Keep Your Head Down, Kid.

(Dead blog!) Funky friendo finding enjoyment in various and sometimes a bit unusual things, sun bears and knitting. If you're feeling down I have a #positive tag and a #for you tag that often overlap and have nice and sweet things because you're great and have an irreplaceable, inherent internal worth. On DeviantART I go by Kaleoscope. (But I'm mostly on Tumblr ATM.) (I'm not really anywhere else either) (You could ask I guess) Please use [xie/xem/xyr/xemself] pronouns, if you would be so kind! [They/them etc.] is also cool, but don't fret too much about it tbh. Don't take the bear stuff too seriously, and if you need me to try to tag a trigger please shoot me a note abt it and I promise I'll try to keep on top of it to the best of my ability. <3

[ohbeffinitely]

I know it’s not Wednesday, but it’s a WIP!

[bob-belcher]

[littleredbard]

[malamatter]

Is that…, josh peck…

[juuliaroberts]

stay focused on the queen

[ziggyplayedd]

hey guys unpopular opinion but you’re not a bad person if you don’t care about every bad thing happening in the world all the time, or if you do care but you’re not constantly reblogging posts spreading awareness and information

it’s okay if you’re just on tumblr to have fun and reblog things you like or that make you happy.

humans aren’t made to process trauma and suffering on a worldwide scale without any breaks whatsoever & the internet has created an unprecedented access to bad news so please never feel guilty for scrolling past it because you can’t process it! and you’re not doing anything wrong & there’s no need to feel guilty

[run-to-stand-still]

I always hope that people who see all my activism posts don’t think I expect them to be the same. It makes total sense to just want to have a place to be into your fandoms. That’s up to you and you’re not a bad person for wanting to rest.

[emosad420]

[questionartbox]

don’t fall over though, master

They are dorks and I love them. Art blog: questionartbox [Commission Info] [Ko-Fi] [Society6]

[modmad]

Besides never, when do you sleep?

Actually, I sleep as much as I can! And while I do get my fair share of restless nights and 3am attacks of inspiration that leave my brain spinning like a car careening off the M6 after just being hit by a ten tonne truck, I do get my 8 hours a night as often as I can and I can’t emphasize how important that is and how important it is for people to know that

it is

good

to sleep

in the creative world there’s this sort of glorification of insomnia and the notion of ‘working all the time’, that an artist has to suffer, that every self respecting cartoonist or animator or painter has to be driven to the point of exhaustion every waking hour in order for them to be allowed to call themselves an artist, that if you are not working you are wasting time and being a self indulgent twat (in a nutshell). I am here to tell you that is not true, and it is not healthy to think that it is true.

I often get people asking me where I get my ideas from, or more often how I get so many ideas and so quickly. I can’t answer that very easily but I know for a fact that the times that I have been stressed and sleepless and a nervous wreck I have not been able to come with good ideas. I have certainly not been able to come up with them quickly.

Ideas need time, your brain needs time, and that time can’t be simultaneously occupied with you worrying about your taxes or whether you ate something this morning or why the cat is on fire. Imagination time is a state of rest, it is a sort of meditation; you need to feel at ease in order to be able to play, because that’s what imagining things is when it gets down to it. Children don’t play when they know there’s an axe-wielding maniac in the room, and they don’t play when they’re cross and tired and angry at the world for being unfair and awake and much too loud. That’s when they cry, and the more people I meet and the more I learn about myself and humans as a whole the more I’ve come to realize that there is no bigger fiction than the concept of ‘being an adult’. Your mind and my mind are just as sensitive, creative and special as they were when we were five years old, we just have a lot more information to deal with, and knowledge to manipulate, and that can be used to our benefit! So long as we don’t keep sending ourselves to sit in detention.

It can be very difficult to find this sort of ‘peace’ to think in, which is why people often have their ideas in the dead of night, or in the shower, or on the bus into work; it is those gaps between the frantic thought that the rest of life demands from us that our minds are allowed to drift, make sparks with synapses that they haven’t used for a long time or smash together two thoughts that they never connected before, but which then go on to make something new. I can’t sit here and tell you to ‘make time to think’, but I can tell you that you shouldn’t think that you should be doing something all the time every second of every day.

Yes, draw every day, that’s great, and doodling is amazing oh my goodness yes doodling is like super fab and covered in glitter, but don’t draw all the time. You have to rest, not just your hand and wrist to avoid physical strain, but you have to rest your mind; it will help you to stay sane and happy, and it will help you to create more and better work than ever before. Working to the point of self destruction is counter productive and dangerous, and I hate the modern myth that surrounds it. It promotes nothing but insecurity about yourself and your work and is a guaranteed one-way ticket to carpel tunnel town and the therapist.

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

a collection of underrated tweets

[mothric]

executive dysfunction is telling yourself for two and a half hours that you need to shower bc you smell like your workplace and you absolutely Cannot do Anything Else until you shower, doing Any Other Thing before showering is illegal!!! but you still haven’t for some reason??? you’ve just been sitting on your bed in a towel scrolling tumblr for 2+ hours thinking “I need to shower right now immediately” and growing increasingly frustrated that you are still not clean and you haven’t eaten or done your laundry either

[mothric]

ok actually no I’m reblogging this because a) I am clean now (and I smell amazing, thank you), and b) I had a heckin Realize and I wanted to share it with y’all in the hopes it’ll help someone else with a brain like mine.

I figured something out about myself a long time ago– it’s only just now occurred to me that I was in fact solving a problem caused by executive dysfunction, and I haven’t been implementing this solution lately because my brain went “that’s a relatively new term to me and therefore a Different problem that requires a Different solution”. thanks a lot, brain.

anyway, long long ago, before I knew these fancy schmancy Official words, the problem, as I phrased it to myself, was such: 

sometimes I get Stuck. I was doing something, or on my way to doing something, and then… I just. got stuck.

“Stuck” looks like refreshing my feed or dashboard repeatedly. or it looks like staring at a spot on the wall. or chewing my fingernails. or picking at a stubborn sticker. all the while, my brain drifts through various unrelated topics I wouldn’t be able to recall if asked. sometimes I can get Stuck for hours before realizing I am Stuck. sometimes I get so Stuck that I go to bed that way (feeling especially bad for being unproductive) and I have to just reset everything by sleeping.

one day I asked myself, “why is this happening? why am I stuck, right now, at this moment in time?” the answer, as it turns out, was pretty simple: I was trying to make a decision, and I got distracted. I haven’t moved forward because I haven’t answered that one question or made up my mind.

let me rephrase this in terms of executive dysfunction: many people have expressed that it feels like knowing you need to do a thing but not feeling “ready” to do it. many with ADHD may also be familiar with the feeling of needing things to be “just so” before you embark on a task- you need your setup to look a certain way, or you need to set a timer, or have the right music playing, etc.

when I get Stuck it’s often because I got lost somewhere in that setting-up process, and my brain took the opportunity to nyoom off into Distraction Town.

getting myself Unstuck is solved, 95% of the time, by tracing my steps back to the original decision I was trying to make- often something small and inane- and then troubleshooting from there. (out loud! verbal processing is totally punk.) 

“what was I trying to do?” 

“was I trying to decide between two things?” 

(the answer’s usually yes.) 

“what were they?” 

“okay, let’s decide. 

“okay, that’s settled. let’s move on.”

and then I am free as a bird to nyoom in the direction of The Thing I Wanted To Do All Along, in the amazingly disorganized, scattered, yet rapid-fire way that I do many things.

so!!! in the case of my first post, where I hadn’t showered for 2 hours? turns out I had been trying to decide what music to listen to in the shower. (another hack: my chances of getting Stuck while showering decrease by 75% if I have music playing to help me keep track of time.) I couldn’t immediately make up my mind, got lost in thought, got distracted, and drifted. once I stopped and asked- “why am I stuck?”-  then I remembered- “oh yeah! I wanted to listen to music”-  and then decided- “I want to listen to Daft Punk’s Discovery album”- I was finally heckin able to shower. and also eat, and also throw my clothes in the dryer.

and may I add I only zoned out once, during the slow part of “One More Time.” :P

I’m not saying this is a foolproof method. sometimes I don’t have a reason for being stuck, and that’s okay! I’m also not saying this is how every adhd brain works. it’s just how my brain works, and I’m sure there’s at least a few who can relate. for those few, I hope this helps!!

[mothric]

a lot of people are reblogging the original post without the update and leaving frustrated comments and that makes me sad! if I can find ways to hack my brain than so can you! executive dysfunction is a real and frustrating challenge, but don’t buy the lie that there’s no way to work with it or around it!!!

[sometimesyouhavetobebrave]

!!!!

[catchymemes]

Animal Reviews!

Source: facebook.com

[dontbotherfiguringitout]

One thing I always bring up that straight writers obviously don’t understand but every gay person ever can attest to is that queer people stick together. Like, every queer person knows like 15 other ones and those 15 know even more. 

Like, having only One in your story completely misses the point of how we organize and stay safe, in addition to completely missing the point on being progressive (ie, having A Single Gay in your story isn’t special anymore and hasn’t been for decades now)

It is a fundamental misunderstanding of how marginalized people act bc straight people are allowed to be solitary and they don’t understand any other way of Being

[moonlitwaterwriting-deactivated]

Hijacking this post to talk about something interesting! There’s a lot of criticism in fanfiction circles of yaoi or yuri fanfiction where ‘everybody is gay’, and it’s almost always by folks who haven’t been involved in queer communities. If you’re queer, you really do surround yourself with queer people - so ‘everybody is gay’ in a character’s social circle actually makes perfect sense! 

this exhibits itself in other ways too, for example, when there’s one queer sibling there’s usually more - often because one sibling will bring the definitions home and the other will use that to explore their own identity! 

[otakusapien]

Another weird phenomenon I noticed is this happens a lot even before people realize they’re Not Straight ™. Out of my close friends in high school, most of us turned out some form of LGBTQA, and I’ve heard other people say the same is true for them. So people saying it’s “unrealistic” that everyone in the same social circle would gradually discover they’re Not Straight ™- yeah, it is totally reasonable and even likely.

[finnglas]

#we know our own #sometimes before we know ourselves (tags via @anneapocalypse )

[brittascribbles]

I have to wonder if maybe THIS is where straight people got the term “catching the gay”… You know?

My mother was so concerned when I moved to CA for college that I would “catch the gay”, and I was just like “???????? pretty sure it’s not something you catch like a cold, mom.” And ignored her.

It wasn’t until I started making friends in the LGBT community and spending time with them and loving them as people that I slowly became aware of the fact that I might not be straight. And after years of talking to LGBT youth and living in a city that embraces that culture, I found myself realizing that I was ALWAYS like this, but never realized it.

It’s like… you could go your ENTIRE life having the choice of eating raisin bran, bran flakes, or plain cheerios for breakfast. And that’s pretty much the only choices you’re offered. But then. THEN! You walk into a supermarket and see an ENTIRE AISLE of a billion cereal choices, and you realize “wait, I…are…are you telling me that I could have had LUCKY CHARMS for breakfast?!”

And OOOOHHHHHH BOI lemme tell you a thing, when you see your buddies eating captain crunch and lucky charms, and you realize you can ALSO have that?

Well, then - if “the gay” is contagious, then you’d better lock me in quarantine.

[what-even-is-thiss]

In my experience it’s actually way more common to have the one (1) straight person in the group then having a token gay.

[nasell]

“Papa, you’re under arrest!”

Redbubble | Ko-fi

[cienie-isengardu]

Young Jyn Erso’s toys according to Rogue One Ultimate Visual Guide

[we-are-rogue]

The Deck of Certain Things, or: The Joke Item That Almost Destroyed my Campaign

[by u/astonishingantman / reddit]

“I created this thing over two years ago as a joke item. One of my players became convinced that I was trying to trick them, and that it was a real Deck of Many Things. His paranoia spread, and the party nearly killed each other over it. After some impromptu group therapy, they decided to leave the Deck be and never speak of it again.

So now you get to use it. Have fun!”

Deck of Certain Things

Wondrous Item, Legendary

A set of 10 cards that come in a small box. “Deck of Certain Things” has been crudely carved into the box’s lid in Common.

Before you draw a card, you must declare how many cards you intend to draw and then draw them randomly (you can use a d10 to simulate the deck). Any cards drawn in excess of this number have no effect. Otherwise, as soon as you draw a card from the deck, its magic takes effect. Each card must be drawn no more than 1 hour after the previous draw. If you fail to draw the chosen number, the remaining cards fly from the deck and take effect all at once. Once a card is drawn it cannot reappear.

Once all 10 cards have been drawn, a pair of Gloves of Thievery appear in the deck box, along with a note thanking the Deck’s owner for the fun.

The cards are decorated with shoddy-looking artwork, seemingly scribbled with crayon. They are:

Acorn: 3d8 terrified squirrels are transported to your location from elsewhere on the material plane.

Fireworks: Your weapon explodes into a shower of brightly-colored glitter. It reforms in 1 hour.

Prospector: A wooden chest containing 10,000 pieces of counterfeit gold drops at your feet. The coins show a winking jester on both sides.

Liar: For the next 1d12 hours, telling a lie causes your trousers to ignite, dealing 1d6 points of fire damage.

Honey Jar: Summons a friendly sentient bear named Sigmund, who acts as an apothecary, selling the party potions from his backpack. He vanishes after 1d20 minutes.

Wallflower: You instantly succeed on all Insight checks for 24 hours, but fail all Intimidation checks.

Invitation: An imp appears in a burst of smoke, kicks you in the shins, then vanishes.

Nightmare: All items worn on your person, with the exception of undergarments, turn invisible for 1d4 hours.

Quill: A flameskull appears in front of you, delivers a heartfelt soliloquy, then explodes in a pillar of green flame. All creatures within 5 feet must make a Dexterity saving throw or take 2d10 fire damage.

Infant: For the next hour your voice is replaced with the shrill cries of a baby. You are unable to communicate through speech or cast spells with a verbal component.

[toodrunktofindaurl]

here, have some happy girls and their girlfriends/wives/significant others ♥

(do NOT repost) | patreon

[invaderxan]

[uulta-deactivated20181225]

what .

[trapcard]

Daniel is a he/him lesbian we love that

[grifalinas]

A concept: An adventuring party made entirely of people of one race disguised as people of another. The disguises are really bad, like the “dwarf” is just a halfling with a fake beard, the “orc” is an elf with body paint and novelty teeth, and the dragonborn is just three goblins in a trenchcoat- but none of them have any experience with any of the races in question and are trying not to draw attention to their own disguises, so all of them are fully prepared to accept any oddity on the part of their party members.

[grifalinas]

The halfling, having just been caught taking off their beard in private so they can breathe: ….this is normal for dwarves The goblins, who were looking for somewhere private that they can crawl out of the trenchcoat: Acceptable, have a nice day

[grifalinas]

Halfling: Friend orc, I don’t mean to alarm you, but the green appears to be coming off of your skin. Onto my hand. Elf: I. Have a skin condition. Halfling, discreetly adjusting their beard: Acceptable, have a nice day

[mikkeneko]

“Hail and well met, fellow elf. I am Zenz’zomar, from the underground city of Menzoberranzan, from which all drow elves, of course, hail.”

The ‘elf,’ actually a hill dwarf on very tall platform shoes, squints uncertainly. “If you’re a drow elf, how come you’re white?”

“Oh my god  Ll’loriel, you can’t just ask someone why they’re white,”  three simultaneous voices cry from the horrified ‘dragonborn.’