Lauren

Watercolor Animal Crossing Postcards made by ShiyiStudio

I see a lot of talk about how neurodivergence evolved and stayed in the gene pool because it was somehow ‘useful’ to our ancient ancestors. While I don’t necessarily disagree with this theory, I would like to propose an alternative. A theory that we already have physical evidence for. Humans just love each other and care for each other. Don’t you think that a species that cared for it’s people while they recovered from broken bones, or nursed their elderly well beyond their ‘usefulness’ would leave a member out because they didn’t make eye contact, or couldn’t stay focused on a particular task, or whatever other trait you associate with neurodivergence? I really don’t.

Sure, maybe it was useful to have someone around who didn’t mind making arrowheads all day, or who knew absolutely everything about all of the local flora and fauna, or who keyed in on every little distraction. At the end of the day, though, these people weren’t kept around because they were useful, they were cared for because they were loved.

This. This. This.

also: parents who kill their disabled kids through abuse or neglect are failing a test our most primitive ancestors cleared a hundred thousand years ago.

don’t know what parent of an autistic child needs to hear this but as long as they’re not harming anyone your kid’s stimming is not a “problem behaviour”

in our house we have a few categories of stimming behavior.

1. the no category. this is for things that are unsafe. hurting self (head banging, scratching), hurting others, chewing on choking hazards. i know this is excluded in OP’s post, but i’m putting it on my list because if you parent an autistic child and deal with this, you have to be aware that a key to off-limits stimming is redirection. stimming satisfies an important physical and neurological need for the autistic brain, and that behavior is sensory-seeking. if you must say no, please also offer options or help redirecting to appropriate outlets for pressure, motion, rhythm, chewing, etc.

2. the shared space category. listen, i get that a lot of people are assholes about things that aren’t hurting them. that’s not what this category is for. but we have a household with multiple autistic individuals and a work from home situation. “shared space” is the code phrase we use for “please take this stimming to a different location.” sometimes, aural stims like repetitive noises or physical stims like pacing can be legitimately distracting to other people in a room (or car!). in the case of other autistic people, it might even feel painful or mentally consuming. this category is no-judgment “please move to another location to continue stimming this way.” it’s not bad, it’s not wrong, you aren’t being shamed– just do your best to respect others and their needs or comfort, and leave the communal area or lower your volume.

3. the you do you category. it doesn’t matter that nobody else is doing this to feel comfortable or happy– you aren’t hurting anyone else, you aren’t being disruptive in a space other people are using together. go for it.

and in every single category, anger has no place in redirecting a stim. not even the no category. stimming isn’t malicious, there’s no actual moral requirement to be “less weird” or “like everyone else.” even reminders like “you aren’t the only person in this room and that’s very loud” don’t need anger. stims aren’t done at anyone. they’re just the body expressing a kind of neurological hunger, and whether the answer is “enjoy that!” or “this isn’t safe for you to eat (ie, do)” fury doesn’t help.

oh shit this is a REALLY helpful way to conceptualize stimming and competing needs.

I love this so much.

Tea party

fae court

The council to decide your fate

The Three Genders

much like the Phoenix, a new dad shall rise from the sawdust reborn

Any story claiming to be a deconstruction of fairy tales but has nothing to offer except new types of violence, more explicit sex, and a general attitude of “lol happy endings aren’t real” is like. such a cultural waste of time tbh

know what actually is a good deconstruction of a fairy tale? Shrek. It fucks up just about everything in a normal fairy tale and still manages to have a happy ending with a good message and never once has to be ‘gritty’ or ‘dark’. It’s actually really well done.

- Ursula LeGuin, ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’

there’s a twitter account where this guy thinks every tweet is directed at him and it’s great

this is how everyone on this website acts

no i dont

half of this website should learn this

Shut the fuck up

this isnt necessarily good news but i hope we can all agree that if you are attacked by a puma and you kill it with your bare hands it should be socially acceptable to wear the pelt wherever you damn well please

spoken like a future puma victim

….why didn’t he shoot the mountain lion?

lol what are you, a gun cuck? cant kill a large predator with your own hands?

the real struggle in 2004

not to be sappy on main BUT one thing that i really loved when studying linguistics was that the more important a word is, the earlier the concept of this thing was given a word. for example, the word water is similar in many similar languages (aqua, agua, água). so, the more important a word is, the more languages it’ll be similar across and the older this word will be, theoretically and generally speaking (many other things also affect this)

AND SO in my years studying linguistics, there was one word that was nearly identical across so many regionally different languages (though there are outliers of course), from europe to most of asia to subsaharan africa to indigenous languages. across nearly all languages this is the first word people learn how to say and maybe the first word humans in general officially named and defined:

this isn’t actually the first word because we teach babies this word (most likely), but because the “mama” or “ama” sounds are the easiest things for babies to say, and it’s nearly always the only thing they can say at first, and adults across all languages defined their language around that.

babies all over the world for thousands and thousands of years all started out blabbering sounds like “mama” and mothers everywhere were all like Oh Shit That’s Me! I’m Mama!

This is so fucking funny

For no Irish speakers when translated it says “make a movie about black people they said” but in Irish putting a colour modifier when talking about a person/group of people it has a cultural meaning, some colours even have different words when talking about hair colour (like red). So in that vein, the word black (‘dubh’ pronounced ‘duv’) is associated with the devil and/or evil things and naturally it’s quite rude to describe someone as black in Irish so we call black people ’gorm’ (pronounced gurrum) which is actually blue. Frequently people claiming Irish heritage mess this up, most notably and hilariously is that cop who tried to make a ‘blue lives matter’ t-shirt and messed up every word single word in the translation except for the ‘blue’ modifier which made his stupid t-shirt actually say 'black lives matter’.

All that to say that it translates as “make a movie about black people, they said” but directly translated it says “make a movie about blue people, they said”.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk

That’s the face of a man who has been working with that dog for over a year to keep it from jumping on people.

And that’s the face of a dog saying to the man I’m not touching you.