Pinned
bau-gremlin has returned to its original name not-easy-being-green-124
when dogs are scary smart
over the last several months, we have been implementing a protocol to eliminate karybelle the sheltie’s barking surrounding her mealtimes. we have accomplished this by initially introducing an alternate activity during prep time (stuffed kong) and religiously giving her a time out gated in the yard if she stops that activity to bark, thus delaying her dinner until she’s quiet. this has been extremely successful; she’s gone from barking literally 100+ times during meal prep to barking 0 times, and only occasionally slips up. the behavior she has chosen to replace her meal-prep-screaming (after all, that energy has to go somewhere) is frantically - but silently - running circles around the coffee table to finally slam into a perfect down-stay as her bowl is set down.
this evening as the food was coming out, karybelle seamlessly slipped into her silent circling routine. except after a couple of reps, she abruptly changed course, yeeted herself out the dog door, barked once, and immediately jumped back in to resume her circling.
if that isn’t a demonstration of crystal clear understanding of criteria, i…don’t know what is lmao
literally the canine version of this
Reblogged ilicythings
the thing about disability is it really does sometimes boil down to "wow i wish i could do that" and then you can't. and it sucks.
accomodations are important but i think they miss the point of this post. sometimes you can't do it. at all. someone needs to do it for you or it will never happen.
"and then you force yourself anyway" folks im starting to think some of you really do not understand what it means to not be able to do things.
Reblogged brightlotusmoon
And this, my non-American friends, is America in one image.
The literal V-Card
Reblogged justjasper
here, have an extremely wholesome tiktok to detox your dash
Reblogged brightlotusmoon
the thing about bullets is that you can touch them and it's fine, but if they're shot by a gun they get so fast they can kill you. it's the speed that does the killing. so much of martial conflict is just using speed to harm one another
what they dont tell you is that this is true about a lot of stuff. an orchestra standing still is a mild inconvenience at worst. but an orchestra scuttling towards you? thats violins, baby
Not violins alone, it's also sax. Sax and violins.
Reblogged slightlysal
I don't know what brand of black paint they're using but I think I'm experiencing feelings I've only read about in fanfiction
Golden High-Flow acrylics are incredible. I don't use brushes as big as this but they are so smooth.
This is incredible work, oh my lord.
Reblogged thesunlightmuse
“This is what Shakespeare would have wanted.”
“Shakespeare wouldn’t have wanted this.”
No! You’re both wrong! Shakespeare wanted one thing and one thing only. To sell tickets.
If people spend money at the Globe theatre and don’t steal his bones then his ghost is happy
“Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, To dig the dust enclosed here. Blessed be the man that spares these stones, And cursed be he that moves my bones.”
Shakespeare’s actual grave. He put a curse on anyone that tries to touch his bones. That’s what Shakespeare wants. Buy tickets and don’t touch his bones.
[image description: a photo of shakespeare’s grave with the plaque transcribed above]
“Buy my stuff and leave me alone” - every writer’s creed
I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.
I really do mean this sympathetically. we are not well equipped as a culture to grapple with the implications of power and violence, because we are intimately saturated in it from birth. cruelty feels natural, and that's hard to unlearn.
a bunch of things that I know are going to sound really corny (which honestly I think is half the cultural problem - the idea that non-coercive parenting is touchy-feely, ineffectual or just kind of cringe - but that could be a whole other post)
the main thing was that they always explained things to me. if I wanted something I couldn't have, they explained why (from 'we can't afford that', 'it's bad for you', 'it's dangerous', all the way up to 'it's made by a big company that treats its workers badly, and we don't want to give them money'). If I threw a tantrum, they either waited it out until I got tired and bored or they redirected what we were doing ('we have to be patient and wait in line. if we don't wait in line, we can't go into the theatre. we can't wait in line if you scream and upset people. okay then, we're going home.')
beyond that, they always spoke to me like a full person. they asked my opinion on things and took it seriously, and asked me why as much as I asked them. apparently I had a phase as a toddler where I always wanted to be the first one on the swings / down the slide, and would throw almighty fits about it, until my mum took me aside one day and said 'why do you want to be first? are you worried the slide will get used up?' I laughed like it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, and never kicked up a fuss about taking turns after that.
on the granular level, they focused on positives over negatives. My mum would draw little good behaviour charts for me, featuring e.g. me walking a long winding path through the woods with my soft toys. the path would be made up of, say, 30 stones, and every day that I was well behaved I'd earn a sticker on one of them. when I reached the end of the path, I got to pick a treat. something like a new plastic animal for my collection, or a day trip to the aquarium.
I do remember them sitting me down once and asking me to come up with what I thought would be an appropriate punishment if I ever did something really bad. I think my first suggestion was something like 'no TV', which was a real nice try because we didn't have a TV at the time. I don't remember what I finally decided on, it might have been 'no dessert for a week'. We wrote it down together and I signed my name, and they sealed it in an important looking envelope which they put in my dad's filing cabinet (for important documents). This would be unsealed if I ever did something Really Bad. the eventuality never came up, but the act of participating in the exercise kept me mostly on the straight and narrow. It's funny, the conceptual punishment itself wasn't even that bad. It was the seriousnes of the adult commitment I'd made to Behaving Well that did the trick.
When I DID do the standard naughty stuff, my parents would just sit me down and explain to me seriously why it was wrong and what impact it had caused for other people. They'd ask what motivated me, and why I acted on those feelings in that specific way. They would, of course, tell me they were disappointed. If necessary, they would tell me how things would have to change as a result of what I'd done. They were always, always open to hearing out my side of the story, and always, always took my feelings seriously even if they disapproved of my behaviour. they would ask if I was ready to say sorry and get a hug. if I wasn't ready, if I was still upset or angry, they would give me space in my room and ask me to come find them when I wanted to make up. and I always did, because I always knew they would accept it.
I keep seeing people call the Trump administration shit like “schizophrenic” and “psychotic” and can we fucking not do this please???? schizophrenics and people with psychosis have a biological and neurological basis for their behavior and beliefs. there is no biological basis for being racist and sexist and a monster. schizophrenics and ppl with psychosis are innocent. you can’t beat bigotry with more bigotry
A reminder that during the nuremberg trials, psychiatrists determined that there was no mental illness, insanity, or underlying pathology that caused the nazis to be nazis. Bigotry and evil are not caused by mental illness, and the most extreme forms of bigotry and other human evils have been perpetuated by the completely sane
