wyvern -> pretty cool

lycanthropic wyvern -> werewyvern (very cool)

time-traveling lycanthropic wyvern -> whenwerewyvern (incredibly cool!)

shape-shifting time-traveling lycanthropic wyvern -> whowhenwerewyvern (a bit much to be honest)

bike-riding shape-shifting time-traveling lycanthropic wyvern -> howwhowhenwerewyvern (getting a bit edgy)

electric bike-riding shape-shifting time-traveling lycanthropic wyvern -> watthowwhowhenwherewyvern (a bit of a stretch, and a little excessive otherwise)

now you guys are just being silly

can i interest u in a box of friend??

it’s him…… the Grey Earl…………..

A most honored guest at the royal ball!

official Grey Earl post

the Council is honored to stand in his presence.

Destiny 命运; Hand in Hand 牵手

Oil on canvas, 2019, by Pang Maokun

call me a first level warlock the way i can do one thing before i need to lie down for eight hours

Get you one who can do both 😍

literally no dermatologist on earth says acne is caused by bad hygeine/lack of a skincare routine btw. its genetic. every single piece of research ever done on acne says its genetic. feel like i need to restate this every time i see a post about skincare

a few years ago i made an identical post to this and someone tagged it with “yeah ive known this from personal experience. because i once spent an entire summer not bathing and the only water that ever touched my face was from public pools yet i never once had any acne” and every single time i see someone talking up their skincare routine this info forces its way back into my brain

dont be a fucking dumbass on this post btw im serious. actually read academic papers on acne dont fucking post correlation is causation shit on this post. every person who has acne has a half dozen multi billion dollar industries constantly trying to convince them its secretly their fault against all published research as it stands. so don’t fucking help them

“stop traumadumping to your friends tell this to your therapist” my god they paywalled human connection

"Nooo people drawing non-passing trans women makes me dysphoric" well only seeing depictions of trans women with body types and appearances that are unattainable to me makes ME dysphoric. Clearly the moral choice here is to never depict trans women.

the statement "looking at non-passing trans women makes me dysphoric" is one i can empathize with. i have been there. but i am telling you right now, the end result of that is that the world is more hostile to trans women. because YOU are being hostile to trans women and trans womanhood. you are cutting yourself off from other trans women. you are holding them to a cis standard.

and just speaking selfishly, learning to love a trans woman's chin or her beard or her shoulders or her voice is going to make you more comfortable with your own chin or beard or so on. and in the long run, that means less dysphoria for you.

i say this with love and the experience of having been there before. Get over it.

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

Teen: *gets a job*

“I GOT THE JOB!”

Parents: Well, when I was your age, I already had 5 jobs and was supporting my family

Teen: *gets all A’s*

“I worked really hard!”

Parents: Well, of course you did, this is the expectation, not a celebration.

probably why so many teens take to social media where they can enthusiastically share their interests and achievements and get positive feedback that their parents never gave

A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK

This hit hard

I remember once, when I was in my early 20s, I was an afternoon supervisor at my job, and I worked with mostly teenagers, and the one day this one kid, who was like 15, was bored so I suggested he could clean out the fridge. He did and when he was done I said he did a good job.

After that, this kid was cleaning out the fridge at least once a week, and I was like, “why are you always cleaning the fridge?” Like, I didn’t mind, but it seemed odd. And he said, “one time I cleaned the fridge and you said I did a good job. I wanted to make you proud of me again.”

Literally, I changed the entire way I interacted with teenagers after that. I actually got a package of glitter stars and I would stick them on their nametags when they did a good job, and they loved it.

My manager had commented on how hard these kids work and I said, “they’re starved for positive feedback. They go to school all day then come to work all evening and no one appreciates it because it’s expected of them, but they’re still kids. They need positive feedback from adults in their lives.”

Like, everyone likes feeling appreciated. Everyone likes being complimented and having their efforts be noticed. Another coworker (who was a mother of teenage children), hated that I did this, and said they were too old to be rewarded with stickers, but like… it wasn’t about the stickers. The stickers were just a symbol that their effort was noticed and appreciated. I was just lucky that I learned this at a time when I was still young enough to remember what it was like to be a teenager. I was only 2 years out of highschool at that point and highschool is fucking hard. People forget this as they get older, but ask anyone and almost no one would ever want to go back and do it again, but they expect kids to suck it up because they’re young so they should be able to do school full time, plus homework, and work, and maintain a healthy social life, and sleep, and spend time with family, and do chores and help out at home, and worry about college and relationships and everything else, and then just get shit on all the time and treated like they’re lazy and entitled. And then they wonder why teenagers are apathetic.

For a german exam I had to argue against an article that was essentially „kids these days, they don’t care about anything and are constantly on their phones“ and really it was the easiest essay I‘ve ever written.

Teens don’t talk to adults bc adults only ask „so, how‘s school“ to then interrupt them two sentences in. And because they can’t engage in a conversation about buying houses and working in a bank. I would’ve loved to talk about philosophy and politics and history with family the way I did with friends and in class but because I was young no one took what I had to say seriously.

And no, teens aren’t always on their phone. They’re on their phone when they’re bored. You think I‘m on social media when I‘m with my friends? When I‘m talking about something I‘m interested in?

Maybe the reason kids are so distant and always on their phone during family parties and the like is because you‘re failing to engage and include them.

Whoop there it is

When you respect kids, they really respond and learn from you. But if you treat kids like “theyre just a kid, what do they know??” then you’ll never find out.

As a Disneyland Cast Member, I’ll add my own experience onto this –

Very frequently, when I first speak to a child while I’m at work, they’ll kind of withdraw and act uncomfortable and shy. Their parents will then rather frequently tell them to not be shy and try to coax them to talk to me – whenever that happens, I always, without fail, politely dissuade the parents from pressuring them.

“I’m a stranger,” I’ll tell the kid’s parents. “I don’t blame them for not talking to me – if they were anywhere else, they’d have the right idea, to not immediately trust me.”

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen that same kid – simply after hearing their initial reaction being validated, instead of reproached – immediately open up to me after that. I also cannot tell you how many times that child and I would go on to start a friggin’ marathon conversation, and I got to hear all about how great their day was or what their favorite Disney movies were or what rides they liked and didn’t like or how much they like a certain Disney character or song…all from me validating that initial feeling and showing genuine interest in what they had to say.

This isn’t just young children, either. I will always remember being positioned outside the Animation Academy one day and starting up a conversation with a young lady, perhaps 12 or 13, who joined the line with her father a full 25 minutes before the class was supposed to start. Now keep in mind, we do a drawing class every 30 minutes: there was no one else in line at that point, and no one else joined the girl and her father in line for a full fifteen minutes. So I could tell pretty quickly that this girl was very emotionally invested in getting a good spot for the drawing class: a conclusion all the more bolstered by the fact that she had a notebook under her arm. I asked her if she was an artist – she said yes, but seemed uncomfortable at the question, so I skipped even asking her if I could see her work, instead admitting that I myself wasn’t very good at art, but that I’m trying to get better and that I love the history of Disney animation. On the screens around us was video footage of different Disney concept art and animation reels, so I pointed one of them out (for Snow White) and asked if she knew the story behind the making of the movie. Upon confirming that she didn’t, I proceeded to get down on the floor so I could sit next to her and her father and dramatically tell the whole story of how “Uncle Walt” created the first full-length animated motion picture, even though everyone and their mother thought he was an idiot for even trying, and how the film ended up becoming the first Hollywood blockbuster. After the story was over, the girl’s father said that his daughter really wanted to be an animator when she grew up, and she finally felt comfortable enough to open her notebook and show me some of her artwork. It was wonderful! Every sketch had such character and you could tell how much work she put into it! And I could tell how much telling her that – and sharing that moment with her, where we got to connect over something we both really enjoyed – had meant. And after the class was over, she sought me out to show me what she and her father had drawn – and sure enough, hers was great! (Her father’s was too, really. XD)

People, kids and teens included, love sharing what they love and how they feel with others. You just have to give them the chance to show it.

A LITTLE LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK!

-~-

I feel like I am obliged to add one more thing: don’t ever think that the kids won’t feel your unspoken judgements cause they do!

I felt always like a ‘problem’ in my family, until I was about sixteen, I got this teacher who was litterally the first to tell I was worthy. He changed my life up till this day.

Also how do grown ups imagine how ‘we’ will ever learn to engage in conversations with adults properly if you don’t teach us?

This post is

Everything

I told one of my new coworkers (who is 26) that he was doing really well and that I was proud of him and his progress. I thought he was going to start crying for how quietly he said “really?”. 

Positive feedback makes the biggest difference to everything.

I used to have a coworker who only spoke Burmese. She knew a few words in English, but literally it was like “hey Susu, can you clean the cooler for me?” “Yes yes, I clean, I clean.” She’d moved to the US in her late 30s and never really got the hang of English. (I don’t say this to make fun of her. She was a refugee fleeing a brutal and bloody war in Myanmar and her broken English was a sign of deep determination and tragedy. I say it because the language barrier, and the extent of it, is important to what happened next.)

She was shy, and kind of withdrawn, and extremely slow—it took this woman an hour to do a sink of dishes that took me 30 minutes and I was considered not particularly fast—but she was absolutely dogged. She would do her job and get it done.

So this one day I realized we had all kinds of “hey, great job!” cards on our little recognition board thing for almost the whole crew, but none for Susu, because “she won’t understand anyway.” So I threw a couple of simple sentences into a translation app and spent like half an hour very painstakingly drawing these sentences in Burmese characters (and drawing is really what it was—I felt like I was four years old and holding a pencil for the first time again) and gave her the card. She kind of glanced and it and went “oh thank you” and then did this massive double-take and raised it in front of her face and read it, and read it again, and then just about hollered “OH THANK YOU THANK YOU” and I showed her where she could pin it on the recognition board if she wanted. She chose to take it home instead, which, totally fair.

All it said was “thank you for your hard work, you’re very reliable.”

Everything changed after that. She started using her limited English more, picking up new words here and there (rather amusingly, ours was a multilingual kitchen but she didn’t know which words belonged to which language, and you really haven’t lived until you’ve seen a tiny Burmese woman slap a fryer and say “Oy vay this thing, yeah! Pendejo!” I mean yes, completely valid emotion about that fucking fryer, but when this is how you’re discovering she’s picked up both Spanish and Yiddish and thinks both of them are English, lemme tell you, that sure is an Emotion), enthusiastically participating in things.

She was in her forties.

Nobody but her children had spoken a word to her in Burmese since she left home.

People just want to be known. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

ok!!! :]

This is one of my favourite posts. I use these strategies a lot with my students, and by the second week, I can usually get half the class to engage in the discussion, even online.

The most important part is that just saying that you appreciate them Diane work for all kids and teenagers. Sometimes you have to be willing to actually show that.

consider: teenagers aren’t apathetic about everything they’re just used to you shitting all over whatever they show excitement about

quick what is everyone doing right now

Source

!???

I'm not sure what I expected, but seeing people with those toy horses that are just a horse head on a stick so you can "ride" it doing actual horse show routines, including jumps of a height that actual horses would probably think twice about, was NOT it.

*J.C. Leyendecker looking respectfully from the afterlife*

absolutely not, my man jc is CRANKING IT in heaven

Sometimes writing is like having an enormous lake in your head, and you want to get it out of your head and into a proper place for a lake so other people can come and go swimming and ride jet skis and stuff, except all you have to move the lake is a teaspoon. So you’re just sitting there frantically flinging water out of the lake with your teaspoon and telling people, “Guys, this lake is going to be so cool when it’s done,” but it will never be done. There is so much lake.

a lot of you need to be a lot more chill about cishet passing people and couples still being part of the queer community

its happened to a friend recently and ive seen plenty of people including streamers/youtubers etc have the same thing happen over and over again, where they put the LGBT label on their streams or a pride flag in their bio and then they get people demanding to know every detail of their identity.

if you see a guy online with his girlfriend and he has a pride flag in his bio and your first reaction is to question whether hes even allowed to put that there, log off. the guy could be bi, could be trans, could be nb, could be literally any queer identity at all and it doesnt matter. its none of your fucking business. he could also just be an ally showing support, its none. of your. business.

you are not the queer police and it is not your job to make sure everyone in the queer community has the properly documented justification for being part of it. touch grass. you need to be normal about not knowing everyones labels and identities and about people keeping those private.

cishet passing people have always existed and will always exist within the queer community, they are our family and belong with us.

You are not the queer police!

also! queer people have been having kids for quite a number of years now! that guy could be the cishet-iest dude in the world but have been raised by lesbians, just like my oldest son!

this gatekeeping is poison. it is poison. stop it. you can't gatekeep the community without excluding people who need it.

For all of my US followers for whom general public official election day is coming up (Nov. 7th) PLEASE do not become so disillusioned with the current state of higher power politicians that you skip out on voting for local offices; off year and local elections are already critically unemphasized but these are the people who have the most direct power over jails, police, school curriculum, etc. Do not let your grief be weaponized as a distraction from also continuing to fight police brutality, queer and bipoc censorship in schools, bodily autonomy, housing inequality, etc, on the smaller scale battlefields where every vote truly does count

It can be so frustrating to vote in small local elections because info is harder to find, but if you take the time to google vote411 and go to their website, get your personal ballot, and then look up the candidates, you will always find that two people are running for a local school board, and one is a lovely person who has slowly been effecting positive change for three decades and the other is a real estate broker who wants more money. And then you have the power to vote against the money asshole and for the nice person in a race that can genuinely go down to a handful of votes. Feels awesome, man. Vote out the bitch who voted against reasonable COVID measures in your local high school 3 years ago.

worm worm worm worm worm

worm worm worm worm worm worm

woooooorm :)