wayward-imp - Tumblr blog

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My favorite thing about fanfic authors is they can identify any gap in a canon timeline where characters are offscreen and exploit the ever living fuck out of it

They see a time skip of any length and go

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Hamlet adaptation where Hamlet is a vlogger and all his soliloquies are breakdowns he uploads to YouTube

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WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS

WHO IS USING THIS

AN APP??? THEY HAVE A FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

THE LAST FUNCTIONING WEBSITE

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thinking about yet another Frankenstein adaptation but

what if the Creature had been embraced by Victor from the start. what if he was given agency and integrated seamlessly into the european high society of his creator, and held no grudge and lived happily.

and then somehow, slowly or all at once, he comes to realize that he is made of the flesh of other people. nameless paupers whose bodies would not be missed, or at least whose families had no power to protect them. and he realizes that his very existence is predicated on violence enacted against oppressed peoples.

and then it's like yeah that is a metaphor for living in the heart of empire.

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I'm not the biggest fan of hoops but... look at Barbara Domingos' routine. Just look at it.

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If you're reading this...

go write three sentences on your current writing project.

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... not part of women's preventative care....

...

I want... to throw stuff.

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I would like to see more people talk about how jobs treat disabled employees.

I used to prep, wash dishes, and cook at mellow mushroom. I had chronic pain that wasn't NEARLY as bad as it is today, but it was still very debilitating. I told my employer "i cannot stand more than 4 to 6 hours. I CANNOT do shifts longer than this due to my illness." And even though i made my boundaries VERY clear, everyday i worked it was 8 hours at the least and 10 or 12 at the most. I would go up to my manager and say "look i really need to leave, my shift is over, my chronic pain is killing me." And he'd say "we really need to here, you HAVE to push through." And so i did, and after one, ONE month of that job my crps got incredibly worse to the point where i could no longer walk my dog around the block which was .5 miles. I quit, and that was FOUR years ago, and ever since that day I HAVE BEEN BEDRIDDEN AND HAVE TO USE A WHEELCHAIR. It is my biggest regret in life.

My best friend who has seen my whole journey has recently developed undiagnosed chronic pain, and she is in the EXACT same scenario i was 4 years ago. Busting her ass at a pizza place with extreme pain that hurts her so much she tells me "im in so much pain i don't even feel like a person." She doesn't feel LUCID. And her manager and coworkers are saying the same thing "if you don't help us you will let us down, we'll be in the shit."

That job thats hurting you isn't fucking worth it. I promise you no money is worth losing all your physical abilities and never getting them back. Your coworkers and boss do not give a shit about you, so don't you dare suffer for them. They will never understand your struggle and they will never try. They truly think being understaffed is worse than whatever pain you experience. They would rather you permanently damage yourself than inconvenience them. FUCK THEM. DON'T FUCKING DO IT!

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I had, in retrospect, a really weird Campfire experience.

Let’s start with the fact that I didn’t want to be in Campfire. I was very clear about this. I wanted to be in Boy Scouts. I had my grandfather’s old boy scouts handbook, and I memorized that thing. (Including the sections on personal hygiene that, uh, did not in any potentiality apply to me. In retrospect, that was pretty weird too.) There was exactly one obstacle to me being a boy scout, and it was the obvious one. And hence feminism. (At twelve, I knew and used the phrase “separate but equal is inherently unequal.” To my poor mother, who had no authority over the practices of the Boy Scouts. Gosh I was a difficult child.)

Anyhow, I was eventually convinced that Campfire Girls might be a pale substitute for the Boy Scouts experience of my dreams. So little twelve-year-old me joined up to the nearby troop, run by the mother of my friend down the street. That was my first mistake. Mrs. T loathed me. She made it her hobby to try and get me in trouble with my mother. Again, in retrospect, this was because I was an intensely mathematically gifted child (with no notion of “shutting up” or “not showing off” or “failing to turn something into a competition”) while her daughter my friend was an extraordinarily gifted artist but much less academic. Neither of us cared, but oh, Mrs. T cared. She cared a lot.

The next problem was that Mrs. T was vaguely-neopagan in that new-agey hippie gluten-free way upper-middle-class women are around here. This wasn’t obvious to me at the time, since Campfire has a vaguely-religious aesthetic going on anyway, but I figured it out eventually. This might have gone over fine, except that twelve-year-old me was a budding Serious Catholic and professional rules lawyer. (At six, I had refused to go to church when we were on vacation, because I had read in my catechism that there was One True Church and deduced that it was clearly good old St. So-and-So’s back home, and was ready to be martyred in the service of my convictions.) So you can imagine there were, er, scenes involving tiny me noticing that something we were doing was suspiciously religious and deciding that not walking through a labyrinth in a vaguely-spiritual meditation exercise was a hill to die on.

The big problem, really, was that I was twelve and too smart for my own good and had never heard of the concept of diplomacy, and tended to form abstract principles and then make the mistake of applying them to my life. (Don’t get my parents started on the time I was ten and read about the labor movement and then went to them demanding partial control over the means of production.) Take for instance the time we were supposed to come up with our own “Campfire names.” Mrs. T passed out booklets of Native American words and English translations, and we were supposed to mash them up together and come up with something that “reflected our identity.” Now, at twelve it didn’t occur to me to object to this for any of the reasons I’d object today, but dangnabbit I was clear on how both dictionaries and linguistics worked, and that abbreviation there meant that those words were from completely different Native American languages, and therefore sticking them together and claiming it meant “eagle paintbrush” made literally zero sense at all. I announced this, loudly and repeatedly, until I got told that if I couldn’t behave and take part in the activities I would be sent home, and then I was being persecuted for my beliefs so I doubled down on it and did in fact get sent home (This was something of a common theme in my Campfire experiences.)

Then there was the time we did scrapbooking, which you might recognize as literally the most innocuous activity ever to have been invented by man. It went without incident for about half an hour, cutting and pasting pictures of our year and putting silly captions on them, until I picked out a picture of H., a boy in our troop striking a silly pose and captioned it “boys can do ballet too!” H. for some unaccountable reason took offense to this; tiny me pointed out that it was in fact inoffensive; H. demanded that it be removed; tiny me refused; Mrs. T. backed H. up. And that would have been the end of things if I hadn’t taken offense at this curtailing of my freedom of the press. Drafting a couple of innocent bystanders in to help, I wrote up a statement of protest, collected signatures, and presented it to the assembled parents. Everyone was horrified at this behavior, people started talking in all seriousness about kicking me out of the troop, and my mother came to me in tears saying that she had never been so ashamed as seeing my signature right at the top of that list. Tiny me, secure in the pride of her convictions, puffed up her chest and said “I bet that’s exactly what John Hancock’s mother said to him!”

Or there was the Friendship Song. You might know this one. It went: “Make new friends/But keep the old/One is silver/And the other gold/A circle is round/It has no end/That’s how long I want/To be your friend.” Now, little me might not have been clear on the concept of “moderation,” but she sure knew geometry. I pointed out that a line also had no end, and in a much stronger sense than a circle, since it extended to infinity in both directions. Mrs. T told me that a line did have ends. I told her that no, that was a misconception, perhaps she was thinking of a line segment. She told me I was wrong. I was indignant and proceeded to sing the song as “A line is straight/It has no end” for the rest of my Campfire career. My friend (Mrs. T’s daughter) cried every time I did. (In retrospect, I can see the other reason Mrs. T didn’t like me.)

I think the last straw might have been the Candy Incident. Campfire, like Girl Scouts, funds its activities through sales. The two differences are: (a) Campfire sells candy instead of cookies, and (b) the candy Campfire sells is overpriced and super gross rather than delicious like girl scout cookies. This unfortunately coincided with my learning about truth in advertising laws. Therefore, when a nice elderly lady stopped by our sales table and asked me and Mrs. T’s daughter sweetly if we liked the candy, I cheerfully told her that no, it was gross and I didn’t like it at all.

(Mrs. T suggested strongly that I might want to find another extracurricular activity. My mother took me home and explained the concept of puffery.)

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I don't think people realize how recent the insane commodification of Salem is. Like there's always been some tourism, but Haunted Happenings only started in the 80s, and it wasn't directly related to witches in the beginning. People still felt icky about the whole "killing a bunch of innocent people for a nonexistent crime" thing during the 300th anniversary in 1992 and didn't want to draw attention to it. Hell, that's probably why they let the Disney corporation shut down the downtown for two weeks in the middle of October to film Hocus Pocus - to keep any tourists away.

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Fibre crafts are 50% soothing repetitive action and 50% "God Fucking Damnit"

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Leverage episode where they have a job in LA and the evil rich asshole of the episode’s lawyers are from this very weird firm called Wolfram & Hart. and Hardison looks into it and is just like. hey guys why do they have deliveries of actual human blood listed under catering expenses

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deadass should i comment on like YEARS old fics i get nervous to i dont wanna be annoying

Yes! Comment!

The author will likely really appreciate it! And if they don’t nothing will come of it!

It’s a win/win!

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And people ask me why Leverage is my favorite show of all time. Friends, Leverage delivered on this feeling in the FIRST EPISODE, more than once, and then spent five seasons twisting the kaleidoscope for beautiful fresh, shiny iterations of it for every single character in the cast by turns. Up to and including Sterling.

My favorite form of redemption arc is “I hate that I have morals now”

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Medical devices should not require an iOS or Android app to work. It took me twelve fucking minutes to set up and get my phone to connect to my migraine treatment device, 12 minutes during a horrendous migraine and I had to fight with my phone to get it to work instead of pressing a fucking button on the device. It might need a small controller to change strength but thats not fucking difficult to add.

Relying on a phone is bullshit: what if I'm out of battery? what if bluetooth is broken or something? what if I'm in too much pain to get the treatment app to work defeating the purpose? What if I'm paranoid about privacy so chose a non iOS/Android phone? What if I have issues with smartphones so use a classic cell phone? I know people that require that.

Requiring a disabled person to have iOS/Android in order for treatment to work is an unnecessary and borderline discriminatory practice.

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"hey why are all the barrier garments like linen shirts or chemises or combinations going away?"

"oh we have more washable fabrics now! you don't need to worry about sweat reaching your outer clothing when you can just chuck it in the washing machine!"

"cool!"

[100 years later]

"so uh all of those new washable fabrics are leaching microplastics into our water, and the constant machine-washing wears garments out faster. they're also not really sturdy enough to be mended, so we keep having to throw them out and now the planet is covered in plastic fabric waste that will never break down. also it turns out that the new washable fabrics hold odor-causing bacteria VERY well. so could we get those barrier garments back please?"

"sorry babe linen now costs $100000/yard and since it's been so long without them, nobody knows how to adapt barrier garments to the current styles anyway"

"..."

"maybe try this new $50 undershirt made of Special Sweat-Wicking Plastic Fabric! :) :) :)"

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