The Skellingcorner

creamhy

15 things to remember:

1. that thing you did that was kind of embarrassing and weird, everyone else forgot about that already

2. you look fine today, if you can’t notice something on your face standing 6 feet from a mirror then nobody else will either.

3. social lives can go through cycles sometimes, if you feel like your friends are all ignoring you for no reason they’re probably just busy with other things.

4. if you can’t stop thinking about someone or something, read a book, paint your nails or watch a movie. it won’t solve any serious problems but you will feel better.

5. listen with the intent to understand, not the intent to reply.

6. if you want something, go get it.

7. drink lots of water, eat lots of fruit, exercise more, go outside, get enough sleep and think positive thoughts.

8. if you don’t ask, the answer will always be no.

9. throw away the idea of a perfect tomorrow and live in the moment.

10. stop comparing yourself to others.

11. a beautiful day begins with a beautiful mindset. It’s a privilege to simply be alive and healthy. Start acting like life is a blessing.

12. act the way you’d like to be and soon you’ll be the way you’d like to act.

13. you will change. You’re not the same person you were three years ago. you’re not even the same person you were three minutes ago and that’s okay. especially if you don’t like the person you were three minutes ago.

14. you don’t have to open the curtains if you don’t want to.

15. being happy is the most important thing.

text mine

chinasorrows

put together some fun vines that i hope haven’t been used in every other compilation ever ✌️ enjoy

i tried to find slightly more Obscure ones cause sometimes i see the same vines in these vine vine compilation video rip vine ill miss u oh and vine tag mine

sourcedumal zombidropper-deactivated2017120

prismatic-bell

writing-prompt-s:

Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight. Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!

Oh my god, this is beautiful.

A small child enters Valhalla. The battle they lost was “hiding from an alcoholic father.” Odin sees the flinch when he slams the cup and refrains from doing it again. He hears the child’s pain; no glorious battle this, but one of fear and wretched survival.

He invites the child to sit with him, offers the choicest mead and instructs his men to bring a sword and shield, a bow and arrow, of the very best materials and appropriate size. “Here,” he says, “you will find no man who dares to harm you. But so you will know your own strength, and be happy all your days in Valhalla, I will teach you to use these weapons.”

The sad day comes when another child enters the hall. Odin does not slam his cup; he simply beams with pride as the first child approaches the newcomer, and holds out her bow and quiver, and says “nobody here will hurt you. Everyone will be so proud you did your best, and I’ll teach you to use these, so you always know how strong you are.”

————

A young man enters the hall. He hesitates when Odin asks his story, but at long last, it ekes out: skinheads after the Pride parade. His partner got into a building and called for help. The police took a little longer than perhaps they really needed to, and two of those selfsame skinheads are in the hospital now with broken bones that need setting, but six against one is no fair match. The fear in his face is obvious: here, among men large enough to break him in two, will he face an eternity of torment for the man he left behind?

Odin rumbles with anger. Curses the low worms who brought this man to his table, and regales him with tales of Loki so to show him his own welcome. “A day will come, my friend, when you seek to be reunited, and so you shall,” Odin tells him. “To request the aid of your comrades in battle is no shameful thing.”

———-

A woman in pink sits near the head of the table. She’s very nearly skin and bones, and has no hair. This will not last; health returns in Valhalla, and joy, and light, and merrymaking. But now her soul remembers the battle of her life, and it must heal.

Odin asks.

And asks again.

And the words pour out like poisoned water, things she couldn’t tell her husband or children. The pain of chemotherapy. The agony of a mastectomy, the pain still deeper of “we found a tumor in your lymph nodes. I’m so sorry.” And at last, the tortured question: what is left of her?

Odin raises his flagon high. “What is left of you, fair warrior queen, is a spirit bright as fire; a will as strong as any forged iron; a life as great as any sea. Your battle was hard-fought, and lost in the glory only such furor can bring, and now the pain and fight are behind you.“

In the months to come, she becomes a scop of the hall–no demotion, but simple choice. She tells the stories of the great healers, Agnes and Tanya, who fought alongside her and thousands of others, who turn from no battle in the belief that one day, one day, the war may be won; the warriors Jessie and Mabel and Jeri and Monique, still battling on; the queens and soldiers and great women of yore.

The day comes when she calls a familiar name, and another small, scarred woman, eyes sunken and dark, limbs frail, curly black hair shaved close to her head, looks up and sees her across the hall. Odin descends from his throne, a tall and foaming goblet in his hands, and stuns the hall entire into silence as he kneels before the newcomer and holds up the goblet between her small dark hands and bids her to drink.

“All-Father!” the feasting multitudes cry. “What brings great Odin, Spear-Shaker, Ancient One, Wand-Bearer, Teacher of Gods, to his knees for this lone waif?”

He waves them off with a hand.

“This woman, LaTeesha, Destroyer of Cancer, from whom the great tumors fly in fear, has fought that greatest battle,” he says, his voice rolling across the hall. “She has fought not another body, but her own; traded blows not with other limbs but with her own flesh; has allowed herself to be pierced with needles and scored with knives, taken poison into her very veins to defeat this enemy, and at long last it is time for her to put her weapons down. Do you think for a moment this fight is less glorious for being in silence, her deeds the less for having been aided by others who provided her weapons? She has a place in this great hall; indeed, the highest place.”

And the children perform feats of archery for the entertainment of all, and the women sing as the young man who still awaits his beloved plays a lute–which, after all, is not so different from the guitar he once used to break a man’s face in that great final fight.

Valhalla is a place of joy, of glory, of great feasting and merrymaking.

And it is a place for the soul and mind to heal.

nerdygayholtz

I’M NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING

firemageking

THIS IS GLORIOUS

writing-prompt-s

Beautiful.

sourcedumal

I love this so fucking much.

Source: writing-prompt-s

zombidropper

profmeowmers

My bros I have been doing a lot of reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a story because I love it okay

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

and that’s exactly what he did. Juan Pujol Garcia died in 1988, at the age of 76

edit: I’ve had a few people asking for sources so here’s a little writeup on Garbo from MI5 itself!
https://www.mi5.gov.uk/agent-garbo

wacky wwii hijinks wwII

writingwithcolor

glovey-bug asked:

Hi. I'm working on a story that involves an African-American individual and their family. Their father falls ill and later passes away from the illness. Is this falling into the MIA father trope? He's been present throughout the MC life until now.

Exploring the Absent Black Father Trope

We are receiving several questions regarding the Absent Black Father trope so i’d like to define it clearly and hopefully clear up any confusion.

The Absent Black Father trope is rooted in stereotypes about Black fathers. These fathers are Missing in Action– deadbeats who choose other priorities over their children. Fathers who make a choice to stay out of their children’s lives and do the bare minimum (if anything at all) in seeing or supporting them financially and/or emotionally.

This is not a father who was separated from his children from circumstances out of his control. For a real life example, my father passed away from terminal illness when I was 19. However, from day one, he was always around as a loving father there to provide a roof over our heads, a trip to the mall, hugs and kisses, support and comfort, and not to mention the occasional (okay more than occasional for me) grounding when we misbehaved.

Now that he’s no longer around, it doesn’t mean the impact he has had on my siblings and I has died; he stays in our memories as we remember fond times and the wisdom he imparted on us. Keep this in mind for your story, for the people who leave us don’t really leave us when you keep their influence alive in your life.

And not that my father can ever be replaced, but I have several supportive family members in my life, which include Black men, such as uncles and friends.

If you have a Black father who is absent from the picture, it shouldn’t mean that now all Black men are excluded from the story, particularly Black fathers. This is representation that is sorely missing from our stories, and frankly i’d rather read about a living breathing Black father than one who’s passed away.

On that note, the Absent Black Father trope is suspiciously similar to a Black Dude Dies First that uses the death of Black men or basically any marginalized character to eliminate them from the story.

Fiction has a trend of having a missing parent or two in the MC’s life to the point where i’m pleasantly surprised when there’s actually two living parents in a hero’s life. And this trope gets suspicious to me when it’s always the Black father being pushed out of the narrative because he’s dead or kidnapped or lost at sea. He may not have chosen to be out of the Main Character’s life, but let’s be real: the author has chosen to keep the Black father out of his children’s life.

And as a result, they’ve also usually chosen to make the Black woman a Single Mother who was forced to be Strong and Independent in order to support her children. Hey, three stereotypes in one!

Our tags offer a wealth of information on handling each of these tropes so to avoid repetitiveness:

Here’s an additional link that explores the ABF trope as it applies in real life: The Absent Black Father: Let’s Shatter the Myth This Father’s Day.

There is complexity to the topic, as with any racial trope as it usually has a background. And, in the cases where there is a story to tell of a not-so-there Black father or a Black woman forced into being strong and independent, the topic is best left to those who have thoroughly researched the topic and put it in front of several beta-readers of the given race/gender, and even better, left to those who have personal experience with the topic. Those who’ve dealt with it are more likely to add a nuanced and thoroughly explored, humanized experience whereas an outsider might present an offensive, flat and ill-informed stereotype.

~Mod Colette

sglovern absent black father stereotypes tropes black black men racism intersectionality characters relationships parents death character death Black person dies first single black mother asks