#fascinating experience

[mx-lamour]

I've been in physical therapy for a neck/back strengthening program, because most of my work/hobbies are things I lean over. I have had terrible posture most of my life for a few reasons.

Sometimes my PT coach likes to chat in between exercises. Sometimes during. Usually just small talk.

But then I'm in this machine, pushing 88 pounds of torque with my spine, and he asks me if I have any new projects going on.

This guy, who I already know is normal athlete guy, and who knows that I engage in art and writing endeavors he has no frame of reference for.

It's sweet of him to be curious, but my god.

So I wrack my brain, and start to explain in the most basic and general way how I'm... doing cosplay? And like, writing a research paper about it?

But it hits my special-interest desire to go into animated detail, full of silly jargon, wherein I would feel compelled to define and delve into the background of every other word, and I'm having to curate on the spot which details are important and why and which he would be able to follow and how to present them in an order that makes sense, and I'm doing a pretty bang-up job, and then suddenly I start to realize that I am burning up.

Miraculously, I manage to say "I'm getting really hot" but don't actually remember that I am still currently engaged in a physical workout, so the guy jumps in and saves me and tells me I can stop the exercise.

I'd literally stopped processing the physical exertion. My brain apparently set it to autopilot in order to effectively craft speech instead. I did not feel tired or sore. I could easily have gone back to doing more reps if I had only shut my mouth.

But as it was, like a computer trying to run a software it wasn't built for, I was literally overheating.

tbh I'm a little bit curious what the crash point would have been, and which would have gone first, my tongue or my back or something else entirely...

[mynnthia]

was talking with a friend about how some of dunmeshi fаndom misunderstands kabru's initial feelings towards laios.

to sum up kabru's situation via a self-contained modernized metaphor:

kabru is like a guy who lost his entire family in a highly traumatic car accident. years later he joins a discord server and takes note of laios, another server member who seems interesting, so they start chatting. then laios reveals his special interest and favorite movie of all time is David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), and invites kabru to go watch a demolition derby with him

[i-schmeared-it-on-a-bagel]

I heard the doorbell ring, so I went to go see who was at the door, and my sister yelled "IT'S THE MAYOR" "I NEED PANTS"

[an-absolute-nightmare]

oh hey i forgot to mention this weird thing that happened couple days ago. i was hanging out at the park with my friends when this old man having four paintbrushes in his hand comes up to our group and starts looking at us. and we all became kinda awkward because well. it was an awkward situation. and i think we were all half expecting him to ask if he wanted to paint us but then he went from one corner of our (fairly large group) to another and then? starts to sing?? and we all didn't know what to do bc it was so weird and random but also he was singing pretty well so we all just sort of stood/sat there until he finished and then he brisk walked away??

[wolfythewitch]

Gf: I want to try out she/they pronouns

Me: holy shit we yuri'd our yaoi

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Kiss Kiss Fallen Tree!

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[soybean-official]

Family portrait.

[genericpuff]

I find something that annoys me is how people misunderstand why Persephone is considered the goddess of spring.

It’s because Demeter makes it spring when she returns. Not because Persephone has some awesome sick flower powers and she makes it all pretty before returning to her 10000/10 husband.

Agreed! But also, if I can offer up my own food for thought / interpretation: Demeter didn't necessarily create 'winter' as we traditionally perceive it, rather she created famine.

In that same sense, Demeter isn't even necessarily "making it Spring" when Persephone returns - she makes the land fertile again, allowing mortals to harvest their crops and thrive. Thus creating the "seasons" of harvest and drought.

Like many of the myths we've preserved and still read today, The Hymn to Demeter was a story created to explain natural phenomena that we didn't yet know how to explain. In Demeter's case, the story of her separation from her daughter explained the cycle of nature - why the clouds would no longer rain, why the ground would dry and crack, why the soil would become brittle, and why the crops would lose their will to live. It wasn't necessarily because she brought about 'winter', it was simply that she stopped performing her own duties, which were specifically dedicated to the harvest, especially that of wheat and grains (both of which are INCREDIBLY important foods that played their own massive role in the evolution of the human race - they weren't only essential to keeping both humans and livestock fed with their carb-heavy components, but could also be used to make fabrics and tools.)

Just as people prayed to Poseidon for safe travels across still waters, so too would people pray to Demeter for a bountiful harvest. Whenever there were droughts, you could understand it as the period when Persephone would return to the Underworld; or you could even blame it on yourself, or even your own fellow mortals, if you felt that perhaps Demeter had been disrespected in some way so as to bring about a drought as punishment.

This is why The Hymn to Demeter also functions as a foundational story for the founding of The Eleusinian Mysteries - a cult that worshipped Demeter, and other deities attributed to the harvest (ex. Dionysus) whose initiates were sworn to secrecy, never to speak aloud what practices were happening within the cult. And they did a damn good job of it too, because to this day we still don't fully know what went down in those cults. They're mysteries, after all :')

Demeter wasn't the only god who was attributed to the harvest and the weather patterns that would cause drought, but she's certainly one of the most popularly discussed, undoubtedly due to the fact that her story is one of the oldest and most well-preserved, and she was attributed to some of the most essential crops of that era.

But as it would happen to many myths over the centuries, the exact cultural contexts and intentions behind her original story have become either lost, or re-interpreted so many times that we can't even fully trust that Homer's version is "accurate", at least not without any way to retrieve those original oral stories that predated both him and other famous poets whose work we still study and analyze today.

But hey, that's just my own interpretation! One out of the thousands that have existed and the thousands that will undoubtedly go on to exist. I'm sure my own interpretation of it isn't perfect or foolproof, but I hope it offers up some fun food for thought!

[fanfiction-obsession]

Major Monogram from Phineas and Ferb is a fascinating accidental example of unjust biases stemming from ignorance and laziness instead of intentional harm in the ‘species-ism’ that is a root of injustice in the PnF universe. In this essay I will

[kayvsworld]

I wish there were mcu comics I wish there were comics but of the mcu. low stakes inter-movie 2012 avengers tower style shenanigans and I am NOT talking about avengers assemble the cartoon OR the tie in comics I am saying a series, an avengers series specifically of the avengers and they do avengers things and it's mcu but it's comics

what I am actually saying is that I wish there had been more avengers movies before aou where they did avengers things and were friends, an avengers 1.5, but this is a more unfixable problem

[starry-bi-sky]

yall ever think Shen Yuan went through like, internet withdrawal after being transmigrated into Shen Qingqiu? Like, he's canonically a NEET shut-in who did nothing but spend his time online, you can't tell me that for the first week or first few weeks of being SQQ he wasn't twitchy.

Like, reaching instinctively to his pockets for a phone that wasn't there, having an obsessive itch in the back of his mind that he should check and see if X or Y novel or webcomic has updated -- only to realize he can't anymore and being irritated by it. Wanting to go and see if there's new posts about this or that, but again realizing that he can't.

When he's bored or uncomfortable or just feels like wanting to escape he tries to go for his phone to distract himself, but oops! Not there anymore, and now he has to find a new and different way to distract himself from his feelings. And going through system notifications, quests, etc only does so much.

And there's that Tetris Effect too. SQQ makes a mistake while writing and instinctively goes to backspace on it except hey-ho that's not a keyboard and now he just dipped his pinkie into a bottle of ink or on a still-drying letter.

With him scrambling to fix his reputation and learn how to be a peak lord, I think his abrupt cold-turkey from all things internet would just be another straw on the camel's back that he promptly Ignores until it goes away on its own after he acclimates to his new surroundings.

[ladyofspoons]

of course you have a blue kanohi and pronouns

[stealingyourbones]

Peter Parker dimension travels to Metropolis. Not MCU Peter, but 616 late 20s Peter Parker who can forge his identity and works for Lex Corp, initially not realizing it’s a bad company, but when he does he continues working for them to slowly yet surely make plans to expose and dismantle the company.

[fatedroses]

More than just the Demon.

[the-random-phan]

Ectoberhaunt Day 13

Isekai: Old Hero New World

[thepringlesofblood]

ok so like. murderbot is famously anti-food right? but consider. we know secunits have a sense of smell. it mentions liking/not liking plenty of smells across the series (the 'dirty sock' human smell, ART's showers smelling good.)

where i'm going with this is that good food smells good. and i don't think mb has ever been around any good food. like think. academic surveys, mining installations, close-quarters space travel, these are not places or occasions known for their cuisine. its experience of food in an olfactory sense is probably limited to ration packs & corporate cafeteria lunch settings. until relatively recently, it had never even been through the 'human' parts of stations before, where it may have smelled some sort of actual food in passing. it's probably seen plenty of other types of food on media, but never smelled any of it.

so imagine. come with me on a mind journey. mb stopping in on Mensah's actual house for some reason during the day, and one of her spouses or something is baking gingerbread (very much the kind of cookie that fills up the whole house with good smells). like. would it even recognize it as being food necessarily? gingerbread is very much one of those smells that everyone tries to recreate and no one quite can. I imagine it's not thrilled with the concept of ovens in general (humans please stop putting your hands in/near hot things), but imagine it frantically trying to place the smell and mensah being like hey you good? and it being like theres. a smell. something must be wrong somewhere. and mensah being like oh no that's just gingerbread, tano's baking cookies. and it's like that's FOOD???