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[sneaqui]

hello all! after 10 years of remission my dad was diagnosed with hodgekin's lymphoma for the second time in his life this august. since his diagnosis my family has been hit by every fucking roadblock and bad luck thing imaginable.

our insurance has decided to make everything we do incredibly difficult and my mom has been fighting for his proper care non-stop. our disability was denied because his work had accidentally been paying him full pay while on leave and now the state wants us to pay back 10k even though it was his company's mistake - or else no disability (we're going to petition this)

he's been suffering from symptoms from his chemotherapy such as intense body pain and deep neuropathy and a hernia (which needs to be removed by surgery but cannot while he's on chemo) alongside a slew of other problems. no amount of pain medication has been really helping and it's been really really awful.

we've been trying really hard to keep things all together but my mom is the only one working who makes enough to pay bills and it's just. really tough.

all this to say. i'd really really appreciate it if the link to this meal train was shared. and if possible someone were to donate.

thank you so so much

[sneaqui]

"Business owners around the country are offering up a lament: 'no one wants to work.' A McDonalds franchise said they had to close because no one wants to work; North Carolina congressman David Rouzer claimed that a too-generous welfare state has turned us all lazy as he circulated photos of a shuttered fast-food restaurant supposedly closed 'due to NO STAFF.'

Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.

A recent study from the University of California–San Francisco looks at increased morbidity rates due to COVID, stratified by profession, from the height of the pandemic last year. They find that food and agricultural workers morbidity rates increased by the widest margins by far, much more so than medical professionals or other occupations generally considered to be on the 'front lines' of the pandemic. Within the food industry, the morbidity rates of line cooks increased by 60 percent, making it the deadliest profession in America under coronavirus pandemic.

Line cooks are especially at risk because of notoriously bad ventilation systems in restaurant kitchens and preparation areas. Anyone who has ever worked a back-of-the-house job knows that it’s hot, smelly, and crowded back there, all of which indicate poor indoor air quality. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Environmental Protection Agency recommended increasing indoor ventilation to fight the virus, but such upgrades are costly and time consuming. There is no data available on how many restaurants chose not to upgrade their ventilation systems, but given how miserly franchise owners are with everything else, one could guess that many, if not most, made no upgrades at all.

Ventilation issues are deadliest for line cooks and other back-of-house jobs, but there are other reasons why food workers’ morbidity rates shot up. Food workers are much more likely to be poor and/or a racial or national minority, and poor people and black and Latino workers are much more likely to die of complications from the coronavirus.

Restaurants are often intentionally short staffed, making it difficult to take time off, so sick workers likely still came to work (and infected others in the process). Bars and restaurants are COVID-19 hotspots, and service workers and customers alike get sick after prolonged restaurant exposure. The difference is that many of those customers have health insurance and other safeguards to prevent them from dying of the illness; 69 percent of restaurants, on the other hand, offer their employees no health benefits at all.

When coronavirus is spread at restaurants, and restaurant workers make little money and rarely earn health benefits, it’s no wonder morbidity rates are so much higher for food service workers. But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers 'lazy.'

There are, of course, also living, breathing people who have decided they do not want to risk their lives for $7.25 per hour and no health benefits. That is a perfectly rational decision for the homo economicus to make. Given how dangerous restaurant work is during a viral pandemic, if restaurant owners really wanted more workers, they would offer living wages, health benefits, and adequate personal protective equipment. But all the wage increases in the world won’t bring back the dead.

There aren’t enough people working in the service industry, and service bosses have somehow turned that into our problem, into something we ought to be ashamed of. We shouldn’t fall for it. Profits accumulate because of labor — without workers to exploit, the owning class can’t get richer. Capitalists cannot exploit the labor of the dead, so when large swathes of the working class die, they turn their ire on the living.

This is a barbaric response to mass tragedy. Workers across the country and the globe are dead or grieving. We shouldn’t risk further tragedies for a paltry minimum wage."

- Sandy Barnard, "Service Workers Aren’t Lazy — They Just Don’t Want to Risk Dying for Minimum Wage." Jacobin, 5 May 2021.

[sneaqui]

—Your Love Finds Its Way Back, Sierra DeMulder

[sneaqui]

“My friend wanted to know - because Jason did a version of this on his cameo - we were wondering if Eliot and Quentin had got married in a Life in a Day or elsewhere. What do you think their wedding would have been like?”

- Lu @reidsass  <3 asking to compare to my similar question for Jason, giffed here by @cafeshopau, for their galaxy con one-on-one. giffed by their permission. If you want to see the clip, find lu on twitter!! https://twitter.com/burnbliind

[sneaqui]

AND SOMEHOW THAT MAKES SENSE, YOU KNOW?

[sneaqui]

everybody wonders what it would be like to love you

[sneaqui]

[sneaqui]

And how do you feel about turtles? Not a fan.

[sneaqui]

“I knew something was up,” Eliot said, cracking open a massive, lethal-looking crimson crab. Like Julia he never seemed to eat, but somehow he got through massive quantities of food anyway, which of course never made him any less skinny. The Magician King (The Magicians, #2) by Lev Grossman The Magicians | S03E05: A Life in the Day (2018)

[sneaqui]

Eliot + first & last eps | Your face. I’m an obsessive fan. So tell.

[sneaqui]

what strikes me even now about "i'm alive in here" is the truly stomach-turning relief of hearing a queer character say it

[sneaqui]

(~˘▾˘)~

[sneaqui]

Summary:

Queliot clothes-sharing smut.

That's it. That's the fic.

Written for Quentin Coldwater-Waugh's 28th birthday. Yeah, it's a couple days late, but he's too busy getting dicked down by his husband to care. Enjoy!

[sneaqui]

Summary:

“Look,” Eliot says, trying to remain as calm as he can manage. “I know there are a lot of timelines out there where you die before you hit thirty, but this is not one of them. In this timeline, any option that’s going to end in your death or dismemberment or life-long imprisonment is absolutely off the table. End of story.”

“So that’s the end of it? You’ve just decided for both of us?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “I have.”

An end of season 3/beginning of season 4 AU in which Eliot kills the Monster, but it doesn’t take over his body. And instead of getting memory-wiped, the gang gets captured and thrown in library jail.

A saved-from-the-underworld fic with a happy ending. Half caper and half romance with some smut thrown in.

Second half is now up!

[sneaqui]

Summary:

“Look,” Eliot says, trying to remain as calm as he can manage. “I know there are a lot of timelines out there where you die before you hit thirty, but this is not one of them. In this timeline, any option that’s going to end in your death or dismemberment or life-long imprisonment is absolutely off the table. End of story.”

“So that’s the end of it? You’ve just decided for both of us?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “I have.”

An end of season 3/beginning of season 4 AU in which Eliot kills the Monster, but it doesn’t take over his body. And instead of getting memory-wiped, the gang gets captured and thrown in library jail.

A saved-from-the-underworld fic with a happy ending. Half caper and half romance with some smut thrown in.

[sneaqui]

Summary:

“Look,” Eliot says, trying to remain as calm as he can manage. “I know there are a lot of timelines out there where you die before you hit thirty, but this is not one of them. In this timeline, any option that’s going to end in your death or dismemberment or life-long imprisonment is absolutely off the table. End of story.”

“So that’s the end of it? You’ve just decided for both of us?”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, “I have.”

An end of season 3/beginning of season 4 AU in which Eliot kills the Monster, but it doesn’t take over his body. And instead of getting memory-wiped, the gang gets captured and thrown in library jail.

A saved-from-the-underworld fic with a happy ending. Half caper and half romance with some smut thrown in.

[sneaqui]

I haven't seen the finale yet, but I'm willing to go on record here: pairing Eliot and Charleton is a retread of the same fundamental failure to care about character work that pairing Margo and Josh was.

Look, I don't hate Charleton or Josh, but they are fundamentally comic relief characters. There's no special reason they had to be, but that's how they were written, don't @ me, it wasn't my decision. And sure, comic relief characters can be good and true and worthy of love.

But Eliot and Margo were leads, which means they both had arcs. Specifically, they both had arcs that were about moving away from their initial appearances as trivial, spoiled, bitchy dilettantes. We were supposed to learn what limitations within themselves kept them in that role, and over time see them expanding and rising to challenges and becoming serious, strong-minded people who trusted themselves to Do Hard Things.

Pairing a character on that journey with someone who doesn't really influence that journey, narratively speaking, is a weird choice, because in a well-constructed story, that's the job of a protagonist's love interest. Taking a character where we're meant to have investment in their increasing seriousness of purpose and ability to exercise power and just throwing them at some amiable goofball because, I guess, love is crazy! That indicates that the writers don't know or care what the actual story stakes are for these people.

It implies that a happy ending for them involves, I guess, lightening up a little, smelling the flowers, embracing whatever kindly innocence Josh and Charleton's fundamental unseriousness is meant to represent. Which is bullshit, because Eliot and Margo started out living fully in the moment and they were terrible. We weren't rooting for them to lighten up.

So it just ends up looking like these romances were some author's concept of whimsy, rather than feeling like they got the right partners to see them as who they were becoming and support them in that. These were serious characters with baggage and struggles who deserved serious adult lovers, not whatever the fuck that's supposed to be.

I feel like I could have articulated this better if I gave it more thought, but also I'm kind of inclined never to think about any of this ever again.