanding things being a noticeable drop in grades at the beginnings of freshman year relating to an undisclosed accident resulting in lichtenberg scarring starting from Daniels palm, and presumably up his arm being hidden by his sleeve. Apparently this accident left Daniel with irregular tremors and, every once in a blue moon, seizures. Damian had thought about taking this suspicious blockage of information to Tim or the Bat Computer to be bypassed, however the idea of sharing Daniel this cases existence with the rest of his family for some unexplained reason bothered him greatly, so Damian has come to the decision to figure out Knight’s true intentions on his own.

Meanwhile Danny’s just trying to live his new, semi-normal life in peace. After a reveal gone wrong results in some good old vivisection, Jazz Sam and Tucker recruit the help of Clockwork to find Danny a new home, where he can heal from both the physical and mental wounds. Clockwork ends up dumping Danny into the DC universe alongside Fright Knight, who was insistent on going with him, feeling responsible in helping to protect his young prince now since he feels he failed the first time. So with a bit of spacetime razzle dazzle, Tucker messing with stuff he probably shouldn't have messed with and a very tearful goodbye with promises to check in every day, Danny goes off to start his new life as Daniel Knight. It was going ok so far, he took half the year to himself, focusing on healing. Also so Frighty could adjust to the whole pretending to be human thing. Danny doesn't have any friends yet, and to be honest hasn't made the effort to make any (Jazz would be disappointed if she knew that), but there's this one boy in Danny's class who might be even weirder than him. Danny can feel Damian's eyes on him, knows how he follows him around without a sound (Danny really shouldn't be able to tell, he only knows because he isn't fully human(and in a weird way, Danny thinks that's kinda cool)), and whenever they do make eye contact Danny can see and feel the boy fluster and shy away.

Maybe he just needs a friend too.

Mob boss who gets equally passionate about rewarding loyalty as punishing betrayal. What?! Johnny Backstabs killed two of my rivals and saved my daughter from assassins?! Incredible!! I want him loved! I want him wifed! I want his bills paid! I want his rent gone! I want his dog pet! I want his gender trans’d! I want her car fixed! I want flowers on her doorstep! Get this DONE!!😡🥰😡

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I like how like… with every new piece of Star Wars media that paints Tatooine as more and more of a shithole where everyone is a murderous crimelord the funnier it gets that Luke Skywalker just grew up on this planet completely normal. Like I’m envisioning a normal day at Tosche Station where a cyborg biker and a  Twi'lek prostitute are stabbing each other over a bag of spice and then it just pans over to this fresh-faced nancy boy sitting at a table sipping on his blue milk going “oh golly, I sure do love power converters!”

Ok listen. Listen to me. Sometimes rural towns are just like that. I know someone who shot his cousin because they were playing with live ammo in their backyard and he never went to court. One time a guy who was driving my friend to school said “watch this” and snorted cocaine off of the steering wheel as he was turning a corner. And at the same time you will graduate alongside people who are completely innocent and have no idea shit went down. You will meet 17-year-olds who still don’t know how pregnancy works. This is one of the most realistic decisions in Star Wars

Luke thought his father was a navigator on a spice freighter, brought a rifle out to the desert with him in case he ran into the Sand People, and immediately got to wiping 3p0 and R2 of any identifying features because he knew the Jawas stole them. Luke knew damn well what kind of planet he lived on, but since he wasn’t personally involved in it crime was just another boring chore.

Luke: I want to join the Rebellion. 

Uncle Owen: What do you want to leave the planet for, huh? Treason here not good enough for you all of a sudden? We’ve got plenty of laws to violate right here.

Luke: I want to make a difference!

Uncle Owen: You can commit crime at home when your chores are done. No need to go anywhere else.

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That’s the face of a man who has been working with that dog for over a year to keep it from jumping on people.

And that’s the face of a dog saying to the man I’m not touching you.

After shoving Hansel in the oven, the witch turns to Gretel - who is currently fending the witch off with a gingerbread chair - and says:

“I can’t believe you thought a trail of breadcrumbs would save you. I mean, honestly, this is a forest! It’s full of animals. Honestly, the very idea that a dumb shit like you thought you could get the better of me is absurd.”

Gretel hits her in the face with said chair. To be fair to the witch, she takes the chairshot like a champ.

“Ow!”

“Did you know,” says Gretel, “that crows are capable of facial recognition?”

“Eh?” Says the witch, clambering to her feet and pulling a candy cane sledgehammer off the wall. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Not only that,” Gretel continues, “but they can remember both friends and enemies. And they’ll often follow people they remember as friends.”

The two fence with their sugared weapons for a moment, before the witch knocks the chair out of Gretel’s hands.

“Enough with the bird facts! Honestly, this whole attempted escape has been utter clownshoes. Get in the fucking oven!”

She seizes Gretel by the collar. Gretel immediately sandbags, letting her whole body go limp. This eminently practical defense forces the witch to try and deadlift her. Which is hard, as the witch often skips leg day.

“For example,” Gretel says, as the witch struggles and grunts, “if you feed crows a lot of breadcrumbs, they’ll probably start to see you as a friend and follow you in the hope of more food.”

The witch stops. Outside, she hears the thunder of wings.

“They’ll even bring you shiny things they find as presents!” Says Gretel, as a corner of the gingerbread ceiling is suddenly cut away by a large crow with a knife in its mouth.

“Oh shitballs.” Says the witch, as the crows descend. “I hope you know this is a great unkindness.”

“Technically,” Says Gretel, “It’s a murder.”

"Captain should be you." "Tread carefully, good my boy." "You been bossmang from da time before me or half the Beltalowda on this ship was born." "Yeah. That's true. I have. And I've drunk real Earth whiskey out of a UN admiral's mug and then scuttled her ship. I flew dark past a Martian battle group, and they never even knew I was there. And I've seen friends breathe the vacuum, and watched my only child burn. So when I tell you to tread carefully, you would do well to stop talking."

The Expanse (s.3, e. 10) : Dandelion Sky

“it’s weird for queer minors to be friends with queer adults” oh my god. ohhh my god.

intergenerational community support, especially in a community that is split so much age wise as the queer community, is immensely fucking important. get to know older queers and younger queers. this is how communities frazzle out and die to infighting.

the hypothetical queer adult that people are mad over in the post this is refrencing is 35 years old. only 35.

its weird for any minors to be friends with any adults, queer or not. There should be no reason why unrelated adults or minors should be making close relationships in any sense outside of professional ones. I understand wanting education, but they can be taught when they are adults as well.

is this a joke.

One of my fondest memories as a young queer is an "older" lesbian I met through her blog.

I must have been 19 when I met her, I think she was in her late 30s, early 40s.

We met a couple of times over the years at cafes and at pride. I wasn't having a good time mentally at that time. My ex's depression was feeding my own, and he wasn't... good for me, overall. I was failing art school. I was isolated and lonely. I carried so much pain and shame.

She just listened to me, gave advice when I asked for it, but mostly she was there. She suffered from bpd iirc, and she was a painter, she understood struggling with mental health and art block. She was a butch, hairy, unapologetic lesbian who smokes and shaved her hair into a Mohawk herself in the mirror. She helped me finally accept myself and my queerness in a punk, political way, rather than the "we just want a white picket fence and 1.5 kids" way.

She's the first person I invited for lunch when I got my very first job.

We lost contact over the way, but I'll never forget her. She saved my life. Helped me keep fighting when at the time I just wanted to disappear.

Friendships between different age groups don't have to be predatory. They can be healing, guiding forces. Especially for young queers.

Wherever Mad is today, I hope she's smoking her favourite cigarette brand and having a black coffee as she paints.

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"Sorry for posting so much of x" baby you are on the posting so much website. We signed up for this. Spam me with your blorbo pictures I love them, genuinely. I love what you love. Its OUR special interest now. ♥️

The Best News of Last Week

Greetings, readers! Welcome to our weekly dose of positivity and good vibes. In this edition, I've gathered a collection of uplifting stories that will surely bring a smile to your face. From scientific breakthroughs to environmental initiatives and heartwarming achievements, I've got it all covered.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air. They’ve come a long way since then. The result is a thin grey disc measuring 4cm across.

One of these devices can generate a relatively modest 1.5 volts and 10 milliamps. However, 20,000 of them stacked, could generate 10 kilowatt hours of energy a day – roughly the consumption of an average UK household. Even more impressive: they plan to have a prototype ready for demonstration in 2024.

Empty office buildings are being repurposed into vertical farms, such as Area 2 Farms in Arlington, Virginia. With the decline in office usage due to the Covid-19 pandemic, municipalities are seeking ways to fill vacant spaces.

Vertical farming systems like Silo and AgriPlay's modular growth systems offer efficient and adaptable solutions for converting office buildings into agricultural spaces. These initiatives not only address food insecurity but also provide economic opportunities, green jobs, and fresh produce to local communities, transforming urban centers in the process.

The Department of Education in the United States has announced that over 804,000 borrowers will have $39 billion in Federal student loans automatically discharged. This is part of the Biden-Harris Administration's efforts to fix historical failures in the administration of the student loan program and ensure accurate counting of monthly payments towards loan forgiveness.

The Department aims to correct the system and provide borrowers with the forgiveness they deserve, leveling the playing field in higher education. This announcement adds to the Administration's efforts, which have already approved over $116.6 billion in student loan forgiveness for more than 3.4 million borrowers.

The move could significantly expand access to contraception. The pill is expected to be available in early 2024.

The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved a birth control pill to be sold without a prescription for the first time in the United States, a milestone that could significantly expand access to contraception. The medication, called Opill, will become the most effective birth control method available over the counter

It is possible to end AIDS by 2030 if countries demonstrate the political will to invest in prevention and treatment and adopt non-discriminatory laws, the United Nations said on Thursday.

In 2022, an estimated 39 million people around the world were living with HIV, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS program. HIV can progress to AIDS if left untreated.

Conjoined twins are finally going home after the pair was safely separated during a complex surgery at Texas Children’s Hospital in June.

Ella Grace and Eliza Faith Fuller were in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) for over four months after their birth on March 1. A large team of healthcare workers took six hours to complete the surgery on June 14. Seven surgeons, four anesthesiologists, four surgical nurses and two surgical technicians assisted with the procedure.

Despite their record in popular culture, according to a recent survey, seven in 10 Canadians say they have a “very positive” view of the iconic predators. 

Here's a fascinating video about how wolves changed Yellowstone nat'l park:

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That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation:

Also don’t forget to reblog.

Full offense and pun fully intended, but I genuinely think the very existence of "dead dove, do not eat" was a fucking canary in the mines, and no one really paid attention.

Because the tag itself was created as a response to a fandom-wide tendency to disregard warnings and assume tagging was exaggerated. And then the same fucking idiots reading those tags describing things they found upsetting or disturbing or just not to their taste would STILL click into the stories and give the writer's grief about it.

And as a response writers began using the tag to signal "no, really, I MEAN the tags!"

But like.

If you really think about it, that's a solution to a different problem. The solution to "I know you tagged your story appropriately but I chose to disregard the tags and warnings by reading it anyway, even though I knew it would upset me, so now I'm upset and making it your problem" is frankly a block, a ban and wide-spread blacklisting. But fandom as a whole is fucking awful at handling bad faith, insidious arguments that appeal to community inclusion and weaponize the fact most people participating in fandom want to share the space with others, as opposed to hurting people.

So instead of upfront ridiculing this kind of maladaptive attempt to foster one's own emotional self-regulation onto random strangers on the internet, fandom compromised and came up with a redundant tag in a good faith attempt to address an imaginary nuance.

There is no nuance to this.

A writer's job is to tag their work correctly. It's not to tag it exhaustively. It's not even to tag it extensively. A writer's sole obligation, as far as AO3 and arguably fandom spaces are concerned, is to make damn sure that the tags they put on their story actually match whatever is going on in that story.

That's it.

That's all.

"But what if I don't want to read X?" Well, you don't read fic that's tagged X.

"But what if I read something that wasn't tagged X?" Well, that's very unfortunate for you, but if it is genuinely that upsetting, you have a responsibility to yourself to only browse things explicitly tagged to not include X.

"But that's not a lot of fic!" Hi, you must be new here, yes, welcome to fandom. Most of our spaces are built explicitly as a reaction to There's Not Enough Of The Thing I Want, both in canon and fandom.

"But there are things on the internet that I don't like!" Yeah, and they are also out there, offline. And, here's the thing, things existing even though we personally dislike or even hate or even flat out find offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable existing is the price we pay to secure our right to exist as individuals and creators, regardless of who finds US personally unpleasant, hateful or flat out offensive/gross/immoral/unspeakable.

"But what about [illegal thing]?!" So the thing itself is illegal, because the thing itself has been deemed harmful. But your goddamn cop-poisoned authoritarian little heart needs to learn that sometimes things are illegal that aren't harmful, and defaulting to "but illegal!" is a surefire way to end up on the wrong side of the fascism pop quiz. You're not a figure of authority and the more you demand to control and exercise authority by command, rather than leadership, the less impressive you seem. You know how you make actual, genuine change in a community? You center harm and argue in good faith to find accommodations and spread awareness of real, actual problems.

But let's play your game. Let's pretend we're all brainwashed cop-abiding little cogs that do not own a single working brain cell to exercise critical thinking with. 99% of the time, when you cry about any given thing "being illegal!!!" you're correct only so far as the THING itself being illegal. The act or object is illegal. Depiction of it is not. You know why, dipshit? Because if depiction of the thing were illegal, you wouldn't be able to talk about it. You wouldn't be able to educate about it. You wouldn't be able to reexamine and discuss and understand the thing, how and why and where it happens and how to prevent it. And yeah, depiction being legal opens the door for people to make depictions that are in bad taste or probably not appropriate. Sure. But that's the price we pay, creating tools to demystify some of the most horrific things in the world and support the people who've survived them. The net good of those tools existing outweighs the harm of people misusing them.

"You're defending the indefensible!" No, you're clumsily stumbling into a conversation that's been going on for centuries, with your elementary school understanding of morality and your bone-deep police state rot filtering your perception of reality, and insisting you figured it out and everyone else at the table is an idiot for not agreeing with you. Shut the fuck up, sit the fuck down and read a goddamn book.

relevant everywhere tbh

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WGA's asking people interested in all the tree law fun to also sign this petition about a god damned bitch of an unsatisfactory situation on another street on the Same FUCKING lot. NBC Universal (whose CEO is Mike Cavanagh just btw in case Ron Pearlman is listening) has started a construction project that completely removed the sidewalks from five different gates, in two cases forcing pedestrians to literally walk into oncoming traffic. In addition to being an ADA violation, it's just flat out despicably evil of them and WGA's asking for public support on this issue.

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Anyhow, if you're in the restaurant industry in LA and this dipshit walks in you have my blessing to spit in his soup

Found on twitter, going to adopt this now

Writer friends, tell me how many WIPs and how many UFOs you have. I have 2 WIPs and [redacted] UFOs (jk it’s around 16 across my three main fandoms)

going one step further... another yarn craft term that writers should put into use is frogging. If you don’t like the project, but the yarn is good, you can frog it (take it apart) and reuse it for another project.

I think a lot of writers don’t give themselves credit for how many of their ufos have actually been frogged, ie that particular project has been abandoned, but the concept, characters, or setting has been taken and reused on a new project.

Almost all of my abandoned fanfics have been frogged. You’ll find the pieces of them in my original work

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my favourite thing about frogging and why it’s called that is because you… rip it rip it (ribbit ribbit)

But! yes! I wholeheartedly concur. I keep “line graveyards” for works that I keep frogging and they wind up being so useful later.

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How Great Grandma Alice taught us to make grilled cheeses.

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Wild concept to the British on this post, apparently, but yes some things can be called different things in different parts of the world!

For example, all the countries you colonized already had names for places and things before you showed up and named them after your fucking kings and queens! 🌸Hope this helps! 🌸

a British grilled cheese is either a cheese toastie shoved into a toastie maker

but mostly we have cheese on toast - which is different from cheese in toast, where you put cheddar between two slices of toast

but to make the perfect cheese on toast

take two slices of bread, layer with slices of preferred cheese, I personally like Irish cheddar and Austrian smoked cheese, add a light splash of Worcestershire sauce, and season with pepper

put under the grill side by side until the cheese is melted and the exposed bread is dark brown, you may have to move it around under the grill for perfect coverage

serve on a plate with a dollop of your preferred chutney, brown sauce or just as is [I like Albert's victorian chutney which is quite gingery], eat with a knife and fork because its less messy, but you can just pick it up and shove it in your mouth - unlike a grilled cheese it doesn't have the structural integrity

you can add other toppings of choice under the cheese, bacon, ham, tomato are popular even though it turns tomatoes into the hottest substance on earth