Every single time I see a take that amounts to "if you write about X happening, or like fiction where X happens, you like X" I'm reminded of this one time I was at a casual friends house as a young kid. We were in her room, pretending to "be orphans" escaping from an evil orphanage and having to take care of each other and fend for ourselves. It was all very Little Orphan Annie/All Dogs Go to Heaven and based on the 80s pop media.

And this girl's mom comes in, hears what we're playing and gets all MAD and UPSET. She says that if we play act something, it's because we want it to happen. So her daughter must WANT HER TO DIE.

First off lady, we were 6 year year olds, so take it down several notches. We barely had a concept of mortality for fucks sake. She made us feel so guilty and ashamed, because she was taking our game personally.

Now I have a 5 year old. And sometimes she looks at me and says "pretend you're dead, and I have to -" Whatever it is. Some adult task she's assigned herself.

And it's just so transparently obvious that she's practicing the idea of having to do things on her own. Which is exactly what 5 year olds are supposed to do. I actually find it very flattering that the only way she can envision me not being available to help her is to be literally deceased. Otherwise, obviously, she wouldn't have to do scary hard things alone.

It's a natural coping mechanism. She's self-soothing about what would happen if I wasn't there by play-acting independence in a perfectly safe environment. She's also practicing skills she needs, and making up excuses for practicing them on her own, without taking on the responsibility of being able to do them by herself all the time yet.

Humans mentally rehearse bad this in their brains all the time. We can do that by ruminating- going over worries over and over again, which tends to lead to anxiety and helplessness and depression. Or we can do it with a sense of play- by recognizing that the fiction is fiction and we can dip our toe into these experiences and expose ourselves to bad things without actually being injured.

My daughter does not want me dead. And I don't want bad things to happen in real life. But fiction and pretend help me face the horrors of the world and think about them without collapsing or messing myself up mentally.

Exactly this.

fiction is a safe space to think of unsafe things if you feel it's messing you up, step away. don't assume it's messing everyone up and you need to eradicate it because you caught a case of the feel-bads from something. go sit with that and think about why instead of pissing in everyone else's cheerios.

this post altered my brain so now whenever i have a bowl of any food i think Oh fuck yes it’s a little bowl of seeds for me

Happy Pride! Especially for my SEAsian folks!

(Please do not steal these, tq. Ask if you’d like to use it somewhere.)

wanted to share some of my bird art i made before coming to tumblr! i’m a huge bird fan <3 some of them were either made digitally, with acrylic paint, colored pencil, or pencil. the heron mosaic piece was actually made with cut construction paper!

I love your use of color and brushwork l, the Bluejay is my favorite

you ever accidentally create a recurring theme in your writing. you start putting together an outline for something you’ve never written before and get partway through planning, rearrange the pieces, and go “GODDAMMIT THIS IS ABOUT GRIEF AGAIN”? because let me tell you,

Time for rainbows! :D

This person's dad is the only person in the world who watches sports correctly

The cedar waxwings blew through a few weeks ago. As a species, their M.O. is to show up like locusts, eat every berry in the state, poop on everyone's cars, and then vanish within a day. I respect it, i suppose.

please watch this tiktok (x)

There’s no way to tell where this goes.

literally fuck companies that don't want their employees to act "unprofessional" in front of customers. I'm at a five guys rn and the employees here are joking around calling orders back and forth to each other and saying things in weird voices and laughing with each other while they work. Someone just came in for their shift while I was waiting for my food and was greeted by the whole kitchen with a secret handshake lookin thing. It was so silly and cute I love seeing ppl have fun at work and I know my food's gonna be bomb bc the ppl there are having fun with each other. Let employees be people and friends and have fun what is the issue!!!!

Hate to be the guy who takes this post very seriously but the reason bosses don’t like this and don’t encourage it is because what follows is talking about wages and treatment at work and then unionizing lol

This

I was at the coffeeshop in the village and someone asked me how my llamas are doing, and a woman overheard and told me that when she was a kid, her parents used to have a couple of llamas in their sheep farm, and every single sheep in their flock imprinted on one of the two llamas. Each sheep chose the best most charismatic llama according to mysterious sheep criteria, and never wavered in their ovine loyalty. Each of the two llamas was worshiped by a small sub-flock of devoted sheep who followed him everywhere like Jesus’s apostles and only left their field for transhumance when led by “their” llama. The funniest thing is the way this woman overheard the word “llama” and immediately came to sit next to me to tell me this, like she had waited since childhood to share her bewilderment about the two religious congregations of sheep led by rival llama prophets in her family farm.

I’d have trouble keeping that in myself.

i love how 100k of us feel the same need to tell everyone that she felt

48hr tumblr blackout proposal

tumblr mobile has seadily become near unusable these past few updates. not just from a user experience perspective (which is important enough in itself) but also from an accessibility perspective.

examples include the new way the image viewer works (if you can call it "working"), the tumblr live button replacing the profile button, and that newly created blogs will be forced to have their main dashboard tab be the 'for you' page.

the demands of the protest would be along the lines of:

to protest against these usability issues, and inspired by the recent reddit blackout, i propose a 48 hour blackout (where you don't use tumblr at all). preferably of both mobile and web (since web has problems too) but mobile is the focus here.

I suggest the 48 hours between the 30th of June to the end of the 1st of July.

this marks the end of pride month (for the "queerest place on the internet") and the start of disability month (since accessibility is a massive issue here).

tumblr office is in San Francisco, USA, so the times and dates will be calculated using their time zone (PDT).

you can find out the times and dates for your timezone here.

i can't afford to blaze this post so please spread it around as much as possible! protests only work if significant numbers show up!

tumblr rejected the blaze campaigns for this post because they know it would hurt them. let's make this an indefinite blackout - it's the best way to get results.

(so the blackout would be from June 30th onwards)

@one-time-i-dreamt @i-am-a-fish @lizluvscupcakes tagging some larger blogs to hopefully get the word out more

a terrifying chair that i would never sit in

I want my ass in this immediately

You: rolling around in office chair

Me: hanging from the ceiling waiting for prey to walk under me

happy summer to dykes in tank tops and basketball shorts, goths who's makeup is melting, little kids catching frogs and fireflies, guys who just bring their guitar everywhere now, 13 yr olds very obviously in their emo phase during a family vacation, gas station employees, old people sitting on porches, and dogs swimming at the beach

the return of the nightmare eyes!! i cant wait to meet you twigs! (busted this out in a day because im so excited for revenant hill)

get urself a man that... no i'm not actually sure what i'm doing up there...

OH HELL YEAH

peachy + mario doodlies I shared on the patreon eheh

Patreon | Ko-Fi

Good for this person. This is exactly what you do. Screw the job.

I had a job that made me work an all nighter, 30 hours straight, over Thanksgiving. I resigned that Monday and it was one of the most satisfying decisions I’ve ever made.

Part 3:

Please pay attention to all the manipulation tactics this boss uses, because they’re pulling out every trick in the book.

This is like a 101 course in how employers use guilt trips to coerce you into putting up with their bullshit. This is precisely why you should never trust those employers who insist that they’re “like a family.” They are not. It’s just a ruse so that your boss can neg you into putting your job ahead of your actual life.