#none of this makes sense without the context

[bowsbar]

Bulllshit inside joak slop where mic soap suitase and lb form a death metal band called fuck ii to cope with getting traumatized

[angel-roses-delight]

together

[icewindandboringhorror]

Would most people realistically use 'carry' and 'convey' as synonyms in typical speech?? Seems a slightly reaching comparison to me lol

[halfamilliontransgendercyborgs]

Someone call Urban Rescue Ranch to come pick these critters up.

[echobows]

should I do full character bios for my ocs? I just wanna post like. all the art I have of them

[classicconundrum]

[cheaploafs]

being able to use daemon when referring to spite in this au is actually the best thing that could have been able to happen.. thank you pondsmith for the rogue ais kinda being an allegory to demons and the old net is likely a gate to hell kind of thing .

[heartfeltletters-written]

the violet/xaden angsty blood&cheese inspired one shot i promised weeks ago snippet

How could I spare any of them after I had felt the weight of your ring on my finger, my love?

You couldn’t, just I couldn’t bear the mere thought of you injured, so I burned them all.

[andiv3r]

"Piss neutral"??

Yes im Piss Neutral™️

[crimeronan]

76. Did you have any ideas that didn't make the final cut of the princess AU in general?

from this ask game!

omg. so many. so so So many. the vast majority of my stories go through a lot of revisions and have a lot of outtakes before i decide on the version that i actually like..... so here are some notable things that Didn't happen in the princess AU, which were originally meant to (or could have happened):

in the original oneshot, luz says that belos taught her to do something she'd really rather not know how to do. at the time, that was ambiguously referring both to creating grimwalkers AND to eating palismen. i ended up not exploring the palisman angle in the long luz fic because i decided that i wanted all of the horror to be tightly centered around Grimwalker Bullshit. the palisman thing would have been an interesting extension of the autonomy themes..... but it also would have meant writing a permanently haunted luz, and it would have been very very very sad. probably better that i didn't!!

2. in my original plan, luz's killing of belos was premeditated. i ended up scrapping that because i couldn't imagine that belos would drop an "i'm gonna kill hunter" bomb & then leave her alone long enough to premeditate a murder, AND i wanted the higher stakes. a luz doing premeditated murder still has some control over her circumstances. i wrote powerlessness instead because it was scarier, more compelling, and it made more sense for luz as a character. (she would not have been NEARLY as traumatized by what happened if she'd been able to simply premeditate belos's death.)

3. there are outtakes of luz meeting the collector. originally, the collector was the one to tell her that the grimwalkers didn't get sick & that belos killed them all for fun. this was a big part of why she planned a premeditated murder. now my working canon is that belos didn't find the collector because luz wasn't there to help him 400 years ago. (poor kid. someone go help them right now)

4. i ended up semi-regretting locking myself into hunter's storyline because i had to maneuver luz's around it. if i HADN'T done that, then hunter definitely would have gotten almost-murdered by belos. luz also would have tried to send him away before things came to a head, and that would have been a WAY more vicious and heartshattering fight than any they've had in the AU canon.

5. i have tons of outtakes of eda and raine having various arguments with each other. these are gonna be edited into something smoother but please know that there are versions of them in my gdocs that are so WILDLY, INSANELY DIVORCED.

6. i have an outtake of darius and hunter fighting about luz but i don't think it fits anywhere in the timeline now. sad :'( the thing about me wanting darius to be hunter's dad is that it's Required that they shout at each other first.

[floorpancakes]

ppl will be like omgggg lesbian yaoi when and not know about rei x kaoru

[toaarcan]

Slowly, carefully, Ahkmou picked through the dragon’s hoard, sifting through piles of stolen treasure, peering under the bigger pieces, scouring the whole room. Then, he seemed to stiffen, and walked straight to one of the largest piles, levitating himself up to the top of it. His left hand closed around something, and the mound of other people’s valuables began to rattle, before shaking itself apart. He ignored it, steadily descending back to the ground, with eyes fixed on the object in his grip.

“I found it…” He almost whispered, a mixture of apprehension and relief in his voice. “After all these years… finally, I found it…”

“Then again…” Quietly, he began to laugh, his voice briefly joined by the second one. “... I suppose it would be a crying shame if I were unable to find…” The metallic rasp of Ahkmou faded, leaving only the deeper rumble of his unwanted passenger. “... myself. Heightened Persistent Hold Person.”

Everything seemed to stop, as Makuta turned fully around, exposing his own golden eyes, and what looked like a piece of once-spheroid stone, radiating a black aura. 

“I will admit, I was a little worried about that ring of yours, but in the end, I think I’m glad you came. I do so love an audience.”

He seemed to shimmer for a moment, and suddenly, the space between his plating wasn’t filled with ancient gears and pistons anymore, but dark red flesh, which now seemed to be growing back out from within him.

“Oh, if only you’d looked closer.” Makuta hissed, as Ahkmou’s chestplate wrenched itself open, exposing an almost-completely black core. His talons crushed the physical form of the Shard of Air between them, its energies flowing into him. Instantly, he doubled over, what remained of Ahkmou’s bronze armour quickly disappearing beneath an ebon skin, red flesh holding the pieces together as he rose, reaching twice his previous height. Tendrils burst from his back, twisting together into a pair of enormous arms with hideously long fingers, before a membrane stretched between them, forming wings.

[mrnnki]

contemplating posting a very cryptic and nonsensical out of context spoilers post for A Starscream-Shaped Blind Spot because I think it would be funny

[jasonqrace]

Idk if I’m over reacting cause of my anxiety or my dad’s underacting cause of his rose colored glasses mentality but how are we reading the same official sites on a current major life issue and he gets “yeah Im optimistic it’s gonna be difficult but fine!” and Im getting “well shit’s bad and this right here is literally saying statistically it’s gonna fucking suck”

[curlicuecal]

playing science telephone

Hi folks. Let's play a fun game today called "unravelling bad science communication back to its source."

Journey with me.

Saw a comment going around on a tumblr thread that "sometimes the life expectancy of autism is cited in the 30s"

That number seemed..... strange. The commenter DID go on to say that that was "situational on people being awful and not… anything autism actually does", but you know what? Still a strange number. I feel compelled to fact check.

Quick Google "autism life expectancy" pulls up quite a few websites bandying around the number 39. Which is ~technically~ within the 30s, but already higher than the tumblr factoid would suggest. But, guess what. This number still sounds strange to me.

Most of the websites presenting this factoid present themselves as official autism resources and organizations (for parents, etc), and most of them vaguely wave towards "studies."

Ex: "Above And Beyond Therapy" has a whole article on "Does Autism Affect Life Expectancy" and states:

The link implies that it will take you to the "research studies" being referenced, but it in fact takes you to another random autism resource group called.... Songbird Care?

And on that website we find the factoid again:

Ooh, look. Now they've added the word "some". The average lifespan for SOME autistic people. Which the next group erased from the fact. The message shifts further.

And we have slightly more information about the study! (Which has also shifted from "studies" to a singular "study"). And we have another link!

Wonderfully, this link actually takes us to the actual peer-reviewed 2020 study being discussed. [x]

And here, just by reading the abstract, we find the most important information of all.

This study followed a cohort of adolescent and adult autistic people across a 20 year time period. Within that time period, 6.4% of the cohort died. Within that 6.4%, the average age of death was 39 years.

So this number is VERY MUCH not the average age of death for autistic people, or even the average age of death for the cohort of autistic people in that study. It is the average age of death IF you died young and within the 20 year period of the study (n=26), and also we don't even know the average starting age of participants without digging into earlier papers, except that it was 10 or older. (If you're curious, the researchers in the study suggested reduced self-sufficiency to be among the biggest risk factors for the early mortality group.)

But the number in the study has been removed from it's context, gradually modified and spread around the web, and modified some more, until it is pretty much a nonsense number that everyone is citing from everyone else.

There ARE two other numbers that pop up semi-frequently:

One cites the life expectancy at 58. I will leave finding the context for that number as an exercise for the audience, since none of the places I saw it gave a direct citation for where they were getting it.

And then, probably the best and most relevant number floating around out there (and the least frequently cited) draws from a 2023 study of over 17,000 UK people with an autism diagnosis, across 30 years. [x] This study estimated life expectancies between 70 and 77 years, varying with sex and presence/absence of a learning disability. (As compared to the UK 80-83 average for the population as a whole.)

This is a set of numbers that makes way more sense and is backed by way better data, but isn't quite as snappy a soundbite to pass around the internet. I'm gonna pass it around anyway, because I feel bad about how many scared internet people I stumbled across while doing this search.

People on quora like "I'm autistic, can I live past 38"-- honey, YES. omg.

---

tl;dr, when someone gives you a number out of context, consider that the context is probably important

also, make an amateur fact checker's life easier and CITE YOUR SOURCES

[therapy-boy]

bonus version of the comic my therapist made that i thought was funnier no offense 😭