Art Is Where the Heart Is

she/they 🌸 hobby artist, gamer 🌸 how the fuck did you even find this blog

[mamoru]

yes I DO live under a rock and her name is the Moon and she is always smiling but she teaches me nothing

[clytemnestraaa]

one of my creative writing professors once said that to evaluate a work as good or not, first you ask what the work is attempting to do, and then you evaluate how well it does it. and this is how to judge everything from critical essays to romance novels to snack packaging to theory tracts.

[dramatic-dolphin]

why do americans think everyone on the internet lives in the same place as them. just saw someone say honeybees are "not native". not native to where????? the entire planet?????

[dramatic-dolphin]

saw a photo of garlic mustard somewhere on the internet once and americans in the comments were like "fun fact this plant is invasive so you should definitely tear out any you see, WITH THE ROOTS so it won't spread!" whole fucking time i'm living in garlic mustard native range. i don't think i will be doing that.

[queerautism]

This drives me absolutely up the wall in r/birdfeeding. Every time there's a picture of a house sparrow, the entire comments are filled with americans talking about them being invasive and how they should be basically killed on sight. But often OP has not provided a location, and house sparrows have a HUGE native range. Here in the UK they're not only native birds, they're on the decline, they need our help and protection.

[robotslenderman]

Me every time I see a post saying that you should destroy your lawn and cram a bunch of native plants as closely together as you can instead. Look, I'm not saying lawns are native to Australia because they're not, but our native plants evolved to burn; they are dry, their leaves are dry, and they're full of oils. If you plant native plants the way Americans tell you to that's a fucking fire hazard and you are endangering yourself and your neighbours next time we have a Black Summer.

[robotslenderman]

My friend @ryttu3k linked me a great PDF on planting a native Australian garden in such a way as to reduce its status as a fire hazard!

[fluffmugger]

tapping onto this, Ry's guide is for a specific part of NSW. Australia is a very very big place and there is a lot of biodiversity. So don't take one guide as The One True Guide because I used to be a ranger and lemme tell you, trying to stuff native plants in terrains they are unsuited for just creates a mess for everyone. Honestly, just google "native planting <your council> " and they will have a guide that is specific to your area.

[ida-backwards-intherain]

The honeybee thing frustrates me because those posts/comments often contain important and useful information about the places where this is true. Even people who live somewhere that it isn't true could benefit from learning about it! But they're so often worded as if they apply everywhere, and I worry that people who live in places where honeybees are not invasive* won't realise that the information doesn't apply to them.

*Which isn't synonymous with being native! Honeybees are neither native nor invasive in the UK, for instance, because they've been here for thousands of years and don't harm the native ecosystem.

[activityenjoyer]

Hi, it’s me, your Flix Bus driver. I heard some of you back there asking why we’re on this dirt road in the middle of a cow pasture if this is supposed to be a direct line from Berlin to Munich. To that I say: you all need to mind your own damn business and look at the fucking moo cows.

[shamebats]

Emos & scene kids got this close to abolishing gender for real. I try not to think about it too much.

[shamebats]

The idea of a popular teenage subculture where girl & boys pretty much all dress the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.

[rainyydoves]

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

[rainyydoves]

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

[bigbigtruck]

"are you really bad at it or are you in 'good at it' spaces" has derailed so much self-hate since I read it

this is a load bearing sentence in my psyche and I can't believe it's only 2 months old

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

One thing I really like about Beverly Engel's book It Wasn't Your Fault, which is about PTSD-induced toxic shame, is that quite a bit of it deals with people who haven't broken The Cycle of Abuse (TM) and have gone on to hurt others. That's a really underserved and vulnerable patient population, and statistically, it's also MASSIVE. I don't think I've read a single other self-help type book on PTSD and self-loathing that confronts the possibility that you're exactly as bad as you think you are.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

I felt better that it so much as mentioned that children can react to abuse with ungovernable rage. Everybody likes the image of PTSD patients as internalizing everything and becoming doormats, which does happen, and often, but it's not the only narrative. Personally I've always hated my abusers and have always wanted everyone who so much as breathed wrong in my direction from ages 0 to 18 to burn eternally in hell. I *never* thought any of it was my fault and ever since I was a toddler I was willing to make it everybody else's problem, and it's really relieving to read a clinical perspective that acknowledges that abuse victims can act that way too.

[reasonablywittyatbest]

It's wild to me that its such a neglected subset of abuse victims. Its really common. When I still lived with my parents and was still subjected to my father every fucking day I would lash out terribly at my mother, to the point when i went to visit them for years afterwards she was afraid I would lash out again. We've worked it out, I'm a much better person when I'm not regularly subjected to mental and emotional abuse, but like, its just so common.

I think it must be, at least partially, because, people hate the imperfect victim. Its easy for so many people to sympathize with someone who never lashed out. Less so for people to sympathize with people who are angry and lash out. Even though its a perfectly sensible reaction to being hurt over and over. I'm sure most people would like to think they would simply never.

I don't think this is the whole reason, but, I think it plays into it.

[sunspotpony]

Similarly, there’s a narrative of, you cannot experience grief over having fucked up. That if you are hurting because you caused harm, because you were the cause of harm, that you’re not allowed to grieve, because you “earned your sorrow. You deserve to bottle it up and to hurt for the bad things you have done,”

Which is punitive logic. It’s copthink. Which is bad.

[angelofthemornings-deactivated2]

important

In fact, you can actually give yourself trauma over fucking up too badly and doing, witnessing, or failing to prevent something evil that goes against your morals; for instance, if you steal your mother's life savings due to drug addiction, kill a civilian during a military operation (please do not join the military), or became abusive because you didn't have the tools and skills yet to handle BPD. In the field of psychology this is called "moral injury" or "perpetrator trauma."

[headspace-hotel]

I had this realization a while back:

Some kids who experienced trauma would react by becoming violent, disruptive, and rageful.

This is an inherently normal and natural response for a creature to have. Attacking and fighting for survival is inherently something most animals sometimes do, it's fundamental and will always happen sometimes

But children that are violent, disruptive, hateful of authority, or angry are labeled as "bad" and are punished for it, and the label of "bad" is not just temporary but lasts a long time, as though there is something fundamentally wrong with the child

So, I thought, a child's value in the world and whether they deserve to be helped is judged in this harsh, punitive way, based on whatever natural survival response happened to pop out of them

And I thought, that is grotesque. It means that a certain fraction of traumatized kids will not be helped, but instead be considered "bad," because of basically a biological thing that their body had to do to survive.

Also it is a good point about perpetrator trauma. People are very caught up in the idea that PTSD means the same thing as being a victim, or that you have to be "innocent" to be traumatized. And many people think that people that are not "innocent" are not really traumatized, they just act like they are to get sympathy.

But in reality people can get PTSD from killing another person or torturing them or harming them in another way. Committing that violent act against another person is very devastating emotionally and mentally.

And sometimes people think that perpetrators don't deserve help for their trauma, as if trauma is a punishment for doing something bad.

Society has to change a lot for us to understand these things and truly be compassionate towards all people.

[screampotato]

Suddenly struck with a need to explain to you how boat pronouns work (I work in the marine industry).

When you're talking about the design of the boat, you say "it".

When the boat is still being built, your say "it".

When the boat is nearing completion, you can say "it" or "she".

When the boat is floating in the water you probably say "she", unless there is still a lot of work to be done (e.g. no engine yet) then you say "it".

When the boat is officially launched and operating, you say "she". If you continue to say "it" at this point you are not incorrect but suspiciously untraditional. You are not playing the game.

If you are referring to a boat you don't really know anything about you may say "it" ("there's a big boat, it's coming this way"). But if you know its name, it's probably "she" ("there's the Waverley, she's on her way to Greenock").

If you are talking about boats in general, you say "it" ("when a boat is hit by a wave it heels over")

If you speak about a boat in complimentary terms, it's "she" ("she's a grand boat"). If you are being disparaging it may be it, but not necessarily ("it's as ugly as sin", "she's a grotty old tub").

If she has a boy's name, she's still she. "Boy James", "King Edward", "Sir David Attenborough"? The pronoun is she.

If it's a dumb barge (no engine), you say it. But if it's a rowing boat (no engine), you say she.

I hope this has cleared things up so that you may not be in danger of misgendering floating objects.

[glitched-out-mess]

[theramblingvoid]

Hit "view post" and lost it

[scribeherself]

having a best friend who meets your level of freak is unmatched. you present them with the most unhinged, deeply buried thought from the depths of your psyche and instead of blinking blankly they just go "oh absolutely"—and I think that mutual brain rot like that is the highest form of intimacy actually.

[beaft]

common advice for social anxiety is to tell yourself "people aren't going to think less of you just because you said something a bit daft" but the thing is. sometimes they will. and you just have to learn to be cool with that and to treat it as a dnd random encounter rather than letting it ruin your whole day

[beaft]

recent example. lady at my careers appointment had a post-it with her name on it stuck to the monitor, so i introduced myself by saying cheerfully "hello, i'm eliot! you must be [name], it's nice to meet you!" and she stared at me as if i was the stupidest person alive and said icily, "yeah, i'm [name]. congratulations, you can read."

in bygone times this would have reduced me to a sort of quivering blancmange. thankfully i am now in a place where i was able to pull back, evaluate this interaction, and say to myself "this woman should probably not be working in a customer-facing job"

[apricops]

I’m not saying it was a good idea but every society has tried to solve the problem of “society needs organization to function but power tends to corrupt people” and I like how ancient Rome’s answer was the position of the tribune, where you get to have unchecked power with no accountability for one (1) year but after that you’re just a guy and everyone you pissed off can beat you to death with hammers.

[footlongdingledong]

idk man not to sound like a cartoon hippie but if your entirrrrre blog and dash is about how the world sucks and everyones bigoted i think you are going to give yorself brain worms

[footlongdingledong]

"ah but all of this is important and true and if i dont reblog all of this important stuff waga baga THE WORMS! THATS WORMS! THE BRAIN WORMS!

[footlongdingledong]

i do not think you are doing activism chief i think what you are doing is sitting in your room flagellating yourself expecting something to happen

[hbmmaster]

just realized my phone doesn't display some braille characters correctly. the dot pattern [⠸] is supposed to be the right three dots, but on my phone it looks the same as [⠇] with the left three dots. that's a really weird problem and I don't know how they messed that up

[hbmmaster]

how am I supposed to tell the difference between ⠝⠥⠅⠑ (nuke) and ⠝⠥⠨⠑ (nuance) if [⠅] and [⠨] display the same way? pretty big oversight there

[hbmmaster]

here's what it looks like on a device that displays braille properly btw, for reference

[hbmmaster]

after looking into it, the reason this bug exists on android is that, one, when braille was added into Noto Sans they just did it wrong at first, and two, even though this issue was fixed in Noto Sans back in 2017, the android system font Droid Serif, bafflingly, hasn't been properly updated in ages despite the decade of work the Noto team have been doing improving these fonts. like different departments at google just aren't telling each other what they're up to. so that's why braille text is broken on android

[prokopetz]

Strictly speaking, "ultimate" means "last", not "best". It's often figuratively employed in the latter sense to suggest that the thing so described is the final word on the subject, after which nothing more need be said, but if we're being real technical, describing a game or movie that was so bad it killed its entire franchise as the "ultimate" is in fact correct.

[prokopetz]

@ffoxer replied:

Now I'm thinking about the prefix "pen," which as far as I can think I may have only ever seen in "penultimate"

It's Latin for "nearly" or "almost", and it does pop up in a few other English words. "Penultimate", "penumbra" and "peninsula" are the only ones I can think of that you'd even remotely expect to encounter in everyday speech, though; the rest are all medical or mathematical jargon.

[prokopetz]

#so peninsula means what? #almost island? #lmao (via @actualanxiousswampwitch)

That is the actual etymology of the word "peninsula", yes.

[orcboxer]

honestly "oracle that nobody believes" is such a solid trope. imagine trying to convince anybody in 2006 what the next two decades was gonna look like

[kuttithevangu]

All fantasy authors wish they had a bigger bathtub in their house. You can tell by every bathing scene ever written into a fantasy novel

[ndnbutch]

sometimes i talk about how awful it was to feel trapped by my daily makeup routine and how i couldn’t leave the house without putting on a full face and it played a major role in the misery of my high school experience because i had to spend so much extra time getting ready in the mornings and that followed me into my early 20s as well and it was hell and it was so incredibly liberating to go through the slow and uncomfortable but ultimately essential process of getting my bare face back and having makeup be an optional accessory instead of a mandatory uniform. and the response always tends to be ah yes of course, because of your trans and your masculine. and it’s like aha so close! actually! I think if I ended up being a feminine cis woman I also still would not deserve even a second of that shit! I think trans women and nonbinary people and every human alive should have the option to leave the house without a single cosmetic product ever touching their face! but thanks for playing!