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Appley

@appleyfrog

they/them

when i was a kid I was really bad (or really good depending on your definition) at hidden object games. which is to say that I would not specifically search for the objects the book asked me to look for. no. that would make no sense. what i instead did was open a spreadsheet

i then proceeded to list every single object in the image in my excel spreadsheet, highlighting the objects the book asked me to find in red as i went. Then, by the end, not only had i found the objects, I had also found and categorized all of the other objects as well. This way, if anyone asked me to find any other objects in that image, i was fully prepared

on an unrelated note i was diagnosed as autistic before third grade

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You used the letter a 46 times!!

And 555 letters, so the letter a is about 8.29%

The letter a is on average used about 8.2% of the time, which means you used it more than average!! :)

a-counter you are my best friend and greatest ally

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Which is why it’s important to not be mean.

Their cult teaches them that the world is full of scary monster people who hate them for being so good and loved by god. If you swear at them and call them names or get in their face you’re just doing the cults work for it.

I’m not saying you have to listen to their presentation or try to debate them (and really getting into a debate without thoroughly understanding what they’re being taught will just make things worse)… I am just saying to be polite and say no thank you like if they were trying to hand you a flyer for something you don’t care about.

It’s easier for them to see the world outside their bubble as less scary if they see everyday people just going about their business and being as nice to them as you are to everyone else. This goes doubly for anyone who happens to dress modestly, not swear, and not drink or smoke because whatever you believe, they’ll see you as a “good” person who happens to strangely have no interest in their “message”, and that might be enough to get some curious about the possibility of themselves living in the real world.

It’s sometimes hard to be nice to people who seem to represent something you dislike. Just remember these “elders” are sheltered young men, some of which are getting their first real contact with people of other/no faiths.

They are not your enemy. They are victims.

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They aren't being sent out to actually convert people, they are being sent out hoping that they will be harassed and treated poorly so they view those outside the cult as dangerous and evil and stick to the safety of the familiar group.

You being mean to some teenager isn't sticking it to anyone, you're doing exactly what their church elders want to happen.

PLEASE READ THIS.

Please read this.

Don't do the church's work for them.

If you're kind to enough of them, they put you on a block list.

They were such sweet kids, they'd turn up at my door with the thatch of raspberries out front and try to share their word with me, and I'm me, so, I fed them.

Then it was one of the wee 'elder's' birthday, so I made him a cake, and all the little lads came, and they asked about my books and board games and CCGs, I was just a nice frumpy middle aged Jewish lady, I was no threat, so I fed them and made them cakes and took them to the local gaming store and listened when they talked.

One loved yu-gi-oh cards, and it turns out, one of the other wee lads, we'll he loved him back, so I got them in touch with some resources so they had support and a different way to pay for college, they're still together 15 years later, they have dogs, they send me ecards on their birthday. No-one figured out I'd.helped them, I was just the nice lady who made them tea and listened when people were slamming doors.

The next one really wanted to be an artist, so I left out art books and resources, my eldest shared their coptic markers, they draw comic books now, no idea why his folks were insisting he needed to be a dentist, but, he's not a Mormon anymore, (not a Jew either before anyone makes any counter conversion claims).

The first 2 lads were the only dramatic ones, the rest went back into the network but, like Hugh of Borg, they spread the word, sometimes I'd get Mormons from other cities come and make the journey to break bread at my Sabbath table and be seen.

I still think very fondly of that time.

Many of those boys still email me now and then.

Most of them aren't Mormons anymore.

Someone higher up spotted the pattern and suddenly no more Mormons at my door.

I was blacklisted, for kindness.

So there you go, if you don't want Mormons at your door, just love those kids for a couple of years, feed them, help them, and eventually, no more will be allowed to visit

As an ex-Mormon myself, I agree with everything posted above. At church every week, I would hear story after story about people being persecuted for being Mormon, about how it’s such a trial and burden to be a member of the “one true church”. I would hear over and over how the original Mormons were forced to move across the US to Utah (so they could practice polygamy in peace, but they don’t tell you that part).

They form martyr complexes about being special but constantly persecuted by anyone not-Mormon. If your family is all Mormon, leaving is a HUGE deal and they will talk about it constantly and how they “hope you will return one day”.

Showing these kids kindness, ESPECIALLY if you are not Mormon yourself, will open their eyes to the fact that the world is not a terrible place outside the church. Many have doubts, but are scared that they will never be happy if they leave. By showing them that they can, it makes staying seem less like their only chance at happiness.

For that matter, this helps with every type of cult.

i have an opposite of bullying technique every artfight where i sniff out ppl who are like 13 and i mass compliment their stuff w a drawing. everyone should do this. get your friends to do it, like a biker gang

i articulated this rather sloppily so, agreeing with people in the tags, encouraging kids with ocs from fandoms you may have grown up with that were seen as “cringey” is incredibly cathartic. giving art to beginner or struggling artists boosts their spirit during artfight as well. you or a group of your friends showing anyone who might be ignored because of their interests or their skill not being “good enough” that You Care is just a cool thing to do and will probably make your younger self happy too. if you have the time, go for it!

lowering the social stigma of gender nonconformity also lowers the threshold of how bad people have to be suffering before they’re willing to discuss their feelings openly. I guarantee you that a TON of humans who felt vaguely alienated by/uncomfortable with their assigned gender have lived and died within a cisgender identity framework, because the enormous social cost of being honest just wasn’t worth it if they weren’t miserable. that was a bad thing!

letting people weigh their options for themselves without putting a thumb on the scale is freeing. so of course we’ve started hearing people discuss wildly unusual ways of experiencing gender. it does not matter whether the teenagers who made up the goofy-sounding new gender term you’re annoyed about end up being capital-T trans or not. it just matters that they feel safe talking about it, because everyone benefits from that. you cannot lower one threshold without lowering the other. this is a feature, not a bug. this is a good thing!

Yes, and this is also why I’m such an advocate for pulling “crossdress“ and its derivatives back from the semi-stigmatized status as ‘outdated relics‘ within the queer community. Because even ignoring the way that “crossdressers and gnc folks are all just eggs”* rhymes well enough with “trans folks are just crossdressing“ that it may singlehandedly prove Horseshoe Theory, gender nonconformity is, in fact, alive and well as a separate phenomenon and should therefore not be lumped in with transgenderism.

I also want to expand OP’s second paragraph argument: Not only does destigmatizing gender nonconformity necessarily help destigmatize transsexuality, it can also help cis folks become more confident in their identity. There’s a post by @froody et al. about how “going through a period of questioning your gender that ends with ‘I am cis’ lets you unlock Cis+“ (1),  and that fact’s entirely true. Experimenting with your gender presentation can both provide more pleasing ways to present cis and (help) determine if you’re trans.

*See, eg. the misuse (2) of Will Wood’s I/Me/Myself by some of his fandom to claim that he’s trans, rather than cis and gnc.

And like, we should also accept that the grey area between ‘being trans’ and ‘being gendernonconforming and cis’ is very fucking blurry and always will be and some people can’t be coherently describes as trans or cis and that’s good. That space between yet another binary is a thing to treasure. 

tumblr users love to say "we don't censor things here like on Twitter" and then type things like "r3ylo" and "jk r*wling"

if you say "and then this fucking r3ylo-" that implies that "reylo" was the bad word in that sentence

tiktokers do it because they have to, we do it because it's mean ☺️

Okay I know this was mostly a joke but I just feel the need to point out - this didn't start out as being mean, it started - and largely continues - as the opposite.

For a long time, tumblr had tags and no other search function. You wanted to find a post that wasn't tagged, you had to go to Google and type in your query and add "site:tumblr.com" and hope for the best.

As it is now, that method is STILL better than our native search function most of the time, but the quality of tumblr's native search function isn't really what's important here, what's relevant is how they implemented it.

See, the search bar in the upper left corner of the site - you used to type in something there, and it would take you to posts tagged with whatever you searched. Then, one day, they quietly rolled out an update that instead brought you to a search page that pulled up nearly every post that even mentioned your search term.

This...did not mesh well with the site culture.

Because, see, we had an etiquette guideline - do not post your negativity in the public tags. Why? Because people go into the public tags to find content about things they LIKE. Posting hate in a public tag was basically seen as being a raging dramamongering pissbaby troll LOOKING to start a fight over petty nonsense.

So imagine, suddenly, you log in one day, and someone's sending you anons angry about you allegedly posting hate in the tags, when you have NEVER done so. You use what you THINK is the tag search function to prove it, and - what the hell? Your UNTAGGED post about how annoyed you are with your notp...is appearing there???

So people started censoring things like that. Usually not because we all think the thing we're complaining about is profane (though sometimes it does get a giggle to think of it as such), but to keep it from showing up when people are searching for what they love and to prevent pointless drama. To avoid looking like some asshole troll going onto a fan forum specifically for The Blorbo Show and making a thread entitled "THE BLORBO SHOW SUXXX AND YOU ALL SUCK FOR LIKING IT!!"

And now it's just part of our site culture, for both peacekeeping reasons and petty glee.

The more you know.

On tiktok, you censor for the algorithm. On Tumblr, you censor for the users.

Also sometimes we censor names as an act of disrespect.

you know the drill. Dislyte's movie poster redraw mission. +some alt versions cuz I couldn't decide on colors dkjfdsfksdf

Tumblr, buddy, listen to me. This is an unprecedented opportunity. You can snap up all of the pie here, and become defacto internet goodguy easy. All you gotta do is... drop the nsfw ban. Unambiguously. Announce that dicks are back on the menu. You want people subscribed the blogs? You want people to actually use your Post+ function? Porn. Let us use it for porn. The youngins aren't joining this site anyway, you're not competing with tiktok. The vaguely horny 20-40 demographic though? You can have that. You can have all of that. Think about it.

Do you know how many pinup artists alone are itching to come back to tumblr, but dont because of the unclear, seemingly arbitrary application of your nsfw policy? These are insanely talented people who are practically begging to give you content. For free. But you gotta change the policy. We can't keep dancing around this. Just think of publicity. The drama. A complete 180. You'd kill it tumblr. You could make it happen. Please.

So my two married-with-kids coworkers started asking me when I was going to get married and have kids earlier. And when I politely told them I wasn’t planning on it and tried to change the subject (because like fuck am I coming out as aroace at work), proceeded to tell me I’d change my mind and be married in no time.

So I went, “You wanna bet?” Told them to pick a time frame and sum of money and we’d have a wager. And one of them took me up on it. I was expecting her to put down a tenner or so, but she put down TWO HUNDRED QUID on me getting romantically involved in the next three years.

I would feel bad about taking the bet, except that 1) if someone specifically tells you they’re not interested in something and you bet against that it’s really on your own head, and 2) if you say something and someone grins at you delightedly and goes “care to bet on that” you should be really really suspicious.

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i cant stop thinking of this video i forgot where i saved it from last night. baby eat fish

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(Video: someone hand feeding a baby seal, two small fish.)