#im on struggle street

[rebellum]

The whole transandrophobia discussion thing is weird bc it feels like it's a bunch of poc and jewish trans people being like "here are my experiences of how specifically being MASCULINE had affected me, and the discrimination and violence I experienced based on that. And here is how that relates to me being a racial/ethnic minority"

And then a few loud white trans people going "ohhh you wanna be oppressed so bad you *slur*. This is why there aren't any poc in your movement it's because REAL poc understand intersectionality"

[morninkim]

37 years old but everyone keeps calling her girl

[abirddogmoment]

I love seeing Rory run in the field!! Bird dog doing bird dog things!! You said in the tags you had different training and priorities with her vs Mav re: offleash running like that. What kinds of things did you do differently with Rory to be comfortable having her offleash at a distance with reliable recall?

I was writing a whole novel but really it boils down to this chart. Under the cut because it's (vertically) long.

In short, it's just as much about what I didn't do with Maverick as what I did do with Aurora.

(Edited to add: I am extremely fortunate to live in the prairies where the kind of visibility I need is easy to find. Use my experience to inspire your own training if you like, but don't use it as a recipe. I have my own goals and my own priorities and those are likely different than yours.)

Maverick:

🔵 Supremely confident from day 1

🔵 Came home in August (extremely good and exciting time for outdoor adventures)

🔵 Prioritized specific sports behaviours over foundational building blocks like engagement and cooperation

🔵 Learned bad habits from my older dog at the time (prey drive > recall)

🔵 Was indiscriminately prey driven. If it moved, he wanted to kill it.

🔵 I phased out treats too fast and didn't want to use an ecollar or long line

🔵 I focused on "social media dog behaviours" (think like walking extremely close to me on trails) and got frustrated when we couldn't meet these rather than meeting my dog where he was at. This created a lot of frustration in our dog adventures.

🔵 I practiced recalls constantly when I didn't have to, making them a tedious behaviour for him. I would recall him 20-50 times a hike for everything from "you're too far away from me" to "I want to take a photo".

Aurora

🟣 Came to me a little insecure and looked to me for reassurance

🟣 Came home in December (a cold and relatively boring time for outdoor adventures)

🟣 I prioritized engagement, cooperation, and name recognition from day 1

🟣 Practiced good habits by walking offleash in the snow either alone or with Pike (amazing recall)

🟣 Is extremely birdy, but is very very focused. She easily calls off deer or people/dogs in the distance because she mostly cares about birds.

🟣 Literally always gets offered a high value snack for recalling or voluntary check ins (I will never phase this out, I will carry chunks of cheese on offleash walks for the rest of her life)

🟣 I never practice recalls if I don't need them. This one is hard to explain, but once Rory understood that long whistle = come back as fast as you can, I don't whistle unless I really need to. I recall her an average of 0-3 times per hike (*based on visibility or wildlife*) and trust her to make good decisions otherwise. I keep my eyeballs on her 100% of the time and choose areas with good visibility, but I don't recall her just for being far away.

🟣 I limit hikes where I have to nag her often (think, in the woods where I dont have a great line of sight and have to remind her to stay close to me) to a few times a month or less so she doesn't start getting frustrated about it.

🟣 I trust the training I put into her and choose to run her in areas with (relatively) reduced risk if she makes the "wrong" choice. I don't nitpick everything she does and I let her make her own choices, within reason.

🟣 I have an interrupter cue to ask her to stop doing something before I call her back (if she's digging a hole and I want her to move on, I use "Rory, enough! Here!") instead of whistling at her.

🟣 I don't force her attention on check ins. If she runs back to me and doesn't want a snack and wants to run straight back out, I let her run back out.

🟣 I have anticipatory cues for the end of a walk so I don't have to recall her when we get to the end of the field.

I want to say that it's nerve wracking to watch my dog sprint at full speed hundreds of yards away from me. I have to fight the impulse to recall her just because she's far away. It's an exercise in trust because I'm always worried about her going over the horizon, or running into a wildlife, or falling into a hole, but it's an important thing to work on if you have a dog that needs that trust to thrive.

Mav and I were a good team, but I never fully trusted him outdoors. I always had my finger on the ecollar buttons ready for him to do an evil and need to be vibrated. It was exhilarating to watch him in the field, but it wasn't really fun or relaxing.

Rory and I built a much stronger foundation of trust (I personally never would have been able to do this if I had more than one dog). She doesn't know any tricks yet, but I'm super confident in her recall and ability to take direction in the field, even when she's sprinting as fast as possible.

[mwagneto]

i think what's really been getting to me the past few months is the realisation that i dont relate to literally any of the mental health stuff i see anywhere. like whenever there's some affirmation or motivation or just relatable-sounding posts in general they all seem like such common problems and it's like, damn i literally dont experience any of that. and yet im still crumpling. something uniquely wrong with me

[ghcstpyre]

I'm so glad people seem to like the little tom ludlow imagine I did 😭💖 i was nervous to post it bc I've never written anything like that before and I literally know nothing about ludlow except for the vibes lol so I really appreciate the nice things y'all are saying in the tags 🥹💚

[sforzesco]

nikkicafeina said: There's just /something/ there when all our revolutionary leaders learned about justice and heroism and politics from Europe (sometimes IN Europe) and Europe learned it from Rome and in the end it just comes down to how we've never learned to say "freedom" in our own languages, and maybe we never can.

I actually have a much more optimistic opinion on this! even if our history has been brutalized four times over (spain, america, japan, and both marcos administrations), we did, as a people, learn to cry for freedom, and it did not come from a place of Roman imagery or European thought.

there were parts of the Philippines that managed to escape the full force of imperial violence due to the simple fact of geography, and they resisted tyranny as much as someone inspired by the writings of Rizal did, and there were parts of the Philippines that have always resisted the forceful reach of Manila to culturally assimilate and consume all other cultures and regions under an invented national one. these are calls for freedom, maybe without language, but it IS resistance born out of the filipino people, without the hand of europe to guide it.

even if much of our history was lost, rewritten, bastardized, the Filipino people have always resisted, even if the conclusion was tragic or forced into something else by someone's poetic but misguided bullshit, because at the end of the day, it is intolerable to be under the foot of someone else and it always has been, everywhere across the world.

the continuation of imperial visuals (whether it's the Western talking points of the government, the architecture, the Roman Empire) has a lot to do with structures of power. the government is distinctly European-Western. honestly, it's fucking American. it's driven by capitalism and imperialism, or a desire to ally with imperialist nations, to subjugate and maintain power to benefit a handful of officials who desire profit above all else. this is a tragedy, and we seem unable to shake it!

but. our students have always come forward to fight against injustice. we burned effigies, we protested, we call for justice even when our journalists are killed, our farmers are massacred in the streets, when our people are shot down by the military. many people from my province do not have a higher education, they would not know of the messy politics of imperial powers, but they do know that the elections were bullshit and the farmers are suffering and government doesn't fucking care, so they all turned out to march through the city to cry for justice, to be recognized.

today, we hold hands across seas with other oppressed people who are also desperate for freedom and peace. it would be nice to have our own words for it! but I'm not sure that we need it. it's enough to stand next to our countrymen and for others across the world and say, I got your back.

as the chant goes: from the classrooms to the streets, etc.

if our history had not been colonized, we might have had our own words and philosophies for it, instead of borrowed approximations, but the desire for freedom and justice is very much ours, and we have always called for it through action. the language now, I think, is one of solidarity. like, I think above all else, we MUST believe in a better future.

[melloneah]

ill answer ur asks soon my lovelies thank u sm for sending them in<3

another rant in tags im so sorry tw death again

[nauticalfools]

.

[beeapocalypse]

playing toys

[gravityqueen]

in pathologic 2 i tell the giant bird to fuck off, then i immediately contend with the fact half the list of people will probably die

[bi-squirrel]

hello little gay ppl who live in my phone, since it is a good day today you can have some cute pictures of my dog. her name is pączki.

[koishua]

"no dw he's super friendly!!" after i was pounced on by a massive dog that im not familiar with 🧍🧍

[leslie057]

finished a long-ish comic for @jancyweeks … now time to try and write some fic?

[starryspeculation]

genders people have assigned me based on my clothing

hoodies and basketball shorts: a teenager

noodle strap tops and lace shorts: a gay university student

printed shirts & jeans: a lad

brightest eyeshadows known to humankind, jeans & tshirts: a lesbian university student

flower print dresses: a tourist lady

shirts & black formal pants: office worker of unidentified gender

vintage coats & long skirts: a lad, again

[aria0fgold]

If there's anything that I noticed bout my writing recently is that I realized that I'm actually pretty good at jumping around dodging something but it still comes out flowing well in the story anyway. Like, I make something both vague yet clear enough for anyone to understand.

[girlhorse]

there's this one particular kind of pet owner that will brag about the size of their pets like my dog is 100+ lbs 😏 and then you meet said dog and the dog is morbidly obese