Our tiny (indoor only) cat absolutely adores these big silly birds. They’re bigger than she is. In winter, when they hang out in our garden, she’ll spend hours snuggled up next to her Kererū plushy watching them from the window. She knows what they’re called, so if I yell their name she’ll come running from anywhere in the house to come and chatter at them.
If I enter the room while she’s staring, she’ll try to call me too. Doing a weird meow that has the same cadence as their name. She gets so excited when I come look.
They are beautiful, and so huge. A few years back one of them crashed straight through our front window. It bounced off the closed blinds and landed outside. It was gone by the time we got there. I spotted it later in the backyard sorting out its feathers, none the worse for wear. The window needed replacing though.
When I was a TA for the freshman art class in senior year my students really adored me. It was so sweet. I’d had classes that were more ambivalent toward me but these guys were all about me.
I loved working with that teacher too. He was the kind of crunchy art nerd whose own kid didn’t know what candy was, who loved bird watching and wearing tweed. We’d chat while they worked and it was just a three hour pleasure rather than work.
When the class switched from charcoal to gouache a devil medium, the evilest watercolor, the students struggled. We’d have in class painting where they’d spend the whole time trying to mix one color instead of just accepting something as good enough and trying to practice other skills.
So one day I showed up to my shift and announced, “I have stickers. If you get color down for the whole composition, you get a sticker.”
They wanted. The stickers. So bad. Students who had agonized before about keeping lines neat and perfect plowed ahead. The first student to call me over I tsked at. “Putting grey on everything doesn’t count,” I chided, “I asked for colors on each object.”
The classroom worked in furious joy, young adults who had seen my bird and cactus stickers and gone feral. The teacher was flabbergasted. “Why do they want stickers? They could just buy stickers…”
I held up my water bottle and showed him a tiny 3D bubble sticker the program director had brought to my game teams space last week. “You never grow out of wanting to earn a sticker.”
By the end of class everyone had a sticker. There was more visible improvement in the work too, which surprised them since they’d been rushing. “Gouache looks terrible before it looks good. It’s okay to start messy and then refine.” The teacher had said the same thing but looking at their frantic sticker paintings they finally saw the truth of it.
Oh, another fun thing with this class. So my game teams producer did camp stuff and when she wanted the whole teams attention she’d say in a clear voice, “If you can hear me clap once!” She’d clap once and there’d be a scattered clap of people belatedly hearing her.
Then, “If you can hear me clap twice!” She’d clap twice and there’d be a strong synchronous second clap as we all joined in silent unison, giving her our full attention.
Some teammates felt this was infantilizing but most of us liked it. The reality of trying to rally 20 people simultaneously without shouting meant it was the most effective method any of us discovered.
So one day in class this professor, who refused to raise his voice, tried in vain to get the classes attention. I knew he would loathe what I was about to do but I grinned impishly and said, “Can I try?”
He gave a tired nod and I called, “If you can hear me clap once!” There was a confused array of claps the first time, but the second clap was just as crisp as I could wish. Many of the class looked bewildered that they’d obeyed, but all were silent and attentive.
I looked back at the professor who was visibly cringing into his tweed. “Never again,” he promised me.
I sweetly agreed and never did it again but his absolute horror was worth it.
This works for STEM classes, too. I TA'd undergraduate-level genetics and neurodevelopment. My situation was different in that the professor wasn't present for my sections, so running class was completely up to me. Fresh to adulthood myself, my previous experience consisted of the education of bubbly kindergartners through jaded tenth-graders. Regardless of age, each and every student LOVED a little prize.
My first day of class coincided with my 21st birthday. I'd gone to the mini-Asian mart on campus -- the same mini-Asian mart any student could have visited -- and procured a few novel Japanese candies.
My analytical brain wanted to do a pre-quiz to determine where my students were at the beginning of the class so I could teach them better. But my class was scheduled for 8pm and I could not think of a quicker way to kill attendance to an already ridiculously planned class than to tell them their first assignment was a pop quiz (even one graded for completion).
Instead, I devised a game of competitive pictionary. The students eyed their candy reward with evenly mixed excitement and confused apathy. But once the two teams were created, every participant betrayed their own burning desire for sugar. Each team was tasked with creating a list of biological terms for the other team to draw from. Their submissions started easy and got progressively more difficult, to the point where even I had to Google specific terms. I didn't know it yet, but this small wave of rivalry heralded a riotously cutthroat typhoon.
Once the lists were approved and edited, I began the game. It unfolded in a heretofore unwitnessed combination of screaming, scribbling, laughter, and violent competition. Although the candy was the original impetus for what quickly became a blood feud, it soon lay forgotten by the side. Chalk scratched furiously against slate, teammates from both sides groaned in frustration and leapt in success. The winning team was announced to equally dramatic cries of triumph and dismay.
Having privately resolved to give extra credit to anyone who committed to being present at this offensively timed evening discussion, I made everyone fill out a password-locked exit ticket. That week's password was simple (they had to wish me happy birthday), and the exit ticket was geared towards understanding their expectations for the term. As students began to finish, one girl from the winning team remembered the candy.
Right! The candy. With instruction to share, I unthinkingly tossed her the bag.
Even after witnessing the unexpected brutality of pictionary, the following carnage was shocking. Studious adults became ravenous, devouring coyotes descending upon the pink packet. It was torn and looted with an eye for destruction that these unassuming biologists would have been astonished to find themselves capable of, if only their conscious minds were aware of the passing events. But their conscious minds were no longer present. That fight was all id.
It's a credit to the inborn tenacity and organizational skill of scientists that each deserving student (and no undeserving student, thanks to a grueling defense of shrieks and shoulders) received their allotted candy. Once satisfied, the roiling mob transformed back into backpack-wearing, composed aspiring biologists. They happily returned the torn remains of the bag (and, to my delight, a few straggling sweets) to me.
The course matter and scheduling grew more complicated, and I wasn't able to play games at that level again. But I like to think that game of pictionary helped create a sense of camaraderie that kept a good portion of my students returning week after week.
There’s no age limit to this either. I once arranged a “design session” for the biggest client of the small webdesign company I worked for. Usually we insisted on a single point of contact, but this client had a committee that dealt with their website and we couldn’t afford to lose them.
I set the session up as a game where everyone picked colours and images from a pile of pictures and swatches. They were then split in 2 groups and had to debate which limited number of colours and pictures the group would prefer. Finally the 2 groups debated each other to create a final choice.
During that first phase, there were scissors on the table so people could cut out swatches from big sheets. Now imagine me, 23 years old, walking around the room listening to the chatter. Suddenly I spot a hand going up at one of the tables, bewildered I address this man twice my age with at least one phd. He asks: “Are we allowed to cut out pieces of the pictures if we only like part of them?”. The “Miss” was missing, but definitely implied in his tone. I say “Yes.”, he gleefully goes back to his work, painstakingly cutting a picture into several pieces.
They later said it was one of the most fun things they’d ever done as a committee.
Our designer admitted that it didn’t actually give her that much more information, but because they all felt like they’d had a say we only got one request for a tweak of the final design.
idk my dude. “I just wanted to cheer up this peasant and give them hope for a better tomorrow, but instead they overthrew the local nobles and now we’ve got to teach a bunch of peasants how to govern a kingdom”
is at least twice as funny as
“this person has sex” especially if your DM is uncomfortable with role playing seduction and such
Many happy memories of the time my players talked themselves through an entire castle full of goblins and bugbears by the sorcerer passing himself off as the wizard the goblins had been working with. (They had defeated the wizard and the sorcerer was using his staff.)
It took a ridiculous succession of 20+ CHA rolls and horribly fumbled insight checks on the goblin’s end, but it was glorious! Extra fun is that the sorcerer was a grung wearing a big hat and scarf to pretend he was a halfling.
I really love the concept of the hope chest when adapted to modern values. Putting aside nice things in a chest as you grow up so that when you move out you have things to make a home with???? like???? sign me up?????
ok i need to rant about this for a quick sec bc i don’t think y’all UNDERSTAND.
hope chests were something young women would do in their teens in the 19th/early 20th century. basically they would collect, make, and be gifted homemaking supplies throughout their teens; things like cutlery, china, quilts, jam jars, pillowcases, sheets, pots and pans, etc. They would keep all these in a big ol’ chest so that when they married and moved to live with their husbands and start a family, they already had a bunch of homemaking equipment.
now adapt this to modern ideals and ???!!!!! having a chest you slowly build up throughout your teens of things you’d like to furnish your future home with ????????? you spot a cute tea towel in a thrift store and in it goes. a painting your parents won’t let you hang up?? paint chips of the colour your future kitchen will be painted?? salt shakers you think are super cute but your parents hate?? It all goes in your hope chest to remind you to have hope that one day this will be your life????????!!!!!!! hello!!!!?!!?!? HELLO!?!?!??!?
I did this; not through my teens, but through the time I was getting my degrees. Some in literal chests, but mostly in storage tote bins. And when I got my house, and got to unpack eight years of things I’d laid aside for my future self to use, it was like christmas morning but all the gifts were exactly what I wanted.
Obviously there’s ranges of scale that this is doable, but if you’re in a transient period of your life, working towards something more permanent in the future: get yourself a box, and put something for that person into it.
My mom helped my siblings and I do something like this. When my surrogate grandpa died, his daughter gave a lot of his stuff to my mom. My mom then sat down with us and sorted through the cutlery & crockery. Everyone got to fill their “moving out box” with a variety of things.
That was the start of it, but over the years we all added to our box when we would find things we liked or when we received more hand-me-downs. Be it a mug or something decorative. I still have some of those things in my cupboard now, 30 years since they were first put in that box. They remind me of old hopes and the kind people who helped me get started in life even though they were no longer around when I finally did.
video game abstractions are something else. i'm leveling Culinarian in FFXIV and i hit level 56. "hold on," i say to nobody in particular, and put my frying pan (hot, wet with freshly cooked sauce) back on my hip. "before I make any more hollandaise sauce, i need a better knife." there in my pocket, it awaits: a knife whose titanium edge is so keen that only a level 56 Culinarian can so much as grasp it. so i do that. and now i have no need for my old knife; it has served me well, but it physically cannot be used by any other. it is inextricably bound to my soul. i cooked with it before, you see. one cook per knife only. so i take it into my hands one last time and disintegrate it into various magical crystals. the concentrated fire essence extracted from within can be used to make more hollandaise sauce
One of the first things that made the social model of disability really make sense was this:
My new doctor hadn't been doing reminder calls for the 2 years I'd had her. I FINALLY got my act together and talked to the receptionist to opt-in.
"We don't do that."
And I froze. What? How could they ... they just ... refused to remind people of appointments? I politely asked if they could make an exception, got turned down, and was in a fog for the next half an hour.
Because I couldn't get to appointments consistently without a reminder. It was hard to get there WITH a reminder, but I was simply unable to without.
Suddenly, I was disabled. Without assistance from my husband, I lacked the ability to get medical help.
-
I'm thinking about that a lot, today. My husband's back at a physical office for work. I have an appointment with NQ's school. And all day, I've been carefully checking my backups.
If I miss the appointment, I'm only 5 minutes away, so I can get there quickly if called. The resource teacher will be understanding if she needs to remind me - she's willing to ask if I'm capable of talking at the beginning of every phone call, and we've set up back up forms of communication if I can't!
Even with my husband unable to physically check if I'm leaving, I have ways to ensure I get to this meeting.
-
With automatic reminder calls, or husbands by my side, I can sometimes forget just how vulnerable I am on my own.
But there's a reason I can regularly see a counselor, but not a general practitioner. There's a reason my husband used to have to take the afternoon off work every time the school set up a meeting, but today I won't be seeing him until this evening.
(There's a reason that I partially started auditing because I showed up at the wrong time and place for almost every university exam, and the stress was destroying me.)
I think that's what the social model of disability is about. It's society in general bearing a slight cost so that vulnerable people don't have to bear an extremely heavy one. Paying slightly more to design buildings that mobility aids can navigate. Banning really dangerous allergens from some public spaces so that people can use them without dying. Normalizing flashing light warnings to avoid seizures.
There are only so many slight costs society can bear before they pile up into a heavy one. I'm not sure how much diversity a society can reasonably support.
But I really appreciate it when an organization is willing to send me reminders. Because my memory and sense of time SUCKS.
The first time my new pharmacy sent me a text to tell me my prescription was up for renewal, I was really shocked just how emotional it made me. It asked me to reply YES within 3 days if I wanted to renew. Then they sent another text when it was ready to be picked up.
I’ve been struggling for years to remember to renew in time. To make the calls, and check whether it’s ready. That automated system has taken such an enormous weight from my shoulders. It even sends the text early enough that I have a little grace time if I can’t pick it up immediately.
Such things are indeed weights on society. However, while that text might be a lifesaver for me, it will still be convenient for people who aren’t disabled. It costs something, but it also adds value for most people. In that sense I think society can actually bear a lot more than we might sometimes expect.
I think one of my favorite DnD Things is when random rolls become retroactive Lore/Quirks for the character. Not even as a DM ruling, I mean something the whole table adopts organically, whether seriously or as a running joke.
A paladin I DMd for failing every single perception roll turned into him canonically needing glasses and not realizing it.
A combination of failed perception checks and concentration saves becoming a character having ADHD and that getting worked into the acting.
My gnome barbarian with low intimidation rolls despite doing/saying some actually terrifying things suddenly having a voice that cracks like the "WHEN WILL YOU LEARN?! WHEN WILL YOU LEARN?! THAT YOUR ACTIONS!! HAVE CONSEQUENCES!!" kid when he shouts.
Or my favorite, my tabaxi artificer, Gus, comedically failing every religion check when it comes to praying so now it's a whole plot point that gods literally do not perceive him.
(Yes this is an invitation to reply or tell me in the tags if you've had any canon-altering rolls like this I love PC stories)
In an ongoing urban campaign, one of our first adventures was exploring a tunnel system under the city and fighting some undead, weirdly Greek monsters, etc… Early on, my fighter nat1’d a History check about the tunnels, and someone—the DM? me? another player? it’s lost to the mists of time—suggested that the only thing I knew about the secret tunnels was that mole people were said to live in them. With the nat1, I was now absolutely certain that we were looking at proof of the legendary mole people.
Almost every single time I’ve rolled a nat1 since in that game, I’ve made it somehow about the mole people that my fighter is 100% certain exist. Failed Perception check? I heard scurrying and saw a giant hairless tale whipping around that corner! Failed attack? I saw a mole (normal-sized) dart into that bush a got distracted—do you think they carry messengers for their human-sized masters? And obviously any failed knowledge-type check (History, Nature, etc) turns up more details of the urban legend…
I dunno if this counts, but it's one of my favorite stories, so:
One of the things that is in my Mage: the Awakening character Fox's (any pronouns) standard setup for missions is a spell that allows them to take on certain animal traits. Usually she does things like infrared vision and toxin resistance, and they always, always load in wall-walking. I've been playing her for fifteen years and I always set this up and it has never mattered. Everyone forgets.
Including my spouse, who was running the investigation we were on when there was an Important Item on the ceiling.
She intended this to be a major obstacle, how to get this thing down without destroying it.
And Fox just... walked up the wall and picked up the thing.
It just became so routine that everyone forgot, oh right, Fox always sets herself up to do that.
And o m g the sense of narrative payoff I felt was incredible.
One of my characters fumbled a dexterity check in our first session. It was for climbing through a secret door in the back of a wardrobe. She fell flat on her face. I exclaimed: “I hate these legs!”. She generally presents as quite intimidating and collected, so it took everyone by surprise.
Since then she’s become canonically very clumsy, every failed dex check is because she’s tripping over her own feet. It completely destroys her carefully crafted image every time.
not to b dramatic but the continued use practical effects is literally integral to the future of live action media. this is not to knock vfx artists, bc cgi can definitely add to an existing foundation, but practical effects are so important (especially in fantasy and sci-fi) because it makes the world feel so much more lived in and believable. if the props are real, the sets are real, the monsters or animal side kicks are real / animatronics / puppets….. the world they exist in feels real!! it’s tangible! there’s people that made it! who cared and loved it!
I love seeing list memes where someone makes a "le cool people vs le cringe" and they obviously skew it so they barely scrape by into the cool kids club
I'm 5'11, but in most casual conversations I'll say I'm 5'9. I do this purely for the chaos that it creates. Because everyone assumes that men only exaggerate their height up, it makes me look like the only person honestly describing their height and thus knocks at least 2 inches off everyone else's description. The panic that the 6'1 guys feel at the thought of being described as 5'11 is hard to understate. I have had people run back to their cars to grab tape measures.
If I could get away with describing myself as 4'6 I would.
I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.
-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a
~*Spiritual Experience*~
I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.
Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.
He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only
BARELY
enough space for the fireworks
and certainly none for his truck.
So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand.
This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.
He begins,
and this is crucial to what happens next,
by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it
unsecured
on his lawn.
Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.
His process for unloading the fireworks is to
1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls.
2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile
He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things.
3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed
4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup.
5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her.
6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house.
7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too.
8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate
9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed
10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.
Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man?
Answer: Absolutely Not.
There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else.
(This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual)
Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally.
Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.
I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.
However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up.
and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop"
And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."
For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."
I move under the eaves.
"Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled."
"Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not."
"Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."
Sometimes,
the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.
The Gods were not merciful today.
It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this,
But I got to see it today.
Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before.
Oh. I realized as it got closer.
That's RAIN.
Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say,
five to tent square miles,
is instead concentrated into an area of say,
my neighborhood exactly.
So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.
The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel.
Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge.
Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.
My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp.
They do not have a tarp.
They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.
Which is when the hail begins.
"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy.
"HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!"
"OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"
I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic.
The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor.
Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.
So.
I was raised Agnostic
-but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.
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