this was dean pov of course

I have been thinking a lot about what a cancer diagnosis used to mean. How in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when someone was diagnosed, my parents would gently prepare me for their death. That chemo and radiation and surgery just bought time, and over the age of fifty people would sometimes just. Skip it. For cost reasons, and for quality of life reasons. My grandmother was diagnosed in her early seventies and went directly into hospice for just under a year — palliative care only. And often, after diagnosis people and their families would go away — they’d cash out retirement or sell the house and go live on a beach for six months. Or they’d pay a charlatan all their savings to buy hope. People would get diagnosed, get very sick, leave, and then we’d hear that they died.

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Anyway, I’m preaching to the choir here. But it is a quiet miracle what’s happened in my lifetime.

I think one element of confusion here is scones are apparently two different things?

I'm an ugly Canadian, not an ugly American, and scones aren't really a thing here, but every time I've eaten/made them, they've looked like this??

I'm learning today that scones can be round and fluffy, not dense triangles.

(Interestingly, Tim Hortons, once a bastion of Canadiana, does sell the above as "tea biscuits". But I don't think they're common in most homes these days.)

Reblog and write the opposite of your URL

openfacedsandwiches → closedtoeburritos

digitalmeowmix ➡️analogkibblesandbits

Amoreanonyname 👉 SomeLessIdentifiedUnknowns

📖 Fic share: SPN, Wincest, Explicit 📓

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: M/M

Fandom: Supernatural (TV 2005)

Relationship: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester

Characters: Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, John Winchester

Additional Tags: Wincest - Freeform, POV Third Person, at times - Freeform, Top Dean Winchester/Bottom Sam Winchester, Public Hand Jobs, Wall Sex, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Pre-Series, Stanford Era (Supernatural), Idiots in Love, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Okay not that bad, but he definitely messes up, Childhood Memories, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Domesticity in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), Sam and Dean are now in a good place, and can deal with the bad memories, about their dad and about each other, but there's a little bit of oof to it, John Winchester's Journal, Soulmates Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Quote: Sam and Dean Winchester are psychotically irrationally erotically codependent on each other, Codependent Winchesters (Supernatural), Married Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester, Samulet (Supernatural)

Language: English

Collections: Supernatural Bro Bone Bang Round 2 (Aug-Nov 2022)

Stats: Published: 2022-08-20 Words: 6,078

by Amoreanonyname

Summary: "And so often, I get up in the morning and Dean’s right in Sammy’s cot with him, arms wrapped around him tight. He’s never stopped being protective of Sammy, ever since that night. But now I’m realizing, Jesus, they must be just about keeping each other alive. I sure as hell haven’t been giving them that. If they grow up normal at all, if they thrive, it’s no thanks to me.”

John's journal has some particularly personal entries that Sam and Dean had respectfully decided never to read. Until one day they decide to read them. Lots of feelings, then eventual healing sexiness, ensue.

[Don't forget to toss a kudos and a comment to the author, who is also here on Tumblr as @amoreanonyname. 🫶]

[My thoughts: Love the almost meta value of this premise, with the boys reading something outside of the show's canon that is still an official tie-in so is technically canonical, I guess? I'm not sure how it all works, but anyway, great idea. 😊]

Omg, thank you so much for this rec! (And so sorry it took me over a week to reply 😅!) If I can say it myself, I think this is one of my fave fics I've written, so I'm so glad people are still discovering and enjoying it.

spin this wheel of hobbies

What would you guys consider the worst movie you've ever seen? Not something that's fun to make fun of, nothing you ironically enjoyed, I mean just an absolutely miserable moviegoing experience that you paid for, hated every second, and wish you had walked out of and asked for a refund.

For me, no joke, Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. It did not even feel like a real movie to me. It made me see red! I was SEETHING with anger and annoyance throughout the entire thing, and I cannot for the life of me articulate why. I saw it once in 2012 when I was 15, I remember almost nothing about it now, but it struck a nerve with me like no other movie ever has before or since.

Tell me in the tags, which movie makes you disproportionately angry just thinking about it?

can he be normal for once

I am actually begging some people to just let some spaces exist untouched by real-world issues and horrors.

Like I've lost count of the amount of times peaceful game or fandom servers have been ruined by people stampeding in with political rants, bitching about world issues, demanding internal activism, demanding vent channels so they can whine about their shitty parents, ect.

Like. Respectfully. Not every single space has to be inclusive of and welcoming of outside topics. The real world sucks. We don't needed to be reminded of that absolutely everywhere.

i'll stop bitching about world issues when

1) genocides end

2) we have solved the fact that we are currently living through an actual apocalypse and even if you're privileged enough to not notice we are

and im sick of folks dog whistling that they're "sick of everyone talking about politics" when they really mean that they don't care about their brothers and their sisters. i hate talking like a hippie but i don't know how to make people understand that people in other countries are Just Like Them.

"You can never enjoy anything while there are bad things happening. Even if you personally can't stop the bad things, you must spend every waking moment of your entire life being absolutely miserable while contemplating the bad things. If you have a moment of happiness, you are helping evil." - the puritans and insufferable modern-day twits

if you want a space without politics, what does that mean to you? To me it means being left alone and not seeing people say things that scare me. If I put you in a place I'd consider to be without politics you'd feel terrified of all the trans people being accepted and you'd feel many of your favorite background ideologies missing. In your space I'd find the passive transphobia and background fascists disheartening. what you want is the status quo, and that is harmful to lots of people. Saying this means you assume the status quo is more important than the people harmed by it.

(I don't know if OP is transphobic, I assume they are at least a little bit but I don't actually know)

op is not, and op uses multiple pronouns. not sure if in a cis or trans way, but still. also not wanting to hear about negative shit doesn't mean your transphobic.

i dont want to hear about the constant attacks on transgender people. i dont want to think about how project 2025 is gonna effect transgender people. because this shit genuinely makes me want to kill myself. it is stressful living in a world that actively wants you dead, and you do not need to be reminded of it everywhere you go

thats honestly pretty valid. I think wanting to be in a space like that makes sense, though I do take issue with framing it as politics. Having all of your identites passively validated and anything else that's possibly uncomfortable ignored is a political statement same as any other. That's what I hear when I hear no politics, even coming from a queer person. Still sucks for OP to get a response like this.

A desire to remove oneself from politics requires a depoliticized of one's identity and situation, something that is functionally impossible from an objective material sense, but possible in a social sense. If the capitalist society we are borne onto perceives a "depoliticization" of our material situation, then we can delude ourselves into thinking that it truly is depoliticized and divorced from "The real world". Conversely, a person living within an active war zone is perpetually considered "political" every second of their lives, and by the original poster's line of logic, their inclusion in these "chill spaces" necessitate a complete rejection of their material reality, a rejection of their existence, purely for the comfort of the privileged, who's material comforts allow them to pretend, if for a moment, that the other does not exist.

But the truth of things is that people being able to go online and engage in fandoms is no less politically charged or "Untouched by real world issues and horrors" than a slave driven cobalt mine is. They are dependent on each other, and a desire to create spaces that neglect the latter but not the former is borne from a desire to remove yourself from accusations of complacency and personal responsibility. Fundamentally, it is self-centered.

I could, and in fact do, say that people of a certain class engaging in recreational material specifically to forget the existence and suffering of the classes below them in the global south is just as much of an issue as the suffering itself.

There's a stereotype that USAmericans tolerate very long car rides.

op I think you may have wildly underestimated american's car tolerance

Speaking of mountains, I know most people live around sea level, but still, I'm curious

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

I would genuinely love to know what kind of mental gymnastics antis do to hold mainstream media/producers and fandom media/producers to different standards and accountability demands.

Like the guy who wrote Game of Thrones isn't questioned whatsoever but the moment I write incest fanfiction about the incest characters, I'm a degenerate awaiting the noose?

"But you're doing it for gratification!"

How do you know George R. R. Martin doesn't play the pink maraca to the Lannisters, huh? How do you know he isn't AO3 user GoldenManeGlory writing 14k of incestual cumplay and breeding kink?

"But his smut wasn't explicit and clearly written to be arousing!"

50 Shades of Grey was considered groundbreaking in terms of explicit smut in professional publishing, and I would like to remind you that these quotes constitute as groundbreaking.

And these.

"You write it because you want to do it in real life!"

My brother in christ if I went to hook up with a guy and, without asking my safeword or even my name, he pulled out a taser and a gun, I can assure you the literal first thing I would do is phone the cops.

Say it with me; what is arousing in concept is not always arousing or wanted in real life.

Or even realistic, for that matter.

And again, I seriously doubt George R. R. Martin wants to bang his relatives and mass murder people with green fire.

(Although he does probably want to run around with cool swords and wear fancy outfits. He both looks the type and, lets be honest, most of us want to run around with cool swords and wear fancy outfits.)

"Nobody gets aroused by the things shown in mainstream media!"

Most of what is shown in mainstream media is specifically orchestrated to be appealing. All those slow-mo shots of half-naked women and men getting out of pools? All those ten minute long sex scenes? All those vaguely sexual fight sequences?

They. Want. You. To. Enjoy. It.

'Sex sells' is not just an off-hand observation.

So, again. I'm asking you. What's the difference between mainstream media, and fandom content?

Wait, what? So, I'm all old, and I dgaf about other people's reading/entertainment habits. I have just learned about this antiship stuff in the last month or so but I had assumed antiship people were also against most entertainment that was geared above maybe a middle school level and you're telling me they watch Game of Thrones then bitch about rape and incest???

Thoughtcrime isn't real and tv/books/manga/movies are pretend. Just figure out what you like (in whatever capacity 😉) and enjoy what you put in your brain.

I'm in my 40s, and I was accused by a 19 year old anti of "being complicit" just because I read and commented on darkfics. The exact phrase was "I see it as my job to purge fandom of people like you." Which was my motivation to report and block. What was really funny was she was smarmy and tried to goad me into blocking her so she could prove I was a big meanie. What was even funnier was that she was the attack dog for an anti who wrote darkfic and still decided randomly to become a very vocal anti. It was incredibly weird and full of hypocrisy and elitism.

From what I've seen, antis seem to fall into two categories:

1) Very young, very traumatized people who may have unfortunately already been primed to see the world as a dangerous place full of people who want to hurt them - who then get sucked into the mental and emotional black hole that is anti-ism.

2) Straight-up bullies who think they've found acceptable targets to lash out at. (And yes, the two groups can overlap. Being victimized does not make one immune from being an asshole.)

Because the anti harassment I've seen - so much of it is just so gratuitous and performative and nasty. I don't genuinely think most antis genuinely think the people they're harassing are abusers or predators - maybe some do. I do think there are a lot of unresolved emotions and anger involved, because happy people just don't act like that. But mostly... it's performance. It's signalling. It's social positioning and grasping for status in a pecking order that doesn't actually exist. Hating the right people, and being seen hating the right people, to prove your worthiness to the ingroup.

There's a reason there's also a "generation gap" on this discourse. Fitting in and social status and impressing your friends (even by bullying others) is all very important at a certain stage of development. Then you get older and it's just... very not. You get older and find your people and engage in what you like and who cares what other people are doing? And if you really, truly, genuinely think there's an abuser in your midst, there are many ways you might react - but hate messages and harassment campaigns probably wouldn't be it.