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AnnoyinglySweetFire

@annoyinglysweetfire

Today is Wet Beast Wednesday!

Today’s wet beast is: Hadal Snailfish

Olive’s wet beast fact: this little guy just broke the record for deepest fish ever recorded! 8,336 meters below sea level! Let’s fucking go boys!

Stay tuned for more Wet Beast Wednesdays!

Writing Legend and Folklore

                Unlike mythology, legends are more rooted in historical events and may even have recorded, proven details. Your legend will likely feature real humans as characters experiencing something that happened in a real place in your world. The fun things about legends is that often the truth of the past has been twisted and changed over time. While it’s important for you as the writer to know the absolute truth about your history, your characters may never learn the truth behind the legend, or may trade slightly different alternate stories.

                Legends reflect the values or fears of a society. Much of Folklore comes from parents intending to shield their children from danger—whether going out at night and getting snatched by the boogeyman, or wandering too close to the rapids and being dragged in by a dangerous Kelpie. So start with a real value or danger, and begin to embellish.

                Maybe in your world society really values compassion. A tale may start out with someone hoarding resources and ignoring those in need which then manifests a shadow monster that gobbles both them and their riches right up! Name the monster, and you have a campfire-worthy folk tale for your characters to tell late into the night.

                Or, if your legend has no moral or lesson, it may feature something unexplainable that happened to real people. Stories you hear of disappearing cities or villages come from this place—people witnessing something or experiencing something they can’t explain, and creating a story to explain it anyway.

                The original teller of this story, or the original source, should be difficult if not impossible to track down, to make sure it remains shrouded in mystery.

                Does your world feature any legends or folktales? Let me know!

The elven children have a ceremony to summon their spirit animals. Most get unicorns, phoenixes, fire salamanders etc. One kid ends up summoning a human, smoking a cigar and sporting a hefty shotgun.

Apparently some people couldn't access the Neurodivergent Insights website on a recent post, so here's the graphs for those interested.

these are great charts but I wanted to correct some of the info on the schizophrenia vs autism chart. it lists repetitive behavior and echolalia as traits that don't appear in schizophrenia but this isn't true, both of those are schizophrenia symptoms. specifically, they're catatonic schizophrenia symptoms (but they can appear in other subtypes too)

(also op I know you didn't make them and are just sharing them but I felt like it's important to put this information out there)

Stuff I’ve learned about social interaction in the past few years that nobody taught me:

  • When complaining it’s important to point out that you’re not mad at people who like the thing you hate (like yeah it’s fine if people like astrology I just do not get it)
  • If you want to keep a conversation going you need to give more than one word answers and ask questions
  • Small talk becomes a lot more fun when you realize it’s a way to show you’re interested in the other person and a way to find out more about them. “Shallow” topics like the weather or what job someone has are fine.
  • You need to tell people when they break your boundaries if you want your boundaries to be known. People aren’t mind readers. And if you set conditions, stick to them.
  • The idea that you should just know what people want from you without them saying is toxic and telling people that they need to communicate their wants and needs with you doesn’t make you the bad guy
  • It’s fine to have a few canned phrases to respond to cashiers and waiters with. Nobody cares. Manners and social scripts exist to keep us all civil even when we’re feeling rotten.
  • If people invite you to hang out it usually means they like hanging out with you. You can express your appreciation for people by inviting them to hang out as well. The act of inviting someone to hang out is not rude.

My ADHD tip of the day/new personal philosophy is: BUY MULTIPLES.

Anything you spend a lot of time looking for, have a bunch around the house. There's no reason you can't have three sticks of deodorants in different rooms or masks in every coat pocket or anxiety pills in every cabinet (the literal worst thing I can ever imagine is being unable to find my propranolol during a panic attack)

I'm old enough to know I'm never going to be a "just leave it in the same place every time" person so I'm just leaning into it. I can always find *one of* the hair brushes after all.

[do make sure you don't drive your roommates crazy leaving shit all over the place though]

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I think a good analogy for me personally at least is like, being autistic and needing/having routines/habits and needing to know scheduldes and the like is like my brain is a train or car (insert joke here about trains and autistics), while allistic's brains walk on foot.

Not in the sense that "trains and cars are faster" but in the sense that trains and cars need roads and traintracks to be able to actually get places. The space outside of the road/tracks is intraversible to them.

So like in this analogy, the road/tracks are the familiarity of a routine, or a specific way of doing something. If I wanna get to a specific place (aka do a specific habit), I have to take the roads/tracks, even if that way is more indirect than what an allistic would do (in this analogy, simply walking there). Because if I don't take the road/tracks, I'm gonna damage the car/train, get stuck, or just not move at all. It's mentally taxing and feels like groping around in the dark, and all around causes stress that would've been saved by just following the road/tracks.

And in the case of needing to know a lot of details of situations before going into them, it's like the road/tracks have to be properly built before my train/car brain can traverse the activity. If I don't have enough of a sense of what's going on, the roads/tracks aren't properly built, which makes it difficult and stressful, or impossoble, for me to traverse. If I don't have enough time to internalize things, the roads/tracks are gonna be low quality, which again makes it difficult, stressful, or impossible for me to traverse.

Meanwhile allistics can just walk across whatever terrain without issue, and will then be like "Well I can walk around in this rocky field okay, so you just need to learn to drive your car through it immediately actually."

They stole you from your world when you were but a young girl, and they forged you into a magical weapon that has been feared across the cosmos. Now that the war is over and you’ve won, they send you back to the moment before they captured you. The skills, PTSD, and memories? Those never fade.

I think tumblr attracts Neurodivergent people because this is basically parallel play and sharing interests or putting scripts with matching photos things which the autism and adhd community love to do