[ladybugsandlattes]

if you know me in real life, no you dont

turn around, you are not wanted here

[asteroidtroglodyte]

I do enjoy a good visual gag, and an old favorite of mine is “there is Math on a Board in the background that contextually makes no sense.” This broadly comes in 3 flavors I enjoy:

• the board is in front of a classroom, and the Math is waaay too advanced for whatever level of pupil these kids are supposed to be; like having the calculus integral in front of kindergartners, or relativistic physics in front of high schoolers.

• the board is in front of Criminals, who are Planning Something, and by all rights there ought to be no Math there to begin with. Like. You’re planning a Heist why do you have the Full Lagrangian on there. Are we taking a rocket to the bank.

• the characters are super-genius science fiction people. The Math is “Pi≈3.24” with an unlabeled pie chart.

[is-this-fascism]

its funny to me how warmups for instruments generally sound nice and pretty. like just basic scales or chords. the exercises i do on my guitar could be mistaken for actual music at times.

and then vocal warmups are shit like. bark like a seal. grunt like a thwomp from mario 64. now sing the melody but instead of the lyrics youre saying 'moo moo mee mee mah mah' even the scales you gotta moo mee mah through that shit and its just so goofy every time. and this is why im not a singer

[is-this-fascism]

see this is exactly what i mean. i thought someone was having a mental break of some kind in my notes until i remembered what i had posted last night

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[i-am-a-fish]

it's warm so I've been doing this activity called sitting in front of a fan

[im-just-crazy-not-sad]

Alright Tumblr

Sure

[i-am-a-fish]

war with the overly zealous sun

[little-grey-dowitcher]

So many people never learned to live with harmless discomfort at any point in their lives and holy fuck does it show

[little-grey-dowitcher]

“But I wanna know!” You’re gonna have to learn to be ok with not knowing some things, especially when those things involve personal details about strangers that they’re not comfortable sharing.

“But it’s confusing!” If you take the time to educate yourself it’ll no longer be confusing. Otherwise you’re just gonna have to learn to be ok with being confused.

“But it’s weird!” You probably do weird things all the time. Everyone does weird things sometimes. Life goes on.

“But it scares me!” Is it hurting you? No? You’ll be fine. Being scared and being harmed are not always the same thing. Learn to tell the difference and then act accordingly.

“But I want it!” And I want a million dollars. You can’t always get what you want.

[breelandwalker]

Addendum:

"But it makes me uncomfortable!" The world is an uncomfortable place and complete strangers are not required to fix that for you. Learning to endure harmless discomfort is a life skill for existing in public.

"But I don't like it!" There's plenty of things in the world and not all of them are fun or enjoyable or For You. This applies to everyone and we all have to deal with that in a mature fashion.

"But I want to do the thing!" You can't always do what you want. Most people learn this in preschool. Wanting something does not entitle you to be inconsiderate to the people around you.

[strictlyquadrilateral]

the more i talk to extended family the more i learn that it was EXTREMELY obvious to all the adults around me as a child that something had gone horribly wrong and i needed professional help, but i guess there's some sort of prime directive thing where you can suggest to the kid's parents that the kid might need help but you can never ever ever let on to the kid that you can tell something is wrong. you just have to hold on to that until the kid becomes an adult who's able to say "so i think i experienced a lot of trauma when i was very little" and then you can say "yes, i know. i didn't know what happened but it was completely unmissable that something had." okay. thank you. that's very validating. but why did you leave me to suffer and keep feeling like there was no other explanation than that i was broken and going insane. would it really have been so bad to sit me down and go "i see you. i can't help much, but i can tell something happened and you're in a lot of pain. you deserve help and support. you're not going insane." or something. i don't know. my internal experience was mostly that i had suddenly become a bad child who couldn't seem to get anything right and was always being yelled at. maybe it would have helped if someone had said something.

[lawbutch]

I sat behind the same girl in class all year and I was painfully jealous of her beautiful curly hair and I assumed she had just figured out some hair routine I didn't know, or had more time in the mornings than me, or was somehow more disciplined or just lucky. And then my friend talked to her one day and found out she gets 500$ perms and highlights 3 times a year. The answer was literally just money. The same friend found out that most of our classmates who I thought were just naturally smarter than me went to private highschools that cost 25k a year.

This is all a metaphor to say that there will be times when you feel like other people understand something that you don't, or have some ability that you don't, or are better than you in some way because they've accomplished something you can't. And it's going to turn out that they're just rich and they spent thousands of dollars to make that happen. You are not bad, you are not broken, the system is just fucked.

[sorreleater]

“it’s also good to learn that life isn’t fair!” i don’t WANT children to accept unreasonable discipline from adults!! i don’t WANT children to expect the adults in their lives to punish at random and ignore their explanations!! the world isn’t fair but we could sure work to make it fairer

[segamascott]

[enki2]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

personally I'm annoyed by the socioeconomic conditions that made words like "unalive" necessary but simultaneously impressed by the linguistic adaptations young people have made to continue talking about important things while subject to those conditions and I think if you can't hold both of those thoughts in your head you might just be old man yelling at cloud

[a-wild-embubble]

Two of my niblings (10 and 7) self-censor like this in real life during actual conversations. I tried briefly to explain to the 10-year-old that they didn't have to do that in real life after they said "unalive" out loud in casual conversation, and they just said they preferred to. On the one hand, I'm sad to see them unconsciously and fully without awareness succumbing to the panopticon. On the other... this post.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

it's not unprecedented in the evolution of languages to see euphemisms adopted as synonyms or even supplanting earlier terms. lots of people say "passed away" even in situations where there would be no particular social cost to saying "died".

for a particularly strong version of this kind of replacement: the word "bear" comes from a proto-Germanic word meaning "brown one" because there was a taboo against saying the animal's actual name. the taboo is gone but it was so strong in the past that we have no record of what the proto-Germanic word for "bear" even was.

maybe in 300 years the word "die" will be archaic and kids will dig it out of an etymology textbook and start using it because "unalive" is getting censored.

[luggifer4]

die has actually already undergone this process. die originally meant "flow" (i guess it's like you're flowing out of life or something? or maybe your life is flowing out of you idk). it was (probably) loaned from old norse to displace the now obsolete "swelt". and yes, that is the root word of "sweltering"

[dragon-in-a-fez]

[libraford]

Not to oversimplify a complex issue, but i think we could reduce the number of deadly car crashes by increasing wages and having shorter work weeks.

[enba-and-luka]

What the fuck do you mean "defraud", they literally didn't do anything wrong.

[existennialmemes]

Your cats are not "manipulating" you they are communicating with you. They do not understand why you're limiting their food supply or keeping them indoors or preventing them from ruining your furniture or whatever.

When they meyowl pathetically for more food, it's not because they're trying to "trick" you into feeding them again. They just want to be fed, and they're smart enough to notice the correlation between certain sounds they make and the responses they get from you.

They've figured out that if they want to communicate to you that they want more food, if they make those pathetic sounds, you're more likely to behave as if you've understood what they're trying to communicate.

When your cat waits for you to look away then yoinks food off of your plate, it's not because they love crime. It's because they're social colony creatures who instinctively share food with each other and they don't understand why you're not sharing the best foods with them.

Your cats are very intelligent, social creatures who see you as their Very Strange sibling.

They've learned how to make intricate sounds just to communicate with their humans. When the sounds they make elicit the responses they want, they learn that those sounds are the most effective way to communicate their desires.

Not because they're scheming about how to control you, but because they don't know how to communicate with you any other way.

[aleshakills]

Is there a word for occupying the space where normies think you're a freak and freaks think you're a normie?

[aleshakills]

I tell a woman with a 9 to 5 office job about the slightly niche speculative fiction novel I just finished and she goes "Oh, that's...interesting. I hadn't heard of that."

I tell a grungy chick I met at a dive bar about the same book and she kinda scoffs and goes "Okay" like I said my favorite show is Sesame Street

[sluttynurse]

We Are All Blocked By Mutual In Laws