random lost girl

Finally a vet, she/her, South African, Ravenclaw. Possibly surviving, but definitely making memories 

[rohirric-hunter]

"You could get up early and do it before work" I could also wait for a magic beanstalk to start growing in my living room LMAO. Let's focus on things that happen in the real world

[wizardarchetypes]

my advice to you is to never waste your time trying to fit into a club or hobby or any community who makes you beg for acceptance and approval just to participate when you could do the alternative—get involved in a niche and endangered hobby run primarily by old people.

i wanted to learn how to hunt ruffed grouse and train bird dogs so i sent an email to my local chapter of the ruffed grouse society explaining that getting into wildlife groups is intimidating to me because I’m trans

and all they saw was that someone under 60 wanted to learn to hunt grouse & several months into my mentorship I was told that like 7 old guys argued over me until they had to pick a number between 1 and 100 to decide who got to personally mentor me.

imagine vying for the acceptance of some gatekeeping weirdos when your mere interest could be inciting verbal combat among retirees

[wizardarchetypes]

my mentor was so sweet & funny too. he suggested we meet over lunch first so he could tell me about what to expect before we got started & I emailed back “I’m ready to get started right away!”

and he said “I was actually suggesting lunch first for your comfort on the assumption you wouldn’t want to get together with a man you’ve never met, in the woods with a gun.”

Like, I trusted him because of the referrals I got from one of my professors but like, right you are sir fair enough. Lunch it is.

[wizardarchetypes]

exactly 😌

[can-i-make-image-descriptions]

[Image ID: Tumblr tag reading: #you're right. murderers can't have lunch (thumbs up emoji) /End ID]

[icantspellthings]

Nothing more embarrassing than accidentally using a big word wrong because now I'm simultaneously both stupid and pretentious, the worst combination of all time

[fandomsandfeminism]

Grief is so fucking wild. It sinks into your muscles, forces itself to be felt. It steals your appetite, floods your brain with cortisol. It makes you so, so tired.

If someone you know is grieving, telling them "just let me know what I can do" means nothing. They can't. They don't know. And the small things are too embarrassing to ask for.

Bring them a cheese platter. Pre-Cut fruit. Peanut butter pretzels. Protein shakes (like slimfast) Food that requires no prep and does not create dishes.

Do the dishes. Take out the trash. Sweep the floor. Vacuum the carpet. They won't ask you to do this, but it will help.

A bottle of acetaminophen honestly might help more than flowers. Grief really can cause muscle aches.

[randomlostgirl]

Grief is crazy! From personal experience: I appreciated all the 'let us know if you need anything ' offers. However, they are always foe the first few days when I didn't even know the floor from.the ceiling. I couldn't sleep but that's all I wanted to do. I was in survival mode-no decisions, no thinking, only necessary tasks.

I agree with all of the above and will add:

1. We got a care box and loved it: coffee, tinned food, some sweets, and necessities for a month 10/10

2. One of our friends paid our electricity bill. 10/10

3. One friend spent a day gardening because we couldn't. She also washed the dishes. 10/10

4. We had lots of people come by the house-so appreciate the condolences. Some were there wrll into the night. please pick up on cues and leave when you have out-stayed your welcome.

5. The best gifts are memories-pictures and stories of the deceased are to be treasured and if I saw a photo or heard a story of my dad that I didn't know I would be so grateful!

6. Check-up on your grieving friends/family in a month or 2 and ask if they need anything again-and mean it. We would have loved the help then when living becomes more of a priority again

[pokichs]

I love it when the unreliable narrator begins to trip and reveal the flaws in their story and themself. I cannot explain how much I adore them. The moment you realize that "wait, something is not right" and start to rethink the whole book is the absolute best thing to happen to you while reading. You just know the reread will be even better.

[mihai-florescu]

The lion does not concern itself with the bank account balance when a little treat is calling

[mihai-florescu]

The lion will never financially recover from this

[sexybritishllama]

the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

[blankie-wanky]

I grew up with a grandma who quilted, but she’d never been interested in passing along the hobby, so when she finally kicked it I was the grandkid who got all her materials, ‘cause I was the only one who knew how to use a sewing machine. Then, in 2015, a friend had a baby and I figured I’d make her a quilt, ‘cause how hard could it be?

oh

my

god

Luckily I am the stubbornest human alive, ‘cause I never woulda finished otherwise. I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the terms to look up how to do anything, I musta reinvented the wheel like eight times and it took ten months, BUT I DID IT.

Figured I’d suffered enough and would never do it again and now I’m on quilt #9 smdh

————————–

I’m hyperventilating.

Holy shit. Holy SHIT.

This is INCREDIBLE.

Oh my god.

I’ve gotta go lay down holy shit look at this how do we just walk by other human beings every day and live our separate lives when there’s a person sitting next to you on the train or in line for coffee who goes home and makes things like this what even IS being human holy shit.

GOOD FUCKING JOB.

[awheckery]

Oh heck I did not expect the notes to blow up on this, UM

Okay so on a purely technical level, this is not that difficult, you just gotta come at it a little sideways.

The background of this sucker is just rows of 1.5″-wide fabric strips. I can’t remember the exact pattern, but I wanna say it was something like one row 6″ strips, one row 4.5″ strips, one row alternating? I don’t remember exactly, it was a while ago. That’s not difficult, you just lay it out and sew it all together one row at a time. It’s not hard, just tedious.

The fish are a lil different. I can’t draw, there is a disconnect somewhere and my hands are stupid, so I figured out probably fifteen years ago that tracing was the way to go. For this, I legit just yanked several photos of fancy-looking goldfish off the internet and traced over ‘em in Photoshop.

Once I had enough, I printed my outlines, laid ‘em out on the background to create the idea of movement, and then traced the outlines out on fabric and pinned the hell out of ‘em.

This woulda been WAY easier with Heat ‘N Bond, but I didn’t know that was a thing at the time. From there I just used just about every fancy stitch on my inherited sewing machine to make the fish STAY WHERE I PUT THEM, and also look good.

I have since learned this is called “raw edge applique” but whatever. It’s fun, it’s neat, you can do it with a bunch of stuff and impress the hell outta people. More recently, it’s how I’ve gone from this:

to this:

(this was another project I SUFFERED over unnecessarily, because I’m the dip that decided to quilt the waves, like a moron)

god that sucked but it looked SO COOL when I was done!

[ms-demeanor]

I’m very sorry to tell you that if you thought we would be less impressed with you after this update you were very mistaken. I’ll say again:

Holy. Shit.

[thelovingend-deactivated2025073]

No one tells you that one day you will get older and look around and notice that 95% of ppl who own a dog should not own a dog

[thememedaddy]

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

[you-are-another-me]

[pokeballvictim]

I am a grown ass adult and I still get nausea when I feel like I'm in trouble. They're gonna send me to the principals office and take away my toys for a week. Can you just fucking kill me instead of making me stew in my fucking anxiety

[thisisctrying]

Gosh I hate grind culture. My little sister just started medical school and all of her orientation leaders are like “you absolutely cannot have a life WHATsoever you WILL have to give up EVERYTHING besides this program say GOODBYE to your hobbies and relationships” and now she’s calling me feeling guilty for running and going to the grocery store and that’s just WRONG! And that is exactly what I was told starting law school as well, and rejecting that mentality was the best thing I ever did but it was so hard not to buy into. Anyway if any of you are in an intense academic program PLEASE take time to sleep and eat and exercise and maintain your relationships and keep up your hobbies! you are not a robot who exists solely to study and I promise that living a life and staying physically and mentally healthy is not going to make you fail

[carnivorousnymph]

Workaholism is not just a “millennial quirk”, it’s a very real psychological problem that should not be normalized and praised. Diligence and self-realization? Awesome!!! Working so much you forget to eat, sleep and socialize? Not okay under any circumstances.

[drferox]

Sometimes, but thankfully only rarely, something catastrophic happens in veterinary medicine and by the time that animal reaches the clinic, it’s already many minutes too late.

This is worse when the catastrophe is unexpected, when the animal is juvenile or when cruelty was deliberate. And sometimes the body is such a mess that CPR or any attempt at heroics is really just… performative.

In times like this, all we can really do is try to manage the people that witnessed it: the owner, their family, the good samaritans who helped them get to the clinic, and the bystanders who happened to be in the waiting room. All of those people need to be managed to some degree after witnessing that degree of trauma.

The pet owner, and possibly the family, need the most time and attention. They may well be in shock, and while you’re trying to tell them what’s happened and get permission to stop CPR, you also need to watch them. Encourage them, gently, to sit down if they need to. Bring them a glass of water if they need to. Nothing wrong with offering a bit of emergency chocolate if they look really shaky or this is going on a long time. Tell them you will clean up their pet and make them look presentable if they want to spend time with them saying goodbye. Encourage them to call family or a friend. Do not let them drive until you are quite sure they are safe to do so.

Then we have the good samaritans, who also witnessed the trauma. Though they’re less emotionally invested they will still be affected. And practically, they may need a lot of help cleaning up their car. (Do not apply heat to blood)

Lastly the bystanders also need to be spoken to, because they’ve also witnessed a terrible trauma, or its aftermath. And you don’t know what previous traumas or baggage they’re carrying with them. At the very least they need a check in, thanked for their patience, and possibly herded to a location that is not covered in blood.

When you can’t do anything for the animal other than clean up the body, there’s still work to do caring for the people surrounding it.

[bedupolker]

Outside

[adventures-in-poor-planning]

op this is good commentary but I’m mostly just captivated by how you drew the kid as a teeny little grub with a propeller hat

[hentaikid]

I seem to recall not that long ago there was a game that made kids go Outside and everyone flipped out

[tainted-scholar]

Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There's been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the "twist" to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes. Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he's introduced we're warned about a cyborg, so you'd have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he's a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it's not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don't know if can be after what Silver's done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver's true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.

Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship's sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic's wreak. And Titanic's plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I'm not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn't know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don't walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.

However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn't make them plot twists was because they couldn't have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you'd have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.

I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren't forced to do it. We've clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.

[mikkeneko]

I remember at one point seeing a breakdown of who knows what when by genre, more or less:

If the audience knows before the character knows, it's horror

If the character knows before the audience knows, it's a whodunit/mystery story

If the character and audience find out together, it's adventure And of course:

If the audience knows and the character never finds out, it's tragedy

[randomlostgirl]

This is why one of my favorite books is the Book Thief. It's literally narrated by death and he tell you the ending in the first paragraph. The rest of the book is getting to know the motivations and lives of the characters and seeing why it ends the way it does. Also, the grim reaper narrates in colours and the way he describes things is so unique and beautiful

[fuckadietcoke]

Someone: how have you been doing?

Me, hanging on by a thread:

[cumaeansibyl]

I feel like I should just queue this to post once a week but at random times