reblog if you are ASEXUAL, support ASEXUAL PEOPLE, or SECRETLY A DRAGON IN HUMAN FORM
fuck "girl lunch" fuck "girl math" a woman is a hairy animal who sweats and grunts and excretes and hungers and gets wrinkly and dies eventually. you have to love that.
what this fandom needs
- more f/f
What fandom, you ask? All of them. There’s not enough in any fandom.
Self improvement is great but ultimately? you have to accept your self. Yes you can eat better, exercise more, read more, set boundaries, love your self, but it all comes down to this. Some days you won’t have the energy to do any of these things. And you’ll look in the mirror and think that this is not enough. That’s a lie. The biggest love for self is to live slowly. To rest. To really rest. Have a nap. Eat what makes you feel good. Read if you want to. Embrace yourself and accept that you cannot and will not be ever be perfect. Accept that you are good enough. You don’t need to keep busy all the time. you don’t need to go out all the time and post on instagram. You don’t need to journal if you don’t want to. You don’t need to make art if you don’t want to. Breathe, give yourself grace and compassion. Give yourself the love and tenderness you so badly need. Be gentle with yourself. You are trying and it is good enough. You are good enough.
fucks me up that by total coincidence the sun and moon's size difference is exactly matched to their difference in distance from us, thus making our beautiful total solar eclipses where you can see the silver threads of the sun's corona possible because the moon just covers the sun completely
The stars (literally) aligned just right for this experience to be possible. It's likely that aliens don't have this
The moon is also absolutely gargantuan by moon standards. It isn't the largest moon in the solar system, but it is BY FAR the largest in comparison with its planet. Ganymede is the largest satellite of Jupiter and the largest moon in the solar system. Its diameter is only about 3.8% of Jupiter's. Titan's radius is 4.4% of Saturn's. Callisto and Io are the next largest in the neighborhood, with 3.4% and 2.6% the diameter of Jupiter respectively.
Our moon is number 5. It is smaller in direct comparison to the above moons. The diameter of the moon is 3475 km. That is a full 27% of the diameter of the Earth. More than a quarter. That's ridiculous. It's unheard of. The universe is large enough that the word unique probably doesn't mean a lot, but this might be about as close as you get.
This has had a huge impact on our planet. Other things aliens might not have are significant tides. One of Mars's dumpy little potatoes wouldn't be able to move oceans the way our moon does.
Our moon has also stabilized our axis to a massive degree. Without her up there our axis would wobble all over the place and our climate would be far more chaotic. Aliens might not be quite so lucky.
I guess what I am really trying to say is that the moon is extremely cool. I like the moon.
Just want to add that the reason we have such a large moon is because a whole planet crashed into proto-Earth. Theia (the planet) and Earth got so superheated by this collision that their component cores fused and the impact jettisoned a lot of material into space. That massive amount of jettisoned material became our moon. So Earth and the moon have very similar composition. This does not seem to be a common method of lunar formation.
what if the answer to the fermi paradox is that life cant exist without a moon like luna
I got a serious beef with the Fermi paradox. There is no Fermi paradox. There stopped being a Fermi paradox once the first radio telescopes went up, and we began to get a true sense of the sheer scale of the universe.
Space is big, empty, and loud. Sunspots can cause enough interference to affect global communications. We’re not even loud enough to talk over our own sun. On our own planet. We can barely communicate with Voyager, and we know exactly where it is and what its signal sounds like.
The Fermi paradox is like doubting the existence of Belfast, because you stood on a windy New York beach shouting towards it and didn’t get an answer.
“wearing all pink to the barbie movie” “wearing full suits to the minion movie” the children yearn for themed parties
My stage career began when I was a little under two months old, when I took the spotlight as Baby Jesus in a Christmas pageant. I’m told that I did a wonderful job and slept calmly through the whole thing, which can only speak to my talents as an actress, because I was 1. the wrong gender 2. a colicky screaming demon of a baby and 3. about as far from divine as it’s possible for an allegedly-human child to be.
I continued to be actively involved in theater as a kid (and frequently played roles of various small animals, because I was tiny for my age). Around the age of ten, I was cast as the lead character in a musical about cowboys that I no longer remember the name of. It was my first real lead role, and I took it very, very seriously. And because I am myself, that means I maaaaybe went…a little overboard.
My character’s introduction was early in the play, accompanied by the crack of a bullwhip. This was more-or-less pre internet (or, at least, our director was not tech-savvy enough to find sound effects online) and we didn’t have a sound effect track for that noise. There were plans to acquire the appropriate sound effect before opening night, but I rapidly tired of making my entrance during rehearsals to the sound of someone yelling “BULLWHIP NOISE!”
This, I thought to myself, is a problem I can solve.
I learned early in life that it’s good to be friends with people who have skills; they always come in handy eventually. After rehearsals one day, I put on my cowboy boots and biked a couple miles over to my friend Grace’s house. I went down to their basement and knocked on her older brother’s door.
“Hello,” I said. “I need to learn how to use a bullwhip.”
“….Okay,” he said. It did not seem to occur to him that he might ask further questions about why I, a tiny horrible munchkin composed exclusively of rage and pointy elbows, needed to be weaponized any further. Clearly, I had come to the right person.
My friend’s older brother would have been an SCA nerd, if SCA was a thing where we were. Instead, he was one of those unsupervised 4H kids with weird hobbies, largely oriented around ancient forms of combat. He was somewhere in his late teens at this time, and he liked to make stuff. It was an urge I, even at age ten, could sympathize with. His name was Aron.
Aron got out his bullwhip (which I had noticed hanging on his wall on a prior visit, and had filed away mentally under a for future use tab) and we went to the backyard.
“Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron began, “Swinging the bullwhip.”
We rapidly discovered that since I was god’s tiniest, angriest creation, a full-size bullwhip was way too long for me to use. Aron’s shins suffered for my attempt.
“…Step one of using a bullwhip,” Aron said, “Making a bullwhip.”
So we went back inside, found a tanned cowhide (that he just…had? I don’t remember if there was a reason for this.) and some razor blades, and I learned how to cut and braid a bullwhip. It took a few tries, and I wound up coming back for a while, because I kept getting frustrated with the bullwhip-braiding process and Aron kept distracting me with bait like: “Hey kid, wanna learn to make some chainmail?” and “Hey kid, wanna fletch some arrows?” and “Hey kid, wanna try doing horseback archery?”
Obviously the answer to these questions was “BOY, WOULD I EVER!” Some delays are necessary to the artistic process.
(At one point my mom asked me “Hellen, what are you doing over at Grace’s house all the time?” And I, perfectly innocent, said, “Making weapons!” and my mother, who never understood why I was like this, but accepted that a girl has needs and those needs occasionally involve stocking a personal armory, said “Okay! Have fun!”)
Soon, the bullwhip, size extra small, was finished. The lessons on actual bullwhip use commenced.
It should be noted that Aron was self-taught, and really had no idea what to do, so this was mostly an exercise in the two of us standing twenty feet apart and flailing wildly with our respective whips until snapping noises happened. And then we figured out what we’d done to make the snapping noises. And then we kept doing that. Extremely vigorously. So vigorously that at one point one of the bullwhips launched into the air and caught on a tree branch and we hand to drag the trampoline over so Aron could bounce me high enough to grab it. But we persisted!
Eventually we reached a point where we could line up pop cans on a fence rail and hit them off three times out of five.
Feeling extremely accomplished and like I finally understood method acting, I packed my bullwhip into my backpack for the next play rehearsal. Soon enough, it was time for me to make my entrance.
I leaped on stage in my cowboy boots and cracked the bullwhip as hard as I could, immediately launching into the song despite the fact that the sound of five feet of braided leather breaking sound barrier had startled the accompanist so badly she’d keysmashed on the piano.
The director shouted something she probably shouldn’t have shouted in a room full of small children, and then demanded, “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT!”
“I made it!” I declared proudly. “I’m a cowgirl! I can make my own bullwhip noise!”
“You…made it?”
“Yes! Because we needed a bullwhip sound effect. And bullwhips are where bullwhip sound effects come from!”
This was, of course, impeccable logic.
It is apparently difficult to argue with a gleeful ten year old who happens to be armed with a bullwhip longer than she is tall. After some negotiation, the director agreed that I could use my bullwhip for my opening song, provided that I didn’t pop it while anyone was anywhere near me on stage and I didn’t let anyone else play with it. These terms were acceptable to me.
Somehow, no one was injured and the play went off without a hitch. We can only chalk up these things to the magic of the theatre.
Nearly a decade later, an unsuspecting college classmate asked me, “Hellen, wanna take a class on bullwhip combat with me?”
And obviously I answered, “BOY, WOULD I EVER!”
“Percy Jackson would be a marine biologist” “no he’d be a fireman” “no he’d drop out of school” “no he’d—“
Everyone be quiet that man got his degree in social work and specializes in advocating for children with learning disabilities and rough home lives while scoping out potential demigods. He’s not gonna let any child, whether they’re mortal and dealing with a Gabe or half-god and dealing with monsters, feel like he did.
do you mean fingering (yarn weight) or fingering (instrument hand position) or fingering (nsfw) or fingering (mispelled potato)
#music school was so fucking funny sometimes#I'd get told shit like I needed to work on my fingering or use more/less tongue and I had to listen with a straight face too#do you know how hard that was#do you know how fucking difficult that could be sometimes (@hjartasalt)
the truth is this post was originally inspired by that time when i, a clueless aroace, tried to explain my struggles with fingering and tonguing to a non-clueless non-musician, and they were just like... bro what
One time my teacher took my sheet music and wrote "CLIMAX" right where. Well. Where the climax of the piece was. And I wasn't allowed to laugh. How cruel.
IN ALL CAPS. 😭. He felt like I wasn't doing enough there and really wanted to drive home his criticisms.
why can I read a 50k fic just fine but a less than 50 word paragraph seems fucking impossible
I should not have pre-d with coffee for this friend of a friend's birthday party
Rereading the manga, I think my favorite thing ever is that Edward looks like he’s a feral animal Mustang just kinda found out back one day. He looks like if he bites you you’re going to get a disease, and he looks like he absolutely would bite a person. They really toned down how feral he is in Brotherhood.
Brotherhood Ed is like some poor cat you found in the alley, Manga Ed is the rabid raccoon you’ve been trying to pull put of your trash since 2013 that Will Not Leave
Like look at him and tell me he doesn’t remind you of some raccoon
I just can't help myself *shrugs*
I’d like to tell you a little story today about why a lot of problems need social workers, not cops.
a long long time ago…like 2010, I worked 2nd shift (2pm-10pm) in a homeless shelter. I worked on a floor specifically for men with addiction and mental health problems. For most of the shift, I was the only staff working. Most of the time, the job was chill to the point of being boring. My job was to do the little things that needed doing, and be always ready to respond if shit went down. Most of the time, nothing much happened.
So one day I’m sitting at my little desk, trying to get up the motivation to organize the food pantry a little bit, and I head SCREAMING.
By the time I’m on my feet, one of the residents was in view. Dude was 6ft 4, with a shaved head, and a SOLID build. He was screaming down the hall, and in his raised fist he had, I shit you not, a blood-covered meat cleaver. He was spattered in blood all over. I knew the man- I knew all the residents. He mostly kept to himself. Sometimes he’d talk to me about his hallucinations and paranoid delusions. (no question these ones were delusions, kids. Man eating pythons can not fit in a half inch radiator pipe.) He had a history of getting pretty worked up.
Switch the camera around 180 degrees. I was 120 lbs and 5ft 4 on a good day, and all by my self. Totally unarmed.
Ask yourself- what would an armed cop do in that situation- alone, with a huge man running at them with a huge bloody knife?
I’m not gonna pretend for one second that my fight and flight instincts didn’t kick in. The ancient parts of my brain that exist to protect me from danger by fleeing or killing something saw this and screamed a great big NOPE.
But by this point I had like 8 years of other training, to. De-escalation training. Training on keeping a cool head in a scary situation. Training that reminded me that I was responsible for the safety of the other 17 men who called this floor their home.
Training that told me that this man was my responsibility, not my enemy.
In short, the opposite of what many police departments train their officers in. They are trained to view people as hostile, to treat their beat like a war zone. To act immediately. I wont say none of them have de-escalation training, but I will say it’s a bit of a useless add-on when they’re taught to go with their gut feeling of whether or not a situation is dangerous.
Because my gut sure as hell perceived a danger.
Anyways, I didn’t run, and I didn’t attack. I rooted my feet and I asked him what was going on.
That was when I saw that he was weeping. He was terrified.
He had bought a new cooking knife off the tv- he liked cooking, and had been looking at it. But one of the side effects of his meds made him clumsy, and he’d dropped it. He’d sliced open the back of his knee, where there’s a huge vein or artery or something- and was bleeding a LOT.
He was understandably alarmed at the river-like quantity of blood gushing out of him, and had run to the nearest help- me.
In his rush and his fear, he’d just forgotten to put the damn knife down.
The other residents had, thankfully, all stayed in their rooms, because a month before I’d got on several people’s cases for coming out to defend me- with the very best of intentions- during a previous incident. Their motives were good, but de-escalating a situation when other people are ready to throw hands is WAY harder. I’d told them to keep their buts in their rooms unless I actually called for help, and God bless them, every single one of them had done it.
This is the point when I called for help. One of the residents got the first aid kit. One called an ambulance. One gave me the literal shirt off his back because our damn first aid kit didn’t have a tourniquet so we ripped the shirt up to make one.
We helped calm the poor injured guy down, and he got a few stitches, and everybody was proud of how we’d come together to help each other out.
Nobody was hurt beyond that one initial injury. Nobody was traumatized. If anything, the guy who’d been hurt was happier, more engaged with the rest of us, having seen that everyone here would take care of him when he was in need. He hadn’t had much care given to him in his life.
So when you see meme’s of “lol what are those social workers gonna do NOW huh?” please remember that 1) we’ve been out here doing this work ANYWAYS and 2) We’ve been doing it unarmed and level headed, which is better than the cops.
Now, does social work ALSO need reform? Does social work ALSO contain racism and ableism and every other social evil? You bet! Just look at…like anything to do with CPS to look at how these systems break down.
But do not use social workers de-escalation training as some kind of “gotcha” to prove we need armed and militant enforcers on every damn corner. And please don’t let others do it, either.
A better way is possible.
it seems so strange to me that the only people it is socially acceptable to live with (once you reach a certain stage in life) are sexual partners? like why can’t i live with my best friend? why can’t i raise a child with them? why do i need to have sex with someone in order to live with them? why do we put certain relationships on a pedestal? why don’t we value non-sexual relationships enough? why do life partners always have to be sexual partners?
My grandmother and grandfather more or less adopted my grandmother’s best friend back in the 50s. After my grandfather died (before I was born, back in 1968 or so) they continued to keep house together, platonic best friends, and they hung together until they died, a few months apart, in 2007.
It’s quite recently, as far as I can tell, that living arrangements like that have stopped being regarded as normal.
It’s absolutely a new thing to find this stuff weird, and it has a lot to do with media pretending that the nuclear family and marriage are the only reasons to live with other people.
I’ve lived in a 3 adult household my whole life. My parents and their best friend. This was never weird to me, even though everyone my age thought it was because the media never portrayed these kinds of housing arrangements. As far as i was concerned, I just had an extra non-blood parent.
According to my parents, it was very common in the 70′s-80′s to buy houses with your friends, because it was financially smart to do so (so long as you were certain they were close friends who wouldn’t fall out with you and fuck everything up). Houses and house payments are much more manageable when you split the bills 3-4 ways instead of just two.
Millenials aren’t the first to think it’s a great idea to just shack up with friends. That’s housemating without the hastle of living with strangers. It’s still a good idea to shack up with people you’ve known a long time so you know how you’ll get on living together, but still. In the current economy, it’s pretty much now our only option for affording anything.
I think, and I’m not researched on this, but I think conservatives probably tried to suppress images of non-nuclear families because they likely thought it would encourage ideas of polygamy, polyamory, open sexual relationships with or without marriage, as well as other relationship types they thought of as un-christian or unsavoury. I could be wrong, but that shit wouldn’t surprise me.
(And i want to make a note that there’s also a disturbing amount of asexual denial around that makes people go ‘if they’re living together they HAVE to be banging because why wouldn’t they?’ and that shit both creeps me out and annoys me no end. People can be in relationships without sex. People can live together without sex. Sex is not the be-all and end-all and people being taught to think it is really need to stop).
Don’t let the media fool you into believing you can only live with a sexual partner or blood family. Someone somewhere has an agenda for making these seem abnormal, when really it’s just practical.
A lot of people acted like it was super weird when two of my brothers decided to move states with me when I started my postdoc. I got really used to giving a little canned speech about it because it seemed to bewilder people so much. (Their leases happened to be up! We could share rent! They wanted to try somewhere new!)
The notable exception was my grandma, who was just like, “oh, yes, when we were young my sister and I decided to move cross-country together and it was lovely.”
More of this kind of thing for everyone, pls.
The implication that close sibling relationships must also be a warning sign for incest also peeves me off; what kind of society are we living in anyway
tags by @bomberqueen17
Having a multi-adult household unit also just makes a shit-ton of sense, tbh. Much easier to split not only the bills, but also the housework and child-rearing responsibilities. Communal living ftw.
drtanner-sfw
It’s also super a capitalism thing.
With only two working-age people in the house, it’s very difficult to make ends meet without one of them (or increasingly, these days, both of them) working away the vast majority of their waking hours to earn enough money to support the household. The other person, if they aren’t also working similar hours, is there to support that working person, full time, with unpaid labour.
The end result of this is that nobody has any time or energy to spend together properly, and they just end up tired and miserable and shackled to their work, throwing money at their problems because it’s all they can do. It’s very easy to convince tired, miserable people to spend their money in the ways you want them to, and it’s also very easy to manipulate and oppress people who don’t have the energy or the means to fight for their rights. Convince a whole nation that this is the way the world is supposed to work, and you’ll be well away.
Death to the cancerous myth of the nuclear family.
this is exactly the type of thing us aros and aces are referring to when we talk about amatonormativity
In addition to the above factors scorning non-nuclear family households, there is a load of racism pointed at living arrangements including more than 2 adults.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s and nearly every multi-gen/extended family (who were rarely ever white) in my quiet, uniformly lower-middle-class neighborhood was thought of as “dirty” and “taking advantage” of “the system”. The defacto impression was these households were drug dealing or otherwise out of control.
The amount of surveillance that white folks dedicated to the comings and goings of a BIPOC multi-adult household was disgusting, and this was *before* Next Door. And despite me being white, people often made clear to me that my own multi-gen household wasn’t How It Was Done because that’s what Those People did.
It’s also something they’ve started baking into HOA’s & leasing agreements. Only certain number of un-related people can live there, only 2 cars per household, etc. Often these little things go unenforced, but if someone wants you out they can be used against you.
This is why I keep bringing up the right to live with people you’re not legally related to as a queer liberation issue. It doesn’t always affect queer people - it’s been used in the past to throw an aunt and her nephews out of a home bc they weren’t “closely related enough” - but it definitely is a queer liberation issue.
My husband and I have been living with our best friend and roommate from college since 2017 and it’s honestly one of the best things we’ve ever done. Not one does it enable us to rent a home in the crazy expensive Seattle, WA area but our daughter get so much more attention and care because our bestie has literally been there since the day she was born and loves her just as much as we do.
It’s just a mutually beneficial living situation all around and I will happily grow old and die a few months apart from her if that’s how things turn out.