@theinstigators - Tumblr Blog

So I work at a library and about a month ago I helped a little old woman who is legally blind figure out how to listen to our audiobooks on her tablet. We got to chatting and I mentioned that I always listen to audiobooks while I knit, which made her very excited and she told me all about the afghans she used to make when she could still see. She was so sweet and I was so glad to be able to help her figure out a way to still enjoy books without being able to read.

Yesterday I answered the phone at work and when I said my name the woman on the other line got so excited and said “Madeline?? You’re exactly who I wanted to talk to! This is Marie, you helped me about a month ago. How late are you working today?” It was her!! And about an hour later she and her husband showed up, and she was carrying a huge stack of old knitting patterns for me, and her husband brought in a few boxes full of yarn. They couldn’t stay long but I was so touched that she remembered me, and I struggled to not just flat out start crying when she handed me the patterns. When I looked through them later I realized it was her entire personal collection from over the years, including all her personal notes and drawings and even some photographs of her finished pieces. No one in my family knits, and to have someone pass on their legacy to me like that was incredibly moving.

This isn’t what I usually post here, but with life being especially dark lately I wanted to share a moment of happiness and a reminder that a bit of kindness goes a long way ♡

lesbianrey

i can’t even quite articulate what it’s like to be socialized on tumblr from a teenager to adulthood without sounding insane…. it did a lot of damage to me unquestionably but also i genuinely feel like I Am Built Different than my peers who did not have that same experience. actually you know what it’s literally just the blade runner ‘i’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, moments lost in time like tears in rain’ speech….i am cringe but i am free

#not to mention that because of tumblr i didn’t turn out as an uber conservative church of christ submissive doormat

alisonzai

#about

no-longer-pheonix-inside

Reblog if you're queer, have ADHD, or hate the government.

Nobody needs to know which one.

ghost-of-a-dreamer

Reblog if you're all three and you want everyone to know.

#all 3

zeldaspeaks

cleaning with ADHD is a nightmare. it’s an endless cycle of finding a half-finished chore and stopping the one you were already working on, then remembering that something else needs to be done and getting started on that, then finding half-finished chore and

jumpingjacktrash

i have the solution! i call it ‘junebugging’.

have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.

how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.

go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.

nt’s will go crazy watching you, and if they demand to know When You Will Be Done you will probably have to roll them in a carpet and stuff them up the chimney. you’re done when you feel done, or you’re too bored to live, or it’s bedtime, or any number of other markers, you get to pick. but the thing is, by returning repeatedly to that one spot, you harness the ‘hyperactivity’ part instead of wasting all that energy battling with the ‘attention deficit’ part.

not only will the bathroom sink almost certainly be clean, and probably the mirror and soap dish too, you might’ve swapped in a fresh toothbrush, a new soap, you might’ve unclogged the drain – you will probably also have cleaned or fixed up several things in the near vicinity, or in the path between the sink and where you get the fresh toothbrush, or maybe you did your grocery shopping cuz you were out of soap, or maybe you couldn’t find a clean hand towel and ended up doing laundry.

this is good. you got shit done! it wasn’t necessarily Cleaned The Bathroom in the way nt’s think of it, but screw ‘em. things are better than they were.

plus you worked off enough energy to be able to sleep. which is not small potatoes when living the ADHD life. :D

spoonie-living

Don’t let the adorable name fool you—this is some Seriously Good Advice. May be useful for brain fog and depression, too!

#reference

shencomix

#silly things

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

a post apocalyptic world but instead of the mad max nonsense basic bros are in love with, most of us just join farming communities

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

do u know how many people actively enjoy growing their own food & creating their own clothes & crafts? when this capitalist hellscape collapses you’re nuts if you think we’re not taking advantage of that

virgo-of-carpathia

The post apocalypse is the farmer’s market renaissance you imagine, but everyone still dresses like they’re extras from Mad Max for the aesthetic.

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

my eyes have been opened

#the dream

boykeats

shout out to my fave under-appreciated unbreakable transgender hero

nonbinerdy-blog

The thing that gets me is he didn’t ASK for the impenetrable skin. Poseidon was just like “cool cool but you know what you need? skin of IRON. don’t worry bud it’s on the house”

enjolras-in-valinor

so… Poseidon made his trans boyfriend bulletproof. alright.

tuffboyfancylad-deactivated2017

I’ve been thinking about that last thing all day and

I’m pretty sure I have a new ship…

ozandtherealboy

Sharing this here because everyone seemed to really like the first one and I’m so pleased with the way my dumb drawing came out

jezebelgoldstone

You know what the ABSOLUTE BEST PART of this is?

Caeneus wishes for a man’s body– and Poseidon doesn’t sigh and half-ass it, doesn’t break up with him for no longer having a female form, doesn’t even simply carry out Caeneus’s wish to the letter.

No no.

My boy Poseidon decides to give his boyfriend something EVEN BETTER just because.

It’s like he couldn’t contain himself; like he couldn’t even deal with how in love with Caeneus he was.

MALE FORM? DONE. WHAT ELSE CAN I GIVE MY LITERAL FAVE? I KNOW. I KNOW. I WILL MAKE SURE NO ONE CAN EVER, EVER HARM HIM. FOR ANY REASON. I WILL KEEP HIM SAFE EVEN BEYOND THE REACH OF GODS AND TIME. I JUST LOVE HIM SO MUCH.

bobbybobertson

Okay I don’t know if we’re all looking at the same image or not but it says that Caeneus was raped by posedion. It goes on to say that the wish was to have a male form so that they couldn’t be raped again. And then Poseidon proceeds to make a joke of it by giving him impenetrable skin, so that Caeneus can’t be penetrated. This isn’t a “oh by the by I’m trans and want to be seen as man physicaly” this is “oh hey so that no one every forces themselves upon me agian I want to not have a vagina.” And if I have to explain the reason why the skin that can’t be penetrated, it’s a joke about rape y'all :/ This isn’t Percy Jackson, it’s actual Greek mythology and actual Greek mythology can be terrible.

Though I mean I do like this version that Tumblr has made, I feel like it’s important to not bury the fact that this was a rape by making the these two male lovers. Let’s have Caeneus be a trans icon separate from Posiedon if anything.

monzterzack

i was about to have a stroke because everyone was ignoring the RAPED BY POSEIDON part

listen, representation is good but please dont…. dont make them be lovers when it is pretty obvious poseidon was a huge piece of shit

loser-freak-beheader

I noticed that and was like increasingly becoming more uncomfortable as I went through the post

psycada

ok usually i don’t reblog discourse-y stuff but this is the WEIRDEST glitch i have seen on tumblr- some people are reading a post that has completely different wording than others

The wording here says “he was abducted by Poseidon, who fell in love with him.” So the implicated here is that he was first kidnapped, and afterwards Poseidon fell on love. But on mobile:

This is the version says “he was raped by Poseidon.” and that he wanted to be a man “so that he may never suffer the same thing again.”

I have no idea how this has happened. This is the same post, not edited, being viewed on the same blog, on desktop and mobile. There’s discourse going on in the notes about the fanart, but the person who made it has probably only seen the desktop version and not the mobile version.

ariasune

This is such a wild glitchy discourse, I’m honestly fascinated by this. Neither side knows what the other is talking about.

glumshoe

This is INCREDIBLY weird. I see different versions when I switch between app and browser, too. How would that even happen? Did the OP upload one screencap and later updated it with a different screencap, and for some reason Tumblr is disseminating both images as one?

Anyway, there’s a lot of outrage in the notes that only makes sense if you see the mobile version. On mobile it appears that people are blithely romanticizing a rape when they are in fact interacting with an innocent version of the same post… how weird.

(Note: there are a lot of versions of the same Greek myths that were often told very differently by different storytellers, so if people are free to create consensual and minimally creepy versions of Hades and Persephone, I think the same liberties should be permitted for other myths.)

thenightling

There’s a very high chance that the consensual version of the Persephone myth actually is the original. For starters, rape originally didn’t just mean against the will of the person whose body was being exploited but also it could mean against the will of the parents.

Hades’ courtship with Persephone was actually a very traditional Greek courtship EXCEPT he didn’t gain the mother’s permission first. Also Persephone, being a demi-Goddess, did not physically NEED to eat anything down in the underworld. Have you ever eaten a pomegranate? Those things are full of seeds. Each “seed” (or “jewel”) is actually like a juice filled, crisp (like the white of apple in texture) berry. She went out of her way to only eat six. (or in some versions, half the seeds). She wanted to stay there.

And later myths show that she was more the dominant ruler of The Underworld in myths such as the story of Orpheus. She was also a hard-core Goth who thought giving a box containing Death-sleep was a delightful wedding present.

Also I can confirm I’m on PC desktop Tumblr and the top post most assuredly says “abducted” in this version.

sunagirl

UM WHAT

I’m currently looking at it on both and uh…

YEAH

thenightling

So weird. Posts shouldn’t change like that from format to format. The Gods are messing with us.

ree-fireparrot

That is a weird and worrisome glitch. Makes me wonder what news and political posts might have the same issue…

#BIG RIP

untitled54184

No matter how many times you fail to meet your own expectations, you have to forgive yourself. Despite contrary belief, dwelling on and badgering yourself over your faults doesn’t ever help you grow into who you want to be.

It’s like gardening: if your flower isn’t blossoming like you want it to, you don’t rip out its leaves as punishment for failing to satisfy you. You recognize the problem and figure out what’s going wrong with its environment so you can modify it, giving the flower a chance to bloom in its own time.

Accept your shortcoming or setback, forgive yourself, and figure out what’s going wrong so that you can plan for how to prevent it from repeating in the future. Thank your past self for trying in the first place and then give your future self the love needed to flourish.

naamahdarling

I am almost affronted at how good and forgiving this advice is.

Flawless positivity.

naamahdarling

Listen.

I read once, don’t remembet where or know if it’s true, that in order to train an animal and to remain good friends with it, you need a 5/1 ratio of positive vs. negative interactions. So for every interaction that the animal considers negative - pilling a cat, for example - you need FIVE positive interactions, such as treats, cuddles, play, or praise if you want to remain on the best possible terms with it.

This applies to your relationship with yourself.

If you aren’t positively interacting with yourself but are instead consistently berating, punishing, or being disgusted with yourself, you are 100% going to have a lot of emotional pain.

You aren’t perfect. Nobody is and nobody should feel like they have to be. You will make mistakes. And contrary to what a lot of folks, self included, seem to believe, being mean to yourself because you think you “deserve” it won’t actually help you learn or becone a better person.

All it does is teach you not to trust yourself, and teach you that you will always disappoint yourself. You take on a toxic relationship with yourself where you play both parts. It’s terrible.

So yes, you HAVE to learn to forgive yourself. You actually cannot grow effectively in the confines of a toxic relationship. Including one you have with yourself.

I know it isn’t easy, I have a hard time too, but it is so, so necessary.

jadelyn

You can’t hate yourself into being happy.

I don’t remember where I read this but it literally changed my life and how I approach growth and personal development. It can be hard to keep in mind sometimes, but it puts it in a way that’s hard to argue with.

#i need to remember this

catchymemes

#wtf??

glumshoe

I made a generator so you too can find your futuristic unisex sci-fi name.

glumshoe

I am going to change my name IRL to Rat Parabola.

glumshoe

ahdjsbsgdh I didn’t even consider this combination

you-had-me-at-zug-zug

RAT CORONA

doh-rae-me

From now on I will only answer to the name RUE SKYWALKER.

forthegothicheroine

I have become a million times cooler now that I am Lee Stardust.

#lex epsilon

shirleyjacksons

i know this will make me sound old and boring but once i’m home for the night i’m home. i don’t like upsetting my plans even when i don’t have any. yes it’s only 8pm but i spent the whole evening believing i’m not going anywhere, i cannot perceive or be perceived right now, try again later

#about