“If I had time travel I’d kill Hitler” “If I had time travel I’d stop my favourite politician getting assassinated” you’re all thinking way too small. If I had time travel I’d stop Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin from dying on the moon due to Soviet sabotage, kicking off the Great Nuclear War and devastating half of the planet.
Your mum’s ability to hold up under active gunfire was really hot. I’m your dad now.
Isn’t that the plot of Terminator
Where do you think the plot for Terminator came from?
This is such a classic trainwreck post that has the vibes of a 2014 screenshot posted to Pinterest and then the last addition is just last Tuesday I can’t even
For the record, she actually abandoned the movement BEFORE they all got whooping cough, but abandoned it too late. There’d been a breakout of measles in her area that caused her to reassess, and she and her doctor had already drafted and started a catch-up vaccination schedule, but her kids caught whooping cough just before it could be started. Then she wrote a blog post for The Scientific Parent explaining how she and her husband had come to wrong decisions in the first place, how they changed their mind, the consequences they suffered as a result, and asking other parents to please vaccinate their kids. And now she’s an activist for destroying the misinformation of anti-vaxxers, and reaching out to anti-vaxxers because she’s understands their fears but knows their kids deserve better.
She was trying to the best for her kids and just didn’t know how to interpret the validity of information or its sources, an actual skill that can be actually difficult and that is under-taught and a necessary first step to being able to trust vaccination research, so chose no action over taking an action she wasn’t sure of. She kept looking into it with family and friends and even eventually came to the right conclusion before her kids became sick, but it was still too late.
Honestly it was pretty brave of her to publicly admit she was wrong. She could have just quietly vaccinated her kids and not become a national news story, but instead she spoke out, even saying “I’m writing this from quarantine, the irony of which isn’t lost on me.” and also “I am not looking forward to any gloating or shame as this ‘defection’ from the antivaxx camp goes public, but, this isn’t a popularity contest. Right now my family is living the consequences of misinformation and fear. I understand that families in our community may be mad at us for putting their kids at risk.”
She understood the consequences and still put herself and her story out there.
You know what, it does take a big person to admit they were wrong so publicly and work to undo the harm. I believe I made fun of her in the past, but timemachineyeah changed my mind.
“I never thought leopards would eat MY face, until I realized they totally would, and they will eat your face, too!” warns defector from the leopards-eating-faces party
The #1 trait of anti-vaxxers is not “they’re stupid” or “they fell for propaganda” but “they don’t know who’s safe to trust.”
The movement is pushed by women, especially suburban moms, because they know damn well you cannot trust doctors. You cannot trust the medical industry, the billion-dollar corporate zone of “you should lose some weight and maybe the pain will stop.” Cannot trust the ones who keep changing diet advice - is it no sugar? No carbs? No fats? Is it dangerous to let kids eat things in wild colors? Food pyramid: good or bad? They cannot trust the BMI chart that says they should lose 75 lbs to be “healthy.” (Whether or not they “should” lose 75 lbs, they know damn well that “healthy” does not describe any part of the journey to getting there.) Cannot trust the ones who keep giving them incomplete and sometimes incorrect information about contraception. The ones who said “that’s false labor; you have two weeks more” 12 hours before they gave birth. And so on.
So they have their kids, and they want so much for their kids to be safe, and the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
So they ask: What about if there’s complications? An allergic reaction? Side effects?
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
This is… not reassuring.
And they ask, My sister-in-law’s cousin had a really bad reaction to the MMR shot and I want to know how I can tell it’s safe for my kids.
And the doctors and nurses say: Get them vaccinated.
Throw in the right-wing/libertarian faction yelling YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO and the insurance companies saying “hey um you need a specific type of coverage for that; we probably cover those vaccinations but you’ll need this special paperwork to be sure” - and then you have the actual anti-vax propagandists yelling some combination of cherry-picked statistics and outright lies, and you get a whole lot of moms willing to say BUGGRE ALL THIS FOR A LARKE.
There is no amount of facts that can fix this. They’re swamped with facts from 300 directions. What they need to fix this is empathy and the kind of connections that lead to trust.
They need to trust that, even as the medical industry dismisses a whole lot of womens’ concerns, in this particular area, they’re right.
Add in the consequences of having a significant portion of your social support network tied up in a particular worldview, leaving it, much less openly condemning it, is really hard and means losing your community support. In a world where the system can’t be trusted to pick up that slack, Moms can’t afford to risk the change - until the cost of staying clearly outweighs the coat of pushing back, not just in general, but for their kids.
Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.
Don’t normally do this but
Kindness doesn’t just matter because it’s more ethical - it'salso a more effective strategy.
Get this into your fucking heads. Kindness and compassion and one might even say “love,” are strategies, not just vague fluffy inoffensive emotions. Cruelty will never save us.
Gods damn I wish there was an option so’s you could see the latest addition to a post when it swims across your dash instead of the first.
KINDNESS IS A MORE EFFECTIVE STRATEGY. CRUELTY WILL NEVER SAVE US.
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the “Star Gauge” or “Map of the Armillary Sphere” - it’s a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - “heart.” Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui’s original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐，
貞志篤終誓穹蒼，
欽所感想妄淫荒，
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: “The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart’s sorrow grows, longing brings only grief.”
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心，
荒淫妄想感所欽，
蒼穹誓終篤志貞，
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: “Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings’ virtue, wisdom, and benevolence.”
That’s just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she “signed” her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 “The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping.”
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 “Su’s poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace.”
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui’s puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject (“Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems”, 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there’s even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It’s a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it’s also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It’s also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it’s also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life “come back to me”.
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su’s brocade he was so “moved by its supreme beauty” that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”
a single andes chocolate mint from the olive garden can fully nourish an adult human for up to 96 hours
This is genuinely the idea behind Kendal Mint Cake
Say what now?
Kendal Mint Cake is a sort of highly dense lump of sugar flavoured with peppermint oil. It does not spoil, and somehow contains 2x more sugar and glucose than sugar or glucose. It is a purposeful product intended as an emergency ration to give a boost of energy when mountaineering. It is associated with hikers and mountaineers in the UK and is sold in camping/outdoor stores. Typically you keep a packet permanently in your camping bag or car or emergency kit, and just never move or remove it. If the time comes, it’s there.
I gestured a hand across an explanation of a Scottish field geologist character named Ken(dal Mint Cake) stating that he always has a packet of Kendal mint cake somewhere and received a message from a friend saying “I didn’t know you also knew (guy that Ken could conceivably be based on)”. I didn’t. This is just a portrait of too many extant guys.
There are several species of this man crashing cheerfully around the UK receiving deep spiritual pleasure from crouching in a puddle in a howling gale up a mountain nibbling pieces of violent mint sugar and apparently metabolising sufficient joy from this to polish off Kendal Mint Cake in marketable quantities for over 100 years.
Unless they made too much of it originally and are still selling it.
It isn’t sugar cube. It’s sugar to the fourth power. Nobody sounds reasonable talking about it.
Tumblr users rising to the challenge . You’ll note the recurring theme
Step 1: go on an entirely optional adventure
Step 2: get into an unpleasant condition in bad weather
Step 3: become very uncomfortable and hateful
Step 4: Kendal mint cake
Step 5: access stratosphere with tits blown off
Step 6: summit
Step 7: say “that was lovely”
If only it had been founded 35 years earlier, the Franklin expedition would have found the NW Passage while carrying their boats like a pack of very determined sugar fuelled ants.
How have we gotten this far without showing the packaging, oh, you know this stuff has cocaine in its DNA.
Consider this (based on a conversation I had with some friends a while ago): Pride and Prejudice and Zombies for people who actually like Pride and Prejudice.
Look–I tried to read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and I got about 20 pages in before I came to the conclusion that the person who wrote it did so out of the belief that the original Pride and Prejudice was stuffy and boring. There were out of character vulgar puns. And the trailer for the movie did not convince me that I had missed anything by cutting short my reading experience.
So, what I’m talking about here is this premise: the world of Pride and Prejudice, but if you die, it’s highly likely, almost certain that your corpse will get up and try to eat people.
But no one dies in Pride and Prejudice, you might say. In fact, few or no people die in any Jane Austen novel.
This is true. But people do get sick with some regularity. Imagine the tension added to Jane getting sick after going to visit Bingley if there was the chance that she would become a zombie after she died. Becoming a zombie in an eligible bachelor’s house probably would have seriously wrecked any chances of any of the living sisters ending up with him.
Imagine Mr. Collins, as a minister, having the duty upon someone’s death of severing their head with a ceremonial plate or something that would prevent the corpse from rising. Obviously important, but this only makes him more self-important and obnoxious.
And dangerous.
For you see, in this version, Mr. Bennett, who stays in his office all the time, whose life is the only thing allowing Mrs. Bennett and her daughters to stay in the house–Mr. Bennett is definitely a zombie. He died at home, and Mrs. Bennett decided that, no way were they dealing with this, and so…just started faking it. Jane and Elizabeth know. The younger sisters don’t.
In this universe, I think we have to go with zombies that are not any faster or stronger than the humans they were, and in fact tend to get weaker as time passes because their flesh is rotting. And…hmm, okay, how about they are pretty violent upon rising, and for about a week afterward, trying to bite people and spread the infection (even though most people are carriers anyway, but getting a nasty bite from a corpse will give you other stuff that will have you die while carrying the virus). But then they calm down and basically just start sort of attempting to act like they did in life, that is, taking habitual actions with no consciousness, in a depressing and desiccated way.
So Mr. Bennett is a zombie, and Mrs. Bennett’s number one goal is to get her daughters married before anyone finds that out. And this, actually, makes Elizabeth’s refusal of Mr. Collins more frustrating for Mrs. Bennett–obviously Mr. Bennett didn’t tell Elizabeth that she could refuse Mr. Collins, because Mr. Bennett is dead, but Mrs. Bennett can’t say anything or the game would be up.
Another question in this version–does Mr. Darcy find out about Mr. Bennett being a zombie somehow? Does Elizabeth find out that he knows and didn’t say anything and this is something that helps repair his earlier actions?
Anyway, this is the Pride and Prejudice and Zombies that I was looking for.
Okay also: in the original, when Elizabeth walks through the rain all the way to bingley’s to care for Jane while she’s sick, it’s a very dramatic expression of both Elizabeth’s love for her sister and her penchant for flamboyant rebellion, but consider, if there is a chance Jane will wake up a zombie and Elizabeth knows it, how does that change the dynamic? Elizabeth might be going to help take care of Jane, or to *take care* of Jane should things take a more morbid turn…by killing her zombie sister.
This works especially well if zombieism is communicable prior to death; if mr. Bennett is a zombie and only the elder Bennetts know, that means Jane has been pre-exposed and is almost certain to wake up as a zombie should she die in the Bingleys’ care— which the Bingleys do not know. Elizabeth has to forge through the rain to be there in case things get ugly, because she knows that the Bingleys aren’t prepared.
And I think you pretty much HAVE to make Mr. Bennett’s zombie status play a role in how and why Darcy separates Bingley from Jane—the heavy implication behind Darcy’s line about the want of propriety shown even by her father hits Elizabeth like a ton of bricks as she realizes he knows—he knows, and he thought Jane lying to Bingley about it was evidence that Jane didn’t love Bingley—but—but Darcy must not have told Bingley that part of it. Bingley couldn’t keep a secret on his life; if he knew, his sister would know, and word would already be out and they’d have been ruined by now—
And of course, not only does the fact that Darcy, who owes their family nothing, has kept and continues to keep this secret for them even after Elizabeth’s refusal deepen the gratitude she begins to feel for him after the letter of explanation, but it also liberates Elizabeth to fall in love with him. Because Elizabeth-who-wants-to-marry-for-love would never be happy marrying someone who didn’t know the family secret in advance. She had resigned herself to spinsterhood because she couldn’t be satisfied with having to hoodwink someone to have their hand, but also couldn’t put her family at risk by trusting someone who wasn’t bound to them by more than an engagement. (Maybe she was even tempted to confide in Wickham at one point, and hasn’t Darcy’s letter proven she was absolutely right not to yield to that passing thought.) But Darcy figured it out himself, and he’s kept her trust, and she could fall in love with him without guilt—if she hadn’t already turned him down.
AND THEN LYDIA HAPPENS. And Darcy realizes immediately that Mr. Bennett can’t do anything to recover her—and if Mr. Bennett doesn’t do anything about Lydia, Mr. Collins might become suspicious, or even just officously involve himself, so find out the while thing. When Darcy blames himself for not revealing Wickham’s character, it’s with a much more immediate sense of urgency. It’s not that the other sisters’ marriage prospects being ruined may impoverish them down the road—it might immediately drag them all into destitution. That’s why he rushes off to go look for Lydia himself.
A few years ago, when I was living in the housing co-op and looking for a quick cookie recipe, I came across a blog post for something called “Norwegian Christmas butter squares.” I’d never found anything like it before: it created rich, buttery and chewy cookies, like a vastly superior version of the holiday sugar cookies I’d eaten growing up. About a year ago I went looking for the recipe again, and failed to find it. The blog had been taken down, and it sent me into momentary panic.
Luckily, I remembered enough to find it on the Wayback Machine, and quickly copied it into a file that I’ve saved ever since. I probably make these cookies about once a month, and they last about five days around my voracious husband - they’re fantastic with a cup of bitter coffee or tea. I’m skeptical that there is something distinctively Norwegian about these cookies, but they do seem like the perfect thing to eat on a cold day.
Norwegian Christmas Butter Squares
1 cup unsalted butter, softened
1 egg 1 cup sugar 2 cups flour 1 tsp vanilla ½ tsp salt Turbinado/ Raw Sugar for dusting
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Chill a 9x13″ baking pan in the freezer. Do not grease the pan.
Using a mixer, blend the butter, egg, sugar, and salt together until it is creamy. Add the flour and vanilla and mix using your hands until the mixture holds together in large clumps. If it seems overly soft, add a little extra flour.
Using your hands, press the dough out onto the chilled and ungreased baking sheet until it is even and ¼ inch thick. Dust the top of the cookies evenly with raw sugar.
Bake at 400 degrees until the edges turn a golden brown, about 12-15 minutes. Remove from the oven. Let cool for about five minutes before cutting the cooked dough into squares. Remove the squares from the warm pan using a spatula.
So I tried this recipe.
And it is GREAT.
It basically makes the platonic ideal of commercial sugar cookies, only in bar form. When I give them to people (which I do a lot, because this is one of those simple recipes where the results seem very impressive), I just tell them they’re sugar cookie bars.
Life hack: add white chocolate chips and sea salt
I made these today for the equinox with sea salt caramel chips and they are simply amazing. Let’s see how long they last with six people in the house!
Noting for later (as we need more butter for this, and probably won’t do a grocery shopping till the weekend).
The OP version of this has become my go-to cookie for basically all things and I have a whole cohort of friends and colleagues who would murder each other to get them. Haven’t tried any add ons yet, since the base recipe is SO GOOD.
I’ve reblogged this before and I’m reblogging it again because I’m about to make it again tomorrow and I wanted to add my own tale of just how amazingly delicious it. it was SO incredibly simple to bake and with an extra dusting of brown sugar on top and served warm and soft they gift you with the taste of the nectar of the gods when paired with a small glass of milk. this image is from when I first made them a couple years ago:
Necromancer that doesn’t know they’re a necromancer and thinks they’re just a really good emt
That is the funniest thing i have ever read
the thing was, she wasn’t going to be able to pass the recertification exam, and she couldn’t figure out why. annabelle studied. she practiced. she pulled out every trick and shortcut she’d learned during her two years as an EMT and none of it worked. she just – she didn’t get it. it made no sense.
“wake up,” she urged the dummy, pressing her hands to the pulse points on its wrists. “come on. what the fuck.”
“yeah, i don’t think that asking nicely is going to do the trick,” hank said, his eyebrows raised. his helmet, the special one they’d decorated for him with craft supplies from michael’s when he’d gotten promoted to firestation chief, sat askew on his head. “i can see now why they didn’t pass you.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “it’s a psychological thing,” she said. “it’s like, you give the brain an instruction and it follows naturally. and the pulse-point thing always works. i don’t know why it’s not, like, in any of the books, but i swear to god it’s worked for me every time.”
it was true that annabelle had the best record on low body counts, which was good because she was the smallest person on the team not counting Georgie, who was a corgi. jake and lillian were always making fun of her for having been the shortest of their whole rookie class. but it hadn’t ever been a problem before; annabelle rarely had to carry anybody out, because she was good enough at getting them on their feet.
but none of that would matter if she couldn’t pass her stupid recertification exam, because they’d take her badge and she’d have to go be, like, a doctor or something.
hank blew out a long breath and sunk down to where she was kneeling on the station floor in full fire gear, giving CPR to the practice dummy, whom they called dierdre. there was a little light that went on when you’d saved its life. it had been a dull gray for an hour now.
“look, AB. i know you’re a good firefighter, and i know you know how to deliver CPR. just do it like you do it during an emergency. you’re overthinking it.”
“but this is what i do during an emergency!” annabelle cried, throwing her hands up. “i put my hands on their pulse points and i use psychological mumbo-jumbo and they just get up and walk!”
hank blinked. “…really,” he said, voice flat. “people who’ve been inhaling smoke for half an hour just … get up and walk.”
“the brain is an incredibly powerful organ,” said annabelle, shrugging. “look man, i don’t know, okay? but it works. i haven’t had to actually do CPR in like a year and a half.”
he gave her a long, quiet look and said, “well….huh,” before pushing himself back up onto his feet and frowning off into the distance. “keep practicing,” he said after a minute, and left her there.
-
hank switched her team.
“what the fuck, man,” she said, sliding into the truck next to him as the sirens went on. “i can’t get CPR on one fucking dummy and suddenly you don’t trust me to do my job without supervision?”
carl and bethany very carefully did not meet her eyes in the rearview from the backseat. bethany pulled a magazine from beneath the seat and said loudly, “look, carl, jennifer aniston and brad pitt are getting back together.”
“thank christ,” said carl. “i’ve been really worried about jen.”
hank gave annabelle the flat look that had gotten him promoted to firestation chief in the first place, the one that said i’m your dad and you don’t want to disappoint me. as always, annabelle wilted underneath it, sliding down in her seat and crossing her arms over her chest. it was a difficult feat in full gear but she wanted him to know she was feeling sullen.
“i trust you completely,” hank told her, his voice a light scold. “i want to see you in action so i can help you figure out what’s going wrong with the dummies. sometimes it’s hard for the brain to accurately remember everything that happens during a crisis.”
annabelle rolled her eyes. “i told you,” she said. “it’s just – it’s the same thing every time, I’m not like, blacking out.”
“great, then i’m about to learn a cool new trick,” hank said serenely, and pulled the truck out of the lot. annabelle kept her gaze focused out of the window, watching the city pass as carl and bethany talked loudly about which celebrities were dating which other celebrities and who wore what better. she tried to swallow down the nerves that tightened her throat. maybe the dummy was right. maybe she was doing something else and didn’t remember it. maybe the last two years had been a fluke and she had no business being a firefighter. maybe she was about to get fired.
there wasn’t a fire, though the alarm was going off. instead they found a bag of smoking popcorn and the collapsed heap of a forty-five year old bachelor type, down to just his boxers and a pair of slippers with llamas on them. he had no pulse.
hank held carl and bethany back, directing them to deal with the smoke from the popcorn; annabelle he pointed toward the resident with a jerk of his chin.
she sighed, kneeling by his side. she pressed her hands flat to his heart and then dragged them across his chest and down each arm, to his wrists. with her thumbs on his pulse point, she hissed, “let’s go, man. up and at ’em. you’re not meant to die in your underwear while cooking popcorn, come on.”
she held her breath for a few moments, conscious of hank’s eyes on her, and let out a long sigh of relief when she felt his pulse jump beneath her, watched his eyes flicker. “what the fuck?” he asked, voice a croak. “what happened?”
“you gotta eat more vegetables, bud,” annabelle told him, and looped his arm over her shoulders to help him get to his feet. she was so relieved she could have wept, but instead met hank’s eyes with a challenging glare. see? she thought. i told you. “let’s get you to the ambulance.”
-
“the bad news is that you have a lot of practicing to do if you want to pass your recert,” hank said without preamble, showing up at her apartment. she didn’t think she’d ever seen him in jeans before. it was weird. “the good news is i understand your problem now.”
annabelle stepped aside, beckoning him in. “what problem?” she demanded. “it worked! you saw it work. that’s the opposite of a problem.”
hank shrugged. he handed her a trifold that he’d clearly printed off at home. it said so you think you’re a necromancer. annabelle blinked down at it, and then up at hank, and then down at the trifold again. “i … don’t understand what’s happening here,” she told him honestly.
“i’m not in the community and they’re kind of cagey, so i can’t really tell you a lot,” hank told her, stilted and visibly uncomfortable. “but i have a cousin who is, and um, i just want you to know that this doesn’t change anything. you’re still who you’ve always been and you have my complete support. we’ll figure out how to get around the recert. maybe i’ll – i can put you on admin duty to give you time to study. we’ll say it’s because of an injury.”
“hank,” annabelle said, with some urgency. “hank, this flier says the word necromancer.”
“yes,” agreed hank, looking relieved. “oh, good, you’ve heard of it already. i thought i was going to have to have the whole your body is changing talk.”
annabelle shook her head. “no, i – hank. you know that … um, you know that necromancy isn’t real, right? people can’t bring other people back from the dead. that’s crazy.”
“annabelle, not four hours ago you instructed a dead man to stand up and he did.”
“okay, he wasn’t dead, obviously. he was almost dead, at best.”
“no. he was dead.”
“i felt his pulse! it was very faint!”
“you called his pulse. no one else would have felt it, because it wasn’t there except in response to you.”
“hank, what the fuck.”
he shrugged. “read the flier,” he instructed. “and bring dierdre home with you. you’re going to have to practice a lot if you want to get recertified, considering you haven’t one time had to use any of the skills you learned the first go around.”
he bussed her temple as he went by, letting himself out of her apartment with a friendly wave. annabelle looked down at the flier in her hand with a frown. when she unfolded it, the first page said, everyone’s necromancy journey is different, but most people discover their gift by accident. have you ever brought a pet back to life? touched an elderly relatives hand and seen some of the color flood back into their face? or perhaps, more subtly, been able to keep cut flowers alive long past their purchase date?
annabelle looked at her kitchen table. she’d had the same vase of tulips on it since she moved in, three years ago. it was true they periodically started to wilt, but she usually just changed their water and they were fine, popping back up one after the other as she slid them into the fresh vase.
“well shit,” annabelle said, letting the flier fall from her hands.
Tumblerians tumblrites and tumblers, all and alike make writing and art prompts out of things that weren’t meant to be and that is a beauty beyond compare. Thank you members of tumblr for the amazing stories and art and for sharing it with the small world that is this website.
Look, it’s a weird hill to die on, especially when I don’t really explain, but children deserve to experience fear, disgust, and discomfort in safe scenarios where they can process those sensations.
Media for children used to be scary and that’s important.
Media for children used to have sensuality–not just fear, but also a sort of fleshiness, a wide breadth of sensations. There was weird surreal stuff that may have been Nightmare Fuel or may have been Fetish Fuel, depending on who was watching it. Women had boobs and jiggly parts, not just smooth barbie doll curves. Bad things happened. Scary things happened. WEIRD things happened. People got tied up, or fell in goop, or transformed into animals, or blew up like a balloon, or a thousand other things that, once the mainstream became aware could be someone’s fetish (despite none of that being inherently sexual–the whole point of a fetish is that it’s having sexual feelings for something that isn’t sex), they freaked 0ut and stopped including. Which severely hampered the story and made it boring and empty of humanity. Humans are made of meat. Art needs to be made of meat also.
The puritanical panic will and has destroyed art. Until you let the fuck go of it, you won’t make good art. We are in a second Victorian era where all stories have to have a Moral Lesson and it’s fucked up. Let art be for arts sake. Stop with this fash bullshit.
Except this feeds exactly into the original post: Hazbin Hotel is not for children! It’s for adults who like cartoons! And at the same time, it’s the right kind of comfortably scary to attract children, plus it’s a cartoon, so kids want to watch it, and adults who don’t know what it is let them! If children’s media were still allowed to be a little frightening when it needed to be, they wouldn’t be as attracted to things like the Hellaverse!
When I was a kid, I had the Care Bears (they lost), Rainbow Brite (child slavery), and My Little Pony (they fought the devil). I didn’t need to watch Wizards when my Mom put it on the VCR. Adult animation isn’t to blame for the current trends in children’s entertainment, and children aren’t to blame for wanting to see a bad dude get stabbed to death by a tiny woman with a cockroach fetish!
I don’t know, the children’s media I see can still be scary. Dead End: Paranormal Park has a lot of supernatural horror and mundane ones. The Gravity Falls veterans have consistently put out shows with Nightmare Fuel: The Owl House, Amphibia, The Ghost and Molly McGee. I have to check the rating on Haunted Hotel, since only one episode talks explicitly about sex. Heck, even Dogs in Space has an entire episode where Loaf of all the dogs has to handle a hostage situation solo.
Sensuality is harder for me to gauge, and I’m trying to become more aware of it. I’m also trying to not give fears to kids by accident since their parents would blame me forever. Baby nephew’s mom vetoed reading Orion and the Dark to him since he has enough trouble sleeping already without being scared of nighttime. I can’t exactly argue with that logic even if the book is funny for the most part.
Maybe it’s a matter of access? That if we make the scary children’s media more available then we can introduce those horrors?
OP here, Hazbin is absolutely not what I’m talking about. It’s not for children and I don’t think it tackles any scary concepts in a way that’s actually appropriate for kids.
I don’t think it’s the end of the world if a kid does watch it, I’m not for censorship as I hope you can tell, BUT IT IS NOT THE APPROPRIATE KIND OF WRITING TO INTRODUCE CHILDREN TO SCARY SUBJECTS.
It’s written for adults and with that has the assumption anyone watching is mature enough to parse through the jokes and sarcasm surrounding its handling of topics like rape, sexual assault, murder, alcoholism, etc.
I haven’t seen any Dead End, so I can’t speak on it, but I have seen a lot of Owl House. It’s definitely a really good kid show and handles lots of topics really well, but I’d still consider it very tame when compared to the horror that was prevalent in media from the 80s-2000s. It’s still very watered down and ‘safe’. There’s a lack of willingness (likely Disney rather than the creators) to let go of the viewer’s hands.
I think a lot of people are also focusing on animation and I see why, but I was thinking more about live-action and things which are specifically horror designed for children.
I’m currently a bit scattered so this isn’t well worded, but I’m thinking more along the lines of:
Half of these aren’t scenes that ‘have to’ go as far as they did - but they did. It’s vaccine for horror.
ALT
