I'm not small

I just live in a big world She/Her pronouns

[unpretty]

“villain attempts to go back in time to kill superman as a small child, gets shot in the face by ma kent, who buries him behind the barn with the others” would probably have niche appeal as a comic but i don’t care, i want it

[unpretty]

The first time a man from the future showed up at Martha Kent’s house, Clark Kent was two years old.

According to his birth certificate, anyway. She just kind of accepted that the details were a little fudged. Relativity, and all.

Maybe the stranger would have succeeded in whatever it was he wanted to do, except that he really did just show up. Appeared, like a ghost made flesh, right in the backyard. Clark, thank goodness, was out in the fields with Jonathan. He couldn’t bear to be alone, that boy, and they could never bear to leave him.

Which left Martha free to shoot the ghostly intruder in the face.

Martha had not always considered herself a shoot first, ask questions later sort of a person. But that was before she found a baby in a spaceship where her corn was supposed to be.

They’d switch off, Jonathan and her, who got Clark and who got the shotgun. Martha got the shotgun more often than not. Guns made her husband uncomfortable. She was hardly a fan, but she’d always been a terrible pacifist. Too determined to defend herself.

The sight of all that blood and brain and bone was still nauseating. She compartmentalized, told herself it was no different from slaughtering a cow; didn’t think about riot gear or tear gas or the friends she’d lost or all the things she’d moved away from when her heart couldn’t take it any longer. This was different. This was her son.

She prodded the corpse with her foot. It remained a corpse. A real nasty looking corpse, all big and burly and holding a gun much too large. She didn’t like making assumptions based on appearances, but she didn’t imagine he’d been coming for anything nice. She bent down to search his pockets, found a metal wallet and flipped it open.

Born 2018.

Well, hell. Wasn’t that just a kick in the pants?

Probably she ought to have been a bit more unsettled than she was. But she’d been waiting two years for someone to show up on her doorstep, men in black or UFOs or something. Hell, she’d half expected her sweet little boy to hatch into something worse.

Just because she brought home space babies didn’t mean she was a damn fool.

Jonathan had rejoined her in long strides, was holding Clark in such a way that he couldn’t see the corpse on the ground. “Well, shit,” he said.

“Eyup,” Martha agreed.

“Don’t look government.”

“Nope.”

“We burying him?”

“I’ll bury him,” Martha said, standing up. “You get Clark inside and read him a book or something. I don’t want him seeing any of this, getting him messed up in the head.”

“You sure? Looks heavy.”

“That’s why we have a wheelbarrow. I’ll stick him out behind the barn, might as well keep all our secrets in one place.”

Martha had a long time to think as she dug a time traveler’s grave. There were a lot of reasons someone might travel back in time trying to kill her kid. The first was her instinct as a mother, which was: he was a fucking asshole. Who killed a kid? Fucking assholes, that was who.

Now, it was also possible that her sweet little boy grew up to be some kind of space Hitler. She didn’t think she’d raise that kind of a kid, but she didn’t suppose there was any parent who set out to raise a Hitler.

Still didn’t sit right with her. She didn’t much like the idea of killing baby Hitler, either.

Keep reading

[unpretty]

The BookCon panel For Fans, By Fans: Fanfiction Addiction can best be summed up by the moment when Riot Baby author Tochi Onyebuchi mentioned a Superman fanfic about Martha Kent shooting every time traveler who tries to kill baby Clark—and then an audience member piped up with the name of the fic, and suddenly all the attendees were distracted bookmarking Empty Graves by Unpretty to read after they were finished gushing about fanfiction.

source: Geeking Out About Fanfiction with Tor.com Publishing Authors at BookCon by Natalie Zutter at Tor.com

[phantomchick]

[aqueerkettleofish]

Okay, anyone who thinks that the snippet above prepares you for the incredibly coherent and well written ride that follows is mistaken and needs to go ahead and click “Read More.” Because Great Rao, this was amazing. AMAZING.

[cantanopeshitthatwastaken]

It’s interesting how diseases rip through schools at incredible speeds despite being in an arguably modern, clean(ish) environment. I wonder if it has something to do with the whole “you need a doctor’s note to excuse your absence of even one day” combined with the average price of going to a doctor, the lack of education on things like “you’re still contagious even after the fever goes away”, and the overwhelming message of “if you don’t struggle through it, you’re a failure!”

[thatgiraffebutt]

On my campus there tends to be a problem where even I you have the doctors note professors will still take points off of your final grade regardless of how sick you are. I’ve seen people show up to class with the stomach flu, pneumonia, respiratory infections and all sorts of other contagious ailments.

[literallyaflame]

Here’s a fun story:

The school system I grew up in put an absolutely ungodly amount of pressure on kids to Show Up Every Day No Matter What. Many schools are like this, but looking back, my town’s was borderline fucking dystopian. They asked me why I didn’t just “postpone” a surgery at one point— when I was fifteen— to give you an idea of how monumentally obtuse these people were.

So, in elementary school, I started having chicken pox symptoms, right? They were mild because I was vaccinated (yay!) but my mom recognized them quickly and took me to the doctor, because my mom is a reasonable human being with standards. The doctor said “yup, you’ve got those pox, it may seem mild but please for the love of god DO NOT take her to school, she is very contagious even though she may FEEL okay.”

So I had to stay home from school until I got clearance from my doctor to go back. I was an angry little gremlin the whole time, because I wanted to go to the school library and read books about the human skull, but my mother said, “no, you cannot leave this house, and do not scratch the bumps please.” So I sat at home and tried not to scratch the bumps, like a good little gremlin.

A few days into my Chicken Pox Related House Arrest, we got a letter from the school. I was far from the only person with chicken pox, as it so happened. Like… a tenth of my second grade class had Confirmed Pox. We all fell ill within DAYS of each other.

So how did this happen, you ask? Well, a kid had chicken pox, and he came to school anyway. “Ah, well perhaps they didn’t know,” you may very well say. “Maybe his parents didn’t notice!” No. No, they noticed. In fact they KNEW it was CHICKEN POX. They sent him to school anyway.

The kid’s parents…….. were, in fact, teachers at the school. And they KNOWINGLY made him go to school sick, because they didn’t want to risk hurting his precious “perfect attendance” record. They figured that since he wasn’t, like, Literally Dying, it was better for him not to miss school. Never mind the fact that they were actively endangering hundreds of little kids.

Fast forward to my freshman year of college. A kid came to class with mumps because he ‘couldn’t afford to miss’. Guess what happened? Mumps outbreak! Diseases are, as it turns out, good at being diseases! Vaccinations are phenomenal, but they can only do so much, and some people rely on herd immunity to not be killed by preventable illness.

This entire attitude needs to die. It’s dangerous. Food service workers are forced to show up sick, little kids are forced to show up sick, college students show up sick because they’re afraid of flunking out.

And on top of it all, misinformation campaigns are encouraging people not to get vaccinations! It’s 2019 and we’re flirting with the plague! Next thing you know some blogger is gonna be like “actually we should all be fucking rats and eating our meat raw, death to all science and god bless america”

[madd-catter]

Many kids at my school will show up really sick because we only get like three days of excused absences without a doctor’s note.

[gen-is-gone]

this is what those in literary academia call “foreshadowing”

(note the dates)

[anarchistmemedistro]

this post aged like an ice cube in an oven

[deathcomes4u]

worst part is! IT’S STILL HAPPENING! SCHOOLS AND WORKPLACES ARE STILL LIKE THIS!!! THEY LEARNED NOTHING!!!!!!!

[mod2amaryllis]

[thotsoflore]

Literally looking like the kind of note you find in a post apocalyptic horror game jesus

[sunnywalnut]

If only we as a society learned from our mistakes

[i-am-a-fish]

uncle iroh would be proud of you I think

[rillabug]

For the void, I suppose

I grew up in the Bible Belt, raised by a conservative Christian family. I didn’t know that liking girls was something I could do, and by the time I learned about being gay, I was convinced it was wrong. I was in love with Nico di Angelo from the Percy Jackson series and said he was “confused” after he came out in the House of Hades. Not proud of a lot of the homophobia I displayed because I didn’t know better.

I met someone made of sunshine and rainbows and Van Gogh’s Starry Night in 2015, and she kept me alive just by being genuinely kind and friendly to me in a way the kids I had gone to church with my entire life hadn’t ever been. She was like meeting a long lost friend from the moment I met her. She was creative and weird and full of so much love. She had dreams of being a nurse one day. Shortly after I met her, gay marriage was legalized in the US. She posted a picture of a cross surrounded by blooming rainbows — it was the only positive imagery I’d seen from someone I went to church with about this historic event. She later told me that she was bisexual, and had dated both men and women. This was groundbreaking for me, because I didn’t know you could be a Christian and still be gay.

I would roll the word around on my tongue and whisper it to myself in the darkness and solitude of my room. Bisexual. I would practice saying it out loud whenever I took the trash out at night, and then I finally said “I’m bisexual” to the driveway one night. I didn’t come out as bi until I got to college. By then, she was gone.

I never got to come out to my sunshine girl. I never got to tell her that she is the reason I’m still here. I never got to tell her she inspired me to keep going and love in spite of everything. I never got to apologize to her for being too scared to go after her. I never got to tell her I got married to someone that I think she would have loved. I never told her that I think she was my first love, and now I have to spend the rest of my life remembering her with a bittersweet smile. I hope she knows, somewhere, that I think about her painting the sky every time the sunset is especially beautiful.

It was such a privilege to know you, love you, and be forever changed by you, Shell. Obergefell is 10 years old, and I wish you were here to see it.

[rythyme]

done with the "came back wrong" trope. what about came back American

[rythyme]

THIS POST IS NOW ABOUT THE POPE

[lyre-of-light]

Reading the excerpt of Sunrise on the Reaping and my mind honed in on Haymitch’s shorts, and just how much is said by that one little sentence. He mentions that they're made of an old bag of flour, and stamped on them are the words " Courtesy of the Capital".

This was a real thing, during the great depression era mother's used old sacks of flour, sugar and other things to make clothing for their children. Companies realized this and many began making their sacks with nice patterns. They tried to give these children a sense of normalcy, and a way to not shout that their families couldn't afford to get them actual clothes.

The Capitol doesn't do that. Instead they stamp them with their label. A reminder to the Districts that everything they have is only because the Capitol gives it to them. Their very lives are Courtesy of the Capitol. One sentence and Suzanne Collins has made a subtle statement about how the Capitol looks at the District children and does not care a lick about them.

[actuallyromantiic]

suzanne collins coming back to make her point even more this time around bc people are still too ignorant to get it god i would die for this woman

[seraisntsmart]

the thing i keep thinking about is how katniss, despite knowing the capitol is evil and despite seeing how they edited her games to tell a story, didn’t question haymitch’s much at all really when watching them. really drilling in the message that no one is immune to propaganda.

[effieotto]

Suzanne C. really saw all those anti-Effie dummies trying that hard to create the narrative where she was a bad person —selfish, indifferent, who doesn’t care about anyone but herself— and not just a regular capitol citizen who were drowned in propaganda since she’s born. And said fine, if you all won’t get the point by yourselves, i’ll have to spell it out. In a totalitarian regime you can’t hold everyone’s responsible for the system they were born into. Ignorance is a real weapon for submission. Take away the right of someone to developed critical thinking and you’ll dominate them completely. Make them trust you to keep them safe and you’ll have their eternal loyalty. And when someone has your mind and body in their hands, there is nothing you can do but to believe on them. There is nothing you can do but go down on your knees and show them all of your gratitude for the privilege of peace and protection

[everdeensmellark]

sunrise on the reaping raises an incredibly important ethical question: how many generations does it take to erase history, to the point of blind, unquestioning acceptance?

i fear the answer is far fewer than any of us are comfortable with.

[rillabug]

Fuck you, let me be happy about this:

I am 25 and I have grey hairs. I have at least one that’s about 3 inches long. I didn’t expect to live this long and I am not afraid of my greys. It’s like a little bit of tinsel I get as a prize for outliving my bullshit.

[xbox-nun]

When he’s a 19 year old fascist and you’re a 24 year old democratically elected politician but he has a tiny braid so you’re helpless to his charming pear floating powers

[wumblr]

star wars is unrealistic because in real life, grimes became a fascist too

[thepleasuregoblin]

“democratically elected politician” she’s a princess

[thepleasuregoblin]

Just been informed that “Queen” is an elected position on Naboo and I hate star wars

[thosemotivationalquotes]

I saw something in the news today that truly took my breath away. If you have been paying attention to U.S. politics over the past few days, you’ve most likely seen this woman:

This is Bishop Mariann Budde, and on Monday (Trump’s inauguration) she led an interfaith prayer for Trump and the incoming administration. During the service she asked him to have mercy for LGBTQ+ Americans and undocumented immigrants. This was badly received by the Trump administration (as expected).

After seeing headlines about this woman, I read something that I wanted to share. In 1998 a man named Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay. I’m not going to get into the details of his death on this post, but please be warned it is extremely triggering if you do choose to read more on your own. Matthew Shepard’s death caused a lot of change in the U.S. regarding how LGBTQ hate crimes are handled, and laws that were passed to protect LGBTQ+ people.

Now you’re probably wondering what Matthew Shepard has to do with an Episcopal bishop. For years after Matthew Shepard’s murder, his family had held onto his remains, too scared to lay him to rest in fear of his final resting place being vandalized. In 2018, Budde had his remains interred at the National Cathedral, which is also the place where the interfaith prayer for Trump and his administration took place. The impact of this really had an effect on me. Budde could have led a non confrontational prayer service, and chosen not to mention the harm that will come to the people Trump and his administration are going after. Instead she chose to call out hate and fear in front of some of the most powerful people on the planet, and at a place that has such a large historic meaning to the LGBTQ community.

In the next few years there will be many challenges in protecting free speech, standing up against hate, and protecting those in our communities. But I would like to believe that for every Donald Trump and Elon Musk, there are people like Marianne Budde. There are those of us who can’t speak up for themselves, so it’s important for those of us who can to amplify our voices, even if it’s not the ‘popular’ thing to do.

“And he said you should apologize. Will you apologize?

I am not going to apologize for asking for mercy for others.” - Mariann Budde’s response in a Time interview

Link to articles: x x x

Link to the Matthew Shepard Foundation if you would like to donate

[b0nkcreat]

do you think it'll all be okay?

yeah. even if it won’t i’ve got people to love in the meantime

[miradelletarot-archived]

Oh shit. That's fuckin deep. 🥺💜

[infectiouspiss]

you have to stay alive. you're going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.

[gallusrostromegalus]

To add to this as a middle aged freak: being a middle aged freak is AWESOME. I cannot overstate how much fun it is to go out visibly freakish, have enough life experience to not worry about it, and get heaps of compliments from everyone but ESPECIALLY the other freaks.

You're going to make it and it will be GREAT.

[mycatisadolfkitler-deactivated2]

I always see the dog choking info on here, so here’s what to do if a kitty is choking

Save your kitties, we all know they eat everything anyway. 

http://www.wikihow.com/Save-a-Choking-Cat

http://www.wikihow.com/Perform-CPR-on-a-Cat

[earthmindheartsky]

Q

[coldalbion]

important

[breelandwalker]

REBLOG TO SAVE THE KITTIES!

[girlwithbird-blog]

IMPORTANT FOR KITTY OWNERS

[hazel-k-proserpine]

THIS IS SO IMPORTANT!!! MY CAR WAS CHOKING ON SOME RIBBON THAT GOT LEFT ON THE GROUND AND THESE TIPS SAVED ONE OF MY PRECIOUS FUR BABIES’ LIVES.

[nico-idc]

Here’s screenshots of how to do CPR on a cat (Below the keep reading)

Keep reading

[sneakyfeets]

Me, plunking Stinky Bastard Man’s carrier on the counter: hi he’s here for shots and a nail trim and he’ll need to be sedated

Nurse: Are you sure? We can try-

Me: he needs to be sedated

Nurse: Well, it’ll take longer-

Me: he needs to be sedated, he will try to rip your face off

Nurse: Well we’ll try without first and we’ll let you know if we need to sedate

Me, watching her carry him away: you will need to sedate him

Nurse, coming back 10 minutes later clutching her hand: so, we will need to sedate him

Me:

[sneakyfeets]

A man with 3 caution stickers on his med file

[sneakyfeets]

Since this post blew up and people have asked for this villain’s record, here are some of Stinky Bastard Man’s more heinous crimes:

Screamed so loudly with such unbridled fury the one time he wasn’t sedated at the vet that he caused a little girl in the waiting room to burst into tears

Ripped an escape hole in the patio screen door in a single night

Snuck into the garage overnight where he managed to pull down his massive food bag from the top shelves, ripped it open and ate so much he couldn’t/wouldn’t move when we found him in the morning  

Learned how to open the laundry cabinet to sleep on the clean towels

Learned how to open doors, thus allowing the dog to follow in after who then eats from the trash

Bats off anything on our windowsills that gets in the way of his sitting. Current succulent casualty count: 4

Thankfully cannot open the bedroom door due to rusty mechanisms, but managed to slip in one night when it wasn’t fully closed. Jumped down from my windowsill squarely onto my stomach, leaving me to bolt awake screaming from the blow and convinced I was under attack

Tricked me into loving him forever anyway

[the-haiku-bot]

Ripped an escape hole

in the patio screen door

in a single night

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

[thedorkdionysia]

oh my god he’s THIS Stinky Bastard Man!!!!

[anais-ninja-bitch]

[bebe-benzenheimer]

the stinky bastard man, the stinky bastard myth, the stinky bastard legend