An-Sceal

We are all the hero of our own story. ----- Reesa, An Old, She/Him/They

[an-sceal]

My Fic

All stories are on AO3, and each is carefully tagged. My style is very much character-driven angst, with a side of "Oh gawd, why am I laughing at this?" So you know, kind of like life. If I've made characters work for something, be it love, redemption, or just the idea that they deserve a future, I will provide it at some point. I don't do bleak, unless it's temporary. I am also sad to report that I'm a himbosexual, I love Daniel LaRusso and think he needs to try an edible, and I think Amanda could do better but support her in her desire to get as much karate dilf action as she wants.

Cobra Kai/Karate Kid

Standalone: A Means, A Way, A Plan - Johnny knew he was never going to get parenting right, but he thought if he could get it -less wrong-, that would be something. When he injures Robby during the fight at Cobra Kai, he begins to spiral, but it's okay- he's been there before. (aka Johnny Lawrence's long history with suicidal ideation, and how he learns to live with himself anyway.)

A Longer Table - Johnny, the LaRussos, and food, in sickness and in health. (by request, for @youandthemountains)

King of Gifts - Johnny's not a Gift Guy. (feat. Lyle, everyone's favourite Pawn Shop owner.) My Cobra Kai Secret Santa gift for @chwheeler

trouble child - The life and times of Joni Lawrence, Ace Degenerate.

Series:

In the Night We Trust (series page, ongoing)

A series of stories about consent, kink, submission, and how all those things have made Johnny the man Daniel and Amanda kind of can't help loving. Getting progressively kinkier as they go. Proud sponsor of the Johnny Lawrence Bottom Club. I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say No Three the Hard Way Form vs. Function A Banquet on Which We Feed -----

Doubt (series page, ongoing)

It turns out, Johnny did know Terry Silver. He just only ever knew him as Twig, the guy who ruined his life. An exploration of Johnny as an adult survivor of childhood sexual abuse. Doubt of the Benefit - aka, Five people who find out, and one who already knew. Shadow of a Doubt - Johnny and Ali have some beer on the beach, while realizing they have different memories of the same event. Our Doubts Are Traitors - Johnny's a survivor, but some days he can't tell anyone why. Johnny Lawrence's List of Things He's Good At - An excerpt from Johnny's therapy notebook, with additions by Daniel. The Appearance of Doubt - Get in, loser. We're going shopping. Or, Amanda helps Johnny try on different kinds of armor. Johnny Lawrence's Little Book of Dumbass Feelings (Excerpts) - Snippets from Johnny's phone and therapy notebook, set during and directly after the events in "The Appearance of Doubt".

Reasonable Doubt - Johnny Lawrence is going to make someone pay for what he went through. It'd be great if that person could be Twig, because Johnny's broke.

Dutch and Johnny Go to Home Goods (or How to Spend $100 Without Really Trying) - Get in, bitches. We're going shopping. (Again.)

Johnny Lawrence's Sex Checklist - Further excerpts from Johnny's therapy notebook.

Johnny Lawrence's Guide to Sartorial Crisis - I got nothing, Alice.  It’s like one of those things, the intrusive thought things, where it’s bouncing around my head and every so often it hits the side of my thick skull and goes, “DING! Put on a skirt, Johnny.”

Dutch and Johnny Go For Broke - Dutch is a goddamn flirt. He’s good looking, in better shape than he has any right to be, and he knows it. He never presses past anyone’s comfort zone, but he flirts with just about everyone he talks to. It’s maddening, because Johnny wants to respond but he hasn’t felt like he should. Except now he’s got permission. He’s even got a text from Amanda asking if he’s made a move yet.

[depsidase]

[an-sceal]

My worst co-irker just outed me to my extremely conservative and religious colleagues. I can’t tell if it was malicious or not.

Happy Pride! 🌈🏳️‍🌈🌈

[loreleywrites]

you solve the mystery of what to have for dinner one night and you think "hell yeah case closed forever" WRONG there is a dinner mystery the next night too

[thoughtsickles]

people in books and tv shows are always getting so upset they throw an untouched meal in the trash. that would never be me. i'd receive the worst news of my life and still be like Let me put this in the fridge.

[an-sceal]

I told my boss that I would have these reports to him "today", as long as he was willing to be very flexible on what "today" meant.

As it is 3:15am but I haven't yet gone to bed, I declare it was still officially "today" when I sent them.

[finnslay]

things you DO NOT need to be a man

a dick

he/him pronouns

XY chromosomes

things you DO need to be a man

the swiftness of a coursing river

the force of a great typhoon

the strength of a raging fire

the mysteriousness of the dark side of the moon

^this post was brought to you by LGBT^

Let's

Get down to

Business

To defeat the huns

[tpwrtrmnky]

Anyway one of the best things you can do for engaging with political discourse is to stop viewing different analytical frameworks as competing teams or a decorative element to add to your bio, and instead view them as what they are: Methods of interpreting stuff that happens in the world, some more reliable than others, some more tailored to specific situations than others.

And then also recognize that sometimes individuals deploy those frameworks badly.

Which in turn means that when you see an absolutely shit take from someone who's usually spot-on with their analysis inside their preferred framework, you can just go "oh, they're outside their domain of applicability, what a shame" and move on with your day.

[tpwrtrmnky]

A big one to avoid is taking the knowledge from a framework meant for analyzing large-scale power structures, learning about how those affect material conditions at population levels, and then starting to go "ohhhh am I being Bad At The Framework if I try to change my material conditions with individual actions" to which the answer is... no. That's just outside the scope of the framework.

[tpwrtrmnky]

That's all to say that when you see someone from any branch of feminism starting to slip into "gals, is it heteropatriarchal if we do lesbian BDSM" you can just laugh to yourself and go "haha, she's individualizing the systemic analysis" and move on instead of trying to formulate a Theory Of How Being A Good Girl For Dommy Mommy Is Actually Super Feminist to counter.

[nepharim-tree]

[galactic-catnip]

I can't find the document I need for some reason.

[mobius-m-mobius]

A lot of people have talked about Benoit Blanc’s accent. Was he always going to sound like that, was that in the original script?

[academicgangster]

[literary-sparks]

“Why don’t you use ai” idk man beyond the obvious environmental and “this machine causes psychosis and encourages people to kill themselves” thing I think asking the equivalent of a solid D student who is also a pathological liar if they can answer my question/do the work for me seems pretty fucking stupid

[directactionforhope]

Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.

So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.

If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)

And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't

[vasyan-pupkinyan]

ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.

how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?

to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.

[directactionforhope]

I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.

I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)

Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:

If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you- even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient. The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier. So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975). But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news... It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin- ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.

-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.

[directactionforhope]

Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.

Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.

Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially

Why Fire Makes Us Human

Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is

Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain. Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.

-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.

Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.

For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:

Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions. August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.

The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process. By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164. Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.

Or, less scholarly:

Fire and the Brain: How Cooking Shaped Humans | AMNH

It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.

[reasonsforhope]

Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.

Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.

By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.

By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live

[kedreeva]

Also like do go ahead and ask an archaeologist/anthropologist. Ask them about the healed broken bones they've seen that is evidence of humans caring for one another since we became human. Ask them about the hearths they've found for humans to gather around, and the cookware they've seen crafted by human hands. Ask them about the small circle of bricks in front of hearths that confounded them until someone realized it was to keep chicken chicks in the house where children could play with them. Ask them about the tools of creation they've seen. Ask them about the musical instruments, and the artwork spanning back to when we lived in caves. Ask them about the children's footsteps, their play preserved in mud. Ask them about the clothing they've seen and the hands that stitched them or wove them.

Ask them how long ago we looked at wolves and saw friends. Ask them when we first tilled the soil and planted seeds so we could grow things on purpose. Ask them how long ago we began to travel simply to explore the world around us.

Ask them why they put their hands on the earth searching for history and spend hours digging through archives and talking to other humans about the past. Archaeologists and Anthropologists are like the #1 people to love humans so much they want to know everything about all of the humans across history, and IMO the questions you ask them are a bigger reflection of the person asking them than anything else.

[aetherograph]

We are a social species. In order to cooperate enough to hunt meat, to find enough food, we have to work TOGETHER. We have to make a together.

The Thin Veneer Theory--the Christian one, the one that says humans are inherently violent--falls completely the fuck apart when you realise that we would not have survived if we were that violent. We just would not have! If you kill someone in your very small group--because we lived in very small groups at first, under 10 people--then you've lost someone's knowledge, their hands, their legs, their eyes, their HELP. Help that you are going to need! Makes no sense. Not even chimps, our most violent cousins, are this violent to one another across their species. Because it's impractical for a social animal.

But the data says otherwise as well. Humans help. From birth. Other social animals also help--not just their immediately family or their group, but even other species of animal from them. Helping is inherent to being an intelligent animal that lives in groups, it seems.

But if you don't want to believe all those experiments and data, that's fine. Believe your own DNA then. Unless you are from Subsaharan African peoples, you have more than one species of human in your DNA. This means at some point, your grandmother and grandfather found someone of a whole other species attractive. That's a fact. And we keep finding more species hidden in our DNA even now--I think the most recent one was Denisovian! I don't know HOW you could interpret THAT information as "humans are violent and hate strangers" because it wouldn't be there if two people of two different species hadn't fucked enough to make a baby that survived long enough to make another and so on down the millions of years to now. That's incredible stuff. That means MILLIONS of humans had cross-species relationships! That means our species is SO friendly that we willing to reach across species and make babies with someone else! That is an incredibly high amount of friendliness!!!

We are a motley of many species of human being. That alone should be proof enough that we are inherently so full up with the desire to Make Friends that we will do it over and over to strangers and other animals unlike ourselves. We domesticated one of our main predators. We were so friendly and kind to cats they decided to bring us their babies and we were so friendly and kind we took care of those babies and now we make images of cats and put them everywhere and share them with one another. Even animals we eat, we are kind to and even decide that some of our gods are in their image, and make rules that say "it is Forbidden to kill this animal in a way that brings it suffering, it is Forbidden by the gods to make this animal suffer while it is alive" in MANY religions.

I do not fucking know what kind fo miserable attitude makes you say that you truly believe your species--your species, which has buildings and roads, maps and schools, books and movies, holidays and parades, sports and medicine and everything ELSE that requires lots of cooperation--is inherently NOT cooperative, altruistic, friendly in nature. We wouldn't HAVE society if we weren't a species that LIKES to cooperate with others! We wouldn't have agriculture! We wouldn't have ANYTHING! It ALL required cooperation!

[56th-tin-knee]

there is no one first ape to become the first human. the first humans are the apes that gathered around a pile of sticks, lit them on fire, and cooked some fruit over that fire.

[ayagdos]

Navigating gender dysphoria? Be heard and be counted in the science.

Join our confidential, cross-country study of 18-25 year olds to tell your story, challenge preconceptions, and have YOUR experience reflected in the science on queer youth | ayagdos.org

[lavishness]

Since this has been blazed across my feed twice now, a reminder to NOT sign up for this study!

The study is being led and funded by well-known anti-trans and TERF assholes. Hence why Blaze is on and comments are off!

Happy pride to all my beautiful trans, enby, & genderqueer pals, ignore these fuckwits!!!

[emilyaxford]

Anthony Head: Buffy and Ted Lasso actor dies at 72

The 72-year-old British actor also had roles in shows including Merlin and Little Britain.

:((((((((((

[pmamtraveller]

Cats by Shou Xin

[damndorothea]

i saw this somewhere else but reply / tag what you did today so everyone can see that we all did something different today

[an-sceal]

Nothing like having the soundtrack in your head suddenly put “Twa Corbies” on repeat.