the shrimp is very good at his job ✨

1 like = 1 prayer for chopper's mental health

do NOT talk to me about 1081 or i will instantly begin to sob thanks

I love how, despite Luffy consistently being the most popular character, we as a fandom go through great pains to avoid writing from his POV. If you check any other fandom on ao3, you'll find that most fics were written from the favorite character POV, or at least include it. But not One Piece. We've collectively decided that the mindset of this dumbass who literally blurts out his every thought is a bit too hard to get into. His inner voice is the same as his outer voice, but making him the narrator is the stuff of nightmares. Luffy goes through 1000 chapters with his every thought and motive out in the open, and you would think that would make it easier but no. He's one of the most straightforward characters I've ever seen, and trying to think from his perspective is like looking at everything a bit sideways. Man just doesn't make sense, and it doesn't even matter that, canonically, his head is empty. It just makes the situation even funnier.

cannot stress enough that his onscreen acts so far have been in no particular order: flipping kidd off, threatening to murder kidd for bossing him around, juggling a disembodied head around for way longer than necessary, act like a complete freak while asking drake how many people he's killed, breaking multiple laws by recruiting an escaped slave onto his crew, have bepo finish a fight he got bored with, and watching luffy cause an international incident with the manic smile of someone obviously smacked on the highest quality shit he could find on sabaody archipelago. unambiguously and undeniably, he is the people's princess.

AU: Kuina lived and her father was supportive of her ambition. He sent her to Wano to learn the way of the swords so they meet again when Zoro arrived at Wano.

I just rlly wanted to design a giant Kuina after seeing how big Kiku is :)))

a comic about wine, a wager, and reconnecting through your weird kids

Oh GodDAMN

I just think that brook would really stress law out, like, conceptually

i am literally sooooo ill about ASL bros fire symbolism/themes all of the time. it drives me fucking bonkers crazy

bad guys/good guys

that one zoro screencap where he's just staring dreamily at luffy. how is that real. he enamored. he's swooning. luffy is getting in a fight with a giant WHALE (so the whale has something to look forward too & exits a depressive spiral) and zoro is looking at him like THAT. oda I am metaphorically shaking u by the collar why did u do that

Here’s the opposite story, though. With apologies because I don’t have the book in front of me, so I may get some details wrong, but I read this “Irena’s Children“ by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

You can choose to be the bus driver.

I have another story from the Holocaust.  

Two, actually.

One is long, and one is brief.

The first story is about my grandfather.

He was a slave in a Krups munitions factory in a Nazi concentration camp in Częstochowa, Poland.

He was also a smuggler.  If I did not have multiple corroborating witnesses to the sheer ludicrious balls that he had, I would dismiss the stories as exaggeration.  But he was a food smuggler–he would buy some kind of sugar from the Polish day workers coming into the factory, make candy out of them, sell the candy back to the workers at a profit, and buy food with the proceeds–which he then proceeded to share with the other slaves, free of charge.  Without him, they would have starved to death, but an extra hundred calories a day made a difference enough to keep them alive.

But that’s not the story.

The story is what happened in Spring of 1945.

My grandfather could hear the guns of the Russian Army off in the distance, and he and the other captives in the camp figured that they would be liberated any day now.  

And then a truck packed full with preteen Jewish children who had just been captured comes into the work camp instead of the extermination camp up the road.  Because the Nazis were so fixated on their hatred of Jews that they diverted war resources to hunting us down even as they were losing.  

So it’s pandemonium.  They’re unloading the truck of the kids, the guards are yelling at the driver, the kids are milling about not knowing what’s going on…

And my grandfather sees one boy who looked a little older, a little more mature, and figured that this one he can save.  It’s just a few days until the Russians arrive, after all.

So he tells the boy to come with him.

And the rest… got loaded back onto the truck and off they went to the gas chambers.

But it wasn’t a couple of days.

It was six weeks.

Stalin personally ordered the Army to slow their advance and told the Polish Resistance to rise up, and that the Russians would support them with food and weapons.  

So they rose up… and were slaughtered.  Because they got nothing from the Russians.  Stalin knew that anyone who would be resisting the Nazis would be resisting him next, and it was an elegant way to weaken Poland before he took it.

Meanwhile, my grandfather is hiding a fourteen year old boy in a NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP.

The risks they took to hide him… they would hold him up over empty shoes sewn to long pants at the evening roll call so that he would look taller.  They smuggled food to him…  If they had been caught… I have nightmares of what would have been done to them.

Finally, one night, they are all locked in their barracks as the Nazis evacuated the camp and the Russians were coming in, with the Nazis using the camp for cover for their escape.

And in the chaos… 

My grandfather lost track of the boy.

Twenty-two years later, he tells this story to my father when my father is 12, and has demanded to know something, be told something concrete.

So he doesn’t know what happened to the boy.  Did he live?  Did he die?  Did he find his mother and sisters?

He doesn’t know.

Six months later, my grandmother is planning my father’s bar mitzvah.  Not as a religious obligation, but as a 200 foot tall flaming middle finger to the Third Reich.  You are gone, and WE ARE STILL HERE.

So she plugs into what my father called the “Camp Network”–the trombonist in the band was on a death march with an uncle, the florist was in a work camp with a friend, etc.  And she’s asking, “I need a photographer, who is good?”

“You want Joe Brown, up in Queens,” she’s told.

So she invites him down to talk terms at their house in Brooklyn, which is quite a haul in NYC.  

And the first question one Holocaust survivor asks another is, “Where were you?”  Because maybe you know someone, maybe you can tell what happened.

“I was in Częstochowa,” he says.

“You were in Częstochowa?  My husband Teddy was in Częstochowa!”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum.”

“Oh, everyone knew Teddy.”

“I didn’t know a Teddy Baum!”

“When he gets home, you’ll see.  Everyone there knew Teddy.”  Because he was smuggling in the food that kept them all alive.

So the thing is, you live in the US for 20 years, you forget that your name was not “Teddy Baum” but “Tuvyas Bumps.”

And when my grandfather got home from work…

…sitting there at his kitchen table…

…was the boy he had saved.

…

(I’m not crying…)

That’s the first story.

The second story is that of my grandfather’s brother.

It is short.

He collaborated with the Nazis to save his own skin.  He let my grandfather’s first wife and son starve to death in the ghetto and informed on people who tried to escape or resist.  My grandfather said that “Good people went up the chimney and he stayed behind.”

Two brothers. 

One saved over a hundred lives.

The other betrayed his own flesh and blood to save his own skin.  

Your choices define you.

Whoever destroys a single life is considered by Scripture to have destroyed the whole world, and whoever saves a single life is considered by Scripture to have saved the whole world.– Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5

I, I was going to add some stuff, I had it all typed out, about how we never see shoplifting, right, about how we always help those less fortunate than ourselves.

I deleted it. It was trite, and general, and not anything like the stories in this post. So I went and found this image instead.

When Trump slapped his immigration ban down and sowed chaos, these lawyers raced to the airport in New York, I think it was JFK, and they began rescuing people trapped on the wrong side of the world.

One person at a time.

Fanfiction Authors: HEADS UP

(Non-authors, please RB to signal boost to your author friends!)

An astute reader informed me this morning that one of my fics (Children of the Future Age) had been pirated and was being sold as a novel on Amazon:

(And they weren't even creative with their cover design. If you're going to pirate something that I spent a full year of my life writing, at least give me a pretty screenshot to brag about later. Seriously.)

I promptly filed a DMCA complaint to have it removed, but I checked out the company that put it up -- Plush Books -- and it looks like A LOT of their books are pirated fic. They are by no means the only ones doing this, either -- the fact that """publishers""" can download stories from AO3 in ebook format and then reupload them to Amazon in just a few clicks makes fic piracy a common problem. There are a whole host of reasons why letting this continue is bad -- including actual legal risk to fanfiction archives -- but basically:

IF YOU ARE A FANFIC AUTHOR WITH LONG AND/OR POPULAR WORKS, PLEASE CHECK AMAZON TO SEE IF YOUR STORIES HAVE BEEN PIRATED.

You can search for your fics by title, or by text from the description (which is often just copied wholesale from AO3 as well). If you find that someone has stolen your work and is selling it as their own, you can lodge a DMCA complaint (Amazon.com/USA site; other countries have different systems). If you haven't done this before, it's easy! Here's a tutorial:

HOW TO FILE A COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FOR STOLEN WORK ON AMAZON.COM:

First, go to this form. You'll need to be signed into your Amazon account.

Please share this information with your writer friends, keep an eye out for/report pirated works, and help us keep fanfiction free and legally protected!

NOTE: All of the above also applies to Amazon products featuring stolen artwork, etc., so fan artists should check too!

The absolute fucking disrespect to fanfic authors is atrocious.

Art piracy from fanartists is horrible, but the amount of piracy of fanfic writers that goes unnoticed is chilling. Its not enough that people steal other's fanfics to claim as their own, but people also sell FANfiction that people lovingly write as priced novels?? Disgusting.

I know this is just a silly sideblog for fanart, but just as a great enjoyer of fanfics and appreciator of fanfic writers in general, this is too important for me to not bring attention to.

Take care of yourself and your works Authors! And non-writers, protect your favorite Author friends!!!!

Aizawa Shouta | Bnha s6 Ep.08 | "SENSEIIII!!!!! 😭"