The real joy of fanfiction is getting to read several versions of the exact same, oddly specific plot written by different people and seeing the small ways things differ and falling in love with every one.
I'd like to remind everybody that this isn't just about A03 or civil rights organizations. This could be applied to any 501 organization. That includes churches, schools, museums and library support organizations. All sorts of support organizations like soup kitchens or places like goodwill. Those are all non-profit organizations and they all have a 501 status. This is a threat to every civil organization we have that is meant to help the public.
So please contact your representatives. Please look this up on Twitter and click the link so you can call your representatives and voice against this. Because there's a hell of a lot more at stake with a bill like this than just ao3. People's lives could be at risk.
The House will vote THIS WEEK to determine whether the incoming Trump administration will have the power to shut down non-profit organizations with no due process.
Congress has already tried to fast-track this legislation once and failed because of the onslaught of calls to their offices. We can’t let them do this quietly. Congress giving Trump the power to crush dissent and target organizations fighting for justice is a betrayal. Tell your representatives to vote NO on this dangerous bill!
This means that it's heading over to the Senate, where they'll tinker with it and vote again.
If it passes the Senate, it goes to the President, who has the option to veto.
Which means NOW you reach out to your Senators (both of them) and tell them that you want them to vote NO on this Trojan horse of awful.
But: we have two more chances to keep this from becoming law. The fight's not over yet.
And that's not even the good news!
For various reasons of political fuckery/ rules lawyering, this bill had to go through TWO rounds of votes in Congress to get through.
It didn't pass the first time because it had a higher threshold of votes to meet (2/3 Congress Critters had to vote yes) and it failed because it couldn't clear that bar.
So the people behind the bill sent it through AGAIN in a way that needed fewer votes to pass (only 1/2 of Congress Critters had to vote yes). This time it got through.
But along the way, almost 40 people changed their vote to "No". ALL BECAUSE OF YOUR OUTREACH.
That's huge.
Here's the home page for the bill. Check out the "Roll Call Votes" section to see how your Representative voted:
Summary of H.R.9495 - 118th Congress (2023-2024): Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act
Personally? Mine flipped her vote from "Yes" in the first round to "No" in the second.
Outreach. Works.
So, what do we do now?
Click the link above, and see how your Rep voted
Send them an email thanking them for their support/ telling them how disappointed you are. Why? Because it's important to let them know you pay attention to how they vote.
Contact your Senators (both of them) and ask them to vote NO
Contact the White House and let President Biden know you want him to veto this thing if it hits his desk
Resources
Not sure who your Representative or Senators are? Click here and type in your address:
Find your members of Congress by typing in your address on Congress.gov.
Not sure how to contact your US Representative, Senators, or the White House?
I personally use Resistbot. It's free, fast, and easy:
Text RESIST to 50409 to contact your federal, state, or local elected officials; create movements; and more. Over 30,000,000 letters deliver
forever obsessed with artemis fowl who, upon realizing that he needs a fuckton of money in order to keep searching for his missing and probably dead father, doesn’t reach for his impeccable hacking skills or his ability to flawlessly recreate artistic masterpieces in order to commit art theft but instead runs the most absolutely insane and convoluted plan that’s ever been constructed (rivaled only by the insane and convoluted plans he constructs when he’s older and aided by time and practice). based solely, by the way, off of what basically amounts to the fairy bible which is written entirely in verse AND in a language that no human being has ever been permitted to see let alone translate. and the plan WORKS
Hey do you think Clara’s body being canonically frozen between one heartbeat and her last is an annoyance to her anatomically? Do you think her hands and feet are always painfully cold? Because she knew she was going to die and she faced the thing that was going to kill her as it approached. The moment between those two heartbeats her body would have been absolutely flooded with adrenaline- she would have been having the most intense fight or flight response in the world and she was frozen there. Do you think people comment that she unusually pale? Or do you think very bright light is painful for her because her pupils are permanently dilated?
The natural follow on to this is how do you think she copes with this? Cause like gloves wouldn’t work if she’s just not producing heat so do you think she’s a bit like a lizard and it’s not uncommon to find her warming her hands on the nearest hot object? Do you think she wears loads of bronzer to look more normal or just toughs it out? And the most important thing of all her solution to the eyes thing would 100% be sonic sunglasses bby
As an extension of this- read this post that I think of roughly once and week and then come back
Because thier relationship is basically the same as Clara and the Doctor's except now both parties can't age or die, so I'd say it's almost
It would all be fine to start with, all clattering down corridors in ankle boots and following a swish of brunette hair as it disappeared around a corner. Clara wears sunglasses a lot, and self warming gloves and socks, she always has a compact of bronzer in her bag to make her seem more… healthy. She listens to music a lot because it’s the only time she can’t hear the absence of her heart.
Clara doesn’t need to sleep but Ashildr does and Clara absolutely refuses to call her ‘Me’. At first she’s like a vampire, she spends her nights reading books, learning languages, playing music. There’s not a hobby safe from her. At first she likes it, she spends her days with Ashildr visiting different parts of time and space and having adventures, but this time it’s *her* in charge. It’s amazing; it’s every worst part of her enabled to the fullest extent. When Ashildr goes to bed, Clara retreats into the bowels of her TARDIS and sinks into her hobbies and her own company. Sometimes Ashildr comes and sits with her companionably, writing in her diaries. Clara gently discourages this practice- she doesn’t think it’s healthy to live in the past.
But it slowly starts to twist. Ashildr killed Clara and she will never forget. She starts to sit at night in Ashildr’s old fashioned sitting room with the roaring fire that she cannot look at without the unbearable brightness causing her a headache, warming her hands until the dull ache fades and then even until the skin starts to turn red and sting all over again. She starts to turn darker in those long, painful nights and slowly the answer to so many adventures becomes death in slowly more deranged and painful ways. Eventually Ashildr forgets a life without Clara, she stopped writing the diaries eventually so she doesn’t even have something to look back on. Eventually she forgets that she was the person who killed Clara. She forgets Clara killed her. Clara doesn’t. It’s only then that Clara gives into the romantic undertones of their partnership and they become each other’s entire world.
They become deranged together, but Clara is worse. Ashildr can forget, her mind is protected my it’s own shortcomings, but Clara remembers it all. Human minds aren’t supposed to hold all that Clara is holding, and the way she twists would make us thankful for Donna’s fate. After millennia of travelling, keeping out of the doctor’s way as best they can, Ashildr leaves her. Very specifically Ashildr leaves Clara because enough of her humanity remains to allow her to escape the event horizon that is Clara Oswald. It’s gets worse then, she finally becomes her true form, a dark force, creeping through the universe like a malevolent cloud. She knows Missy will be looking so she hides, and she hides *well*. It’s takes hundreds of years for Missy to eventually catch up with her (when Clara decides she’s bored and reveals herself) and oh she is proud. Her monster come to life. Seeing Clara’s fatal flaw do something worse than kill her. The act of her running from Gallifrey drained her of all the humanity that made her think she should go back in the first place and Missy gazes upon her with the same wonder as a dying star. What a delicious treat; she cannot wait to tell the doctor this.
@armageddon-generation biiiiiig fan of your post (clearly)
I just reada really good fic but halfway through I realized "oh shit this is really familiar.... didn't I write something like this once?" And as I kept reading I kept predicting what happened next and the further I went the more convinced I was that they'd ripped off my story-
like, copied the ENTIRE plot and re-written it, just better than I had? The characters were more fleshed-out than mine were, and the POV was more interesting, and the pace made more sense- but it was MY STORY?
So close to the end I was like "holy shit.. do I message them? Ask if my story inspired theirs? Should I be angry? Flattered?" Cause their tags and description didn't mention me AT ALL, which, sure, it's fanfiction to begin with, but if you're using my work than at least credit me as inspo, right? Just to be courteous?
But I get to the end of the final chapter, and it's not finished, and I'm kind of disappointed cause I never finished my story and I was really immersed in their version now and had been looking forwards to seeing how they tied up my loose ends- so I scroll to the bottom to leave a comment, and.
It's MY URL.
IT WAS MY STORY THE WHOLE TIME.
THE ONE *I WROTE*.
In *2013*.
And FORGOT ABOUT
BECAUSE I WAS SO INSECURE ABOUT MY SLOPPY, SHALLOW, AMETEUR WRITING
And I'm just sitting here now staring into space thinking about every shitty story I've ever written now like
The perfect prosthetic is a super common trope surrounding amputees and people with limb differences who use a prosthetic limb, so let's talk about it!
This is a kind of extended version of the written post from yesterday with mostly the same stuff, plus additional examples, "red flags" that this trope is showing up in your work to watch out for and some additional detail that got cut from the written version.
Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.
The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.
Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.
A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"
@witchofanguish it is also used in poetry and plays, ghosts talk like that. Imagine being in a folk story, staying overnight in an abandoned cabin and in the middle of the night there's a knock on the door and a bellowing voice going
LET ME IN.
and from the "me" alone you know that whoever is out there is not one among the living.
my strongest doctor who opinion from which all my others flow is that the show is fundamentally at its best when the doctor is neither straightforwardly heroic nor admirable. the doctor should be a self-absorbed douchebag loser in a shitty car backpacking through the universe like a european student but somehow more chauvinistic. and then when they are heroic it should be because simply at their heart they are 1. a chronically nosy meddler who can't leave well enough alone and 2. and this is the important part, a fundamentally decent person despite all their flaws who will always try their best to help.
Folks have got to understand that they probably aren't messed up by some Secret Big Trauma that they just can't remember; but rather by a million tiny microtraumas that they do mostly remember but don't even register as traumatic because nobody actually understood that these things would cause trauma, much less stack on each other over the years.
This is why psychologists have started taking more of an interest in CPTSD in the last 10-15 years. What most people know as PTSD is a response to a single, intensely traumatic event (or even a series of events). However, CPTSD (chronic post-traumatic stress disorder) is caused by living for years in a situation where your nervous system cannot catch a break. Even if nothing huge ever happened to you, you always had to be on guard for a thousand little things that could and did happen.
After years and years of this, your nervous system gets "stuck" in an activated threat response. It never really lets you rest, and if this started when you were a kid, you may not develop a lot of neural pathways that you should have, because your brain was too focused on keeping you safe to bother with little things like "genuine human connection" and "interpersonal attachment."
If you are disabled, if you are queer, if you are chronically ill, if you are the survivor of a toxic but not abusive relationship, if you grew up or lived under the threat of harm but no "actual" harm (or "very little" harm) was done, you may have CPTSD that isn't getting caught because CPTSD looks different from PTSD.
At the risk of falling into a trivialization trap, a lot of things you may not perceive as traumatic actually are. I was embarrassed for a long time in both group and individual therapy to say anything in my childhood was traumatic, because I was sitting with people who had suffered horrible physical or sexual abuse. But here are some things that are, in fact, traumatic and - when they occur over a long period - can set you on a course of maladaptive coping for decades if not addressed:
Being told or shown that your emotions are not valid, that you have no safe place to express them
Parents or caregivers oversharing graphic trauma from their past with you
Threats of physical violence, even if not carried out
Being told or shown that affection or approval is contingent on competency or academic success
Prejudice from inside OR outside the family (homophobia, racism, body shame)
Mocking or dismissal of things that are meaningful to you
If you constantly feel unworthy, afraid, ashamed, or even flat and emotionless, it's worth exploring why. And, because you've been so consistently undermined and minimized, you may feel like a fraud for being upset or functioning poorly. You're not a fraud; it's years of conditioning telling you "I should be able to handle this" or "lots of people are worse off than I am so I shouldn't complain." Your conditioned brain is lying to you; you won't be able to open yourself to the joy of trusting relationships with others OR do meaningful things to help those who are worse off until you do the work to melt the block of ice surrounding you. All my love to you, friends.
izzy806
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