#+act

[hladky]

Ainslie and Fyshwick ACT, 2024 website / instagram / blog

[ohthecalamity]

Hello! I don't know many other kiwis online, but I am trying my hardest to spread this cause around.

To anyone from Aotearoa reading this. Please, sign this petition. Share this cause with your followers, or anyone you know who may sign. Thank you.

A mining company, Bathurst, wants to turn Denniston Plateau into a giant open-cast mine. The nearby Stockton mine is pictured below.

Denniston is home to incredible ecology found nowhere else. Tiny plants. Fossils. Ancient sandstone landscapes. Odd-coloured geckos, flatworms, kiwi, fernbirds, peripatus, and the infamous Avatar Moth.

If this plan goes ahead, they are all lost forever. Along with any chance for study or scientific advancement.

It will also poison major waterways. Runoff from the nearby Stockton mine can, quite literally, dissolve a car.

The money is flowing into the pockets of overseas investors, and they are mainly employing overseas workers. This plan will not 'strengthen the nz economy'. It will weaken tourism, worsen our climate, and make the town of Westport even more dependent on Bathurst.

This mine will cost Aotearoa far, far more than what Bathurst pays us. The human cost, and the environmental cost, is even worse.

Denniston is on stewardship land. This mine will set a dangerous precedent for all protected spaces.

Bathurst proposed this plan a decade ago. (They are now appealing under the fast-track bill.) We beat them before, and we will beat them again!

Anyone in Aotearoa, please, sign this petition. Every signature helps.

It takes no time at all---you only have to input a name and email. An additonal comment is optional.

(and if anyone wants more details, hit me up. I have many more reasons that you should sign!)

tagging people I know are in aotearoa:

@aurafarmerlaurapalmer @shrub-a-dub @ellayeet87 @ollyoxygenfree @icarus-likes-art @bevsdee @mandable-draws @faithy-bean @chick-and-hen @blondddog @vendingmachinesoundeffects @tobsicle456-blog @solar-omens @just-fix-it-in-post @w0nderland42 @crabussy @mucking-faori @takataapui @newzealandwhy @astraladversity @sapphia @beastwhimsy @pitlanewrites @tetohe

I know some of you have already signed it, but share it around, please! I'm risking doxxing myself for this lol

[faveyoutok]

[kylemarshiku]

Last week I dropped the Ultimate Homestuck Recap that summarized the webcomic that once dominated the internet, particularly Tumblr.

Today I bring you what it was all for, a video essay called Homestuck Is Good, Actually.

If you were wondering, "Homestuck, really? In 2025?" The answer is yes. This isn't ironic. It's 100% sincere. I love Homestuck. And I think you should, too. Let me tell you why. Let me tell you about… Homestuck.

It's not perfect by any means though, and brace yourself for some hot takes. But if you'd check it out or show any friends that might be interested, I'd be very grateful.

[axe70]

[obsessedbyneon]

A.C.T. (A Contemporary Theater) in Seattle, Washington. On top of the building are also 44 houses for low incomes.

Scan

[lizardho]

Hello hello

Hope you are recovering well from the penis removal!

I have a question about how to deal with procrastination caused by fear of things not turning out how correctly.

Because I always get told 'to stop being a perfectionist' but that doesn't Help. If you have any tools or techniques that would be. Greatly appreciated

Yes! I have some stuff that works for this! The first thing is a skill called “cognitive defusion,” a technique used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to help people observe thoughts without immediately passing judgement on them.

It helps to start by switching to noticing-focused language. Instead of settling on the automatic thought of “I did this wrong” or “I can’t do this rn, I don’t have the time” try and notice the thought as a thing or an object. “I notice I think I did this wrong” is different than just “I did this wrong.” “I notice I feel incapable of doing this right now” is different than “I can’t do this right now.” It gives you a bit more internal distance with which you can observe the thought. That distance can help you reflect on the thought from a different perspective, as well. You can then ask yourself something like “what else do I think?” or “Am I feeling anything else right now?” Maybe you notice that you’re also thinking about how scared you are to schedule a cleaning with the dentist, or you notice you feel sad about something that happened earlier in the day. Maybe if you call the dentist you notice your emotional bandwidth changes and you can suddenly feel more capable of doing [thing] than you did before, or by letting yourself feel sad for a few minutes you feel more capable than you did a minute or two ago. A

You can also turn the thought/feeling into more explicit words. You may not think the words “I can’t do this,” but if you notice a feeling of resistance you might translate it into those words. From there, you can try changing the voice of the thought. I like changing it to a voice I can’t take super seriously, like Goofy. If I think “Lizard, you can’t do this Hu-HYUCK” and my first of reaction is to go “hehehe that’s silly” then it’s not necessarily a *true* thought, it’s just a thought - like so many others. If I change the voice of the thought to Ben Shapiro’s voice and hear “Ok, well let’s hypothetically say that you’re the worst at this and everyone’s gonna laugh at you for even trying” in that wheedly Pokémon voice he pretends is real and my first reaction is to say “Well FUCK you, Ben, you stupid bitch” then it’s not a correct thought, just a thought.

Remember that your brain is a thought-generating machine in much the same way that your intestines are a poop-generating machine. Your brain extracts important information from sensations and experiences, combines it with knowledge and personal beliefs, and can turn something into a nutritious package of information that feeds you or into the waste product that you eventually expel. In other words - not every thought is created equal, just like every turd is not created equal. Your brain will generate thoughts regardless of the nutritional content they are fed, but some thoughts will be spicy and runny and make you feel gross and others will be solid and dense and make you feel pleased with yourself, and both can be the result of extracted necessities being fed to you.

Some other things that can help are playing thought over like they’re a movie - noticing perfectionist of thoughts or feelings and projecting them onto an imaginary screen in your brain can help you recognize them as simply thoughts and not arbiters of reality. Not all thoughts are created equal just like not all films are created equal. Some thoughts are incredible masterpieces, and some thoughts may end up being made fun of by Danny Gonzalez or Drew Gooden and that’s fine. They all serve a purpose.

Some other things to keep in mind are things like the rule of “close enough.” To date I am the only one of my siblings to ever successfully kill an elk - something that means a lot to cowboy families because “puttin’ meat on the table” is a valuable thing to be able to do. I also like to point out that, compared to my siblings, I am not the best shot. In fact, I am probably the worst shot of any of my brothers. But I never fail to make a kill shot on an elk - and I have a good reason for that: After a Hunter’s Safety Course class on ethical hunting I remember shakily telling my dad that I didn’t want to hunt anymore. We had gone over how to make the perfect shot to an elk’s heart and I realized that elk are HUGE and their hearts are comparably small and I didn’t have an x-ray scope to reveal the exact location of a heart, so I’d have to guess where it was. I told my dad I couldn’t be a hunter anymore because I was scared of causing unnecessary pain, and to his credit he seemed surprised. I explained what I just said - that I couldn’t live with the idea of hurting an animal and not killing it cleanly. He thought for a moment, then drew a crude elk on a piece of blank paper for me. He drew where the class instructors had drawn the elk’s heart, right behind the front shoulder and approximately in the middle of the torso, and then asked me:

“Lizard, what happens if you shoot too low?”

And I said “Well, then that elk’s gonna run off and die in unimaginable pain hours or days later.” My dad listened, then shook his head, and drew a. IG circle around the elk’s heart, and said “an elk’s lungs are about the size of a garbage bag. If you shoot too low, you hit the lungs, and the elk dies in about 60 seconds or less. That’s not bad, especially when compared to slower deaths like starvation, old age, sickness, or even predation. Now, what happens if you shoot too high?” And I was like “Oh, well then THAT’S when it runs off and dies hours if not days later in unimaginable pain,” and again he shakes his head and taps the diagram and says “Nope! Remember, garbage bag lungs. If you shoot too high, but you’re still aiming for the heart, you’ll either hit the lungs, the ascending aorta, or the spinal cord. Either way, it’s dead in under 60 seconds. So what if you’re aiming for the heart and you shoot too far back?” and again I say my line - “it dies in unimaginable pain hours if not days later?” and again he says “No! Elk have livers the size of watermelons and those livers will receive all the blood in that elk’s body over the course of about a minute, meaning the elk will die in 60 seconds or so. Personally, I can’t think of a better way to go than after living a life in nature, surrounded by peaceful greenery, and dying in less than a minute. It sounds idyllic. When I get old I want you to take me into the Alaskan forests and shoot me in the head, and I feel like that’s a fair way for an elk to go too. We’re gonna call this the rule of close enough, and it’s gonna make your hunting trips SO much easier.”

And tbh he was right. The rule of close enough doesn’t mean just saying “fuck it who cares?” It means that if you’re doing your best to do it perfect and you fail, you’ll still be so close that it won’t make much of a difference to others, and that’s important to know.

They say that perfection is the enemy of good, and tbh I believe that to be true. Not because perfection is bad, but because it takes so much out of you that it renders an otherwise doable and maybe even enjoyable task unbearable, exhausting, and overly strenuous. You don’t have to spend hours pouring over elk anatomy to get “close enough,” you just have to do your best and let the rest go where it may. D

This is where the last trick to overcoming perfectionism comes into play, and if you’re like me you’re gonna HATE this part: self-compassion and acceptance.

In my job the thing I hate the most is knowing that in ten years I’m gonna be an even better therapist. I wanna be the best therapist I can be NOW - I don’t want to have to wonder how much sooner my patients could have healed if they came in ten years later, I wanna know what I can do for them now! I don’t want to have to accept that the only way to be a therapist with ten years experience is to do therapy for ten years, but I have to. I don’t wanna have to accept that the way to write a ten-years-of-experience surgery letter is to write 20 “four-years-of-experience” letters right now because it feels so unfair and so unjust, but I have to continually engage in the agonizing work of self-compassion and acceptance to recognize that I can’t do better than my best, even if my best is gonna be better in 5 years. It means that I can’t do better than good if the alternative is doing 1/10th of what I actually needed to do. It means trying and failing in a million small ways and being kind to myself because a blade is sharpened with friction and a skill is honed with repetition and at a certain point volume of repetition and frequency of internal friction matters more than perfection.

Self-compassion is SO hard when you wanted to do better, but it’s SO necessary because without it you end up not being able to practice enough to do better. So be kind to yourself. Be gayer. Read more Terry Pratchett. And let Goofy narrate your thoughts more, because it really makes thinking a lot more fun.