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I don’t identify as “male” or “female”. I identify as a problem

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When the whole party is down but your bard is up

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🎠 Abandoned amusement park 🎠

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Sometimes u just gotta run into your not-boyfriends house at 10:30 and throw flowers at him to show your intentions.

(who is she trying to kid she’s been standing in the shop since 9 on the dot waiting for Sebastian to wake up)

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HR: if they work 40 hours a week u have to give them benefits

Big company: hmm okay. They shall work 39

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So it seems you can tell the different sizes of Pumpkaboo apart, even from the overworld. 

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Do you ever just… crave the forest? Like you feel like you NEED to be in a forest. The crisp cold air with just a sweater on, looking at the red and orange foliage in the autumn. In the winter the frigid and empty branches. The summer all the green. The spring the smell of rain and the mud. God I love the forest.

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New Release: The Nine Songs 【-The Evening Butterfly-】 Series

◆ Shopping Link! >>> https://www.lolitawardrobe.com/search/?&Keyword=The+Evening+Butterfly&Sort=3d

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New Release: Michiko 【-Cute Cat-】 Sweet Lolita Bag

◆ Very Very Limited Quantity! >>> https://www.lolitawardrobe.com/michiko-cute-cat-sweet-lolita-bag_p5592.html

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UPDATE: 【-The Whisper of Stars-】 Jumper Dresses Can Be Added with【-Star Hemline-】 NOW!!!

◆ Shopping Link! >>> https://www.lolitawardrobe.com/with-star-hemline-the-whisper-of-stars-lolita-jumper-dresses_p5593.html

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u ever rb something and then realize who the op is and then u gotta scramble to slap that shit off ur blog

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This Blog Is Unrepentantly Pro- AO3!

This blogger remembers when we didn’t have AO3.

This blogger remembers when we had to put disclaimers at the head of our fics and pray that someone didn’t take it into their heads to sue us for what we created.

This blogger remembers brilliant artists and writers getting decades of work obliterated on LJ because someone who wanted to tell people what they were allowed to create went running to someone who wanted a profit, and told them the artists and writers had been naughty.

This blogger remembers just how hard the creators of AO3 worked to build the thing we all seem to take for granted now.

This blogger watched friends dive into the creation process so heartily and determinedly that they all but disappeared from the writing/gaming/artistic side of their fandom for YEARS while they worked to make the archive happen.

This blogger remembers the sense of giddy wonder that there would possibly be LAWYERS involved, willing to defend our right to create these works, and not leave us hanging at the mercy of corporate legal teams.

This blogger is aware that she reads between twenty to fifty books’ worth of material every year on AO3, and is never REQUIRED to pay a penny for the privilege of getting access.

This blogger is aware that she will not ever see advertisements on AO3, and that her personal data and reading preferences won’t be sold to advertisers in order to raise the money that AO3 needs to pay for the services they provide.

This blogger is aware that AO3 is, and has always been, a labor of love; by fans, for fans, and not for profiting off fans – and this is what makes it unique in the whole of the media universe.

This blogger has NEVER taken AO3 for granted, and has ALWAYS been damned glad to have access to it.  Even in years when this blogger didn’t have the means to support it financially.

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That was my biggest irritation in school-- being told to never use Wikipedia, but never taught an alternative. To this day I'm shit when it comes to researching anything because I simply don't know how to go about finding what information I'm looking for or judging reliable sources from unreliable ones/useful information from less than helpful trivia. And no, just typing what you want to know into Google doesn't always work.

I keep seeing a tweet on my dash that says something along the lines of “teaching kids Wikipedia is unreliable as a source is the biggest scam from school” and while I agree with the sentiment behind it, because there really isn’t anything comparable to Wikipedia in terms of scope and currency, it’s an over simplification of why a professor/teacher wouldn’t want Wikipedia as a source.

People have pointed out the obvious thing here: Wikipedia is a great place to find source material as a jumping off point for research. As someone who teaches people how to do research as a job, I 100% encourage them to check out Wikipedia. The process of reading something easily accessible and then heading to their sources so you can read those too is a really common research method. (You can also type those sources into google scholar and see what they cited as sources and find more material that way. Reverse citation searching is a quick and easy way to build up a lot of sources for a paper.) If your teacher is telling you not to use Wikipedia and still encouraging you to use other encyclopedias (which aren’t as up to date or as accessible), they’re wrong, straight up. That’s what researchers do with an encyclopedia. That’s how they’re supposed to be used—quick intro to a subject, more detailed sources, a jumping off place for in-depth study.

But here’s the thing: Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, but mostly it’s not. Mostly it’s edited by white, straight, cis men. That means that when you look at articles about people of colour, about women, about LGBTQA+ people, and any other marginalized or underrepresented group, you’re largely not getting as knowledgeable a view as you would from someone in the community. This is changing! There are a lot of great people working hard to make Wikipedia more diverse, but it’s going to take time and there are still major gaps. For example, there are way more entries about cool things dead white guys did than cool things anyone else did.

Wikipedia is written in objective language—no value statements allowed—because that’s how you write an encyclopedia. But that language often masks inherent bias. I don’t necessarily mean malicious bias. In many cases, entries are being written by non-experts and you can’t know what you don’t know and sometimes there isn’t an easily located source for that information. For example, the names of First Nations communities in Canada differ greatly between the name bands are registered as with the government of Canada and what they call themselves. While both names are technically correct, in general you should call someone what they want to be called because that’s their real name, the one they use for themselves. On Wikipedia, those names are largely unused or are marked as secondary because the government’s register is regarded as the most authoritative list—so Indigenous peoples aren’t allowed to name themselves and are instead named by settler-colonial governments. This is a pretty obvious bias.

If everyone uses Wikipedia for their research, even just as a starting point, and if everyone uses the same sources that Wikipedia uses, then you only ever get one point of view. One view, raised up as the authoritative one, with maybe a “Criticisms of [blank]” section to read for a brief bit of contrast, and that’s it.

Part of learning to do research as a student is learning information literacy—learning to find, evaluate, and use information. Teachers are trying to teach critical thinking skills, and part of not allowing Wikipedia for research is to encourage students to think about where their information comes from and who’s writing it. It is supposed to encourage some healthy skepticism, creating a classroom environment where people need to look to multiple places and learn how to use many different kinds of research tools so they’re better prepared to evaluate and refute, for example, celebrities claiming that vaccines cause autism (they don’t) or that Barack Obama was born in Kenya (he wasn’t). Am I saying every teacher was great at conveying that? No, definitely not—I’m sure some teachers just said Wikipedia was unreliable because anyone could edit it. But that’s not the full story and please y’all, there is some legitimate reasoning behind what does seem like an otherwise outdated and arbitrary rule.

Most households have an unsolved Rubik’s Cube? Use the Rubik’s Cube solver to calculate the solution in just five minutes.

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Character A tilting Character B’s chin up to get a better look at their face and the evidence of the fight. A delicately thumbs away the streak of blood by B’s mouth, saying nothing as they examine it. After a brief pause, B’s heart skips a nervous beat as A looks them dead in the eyes. Their voice is quiet and tense, their anger barely restrained.

“Who did this to you?”

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Some things I’m learning on this personal ADHD-diagnosis journey:

Some doctors will dismiss you when you admit that, yes, you got straight As in school and were never a classroom disturbance. 

But that doesn’t erase the truth:

I got straight As because I liked school, liked learning, and wasn’t bored.

When I was bored in the classroom, I wrote novels instead of paying attention; that was quiet. I daydreamed all the time; so quiet. After being caught at this once or twice, my ADHD-sensitivity to criticism (rejection sensitivity dysphoria) clicked in and I realized if I answered a question at the beginning of class, the teacher would ignore me for the rest and never put me on the spot. I slipped headphones under my long hair and listened to CDs. Do you know how many times I listened to Tori Amos’s “Winter” on repeat in math class? How many times I invented “Student Council business” to get out of a class that was boring me to rage or tears? Do they care that, even though you got straight As, you missed more than a month of school days in your senior year because you just couldn’t deal with it anymore?

(Absences, I learned, mean nothing if you have straight As. Lies about how you spend your time mean nothing. Listening to the same song over and over and over to drown out the boredom means nothing.)

They don’t ask if all those papers and assignments that got those good grades were completed in a panic the night before after breaking down crying because how could I be so stupid, I knew this was going to happen, why can’t I stop procrastinating, why can’t I just have more willpower, why I am I such a failure? They don’t ask if you can’t finish work without a deadline, and that if the deadline is too vague or far away it means nothing except that you have longer to procrastinate until you panic. They don’t ask how many times you’ve started something and been unable to finish even though you want to, you really really want to. But you can’t. You know it doesn’t make sense. Knowing changes nothing.

Did you get bad grades? Were you a classroom disturbance? What were your report cards like?

They don’t ask if you’re living up to your potential. They don’t ask if knowing you’re not living up to your potential is the slow poison that taints every other aspect of your life.

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Some doctors will say, “ADHD involves impulsivity. Were you promiscuous, did you have problems with drugs or alcohol?” And you will say, “No.” They will dismiss you.

They will not ask if you have a history of overspending, of impulse buying even when your brain says, “Sweetheart, you know you can’t afford that.” They won’t ask if you’re able to be patient when you want attention or feedback or praise. They won’t ask if you’ve pretended that some new piece of clothing was older, or bought second-hand. They won’t ask how much of those university loans you spent not on tuition, but on feeding the pleasure center of your brain that just wants more. More pretty dresses, more video games, more chocolate.

They will not ask how much time you spend on the internet, refreshing pages because you just can’t focus on anything else, and refreshing pages is easy, and might mean a little dopamine hit. They will not ask about the intensity of your interests. When you say the word “hyperfixation” they look uncomfortable, like you know a word you’re not supposed to know. Like they might have to take you seriously.

They’ll still dismiss you, though. You got good grades, you’re put together, you’re not fidgeting.

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Some doctors will interrupt you when you’re trying to explain something, and yes, your explanation involves 23 diversions because you’re trying to really explain it. Really explain it so they understand. They will hold up a hand. They will snap, “Stop talking,” and your rejection-sensitive dysphoria will cripple you. You will want to vomit. You will start to cry and pretend you’re not crying. They will say, “I think you have anxiety, take these drugs. They will say, you are depressed, take these ones.” They will not listen when you say, “But the anxiety and depression have a common root; why won’t you listen to me?” They will not listen when you say, “Why are you treating the symptoms but not the underlying cause?”

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Some doctors will treat you like you’re a drug-seeker, especially if you come in with too much knowledge (because you like learning, because you’ve always liked learning, because maybe you can’t control much of anything but you can read, read, read and cling to that knowledge like a lifeline; you can always be clever. You can always be smart. Less rejection that way.). They may narrow their eyes like you want medication for a nefarious purpose when all you really want is to be able to turn the key in the ignition and start the car. The car is good; there’s nothing mechanically wrong. The tank is full. But without a key, you cannot turn the damn thing on. And because your brain is not always your ally in these things, it whispers, “You’re imagining this. You have the key. It’s in your pocket. Just take it out.” But you don’t have a pocket. You don’t have a key. Telling yourself you do, you just need to find it, just need to manufacture it out of thin air does not make it true.

I’ve learned that to get help, the right kind of help, you sometimes have to turn yourself inside out. You have to somehow accomplish the things your condition makes most difficult: you must accept rejection, you must persevere beyond what you think possible, you must stand up for yourself over and over and get used to disagreeing with people trying to dismiss you, you must not let yourself be silenced.

I have a doctor who is listening to me now. It’s slow-going. It’s frustrating. It’s hard. The last year–more–of trying to make myself understood has been exhausting. But then, hasn’t my whole life been exhausting? Of course it has. I got good grades, I wasn’t a classroom disturbance. No one knew I was suffering. I slipped through the cracks.

The car’s been sitting idle a long time. I’ve probably done some damage to the clutch. But maybe I have a key. Maybe the car will shudder to life when I turn it.