My life is a work in progess

Call me Grem. Currently wild about Critical Role Campaign 4 (and Azune Nayar specifically). Anything I like goes on here, with emphasis on kitties, disability stuff, and fiber arts. Feel free to message me if you want to chat. Icon is a photo of Lancelot from BBC Merlin with short hair, wearing chainmail, and smiling slighly as he looks into the camera. Header is a drawing by lemissingmask illustrating a scene from my fic 'Like a Kicked Dog.' It's a mostly black and white sketch of Lancelot and Arthur's upper bodies. They're standing with their foreheads pressed together and their eyes closed with Arthur's hand holding the back of Lancelot's head. Lancelot has reddish-brown blood smeared over his neck and cheek 

[uphillfarmers]

life could be a dream…

[pisshandkerchief]

everyone's "well-adjusted" and "mentally healthy" until the "sometimes I wish I'd never been born at all" part of Bohemian Rhapsody comes on

[valtsv]

the reason sex scenes exist in fiction is because sometimes people have sex but also to find out what the characters are lying to everyone including themselves about by wrapping that agonising vulnerability in a treat like giving medicine to a dog

[beaft]

the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.

[beaft]

actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:

abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.

i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.

a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.

[charl0ttan]

something i actually just realized on call w some friends recently is how crazey it is that your online friends are as many as thousands of feet above or below u right now. like if you teleported to their location without changing your height above sea level, well your fucked in some way basically

[charl0ttan]

How high above sea level are you right now?

0-250 feet

251-500 feet

501-750 feet

751-1000 feet

1001-2000 feet

2001-3000 feet

3001-4000 feet

4001-5000 feet

5001-6000 feet

6001-7000 feet

7001-8000 feet

8001+ feet

Remaining time: 16 hours 49 minutes

[bebsi-cola]

personally, i don't view my crutches as an extension of my body. but i don't think i have to view them as literally a part of me in order to have people treat me and my ownership of these mobility aids with respect and for appropriate importance given to them considering how much i need them.

[aropride]

joke i like to make when a baby is crying in public is “we’ve all been there.” We literally have

[b0nkcreat]

OH THATS GORE!!!!!!! THATS GORE OF MY COMFORT CHARACTER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 😄😄😄😁😁😀😀😄😁🙌🙌🙏🙌🙌🙏🙌

[evanzbuck]

HEATED RIVALRY | 1.06 "The Cottage"

[vee-dmsr]

[rae-butter]

Writers on a random Tuesday: Sits down, locks in, giggles, writes 10k, does not sleep

Also writers on a random Tuesday: writes one sentence and then stares into the abyss for five fours

[thejewellerybox]

Gannet Diving necklace by Rie Taniguchi

[huffylemon]

[triviallytrue]

aren't gorillas gentle giants or something. i stay out of his way, he doesn't maul me, we have a nice time picking out clothes together in opposite sides of the mall

[friendshapedhole]

Male gorillas are super aggressive and territorial. Also they interpret nearly every human mannerism as a sign of aggression or a challenge. Smiling and eye contact are both things that zookeepers have to be taught to suppress when they’re in the vicinity of gorillas.

[triviallytrue]

Well unless the mall is his native territory I think I'm fine, I wasn't planning on smiling at him

[max1461]

This is all irrelevant because the obvious answer is five black mambas. I mean, that’s not actually very many snakes, and malls are fucking huge. And unlike a gorilla you can definitely outrun a snake if it does show up. Find an open space in the mall where you can see any snake coming and just hangout out there. Fucking easy.

[triviallytrue]

Misguided! I would much rather have a mallmate I can easily see and hear coming. I'm confident I can stay out of the gorilla's way, but if I step on a snake or one otherwise gets the jump on me, it's all over.

It's not just about the physical danger either, it's about my mental health. One gorilla, unless he's actively mad at me, I just keep a healthy distance between us and make sure I never get trapped. With the snakes, it requires a lot more constant vigilance

[ghostpalmtechnique]

They should substitute "chimpanzee" for "gorilla" in this hypothetical.

[triviallytrue]

if it was a chimp i'm taking the fucking snakes

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Black mambas have a reputation build on being very venomous and very fast. I'm not sure why you would think you could outrun one (or five) in an enclosed space like a mall.

[chaumas-deactivated20240115]

Malls usually have pretty slick floors, and escalators. I’d choose the gorilla simply because I think that would make an more interesting story (and a better-selling autobiography, I Survived the Mall Gorilla) but I think I’d stand a pretty good chance at avoiding the mamba. They’re fast and aggressive and will chase you but unless we started immediately beside each other I think my sneakers would have the terrain advantage over scutes.

[nightingalesoul]

this is too good to leave hidden in the replies

[bermuda-n-drangle]

fucking enamored with the implication that this gorilla is fully intelligent but is trying to manufacture plausible deniability like the movie barnyard

[sharigax]

My toxic fandom take is that I think that it's awful how much we can talk to creators and get answers from them word of god style. We should be out here in a godless place rooting for scraps of lore in the media like truffle pigs out in the fields

[rukafais]

[theseventhcrow55]

i get so emotional every time i think about fanfic culture. it's just so beautiful that people are writing and anonymously posting these thousand-word stories about characters we all love and not even getting any money or public fame from it. it's literally just for the love of the game.

shout out to everyone who participates in fanfic culture, be it reading or writing fanfics. you are contributing to such a lovely thing <3

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i was training a young person at work, and she referred to sexual assault as "SA" out loud, and i immediately was like, "no, it's sexual assault, call it what it is," bc idgaf if the algorithm overlords have taught y'all that you should fear direct language, how tf do any of you expect to ever address real issues with any amount of seriousness if you can't even say the words? imagine an advocate looking a sexual assault survivor in the eyes and asking "did he grape you?" it's absolutely fucking absurd, but these young interns and new hires are coming into an environment where we deal with survivors of all different kinds of abuse, and they're coming with the mindset that the words are as bad as the actions, and that makes them shitty at the job and look juvenile af

i HATE self-censorship for a lot of reasons, but being in crisis work makes it even more frustrating. who are you censoring for? like i am being so fr, WHO are you censoring for? have you even thought it through? people who have been raped know that they have been raped. if someone attempts suicide or is grieving someone who did, saying "sewer slide" isn't going to protect them from any of the feelings. a murder victim's family isn't going to feel better bc you said "unalived" instead of murdered. if anything, it's just extremely invalidating and othering. it's saying "what happened to you is so bad that i won't even say the word," which is NOT trauma-informed care. you are not protecting survivors/victims when you self-censor. the ONLY things you protect when you self-censor are the puritanical ideologies that are being encouraged by rich fascists who want your money and obedience

say the fucking words, guys. just say the goddamn words before i go insane!!!

[blighted-elf]