per aspera ad astra

this is the last one, i promise

tiktok || ig

pt.1 - pt.2 - pt.3

here’s a preview of the final piece

every page of This is How You Lose the Time War drives me Insane

His name is No Stopping

If there’s anything worth living for, it’s kittens trying to imitate their moms.

Birds playing volleyball 

(Source)

they kind of suck at it

— Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed

Questions for Ada, Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Anyway, super pissed off at all y’all who’ve been painting any casual, social relationship between minors and adults as “grooming” or “predatory,” as I try to point an 18-year-old on Twitter whose parents are attempting to force them into ABA therapy towards possible sources of help or support, and they say they have….zero safe adults in their life who are older than 18-20.

Folks. Unrelated, decent, older adults are a vital source of support and safety when someone’s family and school are unreliable or abusive.

There are different appropriate boundaries for friendships between kids and adults than between kids and other kids, but making kids believe that zero adults in their lives are safe to have as friends is not actually making them safer.

Adult figures can be supports, mentors, and friends. They can provide valuable perspectives on adult life, important lifeskills, and reality-checking about abusive relationships. And beyond that, they can provide tangible support and guidance to kids they know need help.

Having supportive adults can mean the librarian who helps them with college applications, getting a tutor, or finding an apartment. It can mean the teacher who tells them about a scholarship to the summer camp that gets the kid out of the house for the summer, or helps them get into a college away from home.

It can mean the boss or supervisor who’ll say they’re working when they need to go to a doctor or therapist without their parents knowing, or let them store a go-bag of supplies in the staff room in case they get kicked out.

It can mean the aunt or uncle who lets them stay in their spare room for a few nights or months when things are too tense at home, or gives them a ride to the bus station and money for the trip.

It can mean the pastor of the only LGBT-friendly church in town coming over to drink coffee with their parents and talk about how much better things turn out if you support your kid’s transition

Or in this case, it can mean an older autistic adult who can help them find a better treatment program to suggest instead, maybe recommend a therapist who will advocate for them, and testify personally about how much ABA harmed them.

Abuse can make it really hard to trust, because telling someone you need help makes you vulnerable, and what if you get hurt again? So it really helps for kids to have lots of alternatives to an abusive relationship, and a sense of how to recognize and avoid abuse.

So just teaching kids that any adult outside their family is a Guaranteed Predator, and not talking about what abuse looks like other than “if they’re nice to you they’re trying to molest you” does not keep kids safe. It does the opposite.

my neighbor thought i fucking DIED because he heard a loud crash (easel & canvas fell over while i was asleep) and had been trying to contact me for like an hour anyway artistic rendition of when i opened my door

“So, there is this unusual group of friends…”

(Source)

being an eastern european person on the internet in this time and age is so weird bc ppl who lack historical context will call you a colonizer for being white for woke internet points while the people of your country suffer from immense poverty under modern day dictatorships and women and girls get trafficked into sex slavery every day and literally nobody talks or cares abt it. and you’re also not supposed to get mad bc then you’re somehow racist. iam tired. i am tired of our experiences constantly being invalidated because some of you have such shallow black & white understanding of how this world works.

I’m not on tumblr because I really like it necessarily, but I am a twenty-something young professional in a really formal and prestigious field, and I woke up this morning and wrote a draft of like 400 words of meta about a cartoon character, and like, where the fuck else am I supposed to post that? Facebook? Twitter? You can’t post about anime on facebook. People use their actual photos there. I need somewhere to be weird in peace where there aren’t any employers.

I really think Rasputin lucked out, in that being remembered by history as some species of giant unkillable sex wizard is something most of us can only fruitlessly aspire to.

He didn’t luck out, he worked hard for that rep

he really didn’t though

he was just kind of a garden-variety creep, but the rumor mill did all the work for him and now he’s a banger disco song

to be fair, neither could Rasputin. Alexei very much continued to have haemophilia.

isn’t the current theory that he seemed to heal faster and have more spoons when Rasputin was around because Rasputin wouldn’t let the doctors give him aspirin, a blood thinner?

Ra Ra Rasputin Russia’s wellness scamming fiend

Fun fact: the conspirator who’d been made responsible for preparing the poison for Rasputin, Stanislaus de Lazovert, was a medical intern who’d studied under the exact same doctor who kept trying to treat Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia with aspirin.

Like, I feel like this should be taken into account when evaluating reports of Rasputin’s miraculous immunity to poison.

Did the guy who shot him also study under that doctor?

No, Felix Yusupov was just a useless nerd who thought he knew how murder worked because he’d read a book.

Based on the available historical evidence, the most likely sequence of events is as follows:

Pretty much everything else about Rasputin’s miraculous invincibility is invented whole cloth, much of it by Yusupov himself in order to build himself up in his own published memoirs.

(As icing on the incompetently poisoned cake, elements of Yusupov’s memoirs were later incorporated into the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress, which led to Yusupov suing MGM Studios for libel because the film strongly implies that Rasputin was fucking Yusupov’s wife. The precedent set by that lawsuit is the reason those “similarities to any real person living or dead are coincidental” disclaimers exist.)

That last fact took me off at the knees.

Is no one going to mention that all of this (or at least the start of it with the cakes) happened while they were loudly playing “Yankee Doodle” on repeat in the background to try and cover the sound of their murder attempt from the people downstairs.

I can’t get over this edit lmaooooo

anytime someone talks about “double texting” im just like. sorry. cant relate. every single person i actually text will receive 14 texts in a row at 11pm about whatever random thing im thinking about

I always get confused when people apologize for texting. Like, dude, my phone volume hasn’t been on since I bought this phone and it is face down at night, you could text me at any time as much as you want and I’ll respond whenever I notice them without any though of the time or volume of responses I send back. Relax and reach out freely, babies