Let Me Ask You A Question, Light.

Thanks to whoever edited this wiki article of Kaz Brekker

it’s hilarious

Just a hunch here, gop. But I think being 14 and married to a gross older man or dying in a mining accident is a bigger threat to a child than hearing about trans people.

I finished my Rome book and have now begun one about Pompeii. I’m 65 pages in and I already love it: yes, it covers the volcano, but most of the book is about “this is what the town and daily life of it would have been like, actually.” Fascinating stuff. Things I’ve learned so far:

- The streets in Pompeii have sidewalks sometimes a meter higher than the road, with stepping stones to hop across as “crosswalks.” I’d seen some photos before. The book points out that, duh, Pompeii had no underground drainage, was built on a fairly steep incline, and the roads were more or less drainage systems and water channels in the rain.

- Unlike today, where “dining out” is expensive and considered wasteful on a budget, most people in Pompeii straight up didn’t have kitchens. You had to eat out if you were poor; only the wealthy could afford to eat at home.

- Most importantly, and I can’t believe in all the pop culture of Pompeii this had never clicked for me: Pompeii had a population between 6-35,000 people. Perhaps 2,000 died in the volcano. Contemporary sources talk about the bay being full of fleeing ships. Most people got the hell out when the eruption started. The number who died are still a lot, and it’s still gruesome and morbid, but it’s not “an entire town and everyone in it.” This also makes it difficult for archeologists, apparently (and logically): those who remained weren’t acting “normally,” they were sheltering or fleeing a volcano. One famous example is a wealthy woman covered in jewelry found in the bedroom in the glaridator barracks. Scandal! She must have been having an affair and had it immortalized in ash! The book points out that 17 other people and several dogs were also crowded in that one small room: far more likely, they were all trying to shelter together. Another example: Houses are weirdly devoid of furniture, and archeologists find objects in odd places. (Gardening supplies in a formal dining room, for example.) But then you remember that there were several hours of people evacuating, packing their belongings, loading up carts and getting out… maybe the gardening supplies were brought to the dining room to be packed and abandoned, instead of some deeper esoteric meaning. The book argues that this all makes it much harder to get an accurate read on normal life in a Roman town, because while Pompeii is a brilliant snapshot, it’s actually a snapshot of a town undergoing major evacuation and disaster, not an average day.

- Oh, another great one. Outside of a random laundry place in Pompeii, someone painted a mural with two scenes. One of them referenced Virgil’s Aeneid. Underneath that scene, someone graffiti’d a reference to a famous line from that play, except tweaked it to be about laundry. This is really cool, the book points out, because it implies that a) literacy and education was high enough that one could paint a reference and have it recognized, and b) that someone else could recognize it and make a dumb play on words about it and c) the whole thing, again, means that there’s a certain amount of literacy and familiarity with “Roman pop culture” even among fairly normal people at the time.

jang bros caps + quotes

@hannigramislife called me out by name so here ya go. tonight we all suffer 🥰

I just realized something

cassano.

help a trans woman get surgery maybe?

hey its pride month and idk about yall but I Could Use Some Life Altering Top Surgery!!!! i don’t think i’ll be able to raise the roughly 8,000 usd minimum needed for surgery directly off donations but every dollar counts! i got a temp job and was able to afford rent and bills this month, so i can at least put the donations into savings this summer and add to it til this job is over. idk. i’m tired of covering my mirrors ‘cause i don’t like looking at myself. i’ve got 400$ in savings to start my Boob Fund and if you want to help, i have donation links below! paypal.me/treesinspace / cash.me/$junabugs (p.s. send paypal donations as GIFT FOR FRIENDS/FAMILY, not PURCHASE, or paypal will think i’m a merchant and ask for tracking info)

i remember when someone was complaining about their partner being late for shit allll the time and someone was like ‘oh they MUST have adhd and they just can’t help it,’ so i was like ‘hey, yeah, i have adhd, i get this, here are some things other people with adhd can do to help with this problem’

and like five different people just went ‘um time blindness is REAL and you must just not have a severe enough case :/ but there’s no fixing this’

and it’s just…….. is this how we beat ableism? by just pretending that we aren’t in control of our actions at all?

that instead of having conversations about maybe offering more leeway and empathy for people’s struggles while ALSO equipping people with better tools to help themselves

we’re just gonna go ‘yeah, actually, neurodivergent people are wholly incapable of personal will and are ruled by their neurodivergence and can’t be expected to help themselves or other people in any way.’

like i get that some things are truly harmless or truly cannot be helped but… some things… can be worked on. maybe not “cured” or “fixed” but like… worked on. and maybe we should make that info more accessible rather than pretending like its ableist to like… offer tips or  maybe not let people entirely off the hook for behaviour they can manage

I always say that I like L's death in the manga more, but I've never explained why. It's because it's quiet. You don't realise L's dying until he's actually dying. You see L stop talking mid-sentence, but it's not a weird behaviour coming for him. We see the ellipsis constantly, because he's thinking. You then see Mogi and Soichiro's confused faces, Soichiro asking what's wrong and in the bottom left L's hand trembling, but we already saw him shiver. It was when Ukita died and after Aizawa grabbed him. Or when Misa mentioned the Shinigami in the tapes. So, maybe he's shaking because he's scared or deeply affected by what's going on: Watari just died, the Shinigami disappeared, the Kira Case is getting to a critical point. It's normal to think that he's just trying to calm himself down. But then... He just falls to the side, while letting go of the spoon he was holding. You can't really say that’s usual for him. He fell off the chair once, but it was off screen. Now, even if it's a drawing, you can feel that he's going in slow motion, which means something is very wrong. Obviously, when you read, you can immediately see that bigger picture in which he falls and have a reaction, but going panel by panel, it's just so quiet. He's not going out in a big style or making a lot of noise. And this silent death symbolises to me how L – himself, not the detective – was during his time alive. So unimportant to anyone but Watari, that could've had an immediate reaction in case he had died in front of him. Just like those present had a reaction in that moment. But what if he died and no one was around him? He would've just perished. Alone. Nobody would've known. The world would've not realised that he is gone. And it didn't anyway. All the people he worked with. All the connections he made. None of them knows that L died. When I picture his death in my mind, I can’t help but imagine him being alone, because that's how I think he felt in that moment. He wasn’t actually very close to the task force. They were just people he worked with. Even if he felt some affection towards them, I don’t believe he thought they could feel the same. And they showed that they moved on pretty quickly. When I think about that moment, instead, I see him being on a stage, illuminated by the light, while all around him is dark, and you'd think that at least someone is watching in silence that heartbreaking moment. But once he falls, dies and the light turns off, you'd realise that there is actually nobody to react. No one actually cared about him without the detective persona attached.