Couldn't stop thinking about that tweet, I love the idea of a god promoting his faith.

“I’ll just write this short little fic”, the author says, not realising they’re doomed by the narrative

it's been said before and i'm sure said better than i can phrase it. but really, really - if you like making "i'm going to kill myself" jokes, please try switching to being ironically conceited instead.

anytime something goes wrong, say things like "ah well at least i'm beautiful and charming and everyone loves me." when you forget something, try "my big huge brain is so smart and thinking about too many other very big wizardly thoughts you wouldn't even understand." when you're frustrated by one of your symptoms, start talking like you're in My Immortal. "Life has come for me but my eyes are beautiful pools of gorgeous fire and my hair is amazing. I stuck my middle finger up at life and told it to fuck off and it did."

just... try it for a month or two. try saying the most absurdly self-congratulatory shit you can think of.

i know it's tempting to make suicide or self-harm jokes. and for me at least, a decade ago (!) when someone suggested i stop making those kinds of jokes, i was kind of at a loss for what to replace them with. i wanted to make light of these moments, but genuinely (at the time) my first thought really was suicidal ideation. there was a part of me that even felt like ... i was kind of "making light" of that voice. that if i could say i want to die lol, it would help take the sting out of that genuine (albeit passive) desire. like i could turn my illness into a joke.

when i started complimenting myself instead, it felt awkward and stupid. it felt really, really ironic. what i was actually saying was nobody would ever think this stuff about me, that's what makes it so fucking funny.

but. the effect was immediate. first thing i noticed was the people around me. when i dropped a glass and said ah my skin is too beautiful and sleek the glass has swooned and broken for me, other people were suddenly overjoyed to jump in with the joke. rather than making an awkward moment, we'd both start cracking up. ah princess sleek hands, i've heard of you.

i was 19. i hadn't noticed i'd been making others tense when i said i want it all to end. i know now that it's incredibly hard to know how to walk that moment - do you talk to them about your concern? do you potentially make them uncomfortable by asking if they're okay? do you ignore the situation? do you help them pick up the glass, or do they need to do it by themselves? are they genuinely made suicidal over this small moment? and most importantly, how do you - without professional training or supplies - actually help?

most people want to help you pick up the glass in your life, they just have no fucking idea how to do it. they don't want to make anything worse. they don't want to make assumptions about you. they love you, they're scared for you - and being scared makes people kind of freeze up. it's not because they don't love you. it's because they do.

now when something bad happens, my first thought is how can i make a stupid joke about this. it isn't my brain saying you're a dumb fucking bitch. i spend more time laughing. i spend more time being gentle with myself. i spend more time feeling good.

and the thing is - what's kind of funny - is that you'd be surprised by how many people agree with you. the first time i said i'm too pretty to understand that, someone else said to be fair you're the prettiest person in this room. i promise - you really don't know how kindly your friends see you. but they love you for a reason. they sort of reverse-velveteen-rabbit you. your weird and ugly spots fade away and you just become... the love they want to give you.

go love yourself ironically. the worst thing that happens is that you end up tricking your reflection into actually loving you.

I saw this just after it was first posted and want to update: it hasn't been long, but WOW is this making a difference.

And it is one thousand times funnier.

I don't know who out there needs to hear this but your brain does this amazing little -shift- when something seems to make sense in a new way and it's very addictive and euphoric and totally reliant on the *appearance* of logical conclusions, not actual objective truth

So that bizarre transcendent high you get when the idea of "reality shifting" or "crystal vibrations" or like. Whatever the hell that "manifesting" shit is, when it -clicks- for you, and its like suddenly the entire fabric of reality suddenly makes sense?

That's not a sign that you've unlocked the intangible secrets of the universe. That's a sign that your brain is hardwired to find and exploit logical shortcuts and loopholes and patterns and it thinks it just found one, so you got hopeful and excited and wondrous and received a dopamine hit on top.

And really, I'd just keep my thoughts to myself, except I've experienced these false-positive "revelations" before too, and looking around there is a concerning amount of fake-spititual not-medicine junk being pushed around, opening people up to predatory cults and pyramid schemes that are doing very, very well and it's really fucking scary

And like.

Soft animal brains make mistakes. that's normal. It's why we invented science. Please take your meds and use your aids and get vaccinated. Please

Philippine Frogmouth (Batrachostomus septimus), parents with chick, family Podargidae, Philippines

photograph by Mhark Gee

A frustrating part of the mainstream vegan “love all animals and protect the environment” mindset is the fact that things need to die in real-life ecology all the time but deer hunting season makes icky feelings and carp culls aren’t cottagecore

The vegan “any animal death ever is morally wrong” mindset doesn’t hold up when:

We don’t have any of the large predators we used to (black bears, mountain lions, or gray wolves) but still retain large deer populations. If nothing is removing animals, they’ll quickly overload the carrying capacity of the environment and have massive losses to starvation and disease that can also pass on to livestock. Human hunters replace the large predators that our landscape can no longer support.

It’s kinder to euthanize an un-releasable hawk rather than try to find it a permanent home with humans. Wildlife rehabs have extremely limited space and resources and are usually run entirely on donated money and volunteer time. Only a few are large and stable enough to care for permanent residents long-term, and those spots are few and far between.

An invasive species poses a danger to threatened native wildlife. I will admit- Australian possums are adorable. But not in New Zealand, where they’re an invasive species that eats the eggs of ground-dwelling birds that previously had no such predators. The landowners I worked with replanting native bush, all native Maori, had no qualms about setting the dogs on them.

I don’t know how to end this except. Sometimes things just gotta die and acting otherwise just isn’t a realistic expectation.

Highlights from the notes over the past 6 months include a lot of angry vegans saying “you’re blowing things out of proportion, no vegans actually think like this!” and a lot of people who work in conservation and education saying “Every day. I have to fight people who think like this.”

As a bonus this post was originally inspired by the vegan who called me racist for saying we should kill invasive species

Same vibes

hey hellsite

a lot of anti-historian stuff comes across like “i want history to be simple and i am suspicious of people who tell me it’s not” and this is a thing you see from people on any place on the political spectrum

“historians are bad because they say [something you’ve learned from your GOP written textbook] when in reality [something you only know because historians found it out] so we cannot trust them”

“Historians ignore [thing researched by historians]!”

Your 7th grade history teacher didn’t teach you the entire sum of historical inquiry and you should have been able to figure that out on your own, actually

Like, I support the fuck out of trans girls and young trans women, don’t get me wrong. But it would be nice to see some more pics of middle-aged and older trans women, too.

Speaking as a slightly older-than-tumblr-average trans woman (I’m 41), we’re out here. It’s just that most of my peers don’t hang out on Tumblr, they’re on Facebook or Twitter.

I’ll be 37 this year. Wow … that hurt to say, a little. But yeah, we’re here. <3

39 here, and quite proud of it. Also not on Facebook for what it’s worth. I like the peers I have here on Tumblr. :)

*sigh* fine. FINE. 

i’m… 39. i just turned 39.

i’m only owning up to it because i was terrified of transitioning at 34 and i would do anything to alleviate that fear for someone else. 

we are NEVER talking about this again tho

35 now (just got home from a shoot and an outcall when this was taken)

… the women above me give me lots of hope and joy

THIS IS MAKING ME SO HAPPY OMG

It’s always really nice seeing pictures of older trans people, because quite often on here it’s the transitioning teenagers, and it’s scary because it makes it feel like we don’t have a future

y’all are beautiful and amazing, please keep being you!

I will be turning 40 in April and I  am just getting ready to start HRT.

This is just a list of people my soon-to-be 37 year-old self should be following…

Always reassuring to be reminded that I’m not the only 35+ y.o. transwoman on here!

40 y.o. here. Started HRT 6 months ago.

I’m going to be 43 on July 19. Genderfluid, no plans to go on HRT, but definitely as trans as they come. (Hey @transgirltumbling, @lady-feral and @kruczynskijoy want to jump in on this one?

I’m 43 and never happier!

Well if this isn’t just a great big pile of heros and inspiration I don’t know what is! 39 and one week hrt for me. Not quite ready to add my pic on here but maybe soon. Thanks for this girls!

37 and almost 7 months in, it’s never too late!

56 been on HRT for 1-½ years. I’ve never felt better.

💀🐴SKELTON PAINTED HORSES🐴💀

Oh fuck, are those friesians?

GLOW IN THE DARK????

Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting. Nobody in my life ever said that before.

More lessons from Pratchett:

a lot of pieces of media will show characters catching fireflies with just their bare hands. in some cases they will just land on the persons fingers. to gently be placed inside of a jar..

for people who live in areas who don’t have fireflies, i want you to know that is not made up or exaggerated for those scenes. fireflies are really like that. they are slow and not cautious at all. while camping i would just walk up to one flying in the air and grab it. and it would sit on my hands like “oh ok.” they are my friends.

also i think it’s funny when fireflies are portrayed as round light bulb-ish shapes. they are skinny.

also their butts are yellow even when not lit up. they’re not just all black until suddenly lighting up yellow! they always got little yellow asses!

they are such friends

fireflies our beloveds <3

Thought people might appreciate this video I got of a firefly that landed on my mom’s ring and sat there flashing for about a good minute or two. They really are just like that

I've had to let a couple people know that fireflies are in fact real.

If you're one of todays lucky ten thousand, i'm happy for you. The world is a marvelous place <3

What surprises me always is not that they are real but how shockingly bright they are. That's a whole ass LED. How does he power it? What a beautiful boy

Moving from Brooklyn to a woody area within The Hamptons in the early 90s meant being exposed to Very Starry Skies and especially fireflies. They really did land on me, blinking or just shining brighter. They tickled. It really was incredibly easy to imagine cryptids in my backyard.

For those curious about how fireflies work: this artlcle's pretty good. (Tl:dr; the light comes from a controlled reaction of enzymes with oxygen, mostly. The boys fly around flash-signalling "I GOT SEX HERE!" and the girls, down in the grass, flash back "BRING SOME OF THAT DOWN HERE!" And then (ideally) sex happens. (We have to assume that fireflies who run into people along the way later remark with mild annoyance about how awful the traffic was tonght.)

Unfortunately we don't have them in Ireland. It's a pity. I miss them sometimes.

They also have FREAKY looking babies, so if you ever find one please leave it be!!

I rescued this one from my small pond, and despite living with fireflies in my life for almost 40 years, I had never seen one and had no idea what it was. Thankfully, I am generally kind to bugs and don't smush first and ask questions later, but in case you aren't, this one is perfectly harmless and turns into a slow, beautiful, gentle creature of the night.

I think part of the reason they are Like That is that most of the species that light up so brightly (not all of them do) are also toxic because of the same chemicals used for the light reaction. They can afford to be chill when they know most predators don’t want to eat them.

Another fun fact: You can sometimes find fireflies in just-right marshy habitat even in states where you wouldn’t expect to find them. For example, we have them in Colorado if you know when/where to look (and I’m not talking a handful of fireflies, I mean the whole night is lit up) and I lived here for over a decade before learning that information.

I'm sorry, I don't want to come across as harsh, but this is honestly ignorant as fuck.

I'm not gonna claim to know everything about the importance of studying dead languages, but I think I can safely say that it would probably be a really bad thing if we lost these languages to time if we didn't have people studying them.

We can lose hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years of story-telling history if these languages end up forgotten.

I can't put it into clear words right now because I'm busy or go int depth because I only have a common sense understanding, but I just wanted to address this. So if anybody on Tumblr who's more qualified to speak on this kind of matter wants to explain, then please take the floor for me.

And last but not the least:

Things do not have to be "useful" to have value.

also dead does not mean no longer in use, it means no longer CHANGING. No new words are being added to that dictionary. That’s all it means. Latin is only dead bc new words aren’t being added to its dictionary

Ok I want to say something controversial

But you are responsible for your own safe spaces. You can block tags, block words, block people.

“But i thought fandom was supposed to be a safe space” —yeah you have to curate it.

Unfortunately one persons’s safe space may be another persons’ trigger. That’s ok. Simply block them, block the tag, block the word etc. They can do the same for you.

Maybe I’m just out of touch, but I’ve been around since the days of “don’t like, don’t read” and that’s a good philosophy. If it squicks you, scroll past. If it causes you anxiety or upset, block! Plenty of people are responsive if you ask them to tag an upsetting trigger. And if they’re dicks about it, block em.

Since different people have different needs, one person’s safe space will be another’s Trauma Central.

I don’t know who said it first, but “I need to be able to express my anger without shame” and “I need to be away from yelling and loud noises” are both valid needs people can have for a safe space that really aren’t compatible with each other.

So are “I need to process my trauma” and “I need to not meet any trauma.”

Or “I want a safe space to tell/read the stories that speak to me” and “those stories are distressing to me.”

Insisting that your needs are the only needs anyone should have is not a safe space, it’s its own act of violence.

You don’t get to make others homeless to make the universe your personal safe space.

Read this bit again:

I think people get mixed up a lot about what is fun and what is rewarding. These are two very different kinds of pleasure. You need to be able to tell them apart because if you don't have a balanced diet of both then it will fuck you up, and I mean that in a "known cause of persistent clinical depression" kind of way.

When people say they enjoy things, they usually mean one of two things. The first is that these things are fun; that is, they satisfy immediate emotional needs or desires for pleasure. Candy Crush is fun, for people who are into that sort of thing; waterslides are fun, watching TV is fun. Fun, in the way I'm defining it for this post, is the party food of pleasure; immediately and usually temporarily satisfying, and after that, mostly satisfying only as a happy memory (although some of these activities, like watching a TV show, can generate further opportunities for pleasure down the line like daydreaming, discussion, and making fanart). Like party food, this kind of fun is a good thing to have, and someone who doesn't get enough of it is at high risk of stress-related health concerns. Also burnout. A lack of fun is a major contributor to burnout.

The second kind of pleasure that most people talk about is rewarding activity. The lack of rewarding activity in one's life is a major contributor to depression. It creates a sense of purposelessness and worthlessness and generates a low attention span, sapping the ability to feel long-term motivation or pleasure. People usually try to pick themselves up with the first kind of fun, which is a band-aid but not a very sticky one; the lack of rewarding activity grows and festers over time. Rewarding pleasure involves working on something long-term that feels worthwhile. There are usually also spots of fun (or you wouldn't have gotten into the activity enough for it to become rewarding), but there also tends to be long slogs that aren't that fun. Nevertheless, when people report on doing said activity, they will speak about it with great enjoyment and remember it being enjoyable and claim they like it. (I like being a writer. Writing can sometimes be boring as shit.) (Look into Csíkszentmihályi's work on experience sampling and flow states for more info on this, it is FASCINATING.)

In Reality is Broken, Jane McGonigal sums up what she thinks are the most important contributing factors to rewarding activity. These are not the only factors, but I agree that they're a good baseline of the critical ones. I'm going to paraphrase them using different language. The four big contributors are:

Satisfying work. This is the vaguest one because different people find different things satisfying. Basically, the task itself should feel productive, and you should not feel bad about doing it to the point where it causes you distress. Satisfying work involves clear goals with actionable steps and a clear product, preferably something that you can see, touch or use. A clean house, a new high score, a freshly built table, a happy child.

Mastery. Rewarding pleasure is often something that you can get better at. There are things to learn, practice, improve. Improving your ability to solve tricky code problems, getting better at painting landscapes, figuring out fun new strategies in Magic: The Gathering, being able to build computers better or faster or cheaper. Mastery does not require becoming the best at something (although some people enjoy that specifically also), merely seeing progress in yourself and being able to take pride int he fact that you are better than you were.

Social connection. Rewarding pleasure often involves social or community connection. A long-term social group that discusses fan theories of their favourite show. Your weekly tabletop rpg. Teaching a room full of kids who to make leather belts. Working at a small bookshop and making small talk with all the tourists. Some people find social activity to be fun in the 'immediate pleasure' kind of way, some don't, but it is a critical factor in mental health and in the long-term... rewardingness (?)... of a hobby. Animals can also partially fill this niche, but be warned, they are far, far less effective than people. Your cat might be able to stop you from committing suicide today. You cat alone will not make your life satisfying.

Contribution. Humans are community animals and have a need to be something larger than ourselves or, more specifically to be of service to something larger than ourselves. Looking after kids, cooking big meals for others, creating art or physical products for others. Teaching the next generation how to read. Serving your God. Saving a species of small fish from extinction. Volunteering at your local charity shop or soup kitchen. Being a member of a crowd to reach the Guinness World Record for "most people fit into a storage crate". Making useful tutorial videos, being an entertainer, joining your local queer support group or political organisation. Humans fucking love to be part of something bigger than their own brain and they fucking love to help people.

The world is full of rewarding activities, and not all of them rate high in all four categories. The woman working in the charity shop warehouse and chatting with her coworkers isn't necessarily all that interested in mastery of her job (although I've worked in these places and some people do take pride in learning to be as efficient as possible), the musical hermit training to become the best violinist in the world might not be all that interested in social connection or how the audience actually feels about him. You might have noticed that I've listed hobbies, jobs, and non-employed but important life work (volunteering and childrearing) as possible rewarding activities; you can find rewarding activities everywhere. (In fact the lack of rewarding pleasure in our work lives is a very serious problem that companies keep trying to condescendingly band-aid over. The late David Graeber had a lot to say about this and I highly recommend his work, particularly Bullshit Jobs, which is a book specifically discussing the lack of above points 1 and 4 (satisfying work and sense of contribution) in so many modern workplaces and its distressing psychological ramifications). Rewarding activities are not 'fun' all the time; in fact, Csíkszentmihályi's work found that many of them are quite unfun most of the time. They do, however, create long term pleasure, and are emotionally and psychologically critical.

One final point: research shows that computer stuff counts less. This isn't a 'hurr durr edison was a witch get off your damn computers and get a real job' point; plenty of people do most of their rewarding activity on computers, because the supply cost is so low (most of us already own some kind of computer) and it's so much easier to find an existing community. But it does, psychologically speaking, count less; your brain isn't very good at seeing computers stuff as as 'real', on a primitive sensory level, as things you can touch with your hands or people that are right in front of you. Your massive community of fellow fans on the internet are less effective at filling your social needs than the crochet club at your local library, even if you like the people on the internet much more. It doesn't have to be everything, but ideally you should have at least one physical meatspace social club and at least one physical meatspace hobby, craft, or volunteer job. (They can be the same thing. You can volunteer at a soup kitchen for both.) They don't have to be the most important thing -- I care way more about my writing (electronic) than my crochet (meatspace) and I do the writing a lot more -- but the meatspace thing should exist, if you can manage it.

— Francesca Coppa, “Introduction to The Dwarf’s Tale,” The Fanfiction Reader (via francescacoppa)

Someone put it into words. I gotta sit down

(Why does this belong on my decidedly not-fan-fiction-related blog, you ask? Because this quote illustrates very well how assuming that anything where people put sex in it is debasing it, objectifying it, or simply ‘sexualizing’ it, etc. often misses a lot of the real picture of why people do that thing.)

You when you think of the ‘bird app’, suffering every day:

Me when I think of the ‘bird app’, thriving and skipping through the sunshine:

I CANNOT RECOMMEND THIS MERLIN APP ENOUGH

It is the ultimate birding/identification app in my experience I have not try Audubon and I am sure it is equally good because they are an incredible institution as well!!!

But merlin app let's you listen to bird calls and it will identify it and it helps Correll university migratory bird study!!