Scar Worship

Andrew likes to touch the scars on Neil’s chest when they lay in bed. He kisses them and sucks hickeys against them to make the white scar tissue stand out more. Neil can’t believe Andrew doesn’t find them ugly. He tries to cover how emotional it makes him by sarcastically saying, “And you give me shit about your neck.“

Andrew just says, “They’re proof that you survived.” Neil’s breath hitches a little, and Andrew presses his fingers against a long, thin knife wound over his ribs. "How did you get this one?”

Neil takes a slow breath to brace against the memories, and then talks about Colombia, an early attempt to arrive on foot in one obscure place and fade into a rural setting. The drug lords that had had their young crops burned down and ordered them to grow coca instead, or be executed. One of the very first times he was slapped hard by his mother, for arguing about the amorality of fueling the drug trade against their safety. The family, a middle-aged couple and teenage son, that was told could have the land if they just killed the greedy thieving white people and took it over. The first people Neil had killed, and they weren’t even his father’s people, just a poor family driven to violence by desperation and prejudice. The cut he’d sustained from an unwashed kitchen knife in the fight. The delirious fever that he’d barely survived. Mary’s decision that, even though they’d successfully defended and ‘earned’ their land from the local drug lord, they couldn’t stay in an undeveloped area with poor access to medication, and the shift in survival method to moving quickly through identities and crowded, Caucasian-majority cities.

When Neil falls silent, Andrew takes a long moment before he speaks.

“So if you hadn’t gotten this cut, you’d be speaking Spanish instead of German, and manufacturing cocaine. You would still be afraid that the next white face you saw was sent by your father. You would be holding a hoe instead of an Exy racket. And we’d never have met.”

Neil startles against Andrew’s side, heart picking up speed. He’d…never thought of that. “I thought you don’t believe in fate.”

“I don’t. Bee says that one’s called the Butterfly Effect.” Andrew bends his head and ghosts a kiss over the four-inch line, making Neil shiver and bury a hand in Andrew’s hair. Andrew presses warm fingers to one of the slices at his gut next. “Now tell me about this one.”

underrated fantasy thing is when authors want to avoid giving an actual earth year their story takes place so the characters say shit like "back in the Year Of The Skateboarding Dragon" and all the other characters are like ah yes how could we forget the crops were so plentiful the year that dragon did those sweet sweet kickflips

🐺.

“Tortoise opening the new science lab at the University of Lincoln”

(via)

Okay listen I have another disability related thing that’s important!!

If you have any disabilities linked to tooth decay/erosion, through direct cause or secondary symptom, it is vital that you get one or both of the following items: Sensodyne toothpaste and enamel repair mouthwash

This includes health conditions such as acid reflux, diabetes, thyroid conditions, fibromyalgia, chronic pain & mental illnesses such as depression that create poor hygiene routines, sensory issue disorders like autism and ADHD, and any health condition that causes frequent vomiting / increased stomach acid, including eating disorders and migraines.

All of these disabilities will erode the enamel of your teeth, not only opening you up to cavities but making it very easy to chip your teeth from such simple things as biting the wrong way on the tines of a fork. (I’ve chipped my teeth at least 4 times this way).

The toothpaste on the left here (sensodyne pronamel) is gentle on your teeth, won’t cause painful sensations from any extreme mint flavor, and will even protect your gums if they’re sensitive from any of these conditions.

The mouthwash on the right (Crest enamel repair) will, as it says, repair your enamel — which is marvelous, because the technology to repair your enamel at all is relatively very new to society! — but it is most importantly non-alcoholic. Meaning that it works well as a once-a-day rinse without any of the burning sensations of antiseptics that typically discourage people with sensory issues from taking care of their teeth.

I know remembering to do these things every day can feel like a lot when you’re sick and exhausted, but I promise a collective three minutes out of every day is going to save you an incredible amount of pain and money in the future. If your teeth are susceptible enough to rot, you can actually die from infection. And as they say, with how little insurance actually covers dental —

Not brushing your teeth??

In THIS economy???

also: ask your dentist about durophat fluoride toothpaste!! I got some on prescription and it is a special formula that helps protect teeth

Okay so even BETTER than the enamel repair mouthwash (though get that in addition to this for even better protection) is MI paste. It can be hard to get but some dentists will sell it to you. (It seems to be easier to get in the US. I believe Amazon carries it as well)

It's not cheap at $20 for a small tube, but it is incredible at not just preventing enamel loss, it actually remineralizes your teeth! I'm a fan of the melon flavour personally.

If you have fluoride sensitivities (my mast cells hate me) or want to add another layer I have had huge success with n-ha (nano-hydroxyapatite). Studies have shown it either matching or outperforming fluoride, and I know I personally stopped getting so much tooth sensitivity (which we now know is actually sinus pressure referred and the fluoride was potentially triggering) and my cavities have gone down drastically. Which is great news since the numbing doesn't work on me and I cant afford dental work every 6 months.

I personally like boka, they have a few mint free toothpastes. I keep a travel size in my bedside table for when I can't get out of bed or was 2 dizzy to stand and brush my teeth.

If you have sensitivity to sodium lauryl sulfate, which is in a lot of toothpaste, but want fluoride, Hello makes a couple of toothpastes that might work. The mint is definitely less intense than standard minty toothpaste, and it’s less foamy. It costs a dollar or two more than the usual stuff but I’ve always seen and gotten it on sale and it’s at most drugstores, at least in Canada.

"Marsyas", 2022 by Jakub Godziszewski contemporary painter. oil on canvas

@jakubgodziszewski_art

monster lovers unite

Shapeshifter who gets horribly grotesque and mutilated when flustered

Its actually so important to me

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

you know it also occurs to me that due to how - unlike twitter - we indulge in memes for weeks or months at a time, to the point of some of them becoming shorthand used for years after the fact, we also have a lot of our own oft-incomprehensible-if-translated-literally idioms, of a sort! (not PRECISELY idioms, but they’re something more than just a funny meme, a lot of times, y’know?)

AND many of them are visual idioms or w/e, is that a thing? we use specific images (or images clearly based on the original image) to indicate a certain emotion or response, often with either not enough words to actually convey the response on their own, or no words at all! But those of us fluent in this dialect know what’s meant by it and it actually communicates quite clearly. Which is hella cool. :D

Tumblr is one of those sites that’s insular enough that it’s essentially ended up coming up with a language and culture of its own, to the point where if I interact with someone online whose main social media is Twitter or Reddit I can more or less instantly tell that they’re Not From Around Here. It’s cool and a little freaky at the same time.

Tumblr is an island ecosystem and we are the finches evolving more and more highly specialized bills.

MEMETIC, ICONOGRAPHIC LANGUAGE, MY BELOVED:

and, of course, the og:

@the-vagabond-tabby

👏🏼

He destroyed him

I’m

They weren’t here when the deep magic was written

forbidden neil the rat photos

Wine is exactly like omegaverse fanfiction

I was GOING to say. That when you read a wine menu and see something like "notes of leather and wet stone" you think "did an insane person write this its grapes" but after youve read about wine and growing regions and the effect of oak barrels on aging and tasted a bunch of stuff and given it some thought you find yourself taking a sip of french syrah and thinking "mmm little bit of leather on the finish there" and all of a sudden that shits not crazy anymore. Youve been cooked in the soup. Youve been living in the monkey house.

With omegaverse fanfic. You -

You get the idea. Do the work for me. Please

Sorry tanuki fucker 91. I will be clearer. You get coated in the slick

i am jiggling a credit card in the door crack. life is a rich tapestry come take my hand we will weave it together.