sally: i named you perseus because your father was a greek god percy: my dad is poseidon percy: …so you named me after zeus’ kid? sally: thought it’d throw them off for a bit
Sally Jackson, after frantically researching Greek mythology for baby names:
Today begins the official public testing of ORCS RPG, a text based rpg that will update monthly!
You are The Faceless, the newest, mask-wearing member of the O.R.C.S. (Orcish Resistance Crew Squad), a mercenary guild by monsters, for monsters. With your large, green companions by your side, you will embark on a variety of frankly goofy adventures.
I’m not saying that I dislike that weed has been legalized in more and more states (imo all drugs should be legalized but that’s not the point of this post)- I *am* saying that every time I pass a dispensary that looks like an apple store and I see white people talking freely about making special cookies and smoking in their spare time, all I can think about are the thousands and thousands of black people who experienced huge amounts of state-sponsered violence for even the suspicion of having weed on them and those who are STILL IN PRISON for possession charges.
And it. Just kinda makes me grit my teeth, you know? My father was illegally searched and brutalized in front of me when I was a little kid because the cop “thought he smelled weed” (he didn’t, my dad doesn’t touch the stuff) and in the mean time Becky in accounting takes a “special gummy” every night that she gets from a store next to the Starbucks.
Also you’ve got cops railing against laws that prohibit using “smell of weed (a legal drug in the jurisdiction)” as justification for searches
when my local friendgroup hit our late 20’s/early 30’s we all metamorphosed into ancient romans and/or redwall characters bc now whenever we have ‘get togethers’ ppl are always bringing over cheeses and crusty breads and cured meats and olives and grapes and ales etc
the ancients were wrong about many things but they were absolutely right about snacking plates
it’s commendable how Jim Henson knew that making a variety show that happens to star puppets would inevitably be pigeonholed as a kids show so he chose the name THE MUPPET SHOW: SEX AND VIOLENCE for the pilot to try to avoid that and then it still didn’t work
If you think polyamory or open relationships are cheating, it sounds to me that you view cheating not as a betrayal of trust or a partner’s wishes, but a betrayal of some perceived natural order.
What do any of you know of my Palestine? Of the late night queer parties in Ramallah? Of raves held in biblically aged buildings? Of lesbians in hijabs, of gay men in hoop earrings, of trans Palestinians dancing with joyful abandon?
We fear Israel first, before our families, always.
We’re 100 times more likely to die at the hands of an Israeli gun or bomb than by western propagandized ideas of honor killings.
I’ve seen White Christian Americans wish their child be dead rather than gay. (½)
subeaux:
it’s only Israel that weaponizes the homophobia that Queer people all over the world of all religions experience to justify murdering Palestinians of all kinds, young and old, Christian and Muslim, Queer and Straight.’
Parents get sooooooo mad when anyone even remotely implies that if we know it negatively impacts adults then it’s probably quite detrimental to the health and development of a young mind to stick an iPad in front of a child any time they show signs of Behaviors. “Are you calling me a bad parent?” Yeah. I am.
“Well, what am I supposed to do when my kid Has Behaviors?” Idk. You somehow lived to adulthood without being an iPad baby. What did the adults around you growing up do when you exhibited Behaviors? Was it a positive on your growth and development? If it wasn’t, do you remember what your child-self had hoped an adult would do? Start there.
Anyway. Every generation has its challenges but I think we are all deeply unprepared for just how fucking weird the iPad baby gen, who also had key developmental years during covid social distancing, are showing signs of being.
Okay, so in the worst case scenario where I only blog to the queue, with my current posting speed, it will take approximately 554 days for me to reach a 100K posts… That’s more than a year and a half
and in the best case scenario where I max out my post limit every day, that’s still 320
i also have a whole post i could write about how kudos on ao3 correspond to marketability rather than quality, exactly how the actual publishing industry works, but. the question is… do i have the energy
okay i’m writing it.
there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.
but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.
it’s not.
kudos on ao3 are a marketing game. i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic
my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.
my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation. it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.
by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes. this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation. it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation. it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.
quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today). i wrote it when i was 19. it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.
so why is vacation so much more popular?
a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in. it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks
it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time. i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.
breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities. it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy. it’s dense, and at some times very dark.
much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave. but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.
unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership. but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile. in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos. by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.
that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that. it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some. it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention. most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them. it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.
meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want. the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom. so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background. that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.
i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU). i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun. i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement. i used tags that people often search on ao3. i used popular & humorous title formats. i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.
both of these series are undeniably good. i’m a good writer. but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats. in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.
i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy. i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do. i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.
(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen. unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)
so.
here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:
pick a large fandom. raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom. if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success
pick the most popular pairing. or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.
DO NOT write relationship-less genfic. even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship. (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)
DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags. do not write a summary that’s a million words long.
write a popular AU. high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.
write a popular relationship trope. fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.
write a popular subgenre. sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.
write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.
profit.
does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.
it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.
so if you’re writing for external validation, use this formula and go forth and enjoy success, friends. and if you’re worried that maybe you’re a bad writer because your fic isn’t being engaged with: stop worrying. marketability and quality are not the same thing, and they never have been.
my homestuck fic actually comprises a significant fraction of the first ten pages of top-kudosed works. im on there a lot. i shaped a big chunk of early fanon. there’s an unsettling amount of evidence that im why troll dicks generally look like that. and it’s not because i was the best writer around, it’s because i got in early and because i write fanfiction to throw spaghetti at the wall, trying out whatever seems new and interesting to me, so i ended up blazing exactly one step of a new trail in a bunch of different directions, so then subsequent explorers kept on crediting me.
but like, actually examining my works through the lense of kudos also shows the other filter besides just novelty: i wrote a huge range of lengths and subjects and pairings and tones, and what actually Became A Hit was pretty much all the Normal Shit. the redrom. the strider manpain. the ornate aus with lovely outfits. the palatable stuff that almost anyone liked.
your best work probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t!) be your most popular, because quality is a function of passion and experience and experimentation and originality. popularity is about working with averages. stuff most people like well enough. there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. but you need to keep that in mind if you want to be an unrepentant freak who writes for the unhinged joy of it.
everyone likes a guitar. the inventor of the saxophone was almost assassinated like three times by inept but evidently passionate sax-hating time travelers. draw your own conclusions.
Absolutely love this cat. He’s sherlockthecat_official on tiktok and his bit is for his fans to accuse him of the wildest shit while he stares blankly at the camera:
“Aphrodite loves terfs” do you really think a goddess of love formed from a literal penis and the mother of Hermaphroditus, an intersex god who was associated with androgyny and feminine men, fucks around with transphobia?
she is a literal trans icon and to deny that will get you smited by all the gods
the worst part about having huge autistic fantasy worlds in your head is that it takes like 8 billion years to turn that into something substantial you can show people
like oh yeah man i have these 60 OCs and a whole plot about the ethical and moral implications of meeting your alternate timeline self and if it’s worth sacrificing a whole artificial timeline to get back to your own time. no you cannot see them
No-fault divorce is actually very recent. That is, a divorce just because you wanted to get divorced and not because they were guilty of some provable transgression. California’s no-fault divorce law was 1966; the latest US state, it was 2010. When I was in Catholic school, we were taught to believe in and promote anti-no-fault-divorce positions. This is very recent history, and you cannot take even this for granted. Stop being “edgy” about feminism and its flaws. Every movement will have some flaws. But do you not think that this, and the risk it represents, is significant to women as a class of all backgrounds?
Hey fun fact the reason the murder rate went down when no fault divorce was introduced was because beforehand when women were being abused they would just kill their husbands. do not come at this post with the “well abused people can still get out” like good fucking luck ask any actual abuse victem how the courts been to them ill wait
It’s the other way around. The spousal murder rate didn’t drop because angry women no longer snapped and killed their husbands - it dropped because abusive husbands no longer had access to easy victims.
ALT
No-fault divorce saves women’s lives and removes a lot of men’s access to easy targets for abuse, and that’s why they’re trying to get rid of it.
Since I live in a row house, I live in only a moderate amount of fear that my neighbors are going to do something stupid enough to render my home unlivable. Imagine you’re in the fucking suburbs, and your whole house falls underground because your neighbor has enough privilege to sidestep consequences for, and even builds a successful social media presence on, her untreated mania.
people are absolutely EVIL about the boundaries of “picky eaters”. no, they do not have to try it. yes, they can know they don’t like it without having eaten it before. no, they probably have not suddenly grown a taste for the food they’ve said they hate. no, they probably are not going to like it in the Special Way This One Place Cooks It. yes, you are being a bad friend if you try to “trick” them into eating it anyway
Things that actually help picky eaters try new things:
“Do you want to try this off of my plate?”
“It’s made of [ingredients], I think you’d like [x part]”
“If you want to see if you like [x food], this is a pretty good representation of it”
“You won’t like this, it tastes like [description]. Do you want to try it for fun?”
“Do you remember trying/have you ever tried [x food]? This is like that, but [differences]”
“I think you’d like the taste of this, but the texture is iffy. It’s [description]”
Make sure there’s other food they can eat if they don’t like the new one
And most importantly, build trust with that person by listening to them, showing that you take their concerns into account, and being cool if the answer is no. No is always an option. This isn’t something you do once, it’s a pattern you have to stick to if you want to establish that you are a safe person when it comes to food stuff
Basically: offer the food, explain what’s in it and why you think it’s worth trying, and then be cool with the answer you get. No pressure, no trickery, just be straight up with people
i also have a whole post i could write about how kudos on ao3 correspond to marketability rather than quality, exactly how the actual publishing industry works, but. the question is… do i have the energy
okay i’m writing it.
there’s a very good encouraging post (cannot currently find it) about how ao3 kudos don’t correspond to writing quality, which is true.
but if you don’t know WHY that is, it sounds like meaningless pat-on-the-back “keep your chin up, champ!” stuff.
it’s not.
kudos on ao3 are a marketing game. i’m gonna use my own ao3 works to make my case bc that’s a lot easier (and Significantly Less Asshole-ish) than analyzing the marketability of other people’s ao3 fic
my two main fandoms over the past 8 years are homestuck and the raven cycle/dreamer trilogy verse.
my most popular homestuck fanfiction is vacation. it’s a johndave fic i wrote when i was 16, and as of writing this post, it has 2,974 kudos.
by comparison, there’s breathe on the ashes. this is an ancestor fic similar in length and chapter count to vacation. it has 268 kudos - an encouraging readership for sure, but less than 1/10th of the engagement of vacation. it has less than 1/20th the amount of hits.
quality-wise, breathe on the ashes is SIGNIFICANTLY better than vacation (though there’s a LOT about it i’d do differently if i wrote it today). i wrote it when i was 19. it has better characterization, more thoughtful character arcs, more compelling plotting, better twists, and a significantly more fulfilling resolution.
so why is vacation so much more popular?
a great deal of it is luck - it was the first (i believe?) mainstream mermaid AU in the homestuck fandom, and it inspired a LOT of fanart that brought readers in. it was written in 2012-2013, at the height of the homestuck fandom’s engagement w/ fanworks
it also combines a popular AU concept with the most popular fandom ship at the time. i have multiple very short, badly written johndave oneshots from 2012 that ALSO have significantly more kudos than breathe on the ashes.
breathe on the ashes, by comparison, is about the homestuck ancestors, who get almost no screen time in canon and have no canon personalities. it’s plot-heavy rather than ship-heavy. it’s dense, and at some times very dark.
much of its readership is tumblr mutuals and people who started following my writing for johndave. but also, a significant part of its readership is people reading for the tagged relationships and the promised adventure story. that’s why it has over 200 kudos instead of, like, 10.
unbecoming jordan hennessy is my newest series, so it hasn’t had years to gain a readership. but none of the fics have more than 70 hits, which is unusual for my profile. in fact, only the first fic has more than 10 kudos. by comparison, the vampire AU has 73 series bookmarks, 3,500 hits on the first installment, and nearly 450 kudos on the first installment.
that’s because i knew the jordan hennessy series had little potential readership going in and made no effort to mitigate that. it’s an extremely dark dead dove series that has basically every available content warning and then some. it focuses on a dreamer trilogy character (so, already a smaller fandom than the raven cycle) who gets very little fandom attention, and character spinoffs who get even LESS attention. most didn’t even have ao3 tags of their own until i wrote them. it’s all genfic, and it’s all gruesome and gutwrenching and awful.
meanwhile i DID take steps to encourage vampire AU readership, even as i continued writing what i want. the main characters are in a polycule, but poly fic is rarely interacted with in this fandom. so several installments focus chiefly on the main fandom pairing (pynch) with the polyamory as a background. that way there was already a readership when i started exploring adansey, bronan, etc.
i wrote the vampire AU with fan-favorite tropes (i mean…. it’s a vampire AU). i wrote it to be self-indulgent and fun. i wrote it ENTIRELY as a series where I Do What I Want, but i also marketed it in ways that drive reader engagement. i used tags that people often search on ao3. i used popular & humorous title formats. i used short, snappy summaries that told people what to expect from the fic.
both of these series are undeniably good. i’m a good writer. but only one was written With The Consumption Of Others In Mind, and it’s reflected 100% in the stats. in fact, if i didn’t have tumblr mutuals who’d shared jordan hennessy, NO ONE would have read it.
i’m not sore about people not reading jordan hennessy. i wrote it for myself, like most of my writing is for myself, and i published it for maybe 3 or 4 mutuals who care about the content as much as i do. i knew it wasn’t going to be mass devoured by the fandom.
(i have well over a million words of fiction that i’ve written for myself that no one else has ever seen. unbecoming jordan hennessy is the closest public window into what most of that content looks like.)
so.
here’s how to market a fic to get kudos:
pick a large fandom. raven cycle is a pretty big YA fandom, homestuck is a giant internet fandom. if i cared to write for fandoms like the MCU, i could almost definitely surpass vacation’s success
pick the most popular pairing. or a very popular pairing, if there are several in your fandom.
DO NOT write relationship-less genfic. even if the fic itself is pretty genficcy, tag it with a popular relationship. (use & relationship tags if there absolutely is no romance or it’s focused on familial bonding.)
DO NOT go overboard with relationship tags or with general tags. do not write a summary that’s a million words long.
write a popular AU. high school, college, supernatural, coffee shop, office workers, soulmates, whatever.
write a popular relationship trope. fake relationship, enemies to lovers, there was only one bed, and they were roommates etc.
write a popular subgenre. sickfic, slow burn, married shenanigans, plotless fluff, angst with a happy ending, etc.
write a oneshot or keep chapter lengths somewhere from 2,000 to 4,000 words.
profit.
does any of that have to do with the writing quality? no.
it has to do with what people are searching for on ao3, what they’re likely to read, and how to reach the largest market possible in your fandom of choice.
so if you’re writing for external validation, use this formula and go forth and enjoy success, friends. and if you’re worried that maybe you’re a bad writer because your fic isn’t being engaged with: stop worrying. marketability and quality are not the same thing, and they never have been.
my homestuck fic actually comprises a significant fraction of the first ten pages of top-kudosed works. im on there a lot. i shaped a big chunk of early fanon. there’s an unsettling amount of evidence that im why troll dicks generally look like that. and it’s not because i was the best writer around, it’s because i got in early and because i write fanfiction to throw spaghetti at the wall, trying out whatever seems new and interesting to me, so i ended up blazing exactly one step of a new trail in a bunch of different directions, so then subsequent explorers kept on crediting me.
but like, actually examining my works through the lense of kudos also shows the other filter besides just novelty: i wrote a huge range of lengths and subjects and pairings and tones, and what actually Became A Hit was pretty much all the Normal Shit. the redrom. the strider manpain. the ornate aus with lovely outfits. the palatable stuff that almost anyone liked.
your best work probably won’t (and probably shouldn’t!) be your most popular, because quality is a function of passion and experience and experimentation and originality. popularity is about working with averages. stuff most people like well enough. there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. but you need to keep that in mind if you want to be an unrepentant freak who writes for the unhinged joy of it.
everyone likes a guitar. the inventor of the saxophone was almost assassinated like three times by inept but evidently passionate sax-hating time travelers. draw your own conclusions.
in HEMA (aka historical european fencing), much of the sport is done with fencing masks on, so identifying your clubmates during sparring or tourneys is just based on gear. you know, what color their jacket and pants are, what patches they have on it, how is their mask painted. If someone borrows someone else’s jacket it’s legitimately jarring, like having someone with an entirely different body type and way of moving stealing your friend’s face.
Once i read about historical fishermen in the north sea and how they each had a specific hat pattern that their buddies would use to identity them while they were bundled up. It was so much part of their identity that they were often buried wearing those hats. The gear is like your name, a visual identifier of YOU when you do not have a face.
anyway, back when I was buying gear i got my pants in ELECTRIC blue. I figured i was gonna get a black or grey jacket. but HEMA gear is kind of expensive because it’s all custom- or handmade, so instead of spending $400 on a new jacket I picked up one secondhand for like 20. Except the only jacket that fit me was bright, SCARLET red. And I already had my expensive, new, custom, BLUE pants. I look like a damn rocket pop or like, a mixed Icee. I was like, shit! I should switch my jacket before i become the rocket pop guy!!!
Long story short, not only am I now the rocket pop guy, the color scheme has bled into my entire wardrobe. Every-fucking-thing I own is red and blue. I look like a french revolutionary. I look like a founding father in a school play. I have become a northern fisherman in my stripey hat. Now, even if I DO get a new jacket, I feel like I GOTTA buy it in red, yk? Otherwise they won’t recognize me. Maybe I won’t recognize me. I’m the rocket pop guy!!!
OP I DO HEMA TOO AND SEEING THIS ON MY DASH FILLED ME WITH SO MUCH EXCITEMENT OMG AND I HAVE SOMETHING RELATED TO SHARE (also if you wanna compare where we get stuff from hit me up)
when I was buying my gambeson, I decided to check out the deal of the day section and found one that was my perfect size for much cheaper
except
it’s description said it was blue and yellow and came with an “added patch”
I initially thought it was going to be more muted colors and I could just sorta subtly be supporting my local basketball team’s colors. When it shipped I realized it was very bright blue and yellow. so now I’m very boldly supporting my local basketball team. Go golden state warriors!!
the added patch turned out to not to be the Warriors’s logo, a dragon, another hema place, or anything else I expected to be. it turned out to be a name tag. a name tag that says JEREMY on it. my name is not Jeremy. the people at my club know this. so for me, someone not named Jeremy, who has never in their life supported a basketball team before, to show up in a bright blue and yellow gambeson emboldened with the name JEREMY on it, was a sight. Jeremy has now become his own identity that I simply use on occasion. I would say he has since become a bit of an icon in our group.
if I’m getting hema pants, they must continue the trend. I am Jeremy
I do SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) fight, not HEMA, but we’re all wearing helmets and we can’t see faces unless we’re right on top of each other, so the whole ‘I know that is My Good Buddy Joe because he’s wearing My Good Buddy Joe’s armor’ is legit. And then you have my household, where we all wear the exact same armor because it’s household-issue and Free, so the only way to tell us apart is that we write our names on the back of our helmets. If you’re not behind us, good luck.
SCA here, (i did do HEMA for a bit! I can’t fight now) and yes, the Armor and people’s Arms, that is their colors and device on their shield and clothes? Same deal. Even as onlookers we check for where our buddies are by trying to spot their heraldry. My own involves red and blue because that’s like half my real life wardrobe- it’s very much Me.
So you get, “Dude I know that’s our pal Gilbert De Fancy because look at him he’s got a white bend across vivid blue I can see him from two miles away. And that over there is the Monarch because they are wearing the Monarch’s Kingdom-heraldry, and only a King, Queen or Ruler is allowed to wear that and also look how shiny their crown detail on their helm is.”
It’s like in college when you know everyone by their Winter Coat. You each have just one, and you see people’s bundled silhouette before anything else… so “Long black faux-wool buttoned coat with turned cuffs and heavy hood’ becomes who you Are for five months.
i. the monster’s body is a cultural body - The monster is a work of fiction to be analyzed through tools of literary and sociological theory.
ii. the monster always escapes - As long as the cultural fear from which the monster stems persists, the monster will reappear in retellings, reimaginings, and sequels.
iii. the monster is the harbinger of category crisis - Monsters defy binaries and challenge easy comprehension or categorization.
iv. the monster dwells at the gates of difference - The monster represents the Other.
v. the monster polices the borders of the possible - Tales of the monster exist to discourage unacceptable or taboo behaviors.
vi. fear of the monster is really a kind of desire - Subjects can vicariously participate in the disruption of the social order through the monster.
vii. the monster stands at the threshold… of becoming - Within the monster we find information about the self.
Every time I see another ibuprofen post on this site I’m like STOP
STOP
Stop.
Take that after a meal. Take it with a big glass of water. Don’t take it on an empty stomach EVER. Don’t take it with alcohol. You will destroy your stomach. You will end up with an ulcer. You will vomit blood. I’m not exaggerating.
Love, an adult person over 35 who can’t take NSAIDs anymore
That goes for Alleve (Naproxen Sodium) too! Aleve is worse on your stomach than Ibuprofen is.
Acetaminophen, not a NSAID, even more so that NSAIDS, should not be taken when drinking. No seriously, it causes liver and stomach damage (and it’s particularly hard on the liver to start with).
Painkillers are great! But the common ones are still nasty on your stomach and liver and eventually they won’t be an option for you. If you take them with care, you can extend how long you can keep using them.
This made me cry. I wish all situations could be handled as perfectly as this
I just want to point out the core of what the diffuser did in this conversation
They recognized that the mother was also expressing a vulnerable truth about herself - that she felt like a bad mother because her child was expressing gender feelings she wasn’t equipped to help with - and met her where she was, a concerned parent with limited information - to point her where she should be heading, research and resources.
Im going to make more of an effort to stop reflexively pushing people away when they express biases and make more of an effort to hear the underlying fears when i can
“it’s easier to love ourselves when we feel loved as ourselves”
ALT
