“you Need To Go Outside And Touch Grass” Yeah Well You Need To Say “good Girl” And Give Headpats

dont you just hate it when the maiden you've rescued turns out to be a wee bit monstrous

So my family has a Gay Pirate Plate.

Stay with me.

We do not know how the hell the Gay Pirate Plate was first acquired. This being a point of contention is actually pretty plot-relevant; the saga of the Gay Pirate Plate began with my grandmother and her sister, who, for some ungodly reason, both BADLY wanted the Gay Pirate Plate and believed it to be rightfully theirs.

I should back up, firstly, to establish: The Gay Pirate Plate is the cheapest, tackiest, ugliest plate in existence.

It is in no way a collector’s item. It is physically impossible for it to complement anyone’s decor, because the colors in it are garish. It’s just a ceramic plate with a gay pirate painted on it, and the painting is, this cannot be emphasized enough, extremely bad.

(How do we know the pirate is gay if he’s just posing on a plate? Listen. Fully 100% to stereotype, but he is. He is gay. There’s an energy. That pirate is a flaming homosexual. That pirate has sex with men and does it frequently. That pirate is fucking gay, all right, he just is.)

Anyway. The point is that this is an extremely cheap and ugly plate with a poorly-executed painting of pirate on it who is like a nine on the Kinsey scale.

My grandmother and her sister fought a blood feud over this plate for their entire lives. It would be on the wall in my grandma’s house, and then her sister would visit, and then it would be gone. She’d visit her sister and the plate would be on the wall and her sister would pretend it had always been there. She would steal it back, hang it up, and, when her sister visited, pretend it had always been there. This continued for DECADES.

When the sister died, the Gay Pirate Plate lived triumphantly in my grandmother’s house. And then my grandmother died. And my aunt, who had lived with her and been her carer throughout her life, rightfully inherited their house.

We visit my aunt after the funeral and stay with her for a week or two.

Me, my sister, and our dad. Her brother.

The three of us look at each other. We don’t say anything. We studiously avoid making eye contact with the Gay Pirate Plate mounted proud and ugly on the wall. We notice one another studiously avoiding looking at it. We notice one another noticing. We say nothing. We come to a silent consensus. We pack up to leave. We get in the van. Our aunt comes out to say goodbye. I loudly announce I need to use the restroom before we leave. She obviously stays outside to continue talking to my dad.

I take down the Gay Pirate Plate, stuff it under my oversized sweatshirt, go outside, and get in the van. She happily waves goodbye as we drive off.

Two days later my dad gets a phone call that opens with hysterical laughter and “You FUCKING ASSHOLE did you seriously STEAL THE PLATE–”

Anyway. The gay pirate plate lives in my dad’s house currently.

But he’s trying to get me and my sister out to visit him. And plate mounts are cheap.

What's stopping you?

Reading fantasy again, I've started thinking about how odd it is how in books like that, the non-human races invariably scoff at human frailty and vulnerability, even those that they'll call friends. Like that's mean?? Why would you be a dick to your friend who you know is not capable of as much as you are, and it's not their fault they were born like that. That's mean.

Like consider the opposite: Characters of non-human races treating their human companions like frail little old dogs. Worrying about small wounds being fatal - humans die of small injuries all the time - or being surprised that humans can actually eat salt, even if they can't stomach other spicy rocks. Being amazed that a human friend they haven't seen in 10 years still looks so young, they've hardly aged at all! And when the human tries to explain that they weren't going to just unexpectedly shrivel into a raisin in 10 years, the longer-lifespan friend dismisses this like no, he's seen it happen, you don't see a human for 10 or 20 years and they've shriveled in a blink.

Elves arguing with each other like "you can't take her out there, she will die!" and when the human gets there to ask what they're talking about, they explain to her that the journey will take them through a passage where it's going to be sunny out there. Humans burn in the sun. And she will have to clarify that no, actually, she'll be fine. They fight her about it, until she manages to convince them that it's not like vampires - humans only burn a little bit in the sun, not all the way through. She'll be fine if she just wears a hat.

Meanwhile dwarves are reluctant to allow humans in their mines and cities, not just out of being secretive, but because they know that you cannot bring humans underground, they will go insane if they go too long without seeing the sun. Nobody is entirely sure how long that is, but the general consensus is three days. One time a human tries to explain their dwarf companion that this is not true, there are humans that endure much longer darkness than that. As a matter of fact, in the furthest habited corners of the lands of the Northmen, the winter sun barely rises at all. Humans can survive three weeks of darkness, and not just once, but every single year.

"Then how do they sane?" Asks the dwarf, and just as he does, the conversation gets interrupted by the northland human, who had been eavesdropping, and turns to look at them with an unnerving glint in her colourless grey eyes, grinning while saying

"That's the neat part, we don't."

Everyone always talks abt the ways ADHD makes you forgetful or hyperactive, but one thing I dunno if I’ve seen anyone talk about is the self-gaslighting that can happen, how you get so used to having forgotten/missed something that if you hear a piece of information that contradicts what you’ve heard before, you have this instinct to accept the newer info as the right one because maybe you just forgot about something. You get so used to people seeing you as stupid that you’re tempted to not speak up or ask about or argue against something that’s incorrect out of fear of looking like an idiot.

i really dislike it when people don’t understand perfectionism.

like, it isn’t always “person who has tons of motivation and spends a ton of time making this thing *just* right”

wayyyyyy more often than not it’s:

”I know that if I try to make this thing, it won’t be perfect, so I simply won’t try.”

which definitely sounds bad, right? but when you realize that it doesn’t just apply to voluntarily making art, then you realize how perfectionism is not at all a good thing in any context. 

“i know that if I try to work on this assignment right now, it won’t be good enough, so i’ll wait until the last possible moment so that I have something forcing me to do it.”

”i know that I should start going to the gym, but I won’t see any improvement right away, so I just won’t.”

”i know that i should brush my teeth tonight, but that won’t be good enough to undo the fact that i haven’t brushed them 4 days in a row, so I just won’t.”

perfectionism isn’t the uncontrollable impulse to make things “just right”. (although it can occasionally manifest as this.)

perfectionism is the absolute, psychological inability to accept the concepts of “good enough” and “better than nothing”. even when you spell it out for yourself in a long text post like this.

Who is like God? Justice, seller of pepper.

I think Tumblr should simply gamify reporting spambots for its users and give a day of free crabs to whoever (correctly) reports the most

See ya the 18th tumblr. Hope you rethink you stance on the algorithm.

Just girly things