🚨⚠️ATTENTION FELLOW WRITERS⚠️🚨

If you use Google Docs for your writing, I highly encourage you to download your work, delete it from Google Docs, and transfer it to a different program/site, unless you want AI to start leeching off your hard work!!!

I personally have switched to Libre Office, but there are many different options. I recommend checking out r/degoogle for options.

Please reblog to spread the word!!

Crypt Pad can be an option too!

I don’t use Docs very much at all, but this looks like a good moment to take a sweep through my account and delete anything that’s in there.

You’re an ancient Greek man coming home from 4 months of war to find your wife 3 months pregnant. Now you’ve embarked on a solemn quest: to punch Zeus in the face.

Soon after you begin your quest, you encounter another man in a similar situation. You decide to join forces, as two mortal men stand a better chance at punching Zeus than one. Two villages over, you encounter a woman who had relations with Zeus and was left with a highly aggressive half-boar half-man offspring. She too feels your anger and offers to join your quest. By the time you reach Mount Olympus, you’ve amassed a large and formidable army of cuckolded/ravished mortals, demigods with daddy issues, mythical creatures with scores to settle, and a seamstress who you’re pretty sure is Hera in disguise. Zeus never stood a chance.

What I find best about this scenario is that the original wife probably expected to be murdered for her infidelity at worst or have her relationship with her husband ruined as he grew to resent her baby, at best.

Instead this man looked at his beloved and said, “who did it?”

And she replied “Zeus,” accepting he probably wouldn’t believe her.

And then he sighed, strapped his sandals back on and said, “I’ll be back before the baby is born.”

“Where are you-?”

“The lord of the sky came into my house, molested my wife in my bed and ate my food. I am going to settle the score.”

“Darling, he’ll kill you.”

“He may try, if he would like.”

You’re so right, that IS the best part.

I’m personally caught up on the seamstress.

“The pathway up Olympus is guarded by dozens of traps and perils strong enough to thwart even the Titans. How are we going to get past all of…” the shepherd boy with golden eagle feathers gestured uselessly at the slopes above them, particularly the herd of eight-legged goats snorting fire.

“There’s a way around,” Yiorgos said, though he was not specifically asked. But he had been the first to begin the march on Olympus, and so felt obligated to take the lead whenever possible, “In the stories there’‘s always a way around whatever obstacles the Gods place in our way.”

He hadn’t meant the words to come out as a question, but they had that lilt to them none-the-less. And even though he hadn’t meant it to be a question, much less a question directed at anyone specific, it was directed at one all the same. Just as the eagle-feathered shepherd boy’s had.

“Way I heard it,” a woman’s voice said. Rough with the Mycenaean Greek equivalent of a backwoods accent, and with the depth of a farmer’s wife who straps cattle to her back to carry to market, “there’s a back path. Hidden behind an invisible door that only one key in the world can open.”  Everyone’s eyes had turned to the broad older woman in heavy shawl sitting amidst supplies in the foremost cart. “Least, that’s what my grand-mammy always told me.” she added after a moment of dozens of eyes on her.

“Oh, we were so foolish!” That was Lydia, a lithe waif of a woman, many months pregnant, sitting opposite the seamstress in the wagon. “Of course there’d be a.. a quest. They’d keep such a key in the depths of Tartarus or in the golden chariot of Apollo, or, or-”

“Or”, the older woman cut her off in a voice both firm, but much gentler than she used on anyone else, “he’s like all husbands and has been promising to move the key someplace better for the past three thousand years but hasn’t gotten around to it.”  She gestured vaguely to the hillside, “Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was under, say, that bush right over there.”

It was. Of course. And everyone in the caravan agreed that it had been a very lucky and wise guess from the nameless woman and for the upteenth time since she first sat herself down in the front wagon and announced she was coming along with no further explanation, each and every last member very purposefully gave no further thought to the matter.

Thought balloon: (I don't know... it seemed like a good idea at the time...)

right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters. 

Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.

You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.

I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:

No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.

No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).

Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.

If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).

Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.

As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.

There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.

Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.

Speaking as a Michigan resident:  Look at the laws being passed in Michigan.  Now look at the laws being passed in Florida.  Spot the difference?  That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party.  That’s the difference.  They’re different parties.  It is not the same.

You want what we’ve got?  Vote for it.

(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled?  Keep fucking voting.)

D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy

look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill. 

But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting

Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.

Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.

Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.

Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:

close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights

these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years. Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights. 

when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources

So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.

Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.

I live in Pennsylvania.

Neither of my children is cisgender.

The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?

That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.

And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.

You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.

Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.

PSA from the actual coiner of “neurodivergent”

Yo. Many of you need to take an entire stadium of seats. Like a football arena in Texas number.

I coined neurodivergent before tumblr was even a thing, like a decade or more ago, because people were using ‘neurodiverse’ and ‘neurodiversity’ to just mean autistic, & possibly LDs. But there’s more, like way more, ways a person can have a different yet fucking perfect dammit brain.

Neurodivergent refers to neurologically divergent from typical. That’s ALL.

I am multiply neurodivergent: I’m Autistic, epileptic, have PTSD, have  cluster headaches, have a chiari malformation.

Neurodivergent just means a brain that diverges.

Autistic people. ADHD people. People with learning disabilities. Epileptic people. People with mental illnesses. People with MS or Parkinsons or apraxia or cerebral palsy or dyspraxia or no specific diagnosis but wonky lateralization or something. 

That is all it means. It is not another damn tool of exclusion. It is specifically a tool of inclusion. If you don’t want to be associated with Those People, then YOU are the one who needs another word. Neurodivergent is for all of us.

Annoyedly yours,

Neurodivergent K of Radical Neurodivergence Speaking

We’ve had a few people in the past ask us about the history of the word “neurodivergent” so here it is in the words of the person who coined it to begin with. x -Mea

Damn, missed it again

Happy Bog Day!

Happy Bog Day everyone!!!

I haven’t been on tumblr for quite as long as a lot of people but over several years I’ve noticed this interesting gradual sorta,, shift in the general culture? that it went from this mostly depressed, nihilistic outlook where people would regularly joke about hating themselves and being hopeless and depressed, to a wave of vehemence of “STOP hating everything actually the world is Good and you deserve love!!!” type posts, to now, where those aggressive ‘PSAs’ have faded away and instead I regularly see people romanticizing simple things like stars and hot tea and rainy mornings, and waxing poetic about their friends, and just trying to put love out there. and I don’t know exactly what that means (someone who knows more than me could probably say something smart about generational expression and trauma or popular perception of mental health and whatnot), but I do know that it makes my heart very full to see people learn to love the world and themselves by extension, and a whole userbase adopting healthier coping mechanisms, and therefore teaching the younger users to do so as well. I might just be following different people, but I really do think we’ve grown. everyone has grown. five years ago it wasn’t unusual for the next post on my dash to be a scathing commentary on why nothing matters or an anon ripping into someone they barely knew or someone complaining about how pathetic their interests are. now I have mutuals who get excited and spam reblog art of cows and friends I see tagging each other in pictures of frogs and strangers writing paragraphs about how much I matter. it makes me happy. idk. just an observation I wanted to make. I think people are good and everyone’s just trying their best at the end of the day

I hope this wave of of strikes pushes the veterinary industry to unionise. As corporations like VCA and Banfield (both owned by MARS, yes the chocolate company) continue to buy out independent clinics, the industry is shifting away independent businesses founded and owned by DVMs to corporate franchises.

Working conditions in the industry have been abysmal for years. But everyone working under the same company + significant staff shortages (in canada both DVM and RVT positions typically take 6+ months to fill according to a report by the CVMA) does provide opportunity both for community-building and an advantage for bargaining or, if necessary, striking. Staff are not easily replaced.

We all know we're being overworked and underpayed. It's time to fucking do something about it. Talk about your wages with your coworkers, make sure you're being reimbursed for overtime, see if you're getting enough vacation days. Find out what you want and take it.

Some clinics have already unionized, I hope more will soon.

As a pet owner who uses the vet often for preventive and specialized care, and goes through a chain veterinary clinic because that is where the team I trust implicitly is and you don't mess with that when you have a complicated case, I desperately want all y'all to be paid so much more, and I wish I could do more to help efforts at this point. I appreciate and rely on you and you are not adequately compensated for that, and it makes me ill.

Yes it’s very important for solidarity with workers but, and maybe this is an unpopular opinion, workers should have solidarity with poor customers. Like ignore shoplifting, be sensitive when ppl are using EBT cards, that kinda thing.

If you work retail and you worry about shoplifters I beg you to remember how little money you’re being paid to do this

and also no matter what your boss says to you, someone shoplifting will not cause your wages to be docked. if it DOES, then you can get in contact with a labor attourney, who will proceed to light up like a kid at christmas because they (and you) are about to get a big fat payday. that shit is ridiculously illegal.

Villains in Addams Family movies go to really unnecessary lengths to defraud them of the family fortune. These people just give it away on whims all the time. If I just walked into the house and started wearing their clothes and spending their money, they wold start introducing me as Cousin Intruder and forget there was ever a time I didn’t live with them.

Gomez in particular would enjoy your boldness, Cousin Intruder.

Oh shit.

The Addams family loves and greets every person entering one of their homes.

The Addams family adopted or married every person wishing to stay.

This is why the Addams family is full of freaks.

Of course.

So what we’re saying is, tracing the Addams’ geneology is damn near impossible and it’s just as likely that no living member of the family is actually a blood relative of the people who originally held the family name?

What I’m hearing is that Batman is actually an Addams. 

He most certainly is

I mean, considering if you look at it in the light of a different story, the near (actual, factual) homicidal level of bond and love the Addams have for each other, the idea that they’re all adopted, the way that Bruce is often portrayed as a bit of an aloof, smarmy smarm in private, the possibility that young Bruce might not be wholly appreciative of his extended family’s eccentricities, of which his parents are the mildest of the bunch, the idea that those two parents are (distantly) Addams’ and get gunned down, well.

[Gomez]: I came, I came as soon as I heard

[Bruce]: I…I told you never to come back, I said, I said you were weird

[Gomez]: Please, my boy, to compliment me when you are so wracked with grief. *clutching hug* Dear Thomas, dear Martha, so full of life…

[Bruce]: *extricating* They….they fell in front of me…while he laughed…with mother’s pearls…

[Gomez]: The fiend! This dishonor cannot stand!

[Bruce]: And I felt….I felt it well up inside me, a black blood welling up…

[Gomez]: Yes, dear boy…

[Bruce]: I….will be vengeance….

[Gomez]: Yes….

[Bruce]: I…I will be the night!

[Gomez]: Yes!

[Bruce]: I….I am an Addams!

[Gomez]: YES!

[Bruce]: I. AM. BATMAN. *lightning, thunder*

[Gomez]: YES, YES!!! My boy, the rivers will run red with wonderful blood!

[Alfred]: *sigh* I’ll put the tea on and grab the foils then, shall I, sirs?

I AM DECLARING THIS CANON.

HEADCANON ACCEPTED

@copperbadge

I mean when you think about it, if Bruce Wayne is an Addams, everything he does makes sense. Gotham makes sense. Damian Wayne, trained vegetarian assassin, makes more sense if he’s an Addams.  

Now that we have accepted this revelation, I want you all to think about a hypothetical situation in which Bruce brings Superman and Wonder Woman to meet the Addamses. 

Alternate suggestion: after his parents were gunned down, and before the police arrived, a man on his way to the bathroom for a leak heard the gunshots and the screams, and being the sort of man who holds no fear of death or entertains any sort of disinclination to deliver a nice bit of torture or dismemberment or fisticuffs to someone who deserves it, Gomez Addams burst out the door into the alleyway, too late to do anything but comfort a traumatized boy whose eyes are filled with the sight of his parents’ blood.

His brand of comfort is considered highly unorthodox, but sometimes it’s just the sort of comfort a traumatized child needs, not too warm or too bright to be believed by someone who feels that the world will never be all right again, but the comfort of someone who has learned to walk with death, and even to dance, and by the time the police arrive, and the medics, and the coroners, and Alfred, Bruce Wayne is … not okay, at all, but a little less not-okay than he would be.

And Gomez is a wealthy man, if possessed of a rather eccentric reputation, and there is no doubting his kindness, so when the invitations start arriving for young Bruce to visit, to attend an All Hallows Eve party, to play with young Wednesday and Pugsley, to learn swordfighting or dancing or how to be a good host at a dinner party … Alfred sees no harm in letting his young charge go off to do so. Bruce always comes back a bit more settled, a bit more sure of himself, so they must be a good influence.

And when Bruce gets his idea about vengeance, and protection, and a giant bat suit, well. His mentor Gomez thinks it’s a delightful idea, here, there are live bats in the belfry if Bruce needs some references, and dead ones in taxidermied and articulated skeleton form all through the house if he wants to make anatomically correct wings, and a treasure trove of weaponry and interesting gadgets that Wednesday and Pugsley have been trying to kill each other with for years now, knock yourself out.

And nobody is prouder than Gomez when Batman brings his first sidekick home.

"but if you're pro-union, why are you anti-cop-union?" because cops are not laborers. what cops do is not labor. they are enforcers of the laws that oppress laborers and exist solely to protect capital. don't bother me with stupid questions.

i love, therefore i bite

by: 福永史子

personally i love strikes. love unions. love protests. big fan all around!!

Apparently neopets not only managed to ditch the NFT bros, but with the closure of the Jumpstart brand weeks ago, neopets is now completely independent for the first time since the early 2000′s, got millions in a new investment deal and are currently installing a flash simulator so that all their games and animations work again.

Guys neopets was never scientologist, its brand passed through the hands of a company that turned out to be owned by a scientologist at one point but that only lasted a year or so in the early 2000s

just go see an ob-gyn

Help me ob-gyn kenobi, you’re my only hope.

She needed more midwife-clorians. 

I really hope everyone reblogging this followed the link and read the article, because it’s larger point is really good “Reproductive health and childbirth is a crutch, and Lucas gets away with it because his audience accepts that these things are mysterious and cannot be intervened with the way that that the loss of limbs can be remedied with robot prosthetics, or the way Luke can be rescued from near-death on Hoth by being submerged in a bacta tank. Having babies is worse than being mauled by a wampa ice creature or being chopped up by lightsabers and falling into a river of lava. Lucas can write a world like that, and worse, the audience will accept it. But uteruses aren’t made of malignant magic. Women’s bodies are real physical things that can be studied and understood and when necessary, cured. ”

IDK about everyone else, but I’ve actually been certified as a doula and childbirth educator and worked in women’s health media for most of a decade.  All points valid, but “Help me OB-GYN Kenobi” broke me.