The witch of endless full combos
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

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@silver-chasm
The witch of endless full combos
sorry i will never understand cis grief. your daughter is living her best life and going around with friends and feeling like a human being. your son doesn’t feel like he needs to crawl out of his skin anymore and can actually smile. your children are happy and no longer see their existence as the worst thing in the world. why are you grieving this lmao. grow up.
Do you think the devil grieves for angels
Over Thanksgiving, my wife's mom said to her that she grieved "the son she lost". It pained my beloved so much that she asked me if I ever mourned her like that (we had been dating for like 10+ years before she realized she was trans). I said no; and, when asked why, I thought about it for a second.
Being a very metaphorical thinker, the image of a butterfly came to mind. This beautiful thing that grew out of something else. No longer what it was before, but something new and wonderful. A continuation, a becoming, a realization of self.
I turned to my wife and said "you do not mourn the caterpillar".
She loved that so much that I got @vaspider of NerdyKeppie to put it on a pennant to hang in our home.
(I'm ordering stickers this week.)
The thing is when my kid came out to us it didn't make them magically a new person
It just made them happier
Our main concern was how other people would treat them and we wanted them to know that we were firmly in their corner
But they were still the same kid
Researching trans and non-binary stuff also unlocked my own gender journey but that's unrelated
But my husband, who is as cis as they come, was like "yeah that's the same kid"
And maybe that's because we had put no expectations on our kid. We just wanted them to be happy
so happy and free
this is going to be a silly reblog but i have kind of a fixation on animal qualia and the idea of an animal's umwelt, so i ended up wondering whether pudding was actually "enjoying" this.
which meant i went and read about snail brains.
here's the bad news, at least by human standards:
snails do not have anything like a centralized brain. their nervous system is made up of small clusters of neurons (ganglia) that mostly handle very local tasks. they don't have a cortex, they don't build big integrated models of the world, and they almost certainly don't experience things like appreciation, anticipation, or savoring.
pudding is not looking at the sky and thinking it's beautiful.
snail eyes are basically light sensors - they can tell bright from dark, but not form images. snail "taste" is done through chemoreceptors on their tentacles and around their mouth. those receptors don't produce flavor the way ours do; they just detect chemical compounds and sort them into "approach," "ignore," or "avoid."
so there's no evidence that snails enjoy food, or wind, or views, the way mammals do.
and that does sound kind of sad. but then i thought that maybe we are asking the wrong question.
snails do have valence. they detect aversive things (like salt or dryness) and withdraw from them. they detect non-aversive or beneficial conditions (like moisture) and stay extended. when pudding is stretched out like this, it means his nervous system is basically saying "this is safe; nothing is wrong."
if we define pleasure not as our human experience of dopamine and reward chemicals but instead as "the absence of aversion" - a state where the organism is open to its environment instead of defending itself - then this does count as something positive, even if it's extremely nothing like human enjoyment.
pudding isn't appreciating the wind. but his body is registering humidity, safety, and the ability to keep functioning, and that matters to him in the only way his nervous system can make things matter. he does not think "this is great, this is awesome, i love the weather", because he doesn't think in the way we do at all, but the neurological action in his ganglion tell his body that he is safe, that the moisture is an acceptable level, that it's not too dry or windy, and that there's nothing imminently threatening.
i think a lot of the sadness comes from assuming that a good life has to look like ours: full of enjoyment, meaning, and aesthetic experience. but a snail isn't missing those things. its world just isn't built to include them.
snails don't have a sense of flavor. they don't even have tastebuds. this seems like a gimme, right? but again that might be asking the wrong question about what "taste" is. biologically speaking, it's chemoreception. we taste sweet because it indicates high value, high calorie sugar molecules. we taste salty for salt, umami for proteins. so in what way does pudding's chemoreceptors differ from ours instrumentally? we can say "by our human perspective, pudding can't experience "preference" or "savoring" or "anticipation of delicious food"", but from pudding's perspective we have radically overengineered ourselves for the task at hand. pudding can tell what's salty, what's high value, what has the chemicals he needs. the functional outcome is that he can discriminate food souces based on their composition. is that not taste?
so maybe the point isn't "this is sad because he can't enjoy it," but "this is a reminder that minds come in radically different shapes, and value doesn't have to be rich to be real."
I loooooove getting rejected. People should reject more. It's the "maybes" and ghosting that's just like too much. A firm but polite "no" is infinitely more respectful of everyone's time and feelings. Can we just do that?
You guys know this is a pretty normal human want and not a special accomdation to be saved for people with autism right?
Mega Evolution
I have a baby cousin who's Two Spirit.
Their parents are leftists, open minded, pro LGBTQ+, learned to use the right pronouns (to their face at least) all that jazz.
Their Auntie grew up in a remote area, little old fashioned, doesn't really "get" the non binary thing, and hasn't quite got the hang of the singular 'they' yet. But she tries.
When my cousin got injured and couldn't drive their parents shrugged and told them to quit their job.
Their Auntie drove them to and from work every day until they got their cast off.
Which family member do you think they'll ask next time they need help?
Do you want to be ideologically perfect, or do you want to help?
☝️☝️☝️
this used to be a common knowledge
via AO3Tikli 2022
I don’t like how I’m kinda expected to rewrite the first 20 years of my life just because I’m trans. I was the eldest daughter in a black household. I can’t go back and edit my history to say I was the eldest son, cuz that doesn’t accurately convey the certain standards I was held to. I was the only girl in my engineering class. I can’t leave out the “girl” part. It recontextualizes the entire situation. I don’t think either of those facts invalidates my current gender and I don’t think trans people should be expected to rewrite their own history in fear of that
knock knock
who's there
deez
sigh
deez who ?
deez are the voyages of the starship enterprise
Mario Kart DS - Waluigi Pinball
A lot of pop psychology gets thrown around and since I already have a headache, here's preventing you lot from making it worse.
Love-bombing: A manipulation tactic of increasing affection and grand gestures before or after doing something abusive, specifically to weasel one's way out of consequences.
What it is not: A streak of affection and generosity towards friends/loved ones.
Trauma-bonding: Knowingly traumatizing someone to take advantage of their vulnerable state, to then act like the "hero" or the one who cheers them up.
What it is not: Bonding over similar traumas.
Gaslighting: *Knowingly* convincing someone they cannot trust their own perception of a situation in pursuit of one's own narrative.
What it is not: Misaligned perception of events.
Narcissist: Someone afflicted with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a traumagenic cluster B disorder, that struggles with self-obsession, paranoia, craving validity from the public, delusions of grandeur, and social disconnection.
It is not: Your rubbish ex that cheated on you.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
-Xanthe
Oh... That's what trauma bonding is. Oh.
I *also* didn't know that trauma bonding and love-bombing were... that. added to lexicon and course correcting...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/trauma-bonding
it's another kind of grooming, age regardless - you put yourself in a position of power over someone and then exploit their need for intimacy or protection or affirmation
It’s so unfair i don’t get to see where evolution will go in 50 million years
crab
Crustaceans: Crab
Mammals: Weasel
Plants: Tree
Amphibians & Reptiles: Unchanged because they are perfect
Birds: 360° around back to dinosaurs
Fungi: I shan't speculate on the affairs of gods
this reply made me laugh harder than any reply I think I've ever gotten
How did they find the worst audio ever made
Yknow, I watched this without sound. And I saw "I hate you" as a reply, and assumed something awful happened at the end of the video. And then I scrolled down a bit further, and went back up, listened to the audio and I gotta say. I agree with found-sheep.
Watching this without volume and then turning it on is like a sucker punch
This post always disappears for just long enough to make me forget what the audio is and then returns to punch me again
What the fuck is this post
@hellsite-hall-of-fame
can’t read this post without hearing this verbatim in my head
Dragon figure of the day: SA-TO NAOKI Titanomachia Clockwork-Cryptid 2.0 Dragon Species / Bipedal Juvenile Type (Cherry Blossom)
I was today years old when I learnt about what those symbols in Aboriginal art represented I honestly can't believe we never got taught that, even when I was studying art. I always assumed they had meaning but no one [no white person] had ever bothered to mention it. I'm glad I learnt something new today.
Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to look down on Aboriginal art because they think it's a form of abstract art that is just lines and shapes but almost all of them tell a story. Sometimes it's a very obvious story, such as the emu dreaming where the waterhole flooded, and sometimes it's more symbolic.
the circle in the middle is a waterhole/dam or billabong. The squiggly lines coming out of it are small rivers. the dots represent the earth but because they are in neat lines, it almost feels as if they have been flattened by the flooded water, especially as the vector lines draw out from the waterhole in the middle. the emu tracks are heading toward the waterhole, and the three lines in the middle are marks left by their tail, implying that they are wading through the mud to get there.
It's a birdseye view of a moment just after the waterhole floods and afterwards the emus go looking for food.
It's Interesting, because the original artist D. J. Ross was from Yuendumu which is in central australia, so this would have been a rare time that there was enough rain to flood the waterhole.
Dreaming stories, kinship links, sacred rites, keeping track of biodiversity and songlines are some other topics covered by Aboriginal art.
In the same way monet painted the middle class and the local landscape in the late 1800's/early 1900's Aboriginal people also paint the average lifestyle of our people. It just looks different.
For example, this picture shows a LOT of activity. The men at the top left of the picture are doing a cultural burn near and around a sacred site, the women at the bottom left are digging for food. across the river, on the right the people are preparing food and in the center, two people (presumably elders) are preparing for a ceremony.
I wouldn't say these all happened at the same time, more that this was a common undertaking over a set of time.
it takes time to understand and not all symbols are the same in all areas, but once you do understand them it becomes easier to see the story being told.
So yeah, I hope this gives you the chance to look at Aboriginal art with new eyes
Cool article from the U.S. National Gallery of Art about Aboriginal art
Oh this link is really good.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are warned the link features names of the deceased.