willow @dragonfish816 - Tumblr Blog

“Cats don’t actually love you”

A cat is a small creature in the middle of the food chain that is fully aware that you are a very large thing that could stomp its head in at any moment and yet it chooses to rest its tiny little head on your leg for a nap and spreads out on the floor near you exposing its belly and its most sensitive organs. It brings dead mice and bugs to you to share food.

Don’t you get it? This tiny thing trusts you. It wants to help you too. It licks your leg thinking that it’s helping. It kneads on you to find comfort. It shares its body warmth with you in the cold and gives you your space in the heat. It hisses at other mammals it sees outside including other cats in an effort to protect its family.

Cats love you so so much. But they will keep trying to eat plastic.

dragonfish816

aaaaaaaaaaa i’m fast tracking my adopt a cat plan THE moment i have money

agnesmontague

you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't

derinthescarletpescatarian

It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)

Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.

By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.

Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.

derinthescarletpescatarian

#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?

Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.

storybookprincess

so today a group of 8-9 year old kiddos approaches my desk and goes “hey. we want to go to the downstairs part of the library.”

i’m like “you can totally go downstairs, but just so you know, right now the only thing down there is the genealogy department. that’s like the history of this area and the people who lived here a long time ago.”

i’m expecting them to lose interest, but to my surprise, they go “we want to see the genealogy department!!!!!!”

so i’m like “alright let’s do it!!!!” and lead this group of maybe six elementary school kids across the library make way for ducklings style and downstairs to our extremely not kid friendly genealogy room. our genealogy librarian is super cool, though, and he pulls out a few interesting things for them to look at & they ask a lot of questions and try to find where they live on maps from the 1800s

after about fifteen minutes, their curiosity has been sated, so we go back upstairs and over to the children’s department in that same duckling parade style

truly wish i could render this little scene artistically for you all it was a delight

fozmeadows

[AI user voice] yeah well cloth mother says I'm the most perfect baby on earth, she never tells me no because I'm always right. YOU'RE just jealous because you don't HAVE a cloth mother.

becherdireinen

trust that everything will fall into place without you forcing it there.

emilywithay

IF THE LEAK KINGDON SNIPPET TURNS OUT TO BE AI, IM SUING

magentabug

Hot take LGBT rights are in jeopardy too much in this current day and age for us to be arguing about he/him lesbians or whether bi women’s boyfriends belong at pride and shit like that. There are groups who are fighting tooth and nail to overturn gay marriage in the United States at this very moment and you still want to have meaningless discourse over labels and pronouns?

If shit hits the fan we’re all ending up in the gulags, from the neopronoun-using autistic frog-loving lesbian to the neurotypical “i hate my community I’m basically homophobic lol” gay man.

Can we PLEASE put our thinking caps on?

heroicallynude

My two yr old is looking through a book about prehistoric art and she saw a picture of those cave painting of hands and she held up her own and said "hand!" And I gotta be honest. That hit

im-da-bronx

Oh my god, this reminds me of the childrens garden of our local botanical garden. There’s one section that’s called the prehistoric lives garden or smth, and it’s full of native plants that indigenous people 2000 years ago would have eaten and used as medicine, etc. And within this little garden, there’s an adobe style playhouse, which for some reason (probably lighting reasons) has no roof, which means the rusty red dirt floor is often quite muddy.

And this series of events has led to my favorite interactive art piece ever.

Handprints.

Little tiny handprints at the bottom. Big teenager and adult sized handprints at the top. Handprints upon handprints upon handprints, a modern day continuation of an ancient tradition.

Most of the people who contributed were probably doing so because they thought it would be fun, not for any deep philosophical reason. Heck, you can tell based on the height of the larger handprints that their owners were having a jumping competition. They didn’t think about the fact that they were creating art in the exact same way the earliest humans created art. They didn’t think about the fact that humans have always been and will always be humans, and the ways we interact with each other and the world have always stayed the same in the most important ways.

But I did. I thought about it. And I am in love with humanity all over again.

With AO3 being down on and off the past few days, this is a very good time to remember that a digital archive is not infallible, and so you should absolutely save and archive epubs/pdfs of your fave fanworks.

There are a bunch of ways to do this, but I love calibre. It’s a free ebook manager and is fucking phenomenal; I’ve had it for years and use it to curate my own fic library. This ensures I always have access to my fave fics and allows me to share files if someone’s ever looking for something I have.

So go forth and archive!

clockworkspider

You really need to make non-tragic past for your characters, significant people and events that impacted their lives, non-dramatic mundane moments that shaped them, happy memories, bitter memories, embarrassing memories.

Like yes the space princess lost her whole civilization, but did she have friends before that? Favorite place? Does she miss the sound of her favorite music she use to listen to?