Brilliant Strategy. (Perfect For Secret Agents/spies Such As Myself.)

[ID: A tweet from Emily Gwen @/theemilygwen.

Did you know Disney sells lesbian flag pins? Bob Iger profits off the flag I designed for our community!

On another note, I can't afford to pay for my medication this month! Any help would be appreciated.

Donations: ko-fi.com/emilygwen

Store: emilygwen.threadless.com

END ID]

❤🖤💚🧡💙

Okay, so I don’t know if I want to make a full AU out of my librarian headcanons, but I can post an array of notes even if I don’t end up doing anything with the idea. Here goes:

Harley Quinn •Youth/Teen Department Head—she manages the youth department with a special focus on teen programs. •Harley is the only person with the chaotic energy to match the older kids. She knows how to tire them out to get them to behave. •Her office is a fucking mess, but she knows where everything is in there. Nobody else goes in unless they have to. •The building-wide nerf war that happens every year was her idea. On the one hand, it’s a disaster. Every. Single. Time. But it’s also gotten more teens to sign up for library cards than any other outreach attempt. There’s a waitlist to sign up every year. The  rest of the library has a love-hate relationship to it. Jervis Tetch •Youth/Reference—he’s in charge of storytimes and general child-wrangling. •All his patience is reserved for the little kids. Teenagers and adults get none, which has led to him being dragged away from several altercation where he snapped and let loose on a misbehaving patron. •His method for keeping the kids in line are “Quiet Cards”. The kids in the reading program get one at the start of every storytime they attend. If they misbehave, their card gets taken away, but if they still have it at the end of the storytime, they get tickets that can be put toward prizes later. It works like a charm to the point that Harley started co-opting it for teen programs. •Jervis makes many of the crafts and decorations for the library. The youth workroom is his domain and Harley is the only other one who dares to enter.

Jonathan Crane •Tech—he’s the guy who fills orders and repairs things. Do not fuck with him or he will make your life a living hell. •He and Jervis are constantly at odds because most of the items getting damaged are kids’ books. •Workplace cryptid who is almost never found outside his office. If he comes looking for you, start running. Edward Nygma •Reference — He’s also the de facto IT guy because he’s the most computer savvy person available. •Ed gets stuck with all the problematic patrons and he hates it. The only upside is being able to foist them off on his coworkers and knowing all the drama they cause. •He knows everyone’s secrets and could totally blackmail everybody if he really felt like it. •He’s the only person outside the youth department who does really well with the kids. He likes entertaining the ones that get bored waiting for their parents by sending them on little scavenger hunts (usually for office supplies).

Neglect is abuse. It has the same effect on you. Being last on the priority list of people “have other things to worry about” is not how you grow up into an emotionally healthy person. You will accept being ignored and neglected because it’s whats expected of you. You will be grateful for crumbs of attention and seek for no more, no matter what. You will grow up dealing with every problem alone and learning to not reach out, not ask for help, not take away a second of someone’s precious time for your problems that surely couldn’t matter.

You learn to be quiet and invisible and to not show signs of pain. You learn to blame yourself for not speaking out, for suffering alone, as if you’re doing it on purpose. You learn to cope with being insignificant, because when you’re neglected, that’s a given. Surely, if you were of any importance, someone would care enough to notice, to talk to you, to see if anything’s wrong. To see if you’re drowning in depression and dissociating from the amount of pain you’re in. Surely, what you’re going thru would matter to someone.  

People who don’t care to give you attention are not people who love you and care for you. They don’t raise you, they don’t even learn who you are. And it’s only a matter of time before you fall into resignation and learn that being ignored and sent to the gates of hell to deal with demons all by yourself, is how your life will be. And the more dangerous part – if someone gives you predatory attention, if someone finds something they can use within you, something they can tear away for their own purposes – it will feel welcome, it will make you feel like finally, you’re good for something. Finally, someone is looking at you. You’ll welcome people who use and hurt you, because even that is better than to be completely and utterly abandoned and ignored by the world. Neglect will make you welcome abusers in your life, not only without caution, but with gratitude that even for a moment, you’re not feeling neglected anymore.

Okay, Killer Croc has been so inconsistently written as far as the "Croc" part goes that I think the funniest thing would be if he was still just a dude with a skin condition, but he feeds the mutant rumors to keep people from fucking with him. Someone starts a rumor that he eats people and he just rolls with it. If anyone questions the lack of tail, he says it just came off and hasn't grown back.

If you’ve been thru a phase of your life feeling hopeless, depressed, broken, scared, suffering pain that you didn’t believe would ever stop, or having your whole will to go on eaten away by something devastating that happened to you, and you were alone and abandoned and ashamed of feeling this pain, I want you to know that it wasn’t okay.

Every human, especially young humans, can get overwhelmed and devastated and drown in their dark thoughts and fears, and nobody deserves to go thru that alone. If you were living close to other people, and they failed to notice, or ignored your state, or tried to make sure that you feel guilty for it, ashamed of it, deserving of it, or responsible for it, that wasn’t okay. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. Human society isn’t built on kicking someone when they’re down. Humans are not supposed to see someone suffering and deteriorating and then go ‘serves them right’ or ‘it’s their own fault’. That’s despicable.

You were not supposed to be left alone in your pain. You were supposed to get help and support. Even if you couldn’t imagine how that support and help would look like, if you couldn’t believe you deserved any, even if you felt so worthless and unimportant that taking someone’s time and energy would have felt horrible and selfish to you, you still deserved help and support during the worst period of your life.

Someone should have checked up on you. Someone should have made sure that you don’t spend all or most of your time alone, drowning in your own fears and pain, neglected. Someone should have offered you conversation and reassurances, even if they wouldn’t have fixed the underlying issue. You shouldn’t have been going thru it alone and unchecked. Someone should have taken measures to make sure you know you’re cared for, that people are going to put an active effort into changing your situation for the better. You should have been reminded, with actions and words, that you are still lovable, that you’re desired to be a part of society, that you’re not something to leave behind in a room until you either get your shit together or fail and be forgotten. You should have never feared for your relevance or your value while already suffering from everything else. You shouldn’t have been left to your own devices, with your social needs completely unfulfilled, with society turning their entire back on you.

That kind of situation makes you feel alone for a long, long time. That’s the kind of thing that makes you lose hope in people, and it should have never come to it. You should never have been in so much pain and alone in it. You never deserved that kind of cruel and contemptuous abandonment. You should never have been thru something that makes other people feel like a threat or a dead end. Your problems should never have felt so large that your place in the world your humanity and would be revoked over them.

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.

Amen, amen, amen.

For victims of abuse, it’s almost essential to gain ability to stop empathising with our abusers, not only because it’s keeping us trapped in their manipulations, but because we deserve to know that we don’t have to prioritize the feelings of a person who is actively doing harm to us.

Empathy for victims of abuse is almost mandatory, to the point where we’re punished for every moment we’re not displaying extreme and unconditional empathy for the abusers. We can get called out and berated for simply going about our business and not thinking of what the abuser might want of us in the particular second. We get shamed for ‘not knowing better’ and 'failing our role’ if we take a minute to consider our own needs.

When they’re doing their usual play – hurting us, then quickly acting hurt and playing the victim, bringing out their past trauma, crying about how hard they have/had it, how our feelings hurt them, even in the case we don’t fall for it, and refuse to apologize and accept that our feelings are just collateral damage in their personal crusade, we will get attacked immediately for being an emotionless and selfish person. Fail to react empathetic to the abuser’s guilt trip will get us called out for being horrible, for not caring, for being the most vicious demon, the worst person, the most unworthy and ungrateful human being in the world. That kind of thing sticks. We don’t just get over that. It becomes etched in our brains that displaying empathy, even to someone who is walking all over us, is our biggest priority, that showing empathy is the last thing that might protect us against an even bigger outburst, that might help us deserve to not be attacked for our lack of morality. We don’t get to be mad. We don’t get to stand up for ourselves. We have to put up a display of empathy or endure personal attacks that will make us feel like we don’t deserve to live.

To finally be able to cut the empathy and stand up against the abuser, is an act that fights years, maybe decades of brainwashing and conditioning. To not care if the abuser has it bad anymore, means we faced and fought years of trauma, lies, personal attacks, self doubt, self hatred, pain and injustice. Abusers want to take away our ability not to care, not to empathize and not to prioritize them, and seizing that back means seizing ourselves back, existing in a place where our empathy is not mandatory anymore, where we’re not pure compassionate receptacles of trauma anymore. Where empathy isn’t forced and squeezed out of us under the threat of pain. Where our value and personality isn’t dictated by whether we endlessly forgive and accept people who will only continue hurting us and bringing trauma into our life.

It is not a mark of a healthy and normal human being to offer our entire compassion and understanding to a creature who is destroying us in return. If someone proves to be a danger to us, it’s normal to disregard everything except the knowledge that this is a threat, and nothing else to us. To keep away because our well being shouldn’t be put under a fear of a constant threat. We are normal for following our sense of self-preservation and turning away from whatever is damaging us, regardless of how sad or upset this being becomes. We are not to be a collateral damage to someone’s misery or manipulation. Our empathy doesn’t have to be an opening to accept harm. We can save our empathy for those who also feel for us. We’re not bad people if we close up under a threat of abuse, and want to retreat to safety. We’re not evil, cruel or selfish for extending our hearts only to those who also keep ours safe.

'Never Again' revised script notes.... Mulder's inner monologue 😭💕

Her life has become his.

There it is. Definitive.

Also, that one guy.... "God forbid they make a movie for men." ?!?!??

**cackling b/c dude utterly misses the point**

BARBIE (2023) dir. Greta Gerwig +⭐letterboxd reviews by men

Did your abusive parents continually imply or say outright, that you're a burden not only on them, but also on all other people you interact with?

I had my parents warn me every time I was leaving the house that I was a nuisance and to not allow other people to 'feed me' because then I would be eating somebody else's food. There was a few times where I accepted a ride from my friend's parents, because I didn't dare to ask my own parents, and when they found out, they were outraged, furious and went on this big tirade about how I owe them gas money, how I spent resources that weren't mine, and was now in debt to those people, and they, my parents now had to go and make up for that debt (for the friend's parents, it was a 3 minute detour to pick me up, they were already driving their own kid).

I was discouraged from going anywhere because of how big of a burden I was on those people, and if I wanted to go to a friend's house, they would get mad and ask 'why do you have to go there, aren't we good enough for you', it was mind-boggling.

However it did force me, as a child, to continually believe I have to be extremely useful; at every house I went, I made a gift for them so they wouldn't be mad at me, and to pay my dues that I owe them for being at their place. I also didn't dare to ask for food or drinks anywhere because I believed that would make me a burden and put me in debt, and rides were considered basically unrepayable, and I had to depend on my parents for them, who would use them for blackmail every time. (you have to do whatever I say for 2 weeks, if you want that 15 minutes ride to the train station).

I only realized recently that they actively worked on making me feel despised and burdensome in every place I ever went, not only at my own home, and that it's the reason I never visit other people's houses anymore, and stick to myself in fear of being unwelcome.