Before and after images of Animals Growing Up

@wholesome-animal-images

you ever get tired of living but in a non-suicidal way

like everything is bad everywhere and no one has money and im tired of this cycle

i tried to explain how i was feeling like this to my drug counselor and she was like "yeah that still sounds kinda suicidal" and i could not figure out how to explain that i don't wanna die, i just like. am so so so tired of the way life is for me and all my friends and family. i'm tired of living like this but i'm gonna keep doing it bc i guess there's no other choice

I don't wanna die, I wanna go lay on a warm field under the sun and watch the clouds go by. How is this hard to understand?

I just want to spend a few days in the dim twilight between sleep and waking, but specifically the dim twilight of a Saturday morning in April.

There used to be something derisive from UK psychology/psychiatry, called “shit life syndrome” where the person isn’t actually depressed they’re just unhappy because their life objectively is terrible. Like their mental health issues would go away pretty quickly if they had friends and more money, and some support and people that weren’t being cruel to them all the time. As I unpack my own mental health, I think about that frequently, and I’m more sure that I didn’t have depression. I just was unhappy and my brain was too, that so many of my basic needs were not being met. 

Perfect wording.

(x)

i don’t want to die, i want a different life

Even if you were a difficult child, you didn't deserve to be hurt.

I hope this message reaches all the neurodiverse and disabled people who were made to feel like their abuse was justified because they had "behaviors".

While this message is true for every child, you are who I had in mind when I wrote it.

I love how "Sinners" didn't villify the sinners in the movie. Sammie's father told him that playing music for "drunkards and philanderers who abandon their family responbilities to sweat all over each other" was a sin. And he was right about the kind of people going to the juke joint: Delta Slim is an alcoholic, and Pearline a cheater. It would have been easy to villify them, but the movie tells us that despite their flaws, they are humans worthy of love, respect and freedom.

Delta Slim drinks because he's traumatized by the horrors Black people of his time face. And he's kind and compassionate, encouraging and reassuring Sammie, and sacrificing himself to save everyone else.

Pearline literally saved Sammie's life and sacrificed herself to protect him, a boy she had only known for a day. It shows her kindness because she could have easily stayed back when Remmick tried to bite Sammy and not endangered her life more than necessary.

The movie shows us that preachers blindly condemning those sinners are wrong: Sammie is only alive because drunkards, philanderers and gangsters (Smoke) gave their lives to protect him. They are people, with flaws and qualities.

I love how nuanced the movie is: Sammie's father is not wrong about the kind of people Sammie wants to associate with and their potential bad influence, but he's wrong about them being evil and not deserving of respect.

You ever see something innocuous, minding its own business on the clearance shelf at Michael’s and before you know it, it takes over your life for a few weeks?

So it was with this desktop greenhouse.

I took it home and after taking an appropriate time to “season” my idea in my mind (read: a month or two) I set to make my vision of a mini botanical garden a reality.

I started by removing the heavy glass panels and building a raised floor above the latch. I wanted to use the base as a foundation on the building.

I wrapped the foundation in plastic stone textured flooring (meant for Christmas villages) and built a pond at one end of the same. I then gave it a more realistic paint job and designed a rough layout for my plants and displays.

I also knew I wanted to make the ironwork significantly more intricate, but I wasn’t sure how just yet…

Up next - PLANTS! I went wild making all kinds of plants. Some were specific species and some were more conceptual.

I made several trees with polymer clay and moss, cacti out of beads and flocking, cattails out of raffia, hot glue and coffee grounds, and giant monstera leaves out of paper and wire.

This part should have taken me a long time, but it really came together fast. I loved finding ways to replicate natural shapes and patterns using bits of this and that.

I did make adjustments to my plans as I went like eliminating benches in favor of a simpler overall design.

Then I needed to fill my pond with water. For this I used resin. Lily pads were added to the top layer, and I wired in simple LED fairy lights. The batteries are kept in the box under the foundation.

In a weekend frenzy I added more plants, metal (paper) steps, new (plexi)glass windows, a roof, wrought-iron vines (paper again), doors that open, and a hose reel disguising the latch. Suddenly, a project I thought would take months was finished…

I love my desktop botanical garden. Right now it sits on a simple lazy Susan in my office. But I’d love to get it a proper display box to protect from dust.

Thank you for coming on this little journey with me. This piece packs a lot of joy into a tiny space. I always love building miniatures, and I’ll be doing more in the future I’m sure.

do not go gentle into that good night

be a bit of a bitch about it

can't in good conscience leave this out

@believerindaydreams

fuck that year, I need everyone to hit the showers

hitting the showers for like, decontamination purposes. you've done nothing wrong, you actually did something amazing making it through this year. which is why we should hit the showers as soon as possible. been a disgusting year

Spoiler-free, but one thing I really like about Knives Out 3 is that it shows a wheelchair user who 1) needs her chair in order to function, 2) CAN still walk and does so when the pain of it is less inconvenient than moving her chair around, and 3) has to deal with people being shocked that she can walk. A lot of wheelchair users are still capable of some movement and get treated like they're faking when they stand to reach something, so it was cool to see that just casually represented

Also the movie explicitly rejects the narrative that her disability has to be cured or else her life is over! And, in my opinion, Josh O’Connor puts massive scare quotes around the words “cured” and “fixed” in that final voiceover. She learns to live with and through her pain, she picks up her cello again, she gets proper medical care (cf. tape on her elbow), and she makes music. It’s different and harder than it was before, they don’t gloss over that, but she hasn’t been turned into a sad stereotype.

Disability narratives usually end with one of three fates: cure (including superpowers or superprosthetics that compensate for the disability), death, or institutionalization. This one ends with a musician who does physical therapy and keeps making music. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s vanishingly rare compared with the thousands of variations on the other three endings. Incredible.

tonight I’m hurting my feelings thinking about how one of the first things Ilya says to shane after telling him about his mother’s suicide is I don’t want you to think she was weak. it kills me. shane’s obviously not sitting there judging ilya’s mother as weak! it’s so clear that ilya’s talking to someone else in that moment, speaking aloud the words he could never say to his father. ilya as a child in his father’s house, listening to his father lay into to his mother the way he does to ilya in sochi. too young and powerless to speak up for her or step in between them. you’re weak you’re contemptible you’re defective. how are you not ashamed? aghh it hurts my heart. the abandoned child still defending her memory. still guarding her from anyone who might judge her too harshly or try to pick her apart. she wasn’t weak. she was so funny and beautiful. I don’t want you to think she was weak.

hey quick question @belly-aches why’d you have to hurt my feelings so bad

“No, your grandma didn’t speak in tongues, but she did sob. You called her a dipshit.”

"Really?"

requested by @dumbluckpup

I was scrolling through tiktok and heard "Ea-Nasir" and I knew I had to share lol

the thing is avatar the last airbender is genuinely a lifechangingly good show in the sense that when i watched it as a child it completely blew my mind and fundamentally changed my understanding of what a cartoon could even be and sparked a lifelong passion for animation. and even as an adult i think looked at purely as a piece of storytelling it holds up really really well and i have never not enjoyed myself whenever i've rewatched it. but you can't just be like 'i love avatar the last airbender' without caveats these days lest people think you're the kind of grown adult who consider it the be-and-end-all of not only the entire medium of animation but also political storytelling in general. and well that just objectively is not true by any stretch of the imagination. very unfortunate.

been thinking a bit more about atla over the past week or so. i think its because my sister got me a little blind bag charm for christmas so now there's a little zuko hanging off my purse and i see him whenever I'm going to leave the house.

the elephant in the room with ATLA is the orientalism, which i have absolutely no qualms wholeheartedly condemning and saying is a huge point against the show. a bunch of white dudes making bank and launching their careers by laundering their impression of an amalgam of various asian + inuit culture for american audiences is worth taking a critical look at.

that doesn't change the fact that atla is the first show i watched where i consciously understood that none of the characters are supposed to be white. particularly for children's media, i think there's a lot of merit in asking your primary target demographic to care for and be connected with characters who don't look like them, and whose lives and cultures may not even a little bit resemble their own. I think there's value to be had from that even though I ultimately think "representation" among the kind of people who are allowed to become esteemed and established creators is much more important than "representation" among the characters they create.

but. but! it absolutely should not have been the case that atla was the first show i watched where i knew none of the characters were supposed to be white. and i don't mean that like at age 7 i was not woke enough and should have been #expanding my horizons i mean that when i was a little kid i was a fan of sailor moon, a japanese show made by and about japanese characters, and its weird that i was prevented from knowing this for any amount of time. whereas american creators are allowed to create explicitly asian characters, the east asian import media shown to american children has to be appropriately westernized first. so i grew up watching the valley girl sailor moon dub and only coming to understand these characters as japanese years after the fact.

It's a bit apples to oranges because nickelodeon is not responsible for producing or airing anime dubs to the best of my knowledge. i'm not trying to somehow say that the same people who let atla air with so many non-english character and place names are the same people who decided that tomoyo needed to be renamed 'madison' in the cardcaptor dub. but its worth nothing that even though ATLA proved that children were more than able and willing to connect with unfamiliar place names and character names, anime brought to the west continued whitewashing character names for years afterwards. smile! precure, one of the few precure series to get an english dub, released as 'glitter force' for english audiences in 2015, ten years after atla began airing, with the main characters names changed to things like "emily" and "chloe".

i'm not sure what the current landscape of dubbed children's anime is like because i don't want as many childrens cartoons as i used to and watch extremely little dubbed anime in general. so maybe this trend has more or less died off. but something else that's very relevant hasn't died off died off: american animation studios outsourcing huge amounts of the labor involved with producing their shows to underpaid korean animators.

JM Animation was the primary studio that nickelodeon partnered with to produce ATLA, and working in tandem with JM to make up for a lack of available manpower were DR Movie and MOI Animation. Studio Mir was founded and staffed by JM atla alums, and that studio would go on to be responsible for the overseas work on Legend of Korra and the upcoming Legend of Aang feature film (among a ton of other stuff).

to me that's the biggest issue with avatar's orientalism. white creators and american companies getting fame and fortune and an absolute cash cow of an IP for using the labor of east asian workers to tell a story about primarily east asian characters. i don't really have any big conclusion here or call to action i've just been tossing this one around in my head for a few days. and i feel like the original post the way it was left room for an interpretation where the critical re-examination of and extremely relatively minor backlash against ATLA are somehow unfair or overblown which is absolutely not my opinion on the subject no matter how much i love it.

I can't quite explain it, but Clue (1985), The Princess Bride (1987), Galaxy Quest (1999), and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) are all the same genre

They aren't a spoof (roast) or a love letter (tribute), but a best man's speech; an expression of love with a gentle ribbing on ocassion.

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Viggo Mortensen and Uraeus on the set of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers