puppy play but theres fireworks going off and i’m trembling under a pile of blankets under a desk and you need to feed me little pieces of cheese to calm me down but i’m so scared i might throw up the cheese
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like “I’m not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it.” Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
remember to cry for help without guilt-tripping. i know it feels like you’ve been abandoned and betrayed, but it’s probably not true, and it’s not okay to accuse the people around you of something they might not have done.
“i guess none of you like me” could be better phrased as “i feel unloved right now”
“but nobody cares anyway” could be better phrased as “i feel insignificant and i need reassurance”
rather than assuming others’ feelings, give them time to explain them. you’ll usually get a much better answer.
This is really important for future predictions, too. “You’re eventually going to leave me” is impossible for someone else to disprove without just sticking around forever, but no one wants to stick around when they’re being constantly accused of future abandonment. Giving someone no choice but to either stay with you forever in order to prove you wrong or leave you and prove you right is incredibly emotionally manipulative, whether you mean it to be or not.
“I get scared sometimes because I’m afraid of being alone again” is easier to address and doesn’t leave your partner(s)/friend(s) feeling as though they’re being preemptively accused of something.
hyperfixating on a fictional woman who went underdeveloped in canon is literally FUN and the 80-90% of fandom people who only do the same for background character men have no idea of the degree to which they are fucking missing out
no tumblr i have faith that this post will be found by the enlightened 10-20 percent
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hour 1 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: idk it would’ve been nice if she had more screentime
hour 100 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: ok but despite having only eight lines of dialogue she is literally THE most interesting nuanced and tragic character in the entire series and these writers had no idea what they even had. how is no one else seeing this it’s literally so objectively obvious
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we’re acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it’s actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
Just figured out something about Diesel that makes me feel like such a dumbarse
do share please
So for those who don’t know, Diesel is a typical housecat. He has typical cat behaviours and enjoys typical cat things. He’s my neighbour’s cat, not mine, but I feed him even though I probably shouldn’t, mostly because somebody has to.
Like most cats, Diesel enjoys tasty food. He gets wet food each afternoon and can get pretty pushy in the hour or so pre-food, which is normal for cats. Sometimes, he also gets pushy at random times of the day, including a couple of hours after already having wet food, which is also not unusual for cats, so I just chalk it up to his annoying cat behaviour. It’ll be a few hours after his dinner and he’ll stand in front of my computer screen staring at me and I’ll go to make a coffee and he’ll run to the fridge and meow at me, and grab my leg when I try to leave the kitchen; it’s all very annoying but hey, some cats are annoying, whatever. It’s particularly annoying because he mostly seems do to it when I’m super hungry and then it feels awkward to fix myself something while he’s looking at me like this, then pushing him away from my food, and somehow after I eat he’s never
He does it when I’m hungry.
If you can see where this is going then you’re a lot smarter than me, because it wasn’t until this week that I started paying attention. When Diesel started badgering me and luring me into the kitchen, I started going. I started making myself some food. I sit down to eat it, he jumps up to smell it like normal; I push him away like normal and he goes to eat some of his dry food (the same dry food that’s been there all day but he’s been ignoring and bugging me instead) while I eat my soup. Afterwards he stops bugging me and either goes off somewhere to do his own thing or comes over for a snuggle.
Diesel’s not leading me to the kitchen to ask for wet food. He’s leading me there to tell me to eat. I’m being fuckign. Handled. By a half-stray housecat.
He’s currently purring at me and asking for post-dinner snuggles but it just feels condescending now.
Me: Diesel do not eat my soup.
Diesel: I am confirming that you have food and not yet another craft project to get lost in. Good. Now I will go to my bowl and we can eat together.
More than “here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)” thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that “much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons”
so i live in boorloo (perth) which is on noongar country and 1. i fucking love the noongar seasons it’s so much more accurate to here 2. should be noted that other season stereotypes are completely different! there’s ONE native deciduous tree here (common coral tree) and it blooms in the middle of july, which to a greater point! different native plants are always blooming all year round! the traditional “spring” period doesn’t really that many more (native) flowers than any other time of the year!
anyways i fucking hate how northern hemisphere coded the western holidays are girl why are you putting up snowflakes and reindeer it’s 40°c outside i am going to melt into a puddle
The tags im seeing on these reblogs are implying this thing is evil is some way
Tried looking this thing up to see what it was about, and the only things I could find is this things apparently famous for getting burned down and destroyed a lot
If this thing does represent something evil, do let me know how and why
It doesn’t, it’s a massive version of a traditional Christmas decoration.
It’s a massive highly flammable statue of a traditionally sacrificial animal erected in an public place. It represents optimism.
It fell over, which represents the harsh reality of uncaring nature.
It is a scaled up version of these very cute yuletide ornaments!
They are hand made from straw, and are quite durable. The one in the picture is only about 20 years old, but you can probably find one that is over 50 years old without having to knock on too many doors. There are also various different designs: the only limit is the lenght of the straws.
Goats are linked to yuletide celebrations both as an animal you might have eaten at christmas, and as an old version of santa claus. In Swedish, you can still call santa “julbocken” (the yule goat), and in Finnish, the loanword “joulupukki” is the only word used.
Prior to this, there are believed to have been traditions around the yule goats that may have linked to Thor’s goat driven chariot, but there are not really any great sources to fall back on here, so this is more educated guesses rather than clear facts.
The big goat in Gävle holds no special significance other than being Very Big and temptingly flammable.
I have a whole flock of them!
These were my grandfathers and date to at least the 80s, maybe older. We’ve had them around my whole life. It honestly never occurred to me that people didn’t know they’re just a normal and common Scandinavian holiday decoration. 😅
anyone else now thinking new tradition: eating santa
To quote miridiums upthread: “The big goat in Gävle holds no special significance other than being Very Big and temptingly flammable.”
It definitely doesn’t hold a historical folkloric significance tied to anything negative or to sacrifices or what have you.
But it’s worth mentioning that in modern times, a new sort of folk narrative has grown up around it – kind of an intersection between folklore and internet memes, if you will. Its Wikipedia page has a good run-down on its history, starting in 1966 (its first year, when it was burned), and a chart of each year and what happened that year. Here is a video about it from 2016 (with a couple of brief updates).
The “folk narrative” part comes in with a spreading online narrative regarding the idea that a lucky year will follow if the goat IS burned/destroyed; or, that its burning/destruction is an omen in some way for the coming year. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the idea that the goat itself is “evil” and needs to be destroyed to defeat evil or something. As far as I can tell, the goat is universally acknowledged to be Good, and the idea proceeds from the concept of a sacrifice made to bring good fortune.
I think it would be fascinating to trace this story (or collection of stories), and I’ll have to look to see whether anyone has done any work on that. When/where did it start, how has it spread, how far has it actually spread, etc. It’s definitely what you’d call an “artificial tradition”, and what some would call “fakelore”. At this point I’d probably argue that while its origin is fakelore, it has become its own sort of folklore, but, it’s definitely messy.
What seems to be certain is that building the goat itself was not begun with any particular intentions beyond “this would be really cool” and good for the town of Gävle in a “hey look we have a giant version of the julbocken!” way, and that, having been first suggested by an advertising consultant, it looks like a way of trying to encourage people to visit the town to see it. What’s also certain is that, as miridiums said above, it’s very flammable and thus apparently very tempting to people who like to set huge things on fire, since it was first burned down in its first year. Since the town goes to a lot of effort to protect it, they are clearly not of the same mind regarding “burning it is part of the tradition”. (As many have noted, the goat is expensive to build, and people are proud of having built it, and don’t want to see their handiwork destroyed.)
You could probably do something about trying to connect the desire to burn it with traditions of winter solstice bonfires (burning beseeching fires to keep the year/light alive, to paraphrase Susan Cooper’s poem). While I really do not think that is what’s in the mind of most of the people, historically, who have committed the arson, it seems like this may be what’s partly in the mind of the people passing along the story.
this is NOT about color edits for the flag. I mean the original version as posted above and not any potential fixes or alterations for the existing palette
feel free to discuss why you do / don’t like the flag in the tags
this poll is about purely how it looks and not about the meaning behind the stripes (I already know what they are)
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