Want to have one really nice set of plates and silverware for company and Thanksgiving.
Want to be able to buy a new outfit and a good bra at least a couple times a year.
Want to be able to give “just because” gifts.
Want to burn incense and candles in my home daily, and have nice soaps.
Want to be able to donate to charity frequently and without worry.
Want to buy hardcover books to read and put on a shelf for my kids to read someday.
Want to have candies in bowls for people who visit.
Want to be able to take my young siblings and cousins to a movie and let them get the big popcorn they won’t finish, because there’s magic in just having it.
Want to have a linen closet or at least a linen shelf.
Want to go see live local theater several times a year.
Want to have a bottle of wine or champagne in the house for when I suddenly need to celebrate.
Want to have a kitchen with basic baking supplies so I can bake bread on the weekend, and pies for special occasions.
Wolves React To Gamekeeper Who Had Been Away On Maternity Leave
“WHERE’S YOUR PUPPY! WE WANNA SEE YOUR PUPPY! DID YOU JUST HAVE THE ONE? DO YOU HAVE THEM WITH YOU? ARE THERE PHOTOS?”
I’m not a hundred percent positive but I’m pretty sure this is the wild life center where I visited wolves.
And the safety briefing included the question “So if you’re pregnant, do you want to know or not?”
Turns out there had been a bit of an awkward situation once where the keepers had casually mentioned a woman’s pregnancy in a group, and she herself didn’t even know yet. Turns out the wolves are excellent at telling if you’re pregnant and the keepers can tell based on their body language. They get all odd and careful around pregnancy. (Even wolves knows that you have to take care of pregnant people.)
So they definitely knew she was pregnant.
And if I remember my BBC documentaries right, a wolf will leave the pack to give birth and introduce the cubs to the pack once she feels ready for it. And maternity leave is flexible but often around 6 months so they’re going “YOU WERE GONE FOREVER! WE WERE SO WORRIED! WHERE ARE THE CUBS?? WE HAVE TO GREET THE CUBS!!“
Also the two on her back are fighting over who gets to greet her first. Giving and receiving attention is a commodity that goes by hierarchy and if you don’t accept that there will be scuffles.. The wolf lying down next to her isn’t chill about her coming back, it’s just submissive to the other wolves and waiting for it’s turn to show excitement.
Now I can see why we domesticated these adorable jerks.
So I just read this article about how people end up fucking up whatever task they’re doing when they feel like they’re being watched. Scientists have discovered that the sense of being observed actually SHUTS OFF a part of the brain, the inferior parietal cortex.
Given the fact that women are constantly watched in our society, and we are constantly REMINDED that we are being watched by people making fun of fat, “ugly”, or gender-nonconforming women, it makes me wonder how many women have messed up important tasks or projects or just day-to-day activities because A PART OF OUR BRAIN is permanently being deactivated?
Like talk about a fucking handicap.
Women are constantly held under the microscope- whether we are attractive or unattractive, the gaze of patriarchy never ends.
Just last week I was walking my dog and bent over to literally pick up poop. Suddenly I heard whistling and looked up cause I knew I was the only person around. Sure enough, about 300 feet away, some construction worker was perched on top of a building, grinning at me and calling out stuff I luckily couldn’t hear because he was so goddamn far away.
I wonder what it does to women to have this constant source of stress hanging over us, each and every day, knowing we are being scrutinized and examined no matter what we’re doing. I wonder how many more accomplishments, life-changing discoveries, inventions, etc would have been achieved by women if we didn’t have this constant brain-handicap imposed on us by men.
This feeling of being watched extends even when we’re alone and affects our abilities- here’s a study where women took a math test while in a bathing suit and performed significantly worse than women fully dressed, even though all the women were alone when taking the test. The men in bathing suits and the men fully-dressed had no significant difference in performance. It is a major fucking handicap.
(I don’t remember how to make a cleaner link on my phone, sorry)
This is AMAZING. It never occurred to me that “Observing a thing changes that thing” includes the eye of the male gaze.
This is what cripples my brain when I’m in company? Seriously i can’t even input text on the video game machine with a controller when I’m being observed. like my brain slows down and diverts everything to panic mode. “aaaaaa don’t mess up in no you messed up” etc.
this interacts extra badly with ADHD and executive dysfunction. i’ve missed so many meals because when i went to the kitchen to cook there was someone else nearby and my brain stopped working.
I looked for the article and I think it is here in Nature!
Interestingly I tried to look up further info on the inferior parietal cortex and discovered wikipedia pages on the inferior pareital lobule and the posterior pareital cortex, but not the inferior pareital cortex. On the one hand I’d guess it’s the same as the lobule because I couldn’t tell you what the difference between a cortex and a lobule is anyway, but on the other hand the description of what the posterior one does sounds more like the Nature article, so.
It looks like the posterior pareital cortex is mainly sensorimotor stuff, which fits with the Nature article – it was testing motor tasks – but also deals with attention and spatial reasoning. The inferior pareital lobule deals with… a lot. Pretty sure they mean the cortex one.
According to the article observation also tends to activate the posterior superior temporal sulcus, which is probably not surprising since it seems that gets activated by a lot of social stuff. The article said “functional connectivity between these two regions was attenuated by social evaluation”, which… idk what that means.
Oh, look, here’s a whole table of regions tending to activate or deactivate under social evaluation! …Inferior parietal cortex isn’t even in this table. Inferior pareital lobule is. I’m confused.
Well, anyway. Looks like the brain just wants to drop everything else and deal with people who are watching first. Dammit, brain.
GOD.
This explains SO MUCH of why I cringe in the kitchen or doing chores.
Why do people have to be such sarcastic arseholes? Yeah, they should just instantly go the vet, or could just google how to treat their dog. But how hard is it to just, you know, be a human being and offer advice and comfort to a person who is clearly in distress and freaking about their dog and asking advice? Have you thought that maybe that person can’t afford to go to the vets or can’t get to one easily, or don’t know their local vets? Why are people such jerks? What does is cost to just be nice?
They have to be such sarcastic assholes because these asks keep getting sent to them even after Dr Ferox keeps telling people time and time again that she legally and physically cannot diagnose any animal over a 250-character message, let alone without a physical exam.
Are they worth the time and money to potentially save your pet’s life though? Because that’s basically what we’re looking at here. I get that you have to pay up the ass for emergency services and not everybody can afford it, and that sucks, but in what universe is demanding a diagnosis in fifty-eight characters, zero details, from a vet running a blog in their own spare time any less of a dick move from the asker? Are you willing to work for free in your own spare time when you’ve got like .01% of the things you need for it? No? Then why should she, or any of the other vets?
First I will hop of a plane and fly to Mexico! Because I do not know where in the world you are but at least Mexico must have Mexican chocolate, right? I will start there.
I will disembark the plane after a 20 hour flight, smelling of sweat and cheap airline food, and grab the nearest person on the ground, grasping their shirt front and insisting they tell me how to find the dog of an anonymous person on tumblr that ate some chocolate. And then when they shove me away, declaring me crazy or asking meekly “what’s a tumblr” I will move onto the next unhelpful local.
Questions like “what sort of dog is it” or “How big” or “how old” will go unanswered because I simply do not know. I am just trying to find this dog and anon to help!
Some will ask if I even know they are in Mexico! But I know no other place to start this quest, anon. I have only one clue. Some will wonder where in the world measures chocolate by the circle instead of by weight and we may ponder this together as I await the buss to take me to my next lead.
I am coming Anon. I will help your dog, because you asked.
Or, instead, you could call your local vet clinic and/or their after hours number.
I mean, “don’t be a dick” didn’t stop these messages from being asked over and over and over and over and over and over, so maybe being a dick will work this time.
Watch me be even more of a jerk.
It is in the FAQ not to ask me these time sensitive questions OR specific veterinary advice.
It is frankly a dumb thing to do.
I have been nice for 5 years. These highly inappropriate questions keep coming.
This question is I don’t know how many days old? If they are waiting for my response they are very stupid. And depending on how much this mysterious ‘circle’ is, I don’t know, the dog might even be dead? I should have to bare that, why?
As I have said a hundred times before, calling the vet clinic, phone calls, are pretty much free.
I am a feeling human being and I am tired
of people ignoring being told not to ask these questions, not reading
the FAQ, not using their own brain, throwing responsibility for whatever
happens onto me, thinking they deserve or will get an exception because
I must be willing to work for free in my precious little spare time and
meanwhile because they have ‘asked a vet’ on the internet they think
they’ve done enough? How unfair that they type off one sentence and
expect an answer which to be thorough enough to address all their
variables is going to be about a thousand words long.
Yeah, no.
Being
polite has not worked. So instead of boring readers with yet another
“call your vet” response, I spiced it up a little. I at least value my
time, even if you think I should be working 24/7 at the beck and call of
the entire internet.
But fine, here’s the nicer version for you.
Even non veterinary animal blogs get worrisome requests for help with sick pets. Like one time I got an ask from someone whose cat was having seizures as it came out of anesthesia, and this person had the gall to be upset when I told them to go call the vet.
As if just liking cats magically makes me an expert in cat anesthesia, which people can train for years and years to do.
Phone calls are free. There’s also a version of poison control for animals. It isn’t free (I had to pay over the phone when I called after Aster ingested a potentially toxic plant) but it can be a good first step to see if you need to come in.
ppl are so annoying “you can’t paint ur bedroom pink you’re an adult” i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
I had a sales woman in furniture store try and tell me not to buy a hot bubblegum pink loveseat because she wanted me to “think about the future”
Bitch, I am thinking about the future. I already got a hot bubblegum pink couch at home and now I need a loveseat to go with it.
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as “14 year old girl purple” (through what’s wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I don’t know, even if they’re not what I want as an adult). They didn’t believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a “dark purple”, it would be “depressing”. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, “Oh yeah, that’s really pretty.” (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck ‘em, please yourself. Either they’ll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be “mature” about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that I’m 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, I’m just like “marriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.” If they don’t like it then they don’t have to come to my wedding.
A lot of people are really scared and angry because of the results of the newest climate change reports — as they should be. But I’m already seeing a lot of posts and news reports like “HERE’S WHAT YOU CAN DO TO FIGHT GLOBAL WARMING” and bizarrely enough, the answers are never like “weed out climate change deniers from your government, impose strict new rules for the corporations that are creating most of the emissions, pour government resources into alternate forms of fuel, etc.” It’s always like “carpool to work!”
Look. Of course you should be working to reduce waste in your own life. But let’s not fucking pretend that consumers are the ones who made this mess. You know what another recent study found? Just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. If the rest of us stopped ALL WASTE and fucking ascended to a higher plane of existence that no longer requires consumption of any kind, the world would still be absolutely fucked if those 100 companies keep on as they do.
I hate this personal responsibility model when it comes to conservation. By ignoring the actual source of the problem and focusing on individuals instead, guess who gets targeted? The absolute most vulnerable individuals on the planet. When people advocate personal responsibility, somehow they’re never talking about billionaires and their private jets. They’re creating straw bans that will make life more dangerous for people with disabilities. They’re shaming women for using disposable menstrual products. They’re criticizing the poor and destitute for using “wasteful” products because they’re all they can afford. They’re making vaguely eugenic statements about getting people in “third world countries” to stop ~breeding~ so much. It’s monstrous.
Stop shaming consumers for the sins of corporations and their powerful investors. Stop placing the blame at the feet of the people who already have the hardest time getting through life. Do something, and by “do something” I mean buy a reusable coffee cup on the way to fucking vote. Go to a protest. Call a representative. Demand accountability from the people who got us into this mess.
Vote. Demonstrate that we won’t tolerate climate denialism anymore.
It’s over. They need to leave.
Let’s look at what the evidence has shown us. There was a video of a turtle with a straw up its nose, and now you can’t get a straw in Starbucks. Now, Grocery stores charge you 5p for a plastic bag. There has been an explosion of different cheap biodegradable diapers/nappies in stores in the past year, and they’re stocked conveniently in ordinary stores. Doctor Who is a lady, you can buy pumpkin spice everything in the UK, companies will slap a rainbow on anything you like and we demanded such easy access to television that special new channels have been invented to shovel niche content down our necks. We are perfectly capable of using outrage to demand change; we know that products, services and content creators listen, and cater to our demands. There’s a lot of the People, we have money, and we are scary, and we are necessary. Careers are built, empires rise and fall, and university degrees focus on studying the whims of the People. Kings need us more than we need kings. They need our cash, and they need our approval. They aren’t celestial beings set on a plinth by some God. They have stuff because we allow it and they are terrified of our scorn.
So this is the part where we rise the fuck up. Look at the previous record. We’ve already killed styrofoam cups. And those are indestructible!
cant believe a bunch of english kids go through a fuckin cupboard and find a magical kingdom full of wonder and they go “yeah we’re the royal family now”
typical english behaviour
I think what’s more creepily imperialistic is the reaction of everyone in Narnia to the Pevensies.
Like, the Pevensies end up the royal family in large part because everyone’s like ‘it has been prophesied that you will come and rule us and everything will be great!’ and, well, in-universe I can’t really fault them on that; if I were a young teen or pre-teen in a completely foreign country, I too would probably just go along with whatever seem to make people friendly to me.
But the reaction of the Narnians, in almost ubiquitously welcoming these foreigners as obviously destined to rule them even though they know nothing of the country and the culture… now that is some creepily imperialist writing.
This is the only good reblog of this post in it’s entire 3 year hellscape existence
if four foreign kids popped out of a magic box and deposed trump by the express wishes of god’s fursona, i’d crown ‘em. this winter already fuckin feels like it’s lasted 100 years.
Well, fuck, there is that.
mood
“By the express wishes of god’s fursona” is both the most amazing but also the most Deeply Cursed thing I have read all year
Frankenuff’s Castle 