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darling, take the mask off

@soaringsparrows / soaringsparrows.tumblr.com

sparrow || they/them || 28 sidebar and corner art by hydrae mobile header art by meglm
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miiilowo

tumblr is great because no matter how many followers i get it doesn't stop me from being really fucking annoying. other places i will perhaps think before i post. Not here. not here

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reblogged

Oh so she can open drawers now

Not allowed!

Last night before bed I hid her yarn (only allowed to have it while supervised because choking hazard) and her loud squeaky toy (loud, squeaky) in this drawer.

This morning I heard a noise (derogatory) and came out of the shower to squeak squeak squeak squeak. Both yarn and toy on ground. And I thought "oh man, I must have left the drawer slightly open?" Hid the yarn and toy in a different, much heavier dresser drawer and closed this one properly.

Turns out no I did not leave this one slightly open. The little fiend can just Open this one.

She hasn't stopped, by the way. She's still opening the drawers, by the way. Every morning I shut the damn drawers and then I go to work and then I sit in my cuck little office chair until the cat cam goes "hey. hey. motion detected. hey. she's opening the drawers. you can watch. open the app to watch. she's opening both bottom drawers. you can do fuck all about it. you're gonna come home and your drawers are open. wage-idiot. job-cel. office-cuckold. she's opening both bottom drawers. she doesn't even care."

Lichrrally my fucking drawers

There's nothing fucking in there!!!!!!

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You know what, since I'm thinking about it anyways, let's talk formalwear accessories. Most of these are traditionally menswear but a bit of gender fuckery is good for the soul, and frankly most of these are about making your mass-produced clothing fit and lay properly without having to go to the tailor.

Shirt stays: these go around your thighs to hold your shirt down, so that it stays smooth and tucked in. They're usually elastic, with 1-3 clips, and if you wear skirts frequently this is a GREAT way to make sure your top doesn't ride up. The clips will be visible if you're wearing something tight, so loose pants or skirts are where these do best. There's also an insane version that clips to your socks, but that is for lunatics. If you wanted, you could also use one of these clips to hold up thigh-highs.

These do a great job of smoothing and narrowing the waist area by keeping your shirt from bunching there.

Sleeve garters: usually metal, leather, elastic, or silk. These are usually worn with button-down shirts to adjust where your cuff falls on the wrist or hand. They're properly worn on the upper arm, and you pull the fabric of the sleeve above the garter until you cuff is where you want it. Because this creates a puff of sleeve at the bicep, it also broadens the appearance of the shoulders. It's great if you're working with your hands or if your sleeves are often too long for your preference.

Waistband clip or belt adjustment clip/buttons

Three different ways of tightening the waistband of a pair of pants or a skirt. You're not going to get more than an inch or so tighter without weird bunching, and for most of these you'd want them to be hidden under a shirt or jacket, but they do the job if that's something you're having issues with.

Collar pins: There are so many fun ones out there, both with and without chains. They're not terribly practical, though the slight weight may help keep your collar where you want it. Also consider collar tips, which pin (surprise) to the very tips of your collar points.

Sweater clips/guards: meant to hold your sweater or cardigan mostly closed. Great if your cardigan doesn't button, or if you don't like it to be buttoned all the way.

There's tons of other stuff out there like this--etsy is a great place to find this stuff. A lot of these are old solutions to the very modern problem of mass-maufactured clothes not being as one-size-fits-all as advertised, but they're also a fun way to put a bit of personality into businesswear.

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Also hey, cultural history time: The reason why cats are associated with women wasn't ultimately and originally about women as sly, cruel, or capricious creatures, but about cats as mothers to their kittens. And yes, sure, reducing womanhood to motherhood and a woman's worth to her fertility is Much Bad, but nonetheless I want to stress that the reason cats became the symbol animal of so many goddesses and were associated with women from thereon wasn't over some "cats and women are sly and selfish, dogs and men are straightforward and loyal uwu" dichtonomy.

It was about cats' tendency to go "I am 4kg of whoop-ass and if you try to touch my eight beautiful children I will fucking kill you."

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vrabia

just learned there's a war going on in stardew valley with zero explanation and since the game swings wildly between anti-corporate utopianism and classic kill 3 skeletons for 100 gold this opens up some fascinating world-building possibilities, namely: 1. it's a regular war that's just kind of happening while you wake up each morning, tend to your radishes and then go fight monsters down level 80 of an abandoned mineshaft so you can get iridium for the wizard living in a mysterious tower behind your farm; or 2. it's a magic war that a regular guy named kent voluntarily left his family for, and if you complete his request for a fresh starfruit he'll start telling you about his ptsd

i was jokingly thinking of trying to seduce sam with my top-notch farming skills but in light of this new information i kind of want to do it for real just to find out if that family is seriously messed up and putting up a front. hey skater boy lather some artisanal pomegranate jelly on those home-made pancakes and tell me why your dad is the only guy in pelican town (population: 32) who went to fight in the trenches

i know you can marry and divorce characters in the game but i think the next update should add a cheating option just because i can mess everything up even more. all of pelican town hates me for fucking kent while his wife, the mother of his children, was asleep in the other room, but unfortunately i can't stop growing all of this gold star produce, so what are they gonna do? what are they gonna do, huh? eat mediocre parsnips while golden boy is tearfully fucking his emo bff in revenge because he thinks this means something to me? please.

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Nothing gives the same kind of random ego boost like managing to finally clean up your home and making it nice. Like ooh look at me, I'm living like people do, I made myself iced tea and I am eating my snack from a real plate. I got floors and shit.

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I was playing Stardew tonight and got jumpscared by the wizard just walking his ass through town in broad daylight to go to the bookseller. For 8 years he’s been a hermit! Isolated from the townsfolk who fear and distrust him! At most, he might be hiding at the edges of a festival where no one could notice him! That was the extent of his outings to Pelican Town! But now the bookseller is in town and he doesn’t give a fuck, he’s going to march his ass out there with his silly little hat on in front of the whole town and Yoba to get his books.

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huffylemon

aren't gorillas gentle giants or something. i stay out of his way, he doesn't maul me, we have a nice time picking out clothes together in opposite sides of the mall

Male gorillas are super aggressive and territorial. Also they interpret nearly every human mannerism as a sign of aggression or a challenge. Smiling and eye contact are both things that zookeepers have to be taught to suppress when they’re in the vicinity of gorillas.

Well unless the mall is his native territory I think I'm fine, I wasn't planning on smiling at him

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max1461

This is all irrelevant because the obvious answer is five black mambas. I mean, that’s not actually very many snakes, and malls are fucking huge. And unlike a gorilla you can definitely outrun a snake if it does show up. Find an open space in the mall where you can see any snake coming and just hangout out there. Fucking easy.

Misguided! I would much rather have a mallmate I can easily see and hear coming. I'm confident I can stay out of the gorilla's way, but if I step on a snake or one otherwise gets the jump on me, it's all over.

It's not just about the physical danger either, it's about my mental health. One gorilla, unless he's actively mad at me, I just keep a healthy distance between us and make sure I never get trapped. With the snakes, it requires a lot more constant vigilance

They should substitute "chimpanzee" for "gorilla" in this hypothetical.

if it was a chimp i'm taking the fucking snakes

Black mambas have a reputation build on being very venomous and very fast. I'm not sure why you would think you could outrun one (or five) in an enclosed space like a mall.

Malls usually have pretty slick floors, and escalators. I’d choose the gorilla simply because I think that would make an more interesting story (and a better-selling autobiography, I Survived the Mall Gorilla) but I think I’d stand a pretty good chance at avoiding the mamba. They’re fast and aggressive and will chase you but unless we started immediately beside each other I think my sneakers would have the terrain advantage over scutes.

this is too good to leave hidden in the replies

fucking enamored with the implication that this gorilla is fully intelligent but is trying to manufacture plausible deniability like the movie barnyard

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lizziemack

When I’m reading smut and the author breaks the flow of the story so that the characters can tell us that they have enthusiastic consent it feels exactly like when Dora the Explorer looks directly into the camera and says ‘Seat belts so we can be safe!’ anytime she gets into a motorized vehicle.

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the fact that Stardew Valley is a $15 indie game that came out almost a decade ago with zero microtransactions and is still receiving free DLC updates to this day is absolutely bonkers. There are $50-60 AAA games with paid DLC that have come out more recently and aren’t nearly as actively supported or updated.

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mickstart

You know what really fucking Annoys Me about internet censorship is stuff like swear words being heavily censored because that's entirely an American cultural hangup being forced on the rest of us. I don't know a single country where swearing is as taboo as it is in America. In fact most languages have swear words that would have the same effect on an American as giving a Victorian chimney sweep a pepsi max cherry.

Demonitizing Irish people's videos for having swear words in them is a kind of hate crime and psychological torture I think.

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sailorcuba

the purest form of serotonin is when a cat looks at u and u go like “what?” and it meows at u

like, that is a very unspecific response I still have no idea what you want but I applaud how adorably you meowed all the same, well done

This post led me to reminisce on the nature of cat’s meowing, and I have a funny story

I befriended a feral cat once who had spent her life in the forest without human interaction. I was worried about her because she had a paw damaged from an old injury and was emaciated but obviously nursing kittens that were hidden away somewhere. It took me weeks of putting out food and sitting across the yard every evening for her to trust me even a little and when she decided we were friends and she expected dinner every night she started coming to my door and trying to call for me in the evening, but she didn’t meow. Why would she? Cats only meow naturally as kittens when their vocal chords/ears aren’t fully developed, adult cats communicate with vocalizations that aren’t audible to humans. She probably tried making noises I couldn’t hear to call me but ended up sticking to the one I always responded to- a horrible yowling growl that she had made at me when we first encountered each other in the forest. Except once we were friends she would make this noise while purring and rubbing affectionately against a nearby tree or the porch railing (because she didn’t want to touch me yet). This understandably freaked my family members out but I was touched that she had taken the time to find a way to basically yell FUCK OFF in an affectionate way.

Fast forward to when she finally trusts me enough to bring her hidden kittens out of the forest to me, long story short I gained their trust and put them in this big pen, that I had previously used to keep chickens in, so they’d be safe and to keep her from having another litter. Except she was already secretly pregnant again! (Fix your pets, guys, they make SO many babies) and ended up having her new babies in this pen. I kept my distance, sitting on the outside once they were born until she seemed comfortable enough to let me come inside. The kittens were a bit wild, hissing viscously at me as soon as they opened their eyes, but they warmed up to me. There were four of them and soon they all wanted to be the center of attention during the twice daily play sessions. I’d be playing with one and another would meow insistently behind me and I’d immediately answer them and give them love, teaching them that humans could be friends that answer their needs- making them adoptable once they were weaned. Mama cat (Artie) would just watch me play with them, and I guess she was doing some thinking because one day when they were about a month old I was playing with them and one meowed behind me. I was confused because I hadn’t realized there was a kitten behind me and when I turned, there wasn’t. The only cat there was Artie looking at me really intensely. I turned back around to the kittens and I heard the meow again, I turned back to Artie and responded in the way I always did with the kittens “yes baby?” And she meowed again in an exact imitation of her kittens! After that she would.not.shut.up. It was like she had cracked some kind of code, meowing for attention and snacks and just to say hi. Her two older kittens, the ones she’d had in the forest, had never meowed at me either but started to once they saw how I responded to their mom. and I find it endlessly fascinating because before that it had never occurred to me that cats only meow at humans because they were taught by other cats to keep meowing past kittenhood because that’s the best way to get a human’s attention.

Imagine befriending some weird giant with the wrong number of legs that you met in the forest who seems nice enough but doesn’t seem to be able to hear you, until your friend explains that all they can understand is fuck off! And I’m a baby give me love!

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