One of the greatest kindnesses you can do for other adults is to add positive surprises to their lives. Think about it: When you're a kid, surprises are things like "Our teacher let us watch a movie today," "someone brought cupcakes for their birthday," "my parents got me a puppy," etc. But when you become an adult, surprises are things like your car breaking down, conflicts at work, and unexpected bills. No one plans fun surprises for adults, and you can do so much for morale if you do. Ex: One time I found a tiny unlocked door in one of my university's buildings. It was empty, but because I'm a whimsical bitch, I decided to put something fun behind it for the next person curious enough to open it. See below: The Egg Gnome.

The eggs were filled with tiny plastic plants (I tried candy first, but mice got into them, and that's not good for health and safety). Just for the hell of it, I decided to announce the hidden gnome and basket of eggs in the big college group chat, offering hints to which building it was in. People went BONKERS for it. It added fun to people's days as they inspected buildings they went into every day but didn't pay much attention to. They asked me for hints, tried to remember what building had those floor tiles, and proudly announced it in the chat when they had found eggs.

I did several things like that where I just hid things around the university and challenged people to find them, and it did so much for student morale. Some people messaged me to tell me my random antics were their only source of real fun on a daily basis. Adults are just big kids. We're supposed to play long into adulthood, and the games are just supposed to scale in complexity with age, but even simple things like a scavenger or prize hunt can make people so much happier. If you have any kind of morale-keeping duties or have the option to take them on at a school, workplace, etc., I highly recommend planning fun surprises for the people around you. Planned events are a lot of fun, but it's a totally different kind of fun to find out there's a scavenger hunt going on on a random Tuesday.

As I type this, my coworkers are exclaiming over an adult busy book one of them was given out of the blue - fun papers and paperclips and textured pages and even a few scent sachets! It's unique and beautiful and she loves it.

Earlier in the year, I bought a 12 pack of these for like 2 dollars.

I hid them all over the office - I thought they'd find one every few days but came in to find one of my coworkers actively and eagerly hunting them all down! She'd found all but two by the time I got there. She even helped hide some again so other coworkers could look for them when they came in. Everyone has their own chicken at their desks and at the employee computers. Some have been decorated (one has butterfly wings!) and for a while one was "sunbathing" with a little lifesaver floatie.

We need whimsy! We need enrichment! It doesn't have to be much to make people happy and it's always worth the time and effort to set it up.

the older I get the more I think being in love is about helping your partner give erotic birth to whatever weird unknowable thing is inside of them and the more this concept starts expressing itself in my work

I don’t want to look at her and see me, I don’t need to see me, I want to see her unfold and unfurl like one of the sled dogs in the Thing, I want to see who she turns into in that space of total permission

No, your oc isn't too cringe or a Mary sue. Yes, it's completely fine that it looks similar to your other ocs. Yes it's completely fine that it looks similar to a Canon character design. No it's not uncreative. No the design isn't shitty. No the backstory doesn't have to make perfect sense or be all figured out. Yes it can be self indulgent or unrealistic or overly sappy. No you don't draw your favorite character too much. Yes you can flip flop between developing whatever characters you want. No you don't have to keep the parts of your character that you don't like or that make you uncomfortable just for the sake of consistency, realism or whatever else

just overheard my wife spelling something on the phone and i shit you not saying the words “E as in Eeyore” i am on my hands and knees wailing screaming crying pleading and begging people to learn the NATO phonetic alphabet

like the reason this exists is because none of the words sound like each other, which means that even with a terrible signal both parties should be able to clearly understand the words being spelled

i am dead serious that i believe this should be taught in school

i cannot hate myself into a version of me i will love.

i cannot punish myself in any way that will unmake the past.

How to Ditch Amazon

Support your local libraries and the small businesses that are actually making the products you want.  Fuck Jeff Bezos and the systemic, universal worker abuse, gaslighting, and brutality they live off of.

this seems like a good thing to bring around as people holiday shop

I hate that thing some people do where it's like. "I left my wallet on the table to see if you'd say anything" or "I wanted to see if you'd wash the car if I stopped doing it"

Cause like

I dont know about anyone else

But I am perpetually hovering three inches above the strong subconscious belief that everyone knows what they're doing at all times except me, so if you change your normal patterns and I notice, then I will assume it is an intentional choice with a thought-out plan behind it and I will avoid interfering

And if I don't notice, because I won't, because why would I, because not much bothers me and if you don't say anything to indicate you are bothered then how would I KNOW

Alternatives to experimenting on me like a lab rat when you suspect me of being inconsiderate:

Greetings bugs and worms!

This comic is a little different than what I usually do but I worked real hard on it—Maybe I'll make more infographic stuff in the future this ended up being fun. Hope you learned something new :)

If you are still curious and want to learn more about OCD, you can visit the International OCD Foundation's website. I also recommend this amazing TED ED video "Starving The Monster", which was my first introduction to the disorder and this video by John Green about his own experience with OCD.

The IOCDF's website can also help you find support groups, therapy, and has lots of online guides and resources as well if you or a loved one is struggling with the disorder. It is very comprehensive!

Reblog to teach your followers about OCD

(But also not reblogging doesn't make you evil, silly goose)

Oh please, please spread information about this. It's so goddamn important.

I was diagnosed with OCD in December 2021, and it was a living hell. It's nothing like the pop culture representation of it. It was, without question, the worst experience of my life. OCD is a nightmare to have.

Those feelings you have when something horrible happens? Imagine having those feelings day in and day out, because in your mind, those horrible things are being constantly thought about as a very real threat. Your mind tells you to do the compulsion, or they'll come true.

The compulsions aren't something we like doing. The comic is so right about this. You could be rearranging your room a hundred times to get it exactly right because it makes you happy, and still not have OCD. The compulsions are born out of fear, that started rational and then devolved into things that don't make sense at all.

Because I was a psychology student and I'm someone who pays close attention to my mental state, I noticed the horrifying change in my behaviour and forced my family to take me to see a psychologist within a couple of months of symptom onset.

It's been more than two years of medication and therapy, and the OCD doesn't paralyse me anymore the way it used to. Most days, I barely remember it's there, sleeping in my brain and dormant. Treatment is possible, and I'm proof of it.

This is because I saw something was wrong and got help.

But even being a psychology student, until I got the diagnosis, I didn't even consider it might be OCD. I just knew something was off.

Why didn't I think of OCD? Because of the sheer volume of misinformation that's spread about this disorder.

I don't want other OCD sufferers to not seek help simply because of this popular misunderstanding about what the disorder is. So yeah. Please go through the comic, it explains it wonderfully.

Thank you for sharing your story and I’m so glad to hear you are doing better

It really is so insane (haha) to me that such a common mental illness is so widely misunderstood by everyone. Its insane that even as a psychology student, you had trouble considering that.

And knowing what OCD is…is so goddamn important to fight it. Before I understood how obsessive compulsive thinking worked, I didn’t even attempt to resist my compulsions. I just walked right into spiral after spiral not understanding why I developed these irrational fears. I knew there was something wrong with me, and left to my imagination, my paranoia had me diagnosing myself with every possible illness before I ever considered OCD.

Simply learning what it was improved my life so dramatically it was almost comical.

And ya wanna know where I learned about it?

Randomly scrolling through Wikipedia

Not because someone explained it to me, not because I saw it on TV. Just because I click random Wikipedia articles sometimes.

So yeah, spreading awareness of OCD is so important. Shutting down misinformation about the disorder is so important. The amount of reblogs this comic has gotten with people in the tags just going “uh oh…” and “I think I need to talk to a psychiatrist” and “this describes my last few years of misery holy shit” and quite a few “wait I thought I did these things because I had autism/ADHD? Are hyperfixations not fear related?” and Y’all. It’s literally hundreds. Hundreds of you.

I also want to note that OCD is frequently misdiagnosed as ADHD and Autism—which is bad because the treatment for both conditions are not only super different, treatment for one often actively harms the other. Stimming is helpful, autistic rituals are benign, and accomodating sensory needs is a necessity. Compulsions are harmful to the one doing them and accomodating fear makes fear worse.

Of course, it’s possible and even common to have OCD AND Autism/ADHD (they are frequently comorbid.) So that complicates things as well…

I wish the neurodiversity movement talked about OCD more, and a lot more other things, for that matter.

To all of you that figured out you have OCD because of my silly little comic, Godspeed. If you are in the spiral right now, there is hope, even if your OCD tells you there isn’t any. There will come a time that you are not afraid.

If you are a white kid with a positive relationship (as in they are not abusing you and generally like you as a kid and want you to like them) with a casually racist family member have you considered guilt tripping them? It's been a highly effective tactic with my grampa. When he used to pop off with shit I wouldn't give him a dissertation like my mom and uncle did bcus he'd just dig in his heels and argue. Instead, I found a well placed "wow :( no it's fine I just like idk. I didn't know you were like that :(((( " worked WONDERS. If you want to deradicalize people, don't focus on writing essays for random trolls online. Just make your racist family feel bad for being racist. You might even be able to sneak some idk facts and logic into them after you've been doing that consistently while hanging out.

I'm middle aged now and have reached a status in my family and among my inlaws that I can even just douse them with a look of shocked disgust and they receive the message that what they're saying is way out of line for their social strata.

It seems to be slowly making inroads with some of them, because they start thinking over the bullshit they're parroting, and considering what about it is so nasty.

Letting them intellectualize their bullshit doesn't work. It's too comfortable for them to continue to regurgitate talking points they heard on talk radio. You gotta activate their anxiety about rejection, and prepare to actually do some rejecting.

If you want them to realize the ideas they're spouting have real world consequences, then they need to see consequences can happen to them.

Bonus: my kid sees me reacting with overt disgust and learns that racism is disgusting and horrifying, rather than something to be calmly abstracted and divorced from reality.

ayo this pretty cool

[id: active style manual wheelchair with frame made of rectangle wood planks screwed together. end id]

as we know active type wheelchair very expensive, & repair need buy from specific medical manufacturer n take very long time. someone (who wheelchair user themself of near 40 years) made open source active manual wheelchair where most (if not all?) material from commercial easy get materials! wood, plastic, pvc pipe, & those commercial aluminum square pipe things. n they put guide made them yourself in link for anyone want try make

this video from their instagram show their wood frame wheelchair actually pretty durable, include clip from everyday use & even drop wheelchair all over place (basically imagine what airline do to them…) - n wheelchair stay in tact! n even if some part break - it easy change because wood planks all screwed together so you just buy wood plank & unscrew & rescrew.

not great for people w advanced seating positioning needs probably (think if only problem is easy butt pressure sore, maybe can still use this + supportive cushion but think beyond that it get hard). but if like you don’t need those things then maybe fun project?

have not use for self so can’t actually talk about experience but it look pretty cool

ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige

I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”

Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.

when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.

I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.

But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)

And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.

This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.

https://xkcd.com/150/

I would like you all to view my office. I’m thirty and my rainbow room is awesome, people can fight me

I’m thirty and my first big furniture purchase was a custom coffin shaped coffee table that opens up and is lined with purple crushed velvet. I would have loved it at 13 and I love it now. Growing up doesn’t mean you have to abandon what makes you happy.

GROWING UP DOESN’T MEAN YOU HAVE TO ABANDON WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY.

GROWING UP DOESN’T

MEAN YOU HAVE TO ABANDON

WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, because I am An Old now and repeating stories forever is our prerogative:

When I bought my house, the kitchen was multiple shades of dingy white. It was dismal, but it was now mine! So went to the hardware store for paint (well, several trips, painted swatches on panel, etc — I’m very picky. But this was the final, ‘real’ trip). It was a busy day in the paint section. There were at least five people behind me in line.

Now, remember, latex paint is slightly lighter and brighter when wet than it is when dry. And I’d decided to paint my kitchen candy-apple red. The hardware store employee took my gallon off the Paint Jiggler and cracked it open to put a dab on the top, revealing the most incredibly deep pink, and behind me I hear the entire line of people say,

“Oh my god.”

…in perfect chorus.

I did not realize up until that moment that shocking a crowd of strangers with my paint color choices was a life goal, but at that moment I felt an absolutely overwhelming sense of achievement.

This is the door to my garage. It used to be white. Live your best life.

Mischief the cat says “Who goes there?”

Every visiting friend says “This is so cool.”

If you’re looking for an excuse to do some decorating that will make your soul sing, this entire thread is your sign to do it and don’t look back!

This is the door to

my garage. It used to be

white. Live your best life.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

GRADE SCHOOL SJWS stop using social justice language to explain shit to your conservative parents IT’S NOT GONNA GO THROUGH now all they have are some new words to make fun of. don’t tell your mom she’s being fatphobic tell her she’s being a dick

No, this is for real.

"I don't think you raised me to treat/talk about/ talk to people like that" is an extremely powerful sentence. So is "it makes me sad when you say mean things like that." There's also "I wouldn't like it if someone said rude things like that about you/my sibling/[other parent]/loved family figure."

My parents don't get that a lot of the comments they make about people are fatphobic, perisexist, transphobic, etc. (I'd say that my dad doesn't know that the things he says are homophobic, but he does.) But they do understand that they told me to treat people respectfully all my life, and they hate being shown up as acting hypocritical.

(And for real I hate little more in this world than @mistresskabooms telling me I'm not acting the way I raised her to act.)

For real though, this also (surprisingly?) applies to telling your white racist relatives they're being racist when you're white yourself. Like a word as simple and old as that, you'd think it wasn't on anyone's I don't Get It -list anymore. And yet.

The thing with a lot of people who casually throw around these old school "jokes" about minorities is that they do know those big words like racist and transphobic and fatphobic. They "know" those words mean that it's a bad thing. But they don't understand how and why that is it because the mechanics are strange to them and don't fit into what they've been taught. And if they're really conservative, they know those words mean you're talking Leftist ideologies, which is just about as bad as being the Bad Word. Which results in an immediate shutdown. You're talking extremist gobbledygook. You can't be taken seriously. You've been radicalized.

When you start trying to talk someone out of being an asshole to others, you gotta do it in baby steps. Do the 101. Use small words. Appeal to their sense of needing to be considered a good person instead of immediately using academic jargon, no matter how succinct and tempting it might be. We're here to make people care, make them consider hurting others less first, before you can spring on the "oh yeah this all is called X-phobia, academically speaking" on them.

^^^^^^

Deescalation and communication without blame is SO useful!!!!

This is FANTASTIC for communicating important ideas with others, but is also super useful for diffusing fights, avoiding fights, and communicating feelings!

10/10 DO RECOMMEND

Here, a cheater course on caring for natural fibers!

1. Wool. Treat it like it has the delicate constitution of a Victorian lady and the conviction that baths are evil of a 17th century noble. (If I get in WATER my PORES will OPEN and I will CATCH ILL AND DIE.)

2. Cotton; easygoing. Will shrink a bit if washed and dried hot.

3. Silk; people think it’s like wool and has the constitution of a fashionably dying of consumption Victorian lady, but actually it’s quite tough. Can be washed in an ordinary washer, and either tumbled dry without heat or hung to dry.

4. Linen; it doesn’t give a shit. Beat the hell out of it. Historically was laundered by dousing it in lye and beating the shit out of it with wooden paddles, which only makes it look better. The masochist of the natural fiber world. Beat the fuck out of it linen doesn’t care. Considerably stronger than cotton. Linen sheet sets can last literal decades in more or less pristine shape because of that strength.The most likely natural fiber to own a ball gag.

cr: 百变花央

I’m out here buying tshirts and pants like a chump while some people are just wearing the world’s best rectangles

Pre-manufacturing cultures will really be like, here is the most elegant and gorgeous outfit you can imagine, and it’s achieved entirely with rectangles, ropes, and pins.

Over and over again, across the world, in cultures that never even knew of each others’ existences. Just, rectangles, knots, and pins. And I love that for them.

they should let you get xrays and mris just cause. i wanna see what my skelinton looks like. i wanna see my organs and shit

If you want this specifically for your brain, you can get it. And it's not just free, it costs less than free.

The trick is to find your nearest research university with an FMRI (which is a lot of them) and keep an eye out for neuroimaging studies they're conducting. There are tonnes of these things. Then, you sign up (free) go in to play tetris while the scan your brain for a bit (free, but very loud) and then, at the end, you can just ask them 'hey, can you send me a picture of my brain' and they will! When I did this they gave me both a high-resolution image and a 3D model. (I got it printed and hung it on my wall in a gilded frame)

And the best part is that not a bit of this cost money. It cost negative money. They gave me 45 bucks.