#think that's everyone

[bizarrebazaar13]

what if your doppelgänger wasn’t evil it was just a person. what if your doppelgänger wasn’t trying to replace you it was just trying to learn to be a person and you were the best model it had. what if your doppelgänger looked at you with your eyes and said with your voice that it just wanted to be loved. what then.

[sadgirlautumn]

“kids spend too much time on their devices” well what else are they supposed to do? there’s no corner shops with pinball machines in them on every corner anymore. there’s no malls or stores in small towns for teens to hang out in without being suspected of shoplifting or kicked out for loitering. sidewalks are too broken for them to ride their bikes and there’s no bike lane in the street to make it safe for them. i just don’t understand where they expect these kids to go when they keep taking places away from them. and yes having no safe public places for them is what leads a lot of teens into addiction if they end up at a place where people aren’t truly looking out for them.

[nemesis-is-my-middle-name]

"doesn't this charater under insane stress going through extremely traumatic events realize how inconvenient their irrational emotional reactions are to the people around them?" well, see, you're not gonna believe this, but the thing is,

[xiaq]

Absolutely wild to me how sometimes you don't even realize the way you'd been taught to perceive things as a kid was kinda fucked up, actually, until decades later.

Example:

As a kid, I constantly lived in fear of damaging shit in my parent's house. The walls. The floors (especially the floors. The wood was beautiful. Shiny. But so easy to scratch). The cabinets.

As a sixteen-year-old, I once took my car to the dealership after work and paid a very dear sum of $250 ($10/hr cashier salary) to fix a slight scratch in the paint because I knew if my father saw it there would be hell to pay. It didn't matter that I parked far out, like I'd been taught, and someone scratched it anyway. It was my fault. I failed in my duties as a steward of my vehicle.

Every time I scratched a rim on a curb while parallel parking or got a door ding or, god forbid, didn't wash and vacuum that car every weekend, it was treated like some sort of moral failing.

Last year, when my husband and I first moved into our house, he scraped the side of our car when parking in our (Very Narrow) garage. When he told me, my first instinct was to be afraid for him. Like something terrible was going to happen to him because of this mistake. I urgently reassured him that it was okay, it was an accident, I wasn't mad. Baffled, he was like, "Yeah? I know? Like, thank you for the reassurance, but I'm only a little annoyed, I'm not upset. It's just a car." And I had to take several minutes to process that. It's...just a car.

We keep the car tidy. We maintain it. But we wash it maybe 4x a year. We only vacuum it after dirty road trips or when the dog hair starts to get annoying. It has scrapes and dings and the leather seats have stains. But that's ok. Because it's just a car.

This morning, I realized that a small rock had gotten embedded in the felt foot on one of our bar stools. Neither of us had noticed. There are now scratches on our beautiful hardwood floor. My immediate response was fear accompanied by a heavy measure of paralyzing guilt. "I'm so sorry," I told my husband, "I should have noticed. I'll figure out how to fix it, I swear. I can probably sand down that section and match the stain and--"

"Whoa, hey," he said. "It was an accident. And it's fine. Floors are going to get damaged. They're floors. We live here. There was damage in places before we even bought the house, remember? It's not a big deal. It's just a floor." Right. It's just a floor. Right.

My husband's mom is visiting and this afternoon, as I was sitting in the kitchen looking at the scratches on the floor, I offhandedly asked her if my husband had ever broken or damaged anything as a kid. "Of course," she said. Household items. A TV. A wrecked car during his teen years. I asked how she punished him.

"Why would I punish him for things like that?" she said. "They were all accidents."

Right. Of course. Right.

[koobiie]

shoutout to everyone who wants to infodump but cant string together coherent thoughts to form sentences and instead just look at you like this

[alaryheart]

They’re gettin ready before the big concert

[dramatic-dolphin]

most cartoonishly evil pro-life talking point i've ever seen was "oh so you think minors should be allowed to get an abortion without parental consent?" wait. wait so you think a parent should be allowed to veto a minor's abortion? you think parents should be allowed to force a 12 year old to give birth? against their will? you think it should be allowed and legal to do that? you think it's a problem that parents are not allowed to force a literal child to give birth?

[great-and-small]

This is unrelated to anything else with the silly “Dire Wolf” controversy but them putting these images in all the articles give me the weirdest uncanny valley discomfort. Like it is hard for me to take these photos seriously. Do you know why?

Wolf pups just do not look like that. Because wolves typically have their pups in underground dens, it is an evolutionary advantage for the vulnerable pups to blend in with the dark earth of the den. If they were born white, they’d be sharply contrasted and easier for predators to spot. Even arctic wolves are born dark and gain their typical white coat a little later (though not all arctic wolves are white either).

Fun fact in Game of Thrones they used domestic dogs to play the dire wolf pups; puppy Ghost is cute but he’s clearly no wolf!

Giving birth to pups that are darkly colored is a pretty basic adaptation in a lot of canids that litter underground. Red foxes and arctic foxes are also born a very nondescript shade of dirt. Exceptions exist, but this is just a thing that a lot of wild canines do. Here are various canids (red fox, Ethiopian wolf, maned wolf, and African wild dog) that do this

I don’t know if we have any proof that dire wolves had their pups in dens but it would be kind of weird if they didn’t. So even if the dire wolf had a light coat as an adult they would likely still be born with a darker color to act as camouflage.

So when I keep getting this image

blasted on all my feeds you can understand why my brain has trouble registering it even as a gray wolf pup. It’s just weird. It looks like what chat gpt would spit out if you requested an arctic wolf pup. That thing would stand out like crazy in an underground den. You can make something look like something else all you want but the evolutionary history of a species is too complicated for us to ever faithfully recreate from scratch.

[demaparbat-hp]

That infamous prison escape.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Knowledge Revenge.

[the-bi-fangirl-biatch]

bob sends this to their Thunderbolts gc and gets kicked out and yelena has to add him back

[clowniconography]

drawing of a nightmare situation i may or may not currently be in

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[noonbeam17]

theyre in a polycule

[saradiation]

✨🎂 Happy 413!! ♡🎂✨