#your brain can need a break

[totallytubularific]

Important PSA

Hi there, I am just a dumb little person, but I do have a bachelor's degree in psychology, and this is a reminder, gently, that if seeing terrible news all the time makes your mental health worse, you don't have to look at it, you can block it, you can unfollow people that repost it, and yes, some people will say that you're horrible for this, but the human brain is quite literally not meant to be inundated with awful world news 24/7 that is a new thing with the internet. Usually the only crises we had to worry about, were the ones that were immediately in front of us.

You don't have to be ignorant of the issue of course, please feel free to look at updates once and a while, but really, you don't have to be slammed with horrible world news all the time, it is bad for your brain. and so are the people that say you're bad for not donating or whatever, even if it is a first world problem, you're allowed to be poor, and you don't have to give your last $5. because you need it.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

hope you feel better soon!

I am riddled with ailments, but I stay silly!

[nateezfics]

does anyone else constantly think about smeared lipstick paradigm hongjoong or is it just me.

[bacchuschucklefuck]

[incesthemes]

considering each episode as an allegory for sam and dean's story has done irreparable damage to my psyche. if bugs is about cursed land and if bugs is about sam and his relationship to his father, his family, then bugs is about how sam's body (his "land") has been cursed, later even confirmed to be by his ancestors just as oasis plains was cursed by its ancestors. mary sacrificed sam's body to azazel, poisoned him, sent him to the slaughter. you can't break a curse, you can only outrun it. the fact that sam and dean were stuck within the curse only solidifies the connection: they're fruitlessly fighting the literal curse while sam fights the metaphorical curse within him. it's an episode about sam and his anger at john, about dean and his loyalty to john, about how they're both wrong in different ways. it's an episode about family and ancestors and killing your children, making your lands infertile so no future generations can survive on them. it's an episode about sam.

and it comes right before home, the episode which presents with full, explicit confirmation that sam has developed psychic powers. there's evil inside him and he's scared—"what's happening to me?"—and he's uncertain about himself, his past, and his future. the episode that reveals his psychic powers is the episode they return to their childhood home, is the episode where mary's ghost makes an appearance. sam was cursed by mary and their home was made inhospitable; she forced them out like the white man forced out the euchee.

and it comes right after hook man, the episode which wraps sam's feelings of being cursed in sinful, evil, religious language, which shows his deference to the christian god, which implies there's something evil within him that's hurting the people he loves. sam is evil, sam is cursed, sam is harboring something bad within him and the way to absolve him of his sins is to pray for divine retribution and punishment, for death, because the thing inside of sam is inextricable from himself, is bound to him.

all three episodes are about family and repeating curses, the echoes of harm carrying through generations. all framed through sam's relationship to john, to his past, to the people who came before him he knows nothing about. all culminating in the revelation that sam's fears are coming true and the curse he mentioned two episodes ago is real and it's getting worse and no one knows how to stop it.

but you can't break a curse. you can only get out of the way.

[angelnumber27]

your mental illnesses, disabilities, your trauma etc and the way those things have effected you and your life are not your fault. Don’t ever let anybody convince you otherwise- including yourself <3

[bluegekk0]

Worst part about low self-esteem is feeling intimidated around some of your friends just because you perceive them as more capable than you. Brain, please, stop being stupid. They haven't done anything wrong, so why do I have to feel scared when talking to them. Ridiculous.

[rileys-battlecats]

i really gotta get better about listening to my own brain and needs when i'm making things. i've been working on a video and i'm almost finished (yippee!!), but drawing this One Specific Frame was giving me trouble. i could have just brute-forced my way through it and finalized the initial sketch, since it was relatively good enough. but instead i left it and took a day off from working on the project, let myself recharge, and came back to the sketch with fresh eyes today. and what do you know, my redrawn sketch today is WAY better! now, i can finalize that frame and be genuinely proud of it, instead of just powering through on something i was less than happy with.

i hadn't done any other art stuff that day when i couldn't get my sketches to look right, so letting myself stop and have a break from the project felt sort of "unearned" i guess. but it's just. what i needed! and the break did what i needed it to do; i was able to come back later and make something i could be proud of.

anyway i guess this is me saying that, if you're like me and have this weird morality-complex about letting yourself rest, it's ok to take breaks, even if you feel like you haven't "earned" one yet :)

[lenaellsi]

I’m working on some bigger more complicated pieces rn but if anyone has gomens doodle requests I’d love to hear them! silly halloween ideas very much encouraged

[confusedspaceotter]

(Meme stolen from Reddit

[yuripira4e]

I want to preface this post by saying that I love the cat king as a character, especially one that has such a major impact on Edwin and his relationship with his queerness and learning to be okay with it; HOWEVER, I also believe that everyone that genuinely believes he should be a love interest for Edwin should read this. (Also if you just like the cat king as a character and want to understand his character better and why his and Edwin’s relationship is not something that would be healthy or “real” for either)

[toytulini]

me, stupidly and weirdly resistant to listening to audio books vs reading a physical book for no real reason: man i wish there was a way to like, read a book while i crochet like i do with tv shows and movies and podcasts

[i-wiggle-i-squirm-bc-i-am-a-worm]

So I got distracted while re-reading One Does Not Love Breathing by @wackus-bonkus-maximus (seriously go read it if you haven’t yet, it’s fantastic <3) and I got itching to draw this scene from chapter 5 sdfghjhgfdshg I sWEAR it breaks my heart

but anyways...

go read it go read it go read it-

[3416]

are you normal or do you wake up every day and think about this

[tmae3114]

the example people always go for with 'taking things literally' is 'not understanding idioms and metaphors' or 'not understanding sarcasm' and that's frustrating for Me, Specifically, Personally because I am a person who has a lot of social struggles with Taking Things Literally but, crucially, not in that sense. I understand idioms & metaphors just fine and, as someone who's primary special interest is the written word & storytelling, actually am pretty good at them and thrive with them. I miss sarcasm occasionally but catch it most of the time and am often sarcastic myself.

No, my Taking Things Literally is that if you say something to me or give me an instruction, I will Understand It Literally. I will get what you said and not at all what you meant. There are exceptions to this in cases where I've learned the script and even use it myself (e.g. the other day I asked my mum "Is this Not Butter" about a thing, and she replied "Yes but it has buttermilk", because we both understood the real question was "is this the lactose-free spread?" because I was making food for my sister) but in the vast majority of cases, I just. will miss implications and unspoken assumptions. I will just completely miss them, they will not register, I Did Not Know They Were There.

Implications in a narrative? I am on it immediately, this is my bread and butter, I can pull a story apart to get to five layers of subtext & implication & theme like breathing

Reliably understanding that the request "Can you empty the dishwasher?" includes emptying the drying rack which is not physically part of the dishwasher because the real request is "Can you put the clean dishes away?"? Not a chance

[batsplat]

maybe it's from the particularly acute disappointment of marc injuring himself at the sachsenring but this weekend (so far) has made me feel incredibly nervous for marc's future. like no guarantees of course but if marc was going to win anywhere this year (when the gap between the gp23 and gp24 is increasingly obvious, as you mentioned) it was going to be here. and i'm definitely overreacting because i'm emotional about it but it feels like him hurting himself here feels like a bad sign not just for this year but for the future at large. because it's a reminder that his body can't handle the riding style that used to take him so far. scary!

taking these two together ahahaa. this is truly the life of a sports fan huh

honestly with marc I've now swung so often and so far between 'it's so over' and 'we've never been more back' that I've gotten to an exciting point of. well. I suppose we'll have to see. I mean look, back in that jerez to catalunya stretch it did look like he might be able to be a serious title contender this season. at risk of making myself look like an idiot, I think we can pretty safely conclude that's not happening this year. but y'know, broadly what he needs to do is to figure his shit out for the rest of the year... like he kinda needs to just understand what this version of him can do under what circumstances. the thing about winning is that it's also a habit, it's something that becomes essentially muscle memory, you need to kinda have that reflexive understanding of how you've done it in the past - both in the context of races and titles. and it's still in there for him!! but he's just got to... take the rest of the season to chip away at the gap. currently, pecco and jorge don't just have the edge on him in pace, they have the edge on him in process. that's not just the bike, though it is also affected by marc being less familiar with the ducati. but pecco and jorge have just kind of gotten to the point where they know how to approach most weekends in a way where, more often or not, they will kinda maximise what was on offer for them that weekend. sometimes they chuck it down the road! but in terms of pure pace potential, right now they're getting to the point where they're there. marc is just a series of 'what ifs'. they're not all his fault, he's gotten unlucky, he's in a tough situation, he's still getting used to the new tracks on a ducati etc etc etc... but that's what this year is for. figure out the process, figure out how you actually go about getting wins in the current era - keeping your physical condition in mind - and take it from there

the physical stuff is the... yeah. the thing is, I do think he is capable of winning without all this crashing to figure out the limit. honestly, this approach of his made me deeply uneasy well well before what happened at jerez 2020. that injury and aborted comeback didn't feel like a fluke, it didn't feel like bad luck - in an awful way, it did feel like it had been a long time coming. that being said... well, y'know, marc was the only one who could win titles on the late 2010s honda, and part of the reason for that was that he figured out how to get a capricious bike just to the limit during races. you do not need to chuck the bike down the road fifty times per season to win the title on the ducati. pecco and jorge have very much shown that. sometimes it will just be dumb luck who gets injured or not! the sachsenring crash yesterday you can't really put down to marc being stupid or being irresponsible. he was hardly the only one who fell, weather conditions were tricky, shit does happen (not ideal that he tried to save the crash specifically because he knew his other bike had problems, plus the thing where he went out again before going to the medical centre, mind you). sometimes you fall a lot and you're fine, like marc for most of his prime. sometimes you crash at the start of the race and fall in front of the pack and your survival is up to fate. which is of course what happened last year to pecco, still one of the scariest crashes I've ever seen live in terms of crashes where you really do think you just got very very close to watching someone be killed in real time. this is the thing, right... at the end of the day, you can hope that marc finds an approach that relatively minimises the risk to his body - but also, you can only control so much. especially with where his body is at right now, there's only so many bad knocks you can take. you never know, you can only hope

overall, I have been thinking for a while that it's almost a bit... odd? how the physical stuff hasn't really featured at all in 2025-26 hot takes? I reckon people don't really want to think about it playing a big role, and also I suppose 'well one of them could get injured' is treated as just an underlying assumption of following motorcycle racing... but like we saw with catalunya last year, it's not just stuff that takes you out for ten races that can have big title race repercussions. especially given how marc traditionally went about winning titles, how big a part of that process it was for him. we've had such an incredible lucky streak from the start of the season until mugello that being afraid of injuries has almost... receded a little bit? in everyone's minds? after last year, in particular, where it just felt like you were always worrying about someone, it was just so relentless... and now injury worries have just come back with a vengeance these last few weeks and it is a little scary. a lot of this is scary. no real escaping it I'm afraid

but yes! anon! I agree with you! we'll get back to the smile and we'll get back to the optimism too.. at the end of the day, you can only do what you can do. we'll see what happens. if we're all massively underestimating just how much that sweet red bull cash can do and ktm comes out with a rocket ship next year and pedro wins the next ten titles, so be it. you never know