My therapist told me this specifically. She said “if you find yourself thinking and dwelling on negative things when you are trying to sleep, tell yourself over and over ‘you are not allowed to think of this until lunchtime tomorrow’.

By saying this you’re not ignoring the pain but you’re also giving yourself some rest.

Wanted to redraw some of mu nature guardians :D Here's the first ^W^

Endre Penovác’s Cats.

Gorgeous, emotive water color paintings of black cats by Endre Penovác.

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“Who can prevent all this from happening? The people. Public figures, journalists, musicians, actors, athletes, scientists, doctors, bloggers, stand-ups, Tiktokers, and more. Ordinary people. Ordinary, simple people. Men, women, old, young, fathers, and most importantly - mothers. I know that my speech will not be aired on Russian television. But the citizens of Russia have to see it. They need to know the truth.”

fresh off the boat, s02e11

screaming and crying !!! (sitting in my bed completely silent and staring stoically at the wall)

this movie is so fucking creepy jesus fuck

It’s by Tim Burton, what did you honestly expect?

Actually, it’s Henry Selick, who was the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The book was written by Neil Gaiman, though, and is far…far….worse.

Sorry, I’m about to geek the hell out.

The movie is captivating, but the book is twenty kinds of terrifying, even now, ten years after I first read it. As disturbing as the movie may have been to some, the things Selick added really serve to cushion just how horrific the story really is.

First of all, the character of Wybie does not exist in the book. Coraline is facing all of this nearly alone, with her only help coming from the sly comments of the cat, a warning from the circus mice, and the stone given to her by her neighbor, presented with no comment but that it “makes the unseen seen.”

Second, the Other Parents are never quite as warm (and, dare I say, normal) as they are in the gifs above. They’re described as having paper-white skin and the Other Mother’s hair is said to move on its own, and her long, red, claw-like nails don’t ease any uncertainty that she is absolutely, positively up to no good. The first time Coraline meets them, they (and the rest of the Others) seem to be playing roles (for whatever reason, Coraline does not seem to pick up on this), like they all know what to say and what to do and are simply waiting for Coraline to make her move in their terrifying play world. This is shown to be partly true when the Other Parents tell her they know she’ll be back soon after she refuses the buttons - this time, to stay.

Third, the Other Mother commits atrocities that really should not have been in a book for anyone not fully grown up. She physically deforms the world around Coraline to slow her progress in their game beyond any mild traps the movie portrays, and, instead of turning the Other Father into the wandering pumpkin-thing seen in the film, she simply ceases to use him and throws his body away in the cellar, leaving him to rot with whatever bit of sentience he has left. She begins to lose her touch, as Coraline gains the upper hand. Her world doesn’t just become a nightmare - it falls apart completely. No creepy but oddly cool bug furniture here, just the house that now appears to be a child’s drawing. Whatever the Other Mother is (a beldame, but something tells me she’s much more ancient and powerful than that), she does not give half a hump about what she has to do to ensnare Coraline. Destroy the supporting characters of her twisted creation? Done. Allow herself to be dismembered to ruin Coraline’s life in the normal world? Not even gonna bat an eyelash.

On a final, personal note, imagine eight year-old me, ignored by my parents, absorbed in the story and identifying with Coraline from the start. Imagine me finishing this bloodcurdling book and immediately thinking of my basement, where there is still a locked door that my grandmother swears up and down is nothing more than a storage room, but has not once in my (or my mother’s) lifetime unlocked.

Can you see why this book still scares me?

Fun fact I learned from seeing neil gaiman speak: when he first wanted the book published, his editor said it was too scary. He suggested she read it to her young daughter, and then decide. So she did, and her daughter wasn’t afraid, and it was published. Years later, Gaiman was sitting next to that daughter at an event and told her this story, and she said “oh I was terrified I just didn’t want to tell my mom”.

Coraline WAS too scary to be published, but exists anyway because a girl lied to her mother.

@neil-gaiman, is this true about the publisher’s daughter?

It was my literary agent, Merrilee Heifetz who read it and said “you can’t seriously expect this to be published as a children’s book.” So I suggested she read it to her daughters. And she called me back a week later and said “They love it and they weren’t scared at all. I’ll take it to Harper Children’s.”

A decade later, at the Opening Night of the Coraline musical, I was sitting next to Morgan, Merilee’s youngest daughter, and told her how her not being scared had made the book happen. And she said “I was terrified. But I needed to find out what happened next. So nobody knew.”

So, yes.

This website can be toxic at times, but the fact that people can just tag Neil Gaiman to get his input, like a sorcerer invoking a benevolent spirit, is definitely a bright spot.

as a kid I never appreciated the comedic genius of my elementary school principal, who, whenever our school won against another school in a sport, would play what felt like 2 minutes of “we are the champions” over the PA during announcements, and just as it’s going “cuz we are the champions…of” he’d hit stop and his deadpan voice over the PA system would go “Brampton.”

We had a middle school dance dj who would do something similar with party in the USA. He’d play the chorus like “yeah yeah yeah it’s a party in the..” and then stop the music and just say “school”

this is so fucking funny

Wish there were more animals like this. You're always hearing "oh it's not a man-eater it's really quite nice" about every other beast. BORING. There should be an animal for every environment that always wants to eat people.

there’s a saying summarizing what to do if you encounter the three most common species of bears: “if it’s black fight back, if it’s brown lie down, if it’s white say goodnight.” (sometimes with the addition of “if it’s gummy put it in your tummy”) one time i read an article on what to do in bear attack events and they gave suuuper long and detailed answers for black and brown bears, and then just ended it with "As for a polar bear, rest in peace. :)"

black bears usually attack because they think you have food, they are relatively easily scared (i’ve heard them described as “big dangerous raccoons”) and if you can intimidate them they’ll generally back off. brown bears usually attack because they see you as a threat, so if you play dead (you wanna be on the ground for *at least 15 minutes after the brown bear leaves*) they’ll probably decide you’re not a threat and leave you alone.

polar bears, as op said, see humans as prey. they are BYFAR the biggest and strongest species of bear, it’s not even close. when standing upright, a black bear is about 5-6 feet tall, a brown bear is about 7-8 feet tall, and a polar bear is about 10-11 feet tall. THEY ARE THE LARGEST TERRESTRIAL PREDATOR ON EARTH. a polar bear could kick any other bear’s ass easily, so fighting back as a HUMAN is doomed to fail. and playing dead just makes their meal easier for them.

there is a place called Svalbard. it is a norwegian archipelago in the arctic ocean, and it is one of the northernmost human settlements in the entire world. in Svalbard, it is required by law to have a firearm with you to leave the settlement. you cannot visit Svalbard without a firearm permit. there are about 3 hundred polar bears in Svalbard and about 3 thousand more in nearby areas. 

"When a hungry polar bear spots a potential meal, they don't hesitate. They attack. An unarmed human being has absolutely no ability to resist a polar bear attack. None at all. The largest polar bears can weigh in excess of 2,000 pounds, making them potentially more than ten times larger than the average human. Their jaws can crush and chew up the hardest of bones. Their hunger is often so extreme, they don't even bother killing you before they begin to eat you."

here’s an amazing 2 minute video of a cameraman who locked himself in a transparent cage to film a polar bear, which promptly attempted to kill him. cage did its job and protected him and he got some absolutely insane footage. the polar bear in this video is a female one, male polar bears are even bigger.

The 3D Flower Box screen saver, from Windows 95-XP

We know more random shit than all our ancestors combined because of the internet and our curiosity.

x

Our Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology "food" isn't very distinguished from specifically "rice" until it was pointed out to us that in English "meal" is "loose roughly ground grain"

humans be like staple crop

oh my god.

let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon.

picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then.

every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising.

i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog.

i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then.

i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning.

i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes.

or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window.

ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas.

remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam?

i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water.

and now look at it.

i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know?

if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were.

i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late.

I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations. 

When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words:

“Your regulations are written in blood.”

These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. 

They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. 

Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? 

Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering.

A mediocre wizard searches for items to boost their power. They find a strange hut which has a ‘special goods for sale’ sign. They enter…“What’s this hideous thing?” “It’s an item you can use without incantation…It’s called a gun and there’s much more I can show you.”

i'm becoming a snake so i will never have joint pain again see you losers later i'm going to go warm myself on a rock in the sun

well team it seems i don't actually know anything about snakes

Countries that meet the requirements of the 2016 Paris Agreement

Nice work all

Posts that make you want to take world leaders hostage