[Tweet From @/fozmeadows: “human Gender And Sexuality Are Very Much Like Animal Taxonomy, In That Both

[Image description: a facebook post reads Bobby Easley is at High Caliber Tattoo... followed by I'm very proud to have been able to cover up a tattoo for a client and new friend who has changed his way of thinking about people. I'm happy I was able to make him feel better about himself and the skin he lives in. The post includes four images showing a large swastika tattoo on the back of someone's calf. The person's skin is white and the tattoo includes an American flag motif. In the subsequent images the swastika is drawn over in purple ink and finally tattooed over with a gorgeous dark red carnation. /End image description.]

Reminder: you can always just stop hating and being an asshole. You'll probably even feel better about yourself.

fires, episode 5 (2021)

Window Reflections - Kristie Bretzke , 2024.

American , b. 1950s*

oil on linen panel , 20 x 16 in.

*1978 Education graduation

Pushing the definition somewhat but still a griffon imo

-3012

May 2025, overgrown house

BOUNCY PORK OMG

obsessed with this baby hippo from thailand's khao khew zoo.. she has been so utterly betrayed by the world

Things like this make me feel weirdly hopeful bc this is a fixable problem. A hard-to-fix problem but still a fixable one.

this chart is what haunts me. there is a massive amount of misinformation driving people to think that the problems Trump talks about solving even exist. without a functioning press, how do you campaign effectively against someone whose voters aren't even living in reality in three months

I just really really love this post, y'all. Like, so much. <3

Wait, so you said that you can learn to trust others by building friendships, but how does one go about doing that? Wouldn't someone I don't know be creeped out or annoyed if I suddenly walked up and started talking to them?

Friendships are built of repeated low-stakes interactions and returned bids for attention with slowly increasing intimacy over time.

It takes a long time to make friends as an adult. People will probably think you're weird if you just walk up and start talking to them as though you are already their friend (people think it's weird when I do this, I try not to do this) but people won't think it's weird if you're someone they've seen a few times who says "hey" and then gradually has more conversations (consisting of more words) with them.

I cheat at forming adult friendships by joining groups where people meet regularly. If you're part of a radio club that meets once a week and you just join up to talk about radios, eventually those will be your radio friends.

If there's a hiking meetup near you and you go regularly, you will eventually have hiking friends.

Deeper friendships are formed with people from those kinds of groups when you do things with them outside of the context of the original interaction; if you go camping with your radio friend, that person is probably more friend than acquaintance. If you go to the movies with a hiking friend who likes the same horror movies as you do, that is deepening the friendship.

In, like 2011 Large Bastard decided he wanted more friends to do stuff with so he started a local radio meetup. These people started as strangers who shared an interest. Now they are people who give each other rides after surgery and help each other move and have started businesses together and have gone on many radio-based camping trips and have worked on each other's cars.

Finding a meetup or starting a meetup is genuinely the cheat-code for making friends.

This is also how making friendships at schools works - you're around a group of people very regularly and eventually you get to know them better and you start figuring out who you get along with and you start spending more time with those people.

If you want to do this in the most fast and dramatic way possible, join a band.

In 2020 I wrote something of a primer on how to turn low-stakes interactions with neighbors and acquaintances into more meaningful relationships; check the notes of this post over the next couple days, I'll dig up the link and share it in a reblog.

James Jean - Braid Ill. Acrylic on Wood.