when I try to hear this in my head my mental voice is incapable of pronouncing it fast enough to fit the timing of the line
“noooo oooone… adjksjfksfjslenry like Gaston!”
and when I try to fit it to one of the longer such lines, my mental voice becomes too confused about conflicting scansion to continue
no one’s droll like gaston no one’s swole like gaston no one fits his assigned gender role like gaston
I’m especially fond of the paaaatriaaarchy
My what a guy that gastooon
Bless you for making it scan
NOW I CAN’T READ IT WITHOUT SINGING IN MY HEAD
No one’s droll like Gaston, No one’s swole like Gaston, No one fits his assigned gender role like Gaston! For there’s no one online half as phony, His tinder’s got dick pics to spare, You can ask any neckbeard or brony They’ll show you (no homo) whose trilby they’d wear! No one drawls like Gaston Or catcalls like Gaston, Or manspreads on the train in a sprawl like Gaston! I’m especially fond of the paaaatriaaarchy! My what a guy that Gastooon!
hey so protip if you have abusive parents and need to get around the house as quietly as possible, stay close to furniture and other heavy stuff because the floor is settled there and it’s less likely to creak
socks are quieter than bare feet on tile/wood and for the love of god don’t wear slippers/shoes if you can help it
climbing ON the furniture will disrupt the pattern of your footsteps and make it harder to hear where you are in the house
crawling will do the same and if you get caught crawling you can pretend you fell
the floor near the wall can be really loud if the floorboards/carpet is old and not completely flush to the wall
do NOT attempt to use a rolling chair to travel without footsteps. they are extremely loud and hard to steer
Also. Breath with your mouth and not your nose. Your nose will whistle. Trust me. If you need to get into your fridge, jab your finger into the rubber part that seals the door closed and create a tiny airway. This will prevent the suction noise when you open the door. When drinking liquids (juice mostly), pour out your glass (or chug from the jug) and replace what you drank with water. If it was full enough in the beginning, no one will notice. DO NOT STEAL ALCOHOL. THEY WILL NOTICE IF IT’S WATERED DOWN. Bring a pillowcase for dried foods like cereal and granola. It helps to muffle the sound it makes when it pours.
If your house has snack packs (like gummy bears or crackers or chips), count them every day until you know the rhythm that they get consumed. (This took me a week and a half with my twin brother and sister). Then join the rhythm when you make your nightly visits. It will be that much harder to figure out it was you.
KEEP A TRASH BAG UNDER YOUR BED FOR WRAPPERS AND STUFF BUT DONT FORGET TO THROW IT OUT WHENEVER YOU CAN. BUGS YKNOW. Hope this helped.
I might have some useful info to add.
-a jar of peanut butter is long lasting and easy to hide under a bed or in a dresser drawer. I lived off of jars of peanut butter and boxes of saltine crackers I would buy on grocery trips with my mom.
-two words: Slipper Socks. These are the socks that have rubber designs on the bottom for grip. They make no noise, and also keep you steady on slicker surfaces like tile and wood. You can find them cheap at Walmart. They also keep your feet more protected if you’re outside.
-if you’re secure enough in your room to have a small food stash, make sure you’re not too obvious about it (duh) but also move its location every few days. I kept mine in a shoebox under my bed, then switched it to a backpack in my closet, then wedged between my bookshelf and wall, and I would cycle locations until i moved it permanently to a false-bottomed drawer I installed in my dresser when my father was gone for a weekend. I would NEVER put food directly into my stash after taking it. I would keep it in pockets of my clothes and between books until everyone went to sleep, then I’d stock and stow my stash for the next few days.
-get a water bottle with a filter in it. I used to be able to reach my bathroom from my bedroom door down the hall using a huge step or minor jump/leap. If I was afraid of being caught at night, I’d fill up the humidifier tank we kept under our sink while I took a short shower, and would refill my water that way. It might not be the best option, but I kept a small stockade of water under my bed for emergencies.
-if you can, smuggle your garbage out in your backpack or purse. Dispose of it at work/school. I got caught twice by carelessly throwing away packaging.
-if someone knows the situation you’re going through (close friend/partner/etc) see if there’s a way for them to get food or other supplies to you at school or work or what private time you may get. A hidden first aid kit literally saved parts of my body before and I owe it to a close friend.
-try learning the building’s natural rhythm. The house I grew up in would creak and settle heavily every night for 3-5 minutes. That was my shot, and I had to be QUICK. I still got caught a few times, but learning the patterns in our floors and walls, when they creaked, WHERE they creaked, kept me going. Eventually I was sprinting in slipper socks to the kitchen and back in less than 90 seconds.
-if you have stairs, or live upstairs. Sit as you go down them one at a time, or climb up them like an animal. It keeps you low/out of lots of motion sight, and also can reduce noise and creaking by distributing weight over more than 1-2 steps.
-You can use common hand sanitizer to remove the stains certain snack foods leave behind (coughs cheeto fingers) and a dry toothbrush can help scrub the color off your tongue. If you can get powdered toothpaste or toothpaste tabs to keep on hand, it makes a huge difference in sneakiness.
-I don’t recommend going for dried foods like granola or cereal unless you can sneak it to a secure place to get it. It’s too loud, it’s a gamble every time for something with less caloric intake than it’s worth if you get caught. Of course, there are times when that’s the only option!!
-if you’re taking milk, add water, but be SURE to shake/agitate the bottle to distribute the dairy fat with the water. I got into the habit of shaking milk jugs when I started sneaking it, and explained the habit as something I read in an old comic strip my father showed me. (Back when whole milk had a lot more cream fats and they’d separate, so shaking it would redistribute the cream.) I still shake milk jugs to this day.
-if your windows open or don’t have screens, eat leaning out an open window. Any food mess will be lost in the dirt. I was lucky I had bushes and birds outside that would catch my granola bar crumbs before anyone could notice.
-canned goods are tempting, but not worth it. It requires too many tools (can opener/strained sometimes/utensils/some need heat) stick to thinks like various nut butters (sunflower/peanut/almond), crackers, dried fruit, and easy to conceal food bars (nature valley/nutrigrain/etc.) dried ramen packets are good uncooked if you can stand the texture. Apple sauce and pudding cups are also easier to sneak and stash than one might think, and can be eaten with your fingers. The only canned foods I recommend are condensed soups and precooked pasta (spaghetti-o’s). You can easily mix them with a little bit of hot water from the tap and get something more sustaining than a handful of captain Crunch. The cans are cheap, sometimes recyclable, and drinking soup takes way less time than chewing solid food.
-if you menstruate, attempt to stash pads/tampons in a safe location. Sometimes shit happens. Pads can work as bandages in emergency situations. Sometimes shark week comes unexpectedly. If you can sneak a roll of toilet paper or paper towels, these are also life savers.
-plastic utensils from takeout containers can be hidden inside socks and will be worth their weight in gold when you least expect it. I bought myself a tiny plastic bowl from the dollar store and kept cheap trinkets in it on my desk so it didn’t seem like a bowl I was eating out of. You could try this with something like a mason jar, which is also useful for drinking out of or storing water.
-if you’re eating a crunchy or solid food, try soaking it in water. Mushy food can be repulsive in texture, but I could clock the sound of someone eating a nature valley oat bar from like 6 miles away. Dunking it in water (or using a secret bowl+water) can reduce noise, and also eating time since you don’t have to chew as much.
-keep a laundry bar or tide pen on you. Laundry bars are super useful, a little hard to find though. I washed a lot of stains out of my clothes with laundry bars in my bathroom sink as a kid. Not proud if it, but it kept me flying under the radar at school.
-clear rubber bands, plain twine or string, paper clips, and thumb tacks. Indescribably useful. I once rigged a system to open tricky cabinets and get objects from inside using two paper clips and a foot of plain string like a mock lasso system.
-if you’re pulling objects from tall cabinets, use your chest or stomach to cushion them. Let them fall into your torso and then into your hands cradled underneath. Not as loud, not as much grabbing, if someone sees it they can mistake it for it falling on you by the body language.
-get a bandana. Or four. Napkins, bandages, tool, and accessory all in one.
-get a tiny sewing kit. I’m talking 3 needles and a spool of thread tiny. Scissors if you can sneak it. See things into your clothes. Make hidden pockets or compartments. Threadbanger on YouTube did a video a few years ago about sneaking things into music festivals using tiny clothing mods, but they may be useful in sneaking money or medicine.
-on the topic of sneaking money. don’t take bills, take change. If your abusers don’t meticulously count their nickels and pennies, they’re an easy(ish) way to build up a tiny savings pool. I found nickels the least noticed coin I took, even more than pennies, and taking two every few nights from where they’d be tossed on our countertop soon built up to a semi-reliable fund I passed off to someone to get me food for my stash without having to sneak it from the kitchen. As soon as I became “independent” in my food storage, I was subjected to much less scrutiny. I managed to build up a solid 1-2 week ration supply after hoarding change.
-you can tape SD cards to the inside of book dust covers(the part that folds inside the actual cover of the book), if you have a sewing kit or zipper on it inside the stuffing of your pillow (trim a corner, stuff it inside, stitch it closed) or (this is final resort) VERY CAREFULLY remove the covering from your outlet and tape it to the wall stud before replacing the casing. I kept mine inside part of my wooden bed frame that I hollowed out using, you guessed it, take out silverware knives and 4 nights without sleep.
-THE FLOOR IS LAVA WAS KEY TRAINING FOR ME AS A CHILD. I learned to take pillows with me, climb on furniture to disrupt my flow of movement, toss a pillow down, and use that to cushion any rattle our living room could give off as I crept to the kitchen from the side entrance so my mom’s dog wouldn’t bark or alert anyone. I highly suggest crawling around on all fours like some sort of beast to stay out of sight.
-can you run your house blindfolded?? If you can’t. Maybe you should try to learn. I suffered some heavy eye traumas growing up and had a collective 3-4 months just IN THE DARK. Eyes bandaged, left alone. It was terrible, but damn if I couldn’t navigate the whole place silently, without any visual cues. This helps a lot with the whole moving around in the dark thing, too. Listening is obviously key.
-if your parents start getting suspicious, or you’re suspicious they’re getting suspicious, watch out for traps. String on the ground that gets shifted when you walk on it. Baby powder or flour left to track footprints or doors opening/closing. My dad was partial to wrapping a bungee cord around my doorknob and attaching it to the closet across the hallway. I wouldn’t be able to open my door enough to get out, or if I did, I risked ruining the structural integrity of the wrappings he did, and he would notice.
-learn to tie some knots. Strong ones. They’ll come in handy at one point or another.
-remember that you’re not totally alone. There’s people out there for you. Wanting to make everything better. You don’t deserve what’s happening, it isn’t normal, and you will eventually find help. But staying safe is important, and you are important.
It upsets me that people might need to know these but I know it could really help someone by reblogging
ALWAYS REBLOG
Pro tip if you can use the lid off pudding or jello as a spoon.
it’s so depressing that people need these tips. but if you do, I hope they’re useful. hope they help you stay safer
This tips were definitely something I could have used when I was a kid.
OSRIC You are not ignorant of what excellence Laertes is–
HAMLET
GHOST Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.
HAMLET Murder!
GHOST Murder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
HAMLET Haste me to know’t, that I, with wings as swift As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge.
Ghost I find thee apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear: ‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abused: but know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown.
HAMLET
FIRST PLAYER
….But if the gods themselves did see her then When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs, The instant burst of clamour that she made, Unless things mortal move them not at all, Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven, And passion in the gods.’
POLONIUS
Look, whether he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes. Pray you, no more.
HAMLET
GUILDENSTERN
Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame and start not so wildly from my affair.
HAMLET
HAMLET I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?
I recently saw a post where someone commented that the incredibly charged issue they were arguing about followed them home, and they couldn’t escape it. And it reminded me why this pattern I see of people (especially young people) where the majority of their downtime is spent on tumblr, and their tumblr is mostly some form of activism, from thought out long posts to clicking reblog on a petition, is so worrying to me.
Various forms of oppression are background noise to a lot of people’s lives. Fixing that is not likely to occur within your generation. It might get better, but the chances of it completely vanishing are minuscule. Some activists go home after dealing with bigotry all day at work, and talk about oppression on tumblr. And if they sit down and watch a TV show, they think about how it’s bigoted. If they have a musician they love, they feel obliged to think about how they’re problematic.
This is awful for you, your metal health, and the people around you. You burn out, you start blowing up at people for tiny things because you’re so tired of it. It makes you miserable and unpersuasive, it’s emotionally exhausting.
And this isn’t just me saying this. When my grandpa was training to do work with the labour party, he was told that you had to have a hobby to be good at it. Because otherwise it destroys you. You have to have something in your life that is totally disconnected from the horrific things you are seeing everyday.
If you can’t find TV shows to watch because you can’t switch off the social justice analysis part of your brain, do something else your activism can’t creep into. Take up knitting. Build shit out of cans. Play the recorder. Lock yourself in your bedroom and play minecraft. Whatever you do, please, please don’t let activism and fighting oppression take over every aspect of your life.
Have a separate activism tumblr and a cat pics/memes tumblr. Or blacklist activist things on your tumblr. Set aside some time where you don’t think about how shit the world is.
You have a right and an obligation to look after yourself. Please don’t drive yourself into the ground for the sake of social justice. You can’t fight all the time, and you’ll be no good at it if you can’t take a break.
Activists (irl activists) are told to clearly separate their two main tasks which are providing help and making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also making demands. You cannot help anyone in an environment where you are also complaining about systematic oppression or asking for change.
Tumblr completely conflates the two. The result of this is:
> Tumblr transgender activists, for instance, tell transgender people they are valid and important, then in the same breath, in the same post and on the same blogs, remind transgender people that they are unloved and unwelcome by society, along with factual proof of transphobic violence.
This is incredibly destructive. I don’t think I even need to explain why. It’s the best way to crush transgender people’s self-esteem, bar none. The message it carries is, “even those on your side know the whole world hates you”. It’s just plain dangerous.
> In so-called LGBT safe spaces on tumblr, for instance, there is near-constant bickering about straight passing privilege versus monosexual privilege versus allosexual privilege. It often escalates to absurd levels of aggressiveness (because it’s the internet, duh) and occurs nearly everywhere, making safe spaces unsafe. The solution tumblr found is to build tiny, microscopic safe spaces for each minority within the LGBT.
Because segregation fixes everything. Spoiler alert: it only makes people more afraid of each other and breeds wariness, misunderstanding and conflict.
When you want to help a marginalized community, you either provide help to individuals, OR you raise awareness about their struggles and make demands for social change. You can have a blog for each, and if you do irl activism you most likely have a separate schedule for each.
The most basic rule for helping minorities is that shelters, help lines and safe spaces should never host debates. The most basic rule of safe spaces is: everyone fitting the requirements to enter is equally welcome, no questions asked, no debate allowed on anyone’s legitimacy or identity or privilege.
Safe spaces, shelters and help lines must be happy, uplifting places where people feel welcome, loved, and important. Otherwise they’re unsafe and toxic. If you can’t provide acceptance and compassion for all members in equal measure regardless of their background, privilege or opinion, you’re not fit for the job, stay away from administrating safe spaces.
Raising awareness and making demands is something tumblr does very well an OP explains well how compassion fatigue works and how destructive activism can be, so I’m not going to dwell on it.
Just remember that not everyone has the emotional strength for it, including those in the community you’re trying to help. Most men who have sex with men, for instance, don’t want to hear about how their community makes up 40% of the french population tested positive for aids. We know, and we also know that nearly 20% of that population has aids, but we also need to think about something less dreadful from time to time. It’s a matter of survival. Also, when you’re staring at your or someone else’s misery 24/7, you become so bitter you lose the ability to help anyone. Self-preservation makes us more useful, as activists.
(Apparently a lot of tumblr activists missed the point of OP’s post, which was compassion fatigue, by a few hundred miles; and assimilated it with something like “hahaha I’m so privileged I can afford not to think about discrimination evar”. I’m not surprised.)
as a professional activist. I really feel this. once I started doing my professional activist work. I really just didn’t have the emotional energy to get into fights with terfs as much(which is what I’m most infamous on here for), or talk about trans issues on here as much. because I was doing SO MUCH OF IT in my day to day life. it just wears you out.
ALL THIS IS REALLY FUCKING IMPORTANT.
Particularly the part about those who tone-switch (something I’m guilty of sometimes, but I’d never describe myself as an activist) from positivity to negative. The gear-shift can be exhausting for people
When you struggle with your mental health on a daily basis, it can be hard to take action on the things that matter most to you. The mental barriers anxiety creates often appear insurmountable. But sometimes, when you really need to, you can break those barriers down. This week, with encouragement from some great people on the internet, I pushed against my anxiety and made some calls to members of our government. Here’s a comic about how you can do that, too. (Resources and transcript below.)
Motivational resources: There are a lot! Here are a few I really like:
Sharon Wong posted a great series of tweets that helped me manage my phone anxiety and make some calls.
Kelsey is tweeting pretty much daily with advice and reminders about calling representatives. I found this tweet an especially great reminder that calls aren’t nearly as big a deal as anxiety makes them out to be.
Informational resources: There are a lot of these, as well! These three are good places to start:
– the rise of old friends senior dog sanctuary
– Hamilton
– pokemon go
– female ghostbusters
– i don’t give a fuck im outta here Obama
– captain america civil war
– girl, black guy and latino guy leads in new star wars
– deadpool
– lemonade
– literally???! Nothing??? Else????
… . and this is just what I came up with in a pretty lazy google search in an hour, including distractions where I went down the research rabbit-hole for a bit because holy crap some of that stuff’s NEAT, guys!
And I know I’m missing stuff, because I wanted a citation for every single thing I put on there.
And like I do actually get the sudden overwhelmed feeling of EVERYTHING SUCKS? but that mindset is, at this point, literally our worst enemy. “Everything is terrible somebody do something” helplessness is what will in fact consign us to everything BEING terrible.
Everything is not terrible. In fact there are new ways, every single month, wherein new opportunities and miracles are happening and no that does not balance out the bad shit but it gives every reason to FIGHT the bad shit, and to get past the bad shit, and to make sure the bad shit ISN’T the overwhelming stain.
So.
I want EVERY single one of my followers to read this. PLEASE I know a lot of bad things happened this year and it’s ok to be upset but all of this pessimism is only making things worse
I highly recommend, if you are on the fence about the Cassandra Clare case. You read this court document.
The fact that you can put each character and plot point next to each other and they are the exact same. Says something. I didn’t think they were going to have much of a case. But when it’s this similar. Down to a rebellious sister whose cooking is mocked. I have no sympathy for CC and I will no longer be supporting her books/shows/endeavors.
There’s literally 15 pages that list every single similarity! It’s insane! I’m surprised Clare didn’t get sued earlier. Can someone who’s read both series confirm that these comparisons are accurate though??
Cause I saw someone asking in the reblogs and someone else claiming that the Dark-Hunter series was published after The Mortal Instruments….
Also, there’s this from the initial report of the lawsuit:
On Friday, Kenyon sued Cassandra Clare aka Judith Rumelt aka Judith Lewis, claiming her “Shadowhunter” series initially used Kenyon’s trademark “darkhunter.” After Kenyon demanded that Clare remove the word “darkhunter” from her work, Clare used the term “shadowhunter” for her protagonists instead, according to the lawsuit. The word “hunter” was also removed from the book title. Clare’s book, “The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones,” was published in 2007. Since then, Clare has expanded her use of the term “shadowhunter” despite assurances that she would not, according to Kenyon.
You can find the initial report of the lawsuit here.
I’ve read the first three books (but they’ve been on my reread list for a while) in the series and I can confirm from my recollections that having read through that list? The similarities are pretty fucking damning.
Also, for those who want further reading on the subject of this lawsuit, you can read more here. That contains these two points:
12. In 2006, PLAINTIFF was alerted by some of her distressed fans of the potential
publication by CLARE of a work that incorporated PLAINTIFF’s Dark-Hunter Marks. PLAINTIFF demanded that the term “darkhunter” and the Dark-Hunter Marks be removed from
CLARE’s work. CLARE removed the term “darkhunter” and the Dark-Hunter Marks from her
work, substituting instead the term “shadowhunters” for her protagonist, but removing any
reference to “hunter” (whether “shadow” or “dark”) from the title; the book was published in 2007
as “The Mortal Instruments, City of Bones.” Despite PLAINTIFF’s continuing protests and continuous assurances from CLARE and CLARE’s publisher that she/they would not expand the
use of the “shadowhunters” term or adopt it as a trademark, CLARE has persisted over time in
expanding her use of the term “shadowhunters” from a mere description of her protagonists, first
to a tag line on the cover of her works and eventually to a complete rebranding of her works so as
to be confusingly similar to the Dark Hunter Series. CLARE’s works are now listed on CLARE’s
website, “shadowhunters.com” under the category of “Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters” and
include the series of “Mortal Instruments” novels along with “The Infernal Devices,” “The Dark
Artifices,” “Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy,” “The Bane Chronicles,” “The Last Hours,”
and “The Shadowhunter’s Codex”, each a “Shadowhunter Book” (and collectively, the
“Shadowhunter Series”).
13. The Dark-Hunter Series and the Shadowhunter Series are so similar that CLARE’S
own publisher mistakenly printed 100,000 copies of a Shadowhunter Book referencing the DarkHunter
Mark on the cover. Upon written demand by PLAINTIFF, CLARE’s publisher destroyed
tens of thousands of the Shadowhunter Book that contained PLAINTIFF’s Dark-Hunter Mark on
its cover. Despite the destruction of tens of thousands of copies of this Shadowhunter Book, thousands of Shadowhunter Books including the Dark Hunter Marks on the cover have now been
sold and substantial commercial confusion has resulted.
^^This should clarify things if people are wondering what the fuss is about. It’s more than a couple of similarities (which books based on the same sort of thing are going to have)
^^^^ in addition to what I said earlier. (Not sure what I said? Scroll down two posts please lol.)
Welp. Guess I can remove all of Cassandra Clare’s books from my TBR list and wishlist now.
fivepercent 