vulnerable, but invincible

Ask me Stuff!

[prokopetz]

"Isn't it weird that [thing humans commonly eat] is poisonous to literally every domesticated animal" I mean, there's a pretty good chance that [thing humans commonly eat] is at least mildly poisonous to humans, too. One of our quirks as a species is that we think our food is bland if it doesn't have enough poison in it.

[xeansicemane]

Humans have a really weird mix of mundane superpowers.

We're not fast and don't have a lot of natural weaponry but we're bizarrely tolerant to a broad range of toxins to the point that one toxin is considered a morning necessity for some to perform at work. Gotta love us.

[vexwerewolf]

[missmacfire]

[anxeious]

[curiouslyhigh]

[feinseld]

i missed this post

[worldheritagepostorganization]

World Heritage Post

[funny-tik-toks]

[allthesepurplelights]

i want to add this 🥲

[craycraybluejay]

Amazing addition

[magnetic-deflection]

new femme-only 7-11 opened on my street

[shardsofglassheart]

I think the hardest part about addressing child abuse is getting people to acknowledge, not just intellectually but actually responding accordingly, is that the biggest threat to children, the biggest risk of abuse, is family and parents.

it is of course most often parents who are crowing about needing to protect children (often against far smaller threats than family), and pointing out that they are, statistically, the biggest threat to their kids is not gonna be received well.

[discoursedrome]

tbh I feel like most of society’s rhetoric around “protecting children” comes from the same place as deep-patriarchy rhetoric on “protecting women”, where the idea is that they’re sacred and valuable but also treated essentially as property, and the the desire to protect them is largely experienced as a desire to ensure that those property rights are sacrosanct

[lloydthevoid]

Wow thats it

[allpiesforourown]

Whenever my aunt springs her insane superstitious/religious cures on me I specifically remember when I was 17 and she got me exorcised. The priest was like "I don't think she's possessed" and she insisted "well there's something wrong with her, she's always [symptoms of depression] so..."

And the guy said some verses and touched my head and stuff then said I should drink only holy water for an entire week. Which wasn't hard to do, but my fav part of this whole experience was me saying I want to eat instant noodles and my aunt going "I'll make them for you. With the holy water he gave us." And then I had holy instant noodles

[mountainstackedwithfear]

LIVE (nothing wrong with me)

LAUGH (nothing wrong with me)

LOVE (nothing wrong with me)

[identitty-dickruption]

the problem with addiction is not that it's pleasurable. it's not "having too much fun" disease. it's not even a requirement for addiction that you have fun at any point in the process at all and to be honest it is incredibly common that no pleasure is gained from substance use. imagining that addiction is about pleasure does two things: 1) demonises feeling good (there is nothing wrong with wanting to be happy/comfortable/etc), and 2) frames addicts as people who Like Having Fun Too Much. it's simply not useful to frame things this way as well as just fundamentally not being true

[identitty-dickruption]

idk man I had to get sober because it got to the point where drinking made me suicidal but I also couldn't stop getting to that point. but it's also true that I got to that point in the first place because my life was fucking bleak and I needed something to numb myself from it, and drinking helped me to cope Up To A Point. it's a lot more complicated than pathological hedonism. lol

[beemovieerotica]

there was a well-meaning international student (learning english) in my workspace who came up to me and asked "how is your handsome white boy?" and it took me a few seconds to realize she was not in fact asking about my twink spouse but my white dog

[beemovieerotica]

happies

[amaditalks]

One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?

[oldearthaccretionist]

Please.

[autumn-clover]

[cumaeansibyl]

OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]

Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"

contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them

and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?

[porcupine-girl]

I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:

When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.

And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.

Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.

Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.

Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)

If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.

[unreconstructedfangirl]

I just want to add that this is just...so obviously true. I teach 4-year-olds English. That means that at the beginning of the year I get 13 little monkeys who don't speak English at all, and without using their mother tongue, I teach them English. Truly, it is like a magic trick, and even I am surprised at how they unbelievably fast they learn. By midyear we are fully having conversations.

When I started, I used to try to strongarm them into doing what I wanted in the classroom and had 'consequences' for 'misbehavior' like time-outs and telling their parents they were naughty. But actually, you know, it was never that they were naughty, it's that they were 4, and new to classrooms, and maybe not quite ready to be there, and 'consequences' absolutely did not work at all, and mostly only revealed to them the limits of my authority. Punishing and cajoling them weakened my ability to manage my classroom, and it did not make them any more likely to engage with me or my planned agenda.

But here's the thing: 4-year-olds want to please you. They want to communicate with you! They are absolutely dying for you to love and approve of them. It's their biggest motivation in life to please and engage with you. Praising and encouraging them, laughing at their jokes and making them feel like they please you? That fucking works. That is what gets them to go along with me and engage with my plans. There are no punishments in my class, only a recognition of the fact that they are who they are, and they are fucking babies. I convince them to join me responsively, and it works. Every year my classes get better and more successful because I no longer fight or punish them.

Like, I'm not a scientist or a psychologist, but... Punishment is a tool of hierarchy and a sign of weakness.

[porcupine-girl]

Oh man this happened to come back across my dash at the right time, bc I just had this conversation in my class on Monday…

We were talking about motivation, and I was showing research on how much more effective meeting people’s needs is than punishment, like the effect of giving people a steady job along with their therapy on drug addiction rates or the effect of UBI on crime rates (in one study it dropped all crime by 20% and violent crime by like 27%, when three strikes laws only drop it by like 2-3%).

And one girl asked if we know all of this works, why don’t we do it? Why do we rely on prison and other ineffective and expensive punishments? And well, first I had to say that this is a very big question whose answer has to do with a lot of societal systems interacting, and not something I can give you a quick one-slide answer to in an intro-level class. But aside from that, a lot of people are just more focused on retribution and criminals “getting what they deserve” than on actually reducing crime. And the reasons for that are also complex, but in the end it often just feels good to make someone “pay” for what they’ve done, and we as a society let ourselves be distracted by that.

[lgbtqiatext]

[therealconstellationcollective]

@funnier-as-a-system

[funnier-as-a-system]

[ID: a gif featuring floating 3D text in the quadgender colors. The text reads: If you can't be one, be four / end ID]

[alleesaur]

let's fly through the stars together

[pusheen]

[greekceltic]

if flying things need a rudder to fly well does that mean winged cats would fly with their tail thrushed

[mathew]

[suspectedgeode]

[felassanis]

I really love the idea of The Dark Urge, who's on the road to redemption, actually being pushed into an Alliance with Gortash when they reunite in Act 3 affer the way their companions react to the reveal.

Because EVERYONE (barring Astarion cause hes understandably grateful actually lol, but he still calls u evil) is fucking appalled by the reveal. Karlach outright doesn't even want to look at you, which is MORE than understandable given how one of the closest people to her is getting the heart eyes from Gortash. Gale doesn't want to speak to you, Jaheira is starting to doubt and is horrified because you're not just a Bhaalspawn. But THE Bhaalspawn.

And think about it from Durge's perspective. Through dialogue choices there's option for Durge to come across as...slightly hopeless. They condemn themselves in a very self deprecating manner in some dialogue. But the one thing that makes them want to do better, is to do right by the people around them. To be a better person for them.

But here, their friends are condemning them. Yelling at Durge for being the mastermind, and as someone said in a GREAT post I'll need to track down, All this alienates Durge from their party, potentially reinstating Durge's self-hatred that they're beyond hope, and suddenly...Gortash is the only friendly face in the room.

Regardless if it's intentional on Gortash's part to alienate Durge. Here is this man who knows you, showers you in compliments but it's not...fake. not in the way you would expect from the sleazy man. He is genuinely HAPPY to see you. The first person...ever, to be genuinely happy to see you. (Because you're awful and no one is ever happy to see you rock up) AND he's got all the answers to your past.

Meanwhile behind you. Everyone is seeing you for the monster you've been telling them you are. The monster you FEAR you are.

You suddenly feel alone amongst faces you call friends. They look at you and are repulsed. And yes, of course they are. You're the Dark Urge. Murder incarnate. Why wouldn't they? And with how harsh some companions can be in this scene (again understandably) I can see a real argument for Durge losing all motivation to redeem themselves potentially. They were doing it for their friends and now their friends hate them.

But Gortash? Gortash knows Durge for the monster they are and yet they greet them like an old friend. They ARE old friends. Gortash knows the worst of Durge and yet he can't seem to wipe that smile off his face talking to them.

Maybe this is where Durge was always supposed to wind up.