parents are so crazy because they can say the most fucked up shit to you when your brain is forming and it sets the tone for your whole adult mind set and then they forget about it the next day
that post calling ppl “mentally slow” for using chatgpt was v weird. while i think u should be learning & not getting chatgpt to write ur papers (tbh it’s not even good at writing papers), i get that school is v demanding, esp when u have disabilities and/or a lot else going on. here’s a couple tools to help take off some mental burdens of studying:
formalizer: in the name! changes text to formal language
judge: can tell u about the tone/subtext of ur writing
estimator: judges the length of a task for u
compiler: turns a braindump into a to-do list
researchrabbit: input a source u have already found to create connection webs (through citations) to other literatures -> ensures higher relevance in the sources u find vs digging thru ProQuest or JSTOR for hours
connectedpapers: same function as above, however it’s limited to only 2 free articles
in case the hyperlinks break, direct links are below the cut
Did you know that AO3 allows fics with homicide in them? There’s a whole tag for Major Character Death and even more tags so you can find exactly what kind of character death you want to read.
Don’t they know that murder is illegal? You just know there are a bunch of homicidal maniacs out there who love to read those stories. They write them, too, in between killing people.
Anyone can read the stories on AO3! Kids can read them! They’re getting exposed to stabbing, poisoning, even guns! And they’re writing the heroes doing the killing, too! That’s basically telling kids it’s okay to go out and murder their families. It’s promoting violence and encouraging homicide and if we don’t do something about it soon, you’ll be murdered next!
The devil came to my house and tried to burn it down, which is why this post exists in the first place.
i’m going to say this because other disabled people deserve some warning, and it sure as hell wasn’t given by any prerelease or review media i saw:
the new zelda game, ‘tears of the kingdom’ has a major trigger for medical abuse body horror front and centre from the very beginning, all throughout the game
at the very start of the game, link is injured, and then wakes up to be told that he has had someone else’s dead arm grafted onto him, without consultation or consent, as a “necessity” to “save his life”
there is so much ableist subtext i could draw out from this, but importantly, if you have any triggers with forced or unwanted medical procedures done on you, go in prepared and bracing yourself
it’s not a prosthesis, or gauntlets, or magitech infusion, it is literally textually a dead arm transplant done while unconscious, and the game’s gaze lingers on and highlights it and its difference from his body constantly
i don’t know how this was considered acceptable in a family friendly franchise, other than the sheer ignorance of the developers about disabled peoples’ medical experiences
speaking of which, since i know i’m opening myself up to shit by even mentioning this is an issue, if you have to wonder why this is a trigger especially for disabled people and why i’m treating it with such gravity:
horrifying medical procedures done on us without consent that we’re only told about after waking up is unfortunately routine for people with disabilities of many kinds
and forceful transplantation of an unwanted (or even unviable) limb against patient consent is absolutely a real world thing doctors actually do in the name of making a person “whole” and “fixed” and because disability is abhorrent to them. it’s not a fictional or fantastical scenario, and i know this because it was done to me, and it was living hell that i will never recover from.
so if you want to argue about it with me or tell me “well actually it’s ghost magic”, or tell me about your headcanons, or be in denial about the horrors forced on us that you don’t want to believe are real…. fucking don’t.
already getting a lot of hate from people that don’t seem to understand the very basic fact that real people who go outside and touch grass can still get their real medical trauma triggered by fictional depictions….
For the record, this is not a case of “check the box next time.” The rating of the game and the little black and white box that tells you the contents does not mention anything about medical trauma or abuse. Here’s a screencap from the ESRB website.
This should have been listed, either under “medical trauma” or “medical abuse” somewhere in the warnings but it wasn’t.
Sometimes trauma doesn’t care that what you’re looking at is pixels. My 40 hour a week day job and the fact that I refuse to stop touching grass (I hate being indoors) didn’t really do much to stop an episode of House MD from giving me a severe traumatic flashback.
Game companies please tag your shit. You had room in the rating box, that little bit of extra ink would not affect your bottom line I promise you.
(SPOILERS WITHIN) I hope this is all right to add to this post and I intend it to be sympathetic to the trauma, but one thing that is making me uncomfortable with the narrative of TOTK I have seen so far is how the donor hand is a direct connection to an ancient King of Hyrule who founded and legitimized the nation against its competitors (?). With powers of magical destruction, that we see in action. Sure, fighting 'evil’ but…
It hit me reading this post that part of why this bothers me is not just the political mindset of this (it’s not fairytale-like for kids, it’s very nationalist myth-y) but that Link’s arm is more important than Link. Link is framed as an extension of the one who originally had it.
Link is acting as the literal hand of a King who is lionized in death as the birth of Hyrule as a nation so his wife and also Zelda can be more mystical figures (?)
In prior games, Link used 'tools’ to navigate the world. These tools have been getting more abstract (the Master Sword as a personal assistant GPS in Skyward Sword, the Sheikah Slate as a do-it-all multitool in BoTW) but they were still separate from Link and his personhood and agency. Mostly. Now he is the tool.
Against his will in ToTK Link has become an extension of another person’s body to accumulate magical powers entire NATIONS were passing down: powers that the ancient king sponsored with his gifts long ago. He’s obligated to repeat some kind of ancient battle that ancient king originally LOST.
I can’t imagine a more horrifying situation for a disabled person– a medical procedure is done to you while sleeping without your consent and now your body is literally not your own because the arm you got has shit to do. You are its new 'body.’
“He has to fund the Justice League. They often have a space program.”
“But couldn’t he do more good if he just invested-”
“The Earth is routinely invaded by aliens, gods, and the forces of an extraterrestrial god of tyranny.”
He has, like, three charitable organizations he funds, named after his father, his mother, and Alfred.
Between both Bruce and Batman’s contributions, Gotham should be a better city than it is, and the only reason it isn’t is DC Editorial Mandate that basically says Gotham has to get worse and worse and worse or there’s no Batman stories they can tell (and, obviously, they have no other characters besides Batman).
There’s a reason Batman thinks the city is literally cursed.
I want to see Bruce Wayne go off
“Oh, oh, just charity my way out of dealing with the Penguin, a living, breathing 19th century Marxist’s cartoon of the bourgeoisie? Just fund anti-Clayface measures? Crack down on corporations who put out shapeshifting cosmetics? What socio-economic pressures turn botonists into actual fucking dryads?! What inspires anti-animal terrorism? THAT’S NOT EVEN A REAL KIND OF ECO-FASCISM!”
For the record, Gotham is canonically curse, because it sits on some sort of evil swamp. I think.
There are like, half a dozen curses. The Lazarus Pits are leaching into the water, Slaughter Swamp is an unconnected body of water a few miles outside of the city that also ressurects people (see Solomon Grundy), the Bat-demon Barbatos and his followers (the Court of Owls) have been fucking up the city psychically and financially, the malevolent influence of the warlock Doctor Gotham’s tomb in the center of the city, the madness hypersigil of Amadeus Arkham (in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth), there were several outposts of subterraneans and aliens beneath the city during the Silver Age, constant chemical warfare that makes it the equivalent of a WWI trench managed by MK-ULTRA, it’s in New Jersey, and I think God just hates it
tired: Batman could do more good by running charities than by fighting criminals
wired: Batman could save literally every other city on the planet simultaneously with the amount of effort and resources he’s pumped into Gotham, which is a lost cause, but this is his city damnit.
Inspired: Batman’s diligence is containing the menace that is Gotham’s madness from escaping too far from city limits.
For all his billions, for all his activity, for all his efforts, Gotham is a bonfire fed by the madness of mortal people, cultivated by dark powers and just existing there makes living souls like kindling for it. And left to its own devices,it’d become a breeding ground for supernatural unrest that no mere social service system or social awareness of activist campaign, no government program, no actions of a singular vigilante, could ever hope to undo.
Batman is single handedly if need be but fortunately not alone so often, holding back the noxious psychic influences of warp and wyrd entities and what they do to the very environment and landscape through the power of sheer, unbridled humanity.
Ascended: Gotham is containing Batman, because the forces of evil, consciously or not, have figured out that if let loose, this motherfucker and his sprawling adoptive family would’ve solved every crime in the world ever, so they throw literally everything they have at his home town in hopes that he stays there.
Because they were foolish and let Alan Scott escape. They aren’t making that mistake again.
What if Gotham is the pump?
Like. What if, because Gotham is such a shitshow, anyone looking to improve their lives has their eye on being able to move out of Gotham, so whenever Bruce Wayne’s charitable endeavors come somebody’s way, they take it, pack their bags, and move the fuck away, and take that money with them.
Meanwhile there’s an ongoing influx of people to Gotham primarily because they’re flat broke and real estate in Gotham is dirt fucking cheap because it’s a shitshow, and there’s always places hiring because 1) they’ve got Bruce Wayne money to try to make a difference, 2) there’s no shortage of places that need to be fixed up a little, and 3) villains are always in the market for new henchpeople.
So you’re a broke millennial from any other town in the country, and you have student loans, a job that hasn’t kept up with inflation, and your landlord has raised the rent three times this year so far and it’s eating up two-thirds of your paycheck. You look for housing on the internet and discover that one-third of your paycheck will get you the mortgage for an actual house in Gotham, a house you own and will never have to deal with your scummy rentjacking landlord again. And Wayne Industries is hiring, and so are sixteen different disaster remediation places, and six staffing services with a sort of weird vibe to them but they offer benefits, since when do temp agencies do benefits, and sure the crime rate is high but the rest of the world’s heading in that direction anyway, especially if you’re homeless, which you’re gonna be in like four months if that jackass your landlord raises the rent one more time, so get in losers, we’re going to Gotham!
And you settle into your bigger-than-expected apartment and get a job that brings you a comfortable paycheck and you learn to live with the terrorist attacks and the explosions and the gunfire and the neighbors and the drunken billionaire swimming in the restaurant fountain, and you pay off your student loans, buy a car, suffer a few months’ unemployment when your boss goes to jail for trying to assassinate the mayor and then your partner loses their job for a few months when the office gets smothered in a jungle’s worth of climbing plants and you develop hospital bills when you both get caught in a hallucinogenic terror gas eruption at the mall, but hey, you’d be homeless by now in any other city, so you live with it.
And then it’s a few years later and you’re wanting to start a family, but the neighbor three doors down owns pet hyenas and the park was firebombed last week and someone froze all the water pipes and you crashed your car into one of the impromptu ice sculptures and you’d really like your kids to grow up in a normal city where they don’t have to receive advice like “don’t talk to strange plants.”
So you visit one of the social work offices and get yourself a bit of assistance, save up your money, sell your house for the price of a down payment to the sort of incoming fool you were six years ago, and use your polished resume to get yourself a job someplace that doesn’t have What To Do If Clown Attack on their safety training syllabus.
You came, you left, and Gotham remains. A shithole.
This is a really well thought out way in what keeps Gotham moving. Sure there’s the people that have been there they’re whole lives, families that go back generations, but these are reasons people move in. The kind of people that want out. And maybe are desperate enough to take that Job hunching.
It’s also weird to see my pithy response circle around over 20 times and end up back on my dash…
When the glimmering hope continues against the tide of the hopeless.
People say there’s no crime under the ocean like it’s an insult to Aquaman. Yeah. There’s no crime under the ocean. You think that’s a fucking coincidence?
it’s true that gingers like myself are more likely to acquire skin cancer from sun exposure
it is ALSO true that people of color are more likely to DIE of skin cancer (a very survivable cancer) due to late diagnosis, medical racism, and lower levels of access to care
pls take care of your skin. it’s your biggest organ