(via Saturday Morning Cartoons: Baopu #15) By Yao Xiao

sex is fine but have you ever thought about all the ways you’d rewrite a flawed piece of media that shaped your life and holds a special place in your heart despite its unfulfilled potential

Friends, we are there. We are at that point. ICE is abducting people off the streets and sending them to concentration camps in El Salvador. That is happening. Trump has said that he’d “love” to send the “homegrowns” to these prisons and told the president of El Salvador to build 5 more. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was kidnapped due to an "administrative error" and the Republican regime is refusing to bring him home, even though the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that they must. A US citizen from Georgia was arrested in Florida for being an "unauthorized alien" and they refused to release him, even as his mother waved his birth certificate in their faces. (I just learned while making this post that he has now been released and reunited with his family, thank fucking god.) A hundred other horrors have happened that we don't even know about.

No one is coming to save us. We have to save us.

Please, please, please find a (peaceful!) protest this Saturday and attend if you are able. There are also protests planned for May 1. And, frankly, there should be protests every single day, but we have to build momentum and community for that. So let's start.

If you can’t attend a protest, please consider taking another form of action. I was depressed on the train this morning and brainstormed a very incomplete and unofficial list of Things You Can Do:

Print posters advertising the protests and put them up around your neighborhood, your school, your apartment mail room, public restrooms, anywhere.

Spread the word on social media, yes, but also text your family and friends and ask if they know about the 4/19 and 5/1 protests. This date is not getting the same publicity as 4/5 and people are reporting social media posts being suppressed. Direct communication is the most effective.

Call your representatives. The 5 Calls app makes it extremely easy, even if you have phone anxiety. If your reps, like mine, mostly have their voicemails shut down, email them instead. Resistbot makes it super simple. I know it feels like screaming into the void, but it does have an impact. And even if it turns out it doesn’t, it takes 2 minutes. Do it out of spite. Just do it.

Stop buying anything that’s not absolutely essential and start preparing yourself for a general strike. I don’t know that we will get enough of the population on board to do this, but it is our best hope, and each person that is prepared for it makes the reality of it happening a little more likely. If you can, aim to have food and supplies stocked for a few weeks. If you have the means, be extra prepared to help your neighbors. Talk to your friends about this. Start strategizing.

(Also, a note on that general strike website: I'm sharing it for info, but I know a lot of people don't want to sign their name to a strike card. I get it. You don't have to sign up for anything to get prepared for a strike. You don't have to sign up for anything to stop giving your money to this economy. You don't have to sign up for anything to strike, when the day comes. You don't even have to tell anyone. You can just do it.)

If you are financially able, donate to your local food pantry or mutual aid network. The Republican Regime is cutting funding to the food banks in advance of an economic crisis. We are only as strong as the most vulnerable among us. Help your neighbors! A general strike cannot happen without community solidarity. Start building that solidarity now.

Cancel any subscription you can. Especially Amazon. Fuck Amazon. And Target, and Walmart.

If you have to buy something, buy local. Support your community as much as possible. And hey, it's almost farmers market season, hell yeah!

Mask up!!! Do not throw disabled people under the bus in this movement. Wear a mask. It protects the most vulnerable among us, and it protects you. Not just from disease, but also facial recognition technology. And, you know, RFK Jr.

Stay alive. I am sure I’m not the only one who has plunged to new depths of despair over the past few months. Find something to cling to, even if it’s only spite (some days, that’s all I have). Please stay alive. We need you.

DO NOT GIVE INTO THE FEAR OF BEING CRINGE. Taking action in the face of fascism is cool as fuck and anyone who tells you otherwise is trapped in a prison of their own making and they will bring us all down. Do not get distracted by moral purity tests. Do not be afraid, do not be embarrassed. BE CRINGE, BE FREE.

And finally, most importantly, do not let perfect be the enemy of good. We can all only do the best we can under this oppressive capitalist hellscape we’re forced to endure. We're all struggling, we're all tired, we're all scared. Do not guilt yourself into despair and apathy if you have to buy groceries at a big box store or if you can't take off work for a protest because you'll lose your job/house/healthcare. This is the system. This is how it's designed. The important thing is to try. If you can't do one thing, find something else you can do. Little acts add up, and we are all in this together.* As my dad likes to remind me, no one can do everything, but everyone can do something.

Let's do something. <3

*yes I did start humming high school musical here

Love yourself!

Im gonna be so real can yall actually talk about ways we can support trans women in the UK instead of giving all the attention to fucking JKR. I already know that Harry Poter sucks, I wanna know how to actually HELP people. Something something you have to love the oppressed more than you hate the oppressor

from the bottom of my heart: just because something makes you uncomfortable doesn't mean it shouldn't be allowed to exist

downloading a fic when ao3 dies (when you have the link)

looks like ao3 is down again and i was in the middle of a multi chapter fic when it died on me.

and if that happens to you, this is what you can do to download the fic:

copy paste https://download.archiveofourown.org/downloads/00000000/fic.html in your browser url

replace the pink bit with the number right after /works (that's the work id)

for instance, in https://archiveofourown.org/works/44970790/chapters/113154673 the highlighted bit (44970790) would be the number you swap for the 0s

the download link will look like https://download.archiveofourown.org/downloads/44970790/fic.html

if you want the fic to be downloaded as an epub instead, use .epub at the end of that link

it should start downloading on your device

i'm sure a bunch of people know this and use it but in case you don't, hope this helps

I will be back for you

All USWNT Matches from the 2015 Women’s World Cup

USA v AUS

USA v SWE

USA v NGA

USA v COL

USA v CHI

USA v GER

World Cup Final

This might sound silly, but anything that makes you want to stick around on this godawful earth any longer is worth it. Fandom is worth it. Talking about your favorite characters is worth it. Imagining silly little stories or angst to process your grief is worth it. Please do whatever you need to do to stay alive. Fight for joy in the places you can find it. Your community wouldn’t be the same without you

I don’t usually do discourse on this blog but that last reblog hit the nail on the head. Reader interaction is at an all time low for fic authors and whilst I’m eternally grateful for any and all kudos and comments that I do receive, I feel as if in the past couple of years there’s been this weird migration of comments - they’ve left ao3 and they’re on tiktok instead. So, rather than people leaving comments on my fics, they leave their comments on the videos of people reccing my fics. I see tiktoks about my fics and they’ll have double, triple the number of comments that the fic itself has. It’s so lovely that people are talking about my writing, but it’s just a very strange phenomenon and a very odd feeling when you have a fic that you assume wasn’t overly well received because it has hardly any comments on ao3, but then you see a tiktok full of comments with people saying that it’s their favourite fic.

And I’m going to say something potentially controversial here but not ONCE have I seen a tiktok creator, whose content relies solely on other people’s fics, say anything along the lines of “leave the author a comment if you enjoy the rec.” Literally never ever seen this. And I think that’s a real shame.

#tdor