Abstract Thoughts

Your trauma responses once kept you safe. Thank them, then gently let them know their job is done. It's time to grow.

I'm just like any modern woman trying to have it all. Loving husband, a family. It's just, I wish I had more time to seek out the dark forces and join their hellish crusade.

Anjelica Huston as Morticia Addams in The Addams Family (1991) & Addams Family Values (1993)

"The spectre of communism"

Halloween mural in Melbourne quoting the first passage of the Communist Manifesto

ghost hunting team that keep a nonbeliever named steve around as an emergency supernatural suppressant

he waits in the car with a walkie talkie while they investigate and if things break bad they call him in. as soon as he enters everything stops floating around/trying to kill the hunters and he rolls his eyes and goes back to the car.

he’s not bluffing. i can’t emphasize that enough. he 100% believes that the hunters calling him in is either a prank, to make him feel useful, or because they’re spookable cowards who panicked when a book fell.

he stays because the money is good and he can play his gameboy in the car.

i fucking love this so much. it’s like having a service animal but instead it’s a guy named steve who owns more cargo shorts than the Gap continuously baffled by why he keeps getting befriended by goths.

It could work with any non believer or it could be that Steve, specifically, is so Powerfully Normal TM that he projects a kind of anti-magic field at anything he notices - ironically making him one of the most powerful magical beings in existence and he will never know.

The Rosetta Stone on the Deep Space Nine Promenade, written in English, Klingon, Vulcan, Ferengi, Bajoran and Cardassian

They've included the Jupiter Mining Corporation as a little Red Dwarf reference that's adorable!

So like... people have broached the idea of pride flags having dragons on them like heraldry, which is of course correct and just, but like... they shouldn't ALL have dragons, right? Or at least not the same dragon. Each flag should have its own heraldic beast, ideally one that relates to the orientation the flag represents.

Which begs the question of which heraldic beasts would best suit each color of the rainbow, as it were. I think the iconic four legged, two winged dragon makes sense for the main pride/rainbow flag, since dragons are often posited as, like, the pinnacle of monsters, and so feel best suited to be the one that encompasses the whole spectrum, but I'm kind of paralyzed by the options presented to pick out ones for the others.

I want to claim Sphinxes for gender fluid people because they're both man and beast and neither, have the wings of a bird and the four legs of a beast but are fully neither, and somehow manage to be cohesive beings while never fully belonging to any one category of creature.

@prideknights

Thank you for tagging me! @garnetrena I love this idea! Over the past few weeks, Francesco and I have been discussing this idea and we think we can do it! We're planning to design custom coat of arms for each pride flag, featuring creatures (champions) and symbolic elements that accurately represent the essence of each flag's identity. I think this will be a super cool project with lots of community involvement/fun! Question is...

This means that the rainbow flag will appear to be more Welsh. I am entirely in favour. Imagine this bad arse lizard with rainbow, they'd be way more cheerful.

Phrack prompt anyone?

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2012-2015) ↳ 3x03 Murder & Mozzarella

The closest Phryne ever gets to blushing. Jack would be so amused (and insufferably smug) if he ever found out.

Sometimes I see some variety of North American Little Guy (opossum, raccoon, etc. ) and I’m like “okay”

BUT THEN I start thinking about how excited somebody from not-North-America would be to see this Guy. Like, would an Australian be excited to see the only marsupial not from their country? Are there raccoons in zoos on the other side of the world that are regarded as unique and exotic creatures? Idk but it’s made me more excited to see Guys in my area.

it's me, i'm the person described in the tumbl

I went to a zoo in England this past summer, and there were crowds around the skunks, raccoons, and coyotes.

Raccoons are little floofy guys with tiny hands. Yes, I will always be excited to meet one.

It should however be noticed that I also get hugely excited by hedgehogs and badgers and would levitate with excitement in the presence of a stoat, all of which are available locally.

My stupid mobile game sprung a surprise on me

It will never die

can people please stop filming the entire fucking world around them for public consumption? and especially random fucking strangers who you did not ask???

I work at a park and man the front desk. and I'm photographed and filmed a lot. I'm talking easily 20+ times per day. most of the times, it's parents filming me swearing in their kids as junior rangers. which. they're intending to film their kids. what they get is me and the back of their kids' heads.

there's this recurring problem that like. people forget we're real people? like yeah you're filming your kid, but you're filming me interacting with your kid. I could count the amount of times someone has asked me permission to do this in the past year on one hand. and sometimes that's after they already start filming.

Like, I'm not an actor. I did not agree to this. You could be a dick and make the argument that I'm a public figure, but I'm not. This is not a persona and my uniform is not a costume. I'm a person trying to do my job and help people and teach them about science and history. And you know what makes it harder to do that? The knowledge that anything I say or do could end up shared with thousands of people. The fact that if I fuck up the wording of this kid's junior ranger pledge, or I sneeze, or make some basic mistake, it's not just a funny or embarrassing moment for me and this one family. It could end up on tiktok.

And okay, those are the people intending to film their own kids and not thinking or caring about the collateral. What's worse is the people who film everything. A few times a week some guy walks into the visitor center, phone already horizontal in front of their face, narrating what they're doing and seeing. They come up to the desk and ask me questions, phone in my face. They take wide establishing shots of the visitor center and every visitor in it. None of us agreed to this! None of these people consented to be in your youtube video! We are not the fucking set dressing of whatever travel instagram story you're making!

I don't know where I'm going with this. This is really only the tip of the iceberg. Sometimes people ask us to repeat what we just did - swear in their kid, or explain a detail, or hand them a fucking map - so they can get a second take, and they're already filming so if we say no we look like the asshole. Sometimes we're asked innocuous things like to point out a landmark, and next week there's a photo of us in the 15,000 member Rangers Pointing at Things facebook group (yep, real thing). One time my entire 45 minute evening program was filmed without my permission and I was informed after the fact. This happens all the time, and I'm giving park ranger examples, but this happens to so many people in service work or public positions every single fucking day.

I guess just, next time you go to film in a public space, take a second. Think about who you're about to film, if they agreed to that, what might happen if a video of them went viral. there's a reason I'm not out as trans at work. And then, maybe. don't. or at least fucking ask.

I can only speak to the UK but I teach uni level media and journalism students, and I've found that their flabbers are often fully ghasted at the idea that if you're filming professionally you need to get written permission from the participants and do a risk assessment. That if you don't do those things as a professional making media you open yourself up to litigation and if you're working as a freelancer and fail to do due diligence with this stuff you're going to lose clients.

A few of the comments on the Megyn Kelly tampon post said something to the effect that periods aren't gross and we should stop treating them as such.

I agree with the spirit of that.

But I also think periods are gross.

I think pooping is gross. I think peeing is gross. I think spit is gross. I think all of the fluids involved with intercourse are gross. I think childbirth is just about the grossest thing that ever gross'd.

I think humans are big gross bags of various goo.

I handle all of the gross things my body does by accepting the grossness. I deal with gross things as quickly as I can and then I don't think about it anymore. Our varied assortment of bodily goo is a byproduct of being a human and living a life and just something we have to deal with from time to time.

There is no shame in it. We should not shame others for it. And I don't think we should go out of our way to hide the icky parts of the human experience.

But I also don't think we need to tell ourselves that gross things aren't gross.

It's similar to how I feel about stretch marks. I really do not have the time or mental bandwidth to convince myself they are actually "tiger stripes" and some beautiful aspect of my body. I view them the same as I view my knuckles. They are just there. I don't try to tell myself I have pretty knuckles. I don't think they are ugly either. I assign no aesthetic value to my knuckles.

I personally think this is a more healthy approach than lying to my brain until it believes something. I'm not saying everyone has to take this approach, it's just what works best for me.

But I can say from my experience dealing with an elderly dying person for over a year, it only gets grosser from here, so you should definitely prepare yourself for all of the extra goo in your future.

Sometimes things are gross and that's okay.

#look if it’s one thing that being disabled has taught me it’s that human bodies are gross#and sometimes all you can do is deal with the grossness#the grossness is often times not preventable#ya just gotta deal with it#(also I feel like accepting the grossness of humans would go a long way#toward society seeing the disabled as actual people and give us more room to talk#about the various gross things that come with it#but it’s 5am and I have not had tea yet I cannot have this conversation with rn)

Being a living creature of the Animalia kingdom comes with a lot of mucus and oozes and just because certain mucuses and oozes have specific names doesn't make them any more gross than others.

I feel much this way about most well-meaning efforts to make people feel X thing about them is So Beautiful And Powerful TBH.

I really think I'd enjoy the world much more if people would stop telling me that my fat, 40+ body with its scars and stretch marks and pimples and varicose veins is Beautiful. Because it still carries the message on some level that my body exists to be Beautiful. Which, fuck that shit. It exists to be my body.

There's a nuance to the discussion of periods in this context in that unlike other natural but icky bodily functions there is a long tradition of presenting periods and those that have them as uniquely and spiritually gross. Of keeping discussions around that natural function taboo in ways others aren't. That's how you end up with grown men who sincerely believe it's possible to hold in menstrual blood like you hold in pee. The actual experience of having a period is generally pretty gross, but talking about it shouldn't have to be.

It's also true that when it comes to sex people have different reactions to different bodily goos depending on their own kinks and preferences and the place menstrual blood occupies in that context often reflects a lot of deeply embedded cultural misogyny.