#for this. anecdote.

[peachdoxie]

I love talking with neurotypical people about my executive dysfunction because I'm like "yeah there's this invisible wall in my head that I'm incapable of getting past no matter what I do and it stops me from doing things" and they're like what the actual fuck

Meanwhile other neurodivergents are like

[silvermoon424]

It's so fucking funny how many people who owned Furbies as children ended up being traumatized by them in some way

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[wrenchwenches]

[leidensygdom]

i love finding poetry in the mundane, and yesterday i stumbled upon something that just hits that spot

So, my partner has an old phone- It served them for many years now, but it has one issue: Charging it is hard. Their current charger is hanging on by a thread (literally), and can barely do its job. The phone and the charger came together: They've never used another charger for said phone.

Now, they've tried to replace the charging cord several times. But it doesn't matter how much they've searched what damned specific charger the phone uses, none of them work. They finally decided to bring it to a phone shop and ask what should they use.

The guy at the shop looked at the phone for a bit, and explained: "The port itself is broken. The charger you have works with this phone because they've mutually broken each other into the same shape, in a way that no other charger is shaped. The port itself has corroded in a way that only accepts the charger that shaped it like that in the first place."

And while this is of course a frustrating situation for my partner, I feel like there's a metaphor here. I could write a goddamn story about this. These two half-broken old things have been together for so long they've destroyed each other in a way that keeps them from working with anything else. They've hurt each other in a way that barely keeps them functioning together, and have been rendered useless with literally anything else.

This too is toxic yuri to me-

[tiktaalic]

European: Americans will be like I’m going to watch a whore movie and eat a hamburger slathered in lard

Americans: it’s true I do do this.

American: British people will be like alright I’m off to eat some wheezy bangers (beans and bread out of a can)

Brit: I’ve seen this reblogged by several people I normally trust so: How mocking British cuisine and dialect has a long classist history and how it became frighteningly normalized on an American (uniquely cruel, uniquely ignorant) internet: a thread. 1/?

[marlynnofmany]

In the interest of not derailing this already-long-and-awesome thread, here are some more details! (Paging @sparrows-corner and any other interested parties.)

So in my first semester of college, I took an Intro to Psychology class. I didn't expect anything special; it was just one of those general education courses that everybody was supposed to take at some point. But it turned out amazing.

What the general public didn't know at that point was someone in the college administration had screwed up and forgotten to assign a teacher to this class. Until a week before class. When several students emailed to ask why that detail was missing in the online listing.

The administration panicked, scrambled for someone-anyone-omg-who-can-drop-everything-and-teach-this-class. They called recently-graduated owners of Masters Degrees in teaching.

They found Sandy.

She was qualified and available, and much older than the average recent grad, with the confidence to go with it. This was still a daunting task, though, and she agreed on one condition: that she team-teach the class with a friend of hers who was still working on finishing his degree.

Having no other choice and seeing no real problem with this, the administration agreed. And thus was born the most glorious educational comedy act in my entire academic career. The two of them were a delight. They knew all the stuff they needed to teach, and they knew a great deal more, and they delivered lectures in a way that had everyone paying eager attention. It was great.

This friend, by the way, was awesome in his own right. While Sandy was a curly-haired white lady around middle age, Wayne was a black guy who (1) dressed in impeccable suits and (2) had cerebral palsy.

I think a lot of 18-year-old minds were quietly enlightened about a few things just from watching these two banter back and forth, one with joints more wobbly than the other. Wayne told a memorable anecdote at one point about stopping by a grocery store in sweat pants instead of his usual classy wear. The cashier asked some gentle question about what he spent his time on, assuming that he had some sort of carer following him around. The expression on her face when he told her that he taught college was one I'll never forget, and I didn't even see it.

Anyways, at the end of this semester, the two teachers asked a few of us smart kids if we wanted to be TAs (teaching assistants) for the next semester. Since most of us had already become friends during the make-a-group-and-discuss-things portions of the class, this sounded like a party that would look good on our records later. And it really was.

I TA'd for that class a few times in a row, with my buddies and the two very cool teachers. We met up outside of class for holiday parties and everything.

And, since this was during the time the Lord of the Rings trilogy was first coming out in theaters, we all dressed up in costume and went to an early screening together.

Wayne drove. His handicap placard meant we got to park at the front, which was pretty awesome.

Now, I'd met people before who knew more LotR lore than I did, but they all paled in comparison to Sandy. As I said in the notes on that other post, she shared some stories of her youth with us. When she was fourteen, she ran away to join a hippie commune. She already knew fluent elvish, and she used that to help the commune's drug-runners stay out of the clutches of the cops, by translating their drug notes into a language the cops couldn't read. With a start like that, it was unsurprising that she still knew elvish now, along with all sorts of fascinating deep lore.

She had a limited edition book that looked shockingly expensive. She made beeswax candles for all the TAs as holiday gifts, with our names written on them in elvish. I still have mine somewhere.

I haven't heard from any of these lovely people in a long time, since college moves on and so does life, but I will treasure those memories forever. I hope Sandy and Wayne and the others are doing well. They deserve the best.

[icharchivist]

You lamented the loss of Aerith in your party btw and I feel that too

I remember playing the second The World Ends With You game and a character from the first game joins your party early on and his stats are so good, he definitely carries you hard. It makes sense within the lore that he'd be good, but he was also just really good

Also he's hot, so that was great, I had a lovely time

But then after the first week, like a third or so into the game homeboy just up and leaves to do his own thing and I was heartbroken and also fucking struggling without my resident muscle, how could you do this to me, man

Oh my god 😭😭

The classic "this character was overpowered to carry me and now i miss them" moment. How could they.

In my ff7r playthrough im struggling with that yeah, and the OG is even worse because let's say, to stay vague, that every characters have very specific built, and... there is a Major Character Death mid game from a character from your party that had a very unique role that no one else can fill. And it's linked to the theme of really showing loss and how you can't replace the people you loved. So it hurts :^)

But my funniest story about that is actually from Dragon Age 2, i need to share.

So in da2, you encounter different characters from different class, and once they become members of your party, you're the one who decide everything about their stats or their skillset. You unlock everything with love and care to make them as strong as possible.

And then, midgame, you have a quest where you have to go into the realm of dreams, where demons roam to tempt you, to save someone. And you decide who to take with you on this trip. If incidents happen no one would die, they'd just wake up and leave you alone in the dreamworld tho.

And so i decide to bring my boyfriend Fenris, the two handed sword warrior elf with ghost abilities to rip people's heart from their chest (💖💖💖 he's so dreamy), whom i have lovingly leveled up so he was the strongest most healthy character of my party.

And during that quest, we run into a demon. Who makes Fenris a proposition. And Fenris is like. Damn actually sounds good. And then he turns on you. I had to watch my fucking boyfriend i had lovingly leveled up have a gigantic health bar as he's one shotting me because /I/ MADE HIM OP AS FUCK. WHY.

And then i have to kill him to wake him up. And you have to continue this quest without your warrior. And the remaining of your party is still susceptible to turn on you. So you can reach the big boss of this section with only one party member and it's likely not going to be any of your tank/heavy hitter.

Your name is Hawke and your life is a fucking nightmare.

Gaming is cruel 💔

[vaetis]

牢笼可不是野兽的归宿 "Beasts never belong in a cage" Love and Deepspace fan-made animation by 零零依

[batmanego]

experience i had today

[reunitedinterlude]

not sharing a phone but something much worse (phone soulmates)

[peachdoxie]

There's a bunch of adhd advice out there that's like "people with adhd tend to work better under deadlines due to the anxiety so here are ways to artificially induce a stress response in order to get you to get work done" and it's like well what if I don't want to be stressed out all the time in order to function

[gibbearish]

just saw on the hbomb subreddit that james somerton briefly reactivated his twitter and changed the name to agayraconteur, then 8 hrs later deleted it again because people were noticing, so. everyone who went all in on "he'll keep popping up again and again in new forms" cash your bets in now LMAO

edit: hey yall this post is very out of date but has been getting spikes of notes since the second apology video so i'm gonna be marking it unrebloggable

[inbabylontheywept]

bad dating stories time: the shoe incident

so in highschool, my best friend wasnt allowed to go on dates unless there was another couple there to keep an eye on him. part of this was his parents being insane, but also, part of it was him being insane. in a problem with no reasonable parties, there are no reasonable solutions.

at some point in my junior year, my sorta-gf broke up with me, and i just wasnt feeling dating, which was bad for my friend, because he had a good thing going with a girl he met in court.

he kind of hounded me about it. kept pushing me to just put me feet back in the dating pool and i wasnt real thrilled about it, because i knew he was pushing me for his own benefit, not mine, so i kept telling him to fuck off, and after a few weeks of being told that i would date when i was damn well ready, he eventually said: okay. what if i paid for the date AND found you a blind date AND all you had to do was show up?

and i shouldve said no, i know, but i let him wear me down, and i will own my fault in that. a date starting on such a stupid premise could never have gone well.

but he still managed to find a way to make it worse.

i dont know how long he tried to set a blind date up. it couldve been multiple attempts. he couldve stooped to this immediately. but what happened in the end was that he called a girl from the ward he attended - a girl that he knew had a giant, mushy crush on him - and he said: hey! how would you feel about going on a date this weekend?

(you know, implying it was with him, but never actually saying it.)

and she said YES WOW I WOULD LOVE TO and he said great! and then he called me up and said he found me a date.

i did not learn about his crimes until several weeks later. i will die swearing before god almighty that i would never have allowed this travesty to happen if i had known.

that was on a monday. the date of the date rolled around that friday evening, and im sorry to confess, i really phoned the whole thing in. i showed up in my favorite comfy outfit, which was also a fashion crime: basketball shorts and flipflops and a baja hoodie. it was super comfy but it made me look kind of crazy. i picked him up first, and then i picked up his date next, and then we went to pick up my date, and thats where you're gonna get the play by play.

i arrived, walked across the yard, and knocked on the front door. she opened it almost immediately, like shed been waiting right by it, and i could see her expression go from OMG IM SO EXCITED to super disappointed, then disgusted and finally pissed. and because i didn't know about my friends sins, i thought it was from my outfit. which seemed... harsh. like, hey, im allowed to be quirky, fuck you. also its a blind date, i thought the deal was that we were both going to be sad broken sacks of mortality.

anyway, we looked at each other for several seconds before she slammed the door in my face.

i looked back at my friend. he was sweating bullets. i dont know what he expected from this, but there was this big long pause where we both tried to figure out what to do, and then the door opened up, and her dad invited me in, and he said she was gonna need a few minutes to finish getting ready, and that in the meantime we could sit and talk.

we did not talk. we did sit. i sat down on the couch, and he sat down in a chair across the couch, and then instead of talking he cleaned his pistol on the coffee table. i wasnt actually sure if it was a threat, or if it was just a fidget thing for 40+ year old republican men, but when i tried to help he got snappy so i just watched him put a pistol back together.

he was okay at it.

eventually my date came downstairs, still mad as hell for reasons beyond my ken, and i felt pretty guilty for being such a mess because i thought that was why she was so angry. i tried to make up for by walking her to the car and getting the door for her, just generally trying to be extra polite, but before i could make it back to the drivers side, her dad called me back to the door. so i flipped around, went to the door, and immediately regreted my decision.

soon as i was within range, her dad got waaaay too close to me, leaned in, and said "whatever you do to her, i will do to you," and my brain went into overdrive making three consecutive realizations.

realization one was, damn, the pistol thing was a threat. that sucks. what an asshole. realization two was, wait, im autistic and even i know theres a 0% chance me and my date even hold hands, least of all boink. does this guy actually think there's even a 1% chance of anyone in that car getting laid tonight? is he an idiot? and then realization three went through, which was wait, is this guy threatening to fuck me? and unfortunately, with my brain doing so much processing, my mouth was left to run amok, so somewhere between realization 2 and 3, i said:

"i can't get pregnant"

which, i swear, wasn't actually me trying to be a smartass, it was just me pointing out that he couldn't actually follow up on that threat. it just wasn't possible. we do not live in the omegaverse and im not scared of you.

still, it was an insanely catastrophic thing to say, and the moment we both heard it, we bluescreened. that single sentence obliterated both of our momentary streams of consciousness like a saltine in front of a sand blaster. problem was, he'd probably gone his whole life not even realizing someone could say something that stupid, and making that realization was going to cost him a lot of thinking time. me though? i had been saying shit like that for 17 years, i didnt have to rewrite my expectations of human nature, i just had to plan an exit and start striding. so i was already halfway back to the car before i heard "hey. hey come back. Hey. Hey. HEY. HEY WAIT. HEY GET BACK HERE. HEY-"

and then i was in my car, and i drove away.

if this happened today, he'd have called her, and the whole thing wouldve imploded then and there, but back then, there were still a decent number of teenagers without cell phones. especially the teenagers of insane, gun toting parents. so she just said: whoa what was that all about? and i said: dont worry about it, he'll tell you about it when you get home.

and she said: ok and went back to staring daggers at me and my friend.

WHICH SURPRISINGLY isnt even how the story ends.

we went to an improv comedy show, and it was a disaster. it shouldve been like, 7/10 tops, but between my date being mad, and my friend having a good time, and me having the existential terror of knowing that a guy with a pistol was probably waiting outside his house for me to come back, it was easily 11/10. i laughed way too hard at everything. especially the jokes that flopped. id sit there in this mostly silent room and laugh until i dry heaved a little, and my date was absolutely disgusted, and even my friend was a little embarrassed, which would just make me laugh harder. i laughed so hard that night i could barely talk the next day. and then the show ended, and my friend said, you know, that was a good time, but i think we should maybe do something a little chiller? who wants to walk around the park? and his date said yeah, and my date said no, and i finally had mercy on the poor woman so i said, look, im gonna drop you off. and i am so, so sorry about this, but im dropping you off like a block away. super duper sorry.

do talk to your dad about the pistols thing if you dont want this happening more in the future tho.

and she said: okay. so i dropped her off, and she walked a block down, and that was that.

then i drove my friend and his date to a park that was good for wandering. i figured they wanted something more private, so instead of following them around point blank, i chose a park with this 30 foot rope tower, and i climbed to the top and i said: hey i can see you anywhere from up here, you are officially chaperoned from a distance. get panopticoned idiot. except my friend really is an idiot, and he didnt really get the whole 'now i dont have to third wheel so insanely hard with you guys' thing so he climbed up the tower too, and then his date followed behind him, so there are three people basically sitting together on top of a telephone pole.

and then they started making out.

i was close enough to hear it.

i didnt really know what to do so i was just kind of sitting there, dissociating, when some college kids came around and started shaking the tower. my friend's date went aaaaaaaaaa im afraid of heights :( and my friend went oh, dont worry, ill hold you tight ;) and i went hey, im gonna climb down and ask them to stop.

so i did climb down, and i did ask them to stop, and they flipped me off, which i wasnt even mad about. at that point i was i was like yeah, it would be weirder if this wasnt a mess. gods plan has been to fly this day like a 747 into my metaphorical twin towers and brother he is close enough for me to see him grinning through the cockpit window. still, eventually the college students got bored, so they climbed up the tower, which gave my friend and his date a window to climb down, and together we walked back to my car.

now, i cant explain why this is, but sitting back in the drivers seat was my carriage-back-into-a-pumpkin moment. i'd been chill about all the chaos, just rolling with the punches, but sitting down made me realize how much of a shitshow the day had been, and while i couldnt go back and fix all of it, i could go back and fix one thing.

so i told my friend and his date, hey, you two, stay here and don't do anything weird. don't. then i walked back to the rope tower, and i started picking up the shoes the college students had left at the base in order to climb.

about halfway through this, i realized that if i took all their shoes, they might think i was in it for the money, and i actually wanted them to know i was in it specifically to spite them. fuck those guys. so i put all the right shoes back, gave myself a 100 foot headstart, yelled "nice shoes, assholes", did a little jig, and started running.

my advice to everyone is that college students are faster than you think. even with the headstart, and the whole climb down the tower thing, i was still only fivish seconds ahead of them by the time i got to my car. i flung the door open, looked in the backseat, didnt see anyone, flung the stolen shoes in the backseat, heard two "ow"s, took that as proof of presence, jumped in and pealed out of the lot.

my friend and his date popped up a few seconds later. they were, uh, doing something weird in the back seat. my one request - obliterated.

they climbed up to ask where the hell all the shoes had come from, and i was like yeah i stole them from the college students, and they were like oh. cool. hope you had fun. and i was like, i did. i did. but speaking of fun, what were you doing back there?

and for the first time in my buddies life, i think he was actually embarassed.

[sandersstudies]

This is purely anecdotal, I have no numbers to back this up, but I think the kids who have the best relationships with their parents tend to practice what I call the Circle Back.

In a space that includes both adults and kids, and is safe enough that kids aren't being directly supervised by their parents, I've noticed most kids with strong family relationships follow the same pattern: they socialize with others or participate in an activity, and then periodically circle back to their family group. They might observe one or both parents for a couple minutes, or offer a hug or kiss or brief conversation, and then they go back to what they were doing, and repeat. Sometimes they have a question (When are we leaving? Can I have a slice of cake?) but often it seems like a totally purposeless check-in purely intended to affirm their relationship with their parent. (Hi. Love you. Bye.)

Kids who are very clingy and don't really move away from their parents, or who avoid or evade their parents for most of the evening, would be examples of those who don't follow the circle-back pattern.