THE SMOL MERMAID.The Ecclectic Collector Main Blog.Cisgender She/Her, Bisexual, 26, Pisces, Mermaid Enthusiast, lover of music, weird animals, and food.
when i was 12, my dad left my mum. it was sudden, unexpected, one minute we’d been a happy family, the next he was telling my mum he was having an affair with her best friend. a lot of stuff happened after that.
my mum’s depression kicked in hard (she’d been suffering from it since she was a teen, but she’d been pretty good for the past few years). my mum and dad’s friends both chose sides and my mum lost a lot of her support. I re-read the harry potter series 3 times (we didn’t realize until years later that my obsession with the series may have been caused by the fact that i was watching a harry potter movie when my dad left). my mum tried to kill herself, and upon hearing this my dad (who i was with at the time) didn’t tell me anything and dropped me off outside my aunt’s house, where no one was home. we moved in with my mum’s parents because neither of us was mentally well enough to take care of one another. I lost most of my friends (the real kicker for me was hearing two of them talking about me, not knowing i was behind them, saying “she needs to get over herself, she’s not the only one with daddy issues). I watched my dad almost choke my mum, then try to hit her and only stop when i screamed at him. my dad constantly tried to force me to like and spend time with his new woman, who i felt (and still feel) nothing but hatred for. I myself developed depression and anxiety. it was a lot.
As well as reading harry potter obsessively to cope, i also played a lot of Skyrim (and later Dragon Age). it was nice, to escape into this fantasy world, where the only thing that mattered was to fight dragons. I made characters, spending so long getting their appearance right, getting the right names, etc. Then i joined tumblr and learned what an OC was.
i had a lot of OCs at first, not wanting to abandon a single charatcer, but there were 2 that really grew and that i bonded with, and who i still have to this day. I’ll call them Crow and Llewellyn. I projected on Crow and Llewellyn a lot, each of them taking an emotion i was struggling with a lot at the time of their creation.
for Crow, it was sadness. She was the stereotypical depressed sad backstory character who everything bad happens to. She had a dead twin sister, both her older brothers ran away from home and left her to fend for herself against her abusive mother, her father was never around. She was suicidal and tried to kill herself and cut herself and didn’t really talk to people. She stopped me from actually self-harming, or worse Because even though all these horrible things happened to crow, she always managed to still survive. She made it through. She got BETTER.
for Llewellyn, it was anger. She was a child who’d suffered from anger problems since she was born, was hated and locked up by her family, blamed for her older brothers death (idk, i apparently had a thing about giving character dead siblings???), left locked in her room to stew in her rage, breaking things and screaming. She helped me when i wanted to send angry emails to my dad calling his new woman a cunt and bitch and slut and telling him i hated him and such. And eventually, Llewellyn escaped, she got away from her family, she found a way to help herself and she THRIVED.
(and once i started to realize i wasn’t straight, i added bits to both their backstories where they met and ended up getting together)
self-insert(/heavily-projected-onto) OCs saved my life honestly. They gave me… hope? i’m not sure if that’s the right word. But they helped me. I made more OCs, some less projected onto than others, and you know what? I got better, just like Crow. I thrived, just like Llewellyn.
People say self-inserts are cringey and stupid, but without them i don’t know where i’d be now. So please don’t shit on people with self-inserts. you don’t know what they’re going through
So if you lived in a society where you had to secure your communication in order to be yourself around others, here are the apps that could help you do that.
Signal let’s you securely text and make phone calls.
Onion Browser allows you to surf the web without leaving a trail.
Duck Duck Go isn’t super secure but it won’t record your searches like Google.
ProtonMail is a email client that lets you email other secure email accounts.
Periscope allows you to stream live video.
Semaphor is there so you can securely make group chat rooms.
American privacy laws allow you to use these all. So that’s pretty cool.
Bunch of protests this weekend so here’s some added tips. Don’t officially sign up for them, many RSVP’s are a Terms of Service saying you will fully and quickly follow every direction an officer gives and protestors often do get arrested for a number of (bullshit) things. Signing proves you were there and may give up other rights you have depending the TOS. (Normally your right to sue if something bad happens.)
If you do sign one, make sure you are on your best behavior don’t want to risk everyone on the list because you were forced to jaywalk and the police start grabbing whoever is close for it. And now suddenly warrants are going out days later for more people.
Don’t fingerprint or face unlock your phone. Neither are legally protected by the 4th amendment.
If you are white and privileged dress like you are going to church and use that privilege as a buffer between anyone who might be trouble and someone who needs protecting.
99% of protests are actually nothing but shouting chants and waking peacefully along. Expect the best but prepare for the worst.
UPDATE 1/15/2019
Face ID and finger prints are still risky but it’s now legally protected!!
jablinski blows any other game channel out of the water just for the entertainment value of jack black’s son trying to tell him he doesnt know anything about pop culture while jack black against ALL ODDS shows us that he knows way too much about pop culture
the guy from nacho libre plays undertale. cant stress this enough
This was done in reference to the fact the Fire Emblem Awakening battle models don’t actually have feet
Which to be honest I didn’t notice they didn’t have feet the first time I was playing the game
Here’s a different picture that shows it a bit better
I’m so glad you explained this because I didn’t understand and was about to google “fire emblem chrom feet” before I realized that those actions may have dire consequences
“if you’re not angry you’re not paying attention” used to be such a powerful phrase but now it’s more accurate to say “if you’re not angry you’re probably exhausted by 5+ years of Panic Outrage Mode and are nearing the limit of your emotional range for reacting to this shit”
As a nursing student, I can attest to the amount of bullying and horrible behavior I’ve seen from fellow nursing students. One of the students in my school’s nursing program got kicked out because she was bullying her own patient…
My mom is also a nurse and she has both witnessed AND personally experienced bullying from her fellow nurses. My dad is a nurse as well and has had his own coworkers try to sabatoge him.
This is called “lateral/horizontal violence” and it’s sadly prevalent in the Nursing profession.
it goes as deep as the billing offices for hospitals too. i cant tell yall how much highschool drama my mom has had to deal with in 20 years of billing.
I feel like talking about nurses bullying each other is missing the entire fucking point of this tweet.
“One of the students in my school’s nursing program got kicked out because she was bullying her own patient.” Yeah, that’s the fucking issue right there. It’s not that they backstab each other, it’s that they abuse the patients and they do it constantly. It is not a rare occurrence and rarely are they even reprimanded for it let alone kicked out of a program.
Do you know how viscerally upsetting it is to have been subjected to years and years of ableist abuse from someone just to hear that they’re entering patient care? Do you know what it’s like to have a high school bully walk into your hospital room with a big fake smile on her face? I do.
My cousin used to “play” with me when she was 16 and I was newly diagnosed with POTS at 11 years old by triggering fainting episodes and then laughing about it. She is an RN now and at every holiday she shit talks her patients, often outright breaking HIPPA to do it. She calls them liars and exaggerators. She did it every year until we got disowned. I’m sure she still does. I used to have to leave early because I knew that if I had to endure one more second of it and I would rip her throat out.
The peers that mocked and abused me daily, calling me a faker and a liar for having an invisible disability, going into nursing is way more upsetting to me as a potential patient than them being catty with each other. It’s way more scary to me to have someone who never believed that I was ill in charge of my care than thinking about them fighting over a promotion does.
Bullies who go into nursing abuse patients the same way bullies who become cops abuse civilians. That’s the real issue. It’s not horizontal aggression, it’s medical abuse.
It’s almost like people who get off on abusing power over vulnerable people seek professions in which they have institutional power over vulnerable people.
