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words of affirmation for those seeking a werewolf girlfriend

Ok, I've seen this sentiment before, but the amount of Kindle Unlimited ads I've been seeing is forcing me to repeat it-

Kindle Unlimited is offering two free months of unlimited ebooks. As a trial. Which will then become a paid subscription.

Your local library is offering unlimited ebooks all the time. Forever. No contracts, no predatory practices, no tracking of how long you spend on each particular page in the hopes that information about your habits can be sold for a profit.

Use your library. They want so badly to give you all of the things for free.

[ID: you guys have no idea how deep into the lore I've gone]

It’s actually really important to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it.

It’s also important to understand that our thoughts don’t always reflect our beliefs, and that’s normal. Being able to consider things, whether they fit within our morality or not, is actually a critical part of the brain’s function.

i needed to read this

coming to the whump community be like welcome to

I love you beat up books I love you old book smell I love you yellow pages I love you cracked spines I love you secondhand bookshops I love you library books I love you I love you I love you

Dracula: Now, feel free to write to your loved ones (on this nigh transparent paper) (while I watch). Just to let them know you’re still alive, ha-ha–

Jonathan: Done

Dracula: …What?

Jonathan: Yeah, this is it. Done.

Dracula: One line?

Jonathan ‘Desperate and Tricky Fucker’ Harker: Yeah :)

Flash forward to Whitby, 26th of July

Mina ‘My Fiancé and I’s Joint Habit is Writing Elaborate Descriptions of Literally Everything’ Murray: Oh, this one-line bullshit is definitely not right and Not Him, handwriting or no  

before i had gotten close with ex-catholics i was under the assumption that "catholic guilt" was mostly about sex, or serious topics.

but i was naïve. it's apparently about every positive experience. enjoying a meal? you're so lucky, children are starving. spending your day off cosy in bed? wow, so selfish, homeless people are freezing to death.

every former or present catholic i've met has a very obvious anxiety disorder and it's so painfully not a coincidence.

Just a reminder that Frederick Banting, discoverer of the process to synthesise insulin, sold the patent for $1 because it was so important to him that it be widely available and easily mass produced. Yes, you should be angry.

This is the open Insulin project. An open source movement to develop a cheap and unrestricted recipe for producing rapid acting (lispro) and long acting (glargine) insulin.

These modern forms of insulin are still patented, and only the more dangerous less effective forms have had their parents expire.

Gentle reminder here that there are elder queers out there. Real elders, people in their 80s and 90s who survived, who are here. You can get there, old age does exist for us.

I know an old lesbian couple who have been married since the moment they legalized it. One woman can hardly walk anymore but she loves Hallmark ornaments, so her wife supports her against her walker during Christmas so she can look at them more easily.

I know a transgender man who started transitioning only 10 years ago at 60, and he's brilliant and funny and brings his grandchildren by to get sweets.

I know an asexual woman who, beamed and told me she absolutely loved not having a husband, and that she "never once regretted not getting married. I never felt that way about anybody! Why force it?" She lives with her parrot and loves salsa dancing.

Our elders exist. So many of us have been wiped out and erased on purpose, but we're here. And that means you can get there. When you're old and grey, when you're retired and done, there will be people who will love you and will care for you.

Sometimes I like to imagine what kinds of weird youth subcultures existed in the Byzantine empire

@the-alexandrian-alchemist

Unlike the Gladiator-loving Romans, the Byzantines were more into chariot racing (mostly because they were Christian and had banned Gladiatorial battles). Like, ridiculously into it. So into it that the fanclubs for the various racing teams became so huge, powerful, and intense in their rivalry that they could easily put any modern sport rivalry to shame. Young fans were also known to adopt trendy hairstyles (which often involved shaving a lot of the head except for bangs and side-braids, or just shaving the whole front half) based on the major nomadic cultures the Byzantines encountered, especially the Huns and Avars. These clubs became so intense in their rivalries, that they spilled over from sports into other issues, mostly politics and religion (different clubs tended to support different theological teachings and would argue about them even while cheering on their teams in the Hippodrome). All of this exploded into a giant riot in 532 CE, when a brawl between the two biggest fan clubs (The Blues and The Greens, named for the teams they supported) spiralled completely out of control and turned into a city wide riot that burned down a huge amount of Constantinople (including the original Hagia Sophia). Some political rivals of Emperor Justinian used this as an opportunity to try to launch a coup and use the riot to help them. After being persuaded to stay and face the rioters head on by his awesome wife Theodora, Justinian ordered his best general Belisarius to bring an end to the riots. Which he did. Brutally. An estimated 30,000 people were killed by Belisarius’ soldiers (in a city of roughly 500-600,000 people). And that’s why fandom rivalries are really really bad and never end well. 

I should note, all of this only applies to the Early Byzantines. I got nothing on the later Byzantines. 

To really bring the point home on just how bad ass Theodora was, the story goes that just before Justinian was ready to flee, Theodora had insisted on staying and when Justinian pointed out she might be killed, Theodora replied, “Purple is a lovely color for a burial shroud.”

Context: purple was a heinously expensive dye legally only allowed to be worn by the emperor (& empress). She was saying she would rather die as empress than live and be deposed. 

Theodora had married into the purple from humble origins and she took it seriously.

Also one thing I’ve always liked is Justinian and Theodora loudly and publicly supported opposite sports teams so everyone would feel like they were represented, and Theodora’s sports loyalties were tied into her backstory because the other team fired her dad from his bear-wrangling job when she was a kid so supposedly she still had a grudge.

@whetstonefires are you telling me emperor justinian i and empress theodora were fucking kayfabe

i mean legit now I’m thinking about “oh geeze. Oh geeze, what about ancient sumerians?” Like they didn’t have things like teens the way we do but teens are REALLY MODERN (like essentially a thing born of the early 20th century). But young adults having culture/interests/etc? yeah that’s basically always existed.

So what kind of weird youth subcultures did ancient Sumeria have?????