its so cool that humans can eat seaweed like be honest that fucks
Me, in the summer heat, taking 2 points of fire damage every second: aeugh aeugh aeugh ough eough ough eaugh
on trust and manipulation
Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -
And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”
And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.
Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.
The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.
I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.
I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.
I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.
And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.
Felice never played a trick on me again.
Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed.
And I feel like this is information worth sharing.
fluffypurpleglitterdemon asked:
I feel like no tags or morning visibility reblogs is being good at this site. Nearly everyone whose username or icon I recognize from viral posts (and the people who have 5 million strangers trying to pick fights with them at all times because they're "popular") have absolutely no tags for anything other than extra nonsense that didn't go in the posts. And occasionally content warnings
comicaurora answered:
tumblr’s collective personality sometimes feels like a morality challenge from a saccharine and severely defanged 19th-century fairy tale retelling where the Good Daughter meanders into the woods and says “dopamine go brrr” and the cheerful woodsprites laugh like bells and whisper “posts that have 10K notes To Me” and “investing at 5 notes” and bless her such that pure clout will fall from her lips whene'er she speaks so then the Wicked Daughter storms into the woods with a perfectly curated queue with three guilt-trip calls to action per post and a lengthy diatribe prepared on why likes without reblogs are tantamount to spitting in her hair and the cheerful woodsprites impassively scroll past and then six hours later vaguepost about how much they dislike seeing a specific take that doesn’t name any names but sounds suspiciously like her so the Wicked Daughter anonymously hits up their askbox to complain and for this she is cursed to be screenshotted and mocked in untagged anonymity for all eternity and also spit frogs or something
new heights of extraversion - was at an airport, saw some guys repairing these friction lines, went up to them and asked questions
the lines turn out to be called 'grip strip' and they are using a 'putty knife' and a 'margin trowel' to apply it. The mixture will dry in 15m. Before it dries they also have to sprinkle sand on top and press in with the knife/trowel.
I was writing this down in a notebook, and they asked me what for, and I told them I'm sick of not knowing the words for things. Sometimes it feels like I don't know the words for anything! I've read so many words without ever mapping them to the physical things they corresponded to.
I'm going through the corridor that's outside of the airport building and leads into the airplane, I don't know what it's called either (edit: just asked the flight attendant, it's called a jet bridge)
There's yellow and black angled striped tape on the sides of the floor of the jet bridge, and I don't know why THAT'S there or what it's called. (edit: kind online people have informed me this is "hazard tape" / "hazard stripes" / "safety tape", and the general class is called "barricade tape".)
That feeling when you're so extroverted you become an anthropologist.
Guy who has a DNI but it's just full of antiquated terms and references to factions that haven't existed for 200+ years so it makes no sense to anybody
"Portlandites, Girondins, supporters of Gr/attan or F/ox, Byromania devotees, Friends of Mr Pitt, supporters of the Rights Of Man, Canningites, supporters of Godwinism, fans of the Northern Star or the Anti-Jacobin or L'Ami du Peuple, and people who condone the United Irishmen, DNI"
Funniest thing about this post by far is that at least two people have left angry comments about how fans or members of the Society of the United Irishmen really aren't allowed to interact with them. lads it has been 220 years
so SAG-AFTRA finally released some official guidance for fans, viewers, creators/influencers, critics, and more during the strike. here's what you need to know:
- if you see a publication/news source/journalist talking about a piece of struck work, that's ok. they're allowed to do that.
2. they're asking regular viewers and fans to DONATE TO STRIKE FUNDS, SHOW UP TO PICKETS IF YOU CAN, and please do NOT boycott streaming services or movies in theaters.
3. influencers, content creators, cosplayers, and anything in between is still a bit of a grey area, but they're asking people to use their best judgement. "organically" means UNPAID promo (like an invite to a premiere without being paid, being sent a publicity box, letting the company's social media post a photo of you in cosplay, etc).
obviously this doesn't answer every question, and isn't hard and fast rules for fanworks, but it can at least inform how you personally choose to move forward when posting online and moving publically. i hope this helps!
i saw a really cool butterfly expert man on PBS and was so in awe of him and his butterfly knowledge i tracked down the episode online to see how to spell his name and found his twitter and followed him, only for the next day to awaken to him having read not only my webcomic, but also my livetweets saying how i wanted to marry the butterfly man. he said he was flattered. anyway the moral of the story is please don’t underestimate how far down your twitter a bored entomologist will scroll, and also the internet was a mistake.
What if you loved me so much it literally undoomed me haha jk unless
What if I had so much faith in you it literally reshaped the narrative into a happy ending HAHA JK UNLESS