Little Owl's Nest

A Ghibli inspired Psyduck.

Plenty of highly intelligent people end up getting sucked in to cults because they just wanted people to hang out with. There are antivaxxer nurses. Your ability to act on empirical reason breaks down fast if your social and emotional needs aren't being met.

Like, I reject this idea that people end up becoming tradwives or antivaxxers or cult members because they were dumb. These groups prey on people by filling the social and emotional needs of vulnerable people. They look for people who need help, and give it to them on predatory conditions.

Fucking around with astrology does not introduce some sort of idealogical poison to your brain. That is ridiculous. Some people turn to astrology because they want a sense of agency in an increasingly atomized world. Some people get into astrology because the night sky is pretty. People /believe/ in astrology because they have some underlying desire to believe in astrology.

High control groups will trawl astrology communities looking for the despondent directionless mfers with few community ties. This trick works even better on college campuses, which are full of despondent directionless mfers with few community ties.

I am frustrated with this idea that participating in ostensibly silly things somehow lowers your psychic defense stat, as if it's a video game. That's now how indoctrination works. You are mistaking a correlation for a causation.

Sleeping flamingos.

Flower Field Psyduck, inspired by Keiko Fukuyama's illustrations.

hi I'm from your pseudo-medieval fantasy city. yeah. you forgot to put farms around us. we have very impressive walls and stuff but everyone here is starving. the hero showed up here as part of his quest and we killed and ate him

yeah umm actually everyone kinda lives, inside.. the walls yeah. no yeah theres not any surrounding farming communities or villages to levy taxes from so we're pretty much just in a stone pit all together. Theres a massive stone castle tho! where did the infrastructure for the stone quarring come from? I dont know... Evil wizard maybe?

If you actually want to know how medieval (and overall pre-industrial) cities interacted with its rural enviroment, check out these articles:

Long story short, cities weren't islands in the middle of nowhere. If you're a generic fantasy character approaching a city, you wouldn't find a lonely Shining City Upon A Hill (hmm, interesting imagery there, wonder what it means...), but actually a highly populated area of farms, orchards and all that feeds and maintains a city.

has this happened to you: your peasants are tending the wheatfields and gardens. Then one day they wake up to find everything harvested and missing???

Your kingdom may have been a victim of Evil Wizards stealing produce for their volcanic city of doom!

Call 1800-Get-AVeg and one of our heroing parties will be happy to assist in returning the pilfered produce by first Frost!!!

Toothpaste companies must really hate people who are allergic to mint toothpaste, which a lot of people are! Apparently it's NOT supposed to burn like minty hellfire? (I'm fine with mint candy, it's only mint toothpaste that hurts)

I've been using Tom's fennel for years, but am now trying to find one with fluoride in it, and finding a toothpaste that is no mint and yes fluoride should not be such a huge and infuriating quest. still got some more grocery stores to search, but not even the children's toothpaste in the nearest one had any that were suitable.

#LIKE FIIIIRE! HELLFIIIIIRE! THIS FIRE ON MY TONGUE! #I therefooooore requiiiire a new paste tooooo cleeaaan gums #It's not my fault! I'm not to blame! it is the Colgate brand and Crest who've set this flame! #it's not my fault‚ if in their plans‚ they made the toothpaste so much stronger than a maaaaaaannnnnn #protect me‚ oh grocers! don't let the mint-paste cast its spell‚ don't let its fire sear my mouth and gums! #PROVIDE ME WITH FLUORIDE‚ but not mixed with the fires of Hell‚ and I'll keep all my teeth for years to cooooommeeee

Emphathize with OP definitely but also look at the incredible tags lmao

Beata Maria, you know I'm a hygienic man of my flossing I am justly proud.

Beata Maria, my teeth are so much cleaner than the common, vulgar, weak, licentious crowd.

Then tell me, Maria, why it's never good enough why the pits of rot still mar my teeth.

I must switch to fluoride, but all the options I can find are full of minty pain beyond belief!

Wait back up,

Toothpaste isn't supposed to burn? I thought that's how you knew it worked

NO

But mint is supposed to be spicy though, right? Like how cinnamon is?

NO it's supposed to cause a cooling effect. Like how aloe vera feels on skin, unless that also feels hot to you.

It is, I am told, supposed to "tingle a little bit", which is NOT what it's doing for me. It feels like the minty version of eating a painfully spicy hot pepper, and sticks around for a long time afterwards just like hot peppers do, and it wouldn't make sense to do that on purpose in a thing you're supposed to use before trying to go to sleep.

Thank you to all the suggestions in the comments! Sadly I have seen none of them in grocery stores so far, but it's good to know there are options if I end up having to order toothpaste online.

I'm astounded that it's so hard to find non-mint options, because there are SO MANY comments already on this post from people who can't stand mint, and don't these companies do market research?? hello? huge untapped market for non-mint adult toothpaste here?? There must be thousands upon thousands of adults who use children's toothpaste because of it. If I saw an advertisement that started off with someone complaining about mint toothpaste, it would catch my attention.

Hey friends, just so you know you can absolutely use children's toothpaste with fluoride as an adult and there are many flavors like bubblegum and strawberry and grape (here's Tom's of Maine with a fluoride-containing mango and orange toothpaste). Using children's toothpaste with fluoride is much, much better than using a fluoride-free toothpaste. If you're looking for toothpaste with an adult amount of fluoride and the mint ones bother you, try looking for cinnamon toothpaste - a lot of the grownup non-mint flavors don't have fluoride but cinnamon ones often do.

The fun part is finding a mint-free toothpaste when you're sensitive to sodium lauryl sulfate. That's the part of the toothpaste that makes it foam up as you brush. I'm sensitive to it and and I used to constantly get painful sores inside my mouth until I switched to a toothpaste without it. But I've yet to find a toothpaste that a) truly is free of any mintyness, b) doesn't have sodium lauryl sulfate and c) does have fluoride. At best you can only ever get two out of three, and it's MADDENING.

I'm using one of the more mildly flavored Sensodyne toothpastes now, but as far as I know they don't have one that's purely mint-free. If you're like me, hating mint while having constant mouth sores, that'll probably be an improvement over whatever other toothpaste you're using. But there's a difference between "I hate the taste of mint" and "I'm allergic to mint", ya know?

Look at the "Hello" brand kid's with fluoride - grape and bubblegum flavors are available WITH fluoride but WITHOUT SLS; I don't know why the grape is currently 2.5x the cost of the bubblegum, but here's a link to the bubblegum. Here's a variety pack with raspberry, strawberry, and bubblegum, all with fluoride and without SLS.

Oranurse does sodium lauryl sulfate free unflavored in various fluoride strengths.

Happy boop day🥰

tumblr all day today

Joe Kavik, Inuit artist, Bird, ND

Stone

@nonasuch relevant to your interest in Round Animals?

sure is!

How to wear wrist guards

[eng by me]

‘Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village’ by George Sherwood Hunter

This problem is nothing new, but this specific example with these numbers puts it into a fucking brutal perspective.

To put these numbers a different way: A Taco Bell burrito that used to cost ~7 minutes and 20 seconds of minimum wage work now costs ~30 minutes and 30 seconds of minimum wage work.

You used to be able to work at Taco Bell anywhere in the country and make enough money in one hour to buy at least 8 burritos (maybe 9 if you're a manager or something) and feed, like, 3-4 people a decently-filling meal. But now, the same amount of work at the same job will get you one meal for one person. And this change has happened over a mere 15 years.

Remember this whenever you see rich people demonize younger generations for our financial situations, when they call us irresponsible for not investing a ton of money in savings accounts.

“Before the writers started working on the first season, I wrote a list of six things on the wall that every episode had to do.” - Mike Schur (x)

went to see if my late package maybe showed up without being scanned

but the post man yesterday said it would be here at ooooooooooone

is 9…………. post office closing time…….  no pkg……………………………………………………… >:C

well at least i can skip my post office visit tomorrow

i mean what did i expect really

a package?

too unrealistic

amazon sent me a replacement for my lost package and it “arrived” today

omg she recognized me immediately and got nervous with me while checking the system using my name

she was just as distraught as me when it turned up “arriving tomorrow” again but then she had another idea

mail is dumb

The mail lady saying “NO. I REFUSE to say it again” was more climactic than the Braveheart speech.

oh my gosh, op’s bio says “The package was a laptop” which gives SUCH a new perspective

I'm kind of at a point where the "queer spaces" i feel safest in are the ones that have a pet cishet dude or two hanging around

When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.

Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.

1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.

2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.

3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip

I'm kind of at a point where the "queer spaces" i feel safest in are the ones that have a pet cishet dude or two hanging around

When a space cares a lot about making sure its members are queer enough to participate, you get a space that aggressively polices the queerness of its members. There's no way around that, it's pretty much tautologically true. Only by paradoxically not actually caring if you're queer or not can a group really accept the full range of what queerness can look like.

Also, a space that has room for a cis straight guy who means well and wants the best for his friends has two crucial things going for it.

1) it has space for people who are learning and might fuck up a bit while they figure things out, and that learning process is probably not so godawful and unpleasant that a guy with other prospects would have to be a fool not to go find some nicer friends. This is nice because it is very difficult to personally embody the entire alphabet at once, and learning how to be good allies to one another is a crucial part of queer solidarity. It's nice for that process not to be painful.

2) it has space for people who aren't yet willing to or comfortable with presenting an externally queer label to continue to exist and soak up the queer vibes and information, which means it's welcoming to actual questioning people rather than the theory of questioning people. Probably it therefore has more interest in actually doing things rather than hierarchy politics.

3) it's probably not a radfem tar pit interested in weaponising you against people they've decided to hate in a social smear war that benefits nobody and nothing but their need for a power trip

I'm not currenty in a queer group in person but I've always held that it has the same rule as I have made for myself as someone who grew up in a high-control church.

If the group tells you that only those who are like you are safe, RUN.

If you can't comfortably bring the friends or family you trust with you without having to explain the rules before they come or their concerns after they leave, RUN

And in the previous two situations if you can only bring someone in under the assumption they are secretly like you or you can make you like you, RUN

A majority queer space is still a human space if you wouldn't accept behavior without explanation from your conservative family you shouldn't accept it from your found family.