calmerut

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CW: Rape

The instances of male-on-male sexual assault involving members or retainers of House Greyjoy (Theon, Aeron and Euron, Maester Kerwin) and the particular manifestations of these strike me as related to Norse conceptions of masculinity vis-à-vis the Viking influence on the Ironborn…some relevant excerpts from “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe” by Carol J. Clover under the cut

In songs, the hero always saved the maiden from the monster’s castle, but life was not a song, no more than Jeyne was Arya Stark. Her eyes are the wrong color. And there are no heroes here, only whores.

(ADWD, Theon I)

Maesters had their uses, but Victarion had nothing but contempt for this Kerwin. With his smooth pink cheeks, soft hands, and brown curls, he looked more girlish than most girls. When first he came aboard the Iron Victory, he had a smirky little smile too, but one night off the Stepstones he had smiled at the wrong man, and Burton Humble had knocked out four of his teeth. Not long after that Kerwin had come creeping to the captain to complain that four of the crew had dragged him belowdecks and used him as a woman. “Here is how you put an end to that,” Victarion had told him, slamming a dagger down on the table between them. Kerwin took the blade—too afraid to refuse it, the captain judged—but he had never used it.

(ADWD, The Iron Suitor)

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Commission from twitter

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Tatiana al-Mabhouh tells her story (in Russian language):

Ukrainian Women in Gaza

Aug 31, 2025

'When a Missile Hits, You Don't Hear the Explosion': Ukrainian Women in Gaza Dream of Their Homeland

Ukrainian women who made Gaza their home aren't concerned with politics: they just want to save their families and are calling on their war-torn homeland – from which millions have fled – to take back its refugees

It was December 2023, not long after the war broke out. Tatiana, a 54-year-old Ukrainian-born woman, was in the house her family had just evacuated to in the Jabalya Refugee Camp. She was getting ready to tuck in her 1-year-old step grandson, Mahmoud, when she heard a strange sound.

"It sounded like a vacuum cleaner," she recalls in a phone call from Gaza with Haaretz. "I didn't understand what was happening. I looked down and saw that my left leg had been sucked into the floor up to my hip, while my right leg was raised above it. I was basically doing the splits. I still didn't realize what had happened. I saw my husband thrown up to the ceiling and crash back down. I looked ahead and there was no floor, no mattresses, no blankets – everything had disappeared."

Still trying to make sense of it, she looked around for the child, but couldn't find him.

"I turned to my sister-in-law, who was shouting, 'Missile! Missile! We've been bombed!' I looked to my left – where there used to be a room, there was nothing left but rubble. Only then did I hear the explosion," she says. "The missile had sucked half the house down before it exploded. It's true what they say – when a missile hits a house, you don't hear the explosion right away. The sound comes from far off, like a soft poof. Then the lights went out, and stones and mortar started falling on me. That's when I finally understood – we'd been bombed."

Tatiana's son Mohammed and her stepson Shadi managed to pull her and baby Mahmoud from the rubble. They survived, but nine family members didn't, including Ahlam, her husband's first wife and Mahmoud's grandmother.

"We have a saying here – the innards also quarrel inside the belly," Tatiana says of her relationship with Ahlam. "Of course we fought. There was yelling, there was everything. But we respected each other. We helped each other. I miss her so much."

That horror came just weeks after another particularly painful blow.

On the night between October 26 and 27, another missile strike killed Tatiana's stepdaughter Sujud, her husband, their three children, and more than 30 people from his extended family. Tatiana's 7-year-old step grandson, Mouatez – the first grandchild in the family and her favorite – was among the dead.

"He was the apple of my eye," she says. "I raised him. He was always with me."

Despite these unimaginable losses, Tatiana can't imagine leaving Gaza if it means leaving her family behind.

"In Ukraine, they say, 'We don't leave our people behind.' And neither will I," she says of the place she's called home since 1998. That's when she followed her husband Mahmoud back to Gaza, after the two met in her hometown of Kharkiv, where he had studied.

Once they came to Gaza together, Mahmoud opened a pharmacy that supported the family for years. Now, many of their relatives are dead and the pharmacy is gone, destroyed in a missile strike.

These days, Tatiana wakes up every morning with one purpose: to save the ones who are still alive. There are ten of them left: Tatiana and her husband, their two children – 24-year-old Mohammed and 25-year-old Diana – her granddaughter, her daughter's husband, her stepson Shadi, his wife and their two children.

Encouraging displacement

The story of the al-Mabhouh family reflects the full scale of the horrors in Gaza since the war began. In phone conversations and voice messages, with explosions audible in the background sometimes, Tatiana recounts the winter of 2024, when the family went hungry and baked bread from chicken feed and oats normally used to feed donkeys.

She talks about living under a crumbling asbestos roof; about being displaced again and again – first within Gaza City, then to the south, and then back; about her husband's worsening Alzheimer's; about the killing of countless relatives, both close and distant.

And while this story may sound extraordinary, it's not unique. For historical, social, and economic reasons, dozens of families formed in Gaza in the 1990s and early 2000s – between post-Soviet women and Palestinian men. Russia recently stated that 67 Russian citizens and their families are still in Gaza, but the country has no plans to evacuate them. It claims to have already evacuated about 1,200 people early in the war – Russian citizens, their companions, and underage children.

Ukraine says it has evacuated over 500 people in four operations during the war's early stages. As of now, nearly 140 Ukrainian citizens and over 200 of their family members remain in Gaza. Haaretz is also aware of at least one family with a Kazakhstani-born woman still trying to find a way out. Some weren't permitted to leave in the war's early days, while many others chose to stay with loved ones who weren't on the evacuation lists.

Now, with Gaza in ruins and a military operation underway to retake Gaza City, most of these women are knocking on every possible door in hopes of escaping. The first door is Ukraine's – a country that has seen millions of its citizens welcomed as refugees across Europe and beyond, including several thousand in Israel.

At first, a group of Ukrainian women already outside Gaza – who've been advocating for their relatives' evacuation – were told that another evacuation wasn't possible. Later, they were informed that they had until August 30 to submit to the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel the names of people who are Ukrainian citizens, in order to facilitate a possible evacuation.

Following a query by Haaretz, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel said it had reached out to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask whether relatives of Ukrainian citizens – who are not themselves citizens – could also be included. As of this writing, there has been no response from the Ministry.

Israel's shift in policy

Until recently, Israel had made it extremely difficult for Gazans to leave. In March 2024, Haaretz reported on two young people – children of Ukrainian women – who were barred from evacuating with their families because they were labeled "security threats" by the Shin Bet. But since then, Israel's stance has completely shifted: as long as there is a country willing to accept a particular Gazan resident and handle the logistics of their evacuation, Israel will allow them to leave.

A security official told Haaretz that following U.S. President Donald Trump's public endorsement of a plan to transfer Gazans out of the Strip, Israel's government decided to make it easier for Palestinians to leave. As part of that shift, security restrictions have been significantly loosened. "There has been a significant easing of security criteria," the source said, which has accelerated evacuations. The Shin Bet declined to comment on how the criteria changed or how those changes have been implemented.

According to the same source, at least 95 percent of current evacuation requests are being approved – compared to much lower approval rates prior to this policy change. Some of those who were denied exit before may now be allowed to leave.

Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories reports that between November 2023 – when Israel began permitting Gaza evacuations – and May 2024, when the IDF entered Rafah and the border crossing was shut down, approximately 30,000 people were evacuated from Gaza with Israeli authorization. These included foreign nationals, their families, medical patients and their companions.

Between June 2024 and the start of the cease-fire in January 2025, around 1,200 people left Gaza, most of them medical patients. Israel has offered two main routes: evacuees can be driven to Ramon Airport if the receiving country provides a plane, or to the Allenby Bridge, from where they can cross into Jordan. During the most recent cease-fire, after the Rafah crossing briefly reopened, about 4,400 more people left. Since March – when Israel violated the cease-fire and began easing exit procedures – another 3,000 have been evacuated.

Evacuations are now taking place once a week, with dozens or even hundreds leaving each time. Israel, the source said, hopes to increase that pace. Whether evacuees will be allowed to return to Gaza in the future is a question that, according to the source, will have to be decided by the Israeli government.

Morally indefensible and difficult to implement

The transfer plan publicly backed by President Trump in January and February – and embraced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a series of comments and public statements – presents the global community with a profound moral and political dilemma. On the one hand, it's clear that so-called "voluntary departure" from a devastated Gaza can't truly be voluntary. In these conditions, no decision to leave can be made freely. These aren't typical refugees either – the assumption that war refugees can return home after the conflict ends doesn't apply here, as history in Israel has repeatedly shown.

Despite rumors of negotiations with usually extremely poor, war-torn countries willing to admit large numbers of Palestinians, no such deals have materialized. Former and current Israeli officials have told Haaretz that, in their estimation, no country will agree to such a move. It would likely violate international law, be morally indefensible, and extremely difficult to carry out logistically and financially.

Yet, countless Gazans are desperate to escape. If the world is unwilling to give them shelter, is that any more ethical?

With no comprehensive solution in sight, countries have turned to partial fixes. In December 2023, Canada announced a plan to temporarily admit 5,000 Gazans who have relatives that are Canadian citizens or residents. But by January 2025, only 645 Gazans had arrived in Canada. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs told Haaretz the low number was due to the extreme difficulty of leaving Gaza – factors, they said, that were beyond Canada's control.

Other countries have taken a stricter stance. Norway, for example, evacuated around 200 of its citizens from Gaza but refused to take their non-citizen relatives. However, like other Western countries, it has accepted a small number of medical patients through a World Health Organization mechanism.

"I need him like I need water"

In the meantime, Ukrainian women from Gaza aren't thinking about the future. They're trying to survive the present.

One of them is Tatiana Abu Odeh, a mother of four daughters. Today, she's living in the Cairo suburbs with three of her daughters and two grandchildren. They got there after fleeing their bombed-out home in Beit Lahia during the winter of 2023–2024, initially traveling through shelled Odessa and then into Egypt.

On their way south, they found a cart and pushed it as they walked. They carried with them, for safety, a Ukrainian flag. On March 7, 2024, they arrived at the Rafah Border Crossing, hoping her husband Nidal and the partners of her three eldest daughters would also be allowed to leave, even though their names weren't on the evacuation list. They weren't.

At the last moment, Tatiana's just-married daughter pushed her onto the evacuation bus, telling her she'd stay behind – with her father and new husband. "Go. Work to get us out. We'll be allowed to leave, too," she said.

Eighteen months have passed since then.

The daughter and her husband, who stayed in Gaza, have since had a baby with a serious heart condition. Abu Odeh says the child's father has wasted away. "He weighs 44 kilos. A walking skeleton. Only the eyes remain." In January, during the cease-fire, they made it to Cairo, hoping to reunite with the rest of the family – but they still fear men will be left behind while women and children who escaped find no rest and no peace.

Rimma Alrifi, who lives on the outskirts of Kyiv, is also waiting – for her husband Adel, who's stranded in Gaza. The family relocated to Ukraine in 2019. After a few years, Adel, who has Ukrainian residency but not citizenship, returned to Gaza to visit his ailing mother. Then the war broke out.

Now, Rimma is raising their five children – four sons and a daughter – on her own. Without their father in the home, she says, discipline has completely broken down, and she's struggling to manage. "I must have him here. I need him like I need water," she says. Like many Ukrainian-Gazan women, Rimma has been recording video pleas to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asking for help.

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Ukrainian Women in Gaza

Aug 31, 2025

'When a Missile Hits, You Don't Hear the Explosion': Ukrainian Women in Gaza Dream of Their Homeland

Ukrainian women who made Gaza their home aren't concerned with politics: they just want to save their families and are calling on their war-torn homeland – from which millions have fled – to take back its refugees

It was December 2023, not long after the war broke out. Tatiana, a 54-year-old Ukrainian-born woman, was in the house her family had just evacuated to in the Jabalya Refugee Camp. She was getting ready to tuck in her 1-year-old step grandson, Mahmoud, when she heard a strange sound.

"It sounded like a vacuum cleaner," she recalls in a phone call from Gaza with Haaretz. "I didn't understand what was happening. I looked down and saw that my left leg had been sucked into the floor up to my hip, while my right leg was raised above it. I was basically doing the splits. I still didn't realize what had happened. I saw my husband thrown up to the ceiling and crash back down. I looked ahead and there was no floor, no mattresses, no blankets – everything had disappeared."

Still trying to make sense of it, she looked around for the child, but couldn't find him.

"I turned to my sister-in-law, who was shouting, 'Missile! Missile! We've been bombed!' I looked to my left – where there used to be a room, there was nothing left but rubble. Only then did I hear the explosion," she says. "The missile had sucked half the house down before it exploded. It's true what they say – when a missile hits a house, you don't hear the explosion right away. The sound comes from far off, like a soft poof. Then the lights went out, and stones and mortar started falling on me. That's when I finally understood – we'd been bombed."

Tatiana's son Mohammed and her stepson Shadi managed to pull her and baby Mahmoud from the rubble. They survived, but nine family members didn't, including Ahlam, her husband's first wife and Mahmoud's grandmother.

"We have a saying here – the innards also quarrel inside the belly," Tatiana says of her relationship with Ahlam. "Of course we fought. There was yelling, there was everything. But we respected each other. We helped each other. I miss her so much."

That horror came just weeks after another particularly painful blow.

On the night between October 26 and 27, another missile strike killed Tatiana's stepdaughter Sujud, her husband, their three children, and more than 30 people from his extended family. Tatiana's 7-year-old step grandson, Mouatez – the first grandchild in the family and her favorite – was among the dead.

"He was the apple of my eye," she says. "I raised him. He was always with me."

Despite these unimaginable losses, Tatiana can't imagine leaving Gaza if it means leaving her family behind.

"In Ukraine, they say, 'We don't leave our people behind.' And neither will I," she says of the place she's called home since 1998. That's when she followed her husband Mahmoud back to Gaza, after the two met in her hometown of Kharkiv, where he had studied.

Once they came to Gaza together, Mahmoud opened a pharmacy that supported the family for years. Now, many of their relatives are dead and the pharmacy is gone, destroyed in a missile strike.

These days, Tatiana wakes up every morning with one purpose: to save the ones who are still alive. There are ten of them left: Tatiana and her husband, their two children – 24-year-old Mohammed and 25-year-old Diana – her granddaughter, her daughter's husband, her stepson Shadi, his wife and their two children.

Encouraging displacement

The story of the al-Mabhouh family reflects the full scale of the horrors in Gaza since the war began. In phone conversations and voice messages, with explosions audible in the background sometimes, Tatiana recounts the winter of 2024, when the family went hungry and baked bread from chicken feed and oats normally used to feed donkeys.

She talks about living under a crumbling asbestos roof; about being displaced again and again – first within Gaza City, then to the south, and then back; about her husband's worsening Alzheimer's; about the killing of countless relatives, both close and distant.

And while this story may sound extraordinary, it's not unique. For historical, social, and economic reasons, dozens of families formed in Gaza in the 1990s and early 2000s – between post-Soviet women and Palestinian men. Russia recently stated that 67 Russian citizens and their families are still in Gaza, but the country has no plans to evacuate them. It claims to have already evacuated about 1,200 people early in the war – Russian citizens, their companions, and underage children.

Ukraine says it has evacuated over 500 people in four operations during the war's early stages. As of now, nearly 140 Ukrainian citizens and over 200 of their family members remain in Gaza. Haaretz is also aware of at least one family with a Kazakhstani-born woman still trying to find a way out. Some weren't permitted to leave in the war's early days, while many others chose to stay with loved ones who weren't on the evacuation lists.

Now, with Gaza in ruins and a military operation underway to retake Gaza City, most of these women are knocking on every possible door in hopes of escaping. The first door is Ukraine's – a country that has seen millions of its citizens welcomed as refugees across Europe and beyond, including several thousand in Israel.

At first, a group of Ukrainian women already outside Gaza – who've been advocating for their relatives' evacuation – were told that another evacuation wasn't possible. Later, they were informed that they had until August 30 to submit to the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel the names of people who are Ukrainian citizens, in order to facilitate a possible evacuation.

Following a query by Haaretz, the Ukrainian Embassy in Israel said it had reached out to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to ask whether relatives of Ukrainian citizens – who are not themselves citizens – could also be included. As of this writing, there has been no response from the Ministry.

Israel's shift in policy

Until recently, Israel had made it extremely difficult for Gazans to leave. In March 2024, Haaretz reported on two young people – children of Ukrainian women – who were barred from evacuating with their families because they were labeled "security threats" by the Shin Bet. But since then, Israel's stance has completely shifted: as long as there is a country willing to accept a particular Gazan resident and handle the logistics of their evacuation, Israel will allow them to leave.

A security official told Haaretz that following U.S. President Donald Trump's public endorsement of a plan to transfer Gazans out of the Strip, Israel's government decided to make it easier for Palestinians to leave. As part of that shift, security restrictions have been significantly loosened. "There has been a significant easing of security criteria," the source said, which has accelerated evacuations. The Shin Bet declined to comment on how the criteria changed or how those changes have been implemented.

According to the same source, at least 95 percent of current evacuation requests are being approved – compared to much lower approval rates prior to this policy change. Some of those who were denied exit before may now be allowed to leave.

Israel's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories reports that between November 2023 – when Israel began permitting Gaza evacuations – and May 2024, when the IDF entered Rafah and the border crossing was shut down, approximately 30,000 people were evacuated from Gaza with Israeli authorization. These included foreign nationals, their families, medical patients and their companions.

Between June 2024 and the start of the cease-fire in January 2025, around 1,200 people left Gaza, most of them medical patients. Israel has offered two main routes: evacuees can be driven to Ramon Airport if the receiving country provides a plane, or to the Allenby Bridge, from where they can cross into Jordan. During the most recent cease-fire, after the Rafah crossing briefly reopened, about 4,400 more people left. Since March – when Israel violated the cease-fire and began easing exit procedures – another 3,000 have been evacuated.

Evacuations are now taking place once a week, with dozens or even hundreds leaving each time. Israel, the source said, hopes to increase that pace. Whether evacuees will be allowed to return to Gaza in the future is a question that, according to the source, will have to be decided by the Israeli government.

Morally indefensible and difficult to implement

The transfer plan publicly backed by President Trump in January and February – and embraced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a series of comments and public statements – presents the global community with a profound moral and political dilemma. On the one hand, it's clear that so-called "voluntary departure" from a devastated Gaza can't truly be voluntary. In these conditions, no decision to leave can be made freely. These aren't typical refugees either – the assumption that war refugees can return home after the conflict ends doesn't apply here, as history in Israel has repeatedly shown.

Despite rumors of negotiations with usually extremely poor, war-torn countries willing to admit large numbers of Palestinians, no such deals have materialized. Former and current Israeli officials have told Haaretz that, in their estimation, no country will agree to such a move. It would likely violate international law, be morally indefensible, and extremely difficult to carry out logistically and financially.

Yet, countless Gazans are desperate to escape. If the world is unwilling to give them shelter, is that any more ethical?

With no comprehensive solution in sight, countries have turned to partial fixes. In December 2023, Canada announced a plan to temporarily admit 5,000 Gazans who have relatives that are Canadian citizens or residents. But by January 2025, only 645 Gazans had arrived in Canada. Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs told Haaretz the low number was due to the extreme difficulty of leaving Gaza – factors, they said, that were beyond Canada's control.

Other countries have taken a stricter stance. Norway, for example, evacuated around 200 of its citizens from Gaza but refused to take their non-citizen relatives. However, like other Western countries, it has accepted a small number of medical patients through a World Health Organization mechanism.

"I need him like I need water"

In the meantime, Ukrainian women from Gaza aren't thinking about the future. They're trying to survive the present.

One of them is Tatiana Abu Odeh, a mother of four daughters. Today, she's living in the Cairo suburbs with three of her daughters and two grandchildren. They got there after fleeing their bombed-out home in Beit Lahia during the winter of 2023–2024, initially traveling through shelled Odessa and then into Egypt.

On their way south, they found a cart and pushed it as they walked. They carried with them, for safety, a Ukrainian flag. On March 7, 2024, they arrived at the Rafah Border Crossing, hoping her husband Nidal and the partners of her three eldest daughters would also be allowed to leave, even though their names weren't on the evacuation list. They weren't.

At the last moment, Tatiana's just-married daughter pushed her onto the evacuation bus, telling her she'd stay behind – with her father and new husband. "Go. Work to get us out. We'll be allowed to leave, too," she said.

Eighteen months have passed since then.

The daughter and her husband, who stayed in Gaza, have since had a baby with a serious heart condition. Abu Odeh says the child's father has wasted away. "He weighs 44 kilos. A walking skeleton. Only the eyes remain." In January, during the cease-fire, they made it to Cairo, hoping to reunite with the rest of the family – but they still fear men will be left behind while women and children who escaped find no rest and no peace.

Rimma Alrifi, who lives on the outskirts of Kyiv, is also waiting – for her husband Adel, who's stranded in Gaza. The family relocated to Ukraine in 2019. After a few years, Adel, who has Ukrainian residency but not citizenship, returned to Gaza to visit his ailing mother. Then the war broke out.

Now, Rimma is raising their five children – four sons and a daughter – on her own. Without their father in the home, she says, discipline has completely broken down, and she's struggling to manage. "I must have him here. I need him like I need water," she says. Like many Ukrainian-Gazan women, Rimma has been recording video pleas to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, asking for help.

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Art by Shinsyl

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like a friend - danloumand (parts 2/3)

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(TW: Sex - educational post about sexual thoughts) 

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

„Is it normal to have weird sexual thoughts or is something wrong with me?“ is a much more common worry than you may think - and that is because most people actually experience weird sexual thoughts occasionally. 

These „weird“ thoughts may include: 

sex with someone who is „off limits“ (a teacher, your boss, the partner of your best friend etc.) 

sex with someone who doesn’t match your sexual orientation (a man but you’re not attracted to men at all etc.) 

sexual acts that you would find repulsive, gross or painful in real life 

sex in inappropriate places (in front of strangers etc.) 

For most people, these are fleeting thoughts or mental images - they pop up randomly, you think „that was weird“ and then you move on with your day. 

That’s actually perfectly normal! In fact, it happens to almost everyone. It’s just like all the other random, weird things that pop up in your head for a split second during the day. Like when you pick up a box of cereal in the store and suddenly think „what if I threw this on the ground and stomped on it“, or when you wait for the train and suddenly this image flashes through your brain of you jumping in front of it. 

And then you just put the cereal in your cart and continue shopping. And then you just board the train and drive home. And you forget that weird little thought almost as suddenly as it came on - because it didn’t reflect any actual desire to cause a scene in the supermarket or to harm yourself. Your brain is just constantly working and assessing the situation, and it just misfired for a split second there. It means nothing. It’s basically just a reminder you’re alive. 

We may attach a greater significance to sexual thoughts because we, obviously, want our sexual actions to match our actual values and desires - but really it’s the same thing. Sometimes your brain just misfires and goes „What if you fucked your boss right here during the meeting with everyone watching, would that be weird or what“. Yeah, it would be, brain, thanks for randomly checking in on that. We had no intention of doing that anyway.  

For some people, it can be hard to forget and move on from these thoughts. You have that thought during the meeting and instead of being able to go „Yeah it would be weird, whatever“, you start to panic. You analyze the thought over and over (Am I secretly attracted to my boss? Does this represent some deep hidden aspect of myself? Am I a pervert? Am I a sex addict? Am I crazy?) or you desperately try to suppress it (I can’t be thinking such disgusting things, I don’t want to be a disgusting person, I need to get this thought out of my head immediately, it’s not normal to have such thoughts, what if I think about it too hard and lose control and act on it) - and this desperate attempt of analyzing or suppressing gives the perfectly harmless little brain misfiring an importance it doesn’t deserve. The more you think about the unwanted thought, the louder it gets. 

This is for example a common pattern in OCD or anxiety. It can also happen in autism (because your thinking is more rigid and you may have trouble accepting your own thoughts as untrue). 

It may also be connected to a strict set of moral beliefs around sex. For example, if you feel a lot of pressure to be „sexually pure“. 

But regardless of why you have this pattern of obsessing over these, normally fleeting, unwanted thoughts (inadvertently making them stay longer): they still don’t mean anything. You do not secretly want to act on them. It’s not your „hidden dark side shining through“ or anything like that. It’s still just your brain misfiring occasionally as all brains do! 

So, at which point are these thoughts actually no longer normal? 

You may think „When they cause you distress“ now, and that’s true in the sense that this is the point where it can be a good idea to seek professional help. If these thoughts cause you lasting feelings of stress, depression, anxiety, shame, self-hatred etc. (not just a quick „Huh that was weird“), then you may benefit from talking to a doctor or therapist. This also applies if the thoughts (and all the analyzing and/or suppressing them) 

cause you to isolate yourself (skip school or work, skip social events, cut friends off etc.)

make you perform repetitive behaviors (as punishment or protection, such as washing your hands or asking your friends for reassurance that you never sexually abused them) 

get in the way of your daily tasks (eating, showering, going to work, sleeping etc.) 

But a very important point: those are all signs you may need help to learn to cope with these unwanted thoughts - these are not signs that you’ll act on the unwanted thoughts. The distress you feel actually shows that you are VERY unlikely to ever act on them! If you wanted to act on them, you wouldn’t feel stressed out by them. 

Doctors are aware of this. You don’t need to worry that your doctor will think you’re a sexual predator if you tell them you experience intrusive sexual thoughts. They know better. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Dad 

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I need you folks who are going back to school to understand this, sleep deprivation is not something to be proud of. You are being fed capitalist propaganda to make you believe that working yourself to the bone is a good and smart business model from a young age. If all you do is “get 3 hours of sleep” because you’re studying, you’re just gonna burn out quicker, forget the information you’re trying to cram, and cause your brain to cannibalize itself.

Do not compete by making unhealthy habits. This will only fuck you up in the long run.

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plus a lot of people live in this fantasy land where physical health problems are taken seriously and addressed immediately. like they think if you faint you get rushed to the hospital and everyone spends days and nights investigating what's wrong. instead you will spend 6+ hours in A&E waiting room only for someone to be like "well you seem fine now" and discharge you. you can be coughing blood every day, or throwing up anything you eat for weeks or months, and the people around you will not mobilise to find out what's wrong. if you can't self advocate or have someone very dedicated to advocating for you, you're outta luck

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do it scared do it stupid do it alone etc etc but don’t do it hungry. eat a snack first

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i wish there was an easier way to tell the difference between an "if it sucks hit da bricks" situation and a "sometimes being an adult means doing things that you dont wanna" situation

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"But most police officers are good."

No they're not.

In the general population, there are good people and there are bad people. And every police officer is a member of the general population who decided to become a police officer. The police are not a demographic. Every single police officer chose to be a police officer.

Therefore, if most police officers are good, then that means the police force is designed in such a way that good people are drawn to it while bad people are pushed away from it.

And that's been proven to be false many times.

The police are only as good as the laws they enforce and the standards they're held to.

As long as there are laws against victimless actions, people who only want to protect society from dangerous monsters while defending everyone's freedom are pushed away from the police force, and people who get a sick pleasure from ruining people's lives in order to boost their own egos are drawn to the police force.

As long as the police are able to abuse people and get away with it, people who believe in using as little force as necessary are pushed away from the police force, and people who were bullies in high school and want to be even bigger bullies while being seen as the good guys are drawn to the police force.

As long as capitalists who destroy other people in order to increase profits are considered smart businesspeople while poor people who steal food in order to survive are considered criminals, people who wish to improve society are pushed away from the police force, and people who wish to further traumatize those who are already suffering are drawn to the police force.

If you think most police officers are good, what is being done to draw in good people, and what is being done to push away bad people? If you're so sure that the police are good, then you'd have to have an answer to that. But for some reason, you never do.

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Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of free resources for different sign languages:

American Sign Language (ASL)

Australian Sign Language (Auslan)

Black American Sign Language (BASL)

British Sign Language (BSL)

Chinese Sign Language (CSL)

Emirati Sign Language (ESL)

French Sign Language (LSF)

Indian Sign Language (ISL)

International Sign Language (IS)

Irish Sign Language (ISL)

Japanese Sign Language (JSL)

Mexican Sign Language (LSM)

Plains Indian Sign Language (PISL)

Ukrainian Sign Language (USL)

Please feel free to add on if you know of others, be it more resource for one of the sign languages above, or resources for learning any of the other 300 plus sign languages.

[calmerut]

In 8️⃣ days, Miss Minutes will return in Loki Season 2!

[calmerut]

arya was having trouble finishing her homework

it turned into a group project

[calmerut]

ive said it before and ill say it again: the most valuable skill ive ever learned and im still learning to this day is how to vet information and think critically about it.

ask yourself:

• what is the main point/points of this information i have read or heard?

• is this information neutral? is there leaning of support towards a specific side or cause? is emotional language used and if so, in what way is it used? what parts of this information is it used to emphasis?

• who is telling me this information? what is the benefit to this person if I choose to believe this information? (note: this is often seen as negative but can is also neutral - is it awareness? clout? are they selling a product or service? are they a believer or involved in a cause? is this their field of expertise?)

• how was this information produced/discovered? who funded it? who discovered it? what are their affiliations? again, what do they gain if i believe this information?

• does this information come from other sources? do they agree with it or disagree with it? what kinds of evidence do they have that support or deny it?

being able to stop and ask yourself questions like this is key in order to fight misinformation and propaganda, which is so easily spread with social media.

[calmerut]

origins of the wheel of time

I was originally planning on reading Origins of The Wheel of Time after my reread of the last three books, but it has arrived and also is so much shorter, so I’m going to read it first instead, lol. It’s not a narrative, but I’m intrigued to find out what it has to say about the series. I’m not entirely sure if it’s written more like a sourcebook or whatnot. 

My thoughts contain spoilers through a memory of light

1. Okay, looks like it’s broken into four sections – first will be a bit of a biography of Jordan, then there’s specifically a whole section about how Tolkien inspired him, then his writing process perhaps (the summary on the inside of the book cover notes that there’s a previously unseen early draft of a cut scene from Eye of the World, so maybe that’s there; and then one about “the real world” comparisons (mythology-related maybe; I know that there’s a lot of mythological connections tied into the imagery, especially with Rand, Mat, & Perrin).

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