The City Below

Hello! I'm Betsy aka Adanska. I'm a writer on occassion; an easily searchable database of my stuff is at fe_masterlist, which also contains the stories for Fe, my main original universe (the right colomn has more tag options). I also am on AO3 as, you guessed it, Adanska, which may do you better fic-wise (although I usually take forever to update it whoops). Right now I'm pretty much in the middle of Star Wars hell, so now my blog is a third Star Wars, social issues, and ladies, some of whom are warriors. For the record, I am white and cis, so if I misstep, please, let me know! My previous user icon came from a loose sketch by the amazingly talented Nonvieta; at long last I have switched it out for the one I use everywhere else.

[adanska]

how and why did a fucking terf blog reblog a pandaredd skit i reblogged from me?!

guess it's been awhile since ive said it not in the tags BUT: if you are a TERF i do not like you, i do not respect you, and you can fuck all the way off. i stand with my trans siblings and you are all unilaterally miserable fucks. buh-bye.

[kateammann]

Happy Pride Month to all of my fellow aces!! 🖤🩶🤍💜

[polybatcest]

its so scary when i see art of a robin with full-length pants and i think oh nice tim art and then i see the tags and realize it's dick....... why would you put those on him........... take them off.............. he needs his legs free you sick fuck yuore hurting him..............

[nibblewinger]

I dunno if this’ll be coherent but I think a big thing I like about dg is that he just isn’t fundamentally about that. Like, you can imagine up so many things about him, so many interpretations, like having a very weird relationship with Bruce or getting really into the idea of penance when he’s feeling guilty or the possibility that his perfectionism may have come from his upbringing as a death-defying child performer with John and Mary Grayson and not just Bruce, so many interesting ideas, but none of it is his big thing. None of them feel like a main conflict he needs to overcome, his fatal flaw, his one bad day. They just feel like potentially maladaptive quirks that are fun to pick out and examine, shit he has to live with as he pays his attention to other more pressing things.

An obvious point of comparison would probably be Jason with how all-consuming his tragic backstory is, but honestly, I might feel this way about Dick because of how my mind perceives him and Tim in the mid to late 2000s, specifically with how writers kinda swept Devin Grayson’s run under the rug after editorial fucked with it.

for Tim, the long line of deaths in his life and his less than stellar reactions to them IS the focus. It’s what’s directly being explored, what many of his most well known stories in that era were about, not all but many. It underpins his stories even when he’s not addressing it. It honestly became a fixture for him all the way up until the reboot. Red Robin was heavily reliant on that basis of bad reactions to grief.

That’s not a bad thing of course, I love me some good whump, but it definitely makes for an interesting comparison to Dick experiencing all the trauma of Devin Grayson’s run only to have that abruptly end on the absolute worst thing that could possibly have happen that then goes unsubtly untouched by future writers. His angst and woes didn’t become a mainstay in the same way Tim’s did. But it happened in a way that kinda characterizes him as a guy who picks himself back up and moves on. Not moves up on a path of recovery and healing, just moves on. Gets over it. Without the closure or even acknowledgment that Tim’s struggles with grief gets, Dick’s wounds just fade into the background, not healed, just there.

And that’s kinda how I feel about my boy dg. I feel like a lot of his biggest neuroses are NOT the main focus, and that’s really fun to me. They’re in the background, festering, unaddressed or left for him to just deal with because they are not maladaptive enough to completely ruin his life or warrant intervention, but are dysfunctional enough to drum up some really juicy drama.

[nibblewinger]

I think this extends to his Robin days as well. By virtue of time passing and reading sensibilities changing, a lot of material from when he was Robin may feel outdated, and the amount of content that fits tonally with modern DC is minimal because it’s constrained to flashbacks and mini stories. Thus, it does really feel like a lot of it is up to interpretation, with much more room to explore more out there ideas and characterizations compared to the constraints of heavy canonical explorations in modern day, while also being completely restricted by the fact that Dick looks back on his time as Robin fondly. So no matter how good or bad you want his Robin days to be, the truth of the matter is that anything bad will already be somewhat pushed to the background in order to keep in line with how Dick feels about it now. And I think that honestly gives it a lot of flavor, it’s a lot of fun. It feels like making up skeletons in the closet, except Dick is greeting them casually with an inattentive shoulder pat as he digs for his pants.

maybe all of this is a point of how Dick feels like he’s stuck in a status quo. Tim, I think, was very unconstrained by the status quo in the latter half of the 2000s, so he’s given allowance to really center grief in his narrative, even making a whole new identity out of it. It felt like a huge transitionary period. Dick, on the other hand, feels like he has a status quo firmly established (Nightwinging solo in a city). Departures away will always end up right back here where he started, he can’t escape it. As a result, things that should have lasting impacts and huge ramifications just…don’t. And there is so much fun in pretending that they did, Dick just learned to live with it. His closet’s big enough.

[kannoponta]

[lestatfag]

STAY SAFE!! [ID: the Gilbert Baker pride flag with the words “Happy pride to all those who are unable to celebrate openly and safely. You are loved and seen!” in all-caps black text over it. /end ID]

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

oh wait just realized i can edit my own posts.

like you can't edit reblogs anymore but you can still edit your own post even after it has a thousand notes or whatever.

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

i have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

[validblogname]

one fight at a time

[lizardlicks]

Black Hills drilling project canceled after backlash from tribes

A South Dakota mining company has canceled a drilling project in the Black Hills after opposition from Native American tribes and local grou

[gonzocoded]

nobody will ever get me the way john singer sargent does

[gonzocoded]

like. are you kidding me

[isbergillustration]

Prideful Awooing

[rocketsaurus]

Curious what is actually normal for bed time. Go for your normal/average time, not your most extreme or what you wish it was.

what time do you go to bed? (local time)

7pm or before

8pm

9pm

10pm

11pm

12am

1am

2am or after

it's never consistent

some other time entirely

Remaining time: 4 days 23 hours

I just don't know what grownups do for bedtime and I want to know!!!

[lleyksie]

brown bear, black bear

[inkskinned]

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

[inkskinned]

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.

[reckless-glitch]

[ramblingandpie]

[Video description: Gritty is turning the crank on a flagpole to raise the Progress Pride Flag. He gesticulates angrily that the flag is not blowing in the wind, then gestures offscreen. The flag begins blowing. As Gritty begins raising the flag more, the camera pans out to show a man in a suit and sunglasses, looking like a stern Secret Service agent, is holding a leafblower that points at the flag. End description.]

[noshamehustle]

[formerglory25]

reblog if you too are bi and confused or support others’ right to be bi and confused

[mytearsrricochet]

[reggiemess]

Cannot stand the trend of censoring any and all words that describe concepts that might make you go :( especially when the censoring is done in that quarter-assed way that's just 'did a lil scribble over a vowel so you know that I know this word describes a no-no."

I'm not even going to be vague about what sparked this. Do not fucking censor the word 'stole.' I'm at my fucking limit.

[reggiemess]

Who does this benefit. Who is made safer by this. Whose life is made better by this. Who is out there going "Wow I sure am glad I didn't have to see that word without it scribbled on a little. That really reduced the emotional impact of reading that word." Can I kill them?