It Tolls For You

Lex iniqua lex non est. I like tattoos and tv and books. Mostly, though, I like funny pictures of adorable animals. I am unapologetically bisexual. They/them this is not optional. My icon is by rachuang.

[ufonaut]

Beyond his art, Neal Adams is rightfully remembered as an eternal champion of creators’ rights and for the part he & his work played in the Comics Code revision of ‘71 but his contribution to John Stewart’s creation is – I think –  a rather underrated aspect of his career, especially as it’s such a great reminder of the kind of person he was. Taken from an interview conducted and transcribed by Allen W. Wright over at the Green Arrow: Bold Archer fansite, here’s Neal discussing John’s beginnings (x).

[gotheyjoy]

Sons of Quellon Greyjoy at 283 AC: Balon, Euron, Victarion, Urrigon and Aeron

[batmanlovesnirvana]

this is what I’m saying and what I think a lot of ppl miss about Baelor as a character.

[enki2]

[artemisuns]

[likeaghostofshame]

[formerglory25]

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

[aesungaia]

[bakurapika]

I really like this and relate to it a lot. I can't not share it. But I also can't share it without commentary, because that is not how diagnosis is supposed to work. I'm not claiming that it isn't OP's or many others' experiences, but with providers who are being thorough, acting ethically, and are educated about mental health, that is not how mental health screening is supposed to be done.

I'm familiar with those tests. My dad invented one as his doctoral thesis and used to go to conferences to sell them. (This isn't a humblebrag for many reasons, one of which is that I doubt more than 5 practitioners in the world use it now.)

They're basically the mental health equivalent of taking your temperature. If you're trying to quickly figure out how much of the population is sick, taking everyone's temperature is a quick and cheap way to do it. If you have a patient come off the street complaining about feeling sick, the thermometer is one of the first steps toward figuring out what's going on. But not every illness presents with a fever. And the cheap thermometers that go under your arm are way less accurate than the thermometer you would use to make absolutely sure this person doesn't have a fever at all.

It's supposed to throw a yellow (or red!) flag up for your clinician: this person is feeling distressed and reports that they are anxious a lot. Might want to talk to them about anxiety!

That is nowhere near the same thing as having an in depth conversation with a specialist about whether you fit the diagnostic criteria for something in the DSM. Whether you say you're very anxious "many" days versus "most" days itself should not individually determine anything about the next step to take.

If a person fills out these screening assessments and appears to be perfectly mentally well, but says, "Doc, I am worried about my mental health," the correct reaction is not "Well, you look fine to me, bye!" It's a deep conversation full of topics like: What makes you worry about your mental health? What symptoms are you experiencing? What emotions are you feeling or actions do you take that negatively impact your state of mine, employment/hobbies, relationships with others, sense of self, ability to take care of yourself (and a bunch of other factors I'm not qualified to list)?"

The criteria for essentially any mental health diagnosis includes how much the issues that may be diagnosable affect your life. If you experience auditory hallucinations, say, but it never negatively impacts your life at all, then you don't fit the criteria for a diagnosis you might otherwise qualify for.

But something else to remember about diagnoses, and the DSM in general: they are billing codes for insurance companies.

That is literally why the DSM exists. Treatment guidance is part of the package and I don't mean to diminish that, but insurance billing is the practical reason why we have so many tiny boxes with strict rules to determine what counts as X and what counts as Y.

I'm not claiming that diagnoses in general are an insurance scam. But they're not a holy grail either. I've had diagnoses come from all the checkboxes and in depth counseling; I've had them come from saying, "hey, can I try ADHD meds and see if they help?" "Sure. Oh they helped? You have ADHD, congrats" or "I'm pretty sure I have this based on the symptoms. See, this is what I experience, and this is what the diagnosis says" "Yep, sounds like you've got it, I'll add that to your chart." (I am aware and want to emphasize that these experiences come from a place of privilege, of having a lot of mental health education, having a family who had the same, and having access to medical professionals who were, moreover, willing to listen to me.)

Just that, outside of an insurance standpoint, diagnoses are tools that clinicians and patients (and members of their support network if the patient desires) should (ideally!!) use together as a team to find out what medications/treatments/therapies/changes of daily habit have helped other people in very similar situations, what is most likely to help the patient while exposing them to the least amount of harm (with the patient making the decision at the end of the day of what level of risk of side effects they are comfortable with), and in general, what can be done to holistically improve the patient's life through the lens of mental health care.

Obviously that's not what happened to OP. And I think most if not all of us who have dealt with mental health care in the US and/or outside of it have had at least one bad experience, sometimes many, sometimes only bad experiences.

For things to get better, I think we all deserve to recognize that the system could be set up to help us. It's not a problem of the entire field of mental health being baseless or pseudoscience. It's that there is genuine, worthwhile care out there, and for some reason many of us cannot access it and are still being told otherwise.

[elli-incarnate]

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.

[azzandra]

#you're telling me han solo is a union man? (via @professorsparklepants)

Han Solo look SO MUCH like a union man.

[nightkitchentarot]

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[vmkhoneyy]

“People are inherently terrible” no!!! Have you ever seen a child wait for their friend while they tie their shoelaces? Have you ever known someone who would bring hurt squirrels and rabbits and mice to the nearest vet just so it doesn’t suffer? Have you seen someone grieve? Have you ever read something that hit your heart like a freight train? Have you looked at the stars and felt an unexplainable joy? Have you ever baked bread? Have you shared a meal with a friend? Have you not seen it? All the love? All the good? I know it’s hard to see sometimes, I know there’s pain everywhere. But look, there’s a child helping another up after a hard fall. Look, there’s someone giving their umbrella to a stranger. Look, there’s someone admiring the spring flowers. Look, there’s good, there’s good, there’s good. Look!!!!

[naamahdarling]

"We took in a kitten that was starving, injured, and shot with a pellet gun."

"Oh my god, people are awful!"

"They're not. A person rescued her, other people who are trained in helping animals treated her injuries to make her healthy again, and so so so many people contributed to pay her medical costs, I don't even know how many. That she was hurt by...what, one person? Three? Certainly not many. Is honestly maybe the least important and least meaningful part of her story."

"...Oh."

I am holding a triumph of human kindness in my lap right now and her name is Fancy.

[naamahdarling]

[great-and-small]

I’ll never forget I once had to break the news to two women that their dog had cancer, and as they cried and hugged and asked me questions I said something about how I was grateful this pup had such a loving family to support her- only for these ladies to inform me one of them wasn’t actually an owner at all, she was just the other woman’s Uber driver…

So this driver tells me she’s literally never met the other lady in her life, but when this passenger started crying in the car with her dog because she was worried, this angel in the form of an Uber driver went off the clock, came inside the building, and waited over an hour in a busy emergency room with a complete stranger just so she would have someone there by her side in a scary situation. This woman even took notes about everything I said so the owner wouldn’t have to try and remember it all later.

I see plenty of stuff at my job that makes me tempted to lose my faith in humanity but all I do is remember that Uber driver and it comes roaring back to me just like that. Humans are so unbelievably good, man.

[followthebluebell]

#weirdly it ended up being a uterine tumor (not super common) and the dog was cured with an OVH#a rare feel good story from the ER 🥹#Uber driver came for the dog’s follow up appointment as well!!!

[6qubed]

"the world is a cold and uncaring place" then warm it up. care, dammit

[the-haiku-bot]

“the world is a cold

and uncaring place” then warm

it up. care, dammit

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[jmtorres]

@naamahdarling reading about Fancy helped me recontextualize my own cat's story. I was SO MAD that her previous owner essentially abandoned her at their vacation home (left her with food, but also had doorcam video of her being chased off the property by coyotes and didn't do anything about it???) but. There's so many other people in the story. People up and down the street fed her for two months. One of them managed to catch her and take her to the local shelter. The folks at the shelter fed her and dewormed her and vaccinated her and kept her safe. This shelter is so small, it was housing I think less than a dozen cats when I visited? There's a couple old ladies for whom it's essentially their life's work, there's a vet who comes in once or twice a month, there's a handful volunteers who do things like come to play with the cats and make sure they have attention. They all made a safe haven for this incredibly friendly cat, for the most part without pay as a work of charity (there were some charges for her medical treatment but honestly I think they were at cost for the meds, and even the vet volunteered their time) until someone came to offer her a home. There's one neglectful asshole in her past and ten times as many people who did their best for her (including, in the final inning, me). I used to wonder how she could be so trusting and affectionate when her first human abandoned her but looking back at all the other humans who took care of her in the story, it doesn't feel like a mystery anymore.

Here she is sitting next to me as I write this post on my phone on the couch.

Here she is five seconds later asking for belly rubs

[qillermeme]

[krisonthefrontporchwithabeer]

Please, call me Frankenstein. Frankenstein was my father, but stealing his name and overriding his presence in the dominant cultural consciousness has been really, really satisfying

[faelo-o]

It's giving like the outfit was drawn on her like on a piece of paper I don't know how to describe it.

It has this intense 2d effect on a 3d model vibe,it's absolutely stunning

[faelo-o]

The tear streaks ohhh this fit just keeps getting better and better

[didoleonina]

My version of Baelor, mixing book and show

[ministarfruit]

I love this text post so I drew it

[forcefemdemonprincess]

I don't think I'll ever be normal about this one. Holy fuck

[smolbailey]

to be fair it's incredible, so valid

[butchscientist]

you will never catch me complaining about an actress on a tv show having an imperfectly concealed pregnancy or a character going on a sudden trip somewhere while her actress is on maternity leave. so many actresses (and women working in any other field) are fired, punished and pressured into making reproductive decisions for their employers' convenience & if i have to try a bit harder to suspend my disbelief then that's absolutely what i'm going to do if it means people are getting to exercise reproductive & bodily autonomy without punishment

[confusedlamp]

My favorite writing of this was how Star Trek DS9 handled Nana Visitor's pregnancy. It felt out of character for her character (Kira Nerys) to get pregnant and it's the semi-utopian future, so presumably birth control works quite well and abortions are easily available. Solution: another female character gets pregnant, is injured in an emergency situation, and Kira agrees to act as surrogate. They effectively wrote this entire story line well enough, with implications for the dynamics between Kira and the biological parents, that I didn't realize until later that the actress was actually pregnant. I thought it was just an interesting plot line.