holding yourself to extremely high standards (if I’m not perfect at it, I’m a failure)
being incredibly sensitive to criticism (becoming suicidal if you think someone thinks you’re bad at something)
having a very brittle sense of self-worth that’s heavily reliant on what others think of you
What Narcissism is Not:
being uniquely abusive
having no morals
being a bad person
ETA: this is not an exhaustive list of NPD traits! more traits than these are necessary to have NPD! I chose these particular features to emphasize things that aren’t often talked about outside of dedicated NPD communities and to highlight the fact that NPD is a disorder based in the internalized fear that you are never good enough.
Okay bet, here’s a more comprehensive (if not exhaustive, because it’s nigh impossible to list every NPD experience) list of NPD traits. In addition to the above:
feeling slighted by “insufficient” praise for your achievements (even if the achievement is really basic, such as completing a load of laundry, or the person did praise you, they just didn’t praise you “enough”)
feeling like the only people who are good enough for you are others with NPD
being willing to betray your own moral code to avoid being emotionally vulnerable
prioritizing your own wellness above all others, to a harmful degree; being willing to actively cause harm to people you are close to and care about to protect yourself
having recurrent episodes of suicidality, depression, feeling inadequate, feeling unloved, or otherwise being severely and disproportionately upset in response to criticism or failure
having recurrent episodes of euphoria to an almost manic degree in response to successes or achievements
I’ve tried to make these as clear as possible, but if you’re confused about anything, instead of being like “well ☝️🤓 anyone could behave / feel that way” try asking me for examples of such a thing in an NPD vs. non-NPD kinda way
Not sure if I will ever manage to finish the lil Kallamar fic I had planned and started for months at this point. But I still wanna share the idea.
Basically, Kallamar was supposed to be a very sickish child. Would get sick easily, was very fragile and sensitive. His mom would take care of him and try to keep him safe.
At some point he would start hearing a voice, nobody else seemed to hear. Following it outside the borders of the village at some point…finding the blue crown, which would whisper so softly and welcoming, as to not scare the child.
Time forward, the crown would keep the squid healthy and he could also keep the people of his village safe…despite the crown wanting expansion, claiming to having the cure to all pestilence. As much as the cause of it.
The fic would end with people obviously dying from old age, Kallamar wanting the crown to help his mother but all it has to say is “That is no curse, nor sickness, young God, this is age and death which will come for all mortals eventually.”
Kallamar would stay at the dead and empty village for a while, till Shamura finds him.
Aka, I wanted to give a bit of more depth to Kallamars fear of death.
I’m going to save up for a new motorcycle by running a scam where I bet straight dudes at bars twenty bucks that I can get a girl’s number in under five minutes and then politely walk up her and say, “I just bet that asshole twenty bucks that I could get your number. I’ll split it with you if you pretend to laugh like I just said a good pick up line and then write a fake number on my hand.”
Like, I never understood those kind of bets in those shitty teen movies. Everybody loves being part of a scheme, man. Use your head.
If anyone ever does this to me I’ll call them out on being a con artist.
Joke’s on you, buddy. That’ll only have consequences the first, what, couple dozen times? I can take a punch.
But then eventually, I’ll have money for the bike, and whenever I get called out, I’ll just speed off, and, sure, maybe I crash and die in a gutter and the police can’t figure out why I have hundreds of fake phone numbers stuffed in my jacket and it launches a huge investigation that becomes sort of a local legend, but you know whose problem that is? Not fucking mine.
Because I’m a slutty motorcycle ghost, and who’s gonna’ stop me then? The ghost cops? Nice try. Everybody knows cops can’t become ghosts because they just go straight to hell. It’s basic math.
Moral of the story, don’t be a con artist or you will die in a horrible accident and become a lonely ghost.
First of all, don’t you ever accuse me of having morals, narrative or otherwise, ever again.
And second, where did I say I’d be lonely? I’d be a ghost on a motorcycle. That’s the sexiest thing that there is. You look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn’t bone Ghostrider. Look me in the goddamn eyes.
I’m going to save up for a new motorcycle by running a scam where I bet straight dudes at bars twenty bucks that I can get a girl’s number in under five minutes and then politely walk up her and say, “I just bet that asshole twenty bucks that I could get your number. I’ll split it with you if you pretend to laugh like I just said a good pick up line and then write a fake number on my hand.”
Like, I never understood those kind of bets in those shitty teen movies. Everybody loves being part of a scheme, man. Use your head.
If anyone ever does this to me I’ll call them out on being a con artist.
Joke’s on you, buddy. That’ll only have consequences the first, what, couple dozen times? I can take a punch.
But then eventually, I’ll have money for the bike, and whenever I get called out, I’ll just speed off, and, sure, maybe I crash and die in a gutter and the police can’t figure out why I have hundreds of fake phone numbers stuffed in my jacket and it launches a huge investigation that becomes sort of a local legend, but you know whose problem that is? Not fucking mine.
Because I’m a slutty motorcycle ghost, and who’s gonna’ stop me then? The ghost cops? Nice try. Everybody knows cops can’t become ghosts because they just go straight to hell. It’s basic math.
Moral of the story, don’t be a con artist or you will die in a horrible accident and become a lonely ghost.
First of all, don’t you ever accuse me of having morals, narrative or otherwise, ever again.
And second, where did I say I’d be lonely? I’d be a ghost on a motorcycle. That’s the sexiest thing that there is. You look me in the eyes and tell me you wouldn’t bone Ghostrider. Look me in the goddamn eyes.
I just spent ten days in my childhood home to keep an eye on things
I have hidden 100 small yellow ducks all over the house
I am very excited for my parents to be back
a first update: we have a neighbour who empties the mailbox while my parents are away and this morning I got a notification from our front door camera and watched said neighbour find what I know to be a tiny yellow duck in the mailbox (the camera is too far away to actually see), stare at it for a moment, and place it carefully back inside the mailbox
THE FIRST DUCK HAS BEEN FOUND
They just came home after a friend’s birthday party and I’m guessing went straight to bed, because my dad just sent a photo to the family group chat of the duck I placed on his bed with only the caption “thank you 😘” which makes me suspect they haven’t found any of the others yet. Or noticed that this one has a number on the bottom.
Tomorrow they’re going to find more of them and realise what they’re in for and that’s when the real joy begins.
I just spent half an hour on the phone with my dad mostly giggling maniacally while he complained at me. He thought it was a singular duck and then went to get fresh PJs and “another bloody duck” fell out and now he can’t rest until he has found as many as possible. It is half an hour to midnight, he is prowling the house trying to spot more ducks, and he begrudgingly admitted he still loves me anyway. My mother is significantly less invested but not caring does not protect you from The Ducks. I am absolutely ecstatic with how this is going.
If I ever need to explain my parents’ different personalities to somebody who does not know them, it will be like this: my dad, upon finding the second duck in his pyjamas, refused to believe that there would be more of them, and then went absolutely feral with the hunting instincts of a particularly determined bloodhound. He found 40 of them within about an hour. He has created an Excel sheet to keep track of which ones are still missing (I wrote numbers on the bottom of each duck). He keeps calling me to swear at me and then grumble that he still loves me.
ALT
He did not appreciate it when I told him about zookeepers throwing a pumpkin full of meat into a tiger enclosure.
My mother, on the other hand, thinks the whole thing is hilarious. She loves the ducks. She has accepted the ducks. She’s sad that my dad insists on collecting the ducks because she thinks they should just stay where they are and become part of the decor. “I reckon I will find them when I find them,” she says. I told her that I had to replace one because the original number 4 dropped on the tiles and got decapitated and she thinks I should dramatically stage it next time I visit.
ALTALT
[Image descriptions in alt text]
This is genius well done. Please tell me you labeled them 1-101 while skipping, say, 37, affording your father days of pleasure trying to find Duck 37.
Better yet: Hide duck 37 at YOUR house, so when they visit and see the bloody bird the father will explode and throw hands with you on the spot.
Hey kids here’s a piece of actual for real experienced adult advice: don’t make songs you like your alarm. Ever. You’re gonna Pavlov yourself into hating it or sleep through it and have weird dreams. Don’t do that to yourself. Seriously.
I’m glad the notes on this post have turned around from people going “I am the exception I love music I will never die” but some of you have made some truly unhinged choices about what to set your alarm. Why was it the Seinfeld theme in the first place.
Your experiences are not universal but I wish they were. You’re adorable. I want your life.
knowing the above negative pavlov association, for a while i made the penn and teller’s Bullshit theme my message notification; it’s lively, cheery, but also conveys “agh what fresh hell is this..”
This flashed me back to university when I was hyperfixated on Penn and Teller for about two years
its so sad that radfem just means transphobe and not like. this
I have to double-check every blog name with “rad” or “radical”, and I HATE IT, because rad/radical were some of my favorite words! people who don’t respect trans men/women aren’t radical, they’re tragical!!!
YOU ARE SO RIGHT HOMIE we gotta reclaim rad and radical as phrases only trans people can use forever now
I really don’t like how piglins get portrayed as aggressive barbarian enemies now. Did they forget that they don’t attack without being provoked and you can have positive interactions with them in-game?
One of my favorite things on minecraft is that some mobs are friendly of you follow their rules or “culture”. If you wear gold you can trade with piglins and explore their place. If you wear a pumpkin or dont look in their eyes, you can live in the end, and no enderman will kill you. If you dont hit the iron golens or zombified pigmans, they will not hurt you. I hate when they take it away from the game.
“After receiving a tip about a family of Burrowing Owls on the eastern edge of Cheyenne, a photographer rushed to the location in late June. The owlets seemed nearly ready to leave their burrows. Over the years, the photographer has perfected a method using a GoPro on a small tripod, set to take a photo every 5 seconds. They leave the camera behind, allowing the owls to feel comfortable. The challenge lies in the long wait to see if the effort pays off. This shot was taken on June 28th.”
I hate to say it but there is an america-centric bias to my posting, I am an American who posts about a political topic that is at its worst in the US and Canada (urban design)
I don’t post much about other countries because I haven’t been there or seen the situation there, I have visited exactly 2 countries outside the US, Italy and the Netherlands, I want to fix that but I haven’t had the chance. I don’t want to speak to places I haven’t been and talk over the people there.
A few months ago, I wrote a small guide on good disabled characters and why they were good that gathered quite the attention, and I thought that doing another more specific guide this time would be interesting for writers or just people that are curious ! This guide will include general informations, some things to do, some things to avoid and some ideas that might revolve cane users’s lives.
Things to know about cane users
Cane users are pretty diverse, and putting us in little boxes usually isn’t the best idea if you want to make a character that has substance and isn’t just “the disabled one”. Here some infos about cane users that might be helpful knowledge !
Canes don’t have ages. Most cane users in media are portrayed to be old, but truly, anyone can have the need to wield a cane ! I’ve been using mine ever since I was 17.
Can users can have a large variety of problems for their canes. Some canes are used to avoid pain from effort. Some canes are used for balance purposes. Some canes are to make walking less exhausting (works the same as walking sticks !) And sometimes, it’s multiple problems at once.
Not everyone needs their cane 24/7. Some always need it, some can make small efforts without it but overall often need it, and some people, like me, can spend quite a lot of time without it. I almost never use my cane in my house, and mostly take it outside !
People with canes can run. We’re not necessarily slow, I’m even faster than a lot of my friends.
Not using a cane can come with consequences, but not always. Some people might be able to walk without a cane but then suffer horrible consequences, but for others, canes are just a commodity for specific occasions.
Canes don’t have to be looked down upon. Look at some characters with canes that look cool as hell ! Arsène Lupin, Roguefort Cookie, Brook … Their canes serve their style !
We can be pretty healthy. Some people can have canes just because they were born with a bent leg and that’s it. Our cane doesn’t define our health status.
Canes aren’t a curse. Think of them as something positive. It’s a tool to make our lives better. You don’t see someone sitting on a chair and think “awh, it’s sad that they need a chair”. It’s more something like “hey it’s cool that this chair is here so they can sit down”
Things to do
Make them use their cane. And when I mean use, I mean that canes are just funky long sticks usually made out of metal. Have fun with it ! Let them use it as a weapon ! Trust me, one hit in the knees with a cane and you’re DOWN. Use it to reach stuff that’s too high for everyone ! Have fun. Be creative.
Let them decorate their cane. It’s an extension of their body ! You usually put on clothes that you like, don’t you ? It’s the same for a cane. If they like cutesy stuff, let them paint in it pastel colors ! If they like a more flashy style, add some stickers on it ! If they’re a fancy person, give them a beautiful crafted cane with jewels on it !
You can make them a little shy or uneasy about their cane. Some people don’t feel worthy of confident enough to wield one. It’s not rare to see people think they’re “not disabled enough to do so”
But on the other hand, you can do the complete opposite !! Make them proud of that cane ! Make them act like they’re feeling pretty and more confident with it ! One thing i like to think about with my own cane is that I look like a cool gentleman. That boosted my confidence immensely.
Things to avoid
Don’t make it their whole world. And by that, I do not mean that their cane shouldn’t be a defining trait of their personality. Think of Toph from ATLA. She is blind, and you usually can’t think of her character without describing her as blind. However, that isn’t her entire personality trait. Make cane users have a goal in life, friends who enjoy them for who they are and not just pity them, have fun … Don’t just make them the disabled one.
Don’t try to make the character’s life just a plain disaster unless it’s the focus of your story and you really know what you’re talking about. Having a character who’s always in pain, who feels bad about relying on their cane and/or who’s angry at the entire world for being disabled is a REALLY tricky subject to use if you don’t want them to be either a mass of unhappiness and angst for no good reason or some inspirational porn of the character who inside is deeply tortured but outside keeps up a facade because they shouldn’t cry to avoid making others uneasy.
Do not, and I repeat, do NOT try to heal them, especially in a magical way. Bad idea. A lot of disabled people’s goal isn’t to be healed. It’s to live a normal life. Making it so the ultimate goal for them is to be healed makes it as if they were worthless as long as they were disabled. Making their situation better physically or mentally is one thing. Curing them completely is really bad. “But some disabled folks want to be cured !” True, true. But if you are able bodied, I’m not sure if you can have the right mind to understand all of the complex details about this situation that leads to someone’s life choices and the end result may look like you think the only thing that can make disabled people happy is being freed from their condition. I think it’s best to just avoid it altogether. If you need a more nuanced idea, try to give them a solution that still has a few downs ! For exemple, a prosthetic that feels like a real arm, acts like a real arm and basically replaces it perfectly is a full cure. But a prosthetic that takes time to adjust to, needs repairs sometimes and doesn’t look 100% like an arm can be a better narrative choice
Smaller thing, but don’t make the handle uneasy to wield if you draw the character design. You can decorate most of the cane, but if you have chunky spiky decorations on the place you’re supposed to clench your hand over, you’re gonna hurt yourself. I’ve seen quite a lot of jewel handles or sculpted metal handles and usually their not good. If it’s detailed metal, your hand will end up cramped in little parts and it can hurt. If it’s a jewel, it’s so easy for it to slip out of your hand it’s unpractical.
List of tropes/ideas of scenes/details about canes to help you write new situations !
If you walk with a cane during winter, you can’t put your hand in your jacket to get warm and there’s a high chance your hand will get freezing. So after a long walk, you get an excuse for another character to hold their hand and warm them up.
If the handle is metallic, you get the opposite problem during summer. You can burn yourself so easy ! Easy accident if you want someone to help and get closer to the disabled person without it necessarily involving their disability.
Canes are SUPER useful when you’re walking upon heights. They make things really easy, just like hiking poles on mountains ! I live on volcanoes and whenever we clim on a harsh slope, I’m always the first to get up there. Good moment for your character to get a boost of confidence if they get all the way up somewhere before their friends !
The first time using your cane feels magical. If you have chronic pains, it makes you feel like your pain disapear. If you can’t walk right, it feels like everything is suddenly alright. The moment where a character chooses to wield a cane can be huge for character development. It’s a moment of fear because of the impact a cane has on their appearance, but also a moment of confidence and relief.
Canes fall. All the time. And after a while, it becomes fucking comical. Trust me, putting a cane against the wall, seeing it fall and doing it three times again in a row while it doesn’t want to stay up makes you embarrassed but also makes you want to laugh because of how stupid it looks.
When you get a cane, you stop being invisible. When you walk outside, generally speaking, people don’t look at you. They don’t care about you. But when you get a cane, people start to stare at you for no other reasons that you have a cane. Half of them are just curious, especially if you’re young. The other half has a very specific look. The “oh, you poor thing” look. Which is, trust me, particularly awful to get, especially when you’re just existing and doing nothing special. How does your character react to this ? How do they feel about it ?
I believe that is all I had in mind. I may add some more details in the future if I get other ideas, but this should already be a good start. I would be thrilled to answer questions if you have some, either in my askbox or through DMs.
I will tag this post with characters holding canes that aren’t necessarily considered cane users but that some people may be interested in writing as such. Feel free to tell me if you’d like to see tags being added !
Edit : I’m highly encouraging everyone to look at the tag section under this post where a lot of other can users are sharing their experiences !!
This post is so good it makes me want to create a character with a cane immediately
love seeing revisionism in the wild “free the nipple never meant you can walk around topless every where that’s still sexual harassment it just meant for like breastfeeding and stuff”no it literally means you should be able to walk around topless anywhere because get this. breasts aren’t fucking sexual organs.
I remember when I was about 12, I watched a show on TLC that followed people as they got somewhat uncommon medical procedures.
There was one episode with a trans woman getting different gender-affirming operations, including breast implants. It showed the procedure, and (what I found so fascinating that it’s stuck with me for decades), as soon as the doctor put the implant in, a censor blur popped up on the nipple.
And you just know there was a meeting between the TLC lawyers and the editors and producers of the show to discuss what the difference was between a “man nipple” (can be shown) and a “woman nipple” (no no must obscure, ‘tis naughty). And they decided that as soon as the implant goes in and the nipple has more mass behind it, that’s the moment when it becomes a woman’s nipple and must be hidden to comply with TV rules.
But it’s the same nipple. On the same person. I know what it looks like; I just saw it. But TV and obscenity rules are rules, and the rules say woman nipple = sexual and therefore explicit, but man nipple = neutral, just fine.
“Free the Nipple” was calling out arbitrary bullshit like that, because someone just existing with their body parts should not be considered obscene, and the double standard that men can be topless but women can’t is so blatantly ridiculous. All nipples are just nipples. If you get turned on or bothered by them, that’s on you.
my favorite subreddit is r/IsTodayFridayThe13th which makes a single post each day (Yes or No) answering the question. Every single Thursday the 12th everyone goes “This is ridiculous! I’ve been waiting too long for Friday the 13th. I’m not even going to bother checking this sub anymore; I’ve given up hope completely.” and it makes me laugh every single time
call your senators urging them to vote in support of this resolution! especially if they’re democrats! urge them in your own words about how much this matters to you. if you want to go even further about it, threaten to withhold your vote in the election unless an arms embargo denouncing Israel is made!
I used to do cross country in high school, and there was this guy on the team that was wonderful. Great guy. But his advice to everyone that asked how to get good was to run 20k a day.
If you don’t run, I’ll just tell you, most people’s bodies cannot take that kind of abuse. No matter how much you train, you will not be able to run 20k a day. It’s like how you can’t train to make your cuts heal faster. You recover as fast as you recover. So while a big part of what made this guy so succesful was the dedication and mental toughness needed to actually run 20k a day, an equally big part was that he healed like fucking Wolverine. And that’s fine, but it would’ve been nice if he knew that and stopped telling new guys to commit suicide by jogging.
Different guy on the team ran like, 5-6k a day, which actually isn’t all that much. His problem when he gave advice was that he didn’t really get that 5-6k a day doesn’t generally produce elite results for most people. He was lucky in the sense that he didn’t have to work all that hard to get great results, and unlucky in the sense that if he pushed himself much further than that, he fell apart.
I think about those two whenever I get advice from succesful people. The very things that make them outliers also make their advice useless to most people. Worse, they’re often outliers on totally separate ends of the same spectrum, so their advice will be contradictory.
@creamsoda-slut no, this was a thing on our team too. The 20k guy had a cast iron stomach and he loved hotdogs. I eat hotdogs as a like, a nostalgia thing, but he just truly genuinely loved them. So some runs, he’d duck into a gas station and buy some. Pair it with the fact that this guy also had a major league pot belly, and it was a sort of accidental psychological warfare tactic. I’d be running along, panting, sweating, dying of heastroke by the AZ canals, and then Mr. 20k would blitz past, potbelly jutting 3 inches past his nose, a greasy gas station hotdog in both hands, and then he’d yell HEY BABS YER DOINGF FERFIFIC and I’d realize in the kind of sluggish way you realize everything when it’s over 100 degrees that he had a third hotdog in his mouth and wasn’t even out of breath. And then he’d slap my ass and chortle through his hotdog in this sort of huffy HEUHEUHEUHEUHEU and just rocket over the horizon. It was incredible. Like running with Dionysus.
Another time, we had a girl who wore a tankini on a run to the pool. Some of the other girls were Scandalized, so the coach made a thing about it and she was super embarrassed to be called out and then for the next pool run he showed up in a yellow speedo, gave himself a wedgie up to his nips and just slow jogged in front of the complainers the whole way to the pool. There was nothing they could do. If they tried to go fast, he could just pick up speed indefinitely, he was impossibly fast, and if they went slow, he, he had no issue just taking a mozy with his buns out.
Nobody complained about the tankini after that.
At another race, him and a few other varsity were having a contest to see who could pee up a tree the highest. He won when he ran up to the tree, still pissing, and did a sort of half-backflip that resulted in him falling straight on his head while also whipping piss like 12 feet up the tree. Everyone cheered him on so fucking hard, and he was ecstatic, I distinctly remember doing one of thus chest bump things with him and getting pushed back like 8 feet, but immediately afterwards he had his race and he kept getting lost because it turned out that the whole landing directly on his head thing gave him a concussion. And despite going on like, 3 wrong turns, he still won that race.
I was never friends with him personally, I just kind of watched him in awe from a distance. An incredible human being. One of my favorite people of all time. Only flaw that he had is that he casually would tell new guys to join him for workouts, and then the rest of us poor saps who had actually tried it once would go over and have to tell the new guy to Actually Please Don’t Do That.
This is actually v important and needs to be reblogged
Gonna just share this:
My European Studies professor decided a few weeks ago to take a Friday and instead of following the syllabus, he spent the entire hour and a half comparing Hitler’s actions from a European perspective to that of what Trump is doing in America. He never repeated a single point, and even used video and photos like this to show the comparison.
To make things better, he had us do an in class assignment for participation points. He first played a clip on youtube of one of Hilter’s speeches, subtitled and 3 minutes long. He then played a clip of one of Trump’s rallies. Our assignment? Copy down every single sentence that matched in translation down on a sheet of paper or a word document that wasn’t repeated. The person with the closest amount to what my professor found got a candy bar.
My professor found, in just three minutes of a speech, that Trump matched 65 different phrases/sentences to that of Hitler’s translation.
65 nearly identical phrases used in his speeches. Take a moment to think about that.
The number of times I have been delighted by witty banter only to find out later that I was “Flirting” is both unfortunate and disappointing.
“haha so what about that guy, huh?”
Me: what about him
“Well you seemed super into him”
Me: what why
“…dude you were flirting all night”
Me:
Me: Whoms't™™
I found out several of my female coworkers were planning on trying to get our male coworker to ask me out because “You guys kept flirting” but I was like “We were literally just goofing around. Like we literally just told jokes to each other. Literally just stuff that friends do, the same stuff you and I do.” I was definitely 100% NOT flirting but everyone thought I was
“You were laughing at everything TJ did!”
“He paper clipped a banana to the ceiling, Isabelle. That’s fucking bonkers”
While I’m talking about social stuff I had to learn as an autistic person
There’s a LOT of social interactions between human beings whose purpose really boils down to being like that thing dogs do where they go “omg YOU’RE a dog??? I’M a dog!!!!!” And that’s not a bad thing. Highly ritualized “meaningless” displays of human connection like friendly greetings and talking about things like weather actually do serve a purpose which is like idk ritualized displays birds do. YOU’RE a human? Omg I’M a human!!!! Wow!!!
And they don’t have to be your favorite flavor of interaction. You can even think they’re silly. But they DO serve a purpose or else they wouldn’t be a thing.
There’s lots of good and folksy responses to “how are you doing” that don’t involve either lying or undermining the ritualized purpose of the greeting exchange, too. My great grandmother Ethel for example was a big fan of “well, I’m a-doin’”
“Things like ‘How are you?’ and 'Have a nice day’ and 'What do you think of the weather, then?’ What these sounds mean is: I am alive and so are you.”
- Wings, by Terry Pratchett.
It sounds so cute when you put it this way
When I was a teenager I really hated and gamified smalltalk, but… Then I got cockatiels. And cockatiels have a thing called “contact calls”. Basically, it’s a particular set of noises they make to know where each other are without looking at them directly. There’s variations, when the flock member is close it’s a very sweet little sound, when they don’t know where you are this can progress to a panicked shriek.
I kind of loved mimicking it. It let me interact with my birds in a whole new way that meant a lot to them, and it turned out to be incredibly helpful when my (completely unrecall trained, fully flighted bird) got startled in a bad gust of wind on the way between aviary and house and ended up circling in the bad weather, totally disoriented… And calling for us. It let her figure out how to get back down to come home.
Gradually I realised that lots of animals do this, actually. Cat activation noise is a contact call. Dogs do it in some kinds of whines. Social birds have big repertoires of them. It’s just a ritual to keep in contact.
Then… I realised that’s what a lot of those small rituals of smalltalk actually are. They are the act of petting an anxious or excited dog to soothe it, or letting each other know you’re still in the room together. Humans have a huge variety in the way they use these, but I stopped finding a lot of them so annoying when I realised what the rituals were actually for.
I mean, I still prefer to use the non-word versions among friends and other people amenable to it, but. I find it, given in good faith, kind of endearing now.
“Not beating the ___ allegations” is such a ‘now’ turn of phrase, implying as it does a world where everyone’s behavior is always on literal trial by a guilt-presuming judge and jury that consists of anyone who happens to be paying attention.
Not beating the panopticon allegations
There’s a grain of truth in that, but I like the goofier interpretation that suggests you were… just, facing allegations of whatever you were doing.
“not beating the ___ allegations” only works if ___ was funny to begin with. “not beating the being short allegations” about that beloved mutual you don’t the size of. this sort of thing. “not beating the loved and cared about allegations” is a fun way of saying “I keep telling you, and it’s true”
i love how there’s the genre of fix-it fic where the author goes into great granular detail of how our heroes manage to avoid or undo whatever character death or other unpopular choice occurred, in a way that abides by the laws of the fictional universe and definitely required a substantial plot outline, and then there are fix-it fics where the author just went “that’s bullshit and didn’t happen,” and we as readers all go “agreed. carry on.”
join a server with a toxic matching pfp couple who fights in the public vc, wait for everyone to leave except those two, join the call, say nothing, open farm merge valley, say nothing, deafen, play farm merge valley. this will simulate being a kid in the backseat of a road trip playing ipad with headphones while your parents approach the divorce event horizon
Absolutely not a new observation but i love that the toki pona word for animal, “soweli,” is written like this
fuck man that sure is
i showed this post to my boyfriend last time i saw it (because hes a linguistics nerd in general and a toki pona nerd in specific) and i am delighted to inform everyone that all the words for various types of animals are little fuckin dudes
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