Some women will never want children in their life in any meaningful capacity. They don't want to give birth. They don't want to adopt. They don't want to be the fun auntie. They don't want to be a godmother. They don't want to work in a field with children. They will never change a child's diaper and don't believe their lack of childcare skills is a problem that needs fixing, because childcare is not a crucial part of the human experience, with billions of people on the planet. They go about their day while only seeing kids out at the grocery store or at the park, and nothing is missing from their lives.
The refusal to accept this is driving a global right-wing backlash movement.
(Or, in which Elrond is, within the next thirty seconds, about to begin work on inventing a combination epipen/antitoxin/antidote barely an hour after arriving in Valinor)
Did I have OTHER THINGS to do before leaving for work today? YES! Did they fall by the wayside in favor of this premise I was playing around with suddenly taking over my brain for the space of a one-shot ficlet? ALSO YES!
(I'll probably stick this on AO3 on my lunch break) (Edit: here)
TW: deadly allergies, family reunions, valinor as a horrifying place, sort of
“I need to begin by saying,” Eärendil says, “that it is not overall a bad place to live. Valinor.” He grimaces. “At least, I must assume there are worse ones.”
Out of all the things Elrond has thought his father might say upon their reunion, upon opening the door to find Eärendil the Mariner on his doorstep, this…is not expected.
“How so?” he asks, because he cannot think of anything else to say. If his father had hugged him, he would have embraced him back. If there had been heartfelt words, he would have tried to respond in kind.
But this?
“It is safe,” Eärendil says. “You can be safe here. And there is peace. But—.” He hesitates. “It is not…meant for mortal kindreds.”
“I am aware,” Elrond says, keeping his voice as even as possible. What is Eärendil referring to? Prejudiced attitudes towards mortal heritage? Spiritual difficulties?
Eärendil shakes his head when Elrond inquires. “No—not like that. It’s—everything. You—.” He looks, suddenly, very frightened. “You haven’t eaten anything, have you? Since arriving?”
Given that Elrond has only just arrived in his wife’s home from the docks, the answer to that is no. “I have not,” he says. “…Why does that matter?”
“You have to be really, really careful,” Eärendil says, and what is in his eyes—it is veiled, because Elrond does not know him, but it is not a comfortable expression. “Your mother—she would be here today, she will feel horrible to have missed meeting you from the start—but we didn’t know. We’re usually so careful, but the latest shipment of grain—it came from somewhere else, and they don’t exactly track that because it doesn’t matter to them, but the toxins in the soil—.”
He breaks off, shaking his head. “You need to be careful,” he said again, so urgent and worried it makes Elronds heart seize. “They never need to notice. They never need to care. It isn’t toxic to them, any of it. And there’s inconsistencies—what is lethal to me, what makes me sick—it isn’t always the same as your mother, it’ll probably be different for you. It is in the food, it is in the water. There are spaces where the air is—different—too, and we cannot abide that, but they can, so they don’t even notice.”
“…Adar,” Elrond says, even though the word feels strange on its tongue, too formal and too presumptive both. “Are you saying—are you saying Naneth is dead?”
Eärendil grimaces. “She’ll be back soon,” he says, an answer that nevertheless avoids directly saying so. “It doesn’t take either of us so long, anymore. The Ainur don’t like to think about it, and we don’t want them thinking too hard about it either.”
There are so many horrifying implications in that one statement.
“Come in, please,” Elrond says. “And—we can speak further on this.” He glances around. The streets around Celebrían’s home are quiet; this strange reunion, it seems, has passed by unwitnessed.
Elrond half-suspects, already, that that is a blessing with no divine source.
“Over tea,” he finishes. “If—can we drink the tea?”
Eärendil comes in when Elrond steps aside. “Perhaps,” he says cautiously. “It does depend—on where it was grown, and on where your water comes from. I can take a look—I mostly know what works for us, and you might be…different.”
“All right,” Elrond says, starting to feel—faint. He has discovered, over the years, what is toxic to him, what his heritage does not abide, but—
Those have all been—very small reactions.
Judging by his father’s dire tones and what he has said, such things are not small matters at all, here.
“Let me try it first,” Eärendil says. “Please. You should not spend your first day here in Mandos, if we guess wrong.” He winces. “It might be so anyway, but—it’s a better chance than anything else.”
Elrond’s head hurts.
He wants to—
“Oh,” Eärendil says softly, and then there are arms around him.
“I didn’t expect—,” Elrond says blankly.
His father is holding him, and it is strange and feels awkward, but is also—good.
It is good to feel his father as strong arms and warmth and not as the distant light of the star or a distant absence in memory.
“I know,” Eärendil says. “I—it’s been so long, for us. And I am so glad to see you. I am so far beyond glad I cannot say so in words, not properly. I only hope—oh, I only hope I do not have to watch you die, today.”
There is an ache in his voice that goes beyond all hope, beyond all remedy. Elrond knows that ache, bone-deep and terrible.
It is the pain of a father who does not want to watch his child die.
It is not precisely the same as the pain that now sits uncompromising in Elrond’s heart, but he knows Eärendil must understand that one, as well.
“I hope you do not, either,” Elrond says, hoping whatever words he has come out sounding right. “That would be a tragedy for both of us.
He can feel the shuddered breath that wracks Eärendil’s body, at that. The reluctance to release Elrond.
Elrond does not want him to stop either.
But there is much to speak of. There are answers Elrond needs.
“Come, then,” he says, once Eärendil steps back and wipes the tears off his face. “We can sit and talk, and forgo the tea, for now. There are things I must learn.” A hysterical laugh wants to escape his throat; he does not let it. “It seems the peace and plenty in Valinor is not quite what I was led to believe.”
“It is peaceful, here,” Eärendil says as he follows Elrond into the sitting room. “We enjoy the peace, your mother and I. When we can. It is only—,” he hesitates, seemingly searching for the right word. “It is only…stressful. At times.”
Elrond imagines the stress is the least of it.
“Come, then,” he says, settling himself in a comfortable chair. “Tell me of it.”
i like that tumblr suggested this to me, like, you’ll love this isabelle. you’ll love these jiggling cubes. and for once, tumblr was right. i do love them.
I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating
There’s a whole paragraph that’s like “okay, find the keyboard. Don’t panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, that’s normal. Really, it’s fine. The extra keys don’t make things harder. It’s FINE”
Thought this section was particularly interesting:
Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”
But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.
You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s being creative. It’s just running.
Somebody in 1975 had a better understanding of why artificial intelligence is not in any way “intelligence” than the majority of today’s intellectual minds.
If you use Firefox, you can go to the about:config page, search for "media.mediasource.enabled" and double click on it to set it to false. After you restart Firefox, all youtube videos will load entirely even when paused! This also affects other streaming websites :)
go to About:config
find media.mediasource.enabled and toggle it to false
find media.cache_readahead_limit and change it to 9999
find media.cache_resume_threshold and change it to 9999
additionally if you'd prefer mp4 to webm
also in about:config, find:
media.encoder.webm.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.audio.enabled
media.mediasource.webm.enabled
media.webm.enabled
and toggle them all to false
note!
this will limit video to 1080p
and use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dont-accept-webp/ to kill WebP
Fuck Google
I hate that the "x reader" or "x Y/N" style of fanfic has become sooooo popular, partially because it's just not for me and partially because they clog general non-fic related tags and those authors seem allergic to the "read more" function on this website, but ALSO because I believe that you should have to go through the trouble of creating an absolutely batshit self-insert character, with a backstory that makes no sense and a name that doesn't really gel with the aesthetics of the universe. Legolas and Aragorn should be in a love triangle with Kylie, the angsty sixteen year old half-human half-elf and inexplicable tenth member of the Fellowship. Do the WORK. If everyone was doing "Y/N" nonsense back in the day, there would be no Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way, or probably Bella Swan. These are important women. They deserve to be named, confusingly and with no regard for the fictional world they inhabit.
does anyone have that reddit exchange screenshot where someone is like "what colour is this mouse??" and posts a mouse who is like in some sort of purple world with confetti around it and the top comment is like "it would be easier to tell if your mouse wasn't at the club" . i keep thinking about & referencing mouse at the club and i cant find it
[Image description: a 2025 tweet from @ waitingtobloom reading, "when I was little I thought you were supposed to consciously select what boy to have a crush on". End id]
contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid
#i would describe my gender as not exactly ‘idk dude i just work here’ #more like…..when someone assumes you work somewhere that you don’t #but you know how to help them so you do it anyway #my gender is wearing a red shirt at a target
A portion of people in the notes are like ‘but that makes you trans. That’s called being agender’ and another portion of people are going ‘this is how the majority of cis ppl feel and it’s NOT agender’ and personally I feel like both of them are missing the point here. Yes a lot of people identify as agender because of this feeling. Yes a lot of people with this same feeling still identify as cis. These are not mutually exclusive experiences and it doesn’t mean the agender people are secretly cis or the cis people are secretly agender. It just means they have very similar experiences of gender that they choose to conceptualize and label differently, and neither of them are mistaken or wrong to do so.
At Toba aquarium in Japan, after closing time, some clever little otter pups help their grandpa tidy up their toys. As a reward, he gives them ice cubes
