Genuinely I think you guys should look into Solarpunk. Like, it’s a dark day in America, and everyone is feeling hopeless. And unfortunately America is a country that literally doesn’t mind its own business and has to be involved with the rest of the world. Mostly in a bad way. But.

I think you need to check out Solarpunk. Yes it’s literary as it’s speculative fiction. Yes it’s an aesthetic. But it’s also a real life movement. It’s activism against the climate crisis. To reverse the effects of our planet. It’s activism for human rights. The right to housing, the right to food, the right to water. Activism for education, health care, child care. To have the choice to have an abortion. It is about banding together with your community, with your fellow humans.

Solarpunk is about feeling rage about everything that is wrong with the world and using it to help fix it. It is about feeling hope that the actions you do will change things for the better, no matter how slow. Organization. Protests. Even something like calling, emailing, writing a letter to the people in your government. Your mayor, your county representative, your state representative and so on. It is about choosing kindness to help people in need. To help people who were once in cults and are taught to be afraid of “outsiders.” To help people when they realize that they were wrong and help them be able to grow. To share food with others, offer a friend a place to stay, join community events.

It is okay to rage. To cry. To scream and feel like the world is burning to the ground. Let yourself feel those emotions. And look at Solarpunk. Use your emotions as fuel to make things better. For yourself and others. To make things a bit kinder. For yourself and others.

You don't have to examine and figure out every aspect of your identity if you don't want to. You only have to explore and question as far as you're interested in doing so.

They found the most mysterious song and the comment under the video really got to me like yeah actually that's what it's all about

I'm a little bitter about the puzzle piece for autism. It had potential. It could have represented that the picture couldn't be complete without us. It could have represented an inherent place in the world for us and it doesn't. It had potential

Inexplicably Tiny Entrapta

She's an ant now

I realized the other day that the reason I didn't watch much TV as a teenager (and why I'm only now catching up on late aughts/early teens media that I missed), is because I literally didn't understand how to use our TV. My parents got a new system, and it had three remotes with a Venn diagram of functions. If someone left the TV on an unfamiliar mode, I didn't know how to get back to where I wanted to be, so I just stopped watching TV on my own altogether.

I explained all this to my therapist, because I didn't know if this was more related to my then-unnoticed autism, or to my relationship with my parents at the time (we had issues less/unrelated to neurodivergency). She told me something interesting.

In children's autism assessments, a common test is to give them a straightforward task that they cannot reasonably perform, like opening an overtight jar. The "real" test is to see, when they realize that they cannot do it on their own, if they approach a caregiver for help. Children that do not seek help are more likely to be autistic than those that do.

This aligns with the compulsory independence I've noticed to be common in autistic adults, particularly articulated by those with lower support needs and/or who were evaluated later in life. It just genuinely does not occur to us to ask for help, to the point that we abandon many tasks that we could easily perform with minor assistance. I had assumed it was due to a shared common social trauma (ie bad experiences with asking for help in the past), but the fact that this trait is a childhood test metric hints at something deeper.

My therapist told me that the extremely pathologizing main theory is that this has something to do with theory of mind, that is doesn't occur to us that other people may have skills that we do not. I can't speak for my early childhood self, or for all autistic people, but I don't buy this. Even if I'm aware that someone else has knowledge that I do not (as with my parents understanding of our TV), asking for help still doesn't present itself as an option. Why?

My best guess, using only myself as a model, is due to the static wall of a communication barrier. I struggle a lot to make myself understood, to articulate the thing in my brain well enough that it will appear identically (or at least close enough) in somebody else's brain. I need to be actively aware of myself and my audience. I need to know the correct words, the correct sentence structure, and a close-enough tone, cadence, and body language. I need draft scripts to react to possible responses, because if I get caught too off guard, I may need several minutes to construct an appropriate response. In simple day-to-day interactions, I can get by okay. In a few very specific situations, I can excel. When given the opportunity, I can write more clearly than I am ever capable of speaking.

When I'm in a situation where I need help, I don't have many of my components of communication. I don't always know what my audience knows. I don't have sufficient vocabulary to explain what I need. I don't know what information is relevant to convey, and the order in which I should convey it. I don't often understand the degree of help I need, so I can come across inappropriately urgent or overly relaxed. I have no ability to preplan scripts because I don't even know the basic plot of the situation.

I can stumble though with one or two deficiencies, but if I'm missing too much, me and the potential helper become mutually unintelligible. I have learned the limits of what I can expect from myself, and it is conceptualized as a real and physical barrier. I am not a runner, so running a 5k tomorrow does not present itself as an option to me. In the same way, if I have subconscious knowledge that an interaction is beyond my capability, it does not present itself as an option to me. It's the minimum communication requirements that prevent me from asking for help, not anything to do with the concept of help itself.

Maybe. This is the theory of one person. I'm curious if anyone else vibes with this at all.

This is really fascinating and also relatable, perhaps for you too, dear girl(s).

I had never heard the term "compulsory independence" before, wow.

For me personally, it's a combination of a few factors.

-Absolutely the communication barrier. People do not tend to have the patience to let me finish sentences under the best of circumstances. I have a hard time getting people to listen to me well enough to even understand what's wrong.

Now extrapolate to how much more of a problem this is for a barely-speaking child.

-A pattern of experiences that started very early that inculcated that seeking adult help was not likely to actually get me effective help.

-Some degree of shame that I couldn't do things that I did know I was supposed to be able to. And asking for help was so much more likely to get me grilled about why I couldn't do something myself than to get me help.

-Something that set in more as I got older... If help isn't absolutely, consistently reliable, then I'm better off not relying on it. Help from someone who I wind up always having to remind, for instance, is more stressful than just not having it. Never knowing whether the help is actually going to be there or whether the chances are 50/50 that I'll have to find some last-minute workaround is more stressful than just knowing I'm going to have to rely on myself.

-Asking for help and having it not come through, having a friend flake out on you, for instance, is going to be more upsetting than just not counting on the help in the first place. And then I've just added a meltdown and sadness on top of not being able to do whatever it was I needed help with in the first place.

@chavisory All of this.

One example is the time I stayed at a two-day sleepover, dirty and bored and miserable, because something that's hard to articulate was blocking me from asking to use the shower or calling my parents to go home.

almost every person i know bathes/showers in the evening while i do that in the morning, i’m curious which is more wide-spread so please reblog with tags saying if you take a shower/bathe in the morning or the evening

Evening. In a climate as humid as the one I live in, going to bed without a shower would be very gross.

Low Tech Solarpunk

The level of tech in my personal version of Solarpunk is a lot more like tech in to 90's and early two thousands

Those are just some things that imo we got right the first time and honestly wouldn't mind going back to

I'm for this, but I don't share the antipathy towards smart phones - everyone having a camera at all times has a lot of useful applications. The problem with cell phones is planned obsolescence - the idea that it exists to be thrown away and replaced every year/few years. Phones should be built to last 20 years, with easily replaceable parts. They should have long battery life and be sturdy enough to survive a fall down some concrete steps. They should still have apps and cameras, though.

i mean this in the nicest way possible you guys but you NEED to take better care of yourselves online. getting severely anxious about mass quantities of horrible things you cant change every single day is normal considering the internet’s ability to educate on worldwide issues, it shows that you have empathy and that you truly do care. but relentless knowledge of constant suffering on this scale is NOT something humans are psychologically equipped to handle. it’s okay to shut off. it’s okay to just take a break and enjoy yourself for a while in your own localized space

It was half meant as a joke, but I recently read a post that was something like “If you’re not outraged, you’re probably setting understandable boundaries with the news you consume online”, and I still haven’t stopped thinking about it

Noozles was a 26-episode series about a girl sent a stuffed Koala that comes to life when she gives it a noozle (or eskimo kiss), with a magic pink koala friend named Pinky. It had weirdly ambitious deep lore and worldbuilding for a series aimed at its young audience, with references to Ayer’s Rock being a portal to another dimension where Sandy’s grandfather was prisoner, and the mystical Australian other dimension of Koala-Walla-Land. 

I would love a remastered DVD release of the Noozles dub.

Yearly reminder to everyone trying to find alternatives to tumblr/social media in general: go make a Neocities account and teach yourself basic HTML and post your art/writing/shitposts there.

It does take extra time to set up (but there are templates out there!) but it is so so worth it to have a site that is 100% YOURS!

You don’t even have to be that good at coding. I’m not. My site is not very accessible via mobile devices but that is fine with me (keeps me off my phone) but there are plenty of ways to make your site mobile friendly. There are plenty of bare bones/accessible sites I adore purely for the media on it.

Imagine having your site on your phone and showing someone- hey! I coded this from scratch. And I didn’t even have to pay a company like squarespace. All your images, links, writings, in one place. I have my fandom edits, memes, fanart, and custom graphics there.

Neocities has a very bare bones follower and comment system, but you can disable this if you want your site to truly abstain from any social media-isms. I use it because its a great way to meet other webmasters and get help with coding problems. Neocities isn't an exact replacement for Tumblr (no reblogging here) but html coding is an invaluable skill to know, as is keeping a personal website in this day in age.

The awesome thing about having your own website is if, god forbid, Neocities goes down, you can move your site to any other number of hosting platforms (like Teacake.org). Your site is truly YOURS, and no one else (shitty tech CEO cough cough) can take it away from you.

If you need help getting started, I recommend checking out sadgrl.online. (More links to resources in the comments section of this post).

I know neocities has been talked about before, especially within my follower circle, but I thought I'd bring it up again for anyone unaware of this awesome platform.

Seriously, do it. It's awesome. And the neat thing about Neocities or Nekoweb is that you can easily follow each other's websites.

IMac Aquariums

That post about death note being "everyone's first anime" (untrue statement) made me curious and now I want to gather data for science

Can you reblog this and tell me where are you from and what was your starter anime?

I'm not 100% certain, but it's likely either the US dub of Gatchaman, Battle of the Planets that was on one of the local TV stations in southern California or the VHS tape of the Starvengers movie that the summer daycare place had that we watched a couple times a week.

UK, and does Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend count?

USA, and my first anime was Armitage III

Me too for UK and 'Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend'.

Mine was Serendipity the Pink Dragon/Dinosaur

⬆️ I used to rent Serendipity all the time from our local video store ♥️

Pretty sure mine was Noozles or Hello Kitty and Friends, but I had Serendipity on VHS too.

Less magic schools. More magic universities. Unlearn the simplified models of your secondary education. Discover how to reference scrolls written by a wizard possessed by a different wizard. Identify bias in the voices that whisper from beyond the veil. Have your institution be accused of promoting a Merlinist agenda. Become addicted to energy potions.

Giving me writing ideas like this on a random Friday evening?? How dare!??

I've already got an item in my ideas doc saying "Ars Magica??" Lord help me