Running On Empty

She/her I write fic and post in progress snippets, rant about life, and reblog a lot of crap. Come talk to me about your nerdy obsessions! Also, pictures of cats.

[making-friendos]

A series

[making-friendos]

An addition:

Small dogs are good dogs too!

[the-hwaelweg]

The more Leverage I watch, the more I feel like it’s fanfiction of some alternate Leverage show. Like someone was like, “I love this show and these characters so much, and I need a college AU and a music star AU and an Office crossover and I want them to solve a mystery at a murder mystery party on a spooky island and and and…” I love it so.

[trekscribbles]

Leverage is fanfiction of every heist and action trope written by people who deeply love the genre (and who are even more deeply pissed off by current events.) And that’s why it’s perfect.

[purplesaline]

Melon collies

[sahonithereadwolf]

I can no longer feel the infinite sadness

[beaft]

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.

[beaft]

actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.

[titsay]

guardian of the forest

[queerquests]

Framing illness as even involving morality seems to me a mistake, because of course cancer does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass.

—John Green, Everything Is Tuberculosis

[willowcrowned]

tbh I’ve always found it very funny that Elrond is like “there’s no point bringing Glorfindel on the quest, even though he’s a balrog-slayer. You won’t need balrog-slayers” and then thirty pages later they run into a balrog

[willowcrowned]

#and they could’ve really benefited from having a glow in the dark elf in moria (via @emyn-arnens)

obsessed by the implication that glorfindel is bioluminescent

[willowcrowned]

#most elves aren’t #just glorfindel #dwarves on the other hand ARE bioluminescent #but it’s in a spectrum that elves and men and orcs can’t see in #hobbits can see in that spectrum fine #for better mushroom hunting #but they think it’s rude to point out that one of their party members is glowing #and so the dwarves have no idea the hobbits notice (via @mandaloriandy)

The first night Bilbo camped with the company he very nearly said something about it, but, having no idea what dwarves are and thinking it might be rude, he kept the observation to himself and decided that dwarves must be some kind of fungus. It improved his estimation of them most incredibly, and was, in fact, one of the observations he was most keen to pass on when he got back, seeing as how—even if it didn’t quite make him respectable, per se—it at least provided a valuable new addition to hobbits’ mushroom-lore, which no one (not even a certain few silver-spoon possessing relatives) could fault him for.

[mandaloriandy]

#anyways it’s common knowledge in the shire that dwarves are actually just a kind of mushroom#but no one says anything#because they think (seeing as how the dwarves haven’t brought it up themselves) it would be rude (via @willowcrowned)

[mikkeneko]

My partner, reading this over my shoulder: “It never ceases to amaze me when Tolkein fans write meta that goes off in really bizarre directions”

Me: “These books are 70 years old, everything normal to say about them has been said; if you’re gonna say anything new about it, it’s gonna have to be weird”

[queenaegon]

is that song actually character-coded or is your brain a character-shaped hammer looking for lyrics to nail down somewhere

[solanumflare]

wips aren't meant to be finished. they're meant for you to proudly explain the idea behind them to everyone and then suddenly go silent when someone says "oh cool I'm so excited to see when you finish it!"

[isagisms]

take my hand 🫴 let's write self-indulgent fanfic together forever

[ineedhjalp]

I love fanfiction because sometimes The Character needs to be held gently and sometimes they need to be beaten to death with a club. and you 🫵 can make both of those happen. for free

[creekfiend]

many women are excited to get old and weird, but i have great news that it's fully possible to become weird now, before you get old. just imagine the heights of weirdness you will be able to reach in fifty years if you get started now. that's what I think

[tearlessrain]

making friends via fandom is inherently hilarious because in many ways it's like a regular friendship and sometimes you'll share stuff that's going on in your lives and offer support and talk about food or pets or random cultural stuff because you live on opposite sides of the damn planet, but also some of your interactions are like "hello beloved friend whom I cherish deeply, I have brought you a deceptively platonic gift of lovingly crafted star wars porn"

[pinklocksoflove]

[natalieironside]

Mitch McConnell has been sent to a nice farm out in the country where there's lots of open space to run around and lots of other senators for him to play with

[sawkinator]

can we send him to the glue factory instead

[of-nyon]

girl help they're taking my fave's extremely thin veneer of swaggering overconfidence at face value

[anxietyproblem]