Backbone growth is a slow and painful process but once it is done you will stand taller and feel stronger than ever before.
Mike Driver
Xuebing Du
Not today Justin

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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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Love Begins

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@actualshonenprotagonist
Backbone growth is a slow and painful process but once it is done you will stand taller and feel stronger than ever before.
Hi my name is Henry of Monmouth and I was born in Monmouth Castle (that's how I got my name) and a lot of people tell me I look like Henry of Bolingbroke (AN: if you don't know who he is get da hell out of here!). I'm not related to Harry Percy but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm a prince but I like to drink and steal. I'm also a rogue, and I go to Boar's Head Tavern in Eastcheap. I'm a goth (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly black. For example today I was wearing a black doublet, hose, and boots. I was walking outside my father's castle. It was snowing and raining, yet herein will I imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world. The Percys and Owen Glendower stared at me. I put up my middle finger at them.
ned poins disappearing halfway thru the henriad:
Edmund Mortimer does the same thing. He and Hotspur were chilling with their wives at Owen Glendower’s place and the next scene Hotspur’s at Shrewsbury and Mortimer is nowhere to be seen and he’s never mentioned again.
wrong actually! Doesn’t Edmund Mortimer show up in the first tetralogy (one of the Henry VI plays) and die? Haven’t read them so I just heard this second-hand
He does, but we don't know how he got there.
in conversation about white people who go to Japan and expect their knowledge of anime to culturally carry them, I was once posed with “it’s like if there was a Japanese guy who was obsessed with spongebob and came over here and thought he could get by just communicating in spongebob quotes.” This is a false equivalence because if such a man existed we would crown him king. We’d love him. Americans would fucking love that. sometimes I get sad that this isn’t a real guy I can invite to a party.
I’ve noticed some posts around about how you can’t romanticize your life during a fascist regime and while I deeply sympathize with this sentiment, I want you to try to understand that’s what they want you to believe.
Fascism thrives best in the cesspool of hopelessness. They want us so confused and hopeless that we give in. When you give in, you don’t fight back.
If you wait for life to look good to do the things that bring you joy; life will still be bad - you will just have less joy.
As someone who has struggled with my mental health a lot for the last thirty years, I know this struggle firsthand. And changing this belief system - the one where you spend all of your time expecting bad things so you won’t be surprised when they happen - it’s the hardest work that I have ever done. And I’m not perfect; I still have setbacks. I still experience really real fears about the state of the world and the US, in particular, because that’s where I live.
But I made a vow to myself that I will not let the choices of others ruin my life. When I made that vow, I was thinking of my parents - but it applies to the state of the government right now, too.
There are still flowers in my garden, and ripe tomatoes, and it’s almost pick-your-own apples season, and I have plans with my friends to go to as many cemetery ghost walks as we can find this October.
I still deserve to live. I still deserve to laugh. I still deserve to love. I still deserve to be as happy as I can be.
And you do, too.
Dan Savage.
it's a well-known fact in the textile crafting community that "making objects from textiles" is an entirely separate hobby from "having a collection of materials to make things with."
crafters often refer to this collection as a "stash" or a "hoard."
it's normal to have, but sometimes comes with a certain awkwardness.
the problem is that it takes a very long time to make things from textiles - and it is extremely quick, fun and easy to get more materials.
Presents, impulse purchases, leftovers from other projects, things you bought FULLY intending to make something that you changed your mind about...
Another problem is that you genuinely DO have a plan for the materials! your intentions and desires are THERE!
and admitting that it isn't going to happen - or that your mind has changed, or you're no longer able to do them - can be really painful!
it's incredibly hard to say: "we are not the people who can do these things. we are not the people who WILL do these things."
but sometimes you need to.
it's a natural part of life. it might feel painful to let go of things that you really want to use, but won't. But clearing them out - and the attached guilt and shame - will make room for a lot more things in your life. Room for things you'll use. Room for the projects you'll do.
Room and space - not for hanging on to the shades of the ambitions and intentions and people you aren't - not being held for lives you don't have - but room and space for who you are today, and who you'll be tomorrow, and for the things you'll do.
Room and space to grow.
happy 20 year anniversary of Neil banging out the tunes!
though every rat is special, it's a wonderful and unusual thing for their accomplishments to be remembered and cherished by so many people so many years later. we're all so fortunate to know about the rat who banged out the tunes!
thank you to all the people who sent me reference photos of their beloved rats for this piece!!! credits under the cut!
u ever see someone with extremely fucked up views (or actions) and think wowww if a couple of things in my life went the tiniest bit differently that would have been me
I think most people would benefit from reflecting on how this might be true for them
Sometimes people bitch about media, both fiction and nonfiction, that they think "humanizes" bad people, especially bigots fascists Nazis et cetera. And I'm just like. Hey. Hey. The problem is. They ARE human. HUMANS did that. Your next door neighbor could do that. Your grandma could do that. You could do that.
"No I'm a good person" why? Because you've gotten lucky and not seen propaganda yet that perfectly hit your buttons? Because you had people to correct you when you fucked up? Idk man I don't think we're all so different from the bad people. We're all just people.
Reminding ourselves of our shared humanity with terrible people does NOT serve to justify their actions. It serves to remind us that the seeds of what happened to them could get into us as well, or might already have. It reminds us to be vigilant and interrogate the hatred inside us.
If you convince yourself that you're just an Inherently Good Person who would never believe hateful things well. Now any little hateful thing that makes its way inside you undetected is never going to be interrogated. It will be left to grow undisturbed.
If you remember that those things can get into anyone, you know to look out for them, and weed them out when they appear, and take the criticism when others point them out in you. So remember, that could have been you. If you forget, maybe it will be.
Okay, hear me out.
One of the quiet background realities of the Star Wars galaxy is that it is spectacularly bad at labor. Not just “late-stage capitalism” bad, but structurally, culturally, and institutionally allergic to the idea that workers should have enforceable protections. You’ve got child soldiers, child labor, debt slavery, corporate fiefdoms, and a Republic that can field a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy but somehow never gets around to standardizing “maybe don’t enslave people.” The Empire of course doesn’t fix this; it industrializes it.
So in that environment, formal labor law is either nonexistent, unenforced, or actively hostile. Which means if you’re operating in a sector where the state either can’t or won’t protect you, you get a classic historical pattern: workers build their own rules.
Enter the gray economies.
Groups like the Smugglers' Alliance (Legends) and the Bounty Hunters' Guild (new canon) look, at first glance, like professional associations for criminals. But if you squint at them through a labor history lens, they start to look a lot like early, proto-union structures — especially the kinds you see in maritime or extralegal industries on Earth.
Think pirate codes (yes actual ones, Pirates of the Caribbean didn't make that up). Think matelotage agreements. Think dockworker brotherhoods that predate formal unions.
Because what do these groups actually do?
They:
set norms for compensation and contracts
regulate competition to prevent destructive undercutting
provide a framework for dispute resolution
establish reputational systems (“you don’t honor contracts, you don’t get work”)
That’s industry self-governance in the absence of law.
Take bounty hunting. Without something like the Bounty Hunters' Guild, the field collapses into chaos: clients don’t pay; hunters underbid each other into oblivion; jobs get duplicated, interfered with, or sabotaged. And nobody trusts anybody!
The Guild steps in and says: here are the rules of engagement. Here’s how claims work. Here’s how you get paid. Here’s what happens if you break contract.
That’s basically a union crossed with a licensing board and a regulatory agency, just without any moral pretense.
Same with the Smugglers' Alliance. Smuggling is inherently risky, decentralized, and dependent on trust networks. If everyone is constantly betraying everyone else, the whole system stops functioning. So instead, you hash out agreed-upon routes and territories, informal protections against betrayal, mechanisms for information sharing, and consequences for breaking the code
Again: not altruism. Stability.
And the reason this emerges specifically in gray/illegal sectors is because they have to. The Core Worlds might pretend they have laws, but those laws don’t meaningfully protect the people actually doing dangerous, itinerant, high-risk work. So the margins of the galaxy — where enforcement is weakest and risk is highest — become the places where labor organization evolves first.
Which is very historically grounded.
On Earth, some of the earliest labor protections didn’t come from governments; they came from workers in dangerous, decentralized industries—sailors, pirates, miners—who literally wrote their own rules because no one else was going to save them.
Pirate codes, for example, often included:
compensation for injury
shared distribution of loot
limits on captain authority
Which is … shockingly progressive compared to a lot of contemporary working conditions (cough Amazon cough).
So in the galaxy far, far away, you end up with this ironic inversion:
The “legitimate” systems — Republic, Empire, megacorporations — are exploitative, inconsistent, or indifferent.
The “illegitimate” systems — smugglers, bounty hunters — are the ones building functional labor frameworks, because they need to survive.
And that feeds back into why the galaxy feels so unstable overall. There’s no universal baseline of rights. Everything is hyper-local, network-dependent, and contingent on whether you’re inside a system that has rules you can rely on.
If you’re a clone trooper? You are literally property.
If you’re a factory worker on a corporate world? Your protections are whatever your employer feels like offering.
But if you’re a smuggler or a bounty hunter?
You might actually have clearer expectations about your pay, your risks, and your recourse — because your “union” is the only thing standing between you and total chaos.
So yeah: the Smugglers’ Alliance and the Bounty Hunters’ Guild aren’t just flavor. They’re a glimpse of what labor organization looks like in a galaxy where the state has fundamentally failed to provide it.
Which is both deeply funny and a little too real.
#you're telling me han solo is a union man? (via @professorsparklepants)
Han Solo look SO MUCH like a union man.
i’ll be your god of loss
(from “The God of Loss” by Darlingside, which will make you cry.)
so I was thinking about the trio and kids. Because these people, you know, they adore kids! they’re great with them! And they might not admit to that, they may not believe it, but we know it, we see it with Eliot and Molly, with Hardison and Trevor, with Parker and Josie, with the kids from The Stork Job and The Fairy Godparents Job and their clients’ children and so very many more.
Most of all we see it with Breanna. We see how they mentor her, how they provide advice, how they encourage her, how they build her up, how they laugh with her and speak of teaching her and telling her stories from the beginning. they unashamedly adore her. And they are so very good with her—they know how she looks up to them, they know they are always watched, and they behave like it. They are truly wonderful with her.
We know they love kids. We know, too, that they see the foster system’s flaws, and we know they fear for the children they save from bad situations. We see how they instinctively nurture the kids of the clients who have lost a parent. We watch how they will lift up the children of the marks who do not treat them well.
But they are not meant for white-picket fences.
These are not the kinds of people who settle down. They do not get tired of what they do one day and say “perhaps we’d best end this now.” They never get tired of it. They adore their work, they adore their life, they cannot imagine anything else. They will never willingly stop.
But there is a point where need eclipses want. There will be a day when they cannot do it anymore.
This is a known fact, but it is not a loved one.
Keep reading
thinking about Eliot and food again. so the point of it is that it’s his art, right? it’s his craft, his specialty, the thing he pours all his senses and focus and emotions into. “food is life,” and life is beautiful, and thus food ought to fit that, ought to fulfill you. it is more than fuel, in his eyes.
but it wasn’t always.
and sometimes, well–sometimes it can’t be art. sometimes it has to be fuel, and only fuel, because there’s simply no other option.
because when you’re in the middle of the desert on a deadly op, or crawling through sewers, or huddling in abandoned buildings and hoping to God that you won’t be found, you’ve got to settle for whatever you can get, and hope it’ll be enough.
there were no choices. there were no means to cook. there was no time to think about what he was consuming (and that was for the best, really). food was fuel, and nothing more.
truly, I don’t think any of us want to know the things he’s eaten, has had to eat to survive. Eliot did not come by his fine palate with years and years of good food. Parker is likely the only member of the crew who has had to endure the same struggle of choosing something unthinkable over starvation.
(and let’s be honest: Parker didn’t have to survive in the depths of the wilderness without tools or aid. no–Eliot, of all of them, would have had the worst of the worst.)
isn’t it funny that, of all of them, the one with the strongest stomach has the most discerning palate?
this isn’t only about art. cooking well for himself is a cherished privilege. it’s a reminder that he isn’t where he used to be. he’s not on death’s welcome mat, nor is he shoving someone through the door.
he is safe. he has the means to provide for himself, and he has the time to make something beautiful of it.
so perhaps food is life doesn’t just translate to food is my art and my art is what makes life worth it or food for your loved ones is caring and caring for them is what makes life worth it.
maybe it’s also I can make food into something more than survival, here and now. maybe it’s food is plentiful, and I can pick and choose. maybe it’s I can have something that tastes good. maybe it’s I have the time to make this, I have the time to savor it, and I want to savor it.
maybe it’s I am here and now. I can see the vibrant rainbow colors of the fruits, the royal blue flame of the gas burner, the shimmer of water from the facet, the racks of measuring cups and tools, the warm glow from the oven window (not the gray ash and smoke, not the rusty blood, not the gleaming gunmetal).
I feel cold water over my wrists, warm, soft dough under my hands, the radiating heat from the pan, the tug of the apron around my waist (not the heft of the harness, not the stinging rocks beneath my raw hands, not cold flesh).
I hear the hiss of a bubbling pot, the ear-piercing beep of the timer, and the scrape of the whisk on the bowl (not the screams, not the thunder of bombs, not the howling of the dogs).
Basil smells strong and spicy, parsley fresh and sharp, cilantro tangy with citrus (not piss, not fear-sweat, not metallic or coppery).
And the food tastes–(not rotten, not slimy, not of desperation)–incredible.
maybe it’s safety. and maybe safety is freedom.
i'm about a quarter of the way into the fantastically researched and written yiddish revolutionaries in migration: the transnational history of the jewish labour bund by frank wolff (DM me if you'd like a PDF copy it's very dense but really spectacular work) and it really amazes me how many lessons we could stand to learn from the organizing that was being done by the bund in their, as wolff puts it, "persistent striving for a humanitarian socialism" that was specifically and explicitly antizionist, transnational, pro-yiddishism, doikayt, and secular
update: PDF link can be found here!!!!!
i am still making my way through yiddish revolutionaries but also want to recommend the recently released here where we live is our country: the story of the jewish bund by molly crabapple! while equally as detailed and well-researched as wolff's text (and also very long LOL), it is a significantly more accessible read. definitely recommend checking both works out on their own and in concert
NO FEAR. The actors who played Long John Silver and Captain Flint in Black Sails FULLY ACKOWLEDGE that the Muppet adaptation was the best
(source)
hi i hope i get to be the one to break this news on Tumblr, because
I am reading Tim Curry’s 2025 memoir, Vagabond
and in it, he not only devotes a chapter to Muppet Treasure Island, but also references this very post
so, to recap
no, Tim Curry is absolutely NOT a Muppet; however
yes, he and Miss Piggy ABSOLUTELY fucked
Actually, my therapist has told me this is a healthy way of processing things. Because you can get the trauma out of your head And you can write the ending you wish it had. The trusted person rescue, the catharsis of getting to kill the one who hurt you.
It's good for your brain. It's healthier than bottling it up. Fiction is where we go for emotional release. That can be true with trauma too.
so what you're saying is
character: NO
therapist: YES
Adding @dear-massacre's tags because they are so true:
#this is why it's important to remember that fictional characters are fake #they have no agency. they're made up #it hurts no one to make any character go through the horrors #it is healthy and cathartic
yeah okay ill reblog that
Not pertinent to anything in particular but I do think it's kinda weird that we keep depicting cavemen in media crawling around on all fours covered in dirt with tangled, matted hair, speaking in broken, cobbled-together toddler language when like.
They were us.
Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.
Like
Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not
A real life caveman though??? I think they'd be at least okay at it
This is actually really important and comes up in Anthropology classes all. The. Time.
As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.
There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.
Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.
We've been human for a long, long time, and we are not inherently better than all those who came before.
One the most profound experiences of my life was visiting Font de Gaume, which has 12 thousand year old paintings. They use a technique where the horses appeared to run across the wall when seen in flickering firelight. There was a bison the wall staring at us with such attitude, I could practically hear him. I had the most profound feeling of those ancient artists reaching forward to lay their hands on my shoulders. To say, "This was my world." It was a profoundly moving experience.
Some years later, I went to the Orkney islands where we visited a tiny family run museum of artifacts from the chambered tomb at the other end of the farm. They handed me a pestle once held by some neolithci human.They'd worn groves where the thumb and forefinger would be for better grip.
One time, in a French history class, my teacher randomly at the end of the class had all of us draw a sketch of a horse. And we were all like ??? Okay???
At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.
He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.
And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"
Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.
In Spain, there's a cave full of ancient, ice age era drawings of bison and reindeer and other animals of that period... And one small section of chaotic scribbles just a little away from everything else. These scribblesv were so incomprehensible, they were originally just called the 'Panel of Enigmatic Signs'... Until it occurred to someone that drawings only three feet off the ground probably weren't made by adults.
Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.
What's most charming about the whole thing is the way the cave scribbles look exactly like what you'd find on the wall of a preschool today. Artistic styles vary widely across different times and cultures, but child development is as near to a universal human experience as it gets.
Wisher made detailed 3D scans of the drawings, which helped her understand the uneven pressure applied to the charcoal and the direction the lines were drawn. The team then compared the panel’s composition with age-appropriate artistic efforts by modern children. Kids across cultures go through the same developmental stages, which influence their physical ability to draw, until about the age of 6, Amir notes.
The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.
Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.
...
Adults at Las Monedas would have been aware of what the kids were doing and presumably had lit fires or torches; without ample firelight the cave is pitch black.
a mii asked me what i would compete in if i could and i'm so woefully uncompetitive the answer is like nothing i hate competing i genuinely dont think i've got the skill level required to compete in anything. Maybe a loving my niece competition
You'd crush that shit, though.
It's practically cliché for tabletop RPGs with detailed mechanics for tactical positioning in combat to shoehorn every other condition that could befall a character into that framework, so you end up with stuff like an infected wound being modelled as a very complicated edge case of falling down. I want to see a game do it the other way 'round. I want to play a game where detailed mechanics for modelling infectious diseases are the starting point, then combat is built atop that, so getting knocked prone is modelled in the rules as a disease with a very rapid progression. I want to play a game where you can get infected with "being on fire".
call that an inflammation
Cant recall the game terminology off the top of my head but in pf2 there are really simple binary status effects and way more complicated afflictions that have onset times and multiple stages of effects and jazz so now im imagining every condition in the game as an affliction and how unhinged that would be at the table to play.
Sure youre 'offguard' but is it a mild case of stage 2 offguard or have you contracted deadly stage 3 offguard.
Fumbling your recovery roll to get up and progressing to the terminal stage of the "prone" condition.