“if no art makes you feel anything, make your own art and feel something” is too raw of a line to have come from a jenna marbles video of her painting a rainbow/polka dot seahorse saying “it’s seahorse time” on a denim jacket

Why do you people feel profound thought has to come from high places? The gutter looks at the stars too

not only did you prove your point, but you showed an example of it in the same sentence

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

the thing about “well-behaved women rarely make history" is that the author, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, didn’t write it about women who would be considered “badly-behaved;“ she wrote it in a book about a midwife, about women who had been largely ignored and erased from history because as a result of their “good behaviour.” So it’s not a “BAD GIRLS DO IT WELL" kind of quote; it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.

it’s a reminder to respect and pay attention to the women who go about quietly living their lives.

If someone told me $100,000 a year wasn’t enough to live on I think i’d kill them with a rock right then and there.

This ABSOLUTELY works.

I have used this for many years. Definitely b do it.

This article was super long-winded so I screenshat the important part

the fact we’re responsible for getting doctors to “lower their defenses” in order to literally just do their jobs is ✨INFURIATING✨

what they dont tell you about those little hand baskets in the grocery store is if you put enough things in them they get heavy

aight its time to clock out for a bit. im tired, this has me tired. im gonna draw some dragons getting their heads stuck in things. someone give me some ideas 

what about THREE donuts 

i really liked that third one 

featuring Fowler and his slightly disappointed father 

idiot 

hey guys heres some more dragons with their heads stuck in things

see you in another two years

“There’s a cure?!” asked the girl that kills everything she touches.  “Hey shut up we’re perf” replied the girl that makes clouds. 

For real though. Storm has stopped an entire tsunami before. “Makes clouds my ass” she can conjure lightning and tornadoes and is revered as a god in her tribe. She literally changes atmospheric pressure and that’s how she flies. So fuck you. Storm is flawless.

I think you missed the part where the GIRL WHO KILLS EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES wants to NOT KILL EVERYTHING SHE TOUCHES and everyone dismisses her incredible misfortune just because the lady who is the AVATAR OF THE STORM won the fucking SUPERPOWER LOTTERY

“Finally, a cure for my chainsaw hands!” decreed Chainsaw-Hands Joe.

“There is no cure,” said Johnny Five-Dicks. “There’s nothing wrong with us.”

The last comment literally always cracks me up

The X-Men are an extremely good metaphor for oppressed minorities until they are suddenly an extremely terrible metaphor for oppressed minorities.

The scale on which the first reply misses the point literally never ceases to awe me.

I gotta say, though, this is a place where the X-men are being a good metaphor for oppressed minorities.  Specifically, in this case, the disabled community.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” says the girl with depression.  “Cure for what, motherfucker, I’m not sick,” says the person with autism.

“Yay, there’s a cure!” I say, with my fibromyalgia and random bad pain days.  “Yes, because it’s easier to talk about eliminating us than talk about teaching sign language in school,” says the Deaf person.  “‘Cure’ is violent rhetoric.”

The problem is, of course, that a vast number of things have been aggregated under the label of “disability,” and many of them don’t even resemble each other.  Depression sucks in an objective fashion, whereas autism is just a way of being (which, like many ways of being, may suck at some times, and generally sucks worse when not accommodated).  Similar deal with chronic pain versus the Deaf community.  These things really should not be grouped together, but they are.  And since they are grouped so haphazardly, they will often be at cross-purposes.

It is ridiculous, in the X-men universe, to classify all “mutants” as one group.  You have ridiculously powerful people with little downside, you have powerful people with a major downside, you have people with very limited powers but few drawbacks, you have people with limited powers and massive drawbacks, and that’s not even getting into other divisions, like whether you look like a baseline human all the time, part of the time, or none of the time.  “Realistically,” if you can apply that word to a fantasy universe, Storm and Rogue belong to completely different minorities which should require completely different approaches.  But society has grouped them under one umbrella, or forced them to group themselves for self-protection, and thus you have conversations like the one above.

So it’s actually not a bad take.  Mind you, the X-men have had bad takes, and will do so again, and I’m skeptical about whether “powers” of any kind even work for a metaphor about minority representation—but this particular vignette has something useful to say.

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly what bothers me about purely social analyses of disability.

And even if you look at the mutants as being all one group, it’s still a useful metaphor.

Put another way:

“They can cure us?” asks the autistic person who struggles to think clearly, can’t form full sentences, is overstimulated at the drop of a hat and misses out on a lot of things they’d otherwise like to do because for them, autism is literally crippling.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” I say, as a person with autism who has a job, car, excellent communication and coping skills and a relatively normal life, because for me, autism is a thing I’ve adapted to and worked around.

(And yes, autistic people in the first category do exist. I’ve encountered a few right here on Tumblr and seen more than one say “don’t forget us in your autism activism because we aren’t ‘just a little different,’ this is a genuine problem for us.”)

Or perhaps:

“They can cure us?” asks the amputee who has never fully adapted to the loss of her arm below the shoulder, and gets by okay most days but very much misses being non-disabled.

“No, because there’s nothing wrong with us,” says the person who was born with only one arm and has never considered it any kind of deficit because it’s just how things are.

Different people will experience the same disability in different ways. It may have to do with how they were diagnosed, or how they came to be disabled; it may have to do with complications related to the disability (not to use the same metaphor twice, but someone whose arm was crushed and experiences terrible phantom pains daily probably feels a lot more negatively about their lack of an arm than someone who was born without it and has no phantom limb to feel sensation in). It may even be because of how other people around them treat the disability! A blind person treated with dignity and appropriate accommodation is probably going to feel very differently about their disability than someone with the same kind of blindness, but also a bunch of condescending pricks who want to make it into a terrible tragedy.

The metaphor still works even within any given subgroup of disabled people, and I think we need to remember that in our activism, too.

Today I learned that my husband keeps a notes app on his phone that has a list of all of my favorite things including but not limited to flower, ice cream, and cocktail and I don’t know how I feel about it 😂

Oh listen I know this is very very sweet because again Husband is rocks for brain bubble man. It is hilarious to me because the list has things like

“Favorite ice cream: butter pecan. I married a little old lady.”

“Favorite Ben and Jerry’s (this is different then regular ice cream) Phish Food. Has no idea who Phish is just thinks the chocolate fish are neat”

And I feel exposed.

“Favorite flower: orchid or lily, but she can have neither because our cats are stupid demon babies spat out from hell who will eat them and perish. She would prefer chicken nuggets anyways.”

“Favorite donut: old fashioned, for breaking in half and sharing with with the dog.”

“Favorite coffee: iced. Do not offer hot coffee under any circumstance. The only hot beverage allowed is hot coco and the yearly white chocolate peppermint mocha”

Okay I don’t need to be called out like this.

the mortifying ordeal of being married.

Stop it this is hilarious

i am obsessed with this man

love to follow veterinarian practices on facebook because every one in a while they’ll post a picture of something so bizarrely funny. this axolotl getting an x-ray just took me out

ive been getting a lot of people really worried for this axolotl so i thought i’d clarify: she’s fine. she’s moist on the puppy pad so she won’t dry out and the x ray only takes a few seconds. the x ray was because she had an internal gut blockage due to the wrong substrate being used. they took another x ray after giving her barium to determine where in the gut it was, but the barium lubricated her gut enough that she passed the blockage with no invasive surgery and she’s completely fine. here she is not-flattened

NOT FLATTENED 🎉🎉🎉

a perfect stuffed animal should be proportioned such that the hands can easily and naturally rest on the feet while seated

^the michelangelo’s david of toys

Look closer. The hands are sewn to the feet. That is not a natural rest, but a forced relaxation. It’s really cute though so it’s more like the Venus de Milo of toys

how dare you comment this on my post. you sound so stupid right now. here is another angle of the tumbletuft duck where you can clearly see the hand is in another position touching further down on the foot

and another tumbletuft toy from the same line, made with the same core proportions. both hands are clearly mobile and not sewn down

stop the disinformation campaign

fun fact

im weirdly knowlagable in the history of soda i dont even drink soda why do i know so much about it

coke and pepsi taste different because coke was invent before refrigeration so it was designed to be drunk warm, while pepsi was designed after refrigeration was invented so it was designed to be drunk cold. as a result the tastes are different but if you drink pepsi cold and coke warm theyll taste the same.

Why the fuck do you know this

i honestly have no idea

coke’s recipe was originally green but the designers made it brown so it looked more like tea

Had they never seen green tea?

i dont even know if green tea was invented in 1886 but they wanted to make the public more open to eating the fizzy drink

Green tea was invented in the 13th century and made up 22% of the tea thrown off the ship in the Boston Tea Party 

alan i know about soda not green tea

i will trade u information abt bees and carrier pigeons for information abt the history of soda

no one knows where the origin of the name ‘7up’ started but it did have a mood stabilizer in the original recipe found in present day anti-depressants

i want facts about bees and carrier pigeons now

Carrier pigeons come from a species of Wild Rock pigeon, and their flights could be as long as 1800 km and were used as early as 3000 years ago. 

You know in old cartoons where a character throws a beehive at someone, and you think ‘lol, but that wouldn’t work in real life’. Turns out it would, and did. People used to lob beehives at the approximate location of the enemy forces to expose them. 

this is amazing thank you

Threads like this are pretty much the reason I come to Tumblr

There’s an old story about a greedy parson & a beekeeper.

See, while everybody owed 10% of their earnings to the church, they did not owe of their livestock. This priest was from away, and didn’t respect the traditions, and he demanded a tithe of the beekeeper’s bees. So the beekeeper showed up to his house with them, in the old skeps. If you don’t know, these are made of straw and are fully open on the bottom; they just sit on a shelf and are lifted to inspect from below.

So he walks into the priest’s house with his hives, shakes them sharply to dislodge the bees onto the floor, and walks back out with his equipment. Tithe of bees, as demanded.

They said you could become anything, so I became a woodland fairy. My dream has come true 🧚‍♀️