averycommoncrisis97
she/her | ukrainian | sad language nerd
22 posts
Latest Posts by averycommoncrisis97
"Sources close to the official investigation have also disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was broken. It is the kind of damage that can occur during strangulation. However, the exact cause of death may never be known because when her body was returned during the exchange on 14 February, certain parts were missing, namely the brain, eyes and larynx."
I noticed that a lot of people writing up this story or commenting on it online are confused about why she was returned with missing organs, some speculating that it was because her captors wanted to conceal her true cause of death or extent of her torture. I think that really shows that most of the world can't wrap their minds around a state that operates like the mob. Her captors took her eyes, her voice, and her mind, because she was a journalist, specifically to punish her by taking the organs that symbolize her vocation, so all journalists are afraid.
yep, how about trying to have a normal working week (from home or from the office) while getting like 8 hours of electricity per day (4 of them during the night, btw). also, keep in mind that water supply in some buildings depends on electricity as well, and modern apartment complexes don't have gas, so heating and cooking become a huge problem.
and all of that while being under constant barrage of rockets and shahed drones, the average Ukrainian experience :)
if I see another "how i survived the worst power outage in Europe", I will throw hands
Today is the anniversary of the Chornobyl disaster and I have found this short, but insightful article by Oksana Semenik on how this disaster is depicted in Ukrainian art.
https://artslooker.com/en/five-minutes-for-the-chornobyl-disaster-2/
What gets me is the implication that none of the previous children on their way to die never reminded Haymitch of the people he used to know strongly enough to care about them.
Like, was he waiting for a specific combination of features?
"This kid is from the Seam, she's got pigtails but no pin, whoops, gonna go do shots with Chaff, then!"
It is totally unintentional, but a sad implication that Suzanne Collins established is that Haymitch was never too present, nor cared a lot about the other tributes. The tributes he mentored before Katniss and Peeta, so wholly unconnected to his personhood, who didn't remind him at all about the people he cared for, didn't get the Haymitch we see in the og trilogy. The implication, in the end, is that they get a mentor who's constantly drunk blubbering about his 16 year old dead girlfriend.
Maybe that's why I can never forgive Suzanne Collins when it comes to the retconning of his characterisation. The narrative gives him no chance but to love Katniss and Peeta, but the fact that virtually all of his problems lead to Lenore Dove and not to the kids he had to see die... not only does it take so much of his depth, but tells you that the other kids never had a chance in the first place. Haymitch losing hope on getting his tributes home year by year is one thing, but never having cared in the first place makes his character so one dimensional, and takes away so much about the importance of every tribute despite their loss in the Games.
It is totally unintentional, but a sad implication that Suzanne Collins established is that Haymitch was never too present, nor cared a lot about the other tributes. The tributes he mentored before Katniss and Peeta, so wholly unconnected to his personhood, who didn't remind him at all about the people he cared for, didn't get the Haymitch we see in the og trilogy. The implication, in the end, is that they get a mentor who's constantly drunk blubbering about his 16 year old dead girlfriend.
Maybe that's why I can never forgive Suzanne Collins when it comes to the retconning of his characterisation. The narrative gives him no chance but to love Katniss and Peeta, but the fact that virtually all of his problems lead to Lenore Dove and not to the kids he had to see die... not only does it take so much of his depth, but tells you that the other kids never had a chance in the first place. Haymitch losing hope on getting his tributes home year by year is one thing, but never having cared in the first place makes his character so one dimensional, and takes away so much about the importance of every tribute despite their loss in the Games.
Maybe I'm just a dumb and bitter atheist but I don't really want to hear all the takes about how "good" and "woke pope" Francis was, and the retrospectives on his time as pope are going to be insufferable. He was another one who perpetuated the horrors of the church, and covered it with a thin layer of paint that made him slightly more sensible to a mid-2010s brain. He still covered for abusive priests, he still hated queer people and thought we were disfiguring ourselves, he still contributed to the modern right wing wave we're in.
so, in case anyone is curious about the whole "Easter Ceasefire" thing putin promised...
yep, that's an app that notifies us about air alarms. 21:52 means 9:52 pm for those who use am / pm system, weeell after 6 pm.
oops, that's some rocket danger!
I have just experienced reason #3847474 as to why supernatural and everything connected to it should go to superturbohell.
my mom, who is a pretty open-minded person (especially for an Eastern European woman in her late 50s), works for an edition house. they've been dealing with YA and LGBTQIA+ fiction for quite some time, so books like that can often be spotted on our shelves at home.
however, nothing could prepare me for my mom casually retelling an omegaverse story at dinner and then asking if it was a whole genre. I chocked on my fucking broccoli and had to improvise a PG explanation à la "y'know, it's a world with castes, where everyone can get pregnant".
Isttfg, if she comes to me for explanation of knotting or scenting, I'm gonna explode of embarrassment, and that'll be on you, Kripke.
I keep rereading this paragraph, and it keeps hurting my brain. So, who is supposed to be homophobic in this society, Suzanne?
We are definitely meant to read it as "peacekeepers will harass you, but the D12 citizens are fine with you being gay."
Why, though?
Peacekeepers come from Capitol (or D2 that aspires to be as similar to the Capitol as possible), and we know from MJ that in order to shock the Capitol citizens you need to engage in something really scandalous, like incest.
(Meanwhile, Finnick's "clients" (i.e., rapists) are never specified to be exclusively women. Even Katniss, who is somewhat prudish, is bothered by the quick turnover of his "partners", not their genders.)
Do the peacekeepers go through an insensitivity training of some sorts? Does President Snow personally come to the training centres and explain what kind of bigots they need to be? How are those peacekeepers supposed to act if they later return to the Capitol?
I'm pretty sure Collins just aimed for the "police & authoritative state are homophobic" narrative, but it makes no sense if the Capitol itself is a sex-positive environment. Like, ussr (which is usually a template for the secular YA dystopias) outlawed homosexuality, but they used the "male homosexuality is a sickness, female homosexuality doesn't exist" explanation. Is that something Capitol tells the districts?
Homophobia might have developed under the guise of "replenishing the population after the war", which would make a lot of sense in a post-war Panem, but despite the excessive talks about propaganda and posters we see nothimg about "needing more people" or "having more kids" (as kids would later potentially become tributes). Also, that would surely affect the districts more than the Capitol.
"Fired from jobs" is even weirder. I would understand if D12 was a small and traditional community that persecuted queer people, especially if queerness was something associated with the Capitol and its decadence. But no, we are apparently meant to think that the D12 folk are not homophobic at all, even though there is a pretty clear social divide between the merchants and the Seam miners. Also, who is supposed to do the said firing? Peacekeepers function like an army, so they answer to their higher-ups in the Capitol. I can believe that D12's coal mines are also under the total control of the Capitol, but who is going to fire the window-maker (especially since D12 is very small, so it's unlikely they have more window-makers)? The sellers from the black market? The "goat man"? Are the merchants not in control of the employees in their stores? What about the family-owned businesses, like the Mellarks or the Donners?
"Arrested" finishes me. So, say, you get arrested for being queer. Then what? Are you going to be executed? That was never mentioned as a motivation to shoot / whip / detain someone, even though in CF we see a lot of peacekeepers' crackdowns on D12. Are you going to stay in jail? That's gonna cost Capitol a lot of money. Does D12 even have a jail (Lenore Dove was kept on a "peacekeepers' base" in SOTR)? Are you going to continue working in the mines, but without salary, if we are continuing the ussr metaphor?
More importantly, are gay teenagers more likely to be reaped?
Make it make sense///
Yes, it's a book for kids. But if my kid is old enough to read about war, rebelion, and teenagers killing each other with melee weapons, they are totally old enough to read about gay people.
Haymitch and character assassination bc I have ~thoughts~
Specifically, the thought I kept having while reading SOTR was "Suzanne, don't take my tragic fuckboys away from me!"
Like, I don't care about the shipping, I don't give a flying fuck about Maysilee hating the pin, I honestly just wanted to read more about the character I truly enjoyed in the original trilogy. The problem seems to be that Suzanne didn't understand why people liked Haymitch.
In THG, he was a rude and condescending alcoholic who had already become completely disillusioned with pretty much everything in his life. We knew he was cynical ("you're never gonna leave this train"), incredibly smart even despite years of drinking (he was able to convince both Katniss and Peeta that they were going to save another person) and manipulative (he was capable of selling the tragic romance between his tributes to the Capitol citizens).
These features made Haymitch a useful ally to the rebels and a character the readers would root for, but they were balanced out by his meanness and the way he seemed to despise everybody else. That's why Haymitch's Games were my favourite part of CF: here we get this snarky kid who sneers at everybody and proclaims himself to be the smartest. And then he goes and proves himself to be exactly what he claimed to be: an intelligent guy that managed to win using Capitol's technologies. It also gave us an understanding of what Haymitch's idea of himself had been. Unlike Katniss and Peeta, who constantly underestimated themselves, Haymitch knew what he was good at. He was a scrappy and snarky kid from a poor district, so he had no reason to respect the Capitol citizens or his fellow tributes (in THG we learnt from Katniss that people knew virtually nothing about life in other districts) and was not afraod to show it.
And here comes SOTR, and Haymitch goes "oh, I only know how to make moonshine and maaaaybe something about mechanisms". So where did his vast knowledge come from? Did he go to a nightschool in between his drinking sessions in D12? Did Lenore Dove's braincells leave her body and attach themselves to Haymitch after her death?
Yes, people tend to be a lot smarter at 41 than they used to be at 16, but we were shown in CF that Haymitch was incredibly intelligent, why take that away from him?
Moreover, Katniss is also 16 in the first book and she is naive but far from dumb: she manages to decipher Haymitch's messages, she devises a plan to kill several Careers, she has been feeding her family for years, ffs. And we know from CF that Haymitch was from Seam (and we get no mention of his father), so he was likely forced to earn some money even before the Quarter Quell. But no, apparently the only use Haymitch has for his brain in SOTR is to learn a single fucking poem.
The only thing I find more annoying than dumbing an already established smart character down is making them **nice**. The original trlogy Haymitch was perfect as an adult figure who has had more experiences (almost exclusively bad experiences, mind you) and therefore was biter and unpleasant. The Haymitch from the Quarter Quell was a teenager on his way to become the arrogant alcoholic we know and love. He was already unhappy with his life but was trying to claw his way out of the arena. And then Haymitch did it, he got out alive, but Snow disliked the way he won and killed everybody Haymitch loved and cared about. This read as the thing that broke Haymitch and drove him to alcoholism (and the other 46 children dying not help). Yet in SOTR, we get this dumb but well-meaning kid who keeps trying to die, so somebody "more deserving" could win.
The Newcomers Alliance in general seems to be a result of Collins thinking, "Hm, the readers liked how Katniss befriended Rue and cared for her. Let me juuuust CntrlC and CntrlV, CntrlV, CntrlV...."
The book also has a sentiment of "the charming persona Katniss (and the readers) saw in CF was propaganda, created by Capitol" which I kinda despise. The audience liked Haymitch for being a mean drunk, so we wanted to read a book about that guy, not a loverboy who is painfully nice and "only pretends to be a rasca"l.
And the part that made want to throw the book across the room was the "sweetheart" retcon. Seriously, I started to growl in annoyance.
The way Haymitch treats Katniss in the books (especially at the beginning) is supposed to be condescending and unpleasant. It's like when John Constantine (the comics version, not the one from stupid American adaptation that made him stoic and straight) calls people around "love" or "pet", it was written, so the readers, especially young girls could relate and get annoyed. And SOTR tells us that it "slipped out because Katniss reminded him of another dead child". Suzanne took the most interesting relationship in the book (disenchanted older mentor - angry young student) and turned it into a weird nostalgia bait both inside and outside the story. Why, why did we need to change and retcon the stuff that clearly didn't need it?
In conclusion, now I don't want a book about Finnick because we're going to learn that he was reciting Albatross by Baudelaire every time he killed a tribute or something.
Sumy, Ukraine right now after russian strike 💔
The way Haymitch constantly had to reassure us that he "only liked Maysilee as a sister" was kinda annoying. Can you tell Suzanne doesn't want them to be shipped together?
Isttfg, it's like when Nina Dobrev left The Vampire Diaries, and Bonnie and Damon had to refer to each other as "my best friend" every fucking time they shared a frame.
Rashists hit Kryvyi Rih
«14 dead as of now, including 6 children, according to updated data,» — Minister of Internal Affairs.
Over 50 people injured, this number is growing - they continue to seek medical help.
Deliberate attack on the center of a residential area. Terror in its purest form.
People in the yard were burning alive in their cars.
TW: photos of victims of the russian attack.
It’s a common misconception that vampirism automatically leads to bisexuality but shocking new information from the World Health Organization says that, through sheer coincidence, everyone who’s ever been turned into a vampire was already bisexual. Scientists and statisticians all over the globe are working hard to understand this absolute statistical clusterfuck. More at 11.
I have a lot of complaints about THG, even more about SOTR. But I really, really appreciate Suzanne Collins making orange the colour of the revolution.
Had to review a few essays several months ago. Some of them were clearly written by chat gpt, using words and phrases waaay above the students' levels.
We spent a whole lesson trying to make sense of those overcomplicated sentences later. The best grade (as well as my heart) went to the student who sincerely wrote, "I confess, I still use facebook because I want to see how ugly my classmates have become!"
"you shouldnt use ai for schoolwork because its not actually helpful" this is true "and anyways if you cant even write a 600 word essay then you're stupid and an idiot" well now i think we've gone too far in the wrong direction.
sooooo
A few days ago, I put on a video of a girl watching Anora as a background. I'm Ukrainian, so watching the movie itself is not an option; too much exposure to the russian culture makes me wanna explode à la Soldier Boy.
And the only point that made the reviewer pause and talk for several minutes?
It wasn't the stereotypical "a girl from Eastern Europe is a stripper / an escort / a mail-order bride". It wasn't the way the russian oligarch-junior treated the main character. It wasn't the scene in which russian oligarch-senior's goons completely destroyed someone's small business.
Nope.
The watch-along girl was indignant because the main character used a slur while arguing with the goons. You know, the people who called her a whore, attacked her and tied her up.
Now, I'm usually the annoying woke friend who would tell you to avoid using people's nationality or sexual orientation as a means to offend them. But if the person in question is attacking you - you don't fucking owe them anything. You have no obligation to be polite or respectful towards a guy who tries to tie you up or a guy who calls a slur based on your profession.
I'm starting to understand how Mr "Why aren't you wearing a suit?" got elected though...
Was curious how far Ithaca was from troy today while listening to epic the musical and rereading the illiad and I found this map
I think odysseus would have been better just to walk😭
Since being angry about Severance seems to have turned me from a lurker into a poster, here, have a very cursed HP theory*.
Slughorn has tried to create a horcrux - and failed miserably at that. The idea is that Slughorn is "deeply ashamed" because he taught metaphorical Hitler how to create metaphorical nukes, but it doesn't work. By the time Voldemort asked Slughorn about horcruxes, he had already done all possible research and was clearly intending to do some soul-splinching. So a much closer analogy would be a Hitler asking a scientist: "Look, I'm definitely gonna nuke one city, do you think I would be able to nuke one more after that?"
And Slughorn's reaction was more or less "Dude, what the fuck". And then the infinitely charming little orphan Voldemort managed to convince Slughorn that his interest was exclusively theoretical.
So why the hell is Slughorn "deeply ashsamed", then? Ginny Weasley has done worse when compelled by Voldemort, but she seems to be able to shake it off.
So, my guess would be that Slughorn (who is an incredibly vain and self-serving character**) has tried to create a horcrux for himself. Maybe out of the stupid hourglass we see in the movie. But something didn't work. Slughorn is a potion master, so I suppose he would try to incapacitate his potential victim first. And then he either miscalculated the potion proportions or chickened out in the last moment. Third, much sinister option - he did manage to kill somebody but didn't have enough magical prowess to actually create a horcux. Now, that's something to be ashamed and shady about.
The potential horcrux:
*this should go without saying, but I do not support jk's horrible transphobic beliefs.
**this is not a criticism against the character or the actor, I actually love Broadbent in this role, he is one of the two good things about the sixth movie.
every time I try to find something about The Boys (aka Supernatural season 16), tumblr does this:
feels like it's saying "are you sure you want that drama again? go back to your comfort zone with queer vampires"
fucking seriously???
I've been genuinely worried for this woman, and now you're telling me that she's a tolstoevsky lover?
urgh
and yes, I have a right to be angry about this, I was watching this episode while listening to the russian drones being shot down near my home