#Survival function

[wearenotjustnumbers2]

I'm sorry for the cruelty of this picture, but I couldn't see Amina and not share her story. Trigger warning: eye injury (bloody eyes).

Amina Ghanem, 13 years old, says: We were sleeping and we heard the sound of tanks when they came and walked over the caravan in which I, my father and my siblings lived. The tank squeezed us inside the tin all night, and we were ran over, until the morning. And when they finally let us out, I found that my father and my little sister have been killed. Now we've been brought here.

She tells her story in this video with her little brother beside her. They're all on their own. Their mother is outside of Gaza and cannot get in or get them out. They have no way of communication, their father and sister are killed.

The eyewitness of Genocide.

[countess-of-edessa]

the world is so fucked up and i can't help but think the damage is irreparable when i see people talking about how unusual and prudish it is to wait six to ten dates before having sex with someone. ten dates??? roughly like twenty five hours of interaction????? ten old timer burgers and mango iced teas from chilis equals sex?????? the possibility of pregnancy, STDs, emotional devastation, lifelong consequences, not to mention just straight up the possibility of getting murdered, with a STRANGER you have hung out with for maybe like two months???? and that's a LONG TIME???? and if you feel weird about that and don't want to do that that makes you NOT HETEROSEXUAL????? THATS AN ORIENTATION???? BECAUSE ITS SO OUTSIDE OF THE NORM OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR ????? i hate all of you i hate you i hate you i hate you every day i hate and I hate and I hate you

[lialox]

Yoohankim all have such different reactions to their other selves.

YJK to YJK: You're annoying. You're a fool. You're not me. (YJK's need to compartmentalize his identity)

HSY to HSY: Ah shit, I did that? (1863rd and 3rd round HSY both accept the other as 'herself')

KDJ to KDJ: You're not real to me. You're just a fleeting dream.

[skin-slave]

I wanna say something and all I ask is that you read the whole thing before burning me at the stake.

There are always horrible things happening. There are always ppl who are suffering and dying. There are always corrupt politicians. There are always human rights violations. There are always tragedies. There is always misinformation and exploitation. War is always looming on the horizon or busting in the back gate. The world is always fucked up.

That fact does not mean that the lives affected matter any less than our own. It does not mean that we don't do what we can to help. It does mean that we cannot afford to put our lives on hold while a horrible thing consumes us.

I'm sure that, if your parent/sibling/partner/best friend had a medical emergency, you would gladly do whatever you needed to do to be there. I'm sure that you would sacrifice sleep, skip meals, call in to work, and be by their side until they were stable. You can afford to do that when those emergencies are infrequent and relatively brief.

You cannot do that with the world's emergencies. They are not infrequent. They are not relatively brief. You have to sleep, eat and shower. You have to pay your bills. You have to survive.

Daily life goes on.

It feels unjust. Of course it does. How can you possibly go about the mundane like nothing's going on? You Don't. You go about the mundane like there are horrible things happening. You make the adjustments you can sustain without sacrificing your well-being. You make drastic changes for as long as you can, when you simply can't take it anymore, and then you step back, take a breath, and go grocery shopping. You have to. If you don't, you won't survive the horrible thing.

No one who is going thru a horrible thing wants you to self-destruct. There's so much good you can do over the course of your life if you maintain that life. Adding your name to the list of casualties will prevent all of that good from happening. You have to survive.

And that includes the things that seem optional, bc those things aren't actually optional at all. You need to laugh. You need to watch movies and love your pets and go for walks. You need food that tastes good and clothes that make you feel confident. You need that show you'll regret not seeing. You need to get takeout and take naps. You need to have the weight lifted frequently, so you can heal the parts of you that get worn.

If you aren't living as well as you can, while making adjustments you can afford to make, you will not survive.

Please survive.

[canisalbus]

Machete has parents?? I'm not familiar with their actual lore, so I've been imagining Machete as a desolate victorian orphan boy

Everyone has parents, he didn't materialize out of thin air (or evolve from a crumpled napkin).

But he lost contact with them early on and doesn't remember much of anything about them. Machete was a sickly kid and his family was going through a rough patch at the time, they were constantly struggling to find the time and funds to care for him. Child mortality was high and it was starting to look increasingly likely that he wouldn't make it. He was around three or four when they left him at the closest monastery that accepted foundlings and he hasn't heard of them since.

[lylahammar]

I think the important thing about body neutrality and body positivity existing side by side is that body positivity is a big hurdle for people who are just starting to work on learning to love their bodies. When someone's at their lowest point, it's better to say "aim for just fine," and once they reach that level of neutrality where they can appreciate the functional ways their body is serving them, it's a lot more feasible to make the jump to seeing the visual beauty of it.

[ilynpilled]

another huge crime of the show is making cers give birth to a child from robert who died in a fever right away like some tragedy instead of what actually happened which was cersei and jaime gleefully aborting that thing

[paragonrobits]

a way for the skaven running gag to continue via the Ratkin

Kitten: Okay this has been bothering me for a while. If there's things like werewolves and werecats- Big D: Hold on, I told you about werewolves. How do you know about werecats? Kitten: Long story, lots of family drama, I'd prefer not to get into it right now. But my point is are there other shapeshifters? Big D: You BET THERE ARE. No werechihuahuas, though. That's a joke. And it's NOT FUCKING FUNNY, DEAR GOD I AM SO FED UP WITH THE TOMES OF ARCANE LORE FILLED UP WITH JOKE POSTS ABOUT THEM and okay, okay. Off track. Anyway, there are indeed many different types of shapeshifters. Boy, wandering from another room: There's wererats and stuff Big D: Quite so! They're hardly friendly to humans, for you see, they're quite fed up with human corruption being responsible for HEY WHOA WAIT WAIT. Boy! How do YOU know about wererats!? Boy: They talks to me all the time. Kitten: They do? Boy: Dunno why. They just wander up and complain about humans being a pestilence upon the world. One of them wants to show me a giant mouse wheel it wants to make into a big bike thingy, though.

[cassafrasscr]

I continue to have so many thoughts about Ashton.

I've seen a handful of posts accusing Ashton of being selfish and power-hungry, and I don't think that's completely inaccurate, per se. I don't think it's fair to frame it as Ashton just wanting power for it's own sake without considering the larger context of the threat they're facing.

Let's look back on the Hells' first battle with Otohan.

Ashton was almost completely useless in that fight. He got knocked out twice in the space of a few rounds. Which, no shade. With her Echoes in play, Otohan was almost able kill Keyleth (a level 20 Archdruid, plus her elemental Wildshape) in a single round.

Ashton's whole job is to tank hits and deal damage. With an enemy that can deal out enough damage in one round to put the tank out of commission, his ability to mitigate damage to the rest of the party is severely hampered (if not cancelled out completely).

The only reason Ashton didn't also die in that fight is that his friends healed them enough that they could get back up again, and they were able to make a run for it before Otohan started going back to kill the PCs she had already knocked out.

And that was just Otohan. One of Ludinus' right hand generals, sure, but still nowhere near as strong as Ludinus himself (or even Predathos, if it gets released). Even once they defeat Otohan, the fight that's still in store for Bell's Hells is near insurmountable.

Taliesin has said in a previous 4SD (don't remember which one, sorry) that this fight was the moment that Ashton realized just how invested with this new group they had become. The moment he couldn't protect his friends was the moment he realized that he finally had the family he'd been missing... and by then three of them (Orym, Laudna, and Fearne - probably the PCs Ash was closest to at the time) were dead.

Not only could Ashton not protect his friends, he also ran. He left his friends behind and half of them ended up getting killed. I think Ashton may feel they left their friends for dead in that moment, the same way the Nobodies left him for dead after the Hexum Heist.

Now, I'm not sure I would necessarily equivocate these two situations - this is just where I think Ashton's head might be given recent events. I don't think he would see any significant difference between the Nobodies leaving him after his fall, and him running for his life during the Otohan fight. If I'm remembering correctly, this is also around the time that Ashton really started to double down on their "Nobody gets left behind" rule.

Now that Ash is aware of how much he cares about the other Hells, he will do absolutely anything to keep them. Bell's Hells is too invested in the fight against Ludinus to turn back, and Ashton is never going to leave them again. So if the Hells won't abandon the fight, and Ash won't abandon the Hells, their only option is to get strong enough to keep their friends safe.

So of course Ashton took the Shard of Rau'shan when Fearne didn't want it. No one else seemed able or willing to take it, so Ashton charged ahead with his decision the way he tends to do.

Was it arrogant and hubristic? YES. Was it a power-hungry thing to do? YES. Was it wrong to keep it secret from the rest of the group? YES. But there's not a single force in Exandria that will make Ashton regret taking that shard if it helps him protect his friends even a little bit.

It also feels fitting to me that one of the few things Ashton can't protect them from is his own poor decision making.

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

my propellor, boston 08/05/2009

[lightkrets312]

to the people who write summaries and wikis with thorough breakdowns of all the lore and media for a series that breaks it up into 20 different formats: you are doing fantastic work, may it remain intact and accessible well into the future, I owe you my life

to the people that decide splitting your series into 20 different media formats with critical lore in most/all of them is a good idea:

ARCHIVE YOUR SHIT IMMEDIATELY, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING.

[tweedfrog]

Ok I think im realizing this 5 years too late but in Avengers Endgame how the fuck was society relatively ok after 50% of ppl got snapped. Like I know the "logic" will just be "uhhh superheros and movie magic" but like irl things with 50% death rates (I think the black plague was up there?? Or it was around 30%) fundamentally shift the societies they occur in because they're that devastating

[moongothic]

Seen a few people too many discuss the concept of Dragodile Baby 2 and my hot take is that there's no way in hell Crocodile would ever detransition just to go through nine months of horrible dysphoria again, let alone go through pregnancy ever again (or allow Ivankov to even touch him, what if they died and weren't able to trans Croc's gender again afterwards? Hell naw, ain't worth the risk)

But this leaves an opportunity for a Funnier Option:

Dragon wants another baby? Sure, but it's his turn to carry it >:)

[katels]

eat an actual meal, please

[sixteenth-days]

False as a zombie (but with stitches)?

Dried blood. Stone dust. The roof of her lab, and visible through it, the sky. That was bad. Everything felt hazy, incomplete.

There was pain, somewhat faint and fuzzy, reanimated nerves panicking all through the left side of her body. Everything on her right, meanwhile, was numb. She tried moving, scrabbled the stiff fingers of the hand she could feel against the rubble beneath her.

Something was wrong. She couldn't think clearly. There was a hole in her head. What had happened? She had been- she had been-?

After a few tries, she managed to brace her hand against the ground; found the strength in dead muscles, somehow, to lever herself clumsily upward. Once partly upright, though, alarm bells sounded inside her head, increasingly urgent- something was very wrong with her balance, her center of gravity. She sagged to one side, nearly collapsed to the ground again.

Something was missing. Something was wrong. All the sensations in her body seemed confused. It was very hard to move.

She cast her head around, disoriented and confused, and caught the reflection of her movement in a glass-fronted cabinet against the opposite wall. She froze, stared until she could parse out what was wrong with her own silhouette.

Ah. That explained why she couldn't feel anything on her other side.

Half of her was missing.

One arm. One leg. Her innards spilling out of her bisected torso. Only half of her face.

She looked around, holding her fragile head upright with her one remaining hand, but she couldn't see any scattered limbs, no fingers or hair beneath the chunks of debris.

Half of her was missing, and she had no idea where it had gone.

[straight-to-the-pain]

I don't know if anyone else in the whump community has read 'A Constellation of Vital Phenomena' by Anthony Marra but it is genuinely a really good book and also has some of the best depictions of torture and its aftermath that I have read in fiction.

I wanted to share some of my favourite quotes, hopefully without too many spoilers as it is out of context, but maybe skip this post if you don't want to know anything at all going in.

To give a brief summary, the book centres around the lives of people in Chechnya during the first and second war between the Russian government (Feds) and the separatist rebels. The main story focuses on a man (Akhmed) who is trying to save his neighbour's daughter from being killed by the Feds after her father is taken away in the middle of the night. He does this by taking her to a hospital where he then volunteers. One of the people in his village (Ramzan) becomes an informer for the Feds after being tortured, and this is explored in the excerpts below.

‘Information the Feds would torture them for was written here on the walls for all to see. It was well understood among the men that the Feds had as much sense as two bricks smashed together. It was also understood that pain, rather than information, was the true purpose of interrogation.'

'During his first detention in the landfill, in 1995, in the first war, he had refused to inform. They had wrestled down his trousers, shown him the bolt cutters, and still he had said no. Screaming, thrashing, with his manhood half severed, he had said no. He had done that, and now he was ready to start saying yes.'

'He would have confessed everything, but they didn't ask, weren't interested, threatened to cut out his tongue and put pliers to his teeth if he spoke one more fucking word. Electric wires were wound around his fingers. A car battery was drained into his bones. God might have been watching, but it wasn't God's finger on the battery switch. The interrogating officers didn't speak. Instead he was an instrument they played, performing a duet, and in their own way they conversed through his sobs. They both wore very shiny shoes. That was all he would remember.'

'He had trouble walking, He had forgotten torture could be so exhausting. The new interrogator, the one with less shiny shoes, held him upright, using his whole body as a crutch, and helped him walk. He carefully wiped Ramzan's forehead with a handkerchief before opening the door to the next room.'

'The interrogator with less shiny shoes crouched behind him. His hands were wet. Ramzan promised everything, and the interrogator, like the parent of a child too old to believe in ghosts, watched him with disappointment, his clear eyes saddened by Ramzan's sincerity. The interrogator took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, laid the live wires on Ramzan's chest and mapped the border of their shared humanity. Ramzan offered his soul. He begged to be enslaved. The known universe contracted to the limits of the cement floor, and on it, the interrogator was both man and deity, prophet and god. By ten o'clock the interrogator with less shiny shoes asked his first question. By eleven the electrical wires were unwound from Ramzan's fingers. By noon he was allowed to dress. By one he was on the FSB payroll. He kept thanking the interrogator with less shiny shoes.'

‘Greed didn’t motivate his informing, at least not primarily; primarily he informed by necessity, to survive, for his love and hate and above all awe of the power wielded by the interrogating officer with less shiny shoes.'

'That was his greatest fear. Could he stay silent? Could he withstand what awaited him? He told himself that his love for the girl should fortify him against any torture, but this, like so much of what he told himself, was a lie. After all, he was squeamish at the sight of blood, what would he say when lying in a puddle of his own? But he saw no other way. He would pray for the strength to stay silent, for a quick heart attack, and leave the rest to God.' (This is Akhmed POV)

'When they threatened to beat me, I said nothing, Akhmed. When they threatened to beat me, I said nothing. When they threatened to electrocute me, I said nothing. When they threatened to castrate me, I said nothing. I said nothing, Akhmed. Whatever you think of me, you remember that once I said nothing when a wiser man would have sung. And the interrogators, they couldn't believe it. They called in others to examine me. I was there on the floor, and above their faces were dark ovals silhouetted by the ceiling lights. They had beaten me hard and I couldn't hear right, but I kept saying no, with every breath I had. The main reason they let me go, the only reason they didn't shoot me right there was out of perverse respect, some sort of professional courtesy. But I wish they had shot me, Akhmed, because the good part of me died there, and all this, everything since, has been an afterlife I'm trying to escape.'

‘I knew what was coming. I knew it never stops. They put a shame inside you that goes on like a bridge with no end, the humiliation, the fucking humiliation of knowing that you are not a human being but a bundle of screaming nerve endings, that the torture goes on even when the physical hurt quietens. People treated me differently when I came back the first time.'