Loving animals is a privilege. To see the richness and beauty of their lives. It's in every cat sitting on a windowsill. It's every dog that people are walking. It's also the flies that lose their way in my apartment. It's the spiders that used to scare me. It's the hope-you're-safe I sent towards the rat I saw crossing the road. It's happy cows and pigs and chickens. It's all the animals that I know I'll never see, but that do exist in all their splendidness. All these individuals, all these lives, all these minds.
Loving animals is also hard. It's seeing their dead bodies plastered on billboards. On people's plates. In the butcher's window just around the corner. It's 90% of the grocery store I refuse to buy. It's knowing there is a street in my town where in one building they're saving animals deemed worth saving, and in the one next door their throats get slit. It's animal abuse that only counts when it's an animal we think is cute. It's fish not even getting the respect of being counted as individuals. Loving animals means living in a world full of murder. A reality so inescapable the only safe space is my own house. And the people I love are all complicit.
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The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.
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When I was a kid, I regularly lost reading privileges for "having an attitude" and "acting out".
It wasn't as simple as being told not to read during other activities- one of the first times it happened, I remember being six years old, watching my stepfather pull fistfuls of books off my bookshelf and throw them to the floor in a heaping mess while I cried and asked him to stop.
It was weird. Every other adult I knew described me as exceptionally well-behaved, but at home, it was the opposite, and it was blamed on "learning bad habits from that shit you're reading".
Because I couldn't read at home, I spent all my free time at school in the library, reading with my friends.
When I grew up and moved away, I realized that my family life was toxic and abusive, and the "attitudes" I was being punished for were standing up for myself, standing up for my younger siblings, and resisting actual, real-life psychological abuse. Because I'd learned from what I'd read that my family wasn't normal, not like my parents said it was, and in my stories, the heroes were the people who spoke out when it was hard to.
It is insane to me that there are students right now who can't access books. It is insane that books are being outlawed. It is perverse that we are stealing away an entire generation's ability to contextualize their lives, to learn about the world around them, to develop critical thinking skills and express themselves and feel connected to the world or escape from it, whatever and whenever and however they need.
That is not how you raise a compassionate, thoughtful, powerful society.
That's how you process cattle.
It's fucking disgusting.
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reblog this and tag with a food you no longer have access to (closed restaurant, state you moved away from, ex’s mom’s cooking, etc) that will haunt you until your dying day, mine are the spicy chicken sandwich on the employee menu at the fine dining restaurant I was a prep cook at, and the onion bagel from the kosher place down the street from my house when I lived in the city
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Fool of a Ghoul: 28,000 words written
this is a pinned post to motivate me. the goal is to write 1k a day, with the first draft finished by early May
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My love for gaming is partly anchored in my love for stories. I gravitate towards games that weave a rich narrative involving complex and thoughtful characters in a world to be discovered slowly but impactfully. That's what Dragon Age: Inquisition, with all its flaws, did for me six years ago, and it's how the Mass Effect trilogy crashed into my life only a few months ago, birthing an obsession I didn't know I needed. It's why the Ezio era of the Assassin's Creed series is, in my opinion, still undefeated, and it's what, years ago, kept me playing Horizon: Zero Dawn all the way into the early hours when I really should have been sleeping.
When sequels get caught up in the hype of their forebears and their disappointing ambitions fail to remember their origin in tale-telling, especially while chasing some passing trend only desired by money-loving investors, a light dies in my heart.
Assassin's Creed: Odyssey was, as per Wikipedia, complimented by critics for its story-telling, but I have yet to find the parts that would have brought about such praise. Kassandra is fun, certainly, and her backstory is promising, but I fail to understand her motivations. Perhaps the choice system has something to do with this, but she also seems to be thrown into larger situations that are not warranted by our knowledge of who she is, a young girl growing up to be a mercenary on a small island under the wings of a silly, get-rich-quick schemer who has a penchant for getting into trouble. How does she come to be in command of a ship, despite seemingly having no previous experience with it, and embroiled in a battle of the Peloponnesian War as if she's been fighting wars her whole life? I don't know who this woman is, what drives her, and which experiences inform the actions she undertakes.
I do like her muscled arms, though.
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Me: hm, I want something to put on the TV as background noise... Huh. Looks like YouTube is recommending something called The Last Unicorn. That's perfect, it's probably some old shitty animation that has aged poorly! I can watch it ironically!
Me, 2 hours later as the credits roll: *crying, cheering, buying the book, composing the songs*
Me, 2 weeks later: So I have compiled all of the quotes from the book that I think could make good tattoos, and also, HOW HAVE I NEVER LEARNED ABOUT HOW THE LAST UNICORN FUCKING SLAPS??? This gay-ass little fairytale fed my soul! Watered my crops! Transed my gender! Can't believe I heard of this story from youtube recommendations, of all places!!
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DONATE THROUGH PAYPAL
DONATE THROUGH VENMO
Safebow, led by raindovemodel over on instagram, is a grassroots team currently doing their best to evacuate almost 200 Palestinian individuals from Gaza.
To do this, they had to raise over $300,000 in a very short amount of time. Amazingly, they not only raised that amount, but surpassed it to the point that they'll now be able to buy prosthetics for the hospitals they work with.
However, Gofundme has thrown a spanner into the work by going completely silent and holding up over half of their funds.
They are on a time crunch as they desperately try to recoup their money before the border closes. Please donate to their Paypal, Venmo or Zelle. Their window of success is genuinely a matter of days.
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