Space Witches, Esq.
@popelizbet
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law, poetry, pisstocity, chicken & waffles, relentless do-gooder. kathreggate. they/them; ka/kan. will demand your poems. My employer DGAF. icon by @L0ST_VEGAS
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Joined January 2009
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they told me I was a girl buy I am a five dimensional blob and the start of "Oh, Pretty Woman" and "Rebel Girl" played to sync and remixed by Björk with tori Amos on dual piano, tyvm.
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We fucking told you
An Idaho law banning minors from receiving healthcare without parent approval has created a legal problem. If a child is raped by their parent, medics now require that parent’s permission to administer the rape kit that would prove their own guilt.
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Disabled people have always been in fantasy - abled people just don't think of them as disabled! A thread.
as a disabled artist making a fantasy story with one of the protagonists having a disability, the "why would there be disabled people in fantasy??" discourse is really depressing.
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wash your hands from "I see a little silhouette of a man" to "spare him his life from this monstrosity."
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I'm just...tired, y'all. I'm tired of mask bikini lady. I'm tired of "non parents have no quarantine struggle" Brooklyn mommy. I'm tired of "we can't police lake of the ozarks" from the state that brought out SWAT in Ferguson. I'm tired.
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While the LOTR movies use wizard staffs as magical tools to fun visual effect, that's not inherent to the text. Wizards are stereotypically old men who walk with staffs - which can be a mobility aid as well as a magical item, or just a mobility aid.
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you know what the "modesty" men hate
when you dress "modest" for yourself and your style
midi skirts or longer, high socks in fun patterns, loose t-shirts, no makeup, hippie-goth with minimal exposed skin of any kind
because it isn't about that it's about control.
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if you brought in my cat and told me you would hurt him I would probably confess to every single Zodiac killing even though I know cops lie and those crimes
predate my birth. This goes beyond abolishing qualified immunity and changing the law on police deception.
Fontana pays nearly $900,000 for ‘psychological torture’ inflicted by police to get false confession
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Who doesn't love a good sword cane? But a sword cane is a functional cane. Can be fashion, can be a mobility aid. But you never hear nerds argue that a sword cane in fantasy is ridiculous.
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don't ask me for sympathy for Munro when I've seen a SAHM of 8 including infant twins send their father to jail the second the kid told her what was going on, with no income to rely on and no way to work and afford childcare. That was her baby. There was no calculus.
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Frodo never fully recovers from his Ring-sickness - analogous to, and drawn from, Tolkien's experiences of what we would now call combat PTSD. And despite powerful wizards and immortal elves owing him infinite favors? He never gets his finger back either.
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Returning to LOTR - it's not a stretch to argue that by the time it's just him and Sam, Frodo is being disabled by the effects of the Ring, physically and psychologically. And in Mt. Doom, he loses a finger.
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Good teeth and regular dental care
What’s a luxury that most people don’t realize is a luxury?
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Loss of a finger is disabling. I'm reading in a certain amount here, but I don't think it ever would have occurred to Tolkien to magically fix Frodo's hand - people come back from war missing parts of themselves, sometimes literally, and it would have cheapened the message...
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People who are not from here and don't know about the Index don't know how serious of a "oh fuck" this is. I don't live in hurricane country and I've only seen Waffle House at code red during the Nashville flood iirc.
HOLY SHIT EVERY WAFFLE HOUSE IS CLOSING BETWEEN TAMPA & ORLANDO 😭😭😭
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My brain is being stubborn but I think it's the animated SWORD IN THE STONE that gave us Merlin in glasses (could have happened before, but that's the mental image I have from childhood.) Glasses are a disability aid so common most people don't even think of them...
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...that is inherent in things like the Scouring of the Shire : you can't go home again, war ruins things, even the idyllic Shire doesn't return to innocence. Giving Frodo his finger back doesn't make sense thematically.
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yall we have got to show up for Wendy Williams like we showed up for Britney even if Wendy is a mess who disrespected Whitney Houston, Wells Fargo - KNOWN SCAMMERS - are sticking a Black woman in a conservatorship for *asking to change banks.*
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...as visual evidence of a disability, and wizards in spectacles are not at all uncommon in fantasy. Merlin didn't do magical LASIK on himself; neither did Dumbledore. But the average abled person doesn't see needing glasses as a sign of disability, even though...
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@eeoij
@MrsBundrige
@OGJustPeachie
I'm a dv lawyer and a friend called me for advice on supporting an employee dealing with an abuser and thank God they already had never disclose employee schedule or location in their manual(she is also palm colored like me but we have some sense)
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if memory serves, it's a minor plot point in an HP book that someone (I think Harry) misses something important because he's temporarily unable to see without his glasses.
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"it's too old to be sci-fi" yes when you invent a genre your genre-inventing book will in fact be the oldest thing in it.
@PatrickPogue
@nberlat
Frankenstein is too old to be sci-fi. Sorry, I don't make the rules. Jules Vernes is closer to it.
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Or maybe they enchant his glasses so they don't get fogged up? Or both? It's definitely in there that Harry's eyesight is so bad without glasses that it's disabling.
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Disease is a thing that we find in a ton of fantasy worlds, including both fantasy diseases and things similar to reality. How many fantasy books have you read where there's a plague, currently or in the recent past? Depending on the model of disease the author is envisioning...
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in the new attitude of "y'all are creepy and weird" Let us not forget the hero who posted "The sculptor is a Chinese woman, you dork-ass losers."
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...this is sometimes also a mass disabling event, or at least leaves visible scarring. My brain isn't pulling up specific examples but I know I've read fantasy where the reason for a character's infertility is "since the plague" or someone has facial scarring from "the pox."
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Turning to infertility and pregnancy, these disabilities show up in fantasy all the time, and while sometimes infertility is cured by magic or a child brought to otherwise infertile couples by magical means, plenty of family-tree-heavy fantasies focus on...
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this is a woman, but...it's a well known enough phenomenon that because men are more likely to see late onset schizophrenia emerge in their thirties, guys who have become lawyers or public officials occasionally go quietly nuts not realizing what's happening to them...
@BadLegalTakes
JFC, I thought the path to becoming a lawyer, bachelor's, LSAT, law school, then the bar, was supposed to be a filter
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Terry Pratchett's witches spend a lot more time attending births than doing world-shaking magic, and learning midwifery is part of training as a witch - including having to be the person who makes the difficult decisions of who lives and dies if you can't save both.
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...political implications of infertility that apparently can't be cured by the available magic. People dying in childbirth is also routine all the way back to fairy tales, often happening off screen and before the events.
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@UrsulaV
But again - abled people often don't think of infertility as a disabling condition or pregnancy as a temporarily or permanently disabling condition, so "how is anyone infertile or dying in childbirth when you have magic??" doesn't occur to them.
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It's more modern fantasy a lot of the time that shows magical intervention preventing someone from either dying in childbirth or from internal damage from a difficult birth.
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you can't ignore and bully asexual people and then pretend it's our interests you're concerned with when you try to keep kink out of pride when kink was there first. Glory to the leather daddies, say I.
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@UrsulaV
I can hardly think of a fantasy world in all my reading it since childhood where there are literally no disabling conditions, with the exception of a few where "this supposed utopia practices eugenics" is a plot point.
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I don't want to spoil relatively new books so I'll say that multiple of
@ursulav
s books as T. Kingfisher deal brilliantly with fertility, birth control, and/or disabling births in worlds with magic.
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@UrsulaV
Reluctantly returning to Harry Potter, there's an entire hospital just for magical illnesses or magic-induced disability, all the way up to a long-term ward for folks so magically disabled that they can't care for themselves, temporarily or permanently.
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There have always been disabled people in fantasy, even disabled heroes. What seems to get up the nose of the ableist people who pick on things like magical wheelchairs as supposedly out of place is having to *think about* disability and the idea of a disabled hero.
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You're seriously trying to tell me that you have either a job description of artificer so cool gadgets occasionally can arise or whole fantasy races whose Thing is engineering & tinkering but "what if a chair, but with wheels" is unthinkable? This is a fault of your imagination.
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understand at this moment that abusive parents will install this shit on their children.
Otago and UK researchers have developed a world-first weight-loss device to help fight the global obesity epidemic: an intra-oral device that restricts a person to a liquid diet. Read more:
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The "wahh it's ahistorical ow my suspension of disbelief" argument fails on two grounds: one, there are freaking dragons and magic, so you've already suspended your disbelief pretty far, and two, the idea of someone without working legs using a two wheeled device...
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@UrsulaV
Sometimes there are even magical diseases or spells intended to disable and eventually kill so that it looks like a natural death - it's a major plot point in the Song of the Lioness books.
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@WhippleMarc
yes for many people - keeping track of the scheduled event takes so much RAM they can't multitask in yhe meantime, as it were, or they're afraid they'll hyperfocus right past the start time, or both.
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...to get around is 100% not a modern invention. People will make this "but a modern style wheelchair is ahistorical!!!" argument in games like d&d where you've been able to have a blunderbuss since at least 2d edition and whole classes of artificers exist.
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But here's the thing (leaving aside those eugenics dystopias I mentioned for a moment): a world where magic has absolutely no boundaries, can do anything? Is freaking boring as hell, because it means there are no real stakes to anything.
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on this holocaust day of remembrance remember that the famous picture of Nazis burning books is them burning years of research regarding trans people, who they also wished to destroy.
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Even in that universe, where child wizards are hand-wavily less likely to get injured than non-magical children and the school sport can be lethally dangerous because the teachers can make you float and the nurse has a pre-made potion for broken bones, some things can't be cured.
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you can't control Twitter Twitter worships gritty and union cats and three legged kittens struggling to live and dolly Parton we fight for fun.
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And since there *is* magic, just like you have your magic armor and your magic sword and your magic cloak? A chair with wheels that has some magic emchantment to make it able to handle rough terrain shouldn't really break your brain.
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so, a 35 hour work week, padded with 20 hours of things regular workers don't get to count in their work weeks like doctors appointments and commuting, to make them seem more important and busy than they are.
@TheLexTimes
it's worth remembering that studies on this show that 45% of CEOs' supposedly-lengthy workweek include things like exercise, commuting, and lunch
it's all lies
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Some wheelchair users have absolutely incredible upper body strength from using a manual chair for many years; wheelchair league athletes do things I couldn't do even before my back started giving out on me. Wheelchair doesn't even mean unable to walk in all cases.
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"and then God said, I sent you the vaccine, Dolly Parton, and the wellerman!"
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OK. I'm going to talk about what the Twitter ban means from the point of view of a sexual and domestic violence attorney, because Trump is a domestic violence offender and the pattern is the same.
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But certain people because of their ableism insist that a visibly disabled hero just simply can't exist, at least if it's a type of disability they associate with helplessness (wheelchair) as opposed to one they don't (glasses).
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My brother had kidney failure before he was 30. He tried to make it in life but once you're on dialysis 3x week and sick from it it's a little hard to hold down a job. I suppose he could have given his kidneys a bootstraps lecture?
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my style has been lovingly but brutally accurately described as "church camp refugee taken in by the goth club and the traveling circus" (date poets) and most of the "modesty" dudes cannot abide it at all.
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wash your hands from "someBODY once told me" to "the years start coming and they don't stop coming"
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@AmandaFoody
my dear departed Princess loved nothing else but to walk along precarious edges.
One day she tried walking the edge of the clawfoot bathtub while I was in it.
my legs still have scars. I miss that awesome cat.
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@IamRageSparkle
@birdpoems
my tattoo artist had a similar explanation...do one questionable tattoo, six months later you're a Nazi shop and the non-Nazis disappear.
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I want to go to a movie with my mom and go swimming and go eat Mexican food with my bestie and hug my partner and I'm not doing any of it because I have sense and so do they. I'm gonna spend my 40th birthday at home. It sucks. Death, however, is permanent.
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Seanan McGuire predicted all of this right down to the people protesting and causing mini outbreaks, and y'all laughed at her and said girls can't write science horror.
Y'all owe
@seananmcguire
several apologies but this one most immediately.
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white students at MIT, it's time to disrupt ICE when they come to your campus. waste their time. block their path. text ahead so people can flee or hide. they don't have real warrants, but they also don't have the home field advantage-you do. be a hero.
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The kid was so brave and so was her mom and they struggled to survive but they made it, and he's gone away where he can't hurt any more kids, and he'll stay there a long time.
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@KinniskaMakes
Because Idaho is where Mormons who find Utah too liberal go to do their child raping. Chad and Lori Daybell, also. (Florida has excellent open records laws rather than more asshats).
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"I want a lawyer and I invoke my right to remain silent" and then don't say another word that isn't "lawyer." Practice! You will be stressed and confused!
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@eeoij
@MrsBundrige
@OGJustPeachie
I'm a survivor who went into helping Survivors and she's my ride or die since high school who used to be a clinic escort in her spare time, we are a good team. I hope someday you're totally free.
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If magic can undo every type of damage, every type of malady, every ill, with minimal or no cost or consequences? Everything your characters do has less meaning, because they're not risking much of anything.
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I think people should consider how horrifying the experience of not having adequate food, shelter, medical care, etc condemning you to slow and painful death while a handful of people hoard obscene wealth so they can do stunts like tour the Titanic in a cigar tube is.
I think people should consider how horrifying the experience would be to sit in a submarine 10k ft down as it loses power or implodes or whatever happened. At that point is doesn't matter who the people were or are, they're reduced to their raw humanity, terrified beating hearts.
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She would no more have turned on her child than she would have thrown one of the babies into traffic. She put the blame where it belonged and went into an uncertain future where this man who hurt their child would go away.
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D&D will literally let you come back from "technically dead" at zero or negative HP - but miss that roll, and say goodbye to your character. There have to be stakes commensurate with risks or it isn't fun.
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Manufacturing products with intentional defects to induce planned obsolescence is now a felony which may be prosecuted individually against corporate agents or as conspiracy in the presence of aggravating factors, to include unconsenting "bricking" of electronics.
You get to write one new criminal law effective January 1, 2020. What is it?
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I want most of my skin covered most of the time temperature permitting--more than I was required by the modesty culture I was raised in.
In part because my way of doing it repels a certain kind of man.
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I'm sure there are some people who would enjoy no-stakes no-death D&D* but for most people the possibility that you might die is part of what makes the RP compelling,
*I am not including modified versions for young children learning the game in this argument.
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This lady didn't have Alice's money, connections, portable skills, there was no second parent to help, there was nothing but a house in need of repair and a van inches from death and her kids and she said Let's do this.
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RP is a kind of group storytelling, and most storytelling needs conflict to be interesting. Risks and rewards. Failure conditions. If magic in your world is both so powerful it can erase every consequence and easily controlled and available, your reader is going to know...
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Please please please let the next Tracy Chapman song these new folks hear be "talkin bout a revolution" algorithm gods hear my prayer
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...in the back of their mind that no matter how intense the action is, nothing is really going to be any different for the characters at the end, because the wizard will fix it all up.
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Stepping out of fantasy for a second to make the point: there is a type of storytelling where you know nothing is going to change much for the characters and everything is going to be mostly fine because of a mysterious man of great power who fixes problems but it's still fun.
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they speak of you in somber tones
they don't go near the woods alone
they know they're never free of you, Jolene
for you control the sun and moon
and you always show up too soon
to demand your strange form of tithe, Jolene
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Don't tell me Alice Munro couldn't have done the same, with all her extra advantages, instead of deciding she was the real victim and centering herself and the predator she chose over her child.
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@ValarMorDollars
the sheer amount of time I waste explaining to white judges thar my Latinx clients don't tend to change their names and yes, I need their double last names in the computer accurately and yes, the children have both last names...
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And I'm an essential worker, lucky enough to work from home most of the time but regularly having to go to court and I'm scared, because what if the people around me are being cavalier and I bring death home to my house? Because you wanted to grill out this weekend.
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They really just filed a petition under seal and said "she wants to see what we've been doing with her money and suspects fraud, make her a WARD OF THE BANK." This is a race & gender & disability justice issue.
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This is P.G. Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories. Jeeves, with his Enormous Brain, is the wizard who will by the end of the story solve all the problems of the hapless Wooster and friends, leaving them either free to remain happy bachelors or engaged to the right girl.
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I think of her all the time, because we went above and beyond to keep her roof over her head and get a vehicle that would transport all those kids and run reliably.
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I'm so very tired and I don't feel well today and knowing people are out there Masque of the Red Deathening it up pisses me all the way off.
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what is also interesting about this is how bias is hard coded into the things we create. "greatest painter" gives a very European photo realistic effect while "not very good" gives the kinds of things often called "degenerate" art by fascists. No one intended it but...
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And she never wavered. Never said maybe I shouldn't have done this. Never said anything of the sort. Just supported her kid through criminal court while getting her divorce done and figuring out the uncertain future.
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She just buckled down and said we'll make it without him, realizing why he had kept wanting baby after baby after baby, and determined to keep every one of them safe and get the oldest off to college.
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A true and horrible fact:
You can't finalize a divorce while you're pregnant.
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Occasional variants occur involving other relatively low-stakes conflicts and misunderstandings, but the reader knows that whatever the problem, Jeeves will find the solution.
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But even the magic of Jeeves and his exceptional brain comes at a cost! Jeeves is Bertie's gentleman's gentleman, and Bertie, a bear of little brain, usually begins the story by having some small conflict with Jeeves, generally over some article of clothing...
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Qualified immunity
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Quick go tag your local Confederate monument with a Nike swoosh see if they go for it
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preparing to ruin my timelines fun: the Emmanuel the Emu woman is the same racist white woman who tried to blow up doing Good Ally videos as a Karen character a couple years ago.
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one quick editing tip to pull a commonly used ableist idiom from your communications: for almost every metaphorical use of the word "crippling," "crushing" does the same linguistic lifting, everyone will still know what you mean and disabled people won't wince at your phrasing.
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to me cheap colorful cotton hippie skirt and graphic tee is not any more "dressed up' than jeans and graphic tee. Dressed up is silk and/or structured clothing, my nemesis.
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One must pay a price for magic, including the magic of Jeeves and his Enormous Brain, and almost every Wooster story ends with Bertie paying the price - the offending article of clothing is disposed of, and Jeeves, who Knows Best, is satisfied.
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A friend once scoffed at me when I said I never dressed up for law school because "you wear a skirt every day!"
I just don't like jeans since JNCOs went out, I was allowed to wear pants as a kid but all but soft pants suck.
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