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btw I am about to go camping. with my parents and my sister and steve and the baby and my cousin who I like but don't really know all that well. my boyfriend was going to come too but he got sick. all this is totally fine because I am so very emotionally healthy and resilient now that it's just, like, fine. camping is great. not being at my house or indeed anybody else's house. just sleeping in the woods, where the animals are, and plumbing isn't. so great. I am not even thinking about having an anxiety attack. why would I do that when it's all so totally fine

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Quotes from NIGHT WATCH by Terry Pratchett

Privilege, which just means “private law.” Two types of people laugh at the law; those that break it and those that make it.

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“Yeah, all right, but everyone knows they torture people,” mumbled Sam.

“Do they?” said Vimes. “Then why doesn’t anyone do anything about it?”

“’Cos they torture people.”

—

It wasn’t that the city was lawless. It had plenty of laws. It just didn’t offer many opportunities not to break them. Swing didn’t seem to have grasped the idea that the system was supposed to take criminals and, in some rough-and-ready fashion, force them into becoming honest men. Instead, he’d taken honest men and turned them into criminals. And the Watch, by and large, into just another gang.

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Everyone was guilty of something. Vimes knew that. Every copper knew it. That was how you maintained your authority—everyone, talking to a copper, was secretly afraid you could see their guilty secret written on their forehead. You couldn’t, of course. But neither were you supposed to drag someone off the street and smash their fingers with a hammer until they told you what it was.

—

One of the hardest lessons of young Sam’s life had been finding out that the people in charge weren’t in charge. It had been finding out that governments were not, on the whole, staffed by people who had a grip, and that plans were what people made instead of thinking.

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People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. 

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn’t measure up.

—

Where was the law? There was the barricade. Who was it protecting from what? The city was run by a madman and his shadowy chums, so where was the law?

Coppers liked to say that people shouldn’t take the law into their own hands, and they thought they knew what they meant. But they were thinking about peaceful times, and men who went around to sort out a neighbor with a club because his dog had crapped once too often on their doorstep. But at times like these, who did the law belong to? If it shouldn’t be in the hands of the people, where the hell should it be?

—

“You took an oath to uphold the law and defend the citizens without fear or favor,” said Vimes. “And to protect the innocent. That’s all they put in. Maybe they thought those were the important things. Nothing in there about orders, even from me. You’re an officer of the law, not a soldier of the government.”

—

“You’d like Freedom, Truth, and Justice, wouldn’t you, Comrade Sergeant?” said Reg encouragingly.

“I’d like a hard-boiled egg,” said Vimes, shaking the match out. 

There was some nervous laughter, but Reg looked offended. “In the circumstances, Sergeant, I think we should set our sights a little higher—” 

“Well, yes, we could,” said Vimes, coming down the steps. He glanced at the sheets of paper in front of Reg. The man cared. He really did. And he was serious. He really was. “But…well, Reg, tomorrow the sun will come up again, and I’m pretty sure that whatever happens we won’t have found Freedom, and there won’t be a whole lot of Justice, and I’m damn sure we won’t have found Truth. But it’s just possible that I might get a hard-boiled egg.“

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me, staring in the mirror: am I getting prettier?

boyfriend, warily: is this a trick question?

me: no, I just look really cute to myself lately. am I getting physically more attractive or is this just part of this whole self love trip I'm on and I've just never realized I was always this attractive?

boyfriend, relieved and dutiful: you have always been this attractive.

me, appreciative: dang! look at that!

boyfriend: I've been SAYING this WHOLE TIME--

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In the US, defendants are presumed innocent until they are proven, beyond a reasonable doubt, to be guilty. If a juror isn't completely, 100% convinced that the defendant committed the alleged crime, the juror is supposed to vote "not guilty."

I'm hesitant to post this one because I generally avoid topics speculating on individuals' lives and touchy current events, but it is a good reminder of how the US criminal justice system works. Please be polite in the comments/reblogs.

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We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

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some of my best friends i met at the devil’s sacrament

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extremely underrated subgenre of tumblr post: when someone makes a general statement about something, and another person offers a counter-statement that's just completely nonsensical, and the OP just agrees instantly even if it makes no sense at all

examples:

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i need to get up and do chores but ive posted on here before about my pet theory that autism and ADHD also have two primary subtypes on the adrenergic axis and most autists will have either primarily adrenaline-seeking or adrenaline-avoidant behaviors depending on what they're lacking, with a mixture of upregulating or downregulating behaviors that address self-regulation of minor states. prior to the DSM-5 the split of ADHD into the separate ADD and ADHD subtypes with or without hyperactivity was maybe a more helpful taxonomy in some sense. i remember in the 90s that it was a pretty big deal to differentiate between the disruptive, class clown, hyperactive kids and the morose, withdrawn, sluggish kids for this reason.

there's been a lot of cortisol testing of autistic people and they kept finding contradictory cortisol levels in their subjects until recently one paper i read proposed that rather than autists universally being all high or all low, it seemed to be the case that having normal cortisol fluctuations over the day was a sign of being non-autistic, and the autism biomarker was instead that autists tended to produce the wrong amount of cortisol either for our internal clocks, or for the environment, and that we were usually running on either too much (agitation, overstimulation) or too little (fatigue, dissociation).

how much of this is a direct result of PTSD, or even more interestingly, a cause of PTSD, is one of the interesting factors

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Clueless (1995) dir. Amy Heckerling

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cape, united states c. 1883-88.

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If you mess up a social interaction you can say "Failed Experiment" and move on

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"what's the worst thing you can do as an artist" is not "shade with black" or "not use references" or whatever the worst thing you can do as an artist is hate yourself. and that includes the person you used to be

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these three, in that order

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okay so if you've been on here 5+ years Have changed your tumblr url.... what was your first url?

get as embarrassing as you want, folks, mine was consultant-time-lord in 2011

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You're a royal attendant slowly realising that you've lost track of which of the young princess' numerous anti-assassination body doubles is the real one. The royal portraits are so idealised that they look nothing like her, so you can't figure it out that way, and the Queen is a shitty absentee mom who doesn't remember what her own daughter looks like and routinely gets them mixed up, so she'd be no help even if you dared to ask. None of them will break character. You're beginning to suspect they're doing this on purpose.

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The only adhd tips that actually work:

1. Never tell anyone what you're planning to do until you do it (you will get a premature dopamine hit and sense of accomplishment from telling them and lose motivation to actually do it)

2. Never sit down (never sit down)