For @curlicuecal ! A box elder bug, I believe. They like to winter inside our house. :) Which is okay nowadays, though it used to cause some problems when we had incandescent lamps that they would fly into and get cooked in. :/ Not a pleasant smell, and kind of a sad end for some rather handsome bugs.

They like to swarm on the warm bricks around our house during the warmer seasons, too. Their young ones are kind of goofy looking, though I don’t have any pictures of them to hand!

Not just incandescent, halogen. The ones they later recalled and stopped manufacturing (because they pointed up, caught a bunch of dust, also curtains, and occasionally went up in flames and burned down a couple of houses).

“Not a pleasant smell” also doesn’t cover it. “Horrible vapor and smoke of doom from dead box elder bugs” is a tad closer. It was horrid.

You could hear the *pfzzt* as they got onto the bulb’s shield, and then this wisp of smoke just prettily came up. Then you had to clear the room for a while and turn on some fans.

Quick fun fact I learned in ASL class:

Babies can begin signing as early as a few months old. You don’t have to wait until they’re 9-12 months to start communicating verbally; the parts of the brain that process and use language develop before a baby is able to speak intelligibly with their mouth. Teaching your kid sign language early means that they can communicate effectively months ahead of schedule, when compared to peers that only speak a spoken language.

Additional fun fact: this jumpstart in language is thought to be a possible way to avoid the “Terrible Twos”; that phase of a toddler’s life is thought to be largely due to a toddler being unable to effectively communicate their needs. If a two year old has already been speaking for a year and a half, they’re far more able to communicate to you what’s wrong. Heck, they might also start reading earlier; languages with a fingerspelling component, like ASL, mean that any speaker needs to be able to spell unfamiliar words and ask about them. This can jumpstart a toddler’s ability to recognize letters as components of a word, and teach them to spell, read, and eventually write these letters to communicate.

Which, of course, lends absolutely zero credence to the theory that ASL will inherently stunt someone’s spoken language skills. If anything, sign language fluency makes acquiring any language, spoken or not, easier rather than harder.

So I have heard this a few times, but you know where I heard it first? From people who had just had kids and researched it and decided to try it.

It worked. It worked great. Their kids could communicate preferences much earlier than they would have been able to talk, and the communications meant that they could solve problems that non-signing parents would never have been able to even detect, they could teach the kids about agency, and so on. They could distinguish "don't like this food" from "don't want more food right now". They could distinguish "tired" from "diaper full" quicker and with less unpleasantness.

No evidence of any downsides. Definitely a cool idea.

this site has one setting

I’m laughing, but there’s a super useful corollary, which my husband calls “the Red Balloon.” He was a defense lawyer and had a fair number of drug addicts come through, and there is a thing where if you’re like, on your first offense, they’ll do a thing where you can go to treatment and if you complete it they’ll take the conviction off your record.  And he would tell his clients, “Look, everyone’s going to tell you not to do drugs. They’re going to say it over and over again. And it’s like, if people tell you not to think of a white elephant, you’re going to think of a white elephant. But the trick to not thinking about a white elephant is to think of a red balloon. So you need to find your red balloon. For some people it’s yoga. For others it’s woodworking. For some people it’s scrapbooking or gardening or any of a long list of things to do. They focus on that, it’s a lot easier to succeed in ignoring the white elephant.” So yeah, “watch yourself” is one thing… but the better idea is to watch something else. (Even if it’s fanfic about werewolves fucking.)

It’s a form of productive dissociation, and is super, super helpful. It’s easy for me to get bogged down in how much pain I’m in… but some of the most painful periods of my life have also been the most productive, writing-wise, because writing is one of my red balloons. 

There is a phrase I use A LOT in my parenting and my son gets very sick of it, but it’s true:

The thing you practise is the thing you get good at.

You may not intentionally be practicing “being grumpy” but if you don’t put effort into practicing “not being grumpy” then I’m afraid that’s what you’re doing. It’s hard! It’s really hard! Sometimes, for some things, it’s pretty much impossible and that sucks!

But being carefully aware that you are going to get good at the things you do most of is a good way to be more careful of what those things are. If that makes sense.

You gotta appreciate sometimes how tumblr works in such a way that everyone who wants to reblog this interesting or useful psychological advice is also forced to reblog the thing about werewolf fucking

I’m honestly not sure which of them will be the important part for more of my followers, so I’m okay with that.

[action movie protagonist voice] I like those odds!

Food Fun Facts for dad types!!!

•Adding butter or cheese or salt or whatever to your veggies so that you like them doesn’t change the nutritional content you get from said veggies.

•Additional calories eaten don’t negate the healthy benefits of food. And, stay with me here, low calorie foods are not more morally pure than high calorie foods.

•If making a food more palatable by adding butter (or whatever) is the make-or-break for someone to actually eat the vegetable, then the Brussel sprouts with butter are FUCKING HEALTHIER for you than the Brussel sprouts you don’t eat. A salad with ranch dressing is healthier for you than the dry greens you don’t eat. A sandwich with cheese and mayo is more healthy than the plain sandwich you don’t eat. The strawberry with whipped cream is more healthy than the strawberry you don’t eat.

•We actually don’t have to buy the bullshit that food that makes us happy or tastes good is less healthy.

I was in a lousy mood so I drew something silly and self-indulgent and now I feel a tiny bit better. Small victories.

Sorry for up and vanishing again – I had a minor brain crash and needed to reboot. Hope you’re all having a wonderful day/night. 

"don't ship—" i will just be doing whatever the fuck i want actually

I'm fucking sorry what-

When they say the shipping discourse exploded, that is NOT usually what they mean

The way I understand it then, it’s basically just a more amusing way of saying “don’t like don’t read”?

I would say it’s best understood as an intensifier  to Don’t Like Don’t Read.

Just for example, say a series has some implied cannibalism in it. 

A given fic for this series might tag with “cannibalism warning” just because it’s in the canon and the fic acknowledges or discusses  it. Some people might be okay with discussing it in the abstract, even if they don’t want to see it represented explicitly.  Others might be uncomfortable with just the concept, and the author might add “don’t like don’t read” to remind those people that they may not want to engage with the fic at all.

But if you see both “cannibalism” and “dead dove do not eat” the author is telling you that in the course of this fic, a character is going to straight up chow down on some dead bodies, onscreen.

To refine on that “intensifier” concept slightly, I interpret “dead dove: do not eat” as an intensity modifier. The presence of a tag itself doesn’t necessarily tell me exactly how that content is going to be handled (which is not to say it’s not useful, just that it’s incomplete information). “Dead dove: do not eat” suggests to me that it’s going to on the darker, more serious end of the spectrum, and I shouldn’t read it if I’m not prepared for what may be a psychologically intense or harrowing treatment of the tagged material.

You know what! This conversation has gotten me thinking about the concept of “intensity modifiers” all this morning, and I think it’s actually a fascinating subject we should talk more about!

Because I started off by thinking “DDDNE serves as an indication of subject intensity, which is an important purpose and it’s a shame that we don’t have other things like that” but then I realized, we do! They’re just slightly less formalized than other kinds of tagging systems modern fandom tends to work with.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of intensity scales in common use in modern fandom.

The first is the violence/sex intensity scale, which tends overall to be conflated with or used as a shorthand for the intensity/maturity rating of the fic itself. And people have talked in detail about the difference between an M and an E rating, in terms of how explicitly the sex act or violence act is described. 

But sex and violence are not the only topics that warrant an intensity scale. There are plenty of topics that people (myself included) are okay with when talking about in an abstract or general way, but if the narrative starts to dig down into the real nitty gritty of the topic I might only want to read it if I’m in the right headspace, or not at all. 

And though there isn’t an official G to E scale, fandom has implicitly recognized this need and filled it with canonical tags – such as Implied/Referenced X, Canon-Typical X, or Dead Dove Do Not Eat. 

1. Implied/Referenced X tells the reader that topic X is going to be discussed, but not shown explicitly on-screen. Unless the whole broad topic is a trigger for a reader, it’s probably okay for them to read.

2. Next step up from that is Canon-Typical X, which can generally be understood as the base or standard level of intensity for topic X in fandom Y. Exactly what level of intensity that is varies from fandom to fandom – ‘canon-typical violence’ for The Avengers is probably going to be a different level of intensity than ‘canon-typical violence’ for The Witcher, just to name two offhand. But it is generally understood that if you’re reading fic for fandom Y in the first place, the level of X present in the work is probably not going to be too much for you.

3. And then at the far end of the intensity modifier scale is Dead Dove Do Not Eat, where a topic is explored in such  detail and intensity that even fans of Fandom Y will have to decide whether they’re okay to read this today, or maybe at all.

see this is the kind of quality content that keeps me coming around here on tumbler dot com.

Love me some good fandom midrash

growth is pausing as i go to open twitter and thinking "actually we don't need to do that"

the difference is that twitter is like being actively hit in the head with hammers, whereas logging on to tumblr is like being a given a hammer and expected to hit my own head with it. which i do.

me at any given time: can we just buckle down and focus on the task at hand please???

my brain:

my brain: ……….ranibow sprimkle……………

ranibow sprimkle……..

kepchup.

SPINCH

B A N C H

chichen nuggest

b R o G L e

strawbebbies..

this post almost moved me to tears

Tag yourself, I’m spinch or rainbow sprimkle

I’m kepchup lmao

Brogle and rainbow sprimkle

This is so charming I feel punched in the solar plexus and I’m here for this sort of gentle, sweet violence.

some additions from my own collection

World Heritage Post

[Image description

Image 1: a tweet by @/RaeOfStarShine "Rae" which says "Autism on TV: I say insulting things to people and when they are upset I argue with their logic instead of apologising. Autism in real life: a friend hasn't spoken to me in a few days so I am analysing everything I have ever said to them in case it was rude and they hate me now".

Image 2

Tumblr tags

#tv characters with autism always seem to carry this unshakeable confidence in themselves #like they've never been truly rejected by people they cared about

#whereas every autistic person i know myself included

#has at some point had to internalise the message 'there is a line at which people will get sick of you.'

#this line is invisible and you don't know which of your natural behaviours push you closer to that line #and which are fine to do and help build relationships

#so you had a childhood of just being constantly surprised when suddenly you find the line

#and it's a bad surprise because now you've lost something or someone you care about and it's your fault #you might not be able to get it back either - you just have to accept that life is like stumbling through a minefield in the dark

#sometimes you'll get to the other end. sometimes you'll lose an arm or a leg. and you have no idea which or when.

#and this means that a lot of us do the logical thing and don't move

#we don't socialise we don't stand out we don't show any sliver of personality in case that's the step that blows us up

#we toe the ground so carefully hoping we'll be able to pick up on the danger before we die from it

#but there'll always be those you don't see coming

#and then you end up lonely and people tell you to make friends you have to be yourself

#being yourself is synonymous with deciding to just start running. you know you *could* in theory do it. #but your body's so aware of the danger it physically won't let you

#so what now?

End description]

last minute contender for tweet of the year

"If stuff was just handed to me I'd have no motivation to do anything! That's human nature!" No, babe, that's depression. Psychologically healthy people are still motivated to do things even when their survival isn't being actively threatened.

[Image description: tweet by Roxi Horror @roxiqt on March 30, 2022 at 11:13 AM: “’Oh, so you think everyone should just be handed enough money to live?’ lol. lmao. yeah.”]

okay so like, we all know that housekeeping in a hotel is a Shit Job, right?

I worked with a woman who was independently wealthy. But she liked working housekeeping. So she did. And if the manager got bitchy with her, she’d just shrug and be like “Okay, I can quit.”

Like the manager treated her like a human being because she knew she had to because otherwise she’d lose one of her best workers.

Yes, everyone should be just handed the money to live.

I worked with a lady who’s husband made more than enough to support them both.  She just did the retail to have something to do with herself part-time.

There’s a lot of people who’d happily do the same sort of thing.  Honestly?  A lot of the jobs we consider “shitty” jobs?  Are shitty because the employees are treated like garbage.

If employees weren’t being screwed over by people higher up the chain constantly or being forced to kiss the asses of customers currently shitting all over them, those jobs would by and large be a whole lot more bearable, and appealing to more people!!

GANDALF BIG NATURALS?????

Be careful: nostalgia likes to link arms with fascism.

I've seen a lot of talk about how millennials are especially prone to nostalgia. How technology's rapid evolution left our childhoods as a distinctly different world than our present. How we cling to our childhood hobbies and IPs as a way to heal our inner children, etc etc.

And there's nothing inherently wrong with nostalgia. I still play pokemon games and am in the middle of rewatching Yu Yu Hakusho. You're allowed to love the things you grew up with.

But we need to be careful.

Conservatives, nationalists, and fascists *love* to evoke a ☆mythic☆ idealized past- when men were men, when America was great, upon which to build a fixed and solid identity. Any progress away from this idealized conception of the past is thus decay- corruption and ruin. Nostalgia underpins a fascists worldview and allows them to justify any violence against the forces that would further degrade society away from its perfect past. Protecting the past comes to justify all sorts of things in the present.

We need to be very careful about what we allow our nostalgia to mean to us, what we allow it to excuse or justify.

This is not *just* about Hogwarts Legacy, but Hogwarts Legacy is a good example of it. When you can invoke your nostalgia- that golden beautiful past where you felt safe and special- what are you willing to ignore? What harm are you willing to allow? What will you turn a blind eye to if doing so makes you feel like you've recaptured some of the magic from the past?

Tread carefully, friends. This HP bullshit may have been a test that you passed, but it will not be the last time when our sense of nostalgia may conflict with progress and morals. Always remember that you can love something from the past without letting it dictate the future.

star trek/treasure planet au god help me

I'll be honest, as much as I grump about sloppy worldbuilding, I'm actually kind of fascinated with the way RPG settings reduce things to pure iconography, entirely divorced from any cultural referents. I love it when a fantasy religion manages to develop 13th Century French Catholic trappings even though their object of veneration is a dragon from outer space. I love it when the village doctor is just inexplicably wearing a long beaked mask and black linen robe 24/7 and nobody ever acknowledges that this is weird.

"Well ACTUALLY fantasy cultures are made up, so they can look like whatever you want" yes, thank you for that keen observation, but that's not the incongruity I'm gesturing toward.

In brief, the aesthetic particulars of cultural expressions may be more or less arbitrary, but the material conditions that produce them are not. While there are many imaginable paths to any given end, whatever you end up with can't help but imply things about the material conditions that gave rise to it.

To pose a simple example, architecture made of wood implies the existence of trees, even if you never show a tree "on camera" – and if you explicitly establish that your setting doesn't have trees in it, people are going to wonder where the wood came from!

Let's bring it back around to the second example in the initial post: the plague doctor costume. Sure, some of the aesthetic particulars are arbitrary – the mask didn't have to be shaped like a beak, and the linen didn't have to be black – but the overall form of the costume emerges from the need to fulfill a specific function: it's basically the 17th Century equivalent of a biohazard suit.

Depicting a doctor in your fantasy setting sporting a plague doctor costume as casualwear is the equivalent of depicting a doctor in a contemporary or near-future setting casually wearing one of these:

Naturally, this doesn't oblige your fantasy setting to adhere to any of the real-world particulars of how our world's plague doctor costume came about, but function that costume performs unavoidably implies the existence of some reason for it to be socially acceptable for a doctor in your setting to wear a hazmat suit to dinner.

And that's the fun part for me: digging into all the things the author didn't realise they were implying about the material conditions of their setting because they were treating this stuff as purely iconographic.

Was the author thinking about what they were implying about the material conditions of their setting by establishing that it's socially acceptable for a doctor to wear a biohazard suit 24/7?

Probably not – they just threw it in because it symbolises doctor-ness.

Am I going to think about what it implies?

You bet I am.

This reminds me of my favorite misappropriation of medical history:

I drove by a coffeeshop once whose logo was a bespectacled man holding up a flask in front of a dancing skeleton (taken from an early modern woodcut).

The focus was on the flask, the implication clearly being that it held coffee powerful enough to wake the dead.

Unfortunately, those with a knowledge of the early-modern medicine would recognize the image as a doctor inspecting a patient’s urine.

They even had a closeup of the piss flask right on the door.