professionalchaoticdumbass:

professionalchaoticdumbass:

cast iron? yeah thats a pretty common spell to learn

ALT

you come onto my post and be funnier than me

underwhelmedandoverstimulated:

woman-becomer:

if I were an evil wizard I would choose to be nice instead!!

You can be both

fullmetalfisting:

How about you create a platonic polycule with your coworkers called a union

devilwizard:

cipheramnesia:

monkeychewtoy:

cipheramnesia:

I guess the thing about Godzilla is that it represents a massive national trauma which eviscerated nature and the human soul, but the USA versions fall somewhere on the spectrum between “vaguely about 9/11 or recent natural disaster” and “giant monster smashy smash.” I think that stems from trying to conceptualize Godzilla as representing a particular and isolated instance of disaster and translate that into something of a similar nature in the USA.

But the real deep down soul death and national trauma in the USA isn’t anything recent, you can’t point out something uniquely bad like an atomic bomb. Really the kaiju for the USA needs to be symbolic of how this whole place is an infinite recursive system of devouring its population, starting from colonization and going right up through to the present day. The crucial difference is that if a kaiju was to represent the deep, unhealed, and still bleeding scar at the heart of the nation, it has to by definition be some ancient dead thing which rises on the anguish of everyone consumed in the name of this country and burns it into the ground. There’s not an easy way to make a USAmerican kaiju because the only way to do so accurately means the kaiju has to be the protagonist, and ultimately has to show how much the people in the USA are unified when the hyperwealthy and our government are destroyed.

Who is gonna make that?

who else?

You get it.

I’ll let Mr. del Toro make the movie. I’ve already got something monstrous cooking in one of the labs so I can make it real; you know, so it’ll really drive home the metaphor after it starts eating folks.

Coming soon, to a Near You!

underwhelmedandoverstimulated:

helloneels17:

theresattrpgforthat:

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses:

why aren’t there more mysteries that take place in nursing homes & retirement communities. i want to watch a group of deranged retirees-cum-amateur-detectives combine their powers of:

• decades of life experience
• boredom-fueled busybody shamelessness
• access to the most gossipy next-door-neighbors in existence
• “I am too old to be arrested and/or give a shit” attitude

and solve crimes. this should be an enormous subgenre.

Thanks to @whimsy-of-the-stars I have been summoned! What if I told you…

There’s a TTRPG For That!

Brindlewood Bay is a roleplaying game about a group of elderly women—members of the local Murder Mavens mystery book club—who frequently find themselves investigating (and solving!) real-life murder mysteries.

Honestly one of my favourite mystery mechanics is in this game - the Theorize move, which allows the players to come up with the answer to the mystery and then roll to see how correct they are!

Obachan Panic is a quick, easy-to-teach, easy-to-learn ttrpg about grannies and aunties saving the world. They saved your home and country countless times from alien invasions, government conspiracies, untold monsters, the singularity, economic collapse and deflated soufflés—AND made it home in time to make you that casserole you like.

This game comes with playbooks that you can print, cut out and paste together - a little arts-and-crafts scrapbooking session to go along with your storytelling game! It even comes with art for your characters!

Gold & Girl is a game about retirees, divorcees and widows all rooming together in their sunset years. Deal with problems like Nosy Neighbours, Rising Rent, and Thin Walls - using only two stats! Mysteries should be no problem with this game, just give your Girls something to be nosy about!

Grandmothership, by Armanda, is currently in development but it’s a sci-fi setting about old ladies figuring out why the lights keep going out, why the robots are acting up, and what is going on with recent random disappearances. It’s inspired by Brindlewood Bay, Honey Heist, and Mothership.

I love that the power of elderly women solving mysteries continues into the far future! The feeling of this game is that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself, which very much is the way elderly women might think. You can check out the link for the preview!

i got the PERFECT show for you op

After a failed robbery, a gang of 3 noble thieves: Zuza, Kinga and Alicja hides in a quiet nursing home. While the police are on their heels, the gang continues their activities at the center, giving its elderly residents a second youth.

There’s another show that I think is close (didn’t actually watch it) it’s called like “murders in the building” and it’s a murder mystery with two old dudes and their younger friend.

trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter:

bxsmxth:

miscbones:

foxonrollerskates:

voidpaws:

ok anyways. post this beast

I HAVE THE OTHER PART TO THIS PHOTO

@trochaic-mutant-ninja-tetrameter Happy Bouncing Furry Beastie

ALT

🎶Mustelid go boing boing! Happy power!🎵

e-rose:

bitchpleaseee:

You can’t heal in the same environment that made you sick 🧿

Oh..

…

Oooh 😭😭😭

Pinned post

greetings-inferiors:

allthingslinguistic:

binch-worm:

learn2anarchy:

tacofrend:

enchantingcoffeenightmare:

headspace-hotel:

guerrillatech:

I thought this was my hometown for a second

So this has actually been cited by academics as part of the major draw to online spaces is the fact that just existing in public is reacted to with hostility and punishment. Gretchen McCulloch discussed this is in her book Because Internet, citing research that shows teens and young adults want to be outside! We want to spend time in social places, it’s just that there aren’t any places to exist in public without being charged for it.

When I was homeless as a kid my little brother and I loved to go to the library. We would keep warm in there reading good books all day long. Until residents of the town complained about us “loitering” at the library each day. The library staff then told us we were no longer allowed to stay more than an hour at a time. Imagine seeing two homeless children spending their entire days quietly reading just to keep out of the cold and having a damn problem with it.

Here’s a relevant passage from Because Internet! 

Even the fact that teens use all kinds of social networks at higher rates than twenty-somethings doesn’t necessarily mean that they prefer to hang out online. Studies consistently show that most teens would rather hang out with their friends in person. The reasons are telling: teens prefer offline interaction because it’s “more fun” and you “can understand what people mean better.” But suburban isolation, the hostility of malls and other public places to groups of loitering teenagers, and schedules packed with extracurriculars make these in-person hangouts difficult, so instead teens turn to whatever social site or app contains their friends (and not their parents). As danah boyd puts it, “Most teens aren’t addicted to social media; if anything, they’re addicted to each other.”

Just like the teens who whiled away hours in mall food courts or on landline telephones became adults who spent entirely reasonable amounts of time in malls and on phone calls, the amount of time that current teens spend on social media or their phones is not necessarily a harbinger of what they or we are all going to be doing in a decade. After all, adults have much better social options. They can go out, sans curfew, to bars, pubs, concerts, restaurants, clubs, and parties, or choose to stay in with friends, roommates, or romantic partners. Why, adults can even invite people over without parental permission and keep the bedroom door closed! (page 102-103) 

The source I’d really recommend for lots more on this topic is It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by danah boyd, a highly readable ethnography spanning a decade of observation of how teens use social media. Here are a couple relevant excerpts: 

I often heard parents complain that their children preferred computers to “real” people. Meanwhile, the teens I met repeatedly indicated that they would much rather get together with friends in person. A gap in perspective exists because teens and parents have different ideas of what sociality should look like. Whereas parents often highlighted the classroom, after-school activities, and prearranged in-home visits as opportunities for teens to gather with friends, teens were more interested in informal gatherings with broader groups of peers, free from adult surveillance. Many parents felt as though teens had plenty of social opportunities whereas the teens I met felt the opposite.

Today’s teenagers have less freedom to wander than any previous generation. Many middle-class teenagers once grew up with the option to “do whatever you please, but be home by dark.” While race, socioeconomic class, and urban and suburban localities shaped particular dynamics of childhood, walking or bicycling to school was ordinary, and gathering with friends in public or commercial places—parks, malls, diners, parking lots, and so on—was commonplace. Until fears about “latchkey kids” emerged in the 1980s, it was normal for children, tweens, and teenagers to be alone. It was also common for youth in their preteen and early teenage years to take care of younger siblings and to earn their own money through paper routes, babysitting, and odd jobs before they could find work in more formal settings. Sneaking out of the house at night was not sanctioned, but it wasn’t rare either. (page 85-86)

From wealthy suburbs to small towns, teenagers reported that parental fear, lack of transportation options, and heavily structured lives restricted their ability to meet and hang out with their friends face to face. Even in urban environments, where public transportation presumably affords more freedom, teens talked about how their parents often forbade them from riding subways and buses out of fear. At home, teens grappled with lurking parents. The formal activities teens described were often so highly structured that they allowed little room for casual sociality. And even when parents gave teens some freedom, they found that their friends’ mobility was stifled by their parents. While parental restrictions and pressures are often well intended, they obliterate unstructured time and unintentionally position teen sociality as abnormal. This prompts teens to desperately—and, in some cases, sneakily—seek it out. As a result, many teens turn to what they see as the least common denominator: asynchronous social media, texting, and other mediated interactions. (page 90)

Anyway, more people need to read It’s Complicated, danah boyd really takes young people and technology seriously and doesn’t patronize or sensationalize, and it was a huge influence on me in figuring out the tone for Because Internet so I want to make sure it gets credit! 

When I went to uni I nearly immediately started hanging out with people irl way more, even though all of the people I had known for less than a year. It’s genuinely just way easier for adults living on their own to hang out, especially in a uni city. Sure we can go to the pub or something, but we can genuinely just go to someone’s house and stay for as long as we like because everyone there are adults. We can stay up till 1 or 2 playing jackbox or watching Spider-Man or whatever. It’s great. It’s gotten me to start hanging out with my friends at home more, which lets me see the disparity even more.

underwhelmedandoverstimulated:

hot-multifandom-mess:

Thoughts on self-checkout vs cashiers (as a customer)

I prefer to use self-checkout

I don’t mind using self-checkout

I grudgingly use self-checkout

I refuse to use self-checkout

I struggle to use self-checkout

I’m bald and love vanilla extract (put in tags)

See Results

Please reblog for a greater sample size. I’m having a convo with my mom about this.

I hate self checkout, because it makes supermarkets think they can get away with not having any actual cashiers, and then they end up with lines down the aisles and pulling people from other departments when they should be providing jobs in the first place. I am however sometimes forced to use them, due to the aforementioned lack of actual cashiers.

sabertoothwalrus:

truntechgodhead:

truntechgodhead:

every time i look at the mystery gang i have this like visceral feeling that someone is missing. but nobody ever is. who are they. what happened to them

logically i know this is them. these are the only people in the mystery gang. fred, daphne, velma, shaggy, and scooby. thats the 5 of them. but something deep within my lizard brain is telling me theres a 6th member that has been, for unknown reasons, banished from this timeline and our collective memory as a species

hey so fun fact.

you’re not crazy

Van showed this to my class last year and then said “this drawing isn’t anywhere online :)” so I wasn’t sure if he wanted us to talk about it outside of class. so I’ve just been haunted by this secret scooby doo character, fully remembering this post in the back of my head, and I couldn’t say anything. But since he just posted it on his instagram I guess it’s fine lol

boreal-sea:

transmechanicus:

poolboyvmprmansion:

transmechanicus:

6 hour workday maximum i’m not kidding, if it can’t be done in that timeframe it doesn’t need doing.

this doesn’t apply to jobs like childcare

If i worked in childcare and my 6 hours were up i would start putting babies in ziploc bags and shipping them to Turkmenistan listed as endangered fruits and vegetables

Every time I see this post it reminds me people have no idea what shift work is. You can have a business, daycare, hospital, anything, open 24/7 and only have individual people working 6 hours a day.

squishsfx:

okay so i work in the deli of a grocery store, yeah? and today i got this guy who came up with his two twin children, around five years old. he walks up to the counter, carrying one kid in each arm, and loudly goes “oh, no, i forgot what i wanted!” and turns to the boy in his left arm and, in a perfect blues clues style voice, goes “caleb, do you remember what i wanted?” and the boy goes “half pound of yellow cheese!”

i, obviously, say “you’ve got it little sir!” and slice up half a pound of yellow american cheese, handing it to the little boy, who looks it over, nods, and tucks it in his lap.

then the man goes “well, we can’t just have cheese on our sandwiches. but what else can we put on there?” and the little gurl in his other arm goes “half pound of ham!” so i nod and say “yes ma'am! what kind?” and she points at a random cut of turkey, so her father nods and says “like she said, honey ham!” i cut half a pound of honey ham, hand it to the little lady, she looks it over, nods and puts it in her lap.

then the man goes “now, what should we have for the side?” and the kids both simultaneously start cheering “macking cheese!!!” and the man spins on his heel and marches off, presumably to find the macking cheese.

later, the little boy comes wandering back to the counter while his father looks on and loudly and proudly proclaims that he wants to know where the mustard is. i point him to the correct aisle, he nods, says “thank you mister deli woman” and walks away.

morguezsz:

idk man. i just think itd be really cool if sign language classes were mandatory throughout primary school. yeah because it would make communication with deaf kids and autistic/nonverbal kids much easier. and those kids would be accessible to the others so they could make friends and have healthy relationships. yeah. and kids would eat that shit up man. like their own little secret language? they love that.

my-darling-boy:

So at work there is a soda delivery guy who comes in almost everyday to restock and though we’ve barely said a word to each other, we definitely Know Of each other. Well this morning I finally got a shift where I could sleep in but my dad was like Hey the cable guy is coming at 7 to replace the cable boxes and I was like alright whatever I’ll just sleep in but forgot there was a cable box in my room. So it’s 7 in the morning I vaguely hear my dad let the cable guy into my room to just swap the box and I wake up to see??? Soda Delivery Guy???? in my room???? Turns out his second job is working cable but wow here Soda Man is standing in my doorway and I’m wrapped up in a pink bunny blanket surrounded by stuffed animals like

gentle-giant-swag:

DUNMESHI FANS! DO NOT SPOIL! IF YOU DO SENSHI WILL BE DISAPPOINTED

Non Delicious in Dungeon/dungeon meshi fans, what do you think didn’t happen in season one?

A divorced father of 3 gets the talk about the birds and the bees from a bachelo

Man goes crazy over the idea of making bread

Instead of banging the dragon, they eat it!

Cat girl doesn’t want to be cat girl

A man’s special interest is why they haven’t died

The 40 year old (dwarf age) dwarf gets the panty shots

They just remove the head of a humanoid monster, nothing else

Man get’s betrayed by his water horse :(

They wear frog skin

Armor taste pretty good

Pumpkin has an… interesting face

Dungeon Meshi fan/i don’t have eyebrows

See Results

codedcore:

morguezsz:

ALT

sorry i made this

nekogirltwink:

the “you can be whatever you want when you grow up” crowd vanishing when the boy wants to grow up to be a girl.

sapphicinsanity:

plastidecor:

hollowboobtheory:

hollowboobtheory:

starting a collection

my trinkets

deersatan:

tomorrow……… is august„„„„,?????

its augu…….st?? tomorrW???????????

8th monTH???????? 4 ,more mont hs of 2013?????????????

what??????????????????????????????………………………..

s8riel:

rashemibabe:

memeclassheroes:

Anybody want me to shut the fuck up for $500?

prokopetz:

probabilitydirigible:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

I wonder if there’s ever been a notable unarmed political assassination? Like, some dude goes in for a handshake at a campaign event, and decides to just powerbomb the fucker into the pavement instead and breaks their neck? It feels like the sort of thing that would have happened at least once in history, but a cursory attempt to research the topic just turns up a bunch of anecdotes about Assassin’s Creed.

(Note: incidents of politicians being beaten to death by angry mobs don’t count; these may well involve unarmed violence, but they don’t qualify as “assassinations” as the term is customarily understood!)

The emperor Commodus was strangled by a professional wrestler

Okay, that’s one.

redmegarex:

cheerfulomelette:

This week, I learned that - in the UK - you can be too poor to declare bankruptcy.

It costs nearly £500 to legally declare that you have less than a penny to your name. What the actual hell?

thats the uk for you

dear-ao3:

scarlet-bee:

dear-ao3:

we have once again surpassed our goal so i have raised it to 4200 as we said we would!

dear-ao3 community fundraising

please share and donate, and continue boycotting and remember: free palestine!

[Plain text:

we have once again surpassed our goal so i have raised it to 4200 as we said we would!

End plain text.]

anyway!!! donate for palestine !!!!

midnight-soulless-system:

“This book, this agenda, the entire Project 2025 is a plan to unite the conservative movement and the American people against elite rule and woke culture warriors.”

-Project 2025

Reblog if you’re a woke culture warrior.

og-remys-world:

merobot:

turnstileskyline:

funny as hell next question

he did the same thing with bush in 2004 too!

boag:

weaselle:

imjustusingthistolikeartists:

tenporcupinesinnertrenchcoat:

lontra-ohiensis:

still not over how much I love this

Posts that would kill a peasant from 1173

Mephistopheles and Margaretta, A Double Statue - medium: sculpture, sycamore wood, sculptor unknown, 19th century. Currently located in the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad, India.

i’ve reblogged posts featuring these two separately, but they go great together

yes-sica:

team0player0:

shock:

if fallout 76 really is a world where “every character is a real person” & there’s no NPCs im making it my civic duty to be like this lowly tavern barkeep and then once i’ve established enough of a rapport i’m going to nuke all of west virginia and it will be in character 

someone help where’s the screenshot of some post somewhere about the mmo player who barkept for a longass time then fucked absolutely everyone over

This one?

charlesoberonn:

Justice for REcunt Shirt

meatybunger:

same-pic-rick-roll:

Lets bake a cake!

Cake Ingredients

Flour

Sugar

Egg

Milk

Baking Soda

See Results

baking soda is at a 1%~ we need more baking soda

wutheringheights78:

wutheringheights78:

when they’re remodeling houses on those HGTV shows and they rip out the most amazing seafoam green or baby blue or blush pink 70s tile….why do you hate style and fun

this. we NEED this. now more than ever

the-x-button:

sniperct:

If true we HAVE to make this the biggest flop in gaming history, as in ‘destroys the company’ levels of gaming flop as in a 'lesson must be taught’ gaming flop, as in 'E.T. destroyed atari’ gaming flop

reminder

jofiah:

effemimaniac:

have you noticed that they don’t even want you right clicking anymore

Yeah! you can do it to a youtube video and take a snapshot of that frame if it’s paused, or open the thumbnail in a new tab if it hasn’t started playing yet

Humans are weird: babies

elodieunderglass:

elodieunderglass:

ace-pergers-pigeon:

pleurocoelus:

ace-pergers-pigeon:

So I’m a big fan of the idea that humans are “space orcs”, and today it got me thinking about something else. 

Human birth is pretty unique among mammals. Not only are our birth canals narrower than standard due to being bipeds, but we have a larger head to body ratio then any other mammal. As a result of this, the only way to fit a baby’s head through a person’s birth canal is for them to be born very early, and massively underdeveloped. 

Other mammals are capable of walking and running within the first day of being born, where as a human baby doesn’t even have strong enough neck muscles to hold up their own head. 

They can’t see, they can’t crawl, they don’t have the coordination to grab things, and they have a soft spot on the skull that leaves part of the brain incredibly vulnerable. And while an adult can adapt to a range of temperatures, babies have to be constantly monitored to make sure they aren’t chilled or over heating. 

Can you imagine you’re an alien, who knows humans as these highly adaptable endurance machines that can eat almost anything and survive tremendous physical pain and injury, and you learn that their young are so fragile. That they emerge from the womb barely able to function biologically. 

And suddenly you remember all those humans on your crew who get attached little creatures. The toughest, burliest people who will coo and coddle over fluffy little cats and call lizards babies. And you realise that their whole species developed to care for these tiny, vulnerable, defenceless babies, and that kind of attachment tends to spill over a little. 

And now you understand that old adage, that the most dangerous humans are the ones whose young are in danger. Because if they’re going to stand a chance at surviving until adulthood then human parents have to be willing to defend their children with their lives, and that is exactly what they do.  

Holy crap. That means that we’re like pouchless marsupials (though not as extreme in the underdeveloped infant department).

It fits that we’re called Space Australians.

OKay this is my favourite response so far

To be fair, the mammals “born able to run within hours” are the terrestrial ungulate mammals. They are newcomers and parvenus and they die when they step on a bee. They only showed up when grasslands became common, the meme-loving fucks - they’re all matcha lattes and YEET. Like, okay, we get it, hoofed ungulates: you’re vegan, you really like synthpop, you’ve “discovered” a “new” continent, you ran fifteen miles this morning, your baby walked within eight hours of birth, sure. Fine. You’re cute, diversity is important, you can stay. We need something to eat, after all. 

But ungulate mammals are REALLY poor representation of Mammalia.The ancestral Mammal, rodentlike, that gave rise to Placentals and Marsupials, would have been more like - well, more like today’s Placentals and Marsupials. More like us. More like badgers and dogs and monkeys and hamsters. Born blind and naked, and hidden discreetly from polite society, until the horrible alien thing looks more like a Real Animal. 

Consider the mouse: born completely naked, hairless, blind, deaf, helpless, only able to drag itself to a nipple with terrific effort. Consider the cat: born as a thinly furred sausage with eyes and ears glued shut for weeks. Consider the newborn dog. Big cats. Rats. Bears. Squirrels. Sure, consider the marsupials; also, weasels and rabbits and porcupines and pangolins. All the mammals that aren’t the bloody ungulates. 

Rodents are born practically fetal, their limbs mere buds, their skin see-through, their eyes bulging in their transparent skulls. Their bones aren’t even opaque! You can see their dark livers, the white milk in their bellies! Their eyelids are welded shut, their heads too large to raise. They are a lot more alien than a human baby - a liminal animal indeed. Certainly, rodents grow quickly, because they die so young. Their helpless childhood is still proportionately a large chunk of their life - nearly the same proportion as ours, actually. But they are born like uncooked eggs. I would add a picture of a newborn rat pup here, but young and impressionable children read this blog.

And we are not the weakest of the Furry Mammal clan, if we zoom out. It takes about two weeks for a kitten to open their eyes. It takes about four weeks for their hearing to come online. This is because these senses are still developing. They’re born undercooked, too! 

By contrast with many mammals, human babies come out with their senses active (unless that specific baby is blind or deaf or has another sensory disability)*. It takes a while for human babies to focus their eyes, because we usually have a lot of apps installed (color vision, facial recognition) that take forever to boot up the first time, and focusing requires muscle control - but human babies are goggling at the world with open eyes, and processing what they see, as soon as they come out. Human babies come out able to hear, if hearing is included with that specific baby. We are born able to record and process sensory information, where our other mammalian cousins can’t.  

I mean, I am so guilty of this trope too, I love it to pieces and use it all the time. Even more hypocritically, I personally agree with the “Fourth Trimester” theory, which is that human babies need about three months to adjust themselves to life outside the womb. Thus, the first three months are the “Fourth Trimester,” where you just carry the baby around, and it boggles helplessly at the world and goes “ugh!!” That is the part that makes sense when you look at the birth canal etc, and you go “oh, we’re so undeveloped,” and you mope because you can’t see yourself ever getting your life back. But the first three months is only a small piece of the longer story of human babyhood, and the “weak, helpless” stage is not particularly unusual among our mammalian family. It just seems so terribly long because we compare it to horses and rats, which is unfair on everyone. And at some point we get our lives back, and can’t remember where the time went. And it isn’t as bad as it could be. I mean, we can usually shit on our own. So that’s something!

No, it really is something. Many baby mammals cannot excrete on their own. Cats, for example; the mama cat must lick certain areas of the baby to stimulate it to poo and pee. They can’t do it by themselves. Mama cat must lick them religiously, to make their bowels and bladder work, or the waste will back up and the kitten/cub will die. This is relatively common among the Furry Mammals. Every kitten on Earth had to be forcibly poo’ed for the first three weeks of its life. Every tiger took six weeks (!!) before it could pee by itself. And that’s just the felids. Don’t talk to me about werewolf cubs unless you’re ready to make the decision on whether they need diapers, you cowards.

Humans, though, are born perfectly capable of shitting by ourselves. Which is rather nice, when you consider the alternative. 

So if you take us in context of the other baffling and amazing animals on Earth, we are not really particularly “undeveloped,” taken as a whole. Not particularly in comparison to our cousins, whom an alien would find just as strange and foreign. We humans are simply hitting milestones at our own pace - sometimes faster, sometimes slower, always legitimate, always because an ancestor dodged death once by doing something slightly different. Our infants are for carrying in our arms, so it doesn’t matter that they can’t hold their heads up - but they are born shitting, and boggling with their enormous eyes.

Anyway, aliens would probably regard all this nonsense in the same way as the dinosaurs did - “Lord, what fools these mammals be,” at first, and then “OH FUCK THE MAMMALS DID WHAT?”

“Parenting is important,” reply the badgers and the bears and the humans, aggressively cuddling something they call a baby, although they might be taking the piss: “Really, we will bond with and nurture ANYTHING that meets our vague criteria. Isn’t cuteness just the best thing you’ve ever seen? Don’t your hormones just SQUISH when you see something with specific proportions? You know what’s inherently rewarding? HOLDING SMALL THINGS AND MAKING A SOUND ABOUT IT.” 

“Erm, I guess?” replies the alien or the dinosaur. “I guess… I guess your baby…. thing…. is very …. important? To you??”

“YES I LOVE IT A LOT”

“I …. see that you do. It’s … cute.”

“Cuteness is a powerful weapon,” the mammal says seriously. “Oh, also? This is our planet now.”

---

* Many humans are born without the ability to hear, see, see in color, eliminate, socialize, process sensory information, etc. Or they may lose these abilities later. They are valid, human and loved. These “space Australian” posts are about generalising humans, so I generalise here, but I don’t want to make anyone feel bad. 

2018 post I rediscovered by trying to find a different post. I appreciate how I did actually do the math - it wasn’t available anywhere, and nobody else on the internet seemed to have pointed it out anywhere, so I had to do MATH for you people - to find out that mice spend a similar proportion of their lives in “helpless babyhood” as we do. That was MATH. WHERE are my citations

mantis-lizbian:

kalamity-jayne:

chronivore:

remember all those people who were always going “noo! don’t ne mean to the cute doggo! the little pupper!”?

…yeah… we were telling you.

leebrontide:

Every single time I see a take that amounts to “if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X” I’m reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to “be orphans” escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.

And this girl’s mom comes in, hears what we’re playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it’s because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.

First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.

Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says “pretend you’re dead, and I have to -” Whatever it is. Some adult task she’s assigned herself.

And it’s just so transparently obvious that she’s practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn’t have to do scary hard things alone.

It’s a natural coping mechanism. She’s self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn’t there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She’s also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.

Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.

My daughter does not want me dead. And I don’t want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.

cobblepottery:

hailvady:

#i would describe my gender as not exactly ‘idk dude i just work here’ #more like…..when someone assumes you work somewhere that you don’t #but you know how to help them so you do it anyway #my gender is wearing a red shirt at a target

These are the best tags

turing-tested:

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

A portion of people in the notes are like ‘but that makes you trans. That’s called being agender’ and another portion of people are going ‘this is how the majority of cis ppl feel and it’s NOT agender’ and personally I feel like both of them are missing the point here. Yes a lot of people identify as agender because of this feeling. Yes a lot of people with this same feeling still identify as cis. These are not mutually exclusive experiences and it doesn’t mean the agender people are secretly cis or the cis people are secretly agender. It just means they have very similar experiences of gender that they choose to conceptualize and label differently, and neither of them are mistaken or wrong to do so.

trapny:

firechildslytherin5:

mischieviem:

You guys realize this means we ALL have to vote now. No “don’t wanna vote biden” excuses now- if we don’t vote our rights are going to be taken away.

“but Kamala Harris did-” I don’t fucking care

There is never going to be a perfect candidate, but there is a worst case scenario candidate, and it’s the fucker that’s gonna win if you don’t vote

jarnt8:

“Oh no! This resonance cascade has introduced hostile alien wildlife into the Black Mesa facility! How ever am I going to defend myself???”

The humble crowbar:

slettebak:

bruno-has-definitely-deactivate:

good stop posting strangers on the internet. this should be a rule everywhere

bogleech:

objectlessondujour:

thehmn:

A lot of people around me are having kids and every day it becomes more apparent that hitting your children to punish them is insane because literally everything can be a horrible punishment in their eyes if you frame it as such.

Like, one family makes their toddler sit on the stairs for three minutes when he hits his brother or whatever. The stairs are well lit and he can see his family the whole time, he’s just not allowed to get up and leave the stairs or the timer starts over. He fucking hates it just because it’s framed as a punishment.

Another family use a baseball cap. It’s just a plain blue cap with nothing on it. When their toddler needs discipline he gets a timeout on a chair and has to put the cap on. When they’re out and about he just has to wear the cap but it gets the same reaction. Nobody around them can tell he’s being punished because it’s in no way an embarrassing cap, but HE knows and just the threat of having to wear it is enough.

And there isn’t the same contempt afterwards I’ve seen with kids whose parents hit them. One time the kid swung a stick at my dog, his mother immediately made him sit on the stairs, he screamed but stayed put, then he came over to my dog and gently said “Sorry Ellie” and went back to playing like nothing happened, but this time without swinging sticks at the nearby animals.

The psych nerds found out ages ago that punishments that make the child think for a few minutes (about one minute or year of age until they’re tweens) is much more helpful to develope social intelligence and understanding than punishments which prevents thinking, like the ones that involve pain. In fact, corporal punishment encouraged lying, extreme reactions, violent outbursts, go figure, they don’t trust you.

This is all really fucking serious and important and I’m mainly reblogging for that, because this correct mentality needs to be spread around more, but I’m also reblogging because I absolutely lost it at the child who dreads having to wear the normal blue hat of shame.

promithiae:

mctreeleth:

umbrellanumber5-deactivated2021:

This explains a lot about my lack of asking for help when I clearly need it

Don’t forget the fact that asking for help carries the risk of someone expressing mild disappointment in your inabilities, which will cause you to shut down for 5 to 7 working days.

Also see: learning from a very young age that there’s no point in asking for help because you should be able to do it on your own