Gay Frog Pond

Ash, he/him, I got the gay, the tism, and the sads. I write on AO3 as FancyFrog.  https://ko-fi.com/fancyfrogash/commissions

[therapatical]

"trans men aren't seen as dangerous or predatory or--" have you ever spoken to a trans man of color in your life yes or no

[danielwaldorf]

since becoming a barista i have noticed a few very distinct typologies among my customers. such as:

the woke left: young and fashionable. visible tattoos. often enjoys matcha, lavender flavoring, oat milk, and cold foam. pretty decent customers.

sweet old man: drinks very sweet iced lattes, pays in cash, puts all of his change in the tip jar. sometimes orders hot coffee and i get scared that his shaky old man hands will spill it and he'll get burned but that has not yet happened and god willing never shall.

evil old man: only wants drip coffee and declares it ridiculous that any other form of coffee exists. some variants only want americanos and these variants are even scarier. watch out.

sweet old woman: might need her daughter's help to order but is very bubbly and open to trying new things. compliments baristas freely and frequently.

evil old woman: does not want coffee and only wants sweet tea or soda. will not tip even if she spends three hours in the shop repeatedly asking baristas to fetch things for her.

errand husband: either stiltedly recites an order to you or shows you the order in their texts/notes app. needs to step out of line and make a phone call if you ask any follow-up questions.

grindset girlie: always wearing scrubs, an apron, and/or a name tag. orders the exact same thing every day and knows the exact change she'll need to pay for it. her regular order is both extremely caffeinated and extremely sweet.

#mamabear: is actively wrangling two to four children while ordering. order changes repeatedly because the children cannot decide if they want a muffin or a cookie or apple juice or chocolate milk etc. for some reason these women are always wearing an article of clothing or carrying some personalized item that says "mama" on it.

schoolchildren: band of two to eight adolescents hanging out after school. extremely indecisive but generally quite polite and tip well.

amnesiac in love: grown adult who needs their partner to tell them what they like. gets asked a question about their own preferences and turns to their partner to answer for them. generally acts like a shy child looking to their guardian for behavioral cues if you try to interact with them and only wants to talk to mommy i mean their wife.

this of course is not an exhaustive list but those are just some of the most consistent Types i get. ok bye xoxo

[alexanderwales]

It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.

I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.

[roostercrowned]

DON’T become even a casual nerd about historical fashion because you’ll start looking at pseudo-medieval fantasy and going “that jacket and those breeches are 200 years apart and reflect extremely different social movements” and “oh no they were NOT making shirts like that prior to industrialization” and “a fly front? in MY ~1500s???”

[partywithponies]

One of the most annoying genres of people on the internet are people who act like they believe science is one single monolithic thing. Like, you'll see an article saying something like "scientists studying the movement of tectonic plates", and then in the comments there'll be several smug people saying "smh why are scientists doing this instead of finding a cure for cancer", like. Why would a geologist be doing that.

[l0s3r-g0r3-d3s7r0y4]

What if silence is in fact a sound, but because its a universal sound we just adapted to it and dont notice it anymore

[friends-of-magic]

I actually just wrote a paper on this!!

The short of it is, yes, that's exactly what happens. There's no such thing as pure silence outside of a vacuum (and inside a vacuum you'd be dead). So basically your ears are constantly adapting to the noise threshold of your surroundings and slowly ignoring it. If you were in a perfectly silent room (anechoic chambers are cool!) you would actually start to hear the sound of existing!

[aquilacalvitium]

[darkarfs]

Isn't there some room full of sound baffling foam or something that absorbs all ambient noise and most people go mad from the isolation because they start to hear things like their own circulatory system and their heartbeat pounding in their ears?

Ah, there it is. Orfield Labratories in Minnesota. They say the longest anyone's been able to stay inside was 45 minutes, as they could hear their lungs expanding and their digestive system working overtime.

[donnerpartyofone]

It's hard to say this without sounding like a right wing dickhead, but the thing about progressive spaces is that they may naturally attract people who are always on the lookout for excuses to start a fight. Like you can find yourself faced with someone whose political outrage is totally justified, and whose humanitarian ideals are right on the money, but simultaneously they are carrying a ton of psychological baggage about being wronged and getting revenge, and they will exploit literally any opportunity to live out this psychodrama with anyone in their line of vision. I have thought of several related anecdotes since I started typing this post, but I'll limit myself to the thing that inspired it, which is that I just visited this ultra-lefty cafe/bike shop/community gathering space where I've heard that the proprietor is constantly in a fight with everyone around her. When I paid for my stuff I noticed that there was no tip option, but I thought I had heard something about this, so I snuck away to look at the website and it made me really glad I didn't ask! I think there should have been a really enticing and exciting way for her to say "I've decided to be the change I want to see in the world, so I'm paying my baristas a full living wage, I'm making sure EVERYONE feels welcome and comfortable here, and I'm selling products I believe in!" -- but instead all the web copy sounded more like "You're either with me or against me, you're a fucking piece of shit asshole if you can't handle the inclusive atmosphere here, and by the way tipping is for fascist cavemen and if you ever try to tip someone you are refusing to relate to them authentically and you are enforcing a dangerous and evil power dynamic that should be purged from human society (so therefore I pay my staff well)." Like everything she stood for was totally agreeable, but why did she have to put it like it was directed at her worst enemy, rather than at the kinds of people she wants to attract? If the word on the street is to be believed, the reason for this posturing is that she spends quite a lot of energy making as many enemies as possible, and she probably likes it that way. I guess I'm just reminding myself, and perhaps others, that while one might think of "politics" as being broadly social and theoretical, no individual can fully separate the political from the intimately personal. Even somebody who seems to want to uplift and protect their fellow humans may be getting some perverse inner satisfaction out of that valiant crusade, and you may never realize it until you find yourself in a confusing fight with them.

[imjunebitch]

when we "lose" a cis butch woman because he becomes a trans man or masc you should actually say such things as yay, yippee, or hooray.

[neurodivergentaf]

it's so wild when your parent changes when you become an adult. my dad is very cordial and non confrontational - he regularly helps me with adult stuff like changing the oil or providing insurance tips. he's always smiling when i call him on video and providing jokes when i complain about college

when i was a kid, i would have to tiptoe around his anger issues often, sometimes running quietly past his work table until he got his own place completely separate from our family, locked away for days. every so often he would start screaming in the car and trying to hit me or my brother for talking too loud while my mom attempted to calm him down as he swerved on the road. and now he, smiling, helps me with car insurance.

like oh, this is just who you are when you have power over someone, and this is who you are when you dont have power over someone. no wonder you can have a normal life, friends, work while scaring the shit out of your kids and wife. i see it now. i see why no one would have believed me. that, i think, is one of the core fears of trauma - seeing the outside of it from the perspective of other adults that brushed you aside, and understanding. of course, that understanding gives the opposite of solace; it just gives you more grief with nowhere for it to go

[nonbinary-wrath-month]

To say that masculinity is a flawed construct that inflicts serious psychological damage to many in its current state is true. To say that femininity in comparison is liberatory and pure and the "superior option" for most or all of the people on the planet is nuclear cope. Just weapons-grade ideological myopia. Please put the phone down and only return to the conversation when you can deepen your analysis beyond "this thing is evil because it makes me personally feel bad, and this thing is pure because it makes me personally feel good".

[imjunebitch]

having an actual consistent set of morals in a vibe-based world full of people who say they have a "strong sense of justice" as shorthand for "I get really pissy when I don't get what I want" is kinda exhausting lol

[butchscientist]

you will never catch me complaining about an actress on a tv show having an imperfectly concealed pregnancy or a character going on a sudden trip somewhere while her actress is on maternity leave. so many actresses (and women working in any other field) are fired, punished and pressured into making reproductive decisions for their employers' convenience & if i have to try a bit harder to suspend my disbelief then that's absolutely what i'm going to do if it means people are getting to exercise reproductive & bodily autonomy without punishment

[dailymanners]

I find it quite strange that even though Tumblr is known as The Neurodivergence Website, a lot of people on here seem to assume that they're the only neurodivergent person on here, and/or that they're the only person on here who understands The Neurodivergent Experience, so they're quite eager to assume that every post on here was written by someone who's neurotypical and needs to be lectured on The Neurodivergent Experience

[queer-here-and-in-fear]

if you come out of the movie with a main cast of a black man and a women both with fucked up interesting issues and i see your ass ONLY posting abt the white boy who was on screen for 10 minutes. i am actually the evil leftist who thinks your evil for that and i am going to block your ass. fuck off

[dailymanners]

I feel as though what drives most rude / inconsiderate behavior I experience IRL on a day to day basis comes from a place of having this unearned and unnecessary sense of urgency in situations that aren't actually urgent. I think if more people became aware of this completely unnecessary sense of urgency in situations that actually aren't urgent, it might make co-existing and sharing public spaces with other people a lot easier and more tolerable.

That text post that's been making the rounds that goes something like "Omg you made it to the same red light as everyone else but faster and more dangerously and recklessly, should we call nascar? Do you want a medal?" summarizes exactly what I'm trying to talk about.

It's like when I have to change buses at one of the bigger and busier bus stops, and the people who get off the same bus as me shove and elbow past me to get off before me, and then shove and elbow past anyone even slightly in their way on the way to the bus they're switching to, only to end up on the same bus as all the people they shoved and elbowed, with several minutes to spare before it leaves and plenty of open seats left.

I think this unnecessary urgency a lot of people feel in their day to day lives drives a lot of bad behavior. I'm not saying I'm innocent of this (is anyone?), I've felt it too in plenty of situations that didn't call for it, and regrettably was less kind than I should have been as a result. But I try to be aware of it, and always try to ask myself it it's really as urgent as my lizard brain is trying to tell me it is, and even if it was urgent, does that still justify unkind behavior?

Is shoving or elbowing another person aside going to make the difference between whether or not you make it to the bus before it pulls away? (hint: at least where I live, most of the time that's a no because the drivers usually won't leave if they see people from another bus heading towards their bus). Is shoving and elbowing people aside in a crowded grocery store going to make any real difference in how quickly you get your shopping done?

Does a few extra seconds of time actually justify cruel and unkind behavior towards people you perceive as slightly inconveniencing you?

[strictlyquadrilateral]

i used to hear a lot of "you're not really a man, you just hate how women are treated" directed at trans men, and lately i've been hearing a lot of "if you don't like how women are treated, you're probably not actually a woman" directed at women, and i've gotta say i'm not a fan of either of these.

[sadclowncentral]

so many misguided metaphors around violence and desire. if the open maw of a panting beast fills you with the want to be devoured, that does not make you prey. while the rabbit trembles in fear, its deepest desire is to run. evolution demands it. in fact, the desire to be eaten does not make you any small animal at all.

it makes you a fruit.

[sumverendus]