heavyweightheart:

and i’ve mentioned this before but the common conception that ppl who constantly suffer become desensitized to suffering is perfectly wrong. ppl who experience repeated psychological and physiological stressors, esp in childhood, actually become more responsive to stress, w stress response systems in the brain & body getting increasingly sensitive to stimuli and having more prolonged/exaggerated reactions  

what doesn’t kill you does not make you stronger, it makes you sicker and less able to cope biologically and emotionally w additional hardship

larkandkatydid:

In my great-grandfather’s spy memoir we found this summer,
he talks at length about how he was able, at the age of 30, to infiltrate the
communist party by pretending to be an at-risk homeless teenager (yes,
literally a “hello fellow commie teens!” move). He also explains, in great detail,
how he was able to do this because he had an unusually youthful, round and
baby-ish face….a face which has been passed down through the generations to me.   (There’s also a long, long paragraph where he’s trying to explain to his intended audience and also to himself the overall concept of empathy as if it’s this strange foreign belief system.)

But that means that now, in our family, we justify all our
skincare and make-up purchases by claiming they support our spy work, “How will
I ever infiltrate the communist party without this $15 bottle of snail serum?”,
or, approvingly after applying make-up, “I look ready to infiltrate the communist
party!”

Or, specifically, in the context of a text I just got from
my mother that said only, “I have to stop at ulta on the way home or I’ll lose
my chance to infiltrate the communists”

sepulchritude:

on the topic of humans being the intergalactic “hold my beer” species: imagine an alien stepping onto a human starship and seeing a space roomba™ with a knife duct taped onto it, just wandering around the ship

it doesn’t have any special intelligence. it’s just a normal space roomba. there are other space roombas on the ship and they don’t have knives. it’s just this one. knife space roomba has full clearance to every room in the ship. occasionally crew members will be talking and then suddenly swear and clutch their ankle. knife space roomba putters off, leaving them to their mild stab wounds.

“what is the point?” asks the alien as another crew member casually steps over the knife-wielding robot. “is it to test your speed and agility?”

“no it doesn’t really go that fast,” replies the captain.

“does it teach you to stay ever-vigilant?”

“I mean I guess so but that’s more of a side effect.”

“does it weed out the weak? does it protect you from invaders? do repeated stabbings let your species heal more quickly in the future?”

“it doesn’t stab very hard, it gets us more than it gets our enemies, and no, but that sounds cool — someone write that down.”

“but then what is its purpose?”

“I don’t know,” the captain says, leaning down to give the space roomba an affectionate pat. “it just seemed cool”

excalibelle:

kyraneko:

jenroses:

brinconvenient:

dani-kin:

quarterinthequeerjar:

fairytale-villain:

A good thread on whether “queer” is a slur and if it should be used or not.

“If I am unashamed of being queer, you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur.”

you do not get to give that word BACK to the fuckwits who made it a slur

EVERYBODY WHO CAME OUT BEFORE YOU HAS TAKEN THE ROCKS AND BOTTLES AND MADE THEM INTO SHIELDS AND WINDCHIMES

Holy motherfucking shit. Don’t fucking come at me about Queer is a slur. I FUCKING KNOW IT IS. It was hurled at me like a fucking spear all through my youth. I know it’s a god damn slur. And it’s mine. You don’t get to take it away from me because you can’t take also away the scars it gave me while I was standing in front of my younger queer siblings in this community. 

always, always reblog this one.

If my enemy swings a sword at me and I take that sword away from them, it’s my sword now. And the person telling me I can’t use it because it belongs to my enemy and I have to give it back to them sounds quite a bit like an enemy themselves.

^^ god that analogy

gallusrostromegalus:

cosmicastrogazer:

weirdrussians:

In the deep Tyumen forests, mushroom pickers stumbled upon this mysterious circle of bones.

@seananmcguire @gallusrostromegalus

Leaving bones in artisit but vaugely ominous-looking occult circles out in the woods to worry and confuse hikers is one of the grand joys of rural life.  Cow bones always make a dramatic impression due to thier large size.