«I used to bring Qui-Gon here as a boy. He was fascinated with this tree, having been born here on Coruscant, a planet of steel and stone. He knew nothing like it».
There is a thread on r/AskReddit right now titled, “People who have had a direct run-in with ICE, or know a friend or family member who has been detained or deported, what is the one thing you want the average American to hear about that experience?”
It is full of very distressing stories about the awful place America is in now. Here’s some of them I screenshotted, because I think they need to be both archived and spread around.
Here’s a headline from the UK today:
What has happened to America? What will happen to my own country?
I live in Chicagoland and have family friends who are brown and undocumented. It’s not good here.
I want to specify that the US government ICE agents rapelled from Blackhawk helicopters to take over an apartment building, breaking open apartment doors in the middle of the night to drag barely-clad residents from their homes and detain everyone in UHaul trucks with the children zip-tied to each other. Regardless of citizenship.
There was too much traffic today, and an ICE agent deployed a tear gas canister in traffic in response.
This is not normal.
From the very bottom of my heart: what the ACTUAL FUCK
It’s not even near me yet, but where I live there’s lots of brown folks so they’ll come.
This is surreal. We’re being attacked by the United States.
Today I was listening to Jane Goodall being interviewed and she said something I knew about but had forgotten. The whole reason she went off to Africa to study chimps in the wild was because she was madly in love with Tarzan. Huge fangirl!
“He married the wrong Jane!” she laughed.
But she was so caught up in the romance of it all that she literally went off to live with chimps at a time when field studies of wild animals simply did not exist, and women were not taken very seriously as scientists. And basically invented a whole approach to studying wild animals that is standard today, changed everything we know about chimps, and became one of nature’s biggest champions.
Because she loved real animals and one fictional man.
Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionized science, and she was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.
It was July 1960 when Goodall, 26 years old at the time, first entered Tanzania and began her important research on chimpanzees in the wild. Throughout her study of the species, Goodall proved that primates display an array of similar behaviors to humans, such as communicate, develop individual personalities and make and use their own tools.
In October 2019, my friend @charmwasjess and I saw something unexpained while driving a dirt road on a decrepit farm in east Appalachia. I’m still not sure what it was; we call it the wrist monster.
@charmwasjess@izzydotpng My husband loves cryptology so I showed him this post! He thinks your monster could have been a Fucked Up Bear (a bear with mange)
except more fucked up than that.
It definitely sent us down a cryptid rabbithole anyway!
Ooh, thank you!!! I think y’all are onto something, Sarah!
I moonlight in some reddit bone identifying communities and skeletal bear paws are notorious for looking almost indistinguishable from human hand and finger bones. Hairless/emaciated paws could have accounted for the “wrist” portion of the wrist monster. I know we have had a bad mange epidemic in the region as well!
happy to be of cryptid help! :) now I’ve learned a bit more about bears with mange. This one for example is kinda cute but would be probably be HORRIFYING if you didn’t know what it was, from this picture its limbs look human:
In October 2019, my friend @charmwasjess and I saw something unexpained while driving a dirt road on a decrepit farm in east Appalachia. I’m still not sure what it was; we call it the wrist monster.
@charmwasjess@izzydotpng My husband loves cryptology so I showed him this post! He thinks your monster could have been a Fucked Up Bear (a bear with mange)
except more fucked up than that.
It definitely sent us down a cryptid rabbithole anyway!
It is one year since I finished and published the last chapter of The Final Act, a Mary Jane-centric Parksborn fanfic. Actually it can’t be a Parksborn fic, because one of them is dead and remains dead. In my heart and soul of course it’s a Parksborn fic (love transcends death easily), but it’s – well –
It’s really about growing up in the 00s. It’s really about me growing up in the 00s. And it was written in a different time, a less painful time. The finale makes my heart hurt now. I suppose it should.
I hope my fellow Peter, Mary Jane, Harry, and Spider-Man lovers can get something out of it. It’s hands down the best thing I’ve ever written.
I’ve not been able to stop crying for two hours, but it is tears of joy. I’ve waited so many years to see this news. 23 years I’ve waited. I cannot begin to describe what this means to the Huntington’s community.
One day I’ll write about what it’s like to grow up knowing you might have a terminal, incurable illness, and not be allowed to test yourself because “it’s such a serious decision” they don’t want it hanging over you until you’re an adult (as if it doesn’t hang over you as you witness a parent die, and know you’ve got 50% chance of inheriting the same illness–as do your siblings). One day, I will talk about how, in the fear of traumatising children with the knowledge they might be incurably, terminally ill, they also took away their right to decide over their bodies to a degree that is traumatising. One day.
But today I am going to cry. Because it’s over. Because no child will ever have to go through the same uncertainty, because at least they will know there is a treatment option available. A treatment option that one of my siblings might come to rely on. With all the shit things happening around us, my childhood hope and dream have been realised. That’s got to count for something.
