[Image Descriptions: A Series Of 2018 Tweets From User "G. Willow Wilson" (@GWillowWilson) Reading:

Helmut Moik: Dalmatian Pelican in the Danube Delta, Romania, 2003

Whoa, is this an autism thing? Because yeah I do this constantly

(I'm not sure if I'm autistic, it's something I'm exploring)

Here’s a weird autism thing that I realized this morning—

-If a choir director tells my section to sing louder, I will do so, even if I am already at fortissimo.

-If a teacher criticizes my class for failing to take their work seriously, I will feel guilty, even if I’ve been turning every single assignment in on time.

-If a post calls people in general out for not doing a particular thing and says it’s their fault if a tragedy happens, I will feel stressed, even if I was already relentlessly doing the thing.

I need to be told separately about my personal progress, otherwise I will overcompensate and eventually end up burning myself out. As someone who puts conscious effort in trying to understand social cues, this really messes me up for some reason.

Shyama Golden (Sri Lankan-American, 1983) - The Passage (2022)

Hyewon Kim (Korean, 1993) - Hongik University Station Escalator Exit 1 (2023)

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.

[Tweet from @/fozmeadows: “human gender and sexuality are very much like animal taxonomy, in that both look structured and simple on the surface, but once you start investigating, it turns out there’s actually no such thing as a fish despite the fact that we all know what a fish is, and that’s okay”]

The baobab is known as the thickest tree in the world, with its trunk reaching up to 9 meters in diameter, and the largest one recorded had a circumference of 54 meters. Its upper trunk smooths out into thick branches, forming a crown up to 40 meters in diameter.

– There are nine species of baobab in nature: six of which are found on Madagascar, two on the African continent, and one in Australia.

– The baobab can absorb and store a significant amount of water, with an average tree holding up to 4,500 liters. Elephants love this and eat the baobab’s bark during the dry season.

– Baobabs are incredibly long-lived, with some trees reaching up to 3,000 years old.

– Because the baobab’s trunk has very few growth rings, radiocarbon dating is needed to determine its exact age.

– The wood of the baobab is soft, spongy, and fibrous, used in the making of cloth and rope but unsuitable for traditional woodworking such as furniture making.

– The baobab plays a crucial role in local diets: its leaves taste like spinach, its fruit contains six times the vitamin C of an orange, and its seeds can be processed into oil

https://lifeontheplanetladakh.com/blog/baobab-tree-majestic-lifesaver-africa

[Image description: gifs from The Old Guard. Charlize Theron's character is wounded and a drugstore employee is bandaging her up. Theron's character says, "You haven't asked." The other character replies, "Your business is yours. You need help, what does it matter why? Today, I put this on your wound. Tomorrow, you help someone up when they fall. We're not meant to be alone." End image description.]

THE OLD GUARD (2020) dir. Gina Prince-Bythewood