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Lost in Thoughts All Alone

@echoharmonia

| Echo | 26 she/her | Pokemon, FE, tgcf, anime, games coming soon
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one day I woke up and realised all the waiting and yearning was actually me living my life and it’s happening right now and it’s still good even if it’s not perfect and there is no moment when all your dreams get fulfilled and everything makes sense. like… this is it. this is life. you’ll waste away your youth waiting for some imagined future if you don’t love life for what it is now and make the most of it

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Comic by @shhhitsfine

Ok some more bullshit for twitter refugees who need to learn the Tumblr Etiquettetm

  • Change your blog icon. Do not leave it as Tumblr default bc you will be seen as bots. Also helps if you change your URL to something fandom related/unhinged. urls like sarah-x-lynn will cause people to think you are a bot and block you
  • There's no algorithm. Whatever pops up on your dash is yours to deal with. Unfollow/block people as you please.
  • Again, there's no algorithm. The content on this site is user-circulated. Abuse the reblog button.
  • Abuse the tags. If there's something you wanna say on a post but don't want to intrude, use the tags.
  • Follower numbers don't matter here
  • There's no character limit on posts or in blog descriptions. You can post the bee movie script 50 times if you want. Go ham
  • This isn't twitter or tik tok or whatever. There's no need to censor yourself. Outright admit you want to kill a us senator, no one will judge you.
  • If you're gonna trigger tag something, don't censor it. Don't use like #r/pe tw use #rape tw
  • Lastly, don't be a dick to people. Abuse the block button for all it's worth.

played sims 4 for the first time and one of the married cis men had a desire to try for baby with his cis husband. i accidentally pinned it and could not unpin it. trying for baby is physically impossible. I tried to use cheats to give him a viable womb in create a sim but it wouldn’t let me do so retroactively. so I thought, maybe if they adopt the want for pregnancy will go away, and had them adopt a toddler daughter. but then the try for baby desire did not go away. since they now had an unwanted adopted child I tried to remove the toddler from the household, thinking this would send her back into the ether. it did not. instead she wanders the neighborhood like a feral cat. i thought the social worker would come and take her back so someone else could adopt her, but I guess there is no social worker in sims 4. so now the neighborhood is haunted by a smelly miserable baby that has no home but cannot die and everyone who sees her is uncomfortable. fucking omelas scenario.

no one is feeding her but every time she gets hungry she simply produces a carton of milk out of the ether and drinks it

So, when my dad was alive, he use to do this thing my mom and I would laugh about and jokingly tease him about. Instead of saying "I did the dishes" hed say, "I washed, rinsed and dried the dishes. I then put them away, loaded the other dishes in the dish washer and started the dish washer." A simple thing my mom or I would do ( "I did the cat litter") hed find a way to break it down to all of its components ("scoops the cat poop and pee and threw it away in the outside trash"). But now that hes gone and my mom is struggling with being disabled (something I've had to deal with for half my life, shes only just had to grow accustomed too) I told her she has to start thinking like my dad. Because when you are disabled each action IS broken in all those small details and it makes a difference.

So anyone struggling with physical disabilities (or even mental ones tbh) try and break down what you did. Chances are you did more than you realize. You didnt just take a shower. You went in your bathroom, undressed, got in the shower, washed your body, washed your face, washed your hair(and if you use condition then count this twice) rinsed off, got out of the shower, dried off, got dressed, put the towels away. That's a lot! And you need to give yourself credit for doing all of that.

Those idiots who keep saying "it's both sides" are part of the problem. In fact, they're most of the problem.

Marginalized people want to live their lives authentically and fully, bigots don’t want them to live at all. I can see both sides and think we should allow marginalized people to live but make things really difficult for them. I am very smart and empathetic.

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‘seeing both sides’ should fucking mean ‘I see that you want to exterminate people who are different from you, even in some laissez-faire free-market bullshit way. I see that very clearly. Stop it.’

In the same vein of cave paintings having children’s handprints higher than their height suggesting them being lifted up or sitting on the shoulders of adults, there’s footprints in Australia dating to the Ice Age showing a group of adults and children walking to a body a water, and one child breaking away from the group to seemingly skip in a wavy path until rejoining the group

This is like 20 thousand years ago! And the joy and happiness of going to water made this child playfully skip along! It’s universal! Dancing their way back to their family!

In a language we will never hear, a culture we’ll never know, with thoughts and ideas we can only imagine! There are millennia of untold moments of happiness, of human connection and warmth that are gone forever. But they still happened! Did that family even notice the tracks they left? How could they have known that that one day their impossibly distant descendants would be able to see the imprints they made?

Another set of tracks in the same area shows three men hunting a giant kangaroo, running at incredible speeds, but one of them had only one foot! They jumped along on one foot, every so often an imprint from a stick appearing. How did they lose their limb? An accident? A fight? A predator? Was it completely gone or maimed? Was it from birth? Either way this person was cared for by their family and was able to heal and participate fully in life! They most likely felt grief when their family member lost the use of their limb! Who cared for them? Who gave them the stick to help them walk? What kind of joy did their family feel when they made a recovery? Did someone shape and carve the stick? They certainly worked all of their other wooden tools, something as essential that would have been too.

This was during the ice age when Australia became a brutally cold, dry desert. Their entire food system had to change. By all indications it should have been a stark and difficult life of little resources. But no! They worked together! They looked after their wounded and sick! The speed that these hunters were running at was incredible and means they were well fed and healthy! A millennia of helping one another and caring for one another and all we can get are tiny glimpses of these moments did they catch the kangaroo did they laugh and congratulate each other when they did how happy were they to bring it back to their families I just

There were people who survived trephination long enough for bone to regrow over the hole. Can you even imagine the care that must have required, in prehistoric times with no sanitation or tech or medicine? We have proof, in the form of human remains, that disabled people who couldn’t have walked or fed themselves survived for years in the Stone Age. We have cave paintings that were clearly made by an adult and a child together, one teaching the other.

The past was brutal, but that doesn’t mean everyone who lived in it was.

yo does anyone else feel CONSTANTLY guilty? like you’ve always done something wrong but you don’t know what it is?

Yes, and I’ve spoken to my therapist about it, who offered an explanation:

She says that people who from a young age were made to feel like they kept doing things wrong - people who’s parents had impossibly high standards for them, people who were bullied, people who have special needs, people who didn’t develop crushes on the “right” people, people who didn’t act like the “right” gender - basically ended up being made to feel guilty so much that guilt became their default response to everything. Guilt became the emotional response to anything which the person didn’t already have a set emotion for.

People for whom guilt is the default emotional response are also more likely to have low self-esteem, doubt their own experiences, and experience impostor syndrome. So, watch out for that too guys

Oh no it makes sense

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Vsauce videos show neurotypical people what it’s like to have ADHD

“The actor who played Air Bud, Buddy the dog, passed away in 1998 at the age of 9.”

[He removes a candle from a small cake and sets it down on the table before him, alongside eight other candles.]

“Now, take a look at this.”

[He orients the first eight candles to form a pair of W’s, spelling out “WWI” altogether.  The usual Vsauce music fades out, replaced with an unsettling low tone.]

“Let’s talk about World War I.”

why would you leave this in the tags

[ID: screenshot of a tag reading “my brain is like if every word in a wikipedia article was clickable” /End ID]

Fred Hampton Jr visiting his father on Father’s Day…his grave is annually shot by local police

.Some context for this:

-Fred Hampton was a black activist from Chicago – an extraordinary speaker, youth organizer for the NAACP. 

-He joined the Black Panthers and shone so brightly that he was made chair of the Chicago chapter when he was only 20.

-He founded the Rainbow Coalition, which brought together Black and Latino activists and radical anti-poverty Catholics.  He forged an alliance among major Chicago street gangs to help them make peace and work for social change.

-In 1967, when he was just 19, Hampton was identified by the FBI as a “radical threat.” The FBI tried to subvert his activities in Chicago, sowing disinformation to get the groups he’d drawn together to distrust each other, and getting an FBI plant next to him as a bodyguard.  

-(This is part of an illegal FBI program called COINTELPRO, which aimed to paint black civil rights activists (among others) as violent and threatening.  If you’ve only seen pictures of the Black Panthers as armed and dangerous revolutionaries, and never heard of their children’s breakfast program, their community health clinics, or their “copwatch” patrols, this is why.   It’s because COINTELPRO was a highly successful work of political propaganda.)  

-On December 3, 1969, Hampton taught a political education course at a local church, and then several Panthers gathered at his apartment for a late dinner.  One of them was the FBI plant bodyguard, who drugged Hampton.  

-At 4:45 AM on December 4, a squad of Chicago Police officers and FBI agents with a warrant to search for weapons stormed the apartment. Investigations later showed they fired between 90 and 99 times.  The Panther on security detail, Mark Clark, was holding a shotgun.  He was shot, and the gun went off into the ceiling.  This was the only shot fired by the Panthers. 

-Fred Hampton, in another room, didn’t awaken.  He was shot in his bed.  Twice, in the head, at point-blank range.  He was 21.  

-Four weeks after witnessing Hampton’s death, his finance Deborah Johnson gave birth to their son, Fred Hampton Jr.  That’s him in the photograph, visiting the grave of a father who died before he was born.  A resting place riddled with bullets.  

You can say what you want about the police “protecting and serving” but, what is shooting a man’s grave PROTECTING? Somebody tell me.

hayao miyazaki on ableism re: AI depicting “zombie”-like movements:

presenter:

miyazaki:

the last part usually gets quoted out of context as a meme or to paint miyazaki as an unreasonable grump but he was speaking against the ableist usage of disabled people’s movements for shock value & evoking ‘grotesquery.’

emotional abuse is when someone does something to hurt you, and when you express your feelings, that you’re upset, they turn it around to be something you did to hurt them and they force you to apologize for it, and your feelings, like always, are rendered invalid and silenced, forever damaging the ability to trust others with your feelings because they always are used against you.

this is important because so many people don’t know this

Writing advice #?: Have your characters wash the dishes while they talk.

This is one of my favorite tricks, picked up from E.M. Forester and filtered through my own domestic-homebody lens.  Forester says that you should never ever tell us how a character feels; instead, show us what those emotions are doing to a character’s posture and tone and expression.  This makes “I felt sadness” into “my shoulders hunched and I sighed heavily, staring at the ground as my eyes filled with tears.”  Those emotions-as-motions are called objective correlatives.  Honestly, fic writers have gotten the memo on objective correlatives, but sometimes struggle with how to use them.

Objective correlatives can quickly become a) repetitive or b) melodramatic.  On the repetitive end, long scenes of dialogue can quickly turn into “he sighed” and “she nodded” so many times that he starts to feel like a window fan and she like a bobblehead.  On the melodramatic end, a debate about where to eat dinner can start to feel like an episode of Jerry Springer because “he shrieked” while “she clenched her fists” and they both “ground their teeth.”  If you leave the objective correlatives out entirely, then you have what’s known as “floating” dialogue — we get the words themselves but no idea how they’re being said, and feel completely disconnected from the scene.  If you try to get meaning across by telling us the characters’ thoughts instead, this quickly drifts into purple prose.

Instead, have them wash the dishes while they talk.

To be clear: it doesn’t have to be dishes.  They could be folding laundry or sweeping the floor or cooking a meal or making a bed or changing a lightbulb.  The point is to engage your characters in some meaningless, everyday household task that does not directly relate to the subject of the conversation.

This trick gives you a whole wealth of objective correlatives.  If your character is angry, then the way they scrub a bowl will be very different from how they’ll be scrubbing while happy.  If your character is taking a moment to think, then they might splash suds around for a few seconds.  A character who is not that invested in the conversation will be looking at the sink not paying much attention.  A character moderately invested will be looking at the speaker while continuing to scrub a pot.  If the character is suddenly very invested in the conversation, you can convey this by having them set the pot down entirely and give their full attention to the speaker.

A demonstration:

1

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
“What?”  Drizella continued dropping forks into the dishwasher.

2

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella paused midway through slotting a fork into the dishwasher.  “What?”

3

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
Drizella laughed, not looking up from where she was arranging forks in the dishwasher.  “What?”

4

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
The forks slipped out of Drizella’s hand and clattered onto the floor of the dishwasher.  “What?”

5

“I’m leaving,” Anastasia said.
What?”  Drizella shoved several forks into the dishwasher with unnecessary force, not seeming to notice when several bounced back out of the silverware rack.

See how cheaply and easily we can get across Drizella’s five different emotions about Anastasia leaving, all by telling the reader how she’s doing the dishes?  And all the while no heads were nodded, no teeth were clenched.

The reason I recommend having it be one of these boring domestic chores instead of, say, scaling a building or picking a lock, is that chores add a sense of realism and are low-stakes enough not to be distracting.  If you add a concurrent task that’s high-stakes, then potentially your readers are going to be so focused on the question of whether your characters will pick the lock in time that they don’t catch the dialogue.  But no one’s going to be on the edge of their seat wondering whether Drizella’s going to have enough clean forks for tomorrow.

And chores are a cheap-n-easy way to add a lot of realism to your story.  So much of the appeal of contemporary superhero stories comes from Spider-Man having to wash his costume in a Queens laundromat or Green Arrow cheating at darts, because those details are fun and interesting and make a story feel “real.”  Actually ask the question of what dishes or clothing or furniture your character owns and how often that stuff gets washed.  That’s how you avoid reality-breaking continuity errors like stating in Chapter 3 that all of your character’s worldly possessions fit in a single backpack and in Chapter 7 having your character find a pair of pants he forgot he owns.  You don’t have to tell the reader what dishes your character owns (please don’t; it’s already bad enough when Tolkien does it) but you should ideally know for yourself.

Anyway: objective correlatives are your friends.  They get emotion across, but for low-energy scenes can become repetitive and for high-energy scenes can become melodramatic.  The solution is to give your characters something relatively mundane to do while the conversation is going on, and domestic chores are not a bad starting place.

I actually first learned this lesson when doing improv. Always have your character doing something, but don’t make the scene about what your character is doing. Come in and start putting groceries away and confront your roommate about sleeping with your boyfriend while you’re putting the groceries away. Be working in a clothes store folding shirts and be reunited with your long-lost cousin while working. Etc etc.

And then much later (partially bc I started writing regularly years after I started doing improv but even then it took me way too long to figure it out) I realized this can be applied to writing, and it’s great. Anytime there’s a long dialogue scene and it feels flat, rewriting it so they’re doing something else - something that on the surface is totally unrelated to the conversation - is a sure-fire way to make it more dynamic and open up whole new avenues for conveying thoughts and feelings to the reader.