So whenever my hearing aids run out of battery, a deep-ass man’s voice goes off right next to my ear drum yelling “B A T T E R Y”, and, every time, without fail, giving me a minor heart attack.
And since my hearing aids aren’t synched for when I replace the battery, the left hearing aid will go off one afternoon, and I’ll know that the right one will go off the following night.
Yesterday afternoon, I replaced my left hearing aid battery.
Now it is tomorrow night. Now I sit, and I wait, for that monotone-ass motherfucker in my head to yell “BATTERY” in my ear, again leading to my gradual heart failure. It is only so long before my heart cannot take this repeated occurrence of panic.
Jane Austen: The slowburn writer to end all slowburn writers. Has a mild case of purple prose syndrome. Sets you up to think she's using a really lame trope or cliche, but then pulls the old BITCH U THOUGHT. Gets in fights with commenters who completely miss the point of her work.
William Shakespeare: Where dick jokes meet feels. Recycles old plots that have been in the fandom for years, but always manages to put a new spin on it. That said, he's better known for good character writing than good plots. Kind of problematic, but people love him anyway. Laughs at and encourages commenters who completely miss the point of his work.
The Brontë Sisters: Their fics get lots of comments but they never reply. They never leave author notes, either. They share an account, and there are talks of a collab fic coming soon. Write fics for OTPs of questionable healthiness and consent. Only ever write darkfic. Like, REALLY dark. ...People are getting kind of worried about them.
Edgar Allan Poe: Also only ever writes darkfic, but at this point, people have moved past being worried about him and have just accepted that he's weird, he's morbid, and we love him. Channels his feelings about his ex into his writing. It results in really good stories but everyone's sort of like, "...Dude."
Charles Dickens: Trying to set the record for highest wordcount on ao3, and it shows.
Victor Hugo: Currently holds the record for highest wordcount on ao3.
Oscar Wilde: Only ever writes M/M. Has a BAD case of purple prose, but it's worth it if you manage to get through. His stories are either hilarious or soul-crushing. Or somehow both. People love him but know better than to disagree with him publicly, lest he destroy you with one of his infamous subtweets.
L. Frank Baum: Wrote one really well-loved story that's among the most famous in the fandom, and it's literally all he's known for, and it pisses him off. His popular story became a multichap against his will because it's the only one of his stories anyone actually reads. He keeps trying to end it so he can work on other things, but always ends up coming back.
Arthur Conan Doyle: Feels L. Frank Baum's pain. SO much.
James Joyce: Has fascinating ideas, but takes forEVER to get to the point in his stories. Also a stoner, and it shows.
Lousia May Alcott: Writes stories for her unpopular OTP (that's a NOTP for most of the fandom) and breaks up everyone's favorite ships, mainly out of spite. Also kills everyone's favorite characters, less so out of spite.
Mary Shelley: Writes incredible stories, but publishes under her boyfriend's account because she's banned from ao3. ...Again.
Why does everyone say that they played someone ‘like a fiddle’? Fiddles are actually pretty difficult to play? Why not say ‘I played him like a recorder’? ‘Like a xylophone’? ‘Like a triangle’?
I think it’s got to do with detail and subtlety. If you play someone like a fiddle, that’s like, Iago or some shit. If you play someone like a triangle, you just told them there was free food somewhere when there wasn’t.
I remember a white kid in my class talking about how his parents made 320k combined and they still “struggle” and thinking to myself: “It’s probably because they don’t know how to manage their fucking money and live above their means, but sure, just pretend it’s not their fault”
A few minutes later, he mentions that they vacation 3 times a year, own 3 cars, and spend $1000 a week (A WEEK) on food.
Long story short, I refuse to feel sorry for any of you upper-middle class folk that pretend you’re struggling financially too when you just have no sort of financial management skills.
What’s more interesting is the juxtaposition between how we perceive upper-middle class people’s struggles vs the struggles of the working class. Whenever we talk about the working class or those near poverty, people love to blame them for their own failures, and yet, when it’s somebody who’s well-off, it’s automatically assumed that their struggles are just an inherent part of the life. It’s amazing to me how far people will go to demonize the poor whilst simultaneously excusing the well-off.
Honestly, if that whole green energy thing doesn't work out, just hook me up to the city grid. I bet my rage can power at least a couple municipalities.
A full year after Flint, Michigan, made headlines for contaminated drinking water that poisoned the city’s poorest of residents, the city government is now demanding that its citizens pay for their water services—the very same water that poisoned them in the first place. Back in June, Gov. Rick Snyder told residents that city water was safe to drink with a filter. Of course, this was eight months after finally acknowledging there was a problem—which everyone from the EPA to the international press knew by then. But after the city and state decided to make the Flint River the city’s water source which resulted in thousands of children with lead exposure and an outbreak of Legionnaire’s disease that killed at least 12 people since 2014, people just don’t have faith in the government anymore. Imagine that? But trust aside, the unmitigated gall of anyone to ask these victims of neglect, corruption and greed for money to pay for their water is truly astounding!
The warning letters arrived in Flint mailboxes in early March. Their demand, of almost unfathomable audacity, is delivered in red capital letters, underlined for emphasis: pay for your poison or else.
Snyder’s government, which was largely responsible for the water disaster, announced in February that it would stop giving Flint residents subsidies for their water. Mayor Karen Weaver then decided to resume the practice of shutting off the water for people with unpaid bills.
Meanwhile, residents know that no matter how much the government claims to have fixed the pipes or have restored the lead levels, things will never be back to normal (if there ever was such a thing). That’s the reason why they still head to different sites around the city in order to obtain free cases of drinking water.
And while lead levels have fallen below the federal danger threshold, residents know now that no amount of lead is truly safe, they know the city’s work on its pipes poses new contamination risks, and they say the water is still foul-smelling and still making them sick. So they show up at the Eastown Bowl and Flint’s eight other drive-thru distribution sites six days a week, forming water lines rarely seen outside the world’s poorest and most parched nations.
Some of them won’t even do that. Occupational therapist Audrey Muhammad buys her own bottled water, and only in the suburbs. She is suspicious of anything run by the state and city authorities.
This weekend, Russian media reported that officials in the republic of Chechnya have detained more than 100 gay men and killed at least three. The number of dead may actually be much higher; in recent weeks, gay men have been simply disappearing off the streets.
Russian officials are saying this is impossible because “there are no gay people in Russia.” Really.
A spokesman for Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, who is a vocal supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, denied that any such activities have taken place. He further suggested that there are no gay people in the country at all.
“You cannot arrest or repress people who just don’t exist in the republic,” spokesman Alvi Karimov said in a statement obtained by Radio Free Europe on Saturday. “If such people existed in Chechnya, law enforcement would not have to worry about them, as their own relatives would have sent them to where they could never return.”
Holy. Shit.
You are looking at a gay Holocaust which is happening right now.
“The Shooter” - A story that I came up with two years ago actually but only just now got to draw it out. As a fan of storytelling I always let the art dictate the medium and this one seemed like it could only live as a comic. Hope you all have a great weekend!
You have a reputation for being horribly indecisive. In truth, you’ve been cursed with the ability to see every possible negative outcome of every choice you make, no matter how minor.
As a 19 year old girl, I was shy and meek and very bad at standing up for myself. I worked at a Denny’s with a lot of creepy and rude customers, and one day a regular customer came in and he asked to borrow my pen. I was the only hostess on duty at the time, and the host stand only had one pen, which I very much needed almost constantly. We usually had more pens but servers would often lose theirs and come raid the host station for replacements. This particular pen was very excellent and I guarded the thing with my life… you all know the kind of pen I’m talking about, super ergonomic design and never runs out of ink and writes on any surface. This pen wasn’t going anywhere, not if I could help it.
Well anyway I told the customer, “oh I’m sorry, I’ve only got the one pen right now and I need it”. He said “don’t worry I’ll give it back when I’m done” and just took it. Well I sucked at standing up for myself and they drilled all that ‘customer is always right’ nonsense into our brains pretty well so I just resigned myself to having to track down another pen. (Not an easy task in that restaurant, there was some kind of black hole for pens there.)
Well another customer, a woman in her 40’s, saw the whole thing go down. After the guy had seated himself, the woman pulled a pen out of her purse, I thought she was just going to give it to me but she actually walked over to the guy, snagged my pen out of his hand, and smacked her pen down on the table and said very audibly “Respect her no.” And then she brought me my pen back. I was so touched by this simple gesture of coming to my defense that I paid for her lunch myself. The whole thing took less than 3 minutes but it honestly taught me so much, it taught me the importance of standing your ground, defending other women, and not letting men get away with ignoring your No. If a man can’t even respect a no on something as simple as borrowing a pen, how could he be trusted to respect you on even bigger issues? Anyway I just think about that incident a lot, the importance of standing your ground and not letting men feel entitled to take whatever they want. Bless that woman, I hope she is having a really excellent life.
a shallow and pretentious male narrator whos supposed to fall in love with a manic pixie girl takes a wrong turn, and bumps into another shallow and pretentious male narrator, they fall in love instead
by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd on The Muse, shared by Joanna Rothkopf to Jezebel
Oumou Sangaré, the Malian legend who is known as “the Songbird of Wassoulou” and has spent her life advocating for feminist rights, has released her first original song and video in eight years. Called “Yere Faga” and featuring former Fela Kuti bandleader Tony Allen, its message is for those of us suffering from…
