Magpie Instinct Activated

Proud Watsonian (she/her, 30+) who got trapped in fandom long, long ago and hasn't bothered to try to find a way out. Feel free to say hi-- I get back into fandoms at the drop of a hat, so I'm always up to talk about mutual interests!

[tired-fandom-ndn]

Age gap discourse is surreal to me because social circles being limited by age is very much just something for when you're in school. Even in college, you can be in classes with people 20+ years older than you, especially in community colleges with people getting degrees "later" in life.

People in their late teens and early 20s are coworkers with people in their 40s and 50s. If you join community groups or clubs, you'll probably meet people decades older than you. Your neighbors probably won't be the same age you are. Neither will everyone at the bars or cafes you frequent. It's totally normal to meet someone much older or younger than you and hit it off as an adult because real life is not segregated by age.

[jeslieness]

One of my favorite memories is my fifth birthday party, where I invited everybody I liked. That meant the age range was 50 (my neighbors, who were like second parents) down to 1 (my godmother's baby).

Peers are important, but so are intergenerational friendships. I wouldn't be who I am without all of my friends and mentors.

[wincist]

honestly, people - especially younger people who might not remember as much of the internet before things like tiktok or youtube's adpocalypse - need to understand that censorship is not just a government act. as we lose more and more low-cost irl meeting spaces and are more confined to a work/home dichotomy, social media becomes our main public forum. and social media is censored more and more each year.

i have friends that would rather send me voice memos or talk on the phone because they worry that text messages would "leave a trail" if they talk negatively about their job. i have friends who, after telling a political joke on discord call, will say things like "don't worry fbi guy, it's just a joke!" that shit is not normal. they're not things that i remember doing a decade ago.

just like how a decade ago i could watch a youtube video covering recent news where they didn't censor the words rape or murder. or a video about reproductive health that could say the words penis and vagina. now if i decide to watch tiktok i am forced to hear "unalive" and "SA'd" and various fumbling, inappropriate euphemisms for serious topics. and that's not even counting the censorship of cursing.

censorship is a serious issue, and it is not just government-sponsored. while yes, you should absolutely fight the books being removed from your local libraries and talk your representative's ear off about how you want to keep the internet free of government regulations - they are not the only people censoring your shit. there are advertisers and stockholders and groups of concerned pearl-clutching mothers that are also hounding for this shit. do not tolerate censorship, even when it's perpetuated by your friends or your favorite social media website.

[seventimessix-deactivated202501]

[belovedrival]

Cora’s expression is perfect 😂

[embroiderycrafts]

Beautiful landscape embroider by @embroiderybynusik

[rocedmed]

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[depsidase]

[dandelionsresilience]

Just gonna drop these here as a starting point :)

How to identify, and then deal with, your emotions

Emotional regulation skills

Conflict resolution skills

Creating and enforcing boundaries

Dialectical Behavioural Therapy skills

Emotional intelligence ideals to aim for

Axes of self-care/wellbeing

Self-care self-evaluation (find out where you’re starting)

How to make a self-care checklist

How to start a self-care habit

Reparenting resources

Crash Course Psychology

KhanAcademy: Understanding the Self and Society (some units more relevant than others)

Emotional education activities for children and teens

Social-Emotional Learning activities for kids (information can be adapted for adults)

[daysleftofsecondterm]

Helpful on 1,229 days left

[poikaboo]

{ID - tweet from @/WarpaintJournal reads: "Teaching people how to regulate their emotions is crime prevention. It's addiction prevention. It's suicide prevention. It's generational healing. It's how we stop raising adults who explode, implode, or shut down at the first sign of discomfort. Emotional regulation is not just a soft skill. It's survival. It's the foundation of a society where people can disagree without dehumanising each other, where accountability isn't seen as an attack, and where conflict doesn't always have to mean violence. You want a better world? Start with emotional education."

END ID}

[terror-billie]

it's a weird emotion when somebody goes "doesn't this just shake you to your core and rewrite your dna and change who you are as a person" and your honest experience of it was that it was ok

[fury-brand]

"Fuck I'm going to get a bad grade in friendship media resonance"

[ladytemeraire]

Okay so as someone who is usually on the "shake you to your core" side of things bc Big Feelings, allow me to give my two cents:

If your friend shares something that they care about way more than you do, a really great response to this situation is something along the lines of: "Thanks for sharing! This isn't my usual wheelhouse, but it's really interesting/intriguing/[other adjective here]! I'd love to hear more about why this spoke to you!" And if literally nothing speaks to you, just leave that out and say something like "Ooh, thanks for sharing! Tell me more about why you love this so much!"

(An example where I was on the "meh" side: a friend shared a heavy metal song with me and made a comment about how it had really hit them in the feels. My response was more or less "Wow, I usually don't listen to metal, but I love the wording in this section [quote lyrics here] and I can tell the guitar riff in the bridge took a lot of skill to pull off. Since you're more of a metalhead, I'm probably missing details, so what else gave you feels?")

This phrasing both allows you to positively acknowledge the thing, gently deflect so you're not yucking their yum, and then open the door for them to infodump about something they clearly care about. It takes the onus off you when it comes to talking about details or pretending to love something you're indifferent about, AND it allows your passionate friend to gush about something they love. And who knows? Maybe their explanation will unlock something that allows you to appreciate it more. (And even if it doesn't, at least you're not shutting them down.)

tl;dr It's kind of the non-corporate version of the compliment sandwich. Acknowledge their vulnerability in sharing something they care about, try to find even a small thing you can appreciate, and then flip it back and let them take center stage to explain why they care about it.

[jeslieness]

Aside from being great social advice, I think this is also a good tool for developing nuance in your own opinions (something we can all use more of in the internet age). The truth is, something can be life-changing for a friend and simultaneously leave you cold, and both of those experiences can be valid. I think people who can hold space for that truth are generally going to be happier. Something can just not be right for you without being objectively bad or failing as art. But let's say that your friend is passionate about something that you absolutely can't stand. You couldn't find something to like about it if you tried, and you would rather walk on broken glass than talk about it. Try these words: "This isn't for me, but I see how much you love it, and I love that for you."

[the-uncanny-dag]

[jeslieness]

The other thing is, part of human nature is that when terrible things happen, we're quick to comfort ourselves by finding the reasons we're safe from ever having those things happen to us. It's a natural instinct, but it's one we have to challenge within ourselves because it destroys empathy and it does nothing to make us any safer. A lot of those "I knew Gaiman was a bad writer all along!" posts I've seen really come across as someone assuring themselves that because they have discerning taste, they'd never be in proximity to a predator and are therefore safe from assault. And the truth is, no human being on the planet ever knows 100% of the time with 100% accuracy when they are around someone who wants to hurt someone else. That thought is terrifying, but we all have to face it.

[two-bees-poetry]

twenty years across the sea

[easybbgrl]

[batmanego]

im having feelings about the uffington white horse again

[batmanego]

so essentially there’s this cool horse drawn into the hills in england made out of chalk and it’s like 3,000 years old.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

[aplatonicism]

I miss the peace/isolation/deliberateness-of-interaction of the 90s and 2000s internet.

Back in the 90s and 2000s when I was first going online, you had to go out of your way to communicate and interact with people.

Browsing websites was a solitary experience, not a social one where everyone who was in my circle knew roughly what I was up to at all times.

I saved pictures and fic I was interested in to my harddrive rather than immediately and essentially automatically forwarding it (reblogging it) to an entire mailing list (followers).

Chatting with people was deliberate and intentional. I had to specifically open my AIM, or log in to IRC and join the channels I was in.

In order to communicate with people, I had to deliberately open lines of communication.

Being on the internet used to be a quiet, solitary experience for the most part, with interactions being deliberately sought out. You had to choose to go out of your way to interact with people.

I don't hate the way the internet has become more social, but I hate that I'm expected never to turn it off, and to be available at all times.

[jeslieness]

There's a lot of benefits to phones, but...I miss how going online used to be almost exclusively reserved for computers. I'd go home and spend a couple of hours catching up on forums and Livejournal, then log off and do something else for the rest of the evening. I might check my email a couple of times a day, but it wasn't constantly at hand. I think it was a healthier balance.

[reasonsforhope]

"Choose, every day, to forgive yourself. You are human, flawed, and most of all worthy of love."

—Alison Malee

[infectiouspiss]

violence and death and dying and blood and guts and gore and violence and viscera and fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you

[ospreyonthemoon]

@markscherz do you know what type of frog this is? I can't tell if its a small adult or a baby frog.

[markscherz]

This is a juvenile Chacophrys pierottii, arguably the most comically proportioned frog ever. Here is an adult. If I had not taken this photo myself I would think it’s some kind of ridiculous meme render.

These are also the frogs that bury themselves in a backwards spiral that is seriously relatable.

[sheilakijawaanii]

BACKWARDS SPIRAL??

[wizened-beanie-baby-moved]

"everybody hates me" factoid actually just a statistical error. The average person doesn't hate you, especially not your friends. You, a person who sits in your room experiencing self loathing every day, are an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[fluffylandshark]

[coelii]

This is sweet but I really thought it was going to end with someone named “Haters Horge” who spends every second in a cave halfway across the world just loathing you for no reason and they were the statistical outlier

[vacuously-true]

Don't be your own Haters Horge

[the-bar-sinister]

People not knowing that there's fic they can find and read outside of AO3 is always so strange to me, but I was really happy today to be able to help someone find a source for fics they were looking for from an old fandom by showing them the fanlore page of links to things like livejournal communities, and privately maintained archives.

AO3 is amazing but it's not the be-all-end-all of fic, especially if you're looking for fics from an older era of fandom.

[jeslieness]

I love AO3 and I'm happy it exists, but man, as someone who first stumbled into fic on GeoCities...I do miss the days when everybody had their own webpage and you'd find everything on it from their calculus notes to their fanfic (and banners for the webrings they belonged to!). Wayback Machine saved a lot, but it's not as easy to navigate as I wish it could be. I miss that earlier Web and how creative it was.