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A Sunless Sea Full of Light

@dancing-over-stars

wandering around rebloging what I like. opinions expressed most likely someone else's

Yall do NOT hop on a cosmetic surgery hate train during an ongoing campaign against trans Healthcare I am fucking begging

My tits didn't smaller themselves, fuckos. Either you believe in bodily autonomy or you fucking don't.

The sacred bond between trans people who've had plastics and cis people who have had plastics is fucking sacred and I will not tolerate anybody in the queer community trash-talking plastics no matter what it is and who is getting them and for what reason!!!

I want there to not be a line between 'costmetic' and 'necessary'. If there's a line, then insurance companies and whoever-the-fuck-else will decide everything is 'cosmetic'. That happened to me with getting my jaw rebuilt when I was A CHILD. 'oh it's cosmetic' My insurance wrangler lady and the surgeon had to write SEVERAL LETTERS to the damn insurance company detailing out just how graphically I would DIE if I did not get my face rebuilt before I was 18! If 'we won't pay for cosmetic plastics only necessary ones' wasn't a thing, that wouldn't have had to fucking happen!

So you know what? I don't want to hear the word 'cosmetic' out of anyone's mouth. it's ALL just plastics. And all plastics are still 100% the person's choice to get, I don't care what the reason is, all reasons are your business and should be honoured and that's as it should be. As Sweaterkittens said, you either believe in bodily autonomy or you fucking don't.

Signed,

A Transman who has had exclusively plastics for all FOUR major surgeries throughout his life.

No but guys, GUYS, we need to talk about how important this scene is.  Because the commonly accepted lore about unicorns is that they are so good and pure that they’ll only appear to young virginal girls.  Because Molly Grue is a middle-aged woman who has been living with bandits for most of her life and is as far from innocent and virginal as you’re likely to get.  Because she’s so angry that this creature, embodying everything that society tells her she’s lost, everything she’s thrown away through her own choices, is here now when all that The Unicorn represents is long since behind her.  Because she knows, in a way that only someone who’s been steeped in an oppressive system her entire life can ever know, that she’s missed her chance and doesn’t deserve to be seeing a unicorn now.

And you know what?  The Unicorn doesn’t give two fucks about her virginity, about her supposed loss of innocence and purity.  She’s not repelled by Molly being older, being experienced, being a full human person.  None of that has ever mattered to unicorns, only to the people telling stories about them.  Not only does she step in to physically comfort her here, but before long this bandit’s wife becomes her friend, closer to her in most ways than Schmendrick.

This story is fucking revolutionary, you guys, and I just have a lot of feelings about it.

I heard Peter S. Beagle speak about this scene at a convention once. He said he just kept writing and writing into the scene and suddenly here was this powerful, moving dialogue which came out very strong and natural, flowing directly from inspiration.

He said it was one of those moments when “the writer just gets really lucky.” 

This is one of those scenes you nebulously get when you’re ten and comes up and punches you in the face when you’re thirty.

Molly Grue is a Hero. I don’t just mean she’s heroic; I mean that The Last Unicorn in book form explicitly defines what a hero should be, and she meets that definition. Specifically, she’s  Lír’s mentor in what it means to be a hero. The book doesn’t explicitly say this about Molly, and I don’t know that this is something Beagle was conscious of as he wrote; and yet. There’s this scene in the book:

[Lír said,]  "I am a hero. It is a trade, no more, like weaving or brewing, and likethem it has its own tricks and knacks and small arts […] the true secret of being a hero lies in knowing the order of things. […] Quests may not simply be abandoned; prophecies may not be left to rot like unpicked fruit; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever. The happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
The Lady Amalthea did not answer him. Schmendrick asked, “Why not? Who says so?”
“Heroes,“ Prince Lír replied sadly. “Heroes know about order, about happy endings – heroes know that some things are better than others. Carpenters know grains and shingles, and straight lines.”

Molly spent a long time thinking her role in life was the Hero’s Lady. She shacked up with Captain Cully because she thought he was a hero and that was her role, but over time as she came to understand how un-heroic he was, she became bitter and derisive, pointing out what the true order of things was. Like, let’s go back to her first scene where Cully is explaining to Schmendrick how he and his men all hate King Haggard, and one day Haggard will have to pay “such a reckoning”:

A score of shaggy shadows hissed assent, but Molly Grue’s laughter fell like hail, rattling and stinging. “Mayhap he will,” she mocked, “but it won’t be to such chattering cravens he’ll pay it. His castle rots and totters more each day, and his men are too old to stand up in armor, but he’ll rule forever, for all Captain Cully dares.” Schmendrick raised an eyebrow, and Cully flushed radish-red. “You must understand,” he mumbled. “King Haggard has this Bull –” “Ah, the Red Bull, the Red Bull!” Molly hooted. “I tell you what, Cully, after all these years in the wood with you I’ve come to think the Bull’s nought but the pet name you give your cowardice.If I hear that fable once more, I’ll go and down old Haggard myself, and know you for a –” “Enough!” Cully roared. “Not before strangers!” He tugged at his sword and Molly opened her arms to it, still laughing. 

And within a day Molly Grue has met the Unicorn, set out on a quest with her (and doesn’t bat an eyelash when she learns they’re going directly to Haggard’s castle), and becomes a pivotal player in destroying King Haggard and the Red Bull.

Molly understands “the order of things” when Schmendrick doesn’t. When the Red Bull is about to beat the Unicorn, Schmendrick’s all, “Welp, shit happens, so long,” and it’s Molly who yells and screams at him that this must not happen, how he might have been an inadequate charlatan all his life before this, but this is the moment when he HAS to draw deep on his true power and save her. So he does. And when he does, Molly understands how absolutely terrible becoming human is for the Unicorn, which Schmendrick doesn’t–even though he heard the Unicorn say that Nikos would have done better to let a unicorn die than make it into a man, and she didn’t.

Molly’s work in Haggard’s castle is fairy-tale like in nature, somewhere between Cinderella (”My father sets you to the weariest work there is to do, and still you sing”) and the labours of Hercules or the Biblical Israelites. According to the novel, “Molly Grue cooked and laundered, scrubbed stone, mended armor and sharpened swords; she chopped wood, milled flour, groomed horses and cleaned their stalls, melted down stolen gold and silver for the king’s coffers, and made bricks without straw.”

In reward for her work, several unprecedented things happen. Lír comments that “There has never been singing in this castle, or cats, or the smell of good cooking,” but now that Molly Grue has come, all these things have come to pass. And in the end, this work is pivotal–if Molly weren’t there, the cat wouldn’t have come; and without the cat, they never would have known how to find the Red Bull.

The point of fact is, Molly is able to do what she does for the Unicorn because she’s older, she’s more experienced, she’s weathered hardship and seen dreams broken, and knows what to hold on to and what to give up on. She knows that love is a very fine thing, but unicorns are something else.

And in the end, her reward is that her meeting with the Unicorn wasn’t the end of her story, when she had reached the end of her suitability for fairytales; The Last Unicorn is Molly and Schmendrick, who have lived for some time already, coming to their beginnings, and setting them on the path for their next story, for the real work of their adult lives.

a lot of edgy atheists tend to be antisemitic lmao. Like you know Jesus was a jew, right? God was first discovered by the Jews? Half of the Bible comes from Hebrew scriptures written by the first Jewish patriarchs in the word of God.

Please don't treat Jewish people and Judaism as an origin story for Christianity.

I know you think you're saying a good thing, but this is also a type of antisemitism.

Why should it matter if one of your god-figures is said to have been Jewish. Why should Christianity taking inspiration from some of our holy texts be a central point at all.

Antisemitism is bad because it's bigotry against a people. Why does decrying bigotry need an excuse?

On top of that (and yes, we know that Jesus was a Jew; it hasn't stopped Christians from butchering us in his name for centuries), this argument doesn't even make sense.

Yes, a lot of edgy atheists are incredibly antisemitic. Just the other week, there was one saying that in their ideal world, Judaism will be gone. It's gotten to the point that a lot of Jews online have a standard operating procedure when we start getting harassed by an ex-evangelical anti-theist who takes offense that we're discussing Christian hegemony. So the fact that a lot of formerly Christian atheists are grossly antisemitic isn't even in question.

But what would this statement do to convince them, OP? If anything, you'll just get them to double down on their antisemitism, because it paints Judaism as responsible for Christianity. It's an illogical and nonsensical "argument".

You: "Why do you hate these people? Don't you know that their religion is the foundation for the religion that traumatized you and that you left?"

Atheist: "Oh, yes, sure, now I'll be sure to stop bothering the Jews, now that you reminded me that their religion spawned the one that I ran away from!"

Seriously. Not only are you antisemitic yourself by basically saying that "antisemitism is bad because our founders were Jews" and not for any other reason, like the fact that Jews are human beings deserving of kindness and compassion, but you're not even making a good argument that would convince your target audience! If anything, you'd just make it worse!

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Hello.

I've seen you posting detailed information about the WGA strike and wondered if you had any suggestions as to how those of us not directly involved can show our support for the Union?

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Okay, bearing in mind that all this is entirely subjective at the moment (and so far lacking any more useful input from other sources): a few thoughts.

This will be my third WGA strike. (My first one was in 1988, just after I'd made my first live action sale—s1e6 of ST:TNG). And the thought keeps occurring to me at the moment that this time out, there's a potentially gamechanging player on the field that wasn't there before: truly pervasive social media.

(Adding a cut here, because this goes on a bit...)

A really excellent set of suggestions from Diane.

Reblogging because the most common questions I'm getting in Asks right now are all about how to support the Writers Strike. Diane's suggestions all seem very practical to me.

I have very strong opinions on this subject, and I'm curious how others feel.

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Hi, public librarian (lower case l, no degree) here, please don't.

We're already, in general, severely underfunded. Shocker, the capitalist hellscape we're stuck isn't great about allocating county budget to such a socialist outlet.

When you write in the margins, that's considered damage, and we just do not have the funding to replace every book we have to weed for damage.

Use sticky notes. Please. Write your margin notes on sticky notes in the book. You can even keep your place that way. But please please please don't write in the books, don't crack the spines, and don't dog ear them. That's just going to force us to weed them, and we can't always replace them.

Hi, capital L Librarian here, if you think your notes enhance other readers' experience of the book 1) you're wrong and 2) no one's going to get to read them anyway because you damaged the book and we had to throw it away.

Good job breaking it, hero.

every tiktok expert: make short fun videos 9-15 seconds long

me: how about a 2-minute spoken word monolog about unlearning trauma responses?

in case no one told you, or in case you know but you need encouragement taking the next step: it’s never too late to unlearn a law that is now holding you back, it’s never too late to write a new law

Genuinely one of the best things I’ve heard in forever. Not only the content, but the structure of every sentence, the delivery, the pacing, everything is impeccable.

Oh this is so so good.

An “initiation well,” used in magical rites, which was excavated at the Quinta da Regaleira estate in Sintra, Portugal.  

I feel like you’d love to know that this is from a literal palace that a Freemason built with an occultist buddy with the express and explicit purpose of embodying different occult traditional principles. The Freemason built an 88 foot deep inverted tower-well with a compass and cross at its lowest point because he wanted to be able to use it for magic.

𝖜𝖉𝖙𝖍𝖙𝖉𝖜𝖈

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Never forget that the War on Drugs was fabricated to criminalize certain communities. 

The quickest descent into fascism occurs when the criminalization of innocent, nonviolent activities is combined with a surveillance state to “clean up crime”.

(x)

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It’s also very important to look at how these laws are used. 

For the laws criminalizing pot, white people (usually youth) often get off with a slap on the wrist, but BIPOC get harsh sentences, including prison time. Same goes for traffic offences (including DUI). Also laws for loitering, gangs and so on are used much more often against BIPOC - people are being denied their freedom of movement or just being allowed to be out in public without being afraid of being arrested.  

thechronicmasochist

sex workers fought in the street for you to be able to celebrate pride. sex workers rights should be an essential part of the pride celebration. I'm dead the fuck serious.

thechronicmasochist

I love that so many people have mentioned Marsha P. Johnson in the tags, or made comments about black trans sex workers bc I know that includes Sylvia Rivera, but this post isn't just about them. This post is also about the kids who worked the streets of Greenwich Village who fought until the wee hours of morning on the first night of the stonewall uprising, even though THEY WEREN'T THE ONES THAT THE POLICE WERE TARGETTING THAT NIGHT. this is about those of us who have been fighting new censorship laws tooth and nail, the same laws that are now being used against trans and queer kids across the country and around the world. This is about the sex workers who tirelessly educated the public about safe sex methods during the AIDS crisis, when the government wouldn't even acknowledge that it is a sexually transmitted disease. Sex workers have fought for liberation from the very beginning and have CONTINUED to fight. we don't get to forget that our lives are considered "deviant". we are faced with that reality every single day, but many of us keep fighting for all "deviants" to be free to love, fuck, and live.

Every deviancy law that has ever been closed has been closed by a dog pile of sex workers tirelessly working to do so. Men, women, enbies, old sex workers, eighteen year olds who are homeless and angry, abled, disabled, black, white, latine, every race or ethnicity you can think of, but they all dogpile together on shitty laws and shitty authority figures and FIGHT for you. No cops at pride, keep the sex workers: cuz family friendly means you take care of the family that takes care of you, not sterilizing a protest for marketability.

thechronicmasochist

"family friendly means you take care of the family that takes care of you, not sterilizing a protest for marketability."

fucking. this. thank you. 💜🌈

Every single time I see a take that amounts to "if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X" I'm reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to "be orphans" escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.

And this girl's mom comes in, hears what we're playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it's because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.

First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.

Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says "pretend you're dead, and I have to -" Whatever it is. Some adult task she's assigned herself.

And it's just so transparently obvious that she's practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn't have to do scary hard things alone.

It's a natural coping mechanism. She's self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn't there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She's also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.

Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.

My daughter does not want me dead. And I don't want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.

All UK phones will go off with a loud siren-like sound on April 23rd at 3PM

Screenshot reads as follows:

The new Emergency Alerts system will be tested nationally on Sunday 23rd April.
The system will warn people when their lives are in danger. An Emergency Alert is a loud, siren-like sound with a message on your mobile phone screen.
See more: https://gov.uk/alerts
The Emergency Alerts system is now live and it will be used to warn people when lives are in danger

Please don't ignore this as people with mental health conditions, those in abusive environments, et cetera, who are unaware of this might panic or be in harms way.

If you have a secret phone because you're living in an abusive situation, here is how to turn these Emergency Alerts off because they will still make a sound with your phone on silent:

Even if you're not from the UK, please share this if you can!

Please pre-alert anyone who might be endangered by this or who might just be totally alarmed by their phone making a loud noise and sending them an 'Emergency Alert' text. Many people may be concerned that it's a hoax even if the message clarifies it's a test. For neurodivergent people or people with PTSD this is also a risk. It could just be super annoying in the theatre or if you're putting a baby to sleep.

Either by preparing or by turning it off, please get yourself and friends and family ready

Trans Missourians on HRT, call your doctor as soon as possible and get a 90-day supply or as much as they’ll give you.

Lots of us are going to have to relocate or go through costly and/or illegal channels to acquire HRT now.

I invite trans people in MO to add their payment links this post. We desperately need support. We need people to give a shit right now. This is life-or-death for many of us.

Here’s mine:

Venmo: @smkzq3