Happy Whumptober Wednesday, everyone!

We're shipping (another!) shiny new feature this week…

Export your work to AO3! 🎉

You can now export your work directly to AO3 from Ellipsus! We know how much love, care, and time you put into formatting your fics—now you can focus more energy on the perfect tags vs. line breaks. 🫠

Here’s how it works:

We hope this makes your publishing process smoother, so you can spend more time basking in the glow of some well-earned kudos! 🌟 - The Ellipsus Team xo

*no "see results" button because I'm not letting y'all get out of body positivity. if y'all want results you can find part of yourself to appreciate (even if it's small) and choose that

Edit: TERFS FUCK OFF

(credit to @can-of-pringles for the banner)

Witchcraft, Wisdom, Death...

nakedness, merriment, poetry

A Kiss That Feels Like... Finally

Author: wolfish_willow (@mrs-steve-harrington) Artist: @stevethehousewife Beta reader: @urisarang Characters: Steve Harrington, Chrissy Cunningham, Nancy Wheeler, Tommy Hagan, Carol Perkins Relationship: Chrissy Cunningham/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler Rating: Teen and Up Audiences Additional tags: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - No Upside Down (Stranger Things), Spin the Bottle, First Kiss, Flirting, POV Steve Harrington, Steve Harrington-centric Warnings: none Word count: 10,464

Summary:

Take 2 now that ao3’s up and I can give all the options!

oh this is a life saver

So these are both “Aw Fuck I’m outta real food” meals BUT ALSO:  if you’re learning how to cook, these are great “baby steps” meals to learn how to cook basics into something enjoyable without “wasting” anything expensive.  Though I maintain that even cooking screw-ups are valuable in terms of lessons learned.

Also they’re great for when you get absorbed in something and you realize your blood sugar is dropping and you need to make something Quick.

Making basic storecupboard or fridge ingredients less basic and more nutritious.

We are not the main characters in a film, we are the scriptwriters, make your life what you write in it. Utility Boxes by Abbie Paulhus

Okay the WEIRDEST THING is going going down right now

So some guy in Michigan in the US has just found a letter in his grandmother’s house; it seems to be a pen pal letter from 1973ish, and it’s from a young Welsh girl. In it, she lists:

So this American dude decides to take a photo, whack it on Twitter and ask the only Welsh person he knows if there’s any way to track this Welsh girl down, because you know, ALL WELSH PEOPLE KNOW EACH OTHER, OBVIOUSLY

Except

I am furious to report that it has worked

Welsh person he tags doesn’t know, but takes up the challenge. Someone reckons the Catrin might be a woman who translated a hymn book once, and checks the foreword to see that the dates and ages do seem to be about right. Someone else suddenly has a brainwave - wait, isn’t she the mother of Steff, the comedian?

My husband gets tagged, takes one look at this letter, and is like “That is 1000% my aunt.”

So now it’s 20 to midnight, Steff’s aunt has obviously not yet seen the excited message to put Twitter out of their misery, and my mother-in-law is currently on the phone gleefully telling us that when that letter was written her sister had never sat on a horse in her life before, and she’d lied to an American pen pal for clout before the internet even existed.

Not to sound like a 90s shallow prep, but how you dress can affect your self esteem, and putting energy into wearing things you actively like and projecting an ideal of yourself through fashion instead of seeing clothes as things you have to put on out of obligation helps.

It also can give you a sense of control over your appearance that you otherwise wouldn’t have lmao

I bought a cape because of this

this post is written in a humorous tone but this is the realest shit.

two years ago i wore baggy sweatpants and flip flops every day because i was depressed but then decided eh to hell with it and bought some black edgy emo clothes bc thats how i always wanted to dress but never got a chance to and it was only then that i realized that the sweatpants flip flops look was just keeping me in my depression funk. i didnt like the way i looked and i didnt identify with the clothes i was wearing and it only made me feel worse.

i then went through my entire wardrobe and got rid of everything that made me feel that way.

now i have multiple outfit possibilities requiring different levels of effort but on days where putting on clothes just seems like a project i just have to put on black jeans and a band t-shirt and i can still feel good about the way i look which is a really good way to start off my day.

i can not recommend this approach to clothing enough.

man sometimes i forget that some people aren’t even a little bit queer.

You can only rb this today

Humans were drinking milk before they could digest it

Our history with milk presents a chicken-or-egg conundrum: Humans couldn’t digest the beverage before they evolved mutations that helped them do so, yet they had to already be consuming milk to change their DNA. “There’s always been the question of which came first,” says University of Pennsylvania geneticist Sarah Tishkoff. “The cultural practice or the mutation.”

Now, scientists have found the oldest evidence yet for dairy drinking: People in modern Kenya and Sudan were ingesting milk products beginning at least 6000 years ago. That’s before humans evolved the “milk gene,” suggesting we were drinking the liquid before we had the genetic tools to properly digest it.

All humans can digest milk in infancy. But the ability to do so as an adult developed fairly recently, likely in the past 6000 years. A handful of mutations allows adults to produce the enzyme lactase, which can break down the milk sugar lactose. Genes that enable what’s called lactase persistence are widespread in modern Africa, which has four known lactase persistence mutations. (European populations rely on just one.) Read more.

“The research also shows dairying in Africa goes back just as far as it does in Europe—perhaps longer. That undercuts a myth, propagated by white supremacists, that lactase persistence and milk drinking are somehow associated with white Europeans. “

Being lactose intolerant and eating dairy anyway is a tradition going back millennia is how I’m going to justify my decisions from now on