Goaty

While I'm talking about social stuff I had to learn as an autistic person

There's a LOT of social interactions between human beings whose purpose really boils down to being like that thing dogs do where they go "omg YOU'RE a dog??? I'M a dog!!!!!" And that's not a bad thing. Highly ritualized "meaningless" displays of human connection like friendly greetings and talking about things like weather actually do serve a purpose which is like idk ritualized displays birds do. YOU'RE a human? Omg I'M a human!!!! Wow!!!

And they don't have to be your favorite flavor of interaction. You can even think they're silly. But they DO serve a purpose or else they wouldn't be a thing.

There's lots of good and folksy responses to "how are you doing" that don't involve either lying or undermining the ritualized purpose of the greeting exchange, too. My great grandmother Ethel for example was a big fan of "well, I'm a-doin'"

"Things like 'How are you?' and 'Have a nice day' and 'What do you think of the weather, then?' What these sounds mean is: I am alive and so are you."

- Wings, by Terry Pratchett.

It sounds so cute when you put it this way

When I was a teenager I really hated and gamified smalltalk, but... Then I got cockatiels. And cockatiels have a thing called "contact calls". Basically, it's a particular set of noises they make to know where each other are without looking at them directly. There's variations, when the flock member is close it's a very sweet little sound, when they don't know where you are this can progress to a panicked shriek.

I kind of loved mimicking it. It let me interact with my birds in a whole new way that meant a lot to them, and it turned out to be incredibly helpful when my (completely unrecall trained, fully flighted bird) got startled in a bad gust of wind on the way between aviary and house and ended up circling in the bad weather, totally disoriented... And calling for us. It let her figure out how to get back down to come home.

Gradually I realised that lots of animals do this, actually. Cat activation noise is a contact call. Dogs do it in some kinds of whines. Social birds have big repertoires of them. It's just a ritual to keep in contact.

Then... I realised that's what a lot of those small rituals of smalltalk actually are. They are the act of petting an anxious or excited dog to soothe it, or letting each other know you're still in the room together. Humans have a huge variety in the way they use these, but I stopped finding a lot of them so annoying when I realised what the rituals were actually for.

I mean, I still prefer to use the non-word versions among friends and other people amenable to it, but. I find it, given in good faith, kind of endearing now.

Some of the hardest parts of sharing your opinions on the internet:

You really can just shill for notes on this platform. if this post gets 5k notes and read by PM Seymour I will invade Hungary

Christ, what did Hungary do to you??????

Beaver observations locations in Poland.

kurwa fontos térkép

​WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN

bober shot down the plane

I baked you a pie

Oh boy what flavor

PIE FLAVOR!

*sick guitar riff*

sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium

Francium IS a stupid element. It has a half life of 22 minutes and barely exists at all, only naturally occurring as a product of the extremely rare alpha decay series ²³⁵U ➝ ²³¹Th ➝ ²³¹Pa (𝜷 decay) ➝ ²²⁷Ac ➝ ²²³Fr (1.38% chance). There’s less than a gram of it on earth at any given moment. It has no uses to anybody and it isn’t even the most reactive group 1A element due to relativistic effects fucking up its electron binding energies. Stupid substance.

If you somehow asked a genie to get you a gram of Francium in a sealed vial so you could do an experiment with it, the genie would just give it to you because the enormous amount of radioactivity it produces would instantly vaporize the sample and cook you alive. Absolute dogshit isotope and its synthetic siblings are just the same but worse

found the guy

You really can just shill for notes on this platform. if this post gets 5k notes and read by PM Seymour I will invade Hungary

You really can just shill for notes on this platform. if this post gets 5k notes and read by PM Seymour I will invade Hungary

You really can just shill for notes on this platform. if this post gets 5k notes and read by PM Seymour I will invade Hungary

You really can just shill for notes on this platform. if this post gets 5k notes and read by PM Seymour I will invade Hungary

i think i said this one before but i remember we used to go to church and one day on the way i just out of the blue asked the car "how do we know god is real? what if people just made him up" and the adults all got super mad at me and gave me generic answers like "we just know" and stuff and my ass was fucking CURIOUS so when church started i asked the Sunday School teacher and she was like "well the bible was written about him" or something like that and i was like "but someone wrote Curious George and hes not real, what if someone made him up too" and she was like irritated but was like "he's a talking monkey of course hes not real, children just like fun stories" or something like that and i don't remember exactly what i said but it was something very close to "but adults like stories too! how do you know he's not made up so because adults want to believe in something too?" and she got SUPER mad and i had to apologize in front of the church but i saw an opportunity so i was like "but no one answered me so i still dont know and i guess you guys don't either" and [everyone] got super mad and none of us could go to that church anymore

the adults were okay to go to church again but me and my siblings had sundays off from that point on and that was kind of a catalyst for the way my brother and sister perceived religion

I know the lines around what is and isn't a cult are very subjective but "You are not allowed to think critically or ask genuine questions about our belief system or we will retaliate against you" is definitely cult-y behavior

Not what I expected coming from John Green

I said what I said.

type prevs url with your eyes closed in the tags

CRYING AND BAWLING AND LOSING IT

if i had a dollar for every pixel in this image i’d have 15 cents

if i had a dollar for every ounce of rage i felt in my body after i read this comment i would have enough money to buy a cannon to fire at you

actually I did the math, they would have $225, not $0.15

sis i’m right here….

if i had a dollar i would buy a can of soda :)

while you’re there could you buy me an apply juice please?

sorry i only have a dollar

:(

hey I just realized my friend Vriska is right, they would have $22500 not $225

^my friend Vriska

if i had $22,500 i would buy a can of soda and an apply juice

You can buy anything you want with $22500

yeah and they want soda and apply juice

apply juice to what

directly to the forehead

Great post guys

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Closest match: Barbus barbus genome assembly, chromosome: 1 Common name: Common Barbel

(image source)

@fish-identifier

my bear-man in christ i have already identified it

We can’t be certain until @fish-identifier calls it

adult hood is just

*buys a half gallon of milk* *uses it all within a few days* *decided to buy a gallon of milk to not run out before next shopping trip* *uses a teaspoon of milk that week and it goes bad somehow* *buys a quart of milk instead so it won’t go bad* *uses it in one day* *buys a quart and a half gallon of milk because the gallon was too much but the half gallon was not enough* *only uses the half gallon* *gives up on milk for a few days in general* *buys a gallon of milk again just to tempt fate* *somehow uses all of it without realizing and then has to eat sad cereal with like the 5 drops of remaining milk*